The Kennedy Half-Century (80 page)

Yet as Americans got to know Obama better, it became obvious that the new president was not a clone of the one lost in 1963. Strong backers such as Ted Sorensen certainly noticed key differences: “Kennedy, unlike Obama, continued his oratorical skills into his inauguration and presidency [and] was a wittier speaker who enjoyed laughing and making other people laugh.”
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Obama’s first inaugural speech was surprisingly flat and unmemorable,
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though his second, focused squarely on liberal themes such as minority and gay rights, had more historic luster to it.

With some exceptions, Obama’s presidential addresses have often been wonky and uninspiring.
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As Sorensen suggested, one missing element for Obama is off-the-cuff humor, which JFK frequently employed in press conferences and one-on-one media interviews. The professorial Obama sometimes appears more akin to Woodrow Wilson than John Kennedy in style.

Nor has President Obama cited JFK all that much during his time in office. During his first term, Obama referred to Kennedy 99 times—a fraction of the 327 citations by President Clinton in his first term and even less than President Carter’s low total (for a Democrat) of 165. Perhaps Obama, having been an infant during the Kennedy administration, simply does not relate much to the events of the early 1960s.
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This is true even when the parallels are obvious to older generations. For example, one of Obama’s signal achievements has been the elimination of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. The president’s instrument to achieve his goal was an exceptional group of service personnel, the Navy SEALs, established by President Kennedy in January 1962. JFK’s objective then—to develop unconventional capabilities, including clandestine operations to counter guerilla warfare—describes precisely the SEALs’ mission to Pakistan to deal with bin Laden.

Obama has certainly not ignored JFK or the Kennedys. In May 2011, while Caroline Kennedy was visiting, the president renamed the famous White House Situation Room, established in May 1961 shortly after the Bay of Pigs, for President Kennedy. (Fifty years ago, it was called the “Cold War Control Room.”)
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Two years later, Obama tapped Caroline to serve as U.S. ambassador to Japan.
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Famous JFK phrases and sentences certainly show up from time to time in Obama speeches. As he advocated for action on climate change, Obama mentioned Kennedy’s well-known formulation that “our problems are man-made; therefore they may be solved by man.”
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References to JFK’s efforts to establish the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and Medicare are sprinkled in appropriate Obama pronouncements about foreign policy and health care.
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Obama has invoked the Kennedy wit on some occasions, such as at a fund-raiser for his 2012 campaign: “You know, President Kennedy used to say after he took office what surprised him most about Washington was that things were just as bad as he had been saying they were.”
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Still, the encomia for Kennedy from the “new JFK” seem sparse.

Obama critics have employed John Kennedy’s record in a few policy areas to poke at the president. For example, Obama’s severe cutbacks at NASA provoked the ire of three pioneering astronauts, including the reclusive first man to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
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In a widely discussed column coauthored by astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan, Armstrong (who died in 2012) blasted what he saw as Obama’s timidity, contrasting it with Kennedy’s boldness. JFK had called the space race “the new ocean, and I believe that the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.” The retired astronauts concluded, “For fifty years we explored the waters to become the leader in space exploration. Today … the voyage is over. John F. Kennedy would have been sorely disappointed.”
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The reproach must have stung a president who recalled “sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders in Hawaii, watching the Apollo astronauts return from a journey President Kennedy set in motion. Looking back, I think my own sense that America is a place of boundless possibility comes, in part, from moments like these.”
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Adding to the astronauts’ insult, a conservative group aired a tough TV spot against Obama in 2012, contrasting his NASA cutbacks to film clips of JFK asserting, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard … And the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.” Alluding to JFK’s 1960 campaign pledge to “get this country moving,” a man on the street comments in the advertisement, “We need a leader that is not scared to get this country moving in the right direction again.”
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While President Obama had the lion’s share of JFK associations to himself in 2008, he got a bit more competition in 2012. The first Mormon candidate
for the presidency, Republican Mitt Romney, alluded to JFK’s barrier-breaking religious affiliation occasionally, and the press stressed this particular Kennedy-Romney connection. As Romney put it when he first ran for the White House in 2007, “Almost fifty years ago, another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion.”
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By 2012, religious prejudice certainly wasn’t as widespread as it had been in 1960. Nonetheless, Romney’s task was tougher than Kennedy’s in a crucial respect. While both JFK and Romney could rely on overwhelming backing from their coreligionists, Roman Catholics comprised 26 percent of the U.S. population in Kennedy’s time, while Mormons were just 2 percent of the population during the 2012 election.
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Romney chose one of JFK’s coreligionists for his ticket, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, who was an Irish Catholic and the same age (forty-two) as John Kennedy had been when he declared for the presidency in January 1960. Ryan was the second Roman Catholic to be nominated by the GOP for either spot on its national ticket (in 1964, Barry Goldwater picked a Catholic, Congressman Bill Miller of New York, for vice president). The 2012 major party nominees were a measure of how much America had changed since JFK’s presidential contest. A Mormon-Catholic duo faced off against the nation’s first African American president and his Catholic running mate, Vice President Joe Biden.

JFK’s name came up in the foreign policy presidential debate (Cuba and how a White House should handle the inevitable unexpected crisis) and in the vice presidential debate (Kennedy’s tax cut, raised by Ryan and dismissed by Biden: “Now you’re Jack Kennedy?”). But the 2012 script was different from 1960’s. Romney, the most recent nominee from Massachusetts, like Kennedy, won the first debate by a wide margin, but unlike JFK, he lost the election decisively. As with Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, Romney found that the era of Massachusetts miracles ended with JFK.

The Latino vote was a major reason why. Obama in 2012, like Kennedy in 1960, was able to win over this increasingly important voting bloc with a message of inclusivity. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, alienated many Latino voters by opposing immigration reform and endorsing a “self-deportation” policy for undocumented workers. Obama crushed Romney with Hispanics, winning 71 percent of this tenth of the electorate (a gain even over Obama’s sizable 67 percent in 2008). The seeds of Democratic victory were sown more than a half century earlier. President Kennedy’s last night on earth was spent with a Latino group in Texas in what has been described as a watershed event. The president and First Lady electrified a crowd attending a
Hispanic political gathering in Houston when they showed up unannounced and gave impromptu remarks. Mrs. Kennedy spoke to the crowd in fluent Spanish. The Kennedy campaign realized that Hispanics had helped make the difference in 1960 and might be needed again if Texas turned out to be close in 1964.
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The Obama presidency coincided with the half-century mark since the Kennedy presidential campaign and term of office. Commemorations abounded from 2010 to 2013.
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One of the most remarkable occurred at the University of Michigan, fifty years to the night when John Kennedy, after a long day of campaigning, showed up at the campus well behind schedule—in the wee hours of the morning, in fact. He gave a speech proposing the Peace Corps to thousands of excited students and faculty at 2:00 A.M., and on October 14, 2010, despite a cold rain, roughly fifteen hundred people showed up yet again from one to three in the morning to see a new documentary on the Peace Corps and a ceremony marking JFK’s visit.
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The fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration became a major Washington event. A three-week series of performances at the Kennedy Center began on the evening of January 20, 2011, with over a hundred members of the Kennedy clan assembling to hear Morgan Freeman recite excerpts from JFK’s speeches and President Obama pay tribute to his predecessor.
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But more poignant was a gathering earlier that day in the grand rotunda of the Capitol. The powerful listened in silence as Kennedy’s fourteen-minute inaugural address was replayed near where it was delivered exactly five decades before. A few months later, on what would have been JFK’s ninety-fourth birthday, the U.S. Navy announced that a second aircraft carrier would be named for the late president, the first having been decommissioned in 2007.
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Since JFK would have been in his nineties during the Obama administration, the same clock had affected other members of the Kennedy clan, and slowly the older generation of the family America remembered for its vitality departed this earthly realm. Though there had been plenty of advance notice, Edward Kennedy’s death from a brain tumor was still a shock to most. Kennedy was seventy-seven years old, but most Americans born before 1960 had a fixed view of him as the youngest of President Kennedy’s siblings. His Senate career of about forty-seven years was highly influential by anyone’s yardstick, and he had fully earned the title of the Senate’s “liberal lion.” Most Americans, whatever their politics, probably could agree with the perspective offered by President Obama upon Kennedy’s death: “His fight has given us the opportunity we were denied when his brothers John and Robert were taken from us: the blessing of time to say thank you and good-bye … For his
family he was a guardian. For America he was the defender of a dream.”
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Just weeks before Ted Kennedy’s death, his and JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, passed away. JFK brother-in-law Sargent Shriver followed in early 2011. Later that year, Kara Kennedy, the only daughter of Ted Kennedy, would die of a heart attack at age fifty-one. RFK Jr.’s estranged wife, Mary, committed suicide in May 2012, reviving for the umpteenth time the age-old discussion about the family curse.
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Of course, the Kennedys are a sprawling, burgeoning tribe; most families of that size have loads of tragedies over time, but they are out of the public eye.

If there was a sign of waning Kennedy influence in politics, even in Massachusetts, it was the failure of the Kennedy family to put forth one of their own in the special election to succeed Ted Kennedy.
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After all, this was a Senate seat that had been filled by a Kennedy almost continuously since early 1953.
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Moreover, a Republican state senator, Scott Brown, was elected to the Kennedy seat in early 2010 as a “Tea Party” favorite, having aired a TV spot featuring President Kennedy and his advocacy of the income tax cut; this invocation of Massachusetts’s political patron saint may have eased the blow to the Kennedys a bit.
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Not surprisingly, Brown’s career was a short one in the heavily Democratic Bay State, and he was defeated for reelection in 2012 by Elizabeth Warren, who benefited from an Obama landslide in Massachusetts.

Accentuating the lack of Kennedys in public office, for the second half of President Obama’s first term, there was no Kennedy presence in Congress. The last family representative, Congressman Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, left in early 2011. Briefly, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg had been the New York governor’s choice to fill Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat once Clinton became secretary of state, but Caroline’s selection fell flat as her lack of preparation and knowledge about the intricacies of Empire State politics became apparent.
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However, the Kennedy interregnum was brief. In November 2012, RFK’s grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy III, was elected to represent the liberal Massachusetts district of retiring Democratic congressman Barney Frank. Given the number of adult Kennedy children and grandchildren—numbering in the dozens—it is remarkable that young Joseph Kennedy is currently the only one in any significant elective office at the state or national level.
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Either the newest generations of Kennedys have moved in nonelective directions or the voters have. It is always possible that, in time, either half of this equation could change; more Kennedys could take up politics, and the electorate may look favorably upon them. Many Massachusetts observers believe that Joe Kennedy III may have the right stuff to move up.