The Kennedy Half-Century (79 page)

That same year, while No Child Left Behind was still being negotiated in Congress, President Bush marked the seventy-sixth anniversary of the birth of Robert Kennedy by dedicating the main Justice Department building on Constitution Avenue in Washington to RFK. Before an assemblage of Kennedys and surviving New Frontiersmen, Bush hailed the special relationship between JFK and RFK: “No man ever had a more faithful brother.”
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Asked by a reporter whether the renaming was an attempt to curry favor with Ted Kennedy, Bush laughed and replied, “I’m not quite that devious.”
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But he was. By year’s end, Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind, accompanied by praise from the Massachusetts senator: “President Bush was there every step of the way.”
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The Bush-Kennedy infatuation did not last, and could not. The ideological demands of their very different political parties tore apart the relationship, with Kennedy campaigning for Democrats in 2002, opposing Bush’s conservative Supreme Court picks, and clashing repeatedly with the administration over the Iraq War. Still, George W. Bush had learned a lesson his predecessors had also absorbed. When trying to influence public opinion or make congressional deals stick, the Kennedys, past and present, were good allies to have.

Even Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who was not a man much given to open sentiment, realized the emotional effect a Kennedy appearance could
generate. In September 1963 President Kennedy appeared at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and Cheney was there to see JFK ride in an open motorcade a couple of months before Dallas. “He had inspired us all,” Cheney later wrote, “and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described.”
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Kennedy footprints have been found here and there in the Bush White House years even as the Bushes gave Republicans the opportunity to tout their own dynastic family to rival the Democratic royals. For much of the Bush presidency, JFK had been in eclipse, rarely mentioned and seemingly becoming a distant memory for most Americans. And then something—or someone—unexpected happened in 2008, reviving the Kennedy image and promise. His name, of course, was Barack Obama.

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Full Circle: The Twinning of Barack Obama and John Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy was one of the first to imagine an African American president in the nation’s near future. On May 26, 1961, in an interview with Voice of America about the ongoing attacks on integrationist Freedom Riders in the South, Attorney General Kennedy made a startling prediction: “There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States, certainly within that period of time.”
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While RFK was eight years too optimistic, the Kennedy family’s close association with civil rights causes made the Obama campaign irresistible for many of JFK and RFK’s closest relatives.

The Kennedys chose to back a politician whose background could not have been more different from that of the privileged JFK. Barack Obama was a mixed-race child with an absent Kenyan father and a mother whose peripatetic personal journey meant his upbringing in Hawaii and the Philippines was often less than stable.
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But young Obama got on the right track at age ten when he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents. His natural abilities took him to Occidental College and, by transfer, to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1983. From this point Obama’s future more precisely resembled Kennedy’s in key respects. At Harvard Law School, Obama began to travel in elite circles and served as the first African American editor of the law review, later returning to Chicago to practice civil rights law. JFK’s family was full of politics, so he was schooled in the art from birth, while Obama’s political training was provided by a stint in the Illinois State Senate from 1996 to 2004 as well as a failed bid for Congress in 2000.

John Kennedy’s and Barack Obama’s path to the White House converged in five ways. They successfully sought a Senate seat at an early age (thirty-five for JFK and forty-three for Obama) but had no intention of becoming a Senate fixture; both were planning a glide path to the presidency, with the Senate as
brief a stop as they could make it. They each drew a following of journalists, elites, and policy wonks who were impressed with their intellect and rhetorical ability. The publication of bestselling books (
Why England Slept
and
Profiles in Courage
for Kennedy, and
Dreams from My Father
and
The Audacity of Hope
for Obama) underlined the candidates’ appeal. They both made a splash at the national party convention preceding their presidential nomination; JFK ran for vice president in 1956 and in 2004 Obama delivered a gripping keynote address prior to John Kerry’s nomination, saying in part, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”
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While they lacked executive experience for the presidency, they tried to compensate by projecting hope, promise, vigor, and sharp change from the status quo. Finally, they each had a political handicap, religion for Kennedy and race for Obama, that caused some to say they could not win but many others to flock to their banner. Their potential “firsts” became causes célèbres, making their candidacies larger than themselves and fueling the massive grassroots activism that got them elected. Volunteers and voters want to believe they are participating in a movement or a grand idea that transcends one moment and personality.

These parallels proved alluring to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Ted Kennedy in 2008. Of course, the ground had been carefully prepared. Obama had made favorable references to JFK in
The Audacity of Hope
, and as a new senator, he had sought out his colleague from Massachusetts for frequent counsel.
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The celebrated wordsmith Ted Sorensen was one of the first JFK associates on the Obama bandwagon, actively campaigning for him and making New Frontier allusions whenever possible. To the charge that Obama was lacking in foreign policy training, Sorensen attacked presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for siding with George W. Bush on the Iraq War. Critics had called JFK out of his depth, too, until the Cuban Missile Crisis, asserted Sorensen, who added: “Judgment is the single most important quality in a president of the United States. Kennedy had judgment. Obama has judgment.”
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Caroline Kennedy also reported that her children were taken with Obama and pushed her in his direction.
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In order to endorse Obama, though, the Kennedys had to move away from the Clintons, a presidential family they had once wholeheartedly embraced. This abandonment was made easier by some Clinton missteps. In Ted’s view, Hillary Clinton had slighted his brother during the primaries by praising LBJ for the 1964 Civil Rights Act without mentioning that it had been proposed by John Kennedy and passed in part as a tribute to the late president. Clinton also did not correct a supporter who introduced her and suggested that Obama was another JFK, who merely talked about civil rights, while Clinton was an LBJ, who would actually get things done.
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Ted and Bill Clinton also had a
heated argument by telephone about some of the former president’s tactics in trying to get his wife nominated—ploys that in Kennedy’s view included the unfortunate injection of race into the campaign.
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The fraternal keeper of the Kennedy flame had long been sensitive about insults to the memory of his brothers, and this miscalculation by the Clintons proved costly.

Barack Obama had won the Iowa caucus in early January, but Hillary Clinton had roared back to win the New Hampshire primary. The giant “Super Tuesday” contest in twenty-two states was to be held in early February. Just before this critical juncture, on January 28, Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg stepped onto the national stage to crown Obama as JFK’s natural successor. Carried live by the cable networks and covered extensively by all media outlets, the endorsement rally was a dramatic turning point that would enable Obama to build a small delegate lead he never relinquished in a nip-and-tuck battle with Clinton that lasted all the way until June. Caroline’s blessing was heartfelt and an explicit straight-line linking of her father and Obama. The Obama campaign ran an ad throughout the primaries featuring images of JFK and the moon landing, and using these words from Caroline:

Once we had a president who made people feel hopeful about America and brought us together to do great things. Today Barack Obama gives us that same chance. He makes us believe in ourselves again, that when we act as one nation we can overcome any challenge. People always tell me how my father inspired them. I feel that same excitement now.
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At the endorsement rally, Obama gave an uplifting address that reached across generations and divisions, perhaps especially affecting those who lived in the early 1960s and remembered President Kennedy. On a very political day, Obama insisted, “Today isn’t just about politics for me. It’s personal. I was too young to remember John Kennedy and I was just a child when Robert Kennedy ran for president. But in the stories I heard growing up [from] my grandparents and mother … I think my own sense of what’s possible in this country comes in part from what they said America was like in the days of John and Robert Kennedy.”
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Obama also asserted that his father, Barack Obama, Sr., had been able to travel from Kenya to the United States for study because of an effort by Senator John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy Foundation to pay for his travel expenses.
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Thus, Obama claimed, JFK enabled his parents to meet and, quite literally, the thirty-fifth president had been partially responsible for young Obama’s very existence. This story was almost too good to check, and the
candidate clearly did not. But when the
Washington Post
did, they found that the Kennedy Foundation donation had been made too late to help Obama Sr. The Obama campaign admitted the error.
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The Clintons were aghast at this turn of the Kennedy wheel of fortune. According to close associates, the former president suffered a kind of betrayal, given his lifetime devotion to JFK and good working relationship with Ted during his White House years. Yet there was little the Clintons could do. Any attack on the Kennedys would backfire in the Democratic race. Hillary’s campaign trotted out the backing of a couple of RFK’s children, but even this was negated by the support for Obama expressed by RFK’s widow, Ethel.
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Obama was the big winner in the 2008 primary for Kennedy family blessings.

Kennedy clan appearances on behalf of Obama continued for the rest of the campaign, though Ted Kennedy’s stumping was essentially eliminated after the May 2008 diagnosis of the brain tumor that would take his life thirteen months later. A very ill Teddy did manage to appear at the late summer Democratic National Convention in Denver, where he delivered a farewell that echoed his 1980 convention address after his loss to Jimmy Carter: “This November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans … The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”
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Unlike the Kennedy-Nixon squeaker of 1960, there was relatively little doubt that Obama would win the election after the economic collapse of September 2008. Obama’s Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was hugely burdened by his GOP ties to a deeply unpopular President Bush, whose support had fallen into the twenties because of economic collapse and the lingering Iraq War. Perhaps hoping to establish a link to a better-regarded presidency, McCain referred to JFK from time to time, invoking Kennedy’s willingness to engage opponents in urging more debates with Obama, for example.
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But his most effective use of Kennedy was in tying JFK’s wartime preparation for the Oval Office to his own. Like Kennedy in World War II, McCain had been pushed to his limits during the Vietnam War, but unlike JFK, McCain had been captured and interned in a brutal POW camp nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton. Beyond heroics, McCain found another connection to Kennedy that prepared him for the White House’s life-or-death decision making: “I was on board the USS
Enterprise
[during the
Cuban Missile Crisis], and I sat in a cockpit on the flight deck waiting to take off. We had a target. I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president who needs to be tested.”
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It wasn’t nearly enough for McCain. Obama ended up with 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Remarkably, the first African American ever elected to the nation’s highest office had won a larger percentage of the popular vote than all the other Democratic nominees since the Civil War, save only for FDR and LBJ. Race had proved to be less of a determining factor in 2008 than religion had in 1960.
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After the election, occasional Kennedy references were sprinkled into President Obama’s speeches, and Kennedy symbolism extended even into his choice of White House decor. Once again, JFK’s Resolute desk was chosen for the new president’s use and, as mentioned earlier, among the five quotations woven into the Oval Office carpet that each new president gets is one from John Kennedy: “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”
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