Kennedy and Reagan Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR’S PREVIOUS BOOK

  Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation

  “[An] engaging study of men who came up short in the presidential arena but still had a significant effect on the life of the nation.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “[E]ngrossing biographical sketches. . . . [Farris] describes the circumstances that gave rise to each of these seminal ‘losers’—the causes they rallied around, the unique personalities they possessed—and how their presidential losses laid the groundwork for later political victories, if not for themselves, then for their parties or their cub causes.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “[Almost President] makes the case for the relevancy of several men who lost an election while changing American politics. . . . Farris succeeds in making the book as much a ­celebration of American democracy as it is a collection of biographies.”

  —Roll Call

  “Farris writes with a lively flair, skillfully illustrating his solid historical research with ­revelatory anecdotes and facts.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I absolutely lost myself in Scott Farris’s Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation. I loved the book so much that we invited Scott to be a guest on Saturday. I can’t wait for the chance to talk with him about how often we focus exclusively on winners and forget all of the ways that ‘political losers’ actually have the power to change conversations, set agendas, and alter the course of history.”

  —Blog post by Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC anchor

  “A lively, opinionated examination of the instructive role of the loser in presidential races. . . . [R]iveting, sympathetic treatments. . . . A most useful aide-mémoire for situating the upcoming presidential slugfest.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Almost President illuminates the stories behind many of these candidates, offering intriguing ­glimpses into their unsuccessful campaigns and their lives before and after the election. ­You’ll recognize a lot of these names from school, but the vivid and curious details paint a far richer picture of our shared history.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  Also by Scott Farris

  Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation

  KENNEDY AND REAGAN

  WHY THEIR LEGACIES ENDURE

  SCOTT FARRIS

  LYONS PRESS

  GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  For my parents, Neil and Maxine Blubaugh Farris,

  and my in-laws, William and Grace Tippin Cavanaugh,

  all of whom were contemporaries of Kennedy and Reagan

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott Farris

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  All insert photos public domain unless otherwise noted.

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

  Layout: Maggie Peterson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farris, Scott.

  Kennedy and Reagan : why their legacies endure / Scott Farris.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  E-ISBN 978-1-4930-0187-3

  1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963. 2. Reagan, Ronald.

  3. Presidents—United States—Biography. 4. United States—Politics

  and government—1961-1963. 5. United States—Politics and

  government—1981-1989. I. Title.

  E176.1.F24 2013

  973.09'9—dc23

  2013029119

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chapter 1: The Sincerest Form of Flattery

  Chapter 2: Martyrdom and Near Martyrdom

  Chapter 3: The Most Irish of Presidents

  Chapter 4: Different Incomes, Similar Families

  Chapter 5: Boys Who Loved Books

  Chapter 6: College Days During the Great Depression

  Chapter 7: Early Success

  Chapter 8: The War Stateside and Overseas

  Chapter 9: Anti-Communists

  Chapter 10: Wives and Other Lovers

  Chapter 11: The Book and the Speech

  Chapter 12: The Mad Dash for President

  Chapter 13: Sinatra, Disney, and Casals

  Chapter 14: A City on a Hill and a Man on the Moon

  Chapter 15: Crises and Charisma

  Chapter 16: To the Brink—And Back

  Chapter 17: The Will Rogers of Covert Operations

  Chapter 18: Tax Cuts and Deficits

  Chapter 19: Religion and the Culture Wars

  Chapter 20: Civil Rights

  Chapter 21: A Different World

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were not antagonists in life. They never seem to have met, which is surprising given that they were contemporaries born just six years apart—Reagan in 1911 and Kennedy in 1917—and that they both straddled the worlds of movies and politics, moved in the same circles, shared some of the same friends, and even shared some of the same political convictions. Yet, without the drama of direct competition, their presidencies and personalities are seldom studied together despite their similarities.

  But if Kennedy and Reagan never competed for the same political office in life, they battle for primacy in death. Multiple public opinion polls taken from 1999 through 2011 show that the American public has consistently ranked just three men as the greatest president in U.S. history: Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan. Historians agree with the public’s view of Lincoln. Lincoln, after all, led America through its greatest crisis, the Civil War, which ended slavery. However, historians generally do not share the public’s high esteem for Kennedy and Reagan. When polled, historians have ranked Kennedy and Reagan as average or above average presidents at best. Such middling status is partly due to the fact that neither Kennedy nor Reagan was president at a particularly critical time in American history when compared with periods of great war or great depression. There were crises, of course, but some of those were of Kennedy’s or Reagan’s own doing.

  Yet pundits and politicians, those most in tune with popular opinion, share the public’s reverence for Kennedy and Reagan as their beaux ideals of what a president should be. Each presidential election cycle revives the search within Democratic circles for a new Kennedy and within Republican circles for the next Reagan. Public policy is debated and shaped today in large measure by whether the proposed policies honor the legacies ascribed to these two men.

  Therein lies a significant problem. Popular memory, in service to contemporary causes, has distorted what the legacies of each man actually are. No longer flesh and blood, Kennedy and Reagan have become icons—Kennedy of the left, Reagan of the right—though these labels are far too neat and tidy for two such complicated men. Despite being labeled a lib
eral, Kennedy proposed dramatic tax cuts twenty years before Reagan did the same; despite being labeled a conservative, Reagan took action to ensure Social Security was solvent for generations—in part by raising taxes. These incongruities have helped Kennedy and Reagan become so broadly admired that they now transcend party identification. Regardless of political leanings, the joint influence of Kennedy and Reagan has changed the nation’s conception of what the presidency should be and how a president should look and sound and act.

  Yes, the new presidential ideal involves the superficial qualities Kennedy and Reagan each possessed: good looks, elegant wives, and the ability to give a good speech. It is hard to imagine two bald men ever competing again for the presidency, as was the case when Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson ran against each other in the 1950s, even though this prejudice in favor of physical beauty is the country’s loss. But Kennedy and Reagan’s appeal could not have endured were it based solely on cosmetics.

  This book, then, seeks to understand their deeper influence and how this influence came to be. In truth, I have found both men enigmatic, but for opposite reasons.* Reagan seemed so normal, so average, leaving one to wonder, as from the film Citizen Kane, was there a “Rosebud” to explain how he became who he was? Kennedy, by contrast, between his family, his health, and his own philandering, offers up a Freudian buffet almost too overwhelming to digest. So it occurred to me that perhaps I might understand each man and his legacy better, and allow readers to do the same, by placing Kennedy and Reagan side by side to see if this perspective illuminates the persons and presidencies of each man.

  ** The author was in first grade when Kennedy was shot; he was a reporter for United Press International during most of Reagan’s presidency.

  I describe this approach as “comparative biography.” This may seem a convoluted task, given that their presidencies were twenty years apart, but I did not find it so.

  First, for more than four decades, Kennedy and Reagan shared similar life experiences. Members of what Tom Brokaw famously labeled “The Greatest Generation,” Reagan and Kennedy together lived through most of the great events of the twentieth century—war, depression, and rapid changes in technology and social mores. Certainly their circumstances and experiences were not identical, but the differences help explain how their political philosophies contrasted sharply in some areas, and were nearly identical in others.

  Second, while I profess no psychiatric credentials of any kind, I found it interesting, despite the vast differences in their families’ respective wealth and social status, that Kennedy and Reagan came from families that shared several common dynamics: rakish fathers, pious mothers, domineering older brothers, and a nomadic childhood. There is some evidence that these similar family dynamics, far more important than disparity in family income, formed certain characteristics in both men that would serve them well in politics.

  Third, they ran in similar circles as adults. Both were, to varying degrees, denizens of Hollywood. Reagan, of course, had an acting career in film and television that spanned three decades, but Kennedy had been around the movie business since he was a small child, when his father owned several movie studios and produced films for, among others, his mistress Gloria Swanson. Kennedy, like his father, enjoyed dating starlets, avidly followed the personal lives of the stars, and even had a minor movie star, Peter Lawford, for a brother-in-law. Kennedy and Reagan knew and befriended many of the same people in Hollywood, including Frank Sinatra, who would be the master of ceremonies at inaugural gala events for both Kennedy and Reagan. No two presidents did more to ally Washington with Hollywood than Kennedy and Reagan.

  Fourth, Kennedy and Reagan became household names during the 1950s, when they were two of the most popular public speakers in America. After an extremely well received televised speech at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, where he conceded his party’s vice-presidential nomination to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, Kennedy became the most sought-after political speaker in America. During the same period, Reagan was on television every week, hosting General Electric Theater, while as part of his contract he traveled the country to give hundreds, if not thousands, of speeches on the benefits of free enterprise and electric appliances. How the men’s paths never crossed is a mystery.

  Finally, the twenty-year gap between their presidencies does not invalidate comparison. Rather, their respective presidencies serve as bookends that give us a better perspective on a tumultuous and controversial era in American history. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 seemed to foretell dark times that would follow—the Vietnam War, race riots, other assassinations, and a loss of public trust in government, culminating in the Watergate scandal. Had he lived, the thinking goes, much of that might have been avoided.* Reagan, too, was shot while president, but he survived, which seemed to portend that better times had returned for America and helped ensure some of Reagan’s most important policy victories. Had Reagan been another in a line of seemingly failed presidencies—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter—admirers assert, the ramifications for the American political system might have been dire.

  * It should not be forgotten, of course, that many positive things occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, including legal equality for women and minorities, increased efforts to reduce pollution and its effects, and many advancements in medicine and technology.

  The issues Kennedy and Reagan grappled with during their presidencies were largely the same: avoiding nuclear conflict and blunting the expansion of Communism, finding the appropriate role of the federal government in ensuring civil rights, and promoting economic growth, particularly through tax policy. They shared many of the same basic principles, including an unwavering faith that America could do anything it chose to do, whether that was to put a man on the moon or to make nuclear weapons obsolete. They also made some of the same mistakes, becoming preoccupied with the Communist presence in Latin America and trying to fend off that presence through ill-advised covert actions.

  Ultimately, an in-depth look at both men, compared together, suggests that there are far greater similarities between Kennedy and Reagan than we might have supposed. This discovery may appall devout partisans of both men, though I hope not, for it may auger some good news for twenty-first-century American politics. For if Kennedy, the icon of the left, and Reagan, the icon of the right—the two presidents Americans say they most admire—held similar beliefs and tried to steer America along a similar path, then perhaps, for all our talk of political polarization today, there is an American consensus that other political leaders would be wise to heed.

  And where Kennedy and Reagan differed, perhaps that, too, can help explain our political differences today and, with this better understanding, improve our political dialogue. That, at least, is the not-so-modest goal of this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

  On a presidential campaign stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1988, Colorado senator Gary Hart brushed back the forelocks of his thick tousled hair, jammed his left hand into his suit coat pocket, and stabbed the air with the index finger of his right hand to make his point. The gestures were familiar. They had been the gestures of John F. Kennedy, and Hart was one of a long line of promising Democratic politicians who hoped to evoke the Kennedy magic that still enthralled the nation.

  In late November 2012, the presidential election was merely two weeks past, with Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan having lost to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But already the drumbeat had started and conservative columnists were surveying the prospective Republican field for 2016 and wondering who—Marco Rubio? Ted Cruz? Rand Paul?—might be “the second coming of Ronald Reagan.”

  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Kennedy and Reagan are among the most flattered politicians in history. They are the models, the ideal, for what each of their respective political parties believes a president should be. Significant discussion
is now devoted during each presidential election cycle as to whether the Democrats can find and nominate a new Kennedy, and whether and where Republicans will locate the next Reagan.

  The search is purposeful. A new Kennedy or a new Reagan is sought because they remain enduringly popular. Polling indicates the American people believe them to be two of our greatest presidents. So every four years presidential contenders, so attuned to public opinion, eagerly seek to claim one or the other man’s mantle, self-consciously mimicking, at least as they understand it, the mannerisms, the style, the attitude, the language, and the policies of these presidential archetypes. There is no clearer measure of Kennedy and Reagan’s enduring popularity than to watch them do so.

  An entire generation of Democratic presidential contenders, many who came of age during the Kennedy years but also others even younger, have sought to capture what they believe is the magic of Kennedy’s leadership. Hart, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988, was not the most egregious in mimicking Kennedy; he was simply one of the first.

  Like many Democratic politicians, particularly those of the “baby boomer” generation, Hart said it was Kennedy who inspired him to a vocation in “public service.” Hart styled his hair, tailored his strong national defense views, declared an “end to the New Deal,” and made friends among such Hollywood stars as Warren Beatty, all in tribute to and/or imitation of Kennedy, his “ultimate hero.”

  In 1972, Hart had been campaign manager for South Dakota senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign. McGovern had been director of the Food for Peace program under Kennedy and had tried to attach some of the Camelot panache to his own candidacy by working relentlessly, but unsuccessfully, to convince Kennedy’s youngest brother, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, to be his running mate.