Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Believing that government now worked against their interests, whites began to withdraw their support for government programs generally, providing a ripe environment for Reagan’s agenda of cutting government spending and taxes. Reagan articulated and appealed to white fear and anxiety in language that was not overtly bigoted—at least to whites. Reagan considered his policies “race neutral,” but African Americans did not; in one 1986 survey, a majority of African Americans—56 percent—said they considered Reagan “racist.”

  Reagan provoked black resentment when his administration initially forbade the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax-exempt status to colleges that still practiced racial discrimination. (He backtracked from that position after a public outcry.) He strongly resisted placing sanctions on South Africa to end racial apartheid there, and he gave a controversial speech during his 1980 presidential campaign touting “states’ rights” in a Mississippi community where three civil rights workers had been killed in 1964. And for an administration obsessed with image, they often had lousy optics around race. When Reagan announced he intended to honor jazz great Lionel Hampton with a concert at the White House, of the eight hundred people invited to attend, only twenty were black. As one White House staffer said, “Lionel Hampton will be a token at his own event.”

  Yet in pursuing a policy that might be labeled “conservative egalitarianism,” Reagan was in many ways as tepid in dismantling civil rights legislation as Kennedy had been in promoting it. He did not propose legislation to protect whites from “reverse discrimination,” nor did he issue any executive orders to rescind affirmative action programs. Reagan even claimed that he supported “voluntary” affirmative action; he only opposed “quotas.”

  While his Departments of Justice and Labor did continue to prosecute businesses and institutions charged with discrimination, his administration simultaneously filed a series of lawsuits that led to Supreme Court decisions further paring back affirmative action and minority set-aside programs.* Enforcement of civil rights claims was far less aggressive than in previous administrations, for Reagan appointed men opposed to affirmative action to key posts, such as future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas declared he was “unalterably opposed to programs that force or even cajole people to hire a certain percentage of minorities. I watched the operation of such affirmative action policies when I was in college and I watched the destruction of many kids as a result.”

  * In 1978, three years before Reagan became president, the Supreme Court had already ruled that a quota system for minority students established at the University of California at Davis Medical School was unconstitutional.

  Reagan grudgingly signed legislation into law in 1983 that made Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, but only after causing an uproar when he suggested that those who still believed King a Communist had legitimate concerns. Trying to make amends, Reagan later gave a moving speech about King on the observance of his birthday in 1987.

  Reagan’s empathy with individuals but not with groups was not limited to African Americans. Reagan had gay friends in Hollywood, and he voiced no objection when Nancy Reagan invited her gay decorator and his partner to spend the night in the White House. Yet he was widely criticized for being slow to react to the AIDS epidemic. Only after actor Rock Hudson died from the disease in 1985 did it begin receiving attention, and eventually more than $5.7 billion was spent under Reagan on AIDS research, education, and treatment.

  Gay activists had been more successful than advocates for the poor. Homelessness seemed an epidemic, too, during the 1980s, but the real losers in the Reagan years were the working poor, a disproportionate share of whom were minorities. The largest budget cuts made during the Reagan administration, at least in terms of percentages, were in means-tested programs, where four hundred thousand people lost their eligibility for welfare and another one million for food stamps. The minimum wage of $3.35 an hour was never raised during Reagan’s tenure.

  African Americans had made remarkable economic gains between 1960 and 1980, in part because of the very legislation that Reagan had opposed, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the programs of LBJ’s “Great Society.” Between 1960 and 1980, the number of blacks holding managerial, professional, and technical jobs tripled, from fewer than five hundred thousand to more than 1.5 million. The percentage of intact black families living at or below the poverty line went from 39 percent in 1960 to 15 percent in 1980. The number of black families considered affluent rose from 7 to 17 percent, and blacks, who made up 11 percent of the nation’s population, now composed 10 percent of the country’s college students.

  Blacks continued to make modest—very modest—economic gains during Reagan’s presidency. Average black family income rose from 62 percent of white family income in 1979 to 63 percent by 1989, according to U.S. Census Data. “The general fear of racial retrogression at the hands of the Reagan administration,” as one black official put it, had not come to pass. The change had come slowly, but America had embraced more enlightened views on race. Surveys taken while Reagan was president found that 98 percent of whites claimed they did not object to having a black neighbor, and 95 percent would not mind having a black boss.

  The problems facing blacks in Reagan’s America were becoming less about race and more about class, family structure, and Reagan’s economic policies. The divide between rich and poor, regardless of race, grew widely during the Reagan era. During the 1980s, the top 1 percent of the population saw their family income grow by an average of 75 percent, while the bottom 90 percent of income earners saw their annual income grow by just 7 percent.

  That the wealthy became wealthier was due in large part to Reagan’s tax policies, which ended up raising taxes on much of the working poor. From 1980 to 1990, the combined effects of the change in income tax rates, Social Security, corporate, and other tax rates meant that families in the bottom fifth of income earners saw their taxes increase 16.1 percent, while those in the top fifth of income earners saw their tax burden reduced by 5.5 percent—while the top 1 percent saw a whopping 14.4 percent reduction in their taxes.

  Reagan was unapologetic about the impacts of his tax policies. In a speech he gave in June 1983, he said, “What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.” Minorities may have made up a disproportionate percentage of the poor, but it was a multiracial consensus that led a 1983 Gallup survey to find that 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “Reagan represents the rich rather than average Americans.”

  CHAPTER 21

  A DIFFERENT WORLD

  Hailed in public opinion surveys as perhaps our two greatest presidents, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan would have a difficult time even being nominated for high office in the early twenty-first century. If elected, it is an open question whether they could be successful presidents in a political landscape that has changed dramatically since they did serve.

  The world in which Kennedy and Reagan governed is gone. Seventeen years separated Kennedy’s assassination from Reagan’s election as president, but there was a constant from the beginning of the former’s presidency through the end of the latter’s two terms in office: the Cold War. Kennedy and Reagan are so fundamentally associated with the Cold War that it is difficult to imagine their presidencies without it.

  Because of the rapidity with which the Cold War ended and also the way it ended, with a whimper not a bang, Americans have never really taken stock of how radically our world changed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It unmoored the United States from a set of assumptions that had governed our national behavior for half a century—nearly a full quarter of our national existence.

  The ideology that drove Kennedy and Reagan was neither liberalism nor conservatism. It was anti-Communism, which trumped every other concern. Kennedy and Reagan viewed every policy
choice through the prism of the Cold War. Tax cuts were justified on the grounds that our economy needed to grow faster than that of the Soviet Union. The space program was a competition among systems of government, not a scientific venture. The civil rights struggle received attention because it embarrassed us before the Third World nations we hoped to woo into our sphere of influence. Spending on highways and schools was approved on the theory that it enhanced our defense capability. Balanced budgets were unimportant if they impeded our defense buildup.

  The Cold War shaped almost every aspect of American life. In sports, American athletes trained with the express purpose of defeating their Communist opponents in the Olympics and elsewhere. The Cold War was a primary theme in our movies and books, either addressed explicitly, from James Bond to Red Dawn, or allegorically, primarily through the burgeoning science fiction genre.

  The Cold War provided clarity. In an odd way, despite the fear of nuclear war, it was even comforting. It created a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic world: us against them.

  We even defined what America was by comparison with our Soviet nemesis. Communism provided an ideal foil for Kennedy and Reagan’s leadership. Most Americans despised Communism as completely antithetical to American values. The Soviet Union was dictatorial; it cared nothing for personal freedom. Communism would destroy the free-enterprise system that is our secular religion. It was also officially atheistic in nature, which convinced many Americans, among the most religiously observant people in the developed world, that the Cold War was an eschatological struggle that foretold the end times. Some thought the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead might be the mark of The Beast.

  Leading America against such an enemy, Kennedy and Reagan were able to rally public opinion to their side time and again. In such a struggle, for many, loyalty to the commander in chief was paramount.

  But Kennedy and Reagan had the added benefit of being able to govern as war presidents in a time of peace—at least for Americans. The shooting war between East and West involved surrogates in Asia and Latin America. Because of Kennedy and Reagan’s caution in committing U.S. troops to direct military action, they did not have to endure the criticism that large numbers of military casualties would have generated. The primary criticism they did receive regarded high budget deficits triggered largely by increased defense spending.

  We cannot know, of course, how Kennedy or Reagan might have responded to the more nuanced conflict we have labeled the “War on Terror.” But it is a different type of conflict fraught with even more complications than the Cold War.

  Radical Islam may be frightening, but it is not the existential threat to the United States that the Soviet Union appeared to be. It is also an amorphous enemy, not a nation found on a map, like the Soviet Union, but a ragtag, loosely organized subset of one of the world’s great religions whose aims in attacking the United States are not always entirely clear. We knew (or thought that we knew) that the Soviet Union sought world domination. The ultimate goal of radical Islamists is less clear.

  And while we were surprised when the Cold War ended, we knew that it had ended when the Soviet Union was no more. How will we know when the war on terror is won, and how can it be won? It is unlikely to be defeated by a massive defense buildup, which was the heart of Kennedy and Reagan’s Cold War strategy. The clarity Kennedy and Reagan enjoyed in waging the Cold War is no longer present, and Americans miss that clarity.

  The Cold War not only clarified our foreign affairs, it also helped to forge a political consensus at home. The political polarization so much commented upon in contemporary America was not nearly so great during the Kennedy and Reagan presidencies.

  Following World War II, there was a great deal of talk that the great ideological battles within the United States were over. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, for example, declared that America’s lack of a feudal past ensured that the United States would never succumb to radical ideologies of the far left or the far right. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., meanwhile, argued in The Vital Center that vigorous but practical liberal reform at home coupled with a strong interventionist foreign policy was the best defense against totalitarianism of any stripe.

  Kennedy believed that ideologies served no useful purpose in the second half of the twentieth century. Liberalism and conservatism, he said, were labels that “don’t apply any more. . . .. The trouble with conservatives today is that most of their thinking is so naïve. As for the liberals, their thinking is more sophisticated, but their function ought to be to provide new ideas, and they don’t come up with any.”

  Giving the commencement address at Yale in 1962, Kennedy seemed to lament that most of the great issues had been decided by previous generations. “The central issues of our time are more subtle and less simple,” he said. “They relate not to basic philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals . . . political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solutions. . . .”

  Kennedy very reluctantly bore the label of “liberal” only because he knew he needed liberal support to win the Democratic nomination. Reagan happily proclaimed himself a conservative, and while he was more ideological than Kennedy, he proved to be a remarkably pragmatic politician in office, made more so by his intense dislike of confrontation.

  Together, Kennedy and Reagan operated in the great political middle, as painful as that may be for some partisans of both men to hear. Reagan believed in compromise where “nobody got exactly what they wanted, but nobody lost,” said his cabinet secretary Craig Fuller.

  With his experience as a union leader, Reagan considered himself an excellent negotiator, and he was baffled by critics who demanded all or nothing. As Reagan said many times, he was always content to get 80 percent of what he wanted, with the knowledge that there would be opportunities to get more later.

  Conservative leaders were dismayed. Howard Phillips, chairman of The Conservative Caucus, denounced Reagan’s “consensus politics” and demanded that Reagan practice “confrontational politics” instead. Richard Viguerie, editor of the Conservative Digest, warned that Reagan’s refusal to wage a full-scale conservative revolution would make him “just another politician bending to the pressures from the Washington crowd.” Criticism from the far right was not unwelcome; Reagan believed it helped his standing with moderate voters.

  Kennedy equally dismayed many liberals, particularly in his go-slow attitude toward civil rights. He prided himself on his ability to see all sides of a question to the point that he hesitated to demonize even hard-core segregationists, knowing that they were the product of a different culture and upbringing.

  When activists met with Kennedy early in his administration to push for action on civil rights, he cut them off and told them their criticism was “quite wrong.” As Kennedy defended his cautious approach, one of those present, Joseph Rauh, a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action and general counsel for the United Auto Workers, remembered thinking, “Oh, shit. Nothing is going to happen. How did we let this happen?”

  Following President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, there was a widely held perception that the Republican Party had made a hard right turn ideologically. It led numerous centrist Republicans, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and a host of political commentators, to speculate that Reagan, with his willingness to compromise with Democrats, his openness to certain types of tax increases, and his decisions to expand Social Security and Medicare programs, could not win a Republican primary in the political climate of the early twenty-first century.

  Thought less speculated upon, it is also doubtful that Kennedy could win a Democratic primary today, certainly not in his home state of Massachusetts, given his record of supporting tax cuts, his cautious approach to civil rights, his aggressive interventionist foreign policy, and his oft-expressed concerns about the growing power of the federal government. He would not be liberal enough for national De
mocratic politics.

  When Kennedy was president, and this was still largely true during Reagan’s presidency, the Republican and the Democratic parties were “big tent” parties with liberal wings, conservative wings, and lots of moderates. But two things occurred that caused the two parties to undergo a fundamental realignment that dramatically increased the polarization between the two.

  The first, as discussed in the previous chapter on civil rights, had its origins during Kennedy’s presidency, when he proposed sweeping civil rights legislation that then became law in 1964. The Democrats’ growing identification with civil rights caused white Southerners to migrate to the Republican Party, making the Republican Party more conservative, more white, more Southern, and more male. Conversely, the Democratic Party became more liberal, more Northern, more female, and more reliant upon the votes of minorities.

  The second event that significantly increased the polarization between the two parties occurred during the early 1990s, after the Cold War ended. The Cold War had represented such an existential threat that all other divisions within American society shrank in comparison. As long as all sides agreed that they shared a common enemy, there was more latitude to find compromise in other areas. The end of the Cold War eliminated a bond that had held liberals and conservatives together. Without the Cold War to provide a point of unity, policy differences in other areas were magnified.

  There is a joke, variously attributed to Henry Kissinger, Richard Neustadt, or Wallace Sayre, which states, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This thinking seems to have permeated contemporary politics at large. If Kennedy and Reagan seem like giants compared to those who have succeeded them, it is partly because they governed at a time when the stakes seemed large, when the survival of the free world and the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed very real.