Lessons of the New Frontier

...Thirty years later, an early Clinton misstep was failing to understand the attitude of the military culture toward homosexuals...

...She "chained me to her radiator" for four months, Reeves joked, pressing him to turn a turgid tome into a smooth, chronological narrative...

...Kennedy told his friend Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek and later of the Washington Post: "Well, I always said that when we don't have to go through you bastards, we can really get our story over to the American people...

...Kennedy would find the situation familiar, and ironic...

...It works") Above all, Reeves' careful accretion of detail produces a fine-grained picture of what it really feels like to be President, of how the American system funnels so much power and pressure into one small office occupied by one very human individual...

...Only to a cruel chaos...

...Clinton has preserved his options, and his flexibility, in ways Kennedy never did...

...These people are crazy," he once exclaimed, leaving a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, "I told you to keep them away from me...

...Clinton, after a year, is similarly unsure of himself...

...Those who vote are already for you...

...Like Kennedy—but unlike Walter F. Mondale or Michael S. Dukakis or George S. Mc-Govern—Clinton understood that Democrats could only win the White House by running from the Center out, not the Left in...

...Moreover, one can't read this book without being struck—even startled—by the parallels between the problems Kennedy faced in the '60s and those Clinton is encountering in the '90s...

...Berated by Republicans in love with balanced budgets, Kennedy was determined not to exceed Eisenhower's largest deficit, $12.8 billion in fiscal year 1958...

...And like Clinton, he was thin-skinned about criticism and given to self-pity about how badly he was treated by the press...

...Feelgood, the President replied: "I don't care if it's horse piss...

...That is not necessarily worse, though, than being tough and trapped...

...Kennedy came of age at the end of a journalistic era, when newspaper columnists like James Reston and Walter Lippmann dominated the Washington discourse...

...Republicans still upbraid Democrats for being soft on two things: defense and deficits...

...The current occupant of the Oval Office has read Reeves' book and thought so highly of it that he invited the author to lunch—not far from the spot in the Rose Garden where the 17-year-old Bill Clinton had shaken hands with Kennedy during a White House tour on July 24, 1963...

...Principles can lead to courage and leadership, but also to rigidity and blindness...

...But television had already grown from infancy to adolescence, and was starting to stretch its awkward muscles...

...There is a direct line between Kennedy's pragmatic centrism and the tenets of the Democratic Leadership Council, the group of party moderates who helped shape Clinton's thinking and campaign platform...

...Even though Kennedy had to confront the real possibility of a nuclear exchange —a possibility that has now drastically receded—Clinton faces the same central question his predecessor did: What is the proper use of American military power...

...Today, nuclear proliferation is a foreign policy issue that commands a broad bipartisan consensus...

...Often, Kennedy's actions toward Cuba and Vietnam were driven by a determination to avoid the charge that he, like Democrats before him, had "lost" crucial ground to the Red Menace...

...I can understand why Clinton found the volume absorbing...

...Having researched the origins of the American involvement carefully, he feels obligated to reprint endless memos and conversations to the point of tedium...

...In JFK's day, the few black Congressmen represented big cities like New York and Chicago...

...You can't get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people," he argued...

...On the other hand, he never had to face the charge that he was losing Bosnia or Somalia to Communism...

...In his State of the Union Message in 1962, Kennedy said pointedly, "if we are to pay for our commitments abroad, we must expand our exports...

...We should all be grateful that Mayhew still had steam heat—and a convenient lashing post—in her apartment...

...Among Clinton's chief mistakes during his first six months in office was neglecting his campaign promise to name Republicans to top jobs...

...But I would bet it was a factor...

...Obviously, much has changed...

...When brother Robert questioned the potions JFK was receiving from a shadowy character known as Dr...

...Reeves has produced a clear, compelling story that slows down in only one place: Vietnam...

...Frequently, in Reeves' narrative, Kennedy confesses to being "haunted" by the spread of nuclear weapons, particularly to China...

...Clinton did not have to read that line in the Reeves book...

...Reeves—an old friend and former colleague of mine at the New York Times?is essentially a reporter, not a historian, and for better or worse, this is a reporter's book: long on pungent data and detail, a bit short on commentary and context...

...His approach has enormous strengths, however, enabling him to deal with the most highly-charged material in a cool and detached way...

...In the last election, Southern states like Alabama and South Carolina sent their first black lawmakers to Washington since Reconstruction...

...I can't be sure, of course, that reading Reeves' book in midsummer led Clinton to nominate Bobby Ray Inman—a confessed Bush supporter—as his new Defense Secretary...

...The fact that Kennedy had a mistress named Mary Meyer visiting him regularly in the White House is well-described, but not sensationalized...

...Certainly the global nature of economic competition—and opportunities—has increased significantly, but looking abroad for economic revival is hardly new...

...The same is true of the fascinating fracas among rival physicians eager to probe, and prescribe for, a Presidential body that was never free of pain...

...Most important then was the fear of imperialistic Communism intent on burying what used to be called the Free World...

...Clinton's number one concern is North Korea, and in fact he needs Beijing to exert pressure on Pyongyang...

...I was thinking of photographs with policemen in the cities...

...Nevertheless, Ike hammered him as a tax and spend Democrat, accusing him of "stealing from our grandchildren in order to satisfy our desires today...

...It's almost impossible to write a story they like," moaned Bradlee about his friend JFK...

...In apolitical sense, he is clearly one of "Kennedy's children," as William Schneider dubbed the heirs to a humane but pragmatic tradition who "adopted JFK's lack of ideological passion even as many were inspired by his calls to public service...

...In almost 800 pages, too, the Middle East is barely mentioned, and the most significant problem with Japan is the huge trade surplus in America's favor...

...The voters you need, your people, men with lunchpails, are moving to the suburbs...

...Which is far less threatening to America's national interest...

...And it is why he worked with Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee—not liberal Democrats—to fashion the moderate, bipartisan civil rights bill passed after his death...

...former White House correspondent, New York "Times AT A WASHINGTON party this fall, Richard Reeves recalled handing in the first draft of his masterful new book...

...Kennedy, like the majority of Presidents, was not particularly well-prepared for the job...

...It is much easier to make speeches," he mused, "than it is to finally make judgments...

...Albert," JFK replied, "I got less than 50 per cent of the vote...

...In places I wanted to ask, What do you think, Dick...

...So what else is new...

...The first requirement of the Treasury job is acceptability to the financial community...

...His editor, Alice Mayhew, was underwhelmed by the manuscript...

...Like Clinton, Kennedy was a seducer, of reporters as well as women...

...Again and again, Kennedy vowed to start removing troops from Vietnam and never did...

...In both areas, Kennedy shrewdly chose prominent Republicans for key posts, buying himself insurance against partisan attack...

...Adds Scammon: "It's a new kind of country...

...In addition to discerning the coming of a "new kind of politics," Kennedy realized his party's old New Deal base was rapidly eroding...

...he hears it all the time from Hill Republicans today...

...His statement could have been emblazoned on the wall of Clinton's famed war room in Little Rock, or in the CNN studio where Larry King presided as the ringmaster of the 1992 campaign...

...Pierre Salinger, the President's press secretary, compared the satellite feed to the first atomic bomb in terms of TV's potential impact, and he was right...

...Yet even this section is worth wading through for its moments of genuine drama...

...His timid approach to foreign entanglements has come across at times as weak and unprincipled...

...Indeed, Reeves' book must have been read as a cautionary tale in the White House, causing the President and his advisers to think more carefully about committing troops to uncertain if not unreachable goals in places like Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti...

...At planning sessions for the 1964 campaign, Scammon advised Kennedy not to visit poor inner-city and rural areas...

...Furthermore, he understood that the backlash, combined with the growing affluence of the Democrats' working-class base in the North, could produce a generation of Republican rule —as it did starting five years after JFK's death...

...One reason Democrats need Republicans in the Pentagon is the natural antipathy that exists between the military and a party closely tied to the academic and intellectual elite...

...Kennedy was equally careful in the national security area, naming Republican Robert S. McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Company, to head the Pentagon, and retired General Lucius D. Clay, a former Eisenhower fundraiser, to be his personal emissary in Berlin...

...Days before his death, in fact, he ordered an aide to prepare a study of his options in Vietnam, "including how to get out of there...

...Not the deficit issue...

...Clinton could have written the passage himself...

...Clinton did take troops out of Somalia, and has not sent them to Bosnia or Haiti...

...Clinton surely was chilled reading how the United States got sucked into Vietnam, a story so vivid and unnerving that I was tempted to yell, "Stop before it's too late...

...Perhaps the most striking comparison between Kennedy and Clinton relates to their age and inexperience...

...It was Clinton, almost 30 years later, who finally took Scammon's advice...

...But Kennedy sensed that the black revolution, which he supported reluctantly, would lead to a white backlash and endanger the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South...

...In 1963, a year after satellites first carried the President's words live to European television sets, both NBC and CBS expanded their nightly newscasts from 15 to 30 minutes...

...Sound familiar...

...In a passage packed with political portent, Kennedy asks an adviser, Richard Scammon, what income families have to make before they start moving to the suburbs and voting Republican...

...Domestically, Kennedy was the last President elected before the civil rights movement changed politics forever...

...When Scammon says less than $10,000 a year, Kennedy replies: "It's going to be a new kind of politics...

...That is why he told Americans for Democratic Action, the prime liberal interest group of the era, he could not support their sweeping civil rights agenda...

...Asked in December 1962 what his first two years had been like, JFK replied that the responsibilities—and the limitations—of the Presidency were far greater than he had imagined...

...When Kennedy tabbed C. Douglas Dillon—a Wall Street scion who had contributed $30,000 to Richard M. Nixon—as Treasury Secretary, one of the loudest squeals of protest came from Albert A. Gore of Tennessee, Kennedy's Senate seatmate and father of the current Vice President...

...During the Kennedy years I was a student at Harvard—the President's alma mater and source of many top advisers—and very few of my classmates ever served in uniform...

...Ten minutes after leaving Nikita S. Khrushchev at the Vienna summit of 1961, the first person Kennedy talked to was Reston, then the New York Times Washington bureau chief...

...Then you should go to the new shopping centers on the highways...

...But he has Richard Reeves' wonderful book to help guide him, to show him the pitfalls of the past...

...Kennedy himself was a World War II hero, but he was never enamored of the top brass, particularly those who could contemplate using nuclear weapons to defend Berlin or stabilize Southeast Asia...

...Not all that different from the Bill Clinton who raged in Rolling Stone recently that he had not gotten "one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press...

...Walter Lippmann said of Kennedy during his first year, "he's not sure of himself," and British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan wrote in his diary: "On the wider issues, he seems rather lost...

...Yet for all the chatter about change in the last campaign, certain patterns and priorities persistently impose themselves on our political life...