Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Not every successful president has operated this way. Eisenhower, who had held the title Supreme Allied Commander in the Army, “wanted to be arbiter, not master. His love was not for power but for duty,” Neustadt observed—and not in a complimentary way. There were many journalists and academics in the early 1960s who believed America needed presidents with a fondness for the exercise of power. Journalist Hugh Sidey had praised Kennedy because he had “recaptured all the power and more which Dwight Eisenhower ladled out to his cabinet officers.”

  Kennedy and Reagan accumulated power within the White House because they both distrusted the bureaucracy and they both distrusted experts. Kennedy, particularly, believed that inspired amateurs could do just as well (or better) than those who had devoted their lives to developing a particular line of expertise. Kennedy filled key posts in his administration with generalists, not experts, and Reagan, generally, followed suit.

  To a large degree, Kennedy and Reagan seemed to almost govern from outside the government they were elected to lead. Reagan had said in his inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” Kennedy may have had more faith in government as a concept, but he had no more use for the bureaucracy than Reagan did. One reason Kennedy (and Reagan) liked the CIA was that the CIA seemed responsive to presidential requests (and they never left a paper trail). “The State Department takes four or five days to answer a simple yes or no,” Kennedy complained. When Reagan promised to “get the government off the backs of the American people,” this was, Garry Wills said, the culmination of the anti-Washington counterinsurgency that Kennedy began.

  But the accumulation of power within the White House has drawbacks. Neither man saw himself as the top of an organizational pyramid, but rather the hub of a giant wheel. Kennedy called the presidency “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.” It sounds thrilling, but it also meant that the policies developed and implemented had a temporary and even ad hoc quality, not having taken root in a bureaucracy that would endure long after each administration ended. Kennedy and Reagan, therefore, had little impact upon the bureaucracy. They did not master it, reduce it, or alter it, and so they left far fewer permanent legacies within government than some other presidents. “Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s,” Garry Wills said, “was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions.”

  This is not to suggest that Kennedy and Reagan did not make significant marks on American history. A large portion of this book is devoted to demonstrating that they did. But beyond simple ideological bias, one reason historians tend to have less regard for Kennedy and Reagan than the general public does is because they perceive that other presidents have left more permanent legacies in place within the government itself. As Weber noted, because charismatic leadership is rooted in the person, it is transitory.

  It is perhaps the sense that so much of Kennedy and Reagan’s legacies reside within the men themselves, rather than within the institutions they oversaw or created, that has made it so important for acolytes to preserve their memories as a means of preserving their power. Uniquely among modern presidents, veritable cottage industries have arisen to preserve the memories of Kennedy and Reagan.

  Hundreds of books have been published about each man, and in Kennedy’s case the number may approach two thousand, given the particular interest in his assassination. Virtually every Kennedy and Reagan aide wrote a memoir of his or her experience working for them. In Kennedy’s case, Schlesinger and Sorensen, having once made a living writing for Kennedy, then made a career of writing about Kennedy. In Reagan’s case, each of his four children wrote memoirs of their father; several wrote multiple tomes. They are joined not only by Reagan’s senior aides but also by his pollster, his executive assistant, and even his astrologer.

  To press the case that Reagan was a deeper thinker than commonly perceived, admirers have ensured that not only his diaries and letters have been published but also the scripts he wrote in longhand for the dozens of radio commentaries he gave in the 1970s and even a collection of the three-by-five note cards that Reagan used as outlines for his speeches.*

  * Reagan was also commonly perceived, at least by critics, to be lazy because he allegedly did not arrive at the Oval Office until 9:00 a.m. and often took an afternoon nap. But Kennedy had a similar daily routine. Like Reagan, he also spent the early morning hours reading newspapers in bed, arrived at the office at 9:00 a.m., and regularly took an afternoon nap. It was less a matter of drive than an understanding by both men of the performing aspect of the presidential role, and they always wanted to appear fresh for major events, most usually held in the evening.

  Following his assassination, there was a rush to name things for Kennedy. The launch center for the space program was renamed Cape Kennedy (though Florida voters switched it back to Cape Canaveral by referendum in 1973). Idlewild Airport in New York City was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, and the performing arts center whose roots were in the Roosevelt administration was named the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts when it was completed in 1971. Hundreds of public schools have been named for Kennedy in virtually every state in the nation, and Harvard created the John F. Kennedy School of Government (an honor not accorded the five presidents who attended Harvard before him). He has been honored with two postage stamps, an aircraft carrier, and his image replaced Benjamin Franklin on the fifty-cent coin. There are also scores of roads, highways, and boulevards worldwide named for Kennedy, as was fourteen thousand–foot Mount Kennedy in the Canadian Rockies, which brother Robert climbed in 1965 as part of the first team to do so.

  Not to be outdone, admirers of Reagan have created the Reagan Legacy Project, whose goal is to name a notable landmark for Reagan in all of the more than three thousand counties in the United States and at least one in every state. Lacking the impetus of Kennedy’s assassination, the drive to name things for Reagan has proceeded more slowly, but there are still scores of schools and roads named for Reagan, as well as an aircraft carrier, Ronald W. Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, and, somewhat incongruously, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center—the second-largest federal office building in Washington, after the Pentagon. Admirers are still hopeful Reagan will one day replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill or FDR on the dime.

  There is also the extraordinary location of Reagan’s presidential library, perched on a mountaintop outside Simi Valley, California, with its 360-degree view of the golden land of opportunity that treated Reagan so well. Yet even it cannot compare to a memorial first proposed by Mrs. Kennedy, as she conceived of the Camelot myth, in honor of her slain husband. On the west bank of the Potomac River, in Arlington National Cemetery, with its extraordinary view of the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, there is a flame over Kennedy’s grave that is never extinguished. It is not quite as large as the flame that burns beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but it remains unique, as author Thurston Clarke noted, in that Kennedy “is the only president honored by a blaze promising to last throughout eternity.”

  Against such reverence, it should not be surprising, as was discussed in chapter one, that the quest to find a true successor to either Kennedy or Reagan is futile, just as Weber suggested about truly charismatic leaders.

  Kennedy and Reagan were each succeeded by their vice president. Each vice president, Lyndon Johnson and George H. W. Bush, committed themselves and their presidencies to fulfilling their predecessor’s legacy. Johnson ensured Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights Act and his proposed tax cuts were enacted and his moon program was continued. Bush presided over what was the literal end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he enhanced American military prestige with a quick victory in the Gulf War, and he tried (unsuccessfully) to reduce federal deficits. Despite their clear allegiance, including having been handpicked by their predecessor, neither Johns
on nor Bush was seen as a successor to Kennedy or Reagan, and it is certain, if Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership is correct, that no one ever will be.

  CHAPTER 16

  TO THE BRINK—AND BACK

  Following the United States’ use of nuclear weapons against Japan to end World War II, the world never came closer to nuclear war than it did during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Each man helped cause crises that, by miscalculation or a misjudgment, might have triggered Armageddon. Yet when there were many voices urging each commander in chief to war, Kennedy and Reagan stepped back from the brink, and by the end of their presidencies were lauded as men of peace, which may very well be their most enduring legacies.

  Following the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, Kennedy significantly improved relations with the Soviet Union, culminating in the August 1963 treaty between the two nations that banned detonation testing of nuclear weapons everywhere but underground. Reagan fell short of his dream of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, but before he left office the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, the first reduction in nuclear arms that had occurred since the beginning of the Cold War. Within three years of Reagan’s leaving office, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended as Reagan had predicted it would: “We win. They lose.”

  Talk of peace and disarmament was not how either man’s presidency began, however. Kennedy and Reagan were committed anti-Communists, ­believed the Communist threat to the United States was genuine, and were believers in a strong national defense to counter that threat. They liked to talk tough and did so often, exacerbating rather than decreasing international tensions. But they were also deeply disturbed by the very idea of nuclear war, recognizing that this type of conflict would have no winners, only losers.

  Early in his presidency, Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed him on America’s nuclear strategy. The top brass blithely explained that a direct conflict with the Soviet Union could be expected to escalate quickly to nuclear war. When that happened and the president gave the order, America would execute a plan of massive and indiscriminate retaliation with more than three thousand nuclear weapons simultaneously deployed against the entire Communist world, including China and Eastern Europe. Casualties would be in the hundreds of millions. After the briefing, an angry and dismayed Kennedy muttered, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

  Nearly twenty years later, Reagan was purportedly stunned to learn that the United States had no system for missile defense. Following a tour of the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) in Colorado in 1979, Reagan shook his head in wonder while commenting, “We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.” It was at that moment, an aide said, that Reagan directed his staff to review whether advances in technology might make an antimissile system more feasible than the one that had been debated and discarded during the 1960s.

  The nuclear defense strategy that so appalled Kennedy and Reagan had become known as “MAD”—mutually assured destruction. Eisenhower had found it to be a sound strategy for maintaining world peace. If a nuclear attack meant that the attacker, too, would be destroyed, then surely no nation would launch such an attack. But it seemed barbaric to many, including Kennedy and Reagan, and it limited the ways in which America and the West could respond to perceived Communist provocations. They each searched for creative new ways to wage the Cold War that would not lead to nuclear conflict.

  Kennedy called for the development of strategies that provided the United States with a “flexible response” to Communist provocations, responses that would fall short of nuclear conflict. Kennedy became especially enamored with counterinsurgency tactics. Reagan, firmly believing the rival nation was near economic collapse, hoped to force the Soviet Union to the negotiating table with an arms race that would hasten their bankruptcy. One element of this strategy was to pursue advanced defensive weaponry that would make nuclear weapons obsolete—the Strategic Defense Initiative that became popularly known as “Star Wars.”

  Both strategies required significant new military spending, and the two men presided over the two largest peacetime increases in defense budgets in American history. American military spending had been significantly reduced by amounts of 30 to 40 percent in the years immediately before Kennedy and then Reagan took office, following the ends of the Korean and Vietnam wars, respectively. But even taking this into account, the amount of new money poured into national defense was still extraordinary—particularly since it was clear during both eras and to both men that the United States already enjoyed clear military superiority over the Soviet Union in virtually every facet of defense.

  In his three years in office, Kennedy increased the defense budget by 20 percent, while Reagan increased the defense budget by 40 percent over eight years. In real dollars, Reagan’s defense budgets were near the level of spending that had occurred during the height of the Vietnam War. Because the American economy was much larger in the 1980s than it had been in the early 1960s, Reagan’s defense expenditures, though larger in real dollars than Kennedy’s defense budgets, equaled about 6 percent of national Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while Kennedy’s defense budgets equaled about 9 percent of GDP.* Under both presidents, the bulk of the spending increases were due to new weapons procurement—benefitting the very “military-industrial complex” whose power Eisenhower had warned against in his farewell address.

  * For FY2012, defense spending represented about 4.7 percent of U.S. GDP.

  Public opinion generally supported these defense buildups, though one reason may be that both Kennedy and Reagan seemed loathe to use the massive war machines they had built up. The buildups were sold and seen as a deterrent to, not a preparation for, war, and the very small number of military casualties that occurred during both Kennedy’s and Reagan’s administrations helped maintain their popularity.

  Still, nothing, Kennedy and Reagan realized, seemed to rally and unite public opinion quite like national defense. As Kennedy had noted while still a young reporter for the Hearst newspapers at the end of World War II, “It is unfortunate that unity for war against a common aggressor is far easier to obtain than unity for peace.” It remained an unfortunate fact of the Cold War that even domestic policies had to fit within the definition of national defense to rally public support. Development of the interstate highway system, for example, was called the National Defense Transportation Act, while federal aid to education was made tolerable by labeling it the National Defense Education Act.

  Though a significant peace movement did arise during Reagan’s tenure, Americans generally have developed an affinity for military might; begun during World War II and maintained during the Cold War, it is now central to the American identity. When publisher Henry Luce wrote his famous essay on the “American Century” for Life magazine in 1941, he urged Americans to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influences for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” As historian Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, has noted, embracing Luce’s credo has become a “de facto prerequisite” for holding high office in the United States. Where Americans once feared that large standing armies were a threat to liberty, it is now more commonly believed that the preservation of liberty requires that significant resources be lavished on the armed forces.

  Kennedy was unsurprised, then, that a Gallup survey in 1961 found 85 percent of Americans willing to risk war with the Soviet Union in order to preserve American access rights to West Berlin. It was a risk Kennedy was also willing to take. If World War III were to occur, Kennedy believed Berlin was the place it would most likely start. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was equally aware of Berlin’s symbolic importance, saying, “Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I
squeeze on Berlin.” Though in truth, Berlin was a much bigger problem for the East.

  Following World War II, a vanquished Germany had been divided among the occupying forces of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The U.S., British, and French occupation zones were combined to form West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), while East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) was established in the Soviet zone. Occupied Berlin had also been divided, with West Berlin under the jurisdiction of West Germany and under the protection of the United States—an oasis of democratic capitalism 110 miles inside East Germany.

  For East Germans lured by the promise of a better life in the West, West Berlin was an irresistible draw and the main point of illegal emigration from their country. Between 1945 and 1960, an estimated 4.5 million Germans had fled East Germany, and the problem was growing worse. If nothing could stem the flow of emigrants, many of them the best-educated and best-trained workers in East Germany, the nation’s economy would collapse.

  An earlier Soviet attempt to wrest control of West Berlin had been thwarted by the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949. Now the Soviets felt the time was right to try again, both because of the increasing flow of refugees and also because they believed Kennedy might fold under pressure. Kennedy had not acquitted himself well during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Soviet observers thought the debacle had demonstrated Kennedy’s lack of experience and resolve.

  At their only face-to-face meeting at a summit in Vienna in June 1961, Kennedy had hoped to establish a rapport with Khrushchev, while Khrushchev hoped to test Kennedy’s mettle. Instead of a dialogue, Khrushchev harangued Kennedy on a wide range of issues. Kennedy was appalled, complaining that Khrushchev had treated him “like a little boy.” While Kennedy actually held his own in a number of the exchanges, Khrushchev had concluded that Kennedy was inexperienced and could be bullied. Kennedy foolishly confided to New York Times columnist James Reston that he thought he had performed poorly at the summit, which set the tone of the resulting news coverage and which only increased pressure on Kennedy to be more aggressive in future encounters. Kennedy was particularly irked by a jibe from Nixon who, recalling Kennedy’s inaugural and the promise to “pay any price, bear any burden” in support of liberty, said, “Never in American history has a man talked so big and acted so little.”