The Kennedy Half-Century (68 page)

All these differences hold true, yet among Kennedy’s successors in the White House, none came closer to embodying the “Kennedy mystique” than Ronald Reagan. Perhaps a bit of it was the shared Irish blood; a genealogical tracing linked the Kennedy and Reagan clans, which were both related to the famed tenth-century Irish king Brian Boru.
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Confident and self-assured, comfortable in his own skin, Reagan governed with qualities reminiscent of JFK. No characteristic linked the two presidents more than a playful, self-deprecating sense of humor—a trait lacking in almost all other modern occupants of the Oval Office.
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Reagan was a Democrat for much of his life, and he was bound to a place and a culture that Kennedy loved well—Hollywood. Perhaps as a consequence, no two modern presidents have ever been so comfortable in front of the camera; both were naturals, with their communication skills key to their success as chief executive.

Ideologically, they were not as far apart on many issues as observers would first have guessed. The Kennedy tax cut became the model for Reagan’s. To the extent that social issues were addressed in the early 1960s, Kennedy was as much a traditionalist as Reagan. Both Kennedy and Reagan were Cold Warriors, with a hard-line stance against the Communists from Russia to Cuba. Still, both negotiated major arms control treaties during their time.

Perhaps the parallels make sense because Kennedy and Reagan were generational contemporaries. JFK is frozen in time in his forties, but he would have been sixty-three years old when Reagan took office at age sixty-nine.
They were shaped by the same domestic upheavals, world wars, and social norms. And they were both blessed by fate and family with winning personalities and great good luck in the political arena.

The transformation of Ronald Reagan from loyal FDR Democrat to Goldwater Republican may have been a natural evolution promoted by second wife Nancy Reagan’s conservative stepfather, the neurosurgeon Dr. Loyal Davis.
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But it was also a by-product of Reagan’s transition from Hollywood B-movie star to the national spokesperson for General Electric, beginning in 1954. Reagan’s eight years of hosting
General Electric Theater
on TV and touring the nation as a GE representative, giving speeches to conservative, business-oriented audiences, encouraged the development of Reagan’s Republican political perspectives.

By 1956 Reagan was campaigning as a Democrat for President Eisenhower’s reelection campaign, and he continued to play the role for Vice President Nixon in 1960 despite having worked hard for Nixon’s 1950 Democratic opponent for U.S. Senate, Helen Gahagan Douglas. In a revealing letter to Nixon dated July 15, 1960, Reagan made clear that he had already fully embraced the philosophy that would become his presidential trademark:

Unfortunately, [Kennedy] is a powerful speaker with an appeal to the emotions. He leaves little doubt that his idea of the “challenging new world” is one in which the Federal Government will grow bigger and do more and of course spend more. I know there must be some shortsighted people in the Republican Party who will advise that the Republicans should try to “out liberal” him. In my opinion this would be fatal.

One last thought—shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “State Socialism” and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy.”
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Reagan’s comparison of JFK’s views to those of Marx, Hitler, and long-ago kings is outlandish, given Kennedy’s moderate to conservative presidency, and it would be contradicted by President Reagan’s own firm embrace of some of JFK’s foreign and domestic policies. Yet Reagan’s 1960 anti-Kennedy broadside has become a standard rhetorical theme in GOP evaluation of Democrats over the decades—evocative of the party’s modern-day critique of
Barack Obama (though Obama is unquestionably well to the left of JFK). Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale tried to use this letter to Nixon to discredit Reagan in 1984, an effort that failed badly, further reinforcing Reagan’s fabled “Teflon” coating.
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The usual rule in politics is that invoking Hitler in order to smear opponents results in backfire and backlash. The letter was not made public in 1960, and for that, Nixon could be grateful.
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During the 1960 campaign, Reagan was apparently shown photographs of JFK “going in and out of hotel rooms with different women.” Perhaps reflecting lessons learned in Hollywood, Reagan opposed their use in the campaign, reportedly saying, “We have to base elections on issues and a candidate’s ability to lead. There are bad husbands who are good leaders, and there are good husbands who are bad leaders. Those photos are about a personal matter between Mr. Kennedy and his wife.”
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Even more to Reagan’s credit, once he shifted to the GOP, he made no attempt to curry favor with JFK’s popular Democratic administration. The GE platform kept Reagan in demand, and he held little back, attacking Washington on everything from JFK’s alleged kowtowing to the “roughnecks of the Kremlin” to “welfare statism” at home. Reagan also claimed that some told him, “I was the most popular speaker in the country after President Kennedy. And after a while I noticed something very interesting. I would go into a city and find out at the other end of town, there’d be a member of the Kennedy cabinet. After a while I realized it was deliberate. I guess I was getting too much attention to suit them.”
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It may be that the Kennedy White House saw what millions of Republicans were starting to recognize: Ronald Reagan offered Kennedyesque glitz and glamor with a conservative flavor.

There may have been something to Reagan’s allegation about a Kennedy vendetta against him. Michael Reagan has asserted that General Electric “was in the midst of negotiating some government contracts” when “Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States, bluntly informed GE that if the company wished to do business with the U.S. government, it would get rid of
General Electric Theater
and fire the host … Within forty-eight hours of Bobby Kennedy’s call, the show was cancelled and Ronald Reagan was out of a job.”
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The irony here is that had Reagan continued to host
General Electric Theater
, he probably wouldn’t have run for governor of California, or become president. Could the Kennedy administration have started Reagan on his elective path to the White House?

To no one’s surprise, Reagan changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1962. He went all out for Barry Goldwater in 1964, giving the most memorable televised defense of the GOP presidential nominee in the entire campaign on October 27, 1964, near the campaign’s conclusion.
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This effort endeared Reagan to conservatives everywhere, and the response
encouraged him to seek the governorship of California in 1966. This midterm election year was a perfect environment for Reagan’s tough rhetoric about welfare, crime, student protests, and government waste. The anti-LBJ undercurrent helped Reagan soundly defeat two-term Democratic governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the father of future governor Jerry Brown. Reagan’s long climb to the presidency had begun in earnest.

As a new governor, Reagan’s trajectory intersected once more with the Kennedys. In May 1967, CBS decided to pair him up with Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a transcontinental debate about Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy. Reagan was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War—though not the manner in which Lyndon Johnson was waging the conflict—while RFK was beginning his turn to become a fierce critic of Johnson and Vietnam. An estimated 15 million Americans watched the face-off between Reagan in Sacramento and Kennedy in New York City, with students in London asking tough questions of them both. Reagan took the confrontation seriously, commissioning a lengthy memo from his staff and rehearsing with aides a day before the event, but Kennedy did no preparation. As a consequence, Reagan scored big, robustly defending the U.S. role abroad while Kennedy appeared hesitant and meek. It was no surprise that Kennedy remarked afterward, “Who the fuck got me into this?”
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Had Reagan been the cunning sort, he might have seen his debate victory as revenge for RFK’s earlier role in his firing from General Electric.

Already impressed with Reagan, Republicans took further note of him after the Reagan-RFK face-off. Finally, they had a champion who could best a Kennedy on television. The contrast with the 1960 JFK-Nixon debates was stark. Even though Reagan had served only a few months in his first office, whispers began that Reagan should run for president in 1968. He hesitated at first, and two other governors—Michigan’s George Romney and New York’s Nelson Rockefeller—became the main rivals for former vice president Nixon. By the spring, however, with Romney out of the race and Rockefeller faltering, Reagan warmed to the idea and assumed “testing the waters” status. But Nixon was too far ahead. Reagan secured over 20 percent of the vote in just two primaries, Nebraska on May 14 and Oregon on May 28. He was accorded “favorite son” status in California and garnered 1,525,000 votes on June 4, 100 percent of the total on the GOP side, though this received little attention in the aftermath of the shooting of Robert Kennedy late that night. Because of California, though, Reagan actually outpolled Nixon, 1,696,000 (37.9 percent) to 1,679,000 (37.5 percent) in all the 1968 primaries combined. By the time of the convention, Reagan had considered joining forces with Rockefeller in a “stop Nixon” coalition, but it was far too late. Nixon already had a majority (692) of the delegate votes, to Rockefeller’s 277 and Reagan’s 182.

The presidential bug had burrowed deep into Reagan’s core, however. He ran for and won reelection as governor in 1970, and looked to 1976. Wisely, Reagan decided not to run for a third term as governor in the heavily Democratic year of 1974, when he might well have lost, and planned instead to target the politically weak incumbent president, Gerald Ford. In a titanic battle that went right to the 1976 convention, the more moderate Ford defeated Reagan by a close delegate tally of 1,187 to 1,070. When Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in November, Reagan, at age sixty-five, figured his time had passed. If Carter served eight years, Reagan would be seventy-three in 1984, probably too old to win nomination or election.

During the Carter years, Reagan stayed in the public eye and delivered a series of radio broadcasts focused on contemporary political issues. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report on JFK’s murder in 1979, Reagan may have surprised some of his listening audience by laying out the case for a Communist conspiracy:

I’d like to comment on a conspiracy theory in the Kennedy case that seems to have been overlooked … [H]ave we hesitated to investigate the possibility that Oswald might have been carrying out a plot engineered by an international agency? Even the original investigation by the Warren Commission seems to have ignored some obvious clues and been rather in haste to settle for Oswald as a lone killer.

Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald gave up his American citizenship and moved to Russia. He learned the Russian language before he defected. Someone must have helped him do this. Once in Russia, he married the niece of a colonel in the Soviet spy organization, the KGB. Thanks to that marriage, he lived at a level of luxury above that of the average citizen in Russia. While he is supposed to have recanted his favorable views on the USSR, it does seem strangely unlike the Soviets that he was allowed to return to the United States with his Russian wife … The Warren Commission was evidently unimpressed with the fact that he was an enthusiastic member of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Nor did the commission find it significant that two months before the assassination, he went to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and was seen in the company of two known Cuban agents. After his arrest, his wallet was found to contain the addresses of the
Communist Daily Worker
and the Soviet embassy in Washington. It has been reported by more than one source that President Johnson and the commission were fearful that evidence of a Communist conspiracy involving, as it would the Soviet Union and/or Cuba, would anger the American people and lead to a confrontation, possibly even to war. It is also reported that the FBI files indicate there might have been a Communist conspiracy involving Oswald, but that the commission was unwilling to pursue this. The files further show that the Justice Department and the Warren Commission wanted to establish Oswald as alone in the case, and to get this conclusion to the American people as quickly as possible. Maybe someday, a new investigation will start down that trail.
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Shortly after this, history began to turn in Reagan’s favor. First, Reagan had underestimated his staying power within the Republican Party. The increasingly conservative GOP base, fed up with leaders they considered too ideologically unreliable (such as Nixon and Ford), championed the California conservative who had won their hearts two decades earlier. President Ford’s loss took the steam out of the moderate wing, whose central political argument had always been that the party got victory in exchange for tempering its right wing. As President Carter sank lower and lower in the popularity polls, Republicans believed they could take the chance of nominating Reagan despite his age and sharp rhetoric. The script for the old actor was set, and with just a few rewrites, the year 1980 unfolded as the fulfillment of Reagan’s long-held dreams. JFK had been elected president at his first chronological and political opportunity, and Reagan was elected at his last. After a scare from George H. W. Bush with a loss in the Iowa caucuses, Reagan swept to the nomination and (after seriously considering Gerald Ford for the ticket) chose Bush as his running mate. Burdened by a bad economy, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Ted Kennedy challenge, President Carter was doomed and lost badly to Reagan in November. A new Irish American presidency was born.