America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (26 page)

Ruby shooting Oswald

After a state funeral that mimicked Abraham Lincoln's of a century earlier, Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with an Eternal Flame marking his gravesite. 

Chapter 6: Kennedy’s Legacy

Camelot

John Kennedy's legacy is intimately intertwined with that of his own family.  Even before his White House years, John Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy fascinated the media and became integral parts of American popular culture.  Few Presidents acquire the sort of celebrity status that Kennedy maintained, and the Kennedy family was wrapped in a sort of regality normally reserved only for untouchable stars.  The continued popular fascination with the Kennedys suggests that Americans are still clamoring for the rare type of celebrity that John and Jackie embodied.  Their celebrity lives on most strongly in the Kennedy family.

With his death, the Kennedy legacy hardened.  Just five years after his assassination, John's brother Robert took hold of the Kennedy torch and began his own run for the White House.  In the summer of 1968, however, his dream was also cut short by an assassin's bullet.  A little over a decade later, another Kennedy brother made a much less successful bid for the Presidency when Ted Kennedy challenged the incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980.  Throughout the past few decades, other Kennedy relations have vied for the top executive office, among them Sargent Shriver, who was the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee in 1972 and sought the party's Presidential nomination in 1976.

The Kennedy family has been called “America's Royal Family,” and the family's political history adds credence to the designation.  Apart from Presidential hopefuls, the family has produced Senators, Congressman and many other office holders.  From John Kennedy's election to the Senate in 1952 until Ted Kennedy's death in 2009, a Kennedy continually occupied a Senate seat from Massachusetts.  At least one Kennedy served in the House and Senate between 1952 and 2011, when Ted Kennedy's son Patrick left his seat as a Congressman from Rhode Island.  Since 2011, no Kennedy has served in the House or Senate, but this vacancy may prove to be only a brief interregnum: today, Robert Kennedy's grandson Joe Kennedy III is seeking a seat in Congress representing the Massachusetts 4
^th
District, which today includes parts of Joe's great uncle John F. Kennedy's former 10
^th
District seat.

Other politicos abound in the Kennedy family, including Maria Shriver, former First Lady of California and ex-wife of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kathleen Kennedy, former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and one-time candidate for Governor.  John Kennedy's daughter Caroline also considered a run for US Senate from New York, but opted out.

John F. Kennedy's personal glamor and premature death helped solidify the Kennedy political dynasty and the concept of a “Kennedy Curse.”  So many of the Kennedy's experienced personal hardship – through death, disease and drugs – that the media has labeled the family afflicted by a curse.  With this narrative, John Kennedy has been heralded as a martyr for his family's cause of public service.  Not only was he a celebrity, but a heroic one at that.

Nevertheless, Camelot is an apt name for the Kennedy presidency, because the notion of Camelot was certainly more myth than reality. Behind the façade of a vibrant young President was a man with a broken body. Kennedy had never recovered from wounds incurred in the Pacific during World War II, struggling mightily with a bad back, and he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in the ‘40s. Kennedy struggled so badly with his health that he had been given last rites more than a decade before becoming President, and at the time of his death, he was being administered a witch’s brew of drugs on a daily basis.

The picture of a perfect First Family was also a myth. It was an open secret that Kennedy was a notorious womanizer, never made more apparent than when Marilyn Monroe seductively sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to him in 1962. Kennedy’s staff covered for him, and Jackie, who knew of her husband’s extramarital affairs, had no recourse but to put on a happy face.

Details of Kennedy’s trysts have continued to emerge in the nearly 50 years since his assassination. In February 2012, Mimi Alford, who was a 19 year old intern in the White House in 1962, began promoting her new book,
Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath
. Alford
publicized her affair with the 45 year old Kennedy, who seduced her just four days into her internship by giving her a private tour that led to and ended in Jackie’s bedroom. Although it was the first time Alford went public with the affair, historians had already been aware of it for years.

The Kennedy Legacy

Apart from leaving America a political dynasty to love, Kennedy also left his country a President to admire.  But should Americans be as enamored with Kennedy as they are?

Americans today consistently rank President Kennedy among the greatest Presidents in our nation's history.  Academics, however, are not quite as eager to carve Kennedy into Mount Rushmore.  Few Presidents face such a large disparity between their historical memory and the actual facts of their Presidencies.  Kennedy's assassination – the first ever to be captured on video through the Zapruder Film – has caused Americans to selectively remember Kennedy through the prism of his assassination.

While President Kennedy was a generally popular President, at the point of his assassination roughly 55% of the country approved of the job he was doing, according to the historic Gallop Poll.  While not bad, that number is hardly historic.  A 55% approval rating was about the average for most Presidents during normal times after Kennedy left office.  More importantly, Kennedy was in Texas due to worries about reelection.  Despite this, Americans view President Kennedy as one of the nation's most influential and inspiring, and have done so since very shortly after his death.  The country seems to be suffering from a sort of collective amnesia.

Reviewing the Kennedy Presidency in terms of its tangible accomplishments leaves much to be desired.  After all, Kennedy's Presidency was one of the shortest in history, at less than three years in total. 

On foreign policy, President Kennedy's first year and a half in office was not only unproductive, but outright disastrous.  Botching the Bay of Pigs invasion had devastating results in the later Cuban Missile Crisis.  Not until 1963 are the US and USSR able to agree on a nuclear testing treaty, and a nimble one at that.  The war Americans want to forget – the Vietnam War – began on Kennedy's watch, though Kennedy warned against further escalation, advice his successor did heed.

Without question the most successful foreign policy moment for President Kennedy came with his successful negotiation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  For this, he is rightly remembered fondly for avoiding nuclear war.  On the other hand, would the Cuban Missile Crisis have happened were it not for Kennedy's failure with the Bay of Pigs?  Arguably not.  When the Bay of Pigs failed, the Soviets saw a weak American President unwilling to follow through on failures with Cuba, and so they saw an opening to station missiles in Cuba.  Only because of Kennedy's failure did he have a chance to succeed.

On domestic policy, Kennedy only achieved negligible parts of his New Frontier policy.  On the civil rights issue, he was timid, only coming around to mild concessions for African-Americans in the later months of his Presidency.  Martin Luther King's March on Washington was partly a protest against Kennedy's limited proposal, and in favor of a stronger bill.

When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22
^nd
, 1963, however, his death may have actually given his successor the necessary mandate to achieve the New Frontier – and then some – that Kennedy was unable to.  Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater with over 60% of the popular vote in 1964, giving him a decisive mandate to govern.  Johnson's more “down home” character arguably allowed him to appeal more broadly to Americans than John Kennedy's reelection might have.  Most importantly, Johnson's relations with Congress were infinitely better than Kennedy's.  On domestic policy, Kennedy achieved little beyond the Peace Corps, which was an executive order issued independent of Congress.  Johnson, however, pushed groundbreaking legislation through Congress using his deep legislative knowledge.  This included Medicare, a program originally proposed by President Kennedy.

A huge part of Kennedy's legacy, thus, is his death.  November 22
^nd
, 1963, has become a sort of historical transition point.  For many, the moment marks the point when America threw away the conservative 50's and brought in the radicalism of the 60's.  The Kennedy years, with their cultural conservatism and obsession with stability, were much more characteristic of the 1950's than the more tumultuous 60's.

Perhaps this marker serves to explain why Americans remember their JFK so fondly.  When American remember John Kennedy, they recall an era when America kept its divisions quietly tucked away, unlike the post-Kennedy decades, when the upheavals of Civil Rights, drugs and anti-war movements shattered that ethic.  Kennedy also harkens back to an era when government could be trusted: JFK is the last President to not endure a major scandal of some sort, although Bill Clinton learned the hard way that similar philandering could nearly destroy a presidency 30 years later. Indeed, Kennedy’s womanizing is looked upon as a sign of the times and largely considered a quirk (or outright ignored), as opposed to being a sign of terrible immorality.

In the end, Americans are more than happy to remember Kennedy as an honest man who maintained a stable America, while offering the nation a bit of glamor and sophistication along the way, even if that narrative distorts his real accomplishments. 

JFK Bibliography

Brinkley, Alan and Davis Dyer. 
The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference.
  New

              York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Kennedy, John F. 
Profiles in Courage. 
New York: Blackdog Publishers, 1955.

Klein, Edward. 
The Kennedy Curse. 
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003.

Smith, Carter and Allen Weinstein. 
Presidents: Every Question Answered. 
New York: Hylas

              Publishing.

Ronald Reagan

Chapter 1: Early Life and Education, 1911 – 1932

Midwestern Childhood

Today Ronald Reagan is intimately associated with California, both as a movie star and the state governor, but the future governor of a state sometimes called the Sunshine State was born in the middle of a blizzard. On February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, Ronald Reagan was born in his family’s second story apartment, despite the severe blizzard raging outside. Reagan’s parents had Irish Catholic and British heritage, with father Jack being a working salesman, a profession Reagan’s older brother would also take up.

The Reagans only remained in the idyllic small town for a short time.  Shortly before Reagan's 4th birthday, the family left for Chicago, where Reagan's father Jack took a job as a member of a shoe department staff. Living in Chicago also proved temporary.  In his childhood, Reagan's family was itinerant due in large part to Jack. Despite the semblance of a moral all-American upbringing, Reagan's childhood was constantly disrupted by his alcoholic father.  In Chicago, Jack was arrested for public drunkenness, lost his job, and was forced to leave the city.  Leaving the big city behind them, the Reagans moved to a small town called Galesburg, but in 1918, they left the town for the same reasons they had had to leave Chicago.  Jack's drinking problem wreaked havoc in the Reagan household.