The Kennedy Half-Century (70 page)

Reagan’s remarkable presence of mind and humor in a life-threatening moment won over the country and gave his presidency a big boost in poll ratings and congressional support. He chose to use this painfully won political capital to get his economic program passed. But perhaps the greatest postassassination impact was on Reagan himself. He believed that his life had been spared by God for larger purposes—a belief apparently encouraged by another assassination survivor, Pope John Paul II, who was nearly killed in May 1981 while riding in the open “popemobile” in Vatican Square.
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The harsh world of politics has little time for might-have-beens. Ronald Reagan was lucky—the first incumbent president to be hit by a bullet and survive—while John Kennedy was not. Yet the Reagan experience reminds us that President Kennedy’s personal and political path would have been altered had he been wounded but survived on November 22. Assuming full recovery, Kennedy would certainly have used the inevitable popularity spurt to unfreeze some of his legislation in Congress, quite possibly the civil rights bill. His reelection would virtually have been assured, and by a large enough margin to have carried in much friendlier Democratic majorities in the legislature. Whether he would have pursued a war on poverty and the other components of what became LBJ’s Great Society is a mystery. Kennedy was more cautious than Johnson in some ways. Still, the assassination attempt would have rearranged his plans and perhaps his thinking in ways that are not predictable. The varying trajectories of the bullets marked for Kennedy,
and the one that struck Reagan, remind us that an inch one way or the other can make an enormous difference in history.

Other than a successful congressional effort to tighten up the insanity plea by shifting the burden from the prosecution to the defense, the only significant piece of federal legislation that can be directly tied to the March 30, 1981, shootings came not from Reagan but from another victim, James Brady. While he remained the titular press secretary throughout Reagan’s eight years in office, Brady was too severely impaired to return to the job. Nonetheless he and his wife, Sarah, went to work on designing gun control legislation that eventually passed a dozen years after the shooting. As president, Reagan had always opposed gun control measures, but on the tenth anniversary of his near-assassination, Reagan endorsed the Brady bill.
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The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was signed into law by President Clinton in November 1993. For the first time, it required background checks for most firearms purchases.
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Ronald Reagan began his presidency with no honeymoon bump; Gallup measured his job approval at just 51 percent after ten days on the job—the precise proportion of the vote he had received in November. While he gained steadily, the events of March 30 sent his job approval soaring to 67 percent in Gallup and above 70 percent in some other polls.
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Reagan and his staff knew just what to do. On April 28, the recovering president appeared before a joint session of Congress to a hero’s welcome and marshaled his and the nation’s emotion: “The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know. You have given us a memory that we’ll treasure forever. And you’ve provided an answer to those few voices that were raised saying that what happened was evidence that ours is a sick society …”
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And from there, Reagan made clear that he wanted to cash in his new political chips for his domestic agenda of across-the-board tax cuts as well as defense spending increases to contain the Communists. By summer’s end, the president had most of what he desired. The legislation was delivered to his California ranch and he signed it with a flourish.
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Ronald Reagan had an unusual rhetorical ally in achieving his fiscal and international goals—John F. Kennedy. It is extraordinary how often Reagan employed JFK’s words to his own ends. As one scholar wrote: “… while [Reagan] quoted [Franklin] Roosevelt 76 times between his 1980 inauguration and his 1984 reelection, he cited John Kennedy on 133 occasions. (By contrast, he referred to Hoover once, to Nixon sixteen times, and to Coolidge [one of Reagan’s favorites] in only twenty-four instances.) Even Abraham Lincoln appeared only sixty-seven times—nine fewer than Roosevelt, sixty-six fewer
than Kennedy. All but a handful of these references to Kennedy were highly complimentary.”
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Reagan’s recurrent use of JFK was a carefully planned political strategy, on a par with Lyndon Johnson’s regular invocation of President Kennedy. It was difficult for Democratic politicians to contradict their patron saint, and John Kennedy’s imprimatur made Reagan’s policies more palatable to the public. Late in Reagan’s first term, the Republican National Committee undertook a study of Kennedy’s positions and assembled a “quote file” that could be used by the White House to undergird its proposals. The report opened:

Liberal Democrats have sought, for twenty years now, to embellish their policies and proposals with the theme of carrying forward the “vision” of President John F. Kennedy. They would have the American people believe that their big-government, tax and spend, anti-defense, anti-business policies are what JFK would have pursued had he lived.

A review of the actual words of President Kennedy has yielded an astoundingly different story. In reality, from national defense to tax policy, from foreign policy to the federal budget, from the economy to education—the views of JFK ring far closer to those of President Reagan than to those of the self-appointed “torch carriers.” The fact is that many Democrats and their media sympathizers have grossly distorted the views of President Kennedy, building a false image, possibly, to play upon the reverence accorded an assassinated President to suit their own ends.

The following quotes reveal a man who was strong on defense, ever-mindful of the Soviet threat, sought tax cuts to stimulate the economy, supported the free market, sought to limit domestic spending and the growth of the federal government and was opposed to racial quotas. Indeed, few of the words of JFK contained here would be alien to President Reagan and, in fact, are amazingly consistent with his views of foreign, domestic and economic policy. They provide fascinating reading.
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In no area did President Reagan use JFK to greater effect than for his tax cuts. It was incontrovertible that Kennedy pushed for slashing the top individual rates from a sky-high 91 percent to 65 percent, a reform that was on
track to occur when he went to Dallas and was passed in February 1964.
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From his first month in office, Reagan linked his tax program to Kennedy’s, and when Reagan’s critics accused him of helping the rich, he quoted JFK’s argument, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
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Deficit hawks feared the tax cuts would increase the national debt (as they did), but Reagan used the Kennedy economy to rebut them, employing JFK’s words: “ ‘Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. An economy stifled by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.’ John F. Kennedy said that back in 1962, when he was asking for a tax decrease, a cut in tax rates across the board. And he was proven right, because that—the last tax cut, literally, that we’ve had—actually produced more revenue for government, because the economy was stimulated and more people were working and there was more industry and productivity in America.”
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Over and over again, all the way through his reelection and beyond, President Reagan cited the same passages from John Kennedy and the matching statistics about the post-tax-cut growth of government revenue in the 1960s to deflect concerns about federal deficits in the 1980s. Democrats used Ted Kennedy to attempt to seize back JFK’s mantle, with limited success. “President Kennedy’s tax cut concentrated relief on middle income families. [Reagan’s] tax cut would give the most to the wealthiest segment of our society,” claimed Senator Kennedy in April 1981. In fact, JFK’s tax cut had also done far more for the rich than the middle class.
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Ironically, President Reagan took President Kennedy’s side of the tax cut argument and ignored one of the JFK tax cut’s chief opponents—none other than Barry Goldwater, Reagan’s conservative hero, who believed Kennedy’s tax policies would fuel runaway deficits.
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However, what didn’t happen in the 1960s, when the United States maintained a stronger position in the world economy and much smaller federal expenditures, unfolded with a vengeance in the 1980s. Reagan’s “supply-side economics,” built around his tax cuts, greatly expanded federal debt; promised spending cuts never occurred, mainly because of staunch Democratic opposition.
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The Kennedy tax cut legacy was truly double-edged, an economic boost in the go-go sixties and a fiscal fount of red ink in the more complicated eighties.
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Ronald Reagan also employed JFK, with much less success, in his repeated attempts to reduce federal social spending. The president took to quoting the most famous lines from Kennedy’s inaugural speech (“Ask not what your country can do for you …”), but insisting “it’s time … to remember the second part of what JFK said, ‘Ask what you can do for your country.’”
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His point was unmistakable—Americans should accept less largesse and fewer
federal entitlements. Not even John F. Kennedy could help Reagan with that goal, still unrealized three decades later.

Equal to tax cuts on the list of President Reagan’s passions was his fervent anticommunism. Again, President Kennedy was Reagan’s faithful rhetorical ally. Except for a relative handful of liberals and radicals in the 1950s and 1960s, there was little sympathy for Communism, and on this, John F. Kennedy was no liberal. In the 1950s he had defended his personal friend, Richard Nixon, on his rigid anticommunism, and had even told associates that if he (Kennedy) could not get the Democratic nomination for president, he would vote for Nixon.
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Opposition to the Reds was a basis for bipartisan unity, and opposing candidates such as Kennedy and Nixon tried to out-do one another in bashing Communism.

Once in the Oval Office, JFK faced crisis after crisis—the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the Khrushchev summit, Soviet missiles in Cuba—generated by the great ideological conflict between East and West. The consensus at the time was that Communism and capitalism were engaged in a life-or-death struggle that would leave one side’s philosophy and civilization on the scrap heap of history. Every American adult was familiar with Premier Khrushchev’s declaration to the West, “We will bury you!” Even schoolchildren at the time remember that frightening sentence emblazoned on placards fixed to the walls of school buses.
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Civil defense shelters dotted the map in every urban locality and bomb shelters in individual homes were common. Kennedy’s rhetoric about Communism was tough and harsh, beginning with his inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” President Reagan had many such JFK passages from which to choose.

Reagan’s first use of Kennedy was to adopt his own version of JFK’s “missile gap” charge. President Reagan’s favorite data on defense spending became a staple of his speeches: Under JFK, defense spending accounted for 46 percent of the federal budget, compared to 29 percent for social programs. Twenty years later, just 29 percent of federal money was devoted to defense and more than 50 percent to social spending “that mushroomed during the Great Society.”
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Reagan even included an animated graph of this trend, with credit to Kennedy for keeping America strong, in a televised address to the nation on November 22, 1982, the nineteenth anniversary of the assassination.
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Interestingly, Reagan blamed the shift away from defense not just on the Great Society but “neglect in the 1970s,” when two of his foes, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, were president: “[T]he 1970’s were marked by neglect of
our defenses … Too many forgot John Kennedy’s warning that only when our arms are certain beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt they will never be used. By the beginning of this decade, we face three growing problems: the Soviet SS-20 monopoly in Europe and Asia; the vulnerability of our land-based ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missiles]; and the failure of arms control agreements to slow the overall growth in strategic weapons.”
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Just as Kennedy’s allegation that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the production and deployment of nuclear missiles proved to be false, so, too, was part of Reagan’s accusation that post-Kennedy leaders in the 1960s and 1970s had let America fall behind. In absolute terms, defense expenditures had skyrocketed from $53 billion in 1963 to $134 billion in 1980, the year before Reagan took office—Reagan’s case depended on the high inflation of the 1970s.
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Whatever the truth of the candidates’ assertions, the fear of Communism was such that most voters seemed to side with Kennedy and Reagan, preferring to be prepared rather than sorry.