Landslide (14 page)

Everywhere, he was compared to another president, perhaps the greatest president, felled by an assassin’s bullet nearly a hundred years before. The comparisons started mere moments after Kennedy’s death. Speaking on the Senate floor on Friday afternoon, the Senate chaplain recalled words spoken after the death of Abraham Lincoln: “
God lives and the government at Washington still stands.” Returning to Washington from Dallas that night, Jackie sent word that a description of Lincoln’s catafalque in her White House guidebook should be consulted and the structure replicated in the East Room.
The next day,
The New York Times
printed Walt Whitman’s elegy to the Great Emancipator, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” on its editorial page and noted bitingly that in 1865, Dallas newspapers had cheered the president’s death. To Richard Cardinal Cushing, preaching in his archdiocese of Boston that Sunday, Kennedy was “
a youthful Lincoln, who in his time and in his sacrifice has made more sturdy the hopes of his nation and its people.” Kennedy, said one observer, was “
the second president we’ve lost now on the civil rights issue.” That was a common impulse—to say that, like Lincoln, Kennedy had died while pursuing the highest moral calling, had worked tirelessly to transform and redeem the nation, and had paid the ultimate price. It was consolation in the face of an unspeakable loss: Kennedy was dead, but his legacy and legend would live forever.

But there was one problem with this plan: the Kennedy record. It was true that the Kennedys had brought glamour and a special grace to the capital. And it was clear that Kennedy’s oratory had inspired the nation and given it a sense of renewed purpose after the dull and dowdy Eisenhower years. But his record of domestic achievements was mediocre at best. At the time of his death, Kennedy was pursuing two legislative initiatives, a civil rights bill and a tax cut intended to stimulate demand in the economy. Both were languishing on Capitol
Hill, their passage far from certain despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Kennedy was a liberal who had eloquently articulated liberal ideals in his speeches, but he had done little to advance the policy aims of the left on major issues—universal health care, racial equality, and an end to poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world.

On civil rights, the signal moral issue of the day, Kennedy had been at best a reluctant leader. Kennedy always remembered that he had won the presidency in 1960 by the smallest of margins—0.1 percent of the popular vote—and that, like every Democratic president since Reconstruction, his victory had been secured with the help of a majority of states of the Old Confederacy. The Kennedy who ran in 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr., would later say, talked the right talk on civil rights, but he had been “
so concerned about being President of the United States that he would compromise basic principles.” Only after televised coverage of King’s 1963 Birmingham campaign took hold of the nation’s conscience and Northern whites (including the middle-class whites in Northern suburbs who would decide the
next
election) grew outraged at the behavior of white segregationists in the South—only then did Kennedy push for passage of an antisegregation bill.

Kennedy would never have claimed to be Lincoln, nor would he have recognized the expansive posthumous claims that were being made for his presidency.
A memo that Sorensen prepared for Democratic congressmen at the beginning of 1962, touting the success to date of the Kennedy presidency, betrayed the meager policy aspirations of the New Frontier:

It was hardly the stuff of a transformative presidency, and Kennedy did not fool himself into thinking otherwise. A week before his death, he idly speculated about the location of his presidential library with his friend Charlie Bartlett. Then he stopped himself: “
There won’t be a library if we don’t get a second term. No one will give a damn.”

In that pithy assessment, as much as in the noble lines in the shining speeches, was a hint of what
was
special in Kennedy, what actually made him great. He had a rare ability to cut through the flattery and falsity that surround any president and to see the world as it really was. He had a higher tolerance for ambiguity, contradiction, and imperfection than many classic politicians, who tend to see things as black or white, success or failure, win or lose. He valued courage and he took informed risks, but he always understood that things might not work out the way he predicted or wished.

That was what made Kennedy a great match for his moment in history: he was a man with an exquisite sense of irony, living in a deeply ironic age. It was an age in which peace was kept by weapons that could destroy the world. An age in which a nation that fancied itself the greatest champion of individual liberty the world had ever known had concentrated in its government more power than the world had ever seen. An age in which men accepted that they would have to do bad things in order to advance a greater good.

No amount of reasoning, no clever contortion of logic could explain these contradictions. The only honest way to reconcile them was to accept that the sweep of human history is beyond human understanding, and to accept that though human beings might try, indeed
should
try, to predict the future, their predictions will ultimately fall short. Kennedy had seen his two elder siblings, destined for lives of glory, die young in tragic accidents. Twice he himself had nearly been killed by serious illness. He was a politician, a Catholic, and a Kennedy, and all of these allegiances taught him that nothing is eternal in this world. He brought to the White House an intuitive skepticism toward visions of certain victory or glory.

When, as president, he failed to heed this intuition, disaster inevitably followed. He was skeptical when, in 1961, his intelligence advisers promised that an American-backed invasion force arriving at the Bay of Pigs would prompt the Cuban people to rise and overthrow Fidel Castro. He muzzled his doubts and got the greatest fiasco of his presidency.

He swore afterward that he would not make such a mistake again, and he didn’t. In October 1962, when satellite images revealed Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba, Kennedy’s military advisers counseled immediate bombing or invasion. True, such action might trigger a nuclear response from the Soviets, but in that event, they reasoned, America’s superior strike force would eventually prevail. “
Those brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” Kennedy mused privately at one point. “If we … do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they’re wrong.”

Kennedy saw the reality: there was no such thing as “winning” a nuclear war. So he found a middle path between invasion and capitulation, a path that eventually produced a safe resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Under unimaginable pressure, Kennedy displayed courage reminiscent of the greatest wartime leadership of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Crucially, he was able to tolerate the anxiety of uncertainty. And he refused to relieve that anxiety with the cold certainty of doom. After his death, Kennedy’s country would learn through the painful experience of Vietnam how valuable that tolerance is in a president, and how rare.

But the same qualities that made Kennedy great in moments of crisis—intuition, skepticism, realism—could often make him appear cautious and halfhearted when he turned to domestic politics. His posture on domestic issues only makes sense when considered in the context of the political forces that shaped Kennedy’s day: the consensus politics that had governed America since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.

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consensus” was born in a moment of crisis. The Great Depression of the 1930s left millions of Americans destitute. Without bold action, unrest would have threatened the survival of the republic. Responding to the turmoil, President Roosevelt offered a new covenant between the American people and their government. In exchange for expanded, centralized power, Washington would shield its citizens from the most savage effects of market capitalism with labor protections, relief for the poor, and a savings program, Social Security, for retired wage earners. This was a radical transformation for what had been an essentially conservative country, and it stoked vehement opposition from the right. But voters endorsed it, granting Roosevelt a landslide in his reelection bid of 1936, followed by two more terms in the White House in 1940 and 1944 and another for his successor, Harry Truman, in 1948.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans finally managed to recapture the presidency. Rather than rolling back the New Deal, they ratified it. In his two terms in office, Ike maintained the Democrats’ tax and social welfare policies, rededicated the government’s commitment to Social Security, and, through the creation of the interstate highway system and the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, strengthened Washington’s centralized power. All the while, he maintained broad popularity. “
Gradually expanding federal government,” Eisenhower concluded, was “the price of rapidly expanding national growth.” When Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, the role of government he articulated was virtually indistinguishable from that envisioned by his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon.

Yet while the New Deal consensus was broad and enduring, it was always tenuous. From the horrors of the McCarthy period, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, liberal politicians learned that they would have to be tough on Communism abroad if they wanted to pursue progressive policies at home. And even then, left-leaning Democrats were hamstrung by reactionary elements in their own coalition. In the Congress, conservative Southern Democrats held
disproportionate sway, thanks to their monopoly on powerful committee chairmanships. In the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, liberals were regularly thwarted in attempts to expand labor protections, pass civil rights legislation, promote full employment, and introduce nationalized health insurance. The story of American politics in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s was that of America embracing the New Deal vision of an activist federal government protecting the common man and promoting the general welfare. But it was also the story of the failure of policymakers to bring that vision fully to pass.

Idealistic intellectuals on the left believed that the 1960s, and the Kennedy presidency, would be different. After the dull complacency and lazy materialism of the Eisenhower years, they embraced Kennedy, an attractive mainstream politician who would talk frankly about America’s problems and who would urge the country to use progressive means to solve them. They saw his election as the start of a great liberal era in American politics. Through advances in technology, medicine, and the social sciences, that liberal era could produce policies that took the most difficult problems in American life—poverty, racism, disease, failures in education, housing, and urban policy—and make them obsolete. They were living in a time of unprecedented prosperity, and they believed that through enlightened economic policy, that prosperity could go on and on. With such abundance, soon every American could live a life of material comfort and spiritually fulfilling purpose. To the left’s optimistic intellectuals, that glorious future was obviously near at hand.

Kennedy shared these aspirations, but not the confidence that they would soon come to pass. He saw the politics of his time with the same clear-eyed realism with which he saw everything else. And he saw that a future of liberal triumph was far from certain. He remembered the narrowness of his margin over Nixon in 1960. He saw the growing strains in the Democratic coalition, the increasing impossibility of reconciling its segregationist and civil rights wings. He wondered about the millions of middle-class Americans leaving the
cities for the suburbs, leaving behind their ties to urban government programs, turning instead toward a new politics of … 
what
? He didn’t know exactly where the country was turning; more than that, he saw that the country itself didn’t really know. A talented president could shape the nation’s future, and he intended to try. But he would try deliberately, strategically, sometimes even cautiously. He believed that change took courage, but that it also required realism. And it needed time.

Before his death, that caution had greatly disappointed Kennedy’s supporters on the left. They bemoaned the gap between his soaring liberal oratory and his paltry liberal record. They assumed he wasn’t one of them—he was a conservative, like his father, or he was weak or vain. But they might have listened to his speeches more closely. Again and again, as a candidate and as president, Kennedy advised the nation that a better world was possible, but that it would not come easily and would not come soon. That was his real greatness: urging people to commit to take real risk, to work and to make sacrifices for noble goals even if they couldn’t know how long it would take for those goals to be fulfilled. “
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days,” he said in his inaugural address. “Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”