Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Despite overwhelming military superiority, little went right in the operation. It was said, “The war was won [only] because it could not be lost.” It took two full days to overcome resistance in a country roughly the size of the District of Columbia. World War II–vintage antiaircraft guns brought down state-of-the-art American helicopters, and nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed. The invasion of Grenada came the day after Islamic extremists exploded a bomb that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon, and some thought the invasion was intended to deflect attention from the tragedy in Beirut, but Reagan had authorized the invasion the day before the bombing. Still, Grenada had the effect of minimizing the impact of the Lebanon tragedy on Reagan’s presidency. The day after the Grenada invasion, the New York Times ran five front-page stories on the invasion and only one, one-column story on the Marines in Beirut, even though the bombing had occurred less than forty-eight hours before. As Garry Wills noted, “Reagan is sometimes accused of having a short attention span. The truth, more likely, is that he has a good feel for the public’s short patience with uncertainties.”

  If Reagan was unable to convince the American public of the urgent need for action in Latin America, Kennedy had considerably greater success getting the attention of the American people with his proposed civil defense program. When it appeared in the summer of 1961 that the United States and Soviet Union were moving toward war over the status of Berlin, Kennedy requested a near-sevenfold increase in federal funding for civil defense, and further ordered that a booklet on how to survive a nuclear attack be mailed to every American household. The aim, as Sorensen acknowledged, “was to bestir a still slumbering public” that Kennedy felt was not sufficiently attuned to the growing crisis in Berlin and the very real possibility of war. Kennedy, “succeeded beyond his own expectations and desire,” Sorensen noted wryly.

  The early 1960s’ debate over civil defense reached “the level of near-hysteria.” Sales of nonperishable foods and bomb shelter kits skyrocketed. Given that shelter kits cost $1,500 a pop, John Kenneth Galbraith chastised Kennedy for offering a plan “for saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats.” Particularly unsettling were the debates in the news media and in churches, around water coolers and the dinner table over the ethics of shooting an unprepared neighbor who tried to enter another’s shelter, or whether it might be preferable to die than live like a worm in a hole in the ground.

  Once the Berlin crisis passed with Khrushchev’s decision to build the Berlin Wall, Kennedy let the civil defense issue quietly disappear. Comedians, meanwhile, suggested the government’s nuclear-attack advice to American students and office workers as having amounted to “move away from windows, crouch under desks, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye.”

  Kennedy and Reagan’s ability to stir the “collective excitement” of the nation was enhanced by the media structure in place when they served. The three major networks dominated television during Kennedy’s time, and that remained true of television news throughout Reagan’s presidency. (CNN began operating in 1980, but its market penetration grew slowly; Fox and MSNBC did not begin operations until 1996.) This meant that when Kennedy and Reagan appeared on network television, because viewing alternatives were few or nil, the audiences were far larger than a president generates today when most Americans have access to potentially hundreds of television channels—not to mention streaming services and the Internet—offering alternative programming during a televised presidential speech.

  A further advantage held by Kennedy and Reagan was the public-­service obligation networks felt (under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission) to preempt regular programming and grant a president prime time to address the nation if requested to do so. A presidential address was treated and seen as a special event, worthy of interrupting the everyday routine, which gave presidential remarks a cache they have lacked in more recent times. Today networks are generally unwilling to yield prime time to a presidential address, except for the annual State of the Union or a truly extraordinary event, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the killing of Osama bin Laden a decade later.

  In addition to his State of the Union speeches, Kennedy addressed the nation live from the Oval Office nine times to address issues he felt were of sufficient importance to warrant the attention of the American people. Reagan held thirty-one prime-time news conferences during his eight-year presidency. By comparison, our past three presidents—Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama—collectively held eleven prime-time news conferences from 1993 through 2012, according to the American Presidency Project, and these were generally relegated to the cable news networks, where audiences are a fraction of the size enjoyed by Kennedy and Reagan.

  Contemporary presidents are denied the opportunity to reach as many citizens directly as Kennedy and Reagan did, and the importance of their messages are diminished. Many Americans assume that if the networks have refused to preempt regular programming to cover a presidential address, it must not be that important. Memories of how Kennedy and Reagan could dominate national attention may be another reason for their enduring popularity. They seem giants next to successors who no longer have the means to command nearly total media attention.

  Kennedy would not have thrived as well under the current system. “We couldn’t do it without TV,” he told aides. In addition to televised addresses from the Oval Office, Kennedy began the practice of holding live televised news conferences. While these were usually held every other week during the daytime or early evening, they still drew enormous audiences. An estimated sixty-five million Americans viewed Kennedy’s first live news conference, and surveys found that 90 percent of Americans reported watching part or all of Kennedy’s first three news conferences. Audiences were smaller for subsequent news conferences but still averaged around eighteen million viewers, or roughly three to five times the number that view a presidential news conference today when coverage is limited to the cable networks.

  But it was more than words that heralded the new order of Kennedy’s New Frontier and “the Reagan revolution.” Kennedy and Reagan won confrontations with powerful domestic interests during their presidencies that demonstrated their seemingly unique power and galvanized their admirers.

  The more significant of the two was Reagan’s showdown with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), in part because it occurred earlier in his term and helped set the tone for the remainder of his tenure. PATCO had been one of only two major unions (the Teamsters was the other) to endorse Reagan in 1980. In gratitude, Reagan had promised to address some of the legitimate concerns of PATCO members, which included a highly stressful work environment and antiquated technologies at many airports that made the job more stressful. PATCO further assumed Reagan would be sympathetic to their demands because, as Reagan frequently pointed out, he remains the only president to have ever been a union member, having risen to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild.

  But when PATCO rejected the administration’s proposals for pay raises of up to 11 percent and instead made demands for a thirty-two-hour workweek and pay raises of up to 40 percent—an amount that would mean some senior controllers would make more than members of the president’s cabinet—Reagan said no.

  PATCO then announced it would go on strike, even though its members had each signed an oath that they would never strike. “Damn it,” Reagan said, “the law is the law and the law says they cannot strike.” Reagan gave union members forty-eight hours to reconsider or they would be fired and never rehired.

  Some four thousand PATCO members returned to work, but Reagan fired the other 11,600 who stayed out. “I’m sorry, and I’m sorry for them,” Reagan said. “I certainly take no joy out of this.” The departed controllers—Reagan always considered that he had not fired them but that they had quit—were replaced by supervisors and two thousand air controllers from the military. After several weeks of adjustment, most flights were back
on schedule, but it took a decade to train a full new workforce in the airport towers.

  Reagan’s strong and decisive response to the PATCO challenge turned him from “a politician with dubious credentials . . . into a mythic figure in American life.” The episode had several and large ramifications. Foreign investment began pouring into the United States, and when European financiers were asked why, they responded that they knew their money would be secure “when Reagan broke the controllers’ strike.”

  Surveys showed two-thirds of Americans supported Reagan’s action. It echoed the work of Reagan’s political hero, Calvin Coolidge, who had broken the Boston police strike in 1919, and evoked memories of how Truman had ended looming strikes by both steel and railroad workers after World War II by threatening to draft strikers into the Army. PATCO’s demise convinced other unions to temper demands for higher wages and new benefits, which led Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker to declare that Reagan’s handling of the PATCO strike was “the most important single action” Reagan took as president to control inflation.

  It also had repercussions overseas. When House Speaker Tip O’Neill traveled to the Soviet Union shortly after Reagan fired the PATCO workers, O’Neill aide and future television commentator Chris Matthews said that it was clear that the leaders in the Kremlin, who had seen shocking news photographs of PATCO leaders in handcuffs, detected “something new in presidential policy; steel that showed.” Echoing Volker on domestic issues, Secretary of State George Schultz said the PATCO firings were also “the most important foreign policy decision Ronald Reagan ever made.” All Reagan said was, “I think it convinced people who might have thought otherwise that I meant what I said.”

  Reagan, the former labor leader, had won plaudits for confronting organized labor, the bête noire of Republicans. Kennedy, the son of a millionaire businessman, would have his confrontation with an industrial cartel, the bugbear of liberals. The two confrontations dramatically enhanced each man’s standing with his respective political base.

  Much like Reagan, Kennedy’s greatest economic fear was inflation. His political reasoning was that unemployment directly impacted a relatively small number of Americans, but inflation impacted everyone. While government-imposed wage and price controls had ended shortly after the Korean War, the government continued to pressure business and labor to adhere to federal wage and price guidelines aimed at keeping inflation in check.

  Kennedy’s Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg had personally negotiated a new contract between the United Steelworkers union and the big steel companies led by United States Steel, which at the time was still one of the largest corporations in the world. The new contract held wage increases to 2.5 percent, an amount low enough that Kennedy and Goldberg assumed, based on the wage and price control guidelines, the steel manufacturers would have no need to increase prices. The impression was that the steel companies had tacitly agreed to not raise prices. U.S. Steel thought otherwise.

  On April 10, 1962, days after the new contract was approved, U.S. Steel Chairman Roger Blough arrived at the White House to advise Kennedy that U.S. Steel would be increasing its prices by 3.5 percent that very day, a move that would soon be followed by five other large American steel producers. Kennedy, who had been actively courting the support of business and whose policies were generally very favorable to corporations, was shocked and angry. “You have made a terrible mistake,” he told Blough. “You have double-crossed me.” Later, he told aides, “They’ve kicked us right in the balls. . . . We’ve got to try to fuck them.”

  The next day Kennedy held a news conference in which he excoriated the steel companies, saying, to the audible gasps of newsmen who had never seen the president so angry, that the companies had shown “utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” Kennedy charged U.S. Steel and the other companies with undermining national defense (higher steel costs would cost the military an extra $1 billion, he alleged) while the nation faced “grave crises” in Berlin and Southeast Asia. “Some time ago, I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country, and I asked the steel companies,” Kennedy said. “In the last twenty-four hours we had their answer.”

  Even though there was data that indicated a steel price increase would not impede economic growth, Kennedy still treated the steel increase “like a national emergency.” Advisors were called back to Washington, and meetings were held late into the night at the White House. The president was determined to play hardball. Because five other steel companies had raised their prices by an amount identical to U.S. Steel, the administration charged collusion and price fixing. FBI agents visited steel executives at their homes, company records were subpoenaed, reporters were called in the middle of the night to demand notes from interviews with steel executives, and telephone lines were tapped. This was now personal. As Kennedy said, he believed he had been double-crossed.

  Government contracts with U.S. Steel were canceled and given to the handful of smaller steel producers who had not announced price increases. Kennedy believed the threat to collect and expose executives’ expense reports would be a particularly powerful tool. “Too many hotels bills and night club expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the Country Club,” he said.

  There were howls of protest, and administration tactics were likened to the “Gestapo.” The Los Angeles Times compared Kennedy to Mussolini. U.S. News & World Report said it was an exercise in “quasi-Fascism,” and the New York Herald-Tribune ran a cartoon that had Khrushchev praising Kennedy’s “style.” Kennedy found the cartoon so objectionable that he canceled all two-dozen White House subscriptions to the newspaper. One businessman, when asked his reaction to the administration’s moves, said, “I just figured that this was the way Hitler took over.”

  But Kennedy’s tactics worked. On April 13, Bethlehem Steel announced it would forego the planned price increase, and U.S. Steel folded later in the day. The other companies quickly followed suit. As with Reagan’s handling of PATCO, the public initially rallied to Kennedy, admiring, as the Chicago Tribune put it, “decisiveness in the executive.” Kennedy tried not to gloat over his victory and worked to make amends with the business community, telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on April 30 that his administration was in no way antibusiness. “We want prosperity, and in a free enterprise system there can be no prosperity without profit.”

  But a month after his speech to the U.S. Chamber, on May 28, the stock market suffered its worst one-day drop since the crash of 1929, and the market remained anemic for another year before bouncing back. Business interests charged that Kennedy’s supposed hostility to business, evidenced by his handling of the steel price increase, was largely to blame. Kennedy, whose primary domestic policy goal was economic growth, spent the rest of his administration mounting a charm offensive with business interests to such a degree that he was fairly called “the quintessential corporate liberal.”

  Friends and aides of Kennedy and Reagan remarked about how serene each man had seemed in dealing with PATCO, U.S. Steel, and every other crisis. Martin Anderson, Reagan’s director of domestic policy, said Reagan governed “like an ancient king. . . . He just sat back in a supremely calm manner and waited until important things were brought to him. And then he would act quickly, decisively, and usually, very wisely.” Kennedy’s longtime friend Paul Fay said Kennedy projected a “reassurance that he could never be forced to act irrationally, no matter how many angry, frightened people might try to influence him.” Fay believed Kennedy possessed a special power that prevented him from acting irresponsibly, and instead would always make up his own mind “coolly and unemotionally.”

  Missing from these observations is that Kennedy and Reagan did not merely keep calm during a crisis, real or contrived, but that they thrived in crises. In the cases of PATCO and U.S. Steel, Reagan and Kennedy could have taken alternate courses that would have diffused the situation and likely reache
d a similar result but by far less dramatic means. Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis said Reagan should have given PATCO members longer than forty-eight hours to contemplate life without a paycheck, and the Kennedy administration could have conducted an investigation into suspected price fixing without midnight phone calls and tapped telephones.

  At some level, it seems clear that Kennedy and Reagan enjoyed crises. They had dealt with crises since their youth, including within their families, and their comfort with crises was a key part of their personalities. Reagan had been a lifeguard pulling drowning swimmers out of a river while still a teenager and felt compelled to carry a gun for protection during the postwar strikes that rocked Hollywood, while Kennedy had been given last rites multiple times and had to save his crew in the South Pacific during the war.

  Observers repeatedly remarked how much both men seemed to love being president and the exercise of power. A crisis allowed them to exercise the power of the presidency as they had imagined it. Since they were boys, Kennedy and Reagan had embraced the “great man” theory, where the actions of heroes shape history. A crisis focuses attention not on the bureaucracy but on the president, the heroic leader and his closest aides. A crisis, journalist David Halberstam noted, centers “the action right there in the White House—the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges.”