Historical Myths Series Kennedy Edition, Part 4: JFK's Legacy Debated With A Special Guest Star

 

The next article you’re about to read was not the one I originally planned on writing. However, having spent so much time in the last several months both in my articles and comments berating other writers on this blog for their lack of historical context on certain subjects, I thought it would be hypocritical of me to author this particular article without getting some of my own. And in my case, it helped that I had a resource few of my fellow writers could lean on.

I mentioned at the start of the series that my father is a historian. While he is not the greatest influence on my own love of American history, I will not deny he was a big part of it. He has written numerous books about history over his long career – including a series of children’s books called Great Presidential Decisions (spoiler: one is dedicated to me) – and while much of his work involves the judiciary, a sizable amount has been devoted to the executive and legal branches.

It also helps that in his younger days, he spent much of the 1970s in Washington, D.C. Most of that time was spent in connection with the Supreme Court (apparently as an infant I made an impression on Warren Burger) but you don’t spend that much time in DC and are not at least partially away of what’s going on in Congress and the White House. Nor did his knowledge of public figures start there: growing up in New York in the 1940s and 50’s, he was familiar with a few local public figures, some of whom would eventually rise to national prominence. (I may end up discussing quite a few of them in later articles. And though he told me this at one point, I had forgotten by the time I started this series that, while in college, he had spent his summers interning in the Civil Rights division of the Justice department in 1962 and 1963.  If he were the type to brag, he could say that ‘he worked with Bobby Kennedy’,  though he says he had more of a direct connection with the Deputy Attorneys General each time.

Over my life, it has been a distinct pleasure to engage in conversations with him about American politics. Sometimes I enlighten him on things he was not aware of, sometimes he tells me aspects of that time that I was not aware of. The balance has shifted as I have grown up, but only in the sense that he may need his memory refreshed on the odd detail. So when I told him I was writing this series on the Kennedys, I naturally decided to share some of my thoughts with him to see if his opinions from living in that era might be different from someone who has only read about it.

He agreed with me on many of the basic principles that I have discussed in previous articles. He agreed with me that the campaign Nixon ran in 1960 was far cleaner than any of the others, and that Nixon had more of a right to contest the election than anyone before. He agrees that the Kennedy dynasty is infinitely inferior to the Roosevelts (though any lesser historian wouldn’t deny that) and agreed with me on many of the basic arguments I made about the Kennedys in many ways compared unfavorably to the Bushes. (Indeed, he actually was surprised to learn as much about what I told him of Prescott Bush’s complicated legacy.) And he fundamentally agrees that the idea of the Kennedys being more devoted to their own legacy than anything resembling the good of the party is a sound argument. However, while he agreed JFK’s place in history is overrated by many, he believes it has more to commend than I had thought at the time.

He reminded me how strong he had been on foreign affairs in general, particularly the Bay of Pigs and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, he pointed out something I had forgotten: the speech JFK famously made at the Berlin Wall in 1963 in which he spoke out for the freedom of democracy over communism. (He is, however, smart enough to know that Kennedy misspoke when he famously stated Ich bin Ein Berliner or as has gone down in history: ‘I am a doughnut.’ I will admit it was the thought – and the location – that mattered.)

When I pointed out Kennedy’s legacy when it came to putting a man on the moon, he was somewhat more dubious then some historians as to how much that mattered. As he told me, given how bad American morale was after the launch of Sputnik and later triumphs among Russians such as Gagarin, getting a man on the moon was considered vital for the idea of American exceptionalism. I actually pointed out that this very well could have been an issue that a good Republican strategist could have made hay on: something along the lines of: “JFK would rather make problems on the moon rather than solve the ones we have on Earth.” While he admits this might have been a winning strategy, he reminded me of something I had forgotten that issues like this had bipartisan support – though as song and culture would tell us, not necessarily the support of all Americans.

He also pointed out that, while Kennedy may have not had the greatest electoral mandate, his youth and energy as well as his charisma, did have an influence on Americans who had grown tired of the stodgy politicians such as Eisenhower and Truman. Perhaps the reason there was no clear measure of his effect on the youth of America is simple: the voting age was 21 at the time and would remain so until the 1972 election. There was an influx on young people who entered the Kennedy administration because of the call to arms he famously gave both during his campaign and his inaugural address. That kind of effect truly was hard to measure at the time, and still is today.

When it came to the limited progress that the Kennedy administration had at the time, he made some points that I’d overlooked.  Yes, the Kennedys were all about compromise but that was probably due as much to the makeup of Congress. A sizable percentage of the 64 Democrats in the Senate and the 262 in the House were from the South, and considering the narrowness of his margin of victory, the administration could not afford to antagonize him. Considering the inroads Eisenhower had made in his landslide victories in the South as well as the nearly forty percent of the black vote he had won in his elections (much of which was at least partially due to the segregationists in Congress and the men who ran with Stevenson – John Sparkman of Alabama in 1952, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in 1956 – the Kennedys had a very thin tightrope to walk.  My father told me that the decisions the administration was to try and work within the existing laws and judicial decisions at the time. The moderation was frustrating to African Americans at the time, and my father acknowledged that if Kennedy had won a second term, they would have to have gotten a Civil Rights bill through Congress whatever the cost. He is fundamentally in agreement with me, however, that it is unlikely it would have been nearly as sweeping as the one LBJ managed to get through Congress in 1964. He acknowledged that the Kennedys would never have been willing to make the decision to essentially sacrifice the South the way Johnson more or less admitted he had done after signing the bill in August of 1964. That kind of arithmetic was not in the Kennedy blood.

And it’s worth noting that were some key victories for the administration, integration of universities and schools throughout the south (most famously Ole Miss in 1962) and the resolution of a very public standoff with George Wallace in 1963. Wallace got the headline (he’s going to get his own set of columns in this series, so I’ll spare you the details for now) but the administration carried the day. The fact that the March on Washington happened in the summer of 1963 and unfolded peacefully is a silent testament to the Kennedys; it is hard to imagine some politicians allowing to let that occur.

Then there is the most complicated part of the mythology around Kennedy: Vietnam. My father and I agreed on the fundamental principle. Most of the myth around JFK (and on a different way, Robert) is built on the inability of proving a negative. I still hold that there are many things that make it hard to believe JFK would have acted differently.

There is the fact that America’s involvement in Vietnam had begun under Eisenhower, and that while Kennedy did not perceptibly increase it, he did nothing to shrink existing involvement. Most of the men who ended up giving so much advice to Johnson on Vietnam – Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy – were Kennedy appointees. The administrations hands weren’t exactly clean involving Vietnam even as they spoke about not getting further involved in the war. Just a month before Kennedy was assassinated, the President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup. The CIA knew about this but did nothing to stop it or his assassination. Even Robert Kennedy himself acknowledged in an interview not long before he began to consider his challenge to Johnson that based on the information they had at the time, Kennedy would have likely increased the number of soldiers involved. All of this leaves aside the fact that Johnson himself was an outsider in the administration and knew far less about the situation in Vietnam than almost anyone else in it.

I spoke in an earlier article that the myth of Camelot requires villains. The Kennedys have been just fine casting LBJ as one, and history is just as willing. The fact that JFK almost certainly would not have won his election in 1960 without Johnson on the ticket does not matter to those on the fringe who have no problem casting LBJ as the man behind the assassination. (Oliver Stone is very clear on that in JFK. ) That in some ways Johnson achieved far more than Kennedy did on the domestic front is easily dismissed by those willing to say he did so over the body of their beloved Jack. The fact that Robert himself was just as willing to try and take the legacy away with Johnson within weeks of the assassination by trying to get on the ticket himself proves that fact pretty clearly. I don’t need to argue that Johnson deserves more credit than Camelot has been willing to give him (Robert Caro and Doris Kearns Goodwin alone have more than willing to do enough.) But the reason he was viewed with such contempt for so long by America had as much to do with the Kennedy aura as it did with Johnson’s mishandling of the Vietnam War. (Of course as we shall see, that didn’t mean that Johnson deserves to be considered for sainthood.)

While I admit that JFK’s historical record is superior than I thought it was on first inspection, my father and I are in agreement that his elevation by historians in recent years is based on both his assassination and, in concert with that, the unfinished work of his administration. He also agrees that Kennedy is the only President in history who seems to get a higher grade from Americans based on potential rather than achievement. Most Presidents are ranked on what they accomplished; Kennedy alone is ranked on what he might have accomplished, which isn’t how it works. And with the exception of Lincoln, who despite his complicated legacy as President did get our country through it greatest national crisis, no President who has died prematurely has ever been given what amounts to a bump by historians because of it. As I mentioned to my father, McKinley got assassinated as well, but no one’s ever going to rank him as one of the greatest American Presidents as a result. He more or less concurred with that statement.

It is the aura of Kennedy that carries him farther than his actual accomplishments. He did get a fair amount done in his administrations, honestly far more than he should have given the margins of his room for error in Congress. But his ranking among historians as one of America’s ten greatest presidents (according to the most recent ranking) is a vast overrated. He does not deserve to rank with the two Roosevelts or Truman or Andrew Jackson. At best, he is an above average President, better than most of the nineteenth century mediocrities but never breathing the air on Mount Rushmore.

To put it as bluntly as possible, if he hadn’t been shot, JFK would never have gotten his face on a coin. Eisenhower briefly did not longer after he passed away, and then a few years later it was taken out of circulation. No one will ever take JFK off the half-dollar coin. But his face isn’t on the money because he was anywhere near as great as the Presidents on the other coins or accomplished as much in his era as any of the other men who are on the bills.

Of course there was key legacy of JFK’s presidency – people thought the world would be fine if another Kennedy was in the White House. The aura and mythos led to how the Kennedy family would be part of politics ever since. In the next article in this series I will take a look at Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for the Presidency – and how there are other ways of looking at it then the one history wants us to think.