There was, above all, a sense of disaffection, or revolt, born less out of any specific grievance than a broader, more diffuse sense of estrangement. There were pieces of it in books that appeared before the 1960s really began, like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd or Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It could be found in the mockery of television programs and commercials found in MAD magazine; in the political jabs of comedian Mort Sahl and the acerbic commentaries about race, drugs, and sex from Lenny Bruce. It could be found in the way the music they had grown up with, the three- and four-chord music of rock and roll, had grown more complex, with lyrics that spoke of sex and drugs—or seemed to. A Peter, Paul and Mary song, “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” about a little boy, was turned into an anthem about marijuana, over the strong objections of its author; and college students heard blatant sexual images in the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” (An FBI agent, tasked with deciphering the song, reported that it was “incomprehensible at any speed.”)
As hair grew longer, as skirts got shorter, as the air grew more pungent, a T-shirt began appearing on campuses bearing the warning found on an IBM punch card: “I am a student. Do not fold, bend, or mutilate”; and at Berkeley, graduate students sang a mocking “anthem” to the melody of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:
Keep the students safe for knowledge
Keep them loyal, keep them clean,
This is why we have a college
Hail to the IBM machine!
Journalists and academics might spend hours debating the source of this behavior; there was no debate about its impact. Among the broad middle class, the specter of young men and women massing in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, getting high on illegal drugs, shedding their clothes, was appalling. And especially among those without the money to send their children to college, the idea of privileged children—on a track for a far more affluent life than their children would ever know—shutting down their campuses for the “right” to help run the place was somewhere between laughable and contemptible. And at least one increasingly visible California public figure expressed that emotion with perfect pitch—especially after Kerr crafted a compromise that kept protesting students from expulsion.
“Let me read to you what the star of Bedtime for Bonzo said about me—and you,” Kerr was saying to President Kennedy. “I’m quoting here.
“‘There is no better example of a failure of leadership than what has been perpetrated at Berkeley, when a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame on a great university,’ Ronald Reagan declared. ‘And the silence of Governor Brown—and, for that matter, the President—is deafening. Mr. Kennedy, it should not take a “profile in courage” to call to account those who break the law and defile fundamental moral standards.’”
“Actually,” Kennedy said, “I’m thinking it is time I said something about this. I know I spoke at Charter Day four years ago, but your commencement—”
“Consider yourself invited,” Kerr said.
• • •
“I am painfully aware,” Kennedy said to the tens of thousands gathered at Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, “that many of you regard the commencement speech as that endless interlude between celebrations where you are compelled to hear earnest advice that is as forgettable as it is well-intentioned. Yet, there have been events like this one when the words that were spoken had lasting impact. Winston Churchill proclaimed the descent of an ‘Iron Curtain’ at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri; George Marshall announced the postwar European recovery plan at Harvard; and there are those who trace the origins of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to a commencement speech I gave at American University. And at another campus, the University of Michigan”—here he waited for the good-natured boos aimed at Cal’s frequent Rose Bowl rival to subside—“I proposed an idea that became the Peace Corps and then AmeriCorps, which have seen tens of thousands of young people spend two years of their lives to make a better country and a better world.
“Only a few years ago, the competition for your time would have been the lure of affluence—well-paying, comfortable jobs at our major corporations and industries. Now there is another temptation: what we might call the temptation of Dionysus, the god of celebration, of excess.”
(There were knowing grins among the White House Press Corps at that line.)
“It is,” Kennedy said, “noteworthy that the troubadour of your generation, who once sang of changes that were ‘blowin’ in the wind,’ now beckons you to ‘dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free’ and to ‘forget about today until tomorrow.’ But it is also troublesome. Because we dare not forget about today until tomorrow. When the music stops, when the dancing ends, when tomorrow morning comes, the challenges of today remain. And to confront those challenges, the temptations of Dionysus are shallow diversions. What is needed, rather, is the challenge of Sisyphus, the king of Corinth condemned for his sins to roll a stone endlessly up a hill, only to see it roll down again . . . forever.
“There are times when the labors of justice seem endless; but the good news is, they are not. In your own short lifetimes, you have seen the evils of discrimination begin to end; you have seen the threat of nuclear catastrophe replaced by an era of negotiations, and the poison of radiation cleared from the skies. Now new tasks await: there are still the hungry to be fed, the homeless to be sheltered, the young to be taught, the old to be succored. There is work to fill a hundred lifetimes. Each of you has one. If you do not help in the work we have, who will? And if not now, when?”
The speech won praise from editorial pages, while Time magazine offered faint praise for the President’s “belated but well-earned verbal spanking he delivered to the bearded and bra-less brats of Berkeley.” From Ken Kesey, the author and psychedelic drug champion, traveling with his Merry Pranksters across the southern United States, came the cryptic comment: “Since Mr. Kennedy is clearly off the bus, we invite him, and Jackie, if she is so inclined, to join us on the bus for further journeys.”
The President’s words, however, did little to lessen the consequences of the cultural upheaval, at least in California. The mix of disorder, dissent, and excesses at Berkeley and other campuses was a key reason why Ronald Reagan defeated Governor Pat Brown by more than 700,000 votes—and instantly became a potential presidential candidate. His victory in a state that was a microcosm of America was, in pollster Harris’s memo to the White House, “a clear warning that millions of Americans believe ‘the guard rails have come off,’ that their beliefs and values are under assault. Mr. President, your most urgent political task over the rest of your term is to convince the nation that you are the guardian of those beliefs and values.”
Unfortunately for Kennedy, he was learning that he could no longer count on one of his most reliable resources in carrying his message to the public.
• • •
“You can think of it as the ‘six-year itch,’” Arthur Schlesinger had warned the President as they sat with a clutch of advisors a few weeks after the midterms with the morning papers spread out on a coffee table in the Oval Office. “It’s not just the voters that punish every president in his sixth year; in fact, you got off relatively lightly. The press has seen and heard your act by now. You’ve been on their front pages and on their evening news just about every single day. You can count on them looking for the next chapter.”
Even if historically predictable, that change in the press’s affections would have unsettled the President. He and his family had befriended the press, shared secrets, sometimes bought their assistance or loyalty or silence, sometimes enlisted them as allies, even as go-betweens, as when ABC’s John Scali carried significant messages to Soviet officials during the Cuban missile crisis. Newspapers, magazines, and television had celebrated the Kennedys’ tastes and glamour; what could have been an unflattering portrayal of wealth and p
rivilege instead became a celebration of American royalty. And in his first White House years, John Kennedy could count on the discretion of the press to ignore the details of his private life.
When the story of what happened to Clark Mollenhoff and the Des Moines Register began to circulate—as it inevitably did—something changed. Now the use—or misuse—of official power was not being directed at greedy steel companies, or thuggish labor unions, or corrupt politicians, or the bosses of organized crime. Now that power had been used to threaten one of their own: a newspaper that was investigating a serious charge against the sitting president of the United States. Maybe the story wasn’t conclusive enough to print; maybe it was a mix of rumor and innuendo that wouldn’t stand up under scrutiny. But that wasn’t the point. The President had unleashed the full might of his office to threaten the newspaper’s parent company with financial ruin.
Maybe the press couldn’t follow up on that story; maybe it crossed the line into the personal at a time when no serious journalist would have argued that “the personal is political.” But there was nothing to keep America’s newspapers, magazines, and television networks from casting a much more jaundiced eye on the public record of the administration, to illustrate the kind of pressure that had been applied to one of their own.
And that’s what many of them began to do.
HOW JFK SILENCED HIS CRITICS, a Wall Street Journal headline read, introducing a story that detailed how the White House and the Democratic Party funded sham “citizens’ groups” that filed complaints against right-wing radio broadcasters as the 1964 campaign began. With the FCC applying the “Fairness Doctrine” rule that required radio stations to broadcast contrasting viewpoints, dozens of the Kennedys’ severest critics simply left the airwaves. An accompanying story reported that Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, had urged the IRS to aggressively audit conservative organizations and individuals. (“If true,” Richard Nixon argued in a speech to Illinois auto dealers, “it is an unconscionable, indefensible, if not impeachable abuse of power. Just because a president does it does not mean it’s legal.”)
A month later another newspaper ran a three-part excerpt from a new book by Clark Mollenhoff. The title alone conveyed the thrust of the book: The Imperial Presidency: John Kennedy and the Abuse of Power. Even more eye-opening was the venue in which it appeared: the Washington Post, whose late publisher Phil Graham had been one of the President’s closest friends and supporters in the press. (“Publisher’s ink is thicker than water,” his widow, Katharine Graham, explained to friends. “What they did to John Cowles is simply unacceptable.”) The excerpts went back to the 1962 fight over the steel price hikes, and spelled out in detail the threats of income tax audits and expense account scrutiny, as well as the use of FBI agents to interrogate reporters. Mollenhoff also included a cryptic reference to “the summary deportation of a witness, an attractive ‘party girl’ named Ellen Rometsch, who may have had crucial information about financial and personal transgressions on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
There were even stories about White House “image making”—a relatively new term that was becoming familiar to news readers and viewers, as reporters tried to lift the curtain that once shielded manipulation from public view. An Esquire magazine reporter named Tom Wolfe managed to ingratiate himself with a White House advance team long enough to write an eye-opening piece—“If There’s Room for Everybody, the Room’s Too Damn Small!”—detailing the search for a venue small enough to ensure that the President spoke before a full house. An essay by New York magazine’s Gloria Steinem explored the uncritical, even fawning profiles of Jacqueline Kennedy in women’s magazines.
“The distance from Eleanor Roosevelt’s crusade for the poor to Jacqueline Kennedy’s ‘crusade’ for designer gowns and White House furnishings is a long, disheartening one,” Steinem wrote. “One can hope that in the future, a First Lady will embody less of the feminine mystique and more of a feminist one—not to mention the hope that at some point, we might take seriously the concept of a woman occupying the West Wing of the White House.”
Standing alone, none of these afflictions—racial division, generational division, a less deferential press—would have been enough to seriously damage President Kennedy’s standing in the face of a buoyant economy and a more or less peaceful world. Together, they led to a polarized electorate, one that was almost evenly divided in its assessment of his presidency.
And by the time the 1968 campaign hit its final stage, the choice faced by the country fully reflected that wide and deep division.
• • •
If the 1968 campaign had been fought on the terrain of the previous three decades . . . had someone other than John Kennedy been occupying the White House . . . Richard Nixon would have been the all but inevitable candidate of the Republican Party.
Ever since FDR battled to a third term in the shadow of a second world war, events beyond America’s borders had dominated presidential campaigns: the United States was immersed in that war in 1944; then came the cold war, communism, Korea, nuclear testing, the missile gap, peace in a nuclear age, all of which had been decisive issues in the campaigns that followed. For Nixon—who had come to prominence exposing the Soviet espionage of Alger Hiss; who had debated Nikita Khrushchev in the model kitchen of a U.S. cultural exhibit in Moscow; who had traveled the world since his narrow 1960 defeat—the international stage was his natural habitat. (That was why his 1962 run for governorship of California was so misbegotten, he realized after he’d lost: his vision was focused on the future of Asia, the relevance of NATO. Highway construction plans and school budgets put him to sleep.)
Nixon had spent his years in the wilderness wisely, endorsing Goldwater in 1964, speaking for every GOP nominee who’d have him in the 1966 midterms, challenging John Kennedy’s foreign policies in speeches and magazine articles. He’d stayed silent as his most formidable potential ally, Michigan governor George Romney, self-destructed in a single disastrous television interview. (When asked by WKBD’s Lou Gordon why the Republican Party had chosen Goldwater despite his unsettling views, Romney replied, “Because we had a convention of delegates who’d been brainwashed by the far right.” In a last-minute effort to recover, Governor Romney appeared on the debut episode of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a new topical comedy show, repeatedly putting an oversize foot in his mouth, to no avail.) By the time 1968 began, only the potential entry of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller seemed to stand between Nixon and the nomination; and for the increasingly Southern and Western base of the party, Rockefeller embodied everything they’d been fighting against for almost thirty years.
Except . . . the country wasn’t thinking all that much about the outside world.
There were no American boys fighting and dying in a faraway war, as there had been in 1952 when he’d run with Ike the first time. There was no dangerous standoff in Berlin, or a cold war that periodically threatened to turn hot, as there had been in 1960, when “Experience Counts” was his theme. The U.S. and China were opening embassies in each other’s capitals, and the Cuban embargo had been suspended since early 1967. Now America was turning inward. For the rank and file of the Republican Party, the concerns were here: crime on the city streets, outbursts of disorder and violence, a younger generation at war with traditional morals. Their fears may have been overwrought—writer Jimmy Breslin noted that “most of these Republicans live in places where the muggers couldn’t afford the bus fare to get to them”—but they were real enough as far as motivating their votes went.
It wasn’t that Nixon didn’t understand these impulses. Hell, he’d pretty much invented the “forgotten American” theme in his very first congressional campaign back in 1946 and saved his political life with it in his “Checkers” speech in 1952: the returning vet with the wife, kids, dog, mortgage; the man who lived a simple, unglamorous life; the man who promised to restore clean language to the White House. It was ju
st that there was someone else who could speak to the disaffections of his party in a way that Richard Nixon couldn’t . . . and who could bring to a campaign something that John Kennedy had shown to be of enormous value: a candidate who was also a star.
• • •
It was very easy to underestimate Ronald Reagan. It was also proving politically fatal.
When he’d announced in 1966 that he was running for governor of California, the actor jokes began. (“Ronald Reagan for governor?” studio chief Jack Warner supposedly said. “No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Reagan for Stewart’s best friend.”) When he had faced off against San Francisco mayor George Christopher in the Republican primary, all the smart money was on the moderate mayor. When Reagan won the primary by a 2‒1 margin, Governor Pat Brown’s staff all but threw a party. Their man had beaten Richard Nixon four years earlier, for God’s sake. This actor would be a pushover. When Reagan won with a 700,000-vote plurality, the joking was replaced by a blend of speculation and disbelief: Could this guy actually try for the presidency?
By the time his first year in office was over, the answer to that question was: Well, yeah. Three weeks after taking office, he’d gotten the board of regents to fire Clark Kerr as university president; within six months he’d worked out a budget with his Democratic legislature and also signed the nation’s most liberal abortion bill. The only setback to Reagan’s presidential bid was a charge by columnist Drew Pearson that a “homosexual ring” existed inside the Governor’s inner staff. And by the spring, that issue had faded. Now the question was how openly to pursue a campaign, and it turned out that the current occupant of the White House was the key to their strategy.
“When we looked at the terrain,” Reagan advisor Lyn Nofziger recalled, “we saw that we were in the same place Kennedy was in back in ’60. We knew we’d take a big hit on ‘experience.’ Kennedy did, and he’d been in office for fourteen years, not one. But the big mountain he had to climb was to prove he could win. That’s what West Virginia was all about. For us, Nebraska and Oregon would be our West Virginias . . . and JFK in the White House was one of our best arguments: ‘That’s the kind of candidate we need!’”
If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History Page 20
