Debating JFK

Tuesday's debate takes place in the shadow of JFK's legacy. Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Kennedy have much in common, but this year's candidates pale in comparison to the real thing

by Seth Gitell

On Tuesday, Texas governor George W. Bush and Vice-President Albert D. Gore Jr. will converge on UMass Boston's Columbia Point campus to joust in the shadow of one of the nation's most high-profile political shrines: the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library. Both candidates made much of JFK's legacy at their conventions -- Bush's video biography featured footage of Kennedy, and Gore held his convention in Los Angeles, the site of the 1960 convention that nominated JFK. But both candidates look parochial and timid in comparison to the 35th president.

Bush was right to be scared of coming here. And Gore, who's betrayed not one hint of nervousness about the coming debate, should be. Even if no one says it, many observers of the debate -- the press, the pundits, and the public -- will be comparing GWB and ADG to JFK. And there's simply no way the two men running for president will measure up. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Al? George? You're no Jack Kennedy. Not even close.

And we're worse off for it.

IT'S NO wonder that the Kennedy Library is the most visited presidential library: it's a marvel of myth-making. I.M. Pei's magnificent design juts out dramatically into Dorchester Bay; inside, the smartly edited speeches and carefully chosen artifacts show Kennedy at his best. But strip away the schmaltz and you see a memorial to a youthful, energetic candidate who, by the time of his 1960 candidacy, had already experienced enough of life, government, and war to have settled on a coherent world view that synthesized foreign and domestic policies. Kennedy took full advantage of the blessings of his upbringing and developed a strong sense of himself -- outside the shadow of his father. Both Bush and Gore could have done the same as young men, but they didn't.

On the surface, Kennedy seems to have quite a bit in common with Gore and Bush. All three grew up as sons of privilege and scions of powerful men. Joseph P. Kennedy, the president's father, was the wealthiest of the three patriarchs. A Harvard graduate and self-made businessman, he grew rich from ventures in banking, liquor, real estate, Hollywood, and the stock market. Bush's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, made his money in the oil business and then embarked on public service in Congress, in an ambassadorship to China, and, ultimately, in the presidency. Al Gore Sr. was an influential senator;

his children grew up in DC's Fairfax Hotel, which gave their father easy access to his family while he worked in the Senate.

The Kennedy Library's 17-minute introductory video to JFK's life doesn't back away from the president's privileged background; it shows how as a young man Kennedy not only acknowledged it, but used it to his advantage. We hear Kennedy's voice describing his college years -- the same years his father served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain. "I took half a year off in 1939 to work in the American embassy in Paris," Kennedy says, adding that he took time off from that posting to tour Europe, including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The contrast here with George W. Bush is striking. Just as the elder Kennedy presided over the chancellery in London at a time of international ferment, the elder Bush served as Nixon's ambassador to the United Nations and to the People's Republic of China right after Nixon made his famous visit to China. But whereas Kennedy used his father's diplomatic connections as a chance to learn about the world, the younger Bush appears to have deliberately shunned any experience offered by his father's foreign postings. According to Bill Minutaglio's biography of Bush, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (Times Books, 1999), Bush remained thoroughly apolitical throughout Watergate and détente, even as his father appeared on television with Nixon. Critics of Kennedy say that he was an unfocused, pleasure-seeking youth who used his father's credentials to pad his résumé. Even if we accept that view, however, we still end up with a young candidate who was far more engaged with the volatile world around him than Bush ever was.

There's no hint in the Kennedy Library -- or in other treatments of Kennedy's life, for that matter -- that Kennedy's early years were anything other than what they were: life in a wealthy but highly competitive family. The library is filled with photos of the young Kennedys at play, and there's a striking picture of the whole clan decked out in black-tie formal wear before a London engagement. Compare this honest embrace of the good life with the bizarre identity issues that both Bush and Gore seem to struggle with. At nearly every opportunity, Gore stresses his deep roots in Tennessee. From the folksy excesses of the C&W fundraiser at the Park Plaza in September (complete with bales of hay imported to Boston to add authenticity to the event), one would never have guessed that Gore spent most of his early life in the nation's capital. During his acceptance speech in Los Angeles, Gore said more about his father's time as a schoolteacher than as a US senator. And his elite education at St. Albans School in Washington, DC, and Harvard University is the last thing that Gore, the fighting populist, wants us hear about.

Bush, in his own way, is just as disingenuous about his upbringing. Sure, he grew up in Midland, Texas -- but his father soon sent him off to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then to Yale. After that, Bush earned an MBA from Harvard. His education was just as elite as that of Kennedy, who attended the Choate School in Connecticut and then went to Harvard. But you didn't hear much about Andover in the down-home movie about Bush screened at the Republican convention in Philadelphia.

To be fair, presidential politics today are much different from presidential politics circa 1960. Now more than ever, America is a nation of meritocrats, and the public simply doesn't trust anyone seen as having achieved success by clutching his daddy's coattails. Contrast that with Kennedy's time, when people still remembered Franklin D. Roosevelt, another son of privilege who appealed to the working masses.

Today, both Bush and Gore must downplay their elite upbringings. Bush, in particular, is often accused of having gotten where he is on the strength of his famous father's name. But the thing about Kennedy is that he wore his privilege easily. Kennedy acknowledged his upbringing with grace. Although Bush and Gore may not have that option, a little less contrived humility might go a long way. In Gore's case, that means accepting that he's a product of both Tennessee and Washington, DC. In Bush's case, that means acknowledging that he's as much a product of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they drop their r's, as he is of Midland, Texas, where they drop their g's -- as he is so fond of doing.

Kennedy was a product of both Boston and America as a whole -- and he never tried to hide it. The 1965 biography Kennedy (written by Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's speechwriter, special counsel, and literary alter ego) serves as the literary equivalent of a convention bio-pic. Contrast Gore's reminiscences of his schoolteacher father and Bush's recollections of life in Midland with what Sorensen had to say: "Jack Kennedy loved Boston and Boston loved Jack Kennedy, but he was always more than a Bostonian. . . . He was born in the Boston suburb of Brookline. He was brought up in his formative years in Bronxville, New York, where his father had moved the entire family in the belief that an Irish Catholic businessman and his children would have less opportunity in Boston. . . . When he launched his first campaign in 1946 . . . for Congress in Boston's hard-boiled Eleventh District, from which James Michael Curley was retiring, he knew almost no one in the city except his grandfather. "

AS MUCH as Kennedy relied on his father's contacts and connections throughout his early adulthood, he, like Gore and Bush, struggled to escape his father's shadow. Although Kennedy's father could be a megalomaniac, JFK seems to have done a credible job of becoming his own man. His first book, Why England Slept, a paean to interventionism, can be read as a renunciation of the discredited isolationist views of his old man. (Nonetheless, Kennedy's strident anti-communism echoed his father's hatred of what was coming out of Moscow, and JFK relied -- to a degree -- on his father's advice when appointing members of his cabinet.)

As for Al Gore, his watershed act as a young adult was to enlist in the Army -- a decision he agonized over while at Harvard. But was it an act of independence? His father, after all, was a dove. Or was it to protect Al Gore Sr.'s political interests? By 1976, Gore found himself following in his father's footsteps as a congressman from Tennessee -- after a stint in journalism (a detour that Kennedy made as well). By 1992, when he was elected vice-president, Gore had finally eclipsed his father's accomplishments. His funeral oration for his father in December 1998 is widely regarded as one of his best speeches, and one of his most authentic. Gore finally seems to be making progress in moving beyond his father's legacy.

Bush is a different story. This first-born son lost an election for Congress in 1978 and then, like his father, went into the oil business. Whereas both Kennedy and Gore fashioned successful careers in Congress, Bush didn't emerge with much to show from his experience with Texas Tea. Not until he used his connections to get a two percent piece of the Texas Rangers did he begin to see any success in his own right. In 1994, he ventured back into politics, defeating Ann Richards to win the Texas governorship, which set him up to run for the Republican presidential nomination. But he still labors in his father's shadow. When Bush thought he needed foreign-policy seasoning, he hastily rushed out to select Dick Cheney, his father's secretary of defense, as his running mate. Perhaps Ronald Reagan Jr. summed up Bush's career best: "He was elected governor of Texas, and before that he ran a baseball team and lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business. But what has happened in the intervening five years to make people believe he'd be a good president? What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?"

Surely one of the experiences that shaped Kennedy -- and perhaps gave him the courage to come to terms with his powerful father -- was his service in World War II. Both Kennedy and his elder brother, Joseph P. Kennedy II, joined the Navy. Jack, an accomplished amateur sailor, landed service on a PT boat. His brother Joe became a pilot. At this juncture in his life, Kennedy's ambitions were hazy, but having published his Harvard senior thesis Why England Slept, his ambitions -- to the extent they could be defined -- leaned toward journalism. Those plans were altered, however, when Joe, the golden boy and the object of his father's political ambitions, died after he volunteered to pilot a plane loaded with explosives into a V-1 bomb base. (The plan was that he would parachute to safety before the crash.)

JFK piloted PT-109 and engaged in naval warfare in one of the few arenas where an officer of his relatively low rank could have an impact. PT boats were small and fast, and their command required creativity and quickness of mind; their use was celebrated by film director John Ford in the film They Were Expendable, with John Wayne in the leading role. Today, everyone knows the story of how a Japanese destroyer sank Kennedy's boat. Kennedy rescued one of his wounded men by swimming to safety with the string of the sailor's life jacket in his teeth. With that, he emerged from the war a hero.

After recuperating -- Navy surgeons attempted to repair Kennedy's back, which he injured during the war -- he completed a short stint in journalism, covering the United Nations conference in San Francisco for the Chicago Herald-American. Then he took over where his older brother Joe most likely left off and decided -- with his father's urging -- to devote his life to politics. In what seems today like an impossible changing of the eras, Kennedy actually replaced James Michael Curley as the congressman from Boston.

Nothing in the biographies of either Gore or Bush comes close to Kennedy's wartime experiences. To some extent, this has to do with the historical eras during which they came of age, Kennedy being of the World War II generation and Gore and Bush of the Vietnam era. Still, both of the latter had the chance to volunteer for elite units, or at least for combat -- and they didn't. It's not as if nobody of that generation did. In fact, Senator John F. Kerry's experience as a Massachusetts grandee who joined the Navy and served on small, fast river boats more closely mirrors JFK's. To his credit, Gore signed up. But because of either the wishes of his father or the fears of military higher-ups, Gore scored duty as an Army journalist. According to Bill Turque's biography Inventing Al Gore (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), the commander of Gore's unit requested that the titular head of the unit's press office make sure that Gore "not get into situations that were dangerous." His military service falls far below the mark set by JFK.

Nevertheless, Gore served in Vietnam and visited the front -- which was more than most college grads did. It's certainly a lot more than can be said of Bush, who won a spot in the Texas Air National Guard and was kept safely stateside for the duration of the war. What's more, several months of his service are unaccounted for -- which calls into question whether he ever completed his service. The Boston Globe reported in May that there is no evidence that Bush ever attended drills with a National Guard unit in Alabama in 1972. Superior officers wrote on an evaluation form that "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report."

When Kennedy decided to enter politics, he realized it was time to grow up. In Jacqueline Bouvier, he found a partner to match his wit, grace, and glamour, as well as a wife who could play on the world stage. Jackie had been selected as the 1947 Debutante of the Year in Newport, Rhode Island. In the fall of 1950 she won Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris, which offered an internship of sorts in France. On her application, she listed eight foreign countries that she had already visited, including France, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy. (In addition to her work for Vogue, she also -- ironically -- worked as a member of what today would be considered the paparazzi. By Kennedy's account, he met Jackie, "the inquiring photographer of the Times-Herald," at a party.) She too was a daughter of relative privilege -- her father was the socialite "Black Jack" Bouvier -- but the real Jackie was ambitious. Her interests lay in history, art, and culture, and when she arrived at the White House, that was her main focus other than her children.

Contrast Jackie with Tipper Gore and Laura Bush. Tipper is just as devoted to her children -- and is also a photographer. But she made her name by tearing artists down in her much-reviled campaign to force record labels to rate violent and sexually explicit lyrics -- as opposed to building artists up, as Jackie did. (Although in the wake of the Columbine school shooting, the goal behind Tipper's activism has more resonance today.) To her credit, Tipper coped head-on with personal tragedies and problems, such as the near-fatal car accident of her son and her depression, whereas Jackie more stoically willed her problems away. Laura Bush's personal interests more closely mirror Jackie's. She has become an advocate of literacy in Texas and, according to those in the know, a patron of the Lone Star State's painters and sculptors.

As for Kennedy's lifestyle, say what you will about his philandering, but there's no denying the man had panache. He hung out with Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra and hosted White House pool parties for his pals (with plenty of female guests) when Jackie was away, as Seymour Hersh writes in The Dark Side of Camelot. Heck, Sinatra even wrote a song about him. "High Hopes" features the lyrics "Everyone is voting for Jack/Jack is on the right track."

Contrast that with Bush's 15 years of sobriety and his association with country music's hokey Clint Black. And Gore -- well, the VP is as straight as they come. Sure, he'll hang out with the Hollywood crowd, but only long enough to collect their checks.

ONE CENTRAL difference between Kennedy and our current presidential candidates lies not in family background or appearance, but in ideas. Martin Peretz, writing in the New Republic on August 21, described Bush as an "outer-directed" man who takes his cues on how to behave from the actions of those around him. Both Kennedy and Gore, on the other hand, are "inner-directed" men who take their values from within. That may be true, but there is a key difference between these two. Kennedy was a big-picture man -- which may have been easier during his times, which were defined by one big enemy, the Soviet Union. Gore can be considered an idea man, but he's a man of small ideas.

To be sure, Gore was an early supporter of funding for the military computer project that became the Internet. He quickly identified the environment as a growing global problem. And he stood up for some defense projects. But Gore's programs lack a certain coherence, a failing that is reflected in the public's uneasiness about who he really is. Is Gore the senator who defined a fetus as "life" or the vice-president who now defends Roe v. Wade? Is he the senator who crossed party lines to vote to authorize the Gulf War, or the vice-president who supported dramatic cuts in the military? Is he the presidential candidate who wanted Elián González to remain in the United States and backs a politically timed release of oil from the national reserves, or the principled antithesis to Bill Clinton? Is he the candidate who raises money from Hollywood or the vice-president who has declared himself the watchdog of violent Hollywood films?

Just look at the books written by each man. Gore's Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit is a mishmash of science, rhetoric, and the language of self-realization: "Now, in midlife, as I search through the layers of received knowledge and intuited truth woven into my life, I can't help but notice similar layers of artifice and authenticity running through the civilization of which I am part." Compare that with Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, which dealt with senators who voted against the will of their constituents. "All of us in the Senate meet endless examples of . . . conflicting pressures, which only reflect the inconsistencies inevitable in our complex economy," Kennedy wrote. "If we tell our constituents frankly that we can do nothing, they feel we are unsympathetic or inadequate. If we try and fail -- usually meeting a counteraction from other Senators representing other interests -- they say we are like all the rest of the politicians." The book was a crisp, readable contribution to the chronicles of the Senate -- and no matter how much his speechwriter Sorensen may have helped, the animating spirit was Kennedy's.

One thing that's been lost in the haze of time is the extent to which Kennedy ran for president as a hawk: Profiles in Courage was laden with Cold War steel. "In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy," Kennedy wrote. To him, the problem with Eisenhower and his boy Nixon was that they weren't contesting the Soviets around the globe vigorously enough. And to the extent domestic issues mattered, they mattered because they opened the possibility that America might be falling behind the Soviet Union. This attitude is clear from Kennedy's opening statement at his first debate with Nixon: "In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free." Today many people -- especially those on the left -- might be happy that both candidates take a less Manichean approach to the world. After all, Kennedy's inaugural call to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" led directly to America's involvement in Vietnam.

Still, in his desire that America compete in the Cold War and win -- quite reminiscent of the internal Kennedy-family battles -- Kennedy called upon the American people to serve. He engaged the public. Government could provide services to the aged, sick, and poor, he suggested, but ordinary citizens had to shoulder the burdens as well. Contrast that with the laundry list of promises made by today's candidates: tax cuts, prescription-drug benefits, and a balanced budget. Gore goes even further, pledging to find cures for diabetes and AIDS. They offer nothing but goodies to a carefree and indifferent people. It may be what we want, but it isn't what we need.

Politically, Kennedy was a pragmatist, a Cold Warrior who backed civil rights. He was youthful but hardened, seasoned by war and family tragedies. He wasn't perfect. His administration wasn't Camelot. He made mistakes. His blunders prompted confrontations with the Soviet Union. Ultimately, he died so early that a full assessment of his presidency can't be made. Yet he had a vision. The number and scope of Kennedy's initiatives is dizzying. Foreign affairs, the Peace Corps, the space program -- all these take up a sizable part of the exhibition area in the Kennedy Library.

Maybe Gore or Bush will do as much or more during one term in office. But at this stage, neither has the depth the young Kennedy had when his presidency began -- which critics at the time thought was minimal. (Kennedy was only 44 years old when he was sworn in as president. Gore is 52 and Bush is 54.) Bush gives us only a six-year record as the governor of Texas to examine. With Gore, we have a much fuller résumé, but no more insight into what lies within the candidate and the man.

At the debate Tuesday night, the candidates will face more than each other. They will face a myth. And even the flawed man beneath that myth was more than either candidate is today.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.