The 16-year-old Bill Clinton went to Washington in April 1963 as a delegate for ‘Boys Nation’, a civic training organisation set up by the American Legion. Each delegate received a handshake from the president, and archive film and photographs show Kennedy and the young Clinton shaking hands and beaming at each other – an actually quite rare example of a current US president meeting a future one when young. Clinton’s presidential ambitions are generally said to date from that handshake (the other great influence on Clinton was Martin Luther King, whose ‘I have a dream’ speech he memorised).
Kennedy – who had recently returned from Europe – gave a speech to the boys in the White House Rose Garden, addressing them as ‘Gentlemen’ and told them that ‘ I recently took a trip to Europe and I was impressed once again by the strong feeling that most people have, even though they may on occasions be critical of our policies; a strong feeling that the United States stands for freedom, that the promises in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence while they may not be fully achieved we are attempting to move to the best of our ability in that direction, that without the United States they would not be free and with the United States they are free, and it is the United States which stands on guard all the way from Berlin to Saigon’.
Ronald Reagan’s later presidential declaration that America was a ‘shining city on a hill’ has been much mocked but – despite Kennedy’s slight qualification that American aspirations ‘may not be fully achieved’ – does not differ in essentials from the sentiments expressed in the earlier speech by Kennedy. From ‘Berlin to Saigon’, the oppressed peoples of the world look to the United States for help and succour.
What Happened Next
Less than six years after the meeting in the Rose Garden, Clinton managed to avoid being drafted into the US armed forces – like many of his generation, Clinton believed that, despite Kennedy’s opinion, Saigon did not need his actual presence. Kennedy and Clinton are linked in the public mind as men who were fatally attracted to women, but the linkage is perhaps unfair to Clinton: Kennedy was completely obsessed with sex, and his subsequent reputation on all fronts, from foreign policy to personal morality, has receded to the extent that he may eventually be remembered mainly as the source for the corrupt Mayor Quimby in The Simpsons. Novelist Norman Mailer was obsessed with Kennedy and his women and in Harlot’s Ghost (1991) the narrator shares one of Kennedy’s mistresses. And by a curious coincidence, Clinton dated Barbara Davis before he married Hillary – and Barbara was to become Mailer’s sixth wife.