Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  He was also aware that vanity is perhaps the strongest of human emotions, particularly the closer one comes to the top of the slippery pole. Mrs. Kennedy once told me that the last thing Mrs. Eisenhower had done before leaving the White House was to hang a portrait of herself in the entrance hall. The first thing Mrs. Kennedy had done on moving in was to put the portrait in the basement, on aesthetic, not political grounds. Overhearing this, the President told an usher to restore the painting to its original place. “The Eisenhowers are coming to lunch tomorrow,” he explained patiently to his wife, “and that’s the first thing she’ll look for.” Mrs. Lincoln records that before the new Cabinet met, the President and Bobby were about to enter the Cabinet room when the President “said to his brother, ‘Why don’t you go through the other door?’ The President waited until the Attorney General entered the Cabinet room from the hall door, and then he walked into the room from my office.”

  In its relaxed way Mr. Fay’s book illuminates the actual man much better than the other books if only because he was a friend to the President, and not just an employee. He is particularly interesting on the early days when Jack could discuss openly the uses to which he was being put by his father’s ambition. Early in 1945 the future President told Mr. Fay how much he envied Fay his postwar life in sunny California while “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines full ahead.’ ” Yet the exploitation of son by father had begun long before the war. In 1940 a thesis written by Jack at Harvard was published under the title Why England Slept, with a foreword by longtime, balding, family friend Henry Luce. The book became a best seller and (Richard J. Whalen tells us) Joe wrote his son, “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.”

  Joe was right of course and bookmaking is now an important part of the holy family’s home industry. As Mrs. Lincoln observed, when JFK’s collection of political sketches “won the Pulitzer prize for biography in 1957, the Senator’s prominence as a scholar and statesman grew. As his book continued to be a best seller, he climbed higher upon public-opinion polls and moved into a leading position among Presidential possibilities for 1960.” Later Bobby would “write” a book about how he almost nailed Jimmy Hoffa; and so great was the impact of this work that many people had the impression that Bobby had indeed put an end to the career of that turbulent figure.

  Most interesting of all the myth-making was the creation of Jack the war hero. John Hersey first described for The New Yorker how Jack’s Navy boat was wrecked after colliding with a Japanese ship; in the course of a long swim, the young skipper saved the life of a crewman, an admirable thing to do. Later they were all rescued. Since the officer who survived was Ambassador Kennedy’s son, the story was deliberately told and retold as an example of heroism unequaled in war’s history. Through constant repetition the simple facts of the story merged into a blurred impression that somehow at some point a unique act of heroism had been committed by Jack Kennedy. The last telling of the story was a film starring Cliff Robertson as JFK (the President had wanted Warren Beatty for the part, but the producer thought Beatty’s image was “too mixed up”).

  So the image was created early: the high-class book that made the grade; the much-publicized heroism at war; the election to the House of Representatives in 1946. From that point on, the publicity was constant and though the Congressman’s record of service was unimpressive, he himself was photogenic and appealing. Then came the Senate, the marriage, the illnesses, the second high-class book, and the rest is history. But though it was Joe Kennedy who paid the bills and to a certain extent managed the politics, the recipient of all this attention was meanwhile developing into a shrewd psychologist. Mr. Fay quotes a letter written him by the new Senator in 1953. The tone is jocular (part of the charm of Mr. Fay’s book is that it captures as no one else has the preppish side to JFK’s character; he was droll, particularly about himself, in a splendid W. C. Fields way): “I gave everything a good deal of thought. I am getting married this fall. This means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal.” After a few more sentences in this vein the groom-to-be comes straight to the point. “Let me know the general reaction to this in the Bay area.” He did indeed want to know, like a romantic film star, what effect marriage would have on his career. But then most of his life was governed, as Mrs. Lincoln wrote of the year 1959, “by the public-opinion polls. We were not unlike the people who check their horoscope each day before venturing out.” And when they did venture out, it was always to create an illusion. Mrs. Lincoln tells us in her guileless way that after Senator Kennedy returned to Washington from a four-week tour of Europe, “it was obvious that his stature as a Senator had grown, for he came back as an authority on the current situation in Poland.”

  It is not to denigrate the late President or the writers of his gospel that neither he nor they ever seemed at all concerned by the bland phoniness of so much of what he did and said. Of course politicians have been pretty much the same since the beginning of history, and part of the game is creating illusion. In fact, Kennedy himself shortly after Cuba One summed up what might very well have been not only his political philosophy but that of the age in which we live. When asked whether or not the Soviet’s placement of missiles in Cuba would have actually shifted the balance of world power, he indicated that he thought not. “But it would have politically changed the balance of power. It would have appeared to, and appearances contribute to reality.”

  From the beginning, the holy family has tried to make itself appear to be what it thinks people want rather than what the realities of any situation might require. Since Bobby is thought by some to be ruthless, he must therefore be photographed as often as possible with children, smiling and happy and athletic, in every way a boy’s ideal man. Politically, he must seem to be at odds with the present administration without ever actually taking any important position that President Johnson does not already hold. Bobby’s Vietnamese war dance was particularly illustrative of the technique. A step to the Left (let’s talk to the Viet Cong), followed by two steps to the Right, simultaneously giving “the beards”—as he calls them—the sense that he is for peace in Vietnam while maintaining his brother’s war policy. Characteristically, the world at large believes that if JFK were alive there would be no war in Vietnam. The myth-makers have obscured the fact that it was JFK who began our active participation in the war. In 1961, there were six hundred American observers in Vietnam. At the time of his assassination there were twenty thousand. Shortly before he died, he said, “I have to go all the way with this one.” He could not suffer a second Cuba and hope to maintain the appearance of Defender of the Free World at the ballot box in 1964.

  The authors of the latest Kennedy books are usually at their most interesting when they write about themselves. They are cautious, of course (except for the jaunty Mr. Fay), and most are thinking ahead to Kennedy II. Yet despite a hope of future preferment, Mr. Salinger’s self-portrait is a most curious one. He veers between a coarse unawareness of what it was all about (he never, for instance, expresses an opinion of the war in Vietnam), and a solemn bogusness that is most putting off. Like an after-dinner speaker, he characterizes everyone (“Clark Clifford, the brilliant Washington lawyer”); he pays heavy tribute to his office staff; he praises Rusk and the State Department, remarking that “JFK had more effective liaison with the State Department than any President in history,” which would have come as news to the late President. Firmly Mr. Salinger puts Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his place, saying that he himself never heard the President express a lack of confidence in Rusk. Mr. Salinger also remarks that though Schlesinger was “a strong friend” of the President (something Mr. Salinger, incidentally, was not), “JFK occasionally was
impatient with their [Schlesinger’s memoranda] length and frequency.” Mrs. Lincoln also weighs in on the subject of the historian-in-residence. Apparently JFK’s “relationship with Schlesinger was never that close. He admired Schlesinger’s brilliant mind, his enormous store of information…but Schlesinger was never more than an ally and assistant.”

  It is a tribute to Kennedy’s gift for compartmentalizing the people in his life that none knew to what extent he saw the others. Mr. Fay was an after-hours buddy. Mrs. Lincoln was the girl in the office. Mr. Salinger was a technician and not a part of the President’s social or private or even, as Mr. Salinger himself admits, political life. Contrasting his role with that of his predecessor James Hagerty, Mr. Salinger writes, “My only policy duties were in the information field. While Jim had a voice in deciding what the administration would do, I was responsible only for presenting that decision to the public in a way and at a time that would generate the best possible reception.” His book is valuable only when he discusses the relations between press and government. And of course when he writes about himself. His 1964 campaign for the Senate is nicely told and it is good to know that he lost because he came out firmly for fair housing on the ground that “morally I had no choice—not after sweating out Birmingham and Oxford with John F. Kennedy.” This is splendid but it might have made his present book more interesting had he told us something about that crucial period of sweating out. Although he devotes a chapter to telling how he did not take a fifty-mile hike, he never discusses Birmingham, Oxford, or the black revolution.

  All in all, his book is pretty much what one might expect of a PR man. He papers over personalities with the reflexive and usually inaccurate phrase (Eisenhower and Kennedy “had deep respect for each other”; Mrs. Kennedy has “a keen understanding of the problems which beset mankind”). Yet for all his gift at creating images for others, Mr. Salinger seems not to have found his own. Uneasily he plays at being U.S. Senator, fat boy at court, thoughtful emissary to Khrushchev. Lately there has been a report in the press that he is contemplating writing a novel. If he does, Harold Robbins may be in the sort of danger that George Murphy never was. The evidence at hand shows that he has the gift. Describing his divorce from “Nancy, my wife of eight years,” Mr. Salinger manages in a few lines to say everything. “An extremely artistic woman, she was determined to live a quieter life in which she could pursue her skills as a ceramicist. And we both knew that I could not be happy unless I was on the move. It was this difference in philosophies, not a lack of respect, that led to our decision to obtain a divorce. But a vacation in Palm Springs, as Frank Sinatra’s guest, did much to revive my spirits.”

  Mr. Fay emerges as very much his own man, and it is apparent that he amused the President at a level which was more that of a playmate escorting the actress Angie Dickinson to the Inaugural than as serious companion to the prince. Unlike the other witnesses, Mr. Fay has no pretensions about himself. He tells how “the President then began showing us the new paintings on the wall. ‘Those two are Renoirs and that’s a Cézanne,’ he told us. Knowing next to nothing about painters or paintings, I asked, ‘Who are they?’ The President’s response was predictable, ‘My God, if you ask a question like that, do it in a whisper or wait till we get outside. We’re trying to give this administration a semblance of class.’ ” The President saw the joke; he also saw the image which must at all times be projected. Parenthetically, a majority of the recorded anecdotes about Kennedy involve keeping up appearances; he was compulsively given to emphasizing, often with great charm, the division between how things must be made to seem, as opposed to the way they are. This division is noticeable, even in the censored version of Mr. Manchester’s The Death of a President. The author records that when Kennedy spoke at Houston’s coliseum, Jack Valenti, crouched below the lectern, was able to observe the extraordinary tremor of the President’s hands, and the artful way in which he managed to conceal them from the audience. This tension between the serene appearance and that taut reality add to the poignancy of the true legend, so unlike the Parson Weems version Mrs. Kennedy would like the world to accept.

  Money, image, family: the three are extraordinarily intertwined. The origin of the Kennedy sense of family is the holy land of Ireland, priest-ridden, superstitious, clannish. While most of the West in the nineteenth century was industrialized and urbanized, Ireland remained a famine-ridden agrarian country, in thrall to politicians, homegrown and British, priest and lay. In 1848, the first Kennedy set up shop in Boston, where the Irish were exploited and patronized by the Wasps; not unnaturally, the Irish grew bitter and vengeful and finally asserted themselves at the ballot box. But the old resentment remained as late as Joe Kennedy’s generation and with it flourished a powerful sense that the family is the only unit that could withstand the enemy, as long as each member remained loyal to the others, “regarding life as a joint venture between one generation and the next.” In The Fruitful Bough, a privately printed cluster of tributes to the Elder Kennedy (collected by Edward M. Kennedy) we are told, in Bobby’s words, that to Joe Kennedy “the most important thing…was the advancement of his children…except for his influence and encouragement, my brother Jack might not have run for the Senate in 1952.” (So much for JFK’s comment that it was his own “hustling” that got him Lodge’s seat.)

  The father is of course a far more interesting figure than any of his sons if only because his will to impose himself upon a society which he felt had snubbed him has been in the most extraordinary way fulfilled. He drove his sons to “win, win, win.” But never at any point did he pause to ask himself or them just what it was they were supposed to win. He taught them to regard life as a game of Monopoly (a family favorite): you put up as many hotels as you can on Ventnor Avenue and win. Consequently, some of the failure of his son’s administration can be ascribed to the family philosophy. All his life Jack Kennedy was driven by his father and then by himself to be first in politics, which meant to be the president. But once that goal had been achieved, he had no future, no place else to go. This absence of any sense of the whole emerged in the famous exchange between him and James Reston, who asked the newly elected President what his philosophy was, what vision did he have of the good life. Mr. Reston got a blank stare for answer. Kennedy apologists are quick to use this exchange as proof of their man’s essentially pragmatic nature (“pragmatic” was a favorite word of the era, even though its political meaning is opportunist). As they saw it: give the President a specific problem and he will solve it through intelligence and expertise. A “philosophy” was simply of no use to a man of action. For a time, actual philosophers were charmed by the thought of an intelligent young empiricist fashioning a New Frontier.

  Not until the second year of his administration did it become plain that Kennedy was not about to do much of anything. Since his concern was so much with the appearance of things, he was at his worst when confronted with those issues where a moral commitment might have informed his political response not only with passion but with shrewdness. Had he challenged the Congress in the Truman manner on such bills as Medicare and Civil Rights, he might at least have inspired the country, if not the Congress, to follow his lead. But he was reluctant to rock the boat, and it is significant that he often quoted Hotspur on summoning spirits from the deep: any man can summon, but will the spirits come? JFK never found out; he would not take the chance. His excuse in private for his lack of force, particularly in dealing with the Congress, was the narrow electoral victory of 1960. The second term, he declared, would be the one in which all things might be accomplished. With a solid majority behind him, he could work wonders. But knowing his character, it is doubtful that the second term would have been much more useful than the first. After all, he would have been constitutionally a lame duck president, interested in holding the franchise for his brother. The family, finally, was his only commitment and it colored all his deeds and judgment.

  In 1960, after listening to him
denounce Eleanor Roosevelt at some length, I asked him why he thought she was so much opposed to his candidacy. The answer was quick: “She hated my father and she can’t stand it that his children turned out so much better than hers.” I was startled at how little he understood Mrs. Roosevelt, who, to be fair, did not at all understand him, though at the end she was won by his personal charm. Yet it was significant that he could not take seriously any of her political objections to him (e.g., his attitude to McCarthyism); he merely assumed that she, like himself, was essentially concerned with family and, envying the father, would want to thwart the son. He was, finally, very much his father’s son even though, as all the witnesses are at pains to remind us, he did not share that magnate’s political philosophy—which goes without saying, since anyone who did could not be elected to anything except possibly the Chamber of Commerce. But the Founding Father’s confidence in his own wisdom (“I know more about Europe than anybody else in this country,” he said in 1940, “because I’ve been closer to it longer”) and the assumption that he alone knew the absolute inside story about everything is a trait inherited by the sons, particularly Bobby, whose principal objection to the “talking liberals” is that they never know what’s really going on, as he in his privileged place does but may not tell. The Kennedy children have always observed our world from the heights.

  The distinguished jurist Francis Morrissey tells in The Fruitful Bough a most revealing story of life upon Olympus. “During the Lodge campaign, the Ambassador told [Jack and me] clearly that the campaign…would be the toughest fight he could think of, but there was no question that Lodge would be beaten, and if that should come to pass Jack would be nominated and elected President….In that clear and commanding voice of his he said to Jack, ‘I will work out the plans to elect you President. It will not be any more difficult for you to be elected President than it will be to win the Lodge fight…you will need to get about twenty key men in the country to get the nomination for it is these men who will control the convention….’ ”