JFK’s movie star looks launched era of TV presidency
Today marks the 100th birthday of the nation’s youngest elected president, John F. Kennedy. Though his record is more notable for its promise than its achievement, he remains America’s most popular modern president.
One reason is that the two-thirds of Americans born since that horrific day when Lee Harvey Oswald cut Kennedy’s life short in Dallas have grown up seeing JFK as a vibrant young figure who never grew old.
The 20 percent of us who were at least 10 years old at the time probably have a more nuanced view, based on our recollection of his successes and failures.
Some say he laid the basis for the transformational explosion of federal social and civil rights programs under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Others blame him for the cataclysms of the ensuing decade, the bloody Vietnam War abroad and the racial strife at home. Revisionist volumes have stressed the unsavory aspects of his private life and rated him somewhat lower than his persistent popularity would suggest.
The dichotomy can never be resolved. But beyond the details, this remains Kennedy’s enduring legacy: American politics after him were never the same.
Kennedy was the television era’s first president, the first who regularly held live news conferences in an age when news was mostly confined to 30 minutes on three networks each night. In today’s media-dominated era, when attractive people populate the political ranks, it’s easy to forget that most top politicians before Kennedy were middle-aged, gray-haired white men.
With his movie star looks and quick wit, Kennedy benefited not only from television exposure, but from the onset of color television, which enhanced the image of vibrancy we later learned obscured the fact he was far less healthy than he seemed.
Kennedy also launched, for better or worse, the age of celebrity presidents that culminated with November’s election of a billionaire businessman best known for hosting a reality television show. Ironically, Donald Trump’s obsessive self-absorption contrasts sharply with the sense of detachment, both public and private, that was one of Kennedy’s most appealing traits.
Kennedy’s inaugural address further established his standing as an eloquent new national figure. But the actual presidential record over the next 2 1⁄2 years was marked by leadership far more uncertain than the vibrancy of his persona and the eloquence of his speech.
His first months were marked by his disastrous mishandling of the failed U.S.-backed invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba — which he promptly admitted — and a summit meeting with Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev that encouraged the communist leader to install missiles in Cuba, precipitating the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
And in what looks in retrospect like a dereliction of leadership, he delayed seeking legislation to alleviate the inequities the exploding civil rights revolution revealed, fearful of alienating powerful Southern supporters though segregationist groups blamed him anyway for expanding desegregation. He ultimately proposed what became, under Lyndon Johnson’s leadership, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
His combination of coolness and toughness dramatically forced Russia to back down in the Cuban missile crisis. The following year, he reached a landmark agreement with the Soviet Union banning atmospheric nuclear tests that buoyed his popularity.
He died on a trip designed to shore up his political prospects in Texas.
Epitomizing the incomplete aspect of his tenure, Kennedy left behind the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam amid conflicting signals about his intentions. Kennedy’s friends and allies disagreed on whether he would have followed Johnson’s course of escalation or would have ended the U.S. involvement.
If Vietnam clouds the Kennedy record substantively, Theodore White’s post-assassination interview with Jackie Kennedy for Life magazine gave his presidency an aura that never existed in reality. The president’s widow gave White a glowing account of their evenings at the White
House and quoted what she said were his favorite lines from “Camelot,” a popular Broadway musical portraying King Arthur’s court: “Don’t let it be forgot That once there was a spot For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.”
Top Kennedy advisers, looking back two decades later, disputed any connection between that image and reality.
“It wasn’t like that at all,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said. “I can’t say I remember the Kennedy years that way,” added O’Brien. And White himself said he deserved a “share of the credit and the blame” for creating the Camelot image.
Final judgments of Kennedy’s presidency remain varied.
“He will always be looked upon as a glamorous president, because of his charm and youth,” former President Gerald Ford predicted in 1983. “However, subsequent historians, unaffected by personal exposure to President Kennedy’s dynamic personality, will inevitably chip away at the substance of his 34-month record in the White House.”
Later, volumes blamed him for increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and stressed such less savory aspects of his life as the way he and his aides covered up his persistent health problems and his sexual encounters in the White House with multiple partners ranging from a 19-year-old intern to the girlfriend of a Mafia boss.
None of this has dented his popularity or his historical standing. Kennedy’s average job approval in office was 70 percent, Gallup said, the highest of any president since polling began in the 1930s. Forty years later, it reached 83 percent.
James Reston, who was a longtime Washington columnist of The New York Times, summed up Kennedy succinctly the day after he was killed. “What was killed in Dallas was not only the president, but the promise,” he wrote. “The heart of the Kennedy legend is what might have been.”