The Kennedy Half-Century (75 page)

The year actually got worse for Clinton. He was invited to give the main nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, potentially a great opportunity to shine and position himself for the future. Instead, Clinton showed he lacked John F. Kennedy’s flair when it came to rhetorical ability. Clinton’s address quoted JFK in its final paragraph:

In closing, I want you to remember that in November, when Michael Dukakis is elected president, we will observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. But Mike’s victory will be a tribute to the life and legacy of John Kennedy, to the boundless optimism, the grace, the courage, and the sheer joy with which he urged us forward. The great Israeli statesman Abba Eban began his memorial tribute to President Kennedy with this simple, stirring statement: “Tragedy is the difference between what is and what might have been.” Michael Dukakis has spent his entire public life closing the gap between what is and what might have been.
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It was Clinton’s best paragraph, not because of the Kennedy passage but because it began, “In closing …” Clinton talked much too long, with little apparent emotion, and the crowd turned restless with delegates and guests loudly talking over the Arkansas governor in a thousand private conversations. The magic words “in closing” generated Clinton’s only real ovation. A few days later, arranged by a couple of backers with Hollywood ties, Clinton appeared on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
. In a prearranged gag, when Clinton sat next to him, Carson pulled out an hourglass to set a time limit on the governor’s gab. A good laugh washed away much of the convention embarrassment.
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As it happened, Clinton was fortunate his White House dreams were deferred. Peace, prosperity, and a popular GOP incumbent probably would have defeated any 1988 Democratic nominee, though a more appealing candidate than Michael Dukakis might have made the contest closer. With his long governorship very likely in its final term, and no U.S. Senate vacancy in sight, Bill Clinton realized that 1992 might well be his best shot at the presidency.

George H. W. Bush’s sizable winning margin in 1988 and subsequent victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War led most Democrats to think he would be unbeatable for reelection. Yet a mild recession in 1991 gave Clinton reason to think otherwise. Moreover, as a small-state governor with some obvious
personal baggage, he benefited from the decisions of party heavyweights such as New York governor Mario Cuomo and New Jersey senator Bill Bradley to skip the 1992 race. Against the odds, Clinton took the plunge in October 1991 and launched his campaign.

One of his themes from the start was to emulate, as he put it, “John Kennedy’s ethic of mutual responsibility, asking citizens to give something back to their country …”
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Clinton soon announced that one of his presidential goals would be the creation of a “Democracy Corps” of American legal, financial, and political specialists sent abroad to augment the Peace Corps.
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Clinton’s campaign speeches contained many references to JFK and his policies, from investment tax credits to spur business expansion to the need for religious tolerance.
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Much like Jimmy Carter had done in 1976, Clinton even reversed roles with JFK—going to Notre Dame as a Southern Baptist to appeal for Catholic votes.
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“Clinton always thought of Kennedy as a performer [and] Clinton viewed Kennedy as a kind of ‘third way’ [moderate] Democrat,” says James Carville, Clinton’s chief campaign strategist.
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Thus, Clinton’s gestures, speech patterns, and less liberal, more pragmatic politics show a clear Kennedy influence.

As the early front-runner, Clinton was expected to win the New Hampshire primary, even though another candidate given to Kennedy allusions, former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, was also running. The first hurdle was Clinton’s Vietnam-era draft record, which was decidedly un-Kennedy-like. In order to avoid the unpopular war, Clinton had used his connections to evade the military draft and was less than forthcoming about the details.
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PT 109 it was not. Of course, prominent Republicans such as Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had used multiple deferments to skip Vietnam service, and future president George W. Bush and the incumbent vice president, Dan Quayle, had joined the National Guard. All had connections of some sort within the system, and they used them, like many thousands of potential draftees in that era. But while legal, and given the nature of the war, somewhat understandable, these actions were not admirable in a political context.

Clinton’s draft controversy was chicken feed compared to the full feast on the table laid by Gennifer Flowers. The onetime Arkansas lounge singer stunned the political world in January 1992 with an allegation that she had had a longtime affair with Clinton. Her charges were published in the
Star
, a supermarket tabloid that paid Flowers for the story, but they were given credence thanks to her tapes of private phone conversations with Governor
Clinton about how she should handle questions concerning their relationship. Flowers held a full-blown press conference carried live on CNN to present her evidence, and many analysts at the time thought Clinton was finished politically. As
Newsweek
put it, “Old CW [conventional wisdom]: Hooray, the new JFK. New CW: Uh-oh, the new JFK.”
²³

Clinton fought back, with unconvincing, misleading blanket denials and with a more effective, not-so-secret weapon, Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a joint appearance on
60 Minutes
, the Clintons presented the image of a modern couple that had worked through problems in their marriage, with Hillary insisting she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”
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Once the front-runner, Bill Clinton finished second behind Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary. But he had survived the crises that threatened to eject him from presidential politics, and he declared himself to be “the Comeback Kid” as he declared “victory” with his second-place showing. Clinton won the Democratic nomination mainly because there was no convincing, credible alternative to him in the race. What did not kill Clinton made him stronger—at least until the Monica Lewinsky scandal during his presidency. Though there would be many other lower-level rumors and allegations about Clinton’s past and present womanizing in 1992, some of them likely true, he never again faced scrutiny so intense that his candidacy was endangered.
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Volumes have been written about the Clintons’ marriage, but it may not be all that different from the one that existed between President and Mrs. Kennedy. John Kennedy and Bill Clinton loved their wives, had children with them, and understood they were great assets politically. At the same time, both men were driven by their own apparently uncontrollable desires and demons to commit adultery on a regular basis, oblivious to, or uncaring about, the pain this caused their spouses. For their part, the wives placed a high priority on protecting the children, as well as preserving their marriages and their status. Jackie and Hillary were often angry at their husbands, and privately lashed out at them in various ways, Jackie with her free-spending habits and frequent absences from White House duties, and Hillary by her berating of Bill in private settings. Still, the wives stood by their husbands stoically in public, maybe hoping in vain for maturation in their behavior as they grew older. Politics is careerist for couples, and political marriages are partnerships that benefit husbands
and
wives. The professional bargain that is struck can often outlast the intimate bonds of a spousal relationship.

The personal aspects receded as the strange politics of 1992 continued to unfold. A sputtering economy erased the polling heights once enjoyed by
President Bush. Triumph in the 1991 Persian Gulf War seemed a long time past, and the Clinton campaign adopted the perfect slogan to reflect the public’s anxieties: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Bush and his campaign team, expecting Clinton to collapse under the weight of various scandals, did not take the Democrat seriously until it was too late. “Can you imagine Bill Clinton sitting there?” Bush quipped a few months before the election, pointing toward his chair in the Oval Office as his closest advisers laughed.
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The overconfidence was supplemented by a lack of energy and focus on Bush’s part that may well have been a consequence of Graves’ disease, an immune disorder caused by an overactive thyroid gland that was diagnosed in the president in 1991. His friend and campaign manager Fred Malek recalled, “[During the ’88 campaign] I would get calls from [Bush] two or three times a week around seven A.M., with kind of a rat-tat-tat of different recommendations that he wanted me to think about and follow up. I’d get calls a couple of times a week to come up to the vice president’s residence after work and chat with him and Barbara … He was just full of ideas and thoughts and initiatives. Contrast that with 1992 when I came back and had frequent contact once again. It was altogether different. He wasn’t reaching out. He wasn’t doing those things. Of course, he was president then and had a full-time job. But it was quite clear there was a profound change in his energy and demeanor.”
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Just as consequential as the economy and Graves’ disease was the independent candidacy of the billionaire businessman Ross Perot. Bush’s fellow Texan aimed most of his fire at Bush, double-teaming the president with Clinton. Polls, studies, and opinions differ about whether Perot’s sizable 19 percent of the November vote
^ah
enabled Clinton to win with 43 percent (to Bush’s 37)—or whether by then, Clinton would have won an outright majority against Bush had it been a two-man contest. Certainly, polls at the time showed Clinton thumping Bush in a head-to-head matchup.
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Clinton’s own superbly focused campaign played a role in his remarkable yearlong resurrection. The Gallup poll had Clinton in third place, behind both Perot and Bush, as late as June 1992.
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Yet Clinton never let Bush up off the mat on the economy, and Perot eliminated himself from serious consideration by withdrawing in July after some bizarre charges about Republican plans to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. (Perot reentered the contest in early October, but by then he had forfeited any real chance of winning.)
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This process of elimination left Clinton, even with his credibility problems and the
strong scent of scandal, as the only possible route to change in the country’s direction.

Clinton seized the opportunity and converted himself from the second coming of JFK the womanizer to the reincarnation of JFK the inspirational leader. Like Kennedy, Clinton fared well in debates, mastering the art of “feeling the pain” of people in distress. “You ought to read my mail,” Clinton told
Rolling Stone
. “People my age writing me, saying they haven’t felt this way since Kennedy was president …”
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In Clinton’s campaign proposals and speeches, President Kennedy, as the journalist Joe Klein suggested, “made Clinton seem larger—large enough, ultimately, to unseat the incumbent President of the United States.”
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His nominating convention in New York City in mid-July was consciously designed to evoke Kennedy parallels, not least because a Hollywood producer on his team had studied the films of the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
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An elaborate tribute to Robert Kennedy featured his son, Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Senator Ted Kennedy.
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When Clinton broke with tradition and appeared in the convention hall on the night he officially won the nomination—usually, candidates appear only to give an acceptance address on the closing night—Clinton explained his reasoning to the cheering delegates: “Thirty-two years ago another young candidate who wanted to get this country moving again came to the convention to say a simple thank you.”
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The next night, a film was shown on national television and in the hall to introduce Clinton just before his big speech; the emotional highlight for excited delegates, and probably for the audience at home, was the brief clip of Boys Nation delegate Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. In the film, Clinton’s mother drove home the point: “When he came home from Boys Nation with this picture of John Kennedy and himself shaking hands, I’ve never seen such an expression on a man’s face in my life. He just had such pride. And I knew then that government in some form would be his goal.”
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(On Clinton’s first day in office, he took pride in showing his mother precisely where he had stood in the Rose Garden when he shook JFK’s hand.)
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The selection of Senator Albert Gore as vice president reinforced the theme of generational change. Even the convention’s musical theme, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” was designed to contrast Clinton’s youthfulness and energy with President Bush’s age (sixty-eight) and his alleged personal and policy exhaustion.

Whatever the precise combination of factors that elevated him, Clinton’s almost lifelong ambition to be president became a reality on November 3, 1992. At forty-six, just three years older than John F. Kennedy was when he entered the White House, Clinton was the seventh president to succeed JFK. The twenty-two years in age that separated Clinton from his predecessor
Bush was the second largest in American history, only exceeded by the twenty-seven-year age gap between JFK and Eisenhower.