The Kennedy Half-Century (72 page)

As the campaign began, Mondale had checked all the boxes and taken the stands expected by the various Democratic Party constituencies, such as labor unions and women’s groups. His nomination was considered almost inevitable. But as Democrats began to grasp that a rebounding economy was lifting President Reagan toward a second term, they looked for an alternative to shake up the race. Gary Hart loomed large, with his “Kennedy hair,” hands thrust in his pockets à la JFK, and a practiced rhetorical cadence that was reminiscent of John Kennedy’s. The public’s innate yearning for a JFK revival had been pretested by Hart’s campaign in focus groups. Political impressionists had a field day mimicking Hart mimicking Kennedy.
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Hart stunned Mondale by roaring to a ten-percentage-point victory in New Hampshire, followed by wins in Florida and Massachusetts. Mondale fought back, capturing states where the party organization was strongest, such as Illinois and New York. The party was still deeply split as the primary season drew to a close in June; Hart snagged California, New Mexico, and South Dakota, while Mondale triumphed in New Jersey and West Virginia. Overall, Mondale edged
Hart in all primaries combined, 6.8 million votes to Hart’s 6.5 million, with the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson pulling in another 3.3 million.

If there was a turning point in such a close battle, it may have been the stripping away of Hart’s pseudo-Kennedy persona. Many observers criticized Hart for too much conscious imitation of JFK, and it was found that Hart had remade himself in other small but telling ways, such as shaving a year off his real age, changing his name from Hartpence to Hart, and dramatically altering his signature.
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Never much of a sound-bite politician, Mondale nevertheless borrowed a fast-food slogan when he asked Hart, the man of new ideas, “Where’s the beef?”—the punch line of a popular Wendy’s hamburger commercial that permitted Mondale to claim Hart’s proposals were vague and gauzy and that the candidate was more style than substance.

In the end, Mondale managed to thwart Hart by the slim margin of 224 delegates out of 3,933 at the party’s July 1984 convention in San Francisco. Recognizing his own lack of pizzazz, Mondale tried to generate enthusiasm with the historic nomination of a woman, New York representative Geraldine Ferraro, for vice president. But the temporary boost she provided soon evaporated as questions about her family’s finances were raised.
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An uphill campaign became even more so.

Reagan’s team needed little encouragement to play the Kennedy card, but Hart’s defeat enabled them to appeal to Democratic voters attracted to a defeated JFK look-alike. In speech after speech, Reagan quoted Kennedy, and he often added Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and other prominent Democrats for good measure. At his renomination convention in Dallas on August 23, 1984, Reagan enlisted the pumped delegates for audience participation with this theme:

THE PRESIDENT. Ten months ago, we displayed … resolve in a mission to rescue American students on the imprisoned island of Grenada. Democratic candidates have suggested that this could be likened to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—

AUDIENCE. Boo-o-o!

THE PRESIDENT.—the crushing of human rights in Poland or the genocide in Cambodia.

AUDIENCE. Boo-o-o!

THE PRESIDENT. Could you imagine Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, or Scoop Jackson [a hawkish Democratic U.S. senator from Washington state who died in 1983] making such a shocking comparison?

AUDIENCE. No!
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As Reagan traveled from Iowa to Michigan to Connecticut in the fall, he carried the same message: that he was closer to the policies of JFK and other Democratic presidents than the liberal Mondale and his band of “San Francisco Democrats.” Reagan especially sought crossover votes from Democrats who believed in an interventionist, anticommunist foreign policy: “Harry Truman believed—with FDR before him and John Kennedy after him—in strength abroad and self-reliance at home. To all those Democrats—and I hope there are many here—who feel that under its present leadership the Democratic Party no longer stands behind America’s responsibilities in the world, that it no longer represents working men and women, we say to you: ‘Join us.’”
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The technique even worked in Boston. On his way to carrying JFK’s Massachusetts for the second time, Reagan would stifle hecklers by quoting JFK, and daring them to interrupt Kennedy’s words.
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The only high point of the general election campaign for Mondale came at the first presidential debate, when Reagan lost his place and showed his age—and possibly demonstrated the earliest effects of his then-undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease. (Reagan famously recovered in the second and final debate, joking that he would not exploit his opponent’s age and inexperience for political purposes.) Mondale used his brief opening remarks to associate himself with his own version of John Kennedy:

The president says that when the Democratic Party made its turn, he left it. The year that he decided we had lost our way was the year that John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon. I was chairman of “Minnesotans for Kennedy”; President Reagan was chairman of a thing called “Democrats for Nixon.” Now, maybe we made a wrong turn with Kennedy, but I’ll be proud of supporting him all of my life. And I’m very happy that John Kennedy was elected, because John Kennedy looked at the future with courage, saw what needed to be done, and understood his own government …

The question is our future. President Kennedy once said in response to similar arguments, “We are great, but we can be greater.” We can be better if we face our future, rejoice in our strengths, face our problems, and by solving them, build a better society for our children.
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Judging by the postdebate polls, swing Democrats were unmoved by Mondale’s tactic, though some JFK loyalists were again furious that Reagan was appropriating Kennedy for his own purposes. Ted Kennedy fumed about it with friends, and a hundred academics purchased a full-page advertisement in the
New York Times
to protest Reagan’s use of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy as “a flagrant distortion of reality.”
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Distortion or not, the technique, combined with a rebounding economy, clearly worked. On November 6, 1984, President Reagan not only won 58 percent of the popular vote and forty-nine states—all but Mondale’s Minnesota—he attracted the backing of 26 percent of Democrats. Mondale received a miniscule 7 percent of the Republican vote by comparison.
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There would be no Kennedy revival in 1984, unless one considered Reagan himself the Kennedy substitute.

President Reagan’s public relationship with Senator Edward Kennedy ran hot and cold, depending on the issue of the day, and Kennedy rarely aligned himself with any major administration initiative. In particular, Kennedy fiercely opposed Reagan’s tax cut, Central American policy, and many key appointments. Even today, conservatives have not forgotten Kennedy’s key role in sinking Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Kennedy’s 1987 Senate speech about “Robert Bork’s America” contained a litany of horrors that would descend upon America if Bork took a high court seat.
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But privately, a very different relationship unfolded between Kennedy and Reagan, one that was usually initiated by Ted and included the whole Kennedy family. The record of the Reagan White House is replete with examples. On the thirteenth anniversary of Bobby’s assassination, the congressionally approved Robert F. Kennedy Medal was awarded in honor of the late senator’s service and presented to Ethel Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden. The ceremony was preceded by an informal Oval Office meeting with Mrs. Kennedy and her children as well as Senator Kennedy. In what would become standard for these events, Reagan was exceptionally eloquent and generous in his remarks, saying in part, “[Robert Kennedy] wrote to his son, Joseph, on the day of President Kennedy’s death, ‘Remember all the things that Jack started. Be kind to others that are less fortunate than we and love our country.’ And it is the final triumph of Robert Kennedy that he used his personal gifts to bring this message of hope and love to the country, to millions of Americans who supported and believed in him.” Ted Kennedy responded, “Let me thank you, Mr. President, for this great honor that you have given to Robert Kennedy. And it is appropriate that he should receive it from you, for he understood so well that the common love of our country transcends all party identification and all partisan difference. And you should know that after he debated you on international television in 1967, my brother Bob said that Ronald Reagan was the toughest debater he ever faced and, obviously, he was right. [Laughter]”
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Rose Kennedy visited Reagan in the Oval Office, accompanied by Ted, and Reagan wrote her a letter on her ninety-second birthday.
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He taped a television
commercial for Eunice Shriver, JFK’s sister, for her “Special Olympics”—and attended a White House ceremony for the Special Olympics winners, followed by warm correspondence between Reagan and Shriver about this annual event.
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At Ted Kennedy’s request, Reagan permitted Ted Reardon, a devoted friend of President Kennedy’s, to be buried close to JFK at Arlington.
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On November 22, 1983, the twentieth anniversary of the assassination, at Ted Kennedy’s invitation, President and Mrs. Reagan attended a memorial mass for President Kennedy at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Church. The church was packed with the surviving principals of the New Frontier as well as JFK’s extended family, and the solemn sense of loss was again palpable. Caroline read from her father’s speeches and Ted Kennedy took the opportunity to thank the Reagans, who “have been very kind to our family on this and other occasions.”
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Perhaps remembering his own close call, Reagan issued a stirring statement about the Dallas tragedy and the long-lasting “trauma and grief” of that day.
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Senator Kennedy later asked the president for his backing in raising an endowment for the JFK Library. Reagan agreed to meet with Caroline and John Jr., who noted in a letter to Reagan that their father was unable to do what other former presidents do as a matter of course—make the calls and visits necessary to secure the financial future of his library and museum.
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President Reagan took a personal interest and agreed to speak at an event on June 24, 1985, at Ted Kennedy’s McLean, Virginia, home. It became the site of Reagan’s most moving tribute to JFK:

It is a matter of pride to me that so many men and women who were inspired by his bracing vision and moved by his call to “ask not,” serve now in the White House doing the business of government. Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president; I didn’t. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it’s true, when the battle’s over and the ground is cooled, well, it’s then that you see the opposing general’s valor.

He would have understood. He was fiercely, happily partisan. And his political fights were tough—no quarter asked, none given. But he gave as good as he got. And you could see that he loved the battle.

Everything we saw him do seemed to betray a huge enjoyment of life. He seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump aboard and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey; it’s unthankful not to …

And when he died, when that comet disappeared over the continent, a whole nation grieved and would not forget. A tailor in New York put up a sign on the door: “Closed because of a death in the family.” The sadness was not confined to us. “They cried the rain down that night,” said a journalist in Europe. They put his picture up in huts in Brazil and tents in the Congo, in offices in Dublin and Warsaw. That was some of what he did for his country, for when they honored him they were honoring someone essentially, quintessentially, completely American. When they honored John Kennedy, they honored the nation whose virtues, genius, and contradictions he so fully reflected.

Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy’s death; five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then and his thousand days in the White House.

And sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book: Nothing is ever lost in that great house; some music plays on.

I’ve even been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, “And another thing, Eleanor!” Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a fellow saying, “Bully! Absolutely ripping!” Walk softly, now, and you’re drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter.