GWB & JFK

GELERNTER, DAVID

GWB & JFK There's one thing Bush could learn from the president he most resembles BY DAVID GELERNTER Many people have noticed similarities between our dealings with Iraq today and with Cuba...

...If prose style matters, why shouldn't style in general...
...They both drew on strong, sure senses of national honor, on natural combativeness, on a willingness to fight and not shrink...
...Memorable presidential style partly just has to do with politics...
...And when we reevaluate Kennedy we must factor in, also, his constant pain: the never-ending injections, treatments, check-ups, pills...
...Americans like that...
...JFK himself had nothing to do with it...
...He sounded almost startled...
...The resemblances are worth considering, if only for the practical message...
...But he also bears some David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...He talked a language of sacrifice that no Republican (let alone Democrat) would touch with a ten-foot pole nowadays...
...Both times we considered and rejected an immediate military strike...
...Bush is and Kennedy was a big believer in military strength—although on this issue JFK came down much harder...
...Studies or careers will be interrupted...
...FDR invented the fireside chat, and used it brilliantly...
...As matters stand, this president is impressive but exhausting, and slightly forbidding...
...A fine sentence, deservedly celebrated and remembered...
...But he has a winning personality all the same...
...JFK's popular-vote margin was the smallest since 1884...
...But it can raise a nation's morale too, and stiffen its backbone, and change its outlook...
...he looks uncomfortable in those slippery, formal armchairs...
...The cultural elite has talked down to him from the start...
...Mankind has always been X-rated, but newspapers have not always been...
...That is a phrase the poet Robert Frost used in paraphrasing to JFK, liberally, some remarks with which Khrushchev had favored him...
...Both in Cuba and in Iraq, a dangerous dictator got hold of dangerous weapons—although in Cuba the weapons were Soviet, which made a big difference...
...The differences between the Kennedy and Bush presidencies are obvious (and Bush hasn't even gotten as far into his as Kennedy had at his death in November '63...
...Nothing was settled for good, but trading in "too liberal to fight" bon mots was suspended temporarily...
...In office they faced similar economies in basically the same ways...
...It wants lower taxes, but has a strange, puritan aversion to admitting it does...
...But luckily Khrushchev understood the issues much better than Western intellectuals did...
...strong, unexpected resemblances to a president Republicans don't especially like to talk about...
...representative Adlai Stevenson answered the inevitable blowhards who claimed that the United States had (as usual) gone off half-cocked: "Were we to do nothing until the knife was sharpened...
...JFK invented the televised news conference, and mastered it...
...In the long run this president could easily surpass JFK...
...But if you are right and your style is wrong, you are failing to make the most of your good judgment and good fortune...
...Theodore Sorensen was a top Kennedy adviser and speechwriter...
...At the Smithsonian Institution, he gives a family-history speech, about his father in the Second World War (and opens an exhibit of World War II airplanes...
...No one knows how long the war on terrorism will take...
...Many American families will bear the burden of these requests...
...once in a while, let him talk down to it...
...Neither was a born politician...
...They were both transformed by direct, close-to-home (in Bush's case, at home) military challenges, in Cuba and downtown Manhattan...
...Bush is and JFK was not merely a patriot but a proud, combative patriot...
...JFK floundered badly at the start...
...On private judgment and personal integrity, Bush wins...
...The administration decided on a naval blockade (which it called a "quarantine," because to "blockade" was an act of war...
...Ari Fleischer is good, but carries too much of the Bush-to-the-public burden...
...Essayists writing history wield simile and metaphor also...
...Strom Thurmond was a Dixiecrat, not a Dixiecaw, because the home base of any white southern politician in the heyday of segregation could only be the Democratic party...
...he nearly blew the sides off his nuclear test ban negotiations with the Soviets, and had to back down the same afternoon and get with the program...
...The Cold War continued for another generation beyond October '62...
...Afterwards he can publish the speeches in a book and call it Profiles in Courage (Cont...
...Today the trial lawyers establishment has replaced organized labor as the reigning selfish threat to the public good—and it is vastly more arrogant, anti-democratic, unprincipled, and rapacious than the unions ever were...
...The actual break came between the late '40s and mid-'60s, when intellectuals took over the universities...
...if it captures any sort of essential similarity, it can show us the world in a new way...
...It views class-warfare, soak-the-rich schemes with amused contempt...
...Reagan was master of the eye-contact, heart-to-heart TV address...
...Vigor is good, being in command is important—but the nation needs quiet time, too...
...After decades of ugly revelations about Kennedy's private life, especially his maniac philandering, naturally his reputation has suffered—not only among the revolted but among the envious...
...And, naturally, when big business let them down, they took it personally: When it happened they both talked so tough, and so clearly meant what they said, that they scared hell out of the business community...
...One of the stranger aspects of the Trent Lott story is the idea that Republicans must do penance for their long history of racial misconduct...
...What it thinks today strikingly resembles what it thought in the early 1960s...
...It wants a modest but effective nanny state at home...
...Both times we took our case to the United Nations—although in 1962 we did so after the U.S...
...Such a thing could never happen today...
...Bush has done significant things, and may well accomplish great ones, but he has not been a mood changer—and he ought to be...
...It holds fast to the dumb idea that you improve schools by spending more money on them...
...Castro and Saddam are volatile, dangerous tyrants we had hoped the locals would get rid of, with some help from their friends...
...Serious doubts were cast in Kennedy's own lifetime on the hero-value of his famous PT-109 exploit, but the fact remains that he was there and he fought, and that matters...
...Were we truly men of integrity...
...But it didn't work out that way...
...In any case, nothing inherited...
...The consequences were vast, and we are still living through them...
...We have heard far less about the public's right not to know...
...Both men remained controversial, but were in a position to contemplate much bigger reelection victories than they had won at first...
...the civil rights issue grew steadily more important throughout Kennedy's term...
...A poet works by wielding metaphor like a welding torch, connecting things...
...The early '60s news industry suppressed facts to protect the president...
...he sits in a comfortable chair, relaxes, says his piece—but listens thoughtfully, too, to an occasional comment or question...
...And there were many other differences...
...Neither arrived with any special plans...
...It is hard for young people to grasp, but civil rights was once a pressing moral issue in this country, not just a catchall name for a certain type of cynical power grab...
...We understand that the president is close to his brother and his parents...
...Elite universities used to be social as much as intellectual institutions, but now intellectuals were running them, and then— with their tony colleges and their burgeoning ed schools, journalism schools, law schools, graduate schools—the U.S...
...In the Security Council, Kennedy's U.N...
...Most important: Bush needs to find the right way—his own way—to address the public...
...Bush's best people are at least as formidable as Bundy, McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Walter Heller...
...Kennedy's inaugural address: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty...
...if he fails to convert it to emotional admiration, that is his own fault...
...Even Hugh Gaitskell [the prominent Labour politician] doubted the legality of the quarantine and wondered why Kennedy had not gone first to the United Nations...
...but they do not reflect huge changes in the national will...
...he refused ever to speak to Frost again...
...In Kennedy's farewell address to the Massachusetts legislature in January '61—he had been elected congressman and then senator from Massachusetts—he asked four questions by which, he said, politicians should be judged: "Were we truly men of courage...
...But a good president (bully pulpit and all) must teach, not just preach...
...Profiles in Courage was the collection of historical essays that was published under John Kennedy's name but was evidently, for the most part, other men's work...
...And so was Bastogne...
...GWB's Afghanistan and JFK's Cuba settled nothing for good...
...That JFK got such men as White to write such stuff as this is the most important datum that has come down to us about politics in 1960...
...It is still permitted to discuss God on publicly funded sidewalks...
...In his speeches (anyway in the bits we see on the news), he is almost always fortissimo, staccato, full-blast...
...some men couldn't stomach it, but Kennedys ate it for breakfast—and a few days later, the steel companies cancelled their price rises and crept away whimpering on their bellies...
...maybe CIA was up to its old tricks...
...And the resemblances go farther than that...
...And maybe they did fly...
...Are Americans strong but defensive and jittery...
...His tax reductions passed the House that September, but Senate approval was uncertain...
...husbands and sons will be called away...
...Why should we discount visual style...
...but they rarely seem to add up...
...He could change the nation's mood if he found his medium...
...And so, in fact, was Stalingrad...
...Obviously we don't know how the Iraq story will turn out...
...intelligentsia was suddenly, overbearingly all over American society, where previously it had been too shy even to call up and ask for a date...
...In his 1961 book, White reported that "Kennedy loped into his cottage with his light, dancing step, as young and lithe as springtime...
...Bush unaccompanied, Bush a la carte, leaning back comfortably or on a solitary stroll, reflecting...
...Clearly in his case it was outrageous—to the extent we want to call him "liberal" at all...
...In Lyndon Johnson and Richard Cheney, they both picked strong vice presidents who knew a lot more about Washington than they did...
...He was a Kennedy and a half, and savored the taste of fresh raw power—ice-cold, alive, with a squeeze of lemon...
...Both believed in the free market with the utter heartfeltness that (in the last analysis) only a rich man can muster...
...Or strong, cool, and confident...
...to authorize action against Cuba in advance...
...Contemplating JFK makes it clear that the Bush style has been second-rate...
...It wants a strong, assertive foreign policy—with constant reassurance that it is not warmongering or bullying...
...But these are burdens which must be borne if freedom is to be defended...
...Were we to stand idly by until it was at our throats...
...But the prose style of a Jefferson or Lincoln or Churchill changed history...
...that whole line of thought is nonsense...
...And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists—let them come to Berlin...
...White was a smart and polished sophisticate...
...Bush could be a far more important figure than JFK...
...JFK announced that the Navy would turn back any ship carrying offensive weapons to Cuba, and demanded that Soviet missiles be removed and their launching sites torn down...
...Two compassionate conservatives...
...neither was an ideologue...
...JFK had the harder task—Eisenhower was immensely popular, Clinton was not...
...It is the Democrats, of course, with the long history...
...All in all, the country hasn't gained much by the abolition of taste...
...On the other hand evidence suggests that, in his private and family life, Bush is substantially the better man...
...And two presidencies snapped into focus, in October '62 and September '01, with two such decided clicks they were nearly audible...
...FDR and Reagan accomplished great things...
...Attorney General Robert Kennedy was no man to mess with...
...No one in his right mind ever called either of them a lightweight again...
...in itself, that was wrong...
...JFK exploded...
...It's up to George W. Bush...
...this will be a new, Bushian form...
...We tend to dismiss this sort of love-letter mush—but if we do, we miss the point...
...both prescribed tax cuts—JFK after much hand-wringing over the deficit...
...Obviously that is not Bush's medium...
...But in '01 as in '62, the world had been wondering (as it always seems to be . . .) whether America might not be "too liberal to fight...
...Between JFK's America and ours stands the Revolution of the Intellectuals...
...It believes in civil rights, equal opportunities, and all-around fairness, but only because they are right—not because America is a sinful nation with moral debts to work off...
...Presidential style (Kennedy style, Reagan style) sounds like a fluffy, trivial proposition...
...But the similarities are close enough...
...GWB & JFK There's one thing Bush could learn from the president he most resembles BY DAVID GELERNTER Many people have noticed similarities between our dealings with Iraq today and with Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis...
...there is still a state called Indi-ana—but these are anomalies...
...It needs its own...
...Germans were all in favor of American toughness when their own personal hides were in danger...
...the Smithsonian owns plenty, but hates to display them...
...If I were the president's political adviser, there are some photos I'd want to see: the president in the White House not talking, bantering, or crisply commanding...
...John F. Kennedy was a hair-care pioneer...
...Can you believe it, Jacqueline Bouvier confided to a cousin when she was going out with the future president, he gets his hair done every day to ensure maximum fluffiness...
...JFK mainly surrounded himself with political minor leaguers—but made the public believe that sparks flew when they were all together...
...Both came to office by defeating sitting vice presidents...
...and the world the meaning of American bases close to the Soviet frontier...
...In October '62, the United States uncovered a Soviet project to install nuclear missiles in Cuba...
...and he has great natural dignity...
...The two things don't need to be exactly similar for the metaphor to do its job...
...Imagine three speeches about history: At Harvard he explains Munich and appeasement and Churchill...
...the Bay of Pigs and the post-Gulf War Kurd and Shiite uprisings were two of the worst moments in modern American history...
...Bush has no glittering JFK wit, lacks FDR's powerful charm and Reagan's impossibly warm and compelling delivery...
...The Bush administration can't imitate JFK's (or anyone else's) style...
...that was no revolution...
...Emotional admiration versus mere intellectual assent certainly didn't do FDR any harm in 1936, or Reagan in '84...
...A president speaks to the world in words and images...
...The eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell had already (some time before) thoughtfully pointed out that Kennedy and Khrushchev were "much more wicked than Hitler...
...Both men took civil rights seriously—although the issue seems to mean far more to Bush than it ever did to JFK...
...When I heard a cable-TV documentary praising "the countless thousands of young American men and women who were drafted during World War II," or words to the effect, I knew that our national reeducation must be nearly complete...
...He was a phenomenon, people said, on the order of Cary Grant or (yes) Elvis Presley...
...The West Berliners cheered him frantically: "The most overwhelming reception in his career," Sorensen wrote...
...But it can ponder the JFK style and what it accomplished...
...More Bush family photos are in order...
...Were we truly men of dedication...
...Free peoples underestimate the power of tyrants to squash their internal enemies like lice...
...on 9/11 he found his voice and his issue...
...JFK launched withering rhetoric—and his brother...
...It can affect a nation's reputation abroad, profoundly...
...The country would enjoy that...
...Bush has got the thoughtful support...
...Rising tax receipts and the eventual elimination of budget deficits"—now he is defending his tax cut bill in July '63—"depend primarily on a healthy and rapidly growing economy...
...In September '63 he went on television to say that high income tax rates were not merely unnecessary: "They are, in fact, harmful...
...Public opinion has been amazingly consistent over half a century...
...He was the first (and so far only) non-WASP American president...
...But we do know that, however much the two crises resemble each other, the two American presidents resemble each other even more...
...It made the crisis more dangerous but more manageable, because Khrushchev in the end did not want to see mankind obliterated, and Saddam doesn't seem to care one way or the other...
...You are falling below the level of events...
...in the event, Hitler did away with Germany...
...JFK (and Bush senior) were decorated veterans...
...how much sleep he needed, how one leg ended up a quarter-inch shorter than the other, how narrow a range of food he could tolerate, how low his energy really was, how rotten he often felt...
...JFK did something similar in April '62, when the major steel companies announced price rises in contravention (the president thought) of a promise they had made his administration, when it pressured steel workers to accept modest, "non-inflationary" wage increases...
...At a minimum, it helped convert disinterested political support into emotional admiration...
...We have heard all about the public's right to know...
...White mentions casually in his 1961 book about the Kennedy-Nixon campaign that, at any rate as of 1959, "The schools were better than ever before...
...In the meantime he could learn a lot from his glamorous, compassionate-conservative predecessor...
...Most Americans can't even say the word "style" without patronizing it...
...Kennedy on NATO's exposed position in West Berlin, summer '61: "I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable...
...The Manchester Guardian explained that, if Khrushchev really had brought in nuclear missiles, he had "done so primarily to demonstrate to the U.S...
...Is that so much to ask...
...There are no brand new "emerging majorities," Democratic or Republican...
...both grew up wealthy in decidedly over-achieving families, got Ivy League educations and (when all is said and done) wound up as president because of their fathers...
...From D-Day onward, the Allies breathlessly anticipated that Germany might do away with Hitler at any moment...
...It's likely to be something like a televised fireside chat to a small friendly audience...
...George Bush blew up at Enron...
...Were we truly men of judgment...
...The Cold War colored everything he did...
...he needs to be spelled some of the time by a glitzier performer...
...The weakness of American conservatism has always been its obsession with political as opposed to cultural issues...
...But he soldiered on...
...The Bush administration's style is too keyed-up and (at the same time) slightly dowdy...
...This is his moment...
...and of course JFK had the Catholic issue to deal with...
...Both Kennedy and Bush believed in economic growth at home, lower taxes, equal treatment for all citizens (which has become nearly, though not quite, as loaded an issue as it was then), federal aid to education, foreign aid, and a hard line against America's enemies...
...And both faced big challenges in office, and rose to the occasion...
...To prepare the nation for war, a president should not only exhort, he should teach...
...The best style in the world won't help if you are wrong on the issues...
...Then to Miami to discuss JFK and the Cuban missile crisis...
...Bush held his own, but with no particular distinction...
...How can we not admire him for that...
...In some ways he is the most appealing presidential personality since Truman (or maybe FDR, or even TR...
...Both men were dismissed as political lightweights by their (seemingly) far more experienced and accomplished presidential opponents...
...JFK-Sorensen eloquence was overrated at the time...
...We don't know what the admiration would have accomplished for Kennedy in the 1964 presidential election...
...The schools decline inexorably...
...Both came out of nowhere to bear down on American politics like a speck in the rear-view mirror that suddenly turns out to be a 40-ton tractor-trailer right on top of you, with the driver cheerfully leaning on his horn...
...What do we conclude...
...Any dangerous spot is tenable if men— brave men—make it so...
...He had courage and dedication, beyond question...
...GWB and JFK were both elected on narrow margins with nothing in the political bank, nothing like a mandate...
...It accepts that the United States will always have enemies—which is obvious, but was by no means clear to, say, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton...
...But it also acted to protect the dignity of public life, and the wholesome-ness—a word that barely even exists anymore—of the national atmosphere in which citizens labor and children grow up...
...Of course there have been huge changes in American culture since JFK...
...just thinking...
...W. is not...
...But these are cultural, not political developments...
...When the Soviets heated up Berlin in the summer of 1961, Kennedy asked for tripled draft calls, much higher defense spending, and sacrifice all around...
...George W. Bush resembles many presidents, including (in some important ways) the two dominant ones of the 20th century, FDR and Reagan...
...National mood matters, profoundly...
...Put (say) Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Kass, and Cheney around a table, tell them to make like they are discussing something, take a photo...
...they were also "mood changing" presidents—they cheered the nation up...
...Even on the ranch in his blue jeans, he's nearly always at full boil...
...He is funny and plainspoken, earnest without being pompous, sentimental without being corny...
...Still more important: Both faced decent but slowish economies...
...but it wouldn't have hurt...
...Back then, the press made a collective decision to conceal the facts...
...In Oval Office photo-ops he seems wound up...
...The bill finally made it under Johnson in '64...
...Navy had already set up the Cuban blockade, because (according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., adviser and court historian to JFK) the administration "saw no hope of mustering enough votes in the U.N...
...In Britain, "some questioned," Schlesinger wrote, "whether nuclear missiles really were in Cuba...
...JFK could never be elected today...
...Kennedy needed stronger growth and lower unemployment to prepare for the '64 election...
...He brought academics and intellectuals into his administration, but so had FDR...
...And questions have been raised that have yet to be seriously addressed...
...Our tax system," he reflected in late 1962, "siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power...
...Many Europeans (especially intellectuals) were unen-thusiastic about the American position...
...As young men, neither seemed remotely cut out for the job...
...Saddam might be drawn to the same maneuver...
...Bush, unlike Kennedy, has never tried to pass himself off as something he is not...
...To Kennedy, the insinuation that a liberal frame of mind might conduce to unsoldierly conduct was outrageous...
...When JFK let himself go, as he did in his famous improvised perorations in West Berlin in the summer of '63— "There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future—let them come to Berlin...
...But its sheer patriotic aggressiveness is startling to modern weak-tea sensibilities...
...We know but sometimes forget how much the word "Democrat" has changed...
...Young men are kicked out of collegiate athletics so that young women can be represented "proportionately...
...Here its motives resembled Kennedy's own when he signed the nuclear test ban treaty to help protect his fellow citizens from inhaling radioactive poison...
...Back then men did not act like that...
...In the end Soviet ships turned back, and the missiles were taken away...
...The national mood could be far worse, and it could also be better...
...JFK's accomplishments were modest—after all, he only had three years in which to work—but he was a mood changer also...
...He found his message—but has yet to find his medium...
...We need to understand more about the public's right to remain ignorant...
...Kennedy was wildly popular with young women and foreign governments, and the two facts are intimately related...

Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 20


 
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