The Kennedy Half-Century (53 page)

Meanwhile, suggestions for Kennedy memorials flooded in from across America and the world. JFK was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize by Peru’s Chamber of Deputies, though the Nobel Institute demurred.
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Domestically, there was little or no resistance to most such efforts. Some required federal action, while others were taken by state and local authorities. The Benjamin Franklin half dollar was replaced by the Kennedy fifty-cent piece, and a five-cent stamp with JFK’s likeness was authorized.
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LBJ named President Kennedy a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and also ensured that the forthcoming 1964 World’s Fair in New York City would have a suitable memorial to him.
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The planned Washington, D.C., cultural institute was
rechristened the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, with a federal appropriation of $30 million in matching funds for private gifts.
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New York City’s Idlewild Airport became John F. Kennedy International a month after the assassination.
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Schools and hospitals and highways from every corner of the country were renamed for the late president. Bay City, Alaska, near Anchorage, became John Fitzgerald Kennedy City. The “city” had thirty-five residents, and the mayor believed the new name would make it a mecca; today it is still on the map but a ghost town with a population of zero.
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Popular tunes, solemn marches, and cantatas were composed as musical tributes by well-known artists and anonymous amateurs.
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Thousands of letters were written to the White House and the Kennedys offering condolences.
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Tens of thousands of people requested photographs of the late president and his family.
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They were not available from the government, but private companies quickly offered lithographs as well as long-playing albums of JFK’s speeches and even toy replicas of his famous Oval Office rocking chair, which Kennedy used to ease the soreness in his back.
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Dozens of memorial magazines and newspapers appeared on the stands and were snapped up as keepsakes as soon as they arrived. A blizzard of instant books rained down in the next year, and JFK’s own
Profiles in Courage
returned to the bestseller list.
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On December 10, nineteen days after the assassination, Walter Cronkite decided that a depressed country needed a break from the constant barrage of assassination-related reports, and on his evening news program he ran a feel-good story about a new musical group from England called the Beatles. Fellow CBS journalist Mike Wallace had run a five-minute morning segment on the Beatles’ rising popularity on the day their new album was released (November 22), and it had been scheduled to rerun that evening, before Kennedy’s murder canceled all scheduled items. But Cronkite had seen Wallace’s piece and liked it. Cronkite’s judgment was proven correct, and Americans welcomed the opportunity to focus on a foreign diversion. This was the televised start of the phenomenon called Beatlemania that swept the United States in early 1964. The death of one cultural icon thus gave way to a new one.
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The Beatles sensation was a mere respite from, not a substitute for, the spotlight on John Kennedy. Citizens of all stripes were determined that their fallen leader would be remembered by future generations. The memorial with the most impact on JFK’s legacy was not made of paper, or of brick and mortar. It was an idea hatched by Jackie Kennedy a week after the assassination. Over the years, the image most associated with the short Kennedy term has been Camelot, inspired by the Broadway play and song about King Arthur’s reign. Never during JFK’s life was Camelot linked to him. Mrs. Kennedy
invented it with a simple anecdote she shared with presidential election chronicler Theodore White, whom she had summoned to Hyannis Port on the day after Thanksgiving. White was writing for
Life
magazine, and Jackie trusted him to convey her message intact. She also verified the trust by dictating and editing the article herself—and resisting attempts by
Life’s
editors to tone down the repeated allusions to Camelot. The widely read and discussed article, published December 6, 1963, contained this paragraph:

“When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical,” she said, “but I’m so ashamed of myself—all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:
Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot
.”
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The mythic dimensions of the Kennedy presidency were now set. His widow had decreed that JFK had been King Arthur, his aides and cabinet the Round Table, and the time of John Kennedy would never be forgot. At that moment, after the strength she had shown and the sadness she had borne, Jackie Kennedy had more power to influence America than President Johnson, Congress, and the Supreme Court put together. Her word was cultural law, and the code of Camelot remains dominant fifty years later in the minds of those who lived then.
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The month of national mourning for John F. Kennedy had been a rare respite from partisan politics. Johnson himself had ordered all administration officials to cease “partisan political speeches of any sort,” a ban that occurs only during extraordinary moments of national shock and grief.
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The bombing of Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of September 11 have been the only other modern examples of a complete, lengthy cease-fire in party warfare.

Replacing the partisan angst was a gnawing sense that the nation had lost its way, that it was becoming a “sick society”—a widespread feeling that would only grow throughout the troubled sixties and beyond. Religious and secular leaders suggested that materialism, the decline of national unity that had defined the years of World War II, and a degradation of timeless American values in the postwar years had culminated in the Kennedy assassination. The conservative
Reader’s Digest
, one of the most widely read publications at the time, expressed this sentiment in a statement from the editors:

What is happening to this beloved country of ours? Have we carried the violent spirit of war over into our peacetime lives? Have we become so complacent in our enjoyment of our material blessings that we have forsaken those nobler things of the spirit? Have we forgotten the ancient truths spoken by the prophets? Does the compassion of Christ no longer mean anything to large numbers of our people? Have Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words “… this nation, under God” ceased to lift the heart and fortify the conscience?
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In retrospect, the tendency to blame all of American society for the actions of one or a few assassins appears ridiculously overblown, but it was a reaction to the enormity of the crime. There had to be greater meaning to such a horrific act with untold consequences. The blaming of established institutions and values accelerated with each new assassination in the 1960s, just as it does in contemporary society in the wake of repeated mass shootings. While he obviously disagreed with the assertions, President Johnson had to account for this as he sought to reassure a nation suffering from profound shock and jangled nerves.

The official national mourning period expired on December 22, 1963, but no single month could begin to contain the long-term impact of the events in Dallas. Not long after the assassination, a despondent Robert Kennedy commented privately that public memory was short and Americans would quickly move on. In this prediction, he could not have been more wrong, as he himself would discover in time.

Naturally, the ambitious new president hoped to move out from under John Kennedy’s shadow in the new year. This aspiration was encouraged by his staff. Aide Jack Valenti, who had been with LBJ on Air Force One in Dallas, wrote Johnson in early January 1964, “Up to this point, you have been carrying on Kennedy’s programs—now, it’s your show.”
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But even Johnson understood he had no real chance to become his own man until he won a term in his own right. The affection for his predecessor had grown exponentially since his death, and LBJ the consummate politician knew that JFK’s murder had created enormous banked capital in an account marked Kennedy. Better to acknowledge this golden reserve and use it to build a joint record than to pretend it was not still the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

President Johnson sensed and heard the deep suspicions about him and his intentions in Democratic circles. There had been not a day’s respite from the doubts since November 22. In fact, on the front page of the November 23
New York Times
, just below the dark headline KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER, was a news analysis entitled “Republican Prospects Rise—Johnson Faces Possible Fight Against Liberals”:

President Kennedy’s assassination … elevated into the Presidency … an older, more conservative man still emerging from his Southern heritage. It increased immeasurably, for the leaders of the Republican party, prospects of electing a President next November.
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As preposterous as this projection seems now, the dispatch captured the immediate conventional wisdom about Johnson’s allegedly precarious position. The truth was quite different. American voters were never likely to give the country three presidents in one year, much less a Republican one.
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Yet Johnson had learned from his disputed 1948 Senate squeaker not to take anything for granted in politics.
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He had to hold the Kennedys close personally; be more Kennedy than Kennedy on policy; and accomplish as much as possible in the short window he had before the onset of the 1964 campaign. It was a tall task, but Johnson wasted not an hour.

By the time President Johnson delivered his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, the plan was set. LBJ would secure passage of key parts of the unfulfilled Kennedy agenda while laying the groundwork for his own legacy. “Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—not because of our sorrow and sympathy, but because they are right,” Johnson intoned before Congress and the nation. But the new man would get to refine, redefine, and extend JFK’s “plans and programs.”
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The first major Kennedy bill to become law was the Revenue Act of 1964, passed on February 26. In a move that today sounds more Republican than Democratic, JFK had called for an $11.5 billion tax cut for individuals and corporations in order to “remove the brakes” of high federal tax rates and stimulate the economy—the largest tax reduction to that point in American history.
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The proposal was a year old, although it had already made some legislative progress. Johnson wanted it immediately so that it would have the maximum time to work its wonders before November. Two thirds of what amounted to a substantial 19 percent slashing of taxes went into effect retroactive to January 1, 1964.
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Many economists now believe this fiscal move had its intended effect, and just as important, it enabled Johnson to set forth a credible claim that his actions had produced the prosperity that was evident in the fall.
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While the Revenue Act received considerable attention at the time, no one then understood how influential it would be in characterizing Kennedy’s legacy for future generations. The tax cut enabled Republican candidates and officeholders to seize part of JFK’s image and legacy for
themselves, making Kennedy much more bipartisan in memory than he was in life.

The tax cut bill paled by comparison with Johnson’s premier goal in 1964, the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
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Even Lyndon Johnson’s fiercest critics would admit that he was masterful in his maneuvering to secure this landmark legislation, long sought by African Americans and their allies. Johnson understood that such a massive change in the nation’s culture would have to be backed by bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, not just to ensure enactment but to achieve compliance, however grudging, especially in the South. This was an era when both Democrats and Republicans had large liberal and conservative wings. It was possible for a skilled president to assemble a coalition that bridged partisanship and calmed party fervor. Knowing all members of the Senate and many members of the House—their strengths as well as their flaws—Johnson went to work to stitch together what is arguably his greatest achievement.

At every stage, LBJ made the bill a memorial to John Kennedy. In public and in private he cajoled and pleaded for his bill, insisting that JFK had been a victim of hatred and violence, much as civil rights workers had been. Ironically, if LBJ’s FBI and Warren Commission were to be believed, Kennedy had been killed by a leftist who was sympathetic to civil rights for African Americans.
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But no one was going to argue this point with Johnson, not for the great cause of equal rights, not when JFK’s family and supporters were calling the Civil Rights Act a fitting monument to the late president. Even some conservative Southern Democrats realized the gathering momentum was probably irresistible.