The Kennedy Half-Century (76 page)

Clinton’s embrace OF John F. Kennedy was no campaign gimmick or passing fancy. The news media sensed it and emphasized the theme. Within forty-eight hours of the election, the incoming Clinton White House was being compared to Camelot in TV news programs.
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Time
stressed the Kennedy-Clinton parallels in naming Clinton its 1992 Man of the Year.
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The public caught the wave, with a sizable plurality in a
Wall Street Journal
/ NBC News poll saying the past president most reminiscent of Clinton was, of course, JFK.
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And the nation’s premier satirical program,
Saturday Night Live
, produced a skit with Madonna singing “Happy Inauguration Day” to an actor portraying Bill Clinton, in a takeoff of Marilyn Monroe’s sexy rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” for JFK.
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The Clinton administration began with a symbolic nod to the new president’s idol. On inauguration eve, January 19, 1993, President-elect and Mrs. Clinton joined Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., to visit the graves of JFK and RFK in Arlington Cemetery.
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Clinton placed a long-stemmed white rose on each grave.
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To no one’s surprise, President Clinton’s inaugural address the next day contained echoes of President Kennedy’s. “Let us begin anew,” said both men. JFK asserted, “Now the trumpet summons us again,” as the torch was passed to a new generation, with Kennedy asking what “you can do for your country,” with God’s work on earth being our own. Clinton intoned: “We have heard the trumpets. We have changed the guard. And now, each in our own way and with God’s help, we must answer the call.”
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Clinton also became the first president since JFK to invite a poet to participate in the inaugural ceremony; Maya Angelou succeeded Robert Frost in this special role.
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Though Bill Clinton’s devotion to JFK was real, he also certainly understood the political advantages of the juxtaposition. However, at least at first, Clinton might not have fully realized the risks inherent in competing with a heroic myth. Immediately, Clinton’s workmanlike but uninspiring inaugural address was held up to JFK’s gold standard and found wanting. The historian Garry Wills called Clinton’s language “flimsy” next to Kennedy’s: “Great writing is something you can lean your weight against; it will resist … Flimsy language ‘gives,’ as if you were putting your hand through stage scenery.”
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Throughout his presidency, Clinton was often called articulate but not eloquent. John Kennedy possessed an unusual gravitas—perhaps a combination of handsome visage, vocal distinctiveness, natural wit, and the ability to turn a memorable phrase (with wordsmith Ted Sorensen’s considerable aid). JFK
also instinctively knew that in politics, at the presidential level, less is more. By contrast, Bill Clinton personified his generation’s rhetorical (and other) excesses. More is better; extra words can create escape hatches; phrases must be inserted to cover all constituency bases. With the possible exception of one powerful speech after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the only universally memorable public utterance from the Clinton years is the pitiful and untruthful, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
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Given Clinton’s embrace of all things Kennedy, it is not unreasonable to think about the Clinton presidency in Kennedy-like terms, both in similarities and differences. Both men were resilient: Kennedy bounced back from serious illnesses, and Clinton came back from defeats for Congress and governor, as well as surviving enough scandals to sink a battleship. Of course, Kennedy never lost an elective contest, primary or general, unless one counts the vice presidential nomination at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. Nor did Kennedy have to struggle to rise to the top; he was to the manor born. Clinton didn’t have a father like Joseph Kennedy. His real father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., died in a traffic accident even before Clinton was born, and Clinton—originally named Blythe III—took his surname from his sometimes angry, wife-beating stepdad, Roger Clinton. JFK floated into prep school and Harvard, but Clinton had to work very hard to travel from Arkansas to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law.

After choosing two different pathways to the presidency—Kennedy the Senate, Clinton a state governorship—they entered office with many opponents questioning their legitimacy. To this day many Republicans insist that JFK and LBJ stole the 1960 election with vote fraud in Illinois and Texas, while Clinton had difficulty overcoming his low 43 percent plurality of the vote in 1992.

The most telling similarity between the two administrations may be the trouble both Democrats had getting their programs through a heavily Democratic Congress. In both cases, an alliance between Republicans and conservative Democrats frustrated many of their legislative initiatives, including health care. Kennedy’s Medicare proposals had to wait for LBJ’s term, while Clinton’s “Hillary-care” effort collapsed entirely. Clinton ended up in a far worse situation, since his failures early in his administration produced GOP control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm election and for the rest of Clinton’s tenure. Two government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 were the result of executive-legislative deadlock, although eventually Clinton and Republican leaders were able to reach compromises on some topics, such as free trade, welfare reform, and crime control. Even had he completed two terms, JFK would never have had to face a Republican majority in either house, given his era’s Democratic dominance on Capitol Hill.

Every White House has its share of crises, and there were elements of Kennedy’s in the early 1960s that still resonated for Clinton in the 1990s. Bill Clinton had to deal with an early domestic disaster that paralleled JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco: the Waco tragedy. Just three months after Clinton assumed the presidency, seventy-six people (including more than twenty children and two pregnant women) were killed after a fifty-one-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. This Protestant sect’s flock was under the control of an unstable cult leader, David Koresh. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI, supervised by Attorney General Janet Reno, were the government agencies directly in charge of the situation. Clinton himself delegated final decision-making authority on Waco to Reno. Even though he had actually wanted to hold out longer to try more peaceful means of conflict resolution, he gave in to the insistence of Reno, among others, for a more aggressive approach. In retrospect, Clinton would regret this, though he continued to back Reno publicly.
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Both sides at Waco were exceptionally well armed, and soon after the final assault began, the entire complex was consumed by fire. The government asserted the conflagration was a result of arson by the Davidians themselves, while the surviving sect members insisted that the FBI’s equipment and tactics led to the calamity. In any event, much of the public was horrified by the results—and some Americans were radicalized by it. The Waco siege figured prominently in the motives cited by Timothy McVeigh, the convicted (and later executed) Oklahoma City bomber. McVeigh chose April 19, 1995—the second anniversary of Waco—to explode his car bomb at the city’s federal building, killing 168 people including many children, with roughly seven hundred injured.
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Waco occurred for Clinton at almost precisely the same moment in his young presidency that the Bay of Pigs invasion did for Kennedy (April 16–19). New presidents can make mistakes, trusting too much in their advisers’ judgments, and these tragedies are classic examples. Just as the Bay of Pigs led in some ways to the Cuban Missile Crisis—the Russians became convinced Kennedy was weak and they could take advantage—so, too, did Waco lead to a greater catastrophe at Oklahoma City. Nonetheless, for both JFK and Clinton, a by-product of their early missteps was a strengthening of their two presidencies, and the subsequent crises enhanced their position. JFK had no greater triumph than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Clinton’s skillful comforting of the shell-shocked residents of Oklahoma City is the moment some mark as the beginning of his political recovery after the 1994 Republican midterm landslide, on his way to a successful reelection.
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The connections between and among presidents, even those serving decades apart, are inevitable. For example, President Clinton replaced the last
remaining JFK appointee on the Supreme Court in 1993. Kennedy friend Byron “Whizzer” White, having served three decades, retired and was replaced by Clinton’s choice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Foreign policy ties among presidencies are especially strong. Containing the Soviet Union was an overriding focus for every White House occupant from Truman through Bush. Clinton was the first to benefit from the absence of the Cold War—though it was soon replaced by the threat of terrorism. As much as Cuba bedeviled JFK, the island nation ninety miles to the south of Florida proved to be a major irritant for Clinton. Thirty-eight years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had to deal with the fallout from the repatriation of a six-year-old Cuban refugee, Elian Gonzalez. The boy’s mother had drowned while trying to escape to the United States from Cuba, but Elian made it and was placed with relatives. The boy’s father, still in Cuba, then demanded his return, and the American courts eventually agreed. In a raid on the Miami home of Elian’s relatives in April 2000, the youngster was seized and sent back to Cuba by U.S. government agents, again supervised by controversial attorney general Reno. A famous photo shows Elian hiding in a closet, terrified by the appearance of an armed-to-the-teeth law enforcer.
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This angered many Cuban Americans, a key voting bloc, and the searing incident may well have cost Al Gore far more than the 537 votes by which he lost Florida and the White House in the fall 2000 election.

A poignant JFK-Clinton link was forged on Vietnam, as Clinton brought to a final conclusion the greatest foreign policy mistake of the 1960s. As the first opponent of the Vietnam War to be elected president, and having evaded military service, Clinton was handicapped in his role as commander in chief in the eyes of some. His 1993 initiation of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays and lesbians in the military was deeply controversial at the time, in part because of Clinton’s draft record. But Clinton saw an opportunity to bring the era of divisiveness over American involvement in Vietnam, begun in earnest during the Kennedy administration, to an end. Clinton was encouraged by a letter he had received as president-elect from JFK and LBJ’s defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, a primary architect of the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia. McNamara referred to Clinton’s Oxford roommate, Frank Aller, who resisted the Vietnam draft and committed suicide in 1971: “For me—and I believe for the nation as well—the Vietnam War finally ended the day you were elected president. By their votes, the American people, at long last, recognized that the Allers and the Clintons, when they questioned the wisdom and morality of their government’s decisions relating to Vietnam, were no less patriotic than those who served in uniform.”
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With the help of Vietnam veterans in Congress from both parties, Clinton pursued normalization of relations with Vietnam. In 1995, diplomatic relations were
established between the former foes, and shortly after the 2000 election, Clinton journeyed to Vietnam for the first official state visit by a president of the United States.

Dramatic events aside, the underlying foundation for the popularity of both Kennedy and Clinton as president was a strong economy. JFK’s tax cut in public memory is attributable to Republican praise of it, not Democratic support. Clinton was associated with the opposite, an income tax increase, which he engineered in 1993.
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(Clinton also signed GOP-sponsored tax reductions in estate and capital gains levies in 1997.)
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Both Kennedy and Clinton were considered fiscal moderates; they were tight-fisted in some ways and ran up relatively small deficits, or in Clinton’s case, eventually achieved a balanced budget.
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What mattered most, however, was that the gross domestic product expanded at a fast clip under JFK (5.5 percent) and Clinton (5.8 percent), while joblessness averaged just under 6 percent for Kennedy and 5.2 percent for Clinton.
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Whether their policies were wise or they were just lucky, both presidents are linked in history with prosperity. Nothing leaves a better impression on the American public than a robust economy.

Another direct JFK-Clinton bond could be seen in the establishment of AmeriCorps.
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President Clinton fulfilled a campaign promise by further applying the idea of the Peace Corps to opportunities for domestic service, from after-school tutoring to environmental protection.
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Young people who work 1,700 hours over the typical eleven-month term of service earn a living allowance and up to $5,550 that can be applied to college or graduate school. When he signed the AmeriCorps legislation in September 1993, the Peace Corps’ first director, JFK brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, was on hand and lent Clinton one of the pens Kennedy had used to sign the Peace Corps bill in 1961.

Bill clinton had a luxury denied to President Kennedy—eight full years in office. After the 1994 Republican landslide, Clinton looked very vulnerable to defeat for reelection. But by the time 1996 arrived, the economy was rebounding vigorously, and there was little question that Clinton would beat Republican nominee Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1976 GOP vice presidential nominee. A triumph JFK had hoped for was earned by Clinton, as he swept 379 electoral votes and won the popular vote by 8 percentage points (49 to 41 percent), with Ross Perot again on the ballot and securing about 8 percent.