The Kennedy Half-Century (74 page)

Unlike President Reagan, President Bush rarely mentioned John F. Kennedy in his public speeches and comments. Perhaps the 1988 Quayle incident was part of the explanation; any JFK reference by Bush could be turned by comics or political opponents into a dig at the vice president. Perhaps the Kennedy strategy was also too closely associated with Reagan. Once in office, Bush put some distance between his approach—a “kinder, gentler” one—and Reagan’s more hard-edged ideology. It is also true that the policies Reagan tied to Kennedy were no longer on the front burner. Instead of tax cuts, Bush agreed to a tax increase as part of a 1990 budget deal, a decision that violated his “no new taxes” campaign pledge and would harm his reelection bid.
Moreover, the JFK-Reagan Cold War rhetoric became passé when Communism collapsed in 1989 throughout the Soviet empire.

It is also true that Bush’s father, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, had not been keen on the Kennedy clan, and he had surely made his views known to his son, the future president. In April 1969, the elder Bush, then a former senator, sent a letter to Clover Dulles, the wife of JFK’s former CIA director, expressing disgust with the Kennedy brothers’ handling of the Bay of Pigs episode:

I recall in the summer of 1961, after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, you were away and we called Allen to come for supper, and he accepted. That afternoon he called and asked if he could bring a friend, and we said “surely.” So he brought John McCone, whom we had known well, but had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen’s. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said, in good spirit, that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came [the] next day. We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them. [
Misspellings corrected here
.]
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Occasionally, though, Bush gave a nod to Camelot. His inaugural pledge to honor the old virtues of patriotism and community service, and his call to Americans to give of their time and energy to do what government cannot, struck some as reminiscent of John Kennedy’s “ask not” entreaty.
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Bush’s robust foreign policy, from Panama to Kuwait to the former Soviet and Eastern European republics, was in the Kennedy tradition. And though not as frequent as in the Reagan administration, Bush extended courtesies to the Kennedys, such as a proclamation in honor of Rose Kennedy’s hundredth birthday in 1990.
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As with his predecessors, Bush could not avoid leftover controversies from November 22, 1963. Bush lived in Houston in 1963, and he actually called the Dallas office of the FBI soon after the assassination to report an individual who had made a threat against the life of President Kennedy.
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From time to time, conspiracy theorists have sought to tie Bush to the assassination itself, based on references to Bush here and there in the voluminous records of the assassination. Not a shred of convincing proof of Bush’s involvement has ever been produced, and this claim appears even more specious than the insinuation than LBJ was behind John Kennedy’s murder.
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Actually, President Bush made a positive, if limited, contribution to the
effort to reveal all the facts about the assassination when he signed the Assassination Records and Collection Act (ARCA).
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This law, passed by Congress in 1992, was a direct result of the public’s demand for full disclosure by the government after the release of Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 movie
JFK
. Near the twentieth anniversary of the release of
JFK
, I asked Oliver Stone how his film had approached the body of evidence accumulated about the Kennedy assassination. He admitted that he had employed artistic license to go beyond the known facts. “I view the JFK assassination as the Moby Dick of American stories,” Stone said. “It is the great mystery and is the white whale … I felt like Ahab going after the white whale … There were just too many weird things that happened … All you can say is [my movie is] a countermyth. We can’t prove it.” A filmmaker has no obligation to produce a historically faithful documentary, and in that, Stone is on solid ground. Still, Americans—especially those too young to remember November 22, 1963—often interpret Stone’s film as a cross between documentary and exposé. Stone’s own term “countermyth” ought to be part of the advertising for all showings.
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President Bush may or may not have seen Stone’s film during its original release, but his ARCA signing statement shows that he had some reservations about the structure of the board that would review JFK-related documents, and more broadly, a former CIA director was probably not enthusiastic about shining sunlight into some of the dark corners of the agency he loved. Nonetheless, he was presented with the bill as his reelection campaign drew to a close, and given the substantial popular support for it, Bush affixed his signature on October 26, 1992.
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Ten days later, Bush would be ousted as president by a man who idolized President Kennedy. Enforcement of the Assassination Records and Collection Act—and preservation of the Kennedy legacy—would pass to Bill Clinton.

^af
Mrs. Reagan, now in her nineties, relayed to us through her son Ron Jr. that she does not remember any such conversation taking place. E-mail from Ron Reagan, Jr., May 10, 2012.

^ag
This was not just a first-term phenomenon; my own study of presidential citations, detailed later in the book, shows that Reagan continued to cite President Kennedy with frequency in his second term.

18
Clinton Grabs Kennedy’s Torch

Rarely if ever in american history has one president hero-worshipped another president the way Bill Clinton idolized John F. Kennedy.

On July 24, 1963, seventeen-year-old Bill Clinton was an Arkansas delegate to Boys Nation in Washington. He had met with his state’s U.S. senators on the trip but was most looking forward to a brief audience with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. The youthful Clinton had long identified with the Democratic Party and its new star. He recalled sitting in front of the TV set, “transfixed,” as JFK fought a losing battle to be Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 running mate at the Democratic National Convention. In 1960, encouraged by a couple of Democratic teachers in a heavily Republican county, Clinton had sided with Kennedy in a ninth-grade civics class debate.
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And he had been delighted that November when Arkansas, and the country, voted for JFK.

Now in close proximity to his president, Clinton planned to make the most of the moment. The future president positioned himself at the front of the line so that, even if Kennedy “shook only two or three” hands, his would be one of them. After receiving a Boys Nation T-shirt, JFK strode down the steps and outstretched his hand. Sure enough, Bill Clinton’s hand met his.
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And fortuitously for Clinton, a black-and-white movie camera recorded the second that the thirty-fifth president met the forty-second. That brief segment of film would show up again in TV ads and a Democratic National Convention video presentation in 1992. The torch had been passed yet again.

The Rose Garden handshake was much on Clinton’s mind after he was told of President Kennedy’s assassination. His calculus teacher broke the news to the class, and Clinton recalled a man “so full of life and strength” four months earlier. He also remembered a classmate from that afternoon who remarked that “maybe it was a good thing for the country” that JFK was shot—her feelings no doubt stemming from civil rights controversies that had rocked Arkansas since the 1950s.
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After Clinton moved to Washington to attend Georgetown University in 1964, he became friends with a dormitory floor mate, Tommy Caplan, who
had interviewed JFK in 1960 and later convinced members of his administration to establish a pilot project for a “junior Peace Corps” so that youngsters could correspond with their peers in developing countries. Inevitably Clinton and Caplan pursued their common interest as friends, from visiting President Kennedy’s grave to exploring the National Archives, where JFK secretary Evelyn Lincoln was cataloging the late president’s personal items for history. Mrs. Lincoln showed the young men President Kennedy’s famous rocking chair and many other mementos.
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“[The JFK assassination] was the first real tragedy that any of us had ever confronted,” Caplan recalls. “It wasn’t that Bill Clinton and I uniquely talked about it, we were probably two of the only people who had any direct connection to the [Kennedy] White House.”
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Caplan’s comments reinforce the notion that Clinton’s brief encounter with Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden helped guide his destiny.

Like John Kennedy had been, Bill Clinton was a young man in a hurry. His years at Georgetown were followed by a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University (though he failed to get a degree in the end), law school at Yale, and a quick return to Arkansas to begin his political career with a close but losing run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974. His marriage to Yale classmate Hillary Rodham in 1975 was quickly followed by his election as state attorney general in 1976 and successful campaign for governor in 1978. At age thirty-two, Clinton was one of the youngest governors in American history, marking Clinton as a comer.

From time to time, Clinton quoted JFK in his speeches,
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but the governor of this socially conservative Southern state gave a wide berth to Ted Kennedy’s presidential candidacy in 1980. Clinton stuck with Jimmy Carter, much to the dismay of his friends from the 1972 McGovern campaign.
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But politically, Clinton could hardly have done otherwise.

The irony is that Carter’s growing unpopularity, combined with the White House’s decision to send thousands of Cuban refugees to be housed in Arkansas, created a Republican tidal wave in 1980 that swept Clinton out of office after a single two-year term.
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Reagan’s coattails elected the GOP’s Frank White to replace Clinton as governor, and his once-bright future seemed shattered. Clinton had contributed to the debacle himself, trying to do too much all at once, instituting a hated increase in the car tax and assembling a staff that looked and acted too liberal for Arkansas.
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As Clinton himself later wrote, “I organized the governor’s office without a chief of staff … President Kennedy had organized his White House in a similar way, but his guys all had short hair, boring suits, white shirts, and dark, narrow ties. [Clinton’s top staffers] all had beards and were less constrained in their dress code.”
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But Clinton quickly demonstrated the resilience that would mark his political exploits. In a campaign noted for its emphasis on humility, listening
instead of talking, and redemption, Clinton worked his way back into Arkansans’ favor. Assisted by a deep recession that hurt Republicans in the 1982 midterms, the youthful ex-governor ousted Frank White to secure a nonconsecutive second term. Clinton never let down his guard again, and he never faced another serious challenge in Arkansas, winning gubernatorial reelection in 1984, 1986 (when the term was lengthened to four years), and 1990.

In the midst of his fourth term, Clinton seriously considered a presidential run. Preparations were well under way, and the national press corps was called to Little Rock in July 1987 to hear Clinton’s long-awaited announcement. But Clinton had long before chosen to emulate the seedier side of John F. Kennedy, and his many sins of the flesh caught up with him. Not long after his gubernatorial defeat in 1980, journalists in Arkansas had received tips about Clinton’s extramarital activities. Sure enough, Clinton eventually hinted that he had first “brought pain” into his marriage at about that time.
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(Close observers of Clinton say it started long before then.)

Over the years, the evidence had mounted—inescapable proof both to Clinton’s fellow politicians and those closest to Clinton in his political circle. At National Governors Association meetings in Washington and around the nation, Clinton’s fellow state chief executives would sometimes make bets on which young woman in the room would be approached by their Arkansas colleague, who usually was not accompanied by his wife. The governor’s Arkansas staff was loyal, but it was impossible for them to overlook the accumulating evidence that was close at hand. The night before Clinton’s scheduled presidential announcement, his gubernatorial chief of staff, Betsey Wright, reviewed a lengthy list of women who had been linked to the handsome governor. After a number of replies from the governor along the lines of “She’ll never say anything,” it was obvious that Clinton had a big problem. Looking back, decades later, Wright said, “I felt betrayed. He lied to me. He lied to a lot of people about [adultery], not least of whom was himself.”
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Two months before Clinton’s announcement, in May 1987, Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart had been forced out of the race in the midst of an extramarital scandal, and Hart had been asked, “Have you ever committed adultery?”
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Given the widespread, substantive rumors about Clinton’s womanizing, the question was inevitable, and the answer was unavoidable. To the considerable surprise of the gathered media, a subdued Clinton accepted reality and declared that he would not run, citing the classic excuse that he wanted to spend more time with family.
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Even at that time, the scuttlebutt throughout the national political community was about Clinton’s extramarital affairs. This experience was just a hint of what was to come, and amazingly, the highly intelligent Clinton learned little or nothing from his brush with private life revelations.