Kennedy and Carter in Contrast
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
Washington-USA KENNEDY AND CARTER IN CONTRAST BY GEORGE E. HERMAN Washington A correspondent who covered the White House when John F. Kennedy was its occupant, and who last month watched Jimmy...
...Both took office on the heels of a recession, convinced that the only cure for the nation's economic ills was government intervention...
...Kennedy's ability to attract some of the best and the brightest notwithstanding, the Presidency disappointed him in some ways...
...The result was occasional lovers' quarrels, generating a lot of heat and accomplishing nothing...
...Obviously under orders from the boss, he persisted nonetheless while another aide who knew better, Larry O'Brien, sat alongside in embarrassed silence...
...Kennedy, the Northeastern intellectual with the odd and charming Boston accent as amended by his family, quoted from the classics and told esoteric anecdotes about French marshals of the Napoleonic era...
...Kennedy's outsider status, little perceived by the general public, could have had no positive impact and if widely known might even have proved damaging...
...He abolishes the playing of "Ruffles and Flourishes" and "Hail to the Chief" in the White House, signs official documents "Jimmy Carter," and has his wife wear her old evening gown to the Inaugural "parties"not Balls...
...After all, he had been a member of the House of Representatives and a Senator...
...Kennedy's youthful good looks and emphasis on brilliance combined to serve as a magnet...
...Another issue Carter will have to deal with is drawing power—that incredible attraction which drew bright young people to Washington to work for John F. Kennedy's Administration...
...He proposed, as Kennedy had proposed, "To get the country moving again...
...Historians may note that President's wives usually dress in George E. Herman is a correspondent for CBS News in Washington...
...After these Vienna talks the most important word in the White House was "credibility," which meant that when the inexperienced Kennedy took a stand the Kremlin had better listen, because he would see it through no matter what...
...voters reacted approvingly to his declarations that he had no ties to the entrenched power structure...
...Carter must help us believe that "the long national nightmare," embodying so much more than just Watergate, is really over...
...This seems likely to stand the outsider from the South in good stead as he seeks to construct a functioning union of White House and Congress that is bound to have its period of stress...
...Carter, aided by Congress' forceful reassertion of its independence during the Nixon-Ford years, appears to have a somewhat better grasp of how matters stand...
...The essence of the "un-style," partly shaped and adroitly followed by Press Secretary Jody Powell, is humor, underplaying and modesty...
...cloth coats to inaugurations and in fur coats upon leaving office, when there are no more votes to be wooed...
...He hit out against inactivity, against leaving things as they are, and for vigorous action by the Federal government...
...This was not an issue, however, since there was then no Watergate, no Elizabeth Ray, no Tongsun Park...
...Finally, President Kennedy, worried about that "paper-thin majority," fostered a love affair with the nation and the press...
...At the same time he must convince our allies that we are still a friend to be counted on and our foes that we are not, in a favorite phrase of the Kennedy White House, "a paper tiger...
...I don't think it has yet been fully appreciated how much his death and "old pol" Johnson's succession disillusioned the country's college educated youth...
...Jimmy Carter is also undeniably bright and relatively young, though he does not project either image...
...What aides described as a "somber" confrontation with Nik-ita Khrushchev, who was bent on expanding the strength and sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, seriously unsettled the young President...
...His slogan is "Why not the best...
...Carter likewise faces a credibility problem, but on more than one front...
...Lyndon Johnson might have tared them in, were it not for his mistrust of them and the divisive effects of Vietnam...
...The extent of his success was measured unofficially by an issue of Time magazine bearing his and Jackie's pictures on the cover...
...In what must have been one of the most ill-fated and egotistical experiments with style, White House aide Ted Sorensen held a series of briefings in the first year of the Kennedy Administration and sought, with charts and tables, to convince the press that Kennedy's first 100 days had been three times as productive as Franklin D. Roosevelt's...
...And that crucial difference in approach may very well overshadow all the similarities between the two men...
...Kennedy had campaigned around the country so tirelessly that he was better known outside the capital than in it...
...Accordingly, the young Senator took aim at the Eisenhower image and its inheritor, Richard Nixon...
...The old Washington cliff-dwellers were barely familiar with his name...
...Establishing this kind of credibility requires a delicate balancing act, and the eyes of the nation—as well as the world—will be watching it closely...
...Yet there are also differences in their similarities that reflect events at home and abroad over the past 16 years...
...The hope is that Carter can tap a vastly underutilized resource: those young innovators who speak not in dipped Ivy League cadence, but with leisurely southern accents...
...Washington-USA KENNEDY AND CARTER IN CONTRAST BY GEORGE E. HERMAN Washington A correspondent who covered the White House when John F. Kennedy was its occupant, and who last month watched Jimmy Carter stride down Pennsylvania Avenue to take up residence there, could not help being struck by the similarities between the two men...
...Skeptical reporters, some of them veterans of FDR's innovative year, made life miserable for Sorensen at each session...
...Jimmy Carter could make these effective sub-themes, deploring the Ford Administration's lack of initiative and the nation's slowdown...
...He has himself photographed lugging his own luggage, carrying his daughter's doll-house and lounging about in farmer's clothes...
...In the wake of Watergate the strategy worked well...
...And both were, in a sense, outsiders...
...Though the styles of the men were radically different, their emphasis on and use of style was much the same...
...Problems of "macho" and toughness on the international stage obsessed Kennedy soon after he took office, too...
...Personalities played better...
...Young and intelligent, both sought the Presidency not to implement some strongly held ideal, but because they thought they could win and because, as Kennedy said, "It's the center of action...
...Once in power he became uneasily aware of what he called "the paper-thin majority" that had elected him and manipulated his style and appeal energetically to unite the nation behind the Kennedy clan...
...It sold a record number of copies...
...For Carter, being an outsider was helpful, and he exploited it fully in a campaign directed largely against Washington...
...Carter apparently wants something cooler, a low-key working relationship...
...Once elected, he found that many of the levers of power were connected to Congress, mostly to the committee chairmen whose club he never joined...
...Attacking the Establishment would not yield any votes...
...But the appearance was deceptive: He had put no stamp on the Senate, never belonged to the Senate "club," was not a wheeler-dealer or one of the movers-and-shakers of the legislative branch...
...He appealed overtly to the country's intellectual aspiration, covertly to a certain snobbism...
...Even the "five percenters," the deep freezes and the vicuna coats had been forgotten...
...But it remains to be seen whether he can appeal to the turned-off newly emergent intellectuals whose participation in government, despite the current anti-intellectualism, is vital to the nation's health...
...Not even his odd-couple relationship with LBJ could make the levers work as he wanted them to...
...Moreover, not being a scion of the rich and the powerful forced him to start at the bottom, where foundations are usually built...
...The President finds himself at the head of a country that is unsure it can trust its leaders in Washington and its servant, the Sorcerer's Apprentice CIA...
...Perhaps in this area Carter has profited from John Kennedy's mistakes...
...Surely, he was an "insider...
...The climax of this was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when our credibility was established to Chairman Khrushchev's satisfaction, if not discomfiture...
...Nobody wants another round of wiretapping the opposition party, foreigners and even the negotiating team of one of our island protectorates...
...President Carter affects a style that amounts almost to an "unstyle...
...It is a measure of the extent to which he was an outsider that he did not fully realize its limitations before reaching the White House...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 4
