A FEW YEARS AGO, Gallup pollsters asked Americans to assess the last nine presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Kennedy came out on top, with an 85 percent approval rating. The only one close to him was Ronald Reagan, with a 74 percent endorsement. The poll was not an aberration. Ever since his assassination in 1963, surveys have elevated Kennedy to a place alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the truly notable presidents in the country’s history. At various times in the 1970s and 1980s and again in 2000, a majority of Americans ranked him as the country’s foremost president, Founding Fathers and Honest Abe included.
It is a puzzling result. Kennedy, after all, was president for only a thousand days—one of the shortest Oval Office tenures in U.S. history. Moreover, as this book demonstrates, his record of achievement in domestic affairs was pretty barren. None of the four major initiatives Kennedy put before Congress—the $11 billion tax cut to expand the economy, which had been in recession under President Eisenhower; Medicare, providing health insurance to seniors sixty-five and older; federal aid to improve U.S. schools, which lagged behind the Soviet Union in producing engineers and scientists; and civil rights legislation to rectify historic wrongs across the South, where segregation denied African Americans equal opportunity and representative government—won approval during his time in office. I remain convinced, as I said in the first edition of this book, that Kennedy deserves some credit for laying the groundwork for Johnson’s passage of these measures. But Kennedy’s contribution to these landmark laws is hardly enough to elevate him to the front rank of presidents.
In foreign affairs as well it still seems fair to say that Kennedy’s leadership was imperfect. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion and unresolved conflicts with Castro’s government continue to trouble U.S. relations with Cuba to this day. Kennedy’s stumbling performance in Vienna, where he was overpowered by Khrushchev, and his commitment of some sixteen thousand military advisers to Vietnam also stand as negative marks on his record. True, more than ever, we recognize that he managed the Cuban Missile Crisis brilliantly, averting a disastrous nuclear war that his military chiefs were ready to risk. In addition, the agreement with Moscow to a limited nuclear test ban and grudging Senate approval for what many saw as a controversial treaty are landmark moments in the struggle against the Communists. Despite those gains, the Cold War remained a post-Kennedy burden for almost thirty more years.
Revelations about Kennedy’s cover-up of his health problems first described in this book, and the steady drum beat of stories about his reckless womanizing, also marred his White House tenure. His affair with a nineteen-year-old intern, which I briefly recounted in 2003, has now become more of a burden to his standing as a president worthy of our admiration: His execrable conduct in seducing Mimi Beresford (now Alford), which she has described in her 2012 book, Once Upon a Secret, provides disturbing details of his compulsive involvement with an impressionable and vulnerable young woman. Indeed, her book adds to the picture of a man and president more successful at image making than as a heroic leader notable for his honesty with the public and family values.
Why then the continued admiration for so flawed a man with so questionable a claim on presidential greatness?
Kennedy’s enduring appeal has little to do with presidential achievements. In fact, the public approval of our most popular twentieth-century presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton—rests less on great acts of leadership than on memories of them as appealing and inspiring figures.
Do people remember that TR founded the Food and Drug Administration or built the Panama Canal? Perhaps they associate him with the national parks and conservation, but that achievement is not what recommends him to most Americans. Do people recall that Wilson set up the Federal Reserve or established the Federal Trade Commission? Surely, they associate him with victory in World War I. But the unpopularity of that conflict in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequent convictions that the war was unnecessary and, worse, led to World War II largely undid Wilson’s appeal as a war leader.
FDR is remembered as the president who led us through the Great Depression and World War II. But how many details of the New Deal—including Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing union rights, and the Fair Labor Law mandating minimum wages and maximum hours—do Americans recognize as his legacy? Truman is no doubt still identified with the Korean War and his defense of executive authority by dismissing General Douglas MacArthur. Yet it’s hard to believe that many people seem to have forgotten Truman’s reliance on containment, which was so central to winning the Cold War. And how many Americans can tell you anything about his Fair Deal, or defense of civil liberties against Senator Joseph McCarthy, or even specific elements of containment? Could many Americans say what the Truman Doctrine or Marshall Plan were?
For most people in this country, Eisenhower’s presidency is pretty much a blank. They might recall his military leadership in World War II, but would they even know that he commanded allied forces in the 1944 D-Day invasion? Reagan’s record as well, almost twenty-five years after he left office, is largely lost from view, except perhaps as a tax cutter. The very smart Stanford University and University of California students I have taught in recent years have no direct memory of Reagan and are hard-pressed to tell me anything he did in office. Bill Clinton had a robust 69 percent approval in the 2010 poll, but it hardly rests on any clear idea of what he accomplished or did as president, except perhaps to have presided over an expanding economy and for lying about his own sordid affair with a young White House staffer.
What sets Kennedy apart from these other presidents is his assassination. The murder of someone as young and full of promise as Kennedy has consistently made him an object of public regard. But this alone can’t explain his hold on the public. What distinguishes him from William McKinley, whose considerable popularity in 1901 did not resonate at all fifty years after his assassination?
Kennedy’s appeal, which he largely shares with other popular presidents, rests on attributes other than specific accomplishments or untimely death. All the popular presidents were well liked, and gave most Americans a sense of personal connection to them. They were and remain inspirational figures who make people feel better about the country and hopeful about the future.
Theodore Roosevelt was almost universally admired, if not adored, by millions of Americans. In his day, he was every boy’s beau ideal—with toy companies naming a stuffed bear after him. His feats as a horseman, warrior, hunter, and moralist disciplining wrongdoers at home and abroad brought him a Nobel Prize and a celebrity that resonates almost a hundred years after he left the scene. His use of the White House as a Bully Pulpit to endear himself to citizens, advance his agenda, and promote national self-regard continue to make him a model president.
Woodrow Wilson never enjoyed TR’s degree of hero worship, but he won his way into his countrymen’s hearts as a man of unquestioned rectitude who made millions proud to be American. His command of English made his oratory a national treasure. (Some people said his speeches were so lyrical that you could have danced to them.) Moreover, despite falling short of realization, his vision of a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy continues to echo the country’s highest ideals—as evidenced by George W. Bush’s assertion that the Iraq war would eventually spread democracy across the Middle East, and Barack Obama’s backing of democracy in Libya.
No president had a stronger hold on Americans, and foreigners drawn to democratic governance, than Franklin Roosevelt. His Fireside Chats created an extraordinary tie to anyone who listened to him on the radio. Two anecdotes say it all: After Roosevelt died, a man stood sobbing by the railroad tracks as the funeral train traveled from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Hyde Park, New York, where he was laid to rest. Did you know the president? someone asked the crying man. No, the man replied, but he knew me. Someone stopped Eleanor Roosevelt on the street, not long after Franklin had died, to say, “I miss the way your husband used to talk to me about my government.” It is difficult to imagine anyone saying that about any of our recent elected officials.
During his presidency, Harry Truman provoked the wrath of opponents and lost popular support over the stalemated Korean War that was costing the country so much blood and treasure without a foreseeable favorable end. Yet today, sixty years after the end of his term, Truman is a revered president. And nothing quite accounts for his popularity more than the remembered force of his personality. The most storied moment in his presidency was his 1948 upset election over New York Governor Thomas Dewey. Truman’s cross-country whistle-stop campaign at small-town railroad crossings, where people warmed to his plain speaking, is etched in the minds of those who saw him and those who heard or read about his performance then and now: listeners responded to his verbal broadsides against “the do-nothing, good-for-nothing Republicans” in the 80th Congress with shouts of “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Truman’s enduring appeal also rests on memories of his ability to articulate the understandable and ultimately realizable containment strategy for defeating communism without a nuclear war.
Dwight Eisenhower had a different, but equally affectionate relationship with the mass of Americans. The campaign buttons supporting him in 1952 defined his widespread appeal: “I like Ike.” He was seen as an unassuming war hero—a reluctant politician who had never voted before he ran for president. He assumed the highest office not out of any overriding ambition or need for public affirmation but in order to serve the country in a time of Cold War peril. He was seen as a twentieth-century George Washington, the ideal citizen soldier, selflessly doing his duty in defense of the nation’s highest ideals. His picture of an America with a smaller federal government, and diminished red tape impeding free enterprise, is never too far from the center of the country’s political discourse.
During his time in office, Ronald Reagan was the most popular president since FDR. His ability to speak persuasively on television, radio, and in person to a majority of Americans gave him the enviable title of the great communicator. One liberal columnist condescendingly described Reagan as “President Feel Good,” but it was a description Reagan readily embraced as a surefire means to win public backing for his program of tax cuts and limited government. Although his promised reforms proved to be much less far reaching than advertised, people warmly endorsed his broad platform of change as the Reagan Revolution.
Bill Clinton had a number of stumbles as president, but no one could deny his similar skill at creating a bond with millions of Americans when he said, “I feel your pain.” His ability to get into people’s skins or create a sense of shared feelings allowed him to win two terms and achieve the considerable post-presidential standing reflected in his 69 percent approval rating. The prosperity of the nineties during his eight years spurred a belief in the country’s future that people longed to recreate during the recent recession. And his role in the 2012 campaign was a potent reminder of the hold he still has on the voting public.
It is invaluable to compare Kennedy’s popularity against that of other presidents. Like theirs, Kennedy’s appeal largely rests on the sense of personal connection people feel to him. They identify with the tragic events that befell him and his family: his assassination and that of his brother, Bobby; the death of his only son, John Kennedy Jr., in a senseless accident; and Jacqueline Kennedy’s death at a relatively young age. During his life, and as much since, Kennedy enjoyed the sort of affection the country reserves for its most popular celebrities. Visual images of him on television, especially, served his ability to make Americans feel that they knew and liked him. His good looks, charm, wit, and intelligence are captured and preserved in the taped news conferences he held during his thousand days in office. He is remembered, most of all, as an inspirational president, who encouraged young and old alike to serve their country in the reach for a “New Frontier,” and the Peace Corps is a lasting expression of his call to service. He continues to inspire feelings of hope—that the country can meet any challenge, as it did in response to his call to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
However whimsical and romantic it seems, Kennedy is fixed in our minds at the age of 46—a youthful war hero and political leader determined to bring out the best in his countrymen. His words asking Americans “to bear the long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself” are as relevant today as they were when he spoke them in 1961. In predicting that the battle to conquer these universal enemies would exceed all our lifetimes, he gave himself a kind of eternal hold on the nation and the world. Fifty years after his death, his appeal endures.