The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Even international fashions seemed to resonate to the anglophile and “swinging” tastes of Kennedy. Mary Quant’s London became the center of “the action,” and Americans itched outward to Petula Clark’s “rhythms of the gentle bossa nova.” Schlesinger raved in Show about Julie Christie, Peter Sellers, and (of course) the Beatles: “They are the timeless essences of the adolescent effort to deal with the absurdities of an adult world.” Real culture was not safe, not dull and respectable like Eisenhower’s early-to-bed shows. It was frisky, and risqué.

  Yet elegant, too: “In an Executive Mansion where Fred Waring once flourished, one now finds Isaac Stern, Pablo Casals, and the Stratford Players,” Schlesinger assured us. Mrs. Kennedy—whose next husband would decorate in whale testicles—became the very embodiment of Culture. For the best and the brightest, attracted to her husband, she personified all that was most beautiful. She defied the rule that political wives must wear American clothes and drink American wines. But that, too, separated her husband’s White House from the Fred Waring days. Schlesinger approved:

  The things people had once held against her—the unconventional beauty, the un-American elegance, a taste for French clothes and French food—were suddenly no longer liabilities but assets. She represented all at once not a negation of her country but a possible fulfillment of it, a dream of civilization and beauty, a suggestion that America was not to be trapped forever in the bourgeois ideal.

  So glittering did the Kennedy style appear that some accused the President of being all style, no substance. Schlesinger answered that such style was itself a political act of substantial import: “His ‘coolness’ was itself a new frontier. It meant freedom from the stereotyped response of the past.… His personality was the most potent instrument he had to awaken a national desire for something new and better.” When one man’s personality is an administration’s most potent tool, then efficient use of resources dictates a cult of that personality. A shrewd administrator must, to achieve his policy goals, maximize the impact of the leader’s charm—must, that is, join in the contriving of images to celebrate the prince. Honorary Kennedys had always tended the family image. Now an entire administration would be recruited to that task.

  Sorensen’s book tells us how carefully Kennedy crafted his symbols. When his back troubles forced him to use crutches, these signs of weakness were abandoned whenever he moved into an area of the White House where he could be seen. On the other hand, his rocking chair was an acceptable sign of relaxation. Even the chair had its carefully chosen “image,” making it “a nationally recognized symbol of the traditional values, reflective patience, and practical informality prevailing in the White House.” Hugh Sidey called Kennedy’s chair “a symbol of him and his administration,” with “the full status of F.D.R.’s cigarette holder.”

  The chair stood for relaxation, not weakness. The President declared the need for “vigah,” and sent his “frontiersmen” off on fifty-mile hikes. He cut back on his own golfing, and avoided photographers when he did indulge the sport—he did not want to be compared with grandfatherly Eisenhower at this retirement sport. The putting green on the White House lawn, Ike’s spike marks on the Oval Office floor, became objects of ridicule. Yet, away from cameras, Kennedy drove golf balls toward the Washington Monument, and bet “Red” Fay he could not send a drive over the Ellipse fence.

  Many of Kennedy’s initial moves were planned to provide dramatic contrast with his predecessor’s style. No more Fred Waring. No more “Hottentot” taste in the arts. Sorensen’s book reveals that the inaugural address was expressly framed to dramatize this difference:

  Few will forget the striking contrast presented by the outgoing and incoming Presidents. One was the likable, dedicated product of the rural Midwest and the Military Academy. The other was the urbane product of the urban East. Both had spent their entire adult careers in the service of their country, yet they were vastly different, not only in age, religion and political philosophy, but in their views of politics as a profession and the Presidency as power. Every eye watched them take their places, the oldest man ever to serve in the office of the Presidency and the youngest man ever elected to it.… Their contrast lent added meaning to the phrase: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.…”

  Sorensen’s book breaks off the quote there. But his text, read on that day, continued: “born in this century.…” Eisenhower was born in 1890.

  Kennedy’s task, according to his followers, was to combat the national enervation caused by Eisenhower. If the country had to get “moving again,” it was because Eisenhower had brought it to such a total standstill. In this view, presidential style not only establishes an agenda for politics but determines the tone of national life. The image projected by the President becomes the country’s self-image, sets the expectations to which it lives up or down. This was the reading of history that made style equal substance; and the Kennedy transition seemed to confirm the reading. If Kennedy could suddenly energize the press, the academy, and the arts, it was because Eisenhower had previously narcotized them. Only the vigor projected by a President can animate the citizenry.

  The canonical first statement of this thesis was Mailer’s Esquire article on Kennedy as a true hero come to rescue us from Eisenhower “the anti-hero, the regulator.” Arthur Schlesinger quotes that article with approval in his history of the Kennedy administration. Mailer had grasped the essential point, according to Schlesinger—that Kennedy’s style was changing the very national identity, freeing the country from its past (boring) self: “There can be no doubt that Kennedy’s magic was not alone that of wealth and youth and good looks, or even of all these things joined to intelligence and will. It was, more than this, the hope that he could redeem American politics by releasing American life from its various bondages to orthodoxy.” For Mailer, Kennedy was ending the era of the small town. Like Sorensen, he saw the contrast with Eisenhower in terms of a new urbanity:

  The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it. But since America has been passing through a period of enormous expansion since the war, the double-four years of Dwight Eisenhower could not retard the expansion, it could only denude it of color, character, and the development of novelty. The small-town mind is rooted—it is rooted in the small town—and when it attempts to direct history the results are disastrously colorless because the instrument of world power which is used by the small-town mind is the committee. Committees do not create, they merely proliferate, and the incredible dullness wreaked upon the American landscape in Eisenhower’s eight years has been the triumph of the corporation.

  Electing Kennedy would be an adventure, an existential act, reminding us that “violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love.” We would at last shake off the Eisenhower spell, the deadening “benevolence without leadership” that had made the nation sluggish—its architecture empty, its manners sexless, its goals tame: “The life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far, and the energies of the people one knew everywhere had slowed down.”

  The cultural revolution Mailer anticipated was, in fact, accomplished, according to President Kennedy’s biographers. Yet what was this declaration of the new freedom but an abject profession of servility to the one man—whatever man—sitting in the White House? The apparent compliment to the life of the mind was in fact a profound insult. Those who could only act free with a Kennedy to inspire them confessed that they had been cowed by the mere presence of Eisenhower in the Oval Office.

  What, after all, in Ike’s avuncular image automatically turned off thought? On the night he was elected, did his stealthy minions, some guardian angels of boredom, slip into newspaper rooms and faculty offices, to stuff invisible pillows in the typewriters? Did they proscribe the reading of philosophy? If so, how was the proscription enforced? Did a painter wake up, late one November mo
rning in 1952, and decide he must pack his brushes away for at least four years? Conversely, did Kennedy’s election make a philosopher wake up, look at his morning paper, and say, “At last I can start thinking again?”

  Put this way, it seems an absurd claim. Yet that is what Schlesinger and others believed. The appearance of Pablo Casals in the White House became for them a signal that America had adopted art as a national purpose, even as part of the Cold War: “I would hope that we will not leave it to the Soviet Union to uncover the Van Cliburns of the future,” Schlesinger wrote. Poor dumb Eisenhower—he not only lost Cuba; he lost Cliburn. He created the pianist gap.

  What was the political meaning of Casals (rather than Waring) in the White House? It provided John Kennedy his first opportunity to hear the cellist—and late education is better than none; though there is no evidence that the evening made Kennedy give up his show tunes for Bach. Did Casals need the boost? Hardly. Some of the Harvard faculty types coming to Washington had, no doubt, listened to Casals before; those who had not were as little likely as Kennedy himself to become addicted after this one exposure. Did the “unwashed” make a run for Casals records? If they did, the fad can hardly have lasted very long. Those who listen to Casals because the President endured one night of him will soon, I would bet, backslide in Fred Waring’s direction.

  What was the result of that fabled night, then? The ones who got most benefit were those who had listened to Casals all along. He did not play better, after that, or Bach sound better; but these listeners felt better—felt bigger. They had been endorsed. Listening to Bach received a presidential seal of approval. The obverse of this is that these people felt smaller under Eisenhower. Their Bach did not have that extra ingredient which can make all the difference—the President was not noticing the listeners as they listened.

  This view of things gives to the President a stunning power—to bestow or withhold pleasure in Bach. But he can do this only if those craving for presidential approval have debilitated themselves—have given a ridiculous importance to their own pose as Listeners. David Halberstam argues that “the best and the brightest” were self-corrupting in their confidence—in their assurance that rational gifts and expertise and toughness can set the world straight. But there was a deep sense of social and cultural inferiority under the tough outer whir of analysis and blur of activity. These best and the brightest felt intimidated by the suspicion that Americans consider art and culture “sissy stuff.” Yet here was a war-hero President saying it was all right to listen to Bach, to like art and French wines. The embarrassing gush of gratitude for this largesse infects Schlesinger’s and Sorensen’s books as much as Manchester’s. The gratitude is expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, but it is essentially the same in all three men.

  Blessed with the approval of this macho President, the cultural monitors would prove that he was not mistaken, that they were not sissies, by taking on Kennedy’s own worldly and fast-living air. They would wink at his secret parties in the White House and think that the proper underside of aristocratic graces. The results of this in policy were a “frontier” love of guerrilla boldness, a contempt for dithering Adlai Stevenson and courtly Dean Rusk and moralizing Chester Bowles. Style meant that the President—and those who now dressed like him and spoke like him—did not want to be bored. They talked in wisecracks; wrote witty verse at cabinet meetings; used the code of a superior set. According to Harris Wofford, this style forbade the raising of some questions, the expression of “square” inhibitions, of “preachy” concerns. Chester Bowles was resented for having been right about the Bay of Pigs; but he was exiled from the State Department, not because he was right, but because he was dull. It was every man’s duty, around Kennedy, to sound brilliant.

  The pursuit of style as if it were substance leaches vitality from the style itself. The Kennedy rhetoric sounds flashy now; raises snickers. This is not simply a matter of passing time and changing fashions. Dr. King’s sermons retain their power to move us—but of course they were overtly preachy, moral and old-fashioned. Arthur Schlesinger hailed a cultural revolution, and gave up his monumental work on the Roosevelt years to suppress a report on the Bay of Pigs project at the New Republic, to mislead Adlai Stevenson during the missile crisis, to browbeat William Attwood at Look, and (in the words of Murray Kempton) “to fall upon William Manchester in the alleys of the American Historical Association.” Kennedy did not liberate the intellectuals who praised him; he subverted them. He played to all that was weakest and worst in them. It became apparent that they did not simply want a President who praised them for listening to Bach; they wanted a President who would listen to them, and they were willing to say whatever “played” with him. National purpose would compensate for private failure, would fill with public rhetoric the empty places in them where poetry should have been breeding. Men rose up from the ruins of their family to redeem their country; or preached the comity of nations because they could not abide the members of their own university department.

  Benefactors of mankind may start tending to the world, at least in part, to get out of the house. But artists and academicians, writers and the privileged jounalists seem to feel a special responsibility for what goes on in Washington, a personal guilt when things go badly. They are prominent among those who make the threat that they will leave the country if so-and-so gets elected. This threat is not very terrifying, since its auditors would think it a blessing if fulfilled. And I do not personally know any intellectual who has missed a meal, or been put significantly off his feed, by the victory of an unpalatable candidate. But they undoubtedly think they should feel sad, and that the untoward election has blunted their creativity if not their appetite. One catches in faculty gossip about politicians the note of housewives wrapped up in soap operas—the note of a substitute vitality, shared artificial crises that alleviate the speaker’s own problems. They may not agree on the merits of a “minimester,” but they all hated Nixon. More important, they all agreed to love Prince Charming. We mainly spread havoc under Presidents we love. Camelot was the opium of the intellectuals.

  Later, under the dreaded Nixon, celebrators of the New Frontier began to express misgivings about the Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger himself then traced the growth of presidential power, admitting faults in his heroes, Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy. But Kennedy’s short time in office was not just an acceleration of prior trends. It added something new—not so much the Imperial Presidency as the Appearances Presidency. The man’s very looks thrilled people like Mailer: “If the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might be given to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American.” Kennedy was able to take the short cuts he did, command support for rash acts, because he controlled the images that controlled the professional critics of our society. They had been recruited beforehand on minor points of style. He was not Eisenhower—and that was sufficient achievement for the “eggheads” who had been mocking Eisenhower for years. Kennedy was a Steerforth who flattered and tamed the schoolboys by standing up to their master. He was their surrogate, their dream-self, what all the old second lieutenants from World War II wished they had become. Through him they escaped their humdrum lives at the typewriter, on the newspaper, in the classroom. From OSS to MLA is a rude descent.

  None of this just happened, of course. Kennedy was a shrewd manipulator of his own appearance and impact. He crafted his non-Eisenhower persona expertly. He monitored reviews of it. He censored undesired impressions. He thought always in terms of public relations, and of managing the press. It was soon discovered that he kept the New York Times and New Republic from reporting the preparations of a Cuban invasion. But the way he intertwined policy and image-making was not fully revealed until 1974, when a note in Kennedy’s hand was found in the Kennedy Library. Written just before the invasion, it says, “Is there a plan to brief and brainwash key press within 12 hours or so?” Those who should be brainwashed are then listed: the New Y
ork Times, Walter Lippmann, Marquis Child, and Joseph Alsop. After the invasion, Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor to brief and brainwash Time-Life editors on the disaster. The President sent a covering letter to Henry Luce asking that the meeting be kept secret. The President said he must “emphasize the need for keeping the fact that this discussion has even taken place completely in the bosom of your official family.” He claimed to be giving the editors more information than Congress had received, and that favor should be repaid.

  Kennedy was admired by liberals for his nonsentimental realism. He always said ADA types made him uncomfortable. He was “beyond ideology.” This calculating approach thrilled the ideologues themselves. Schlesinger said it best: his coolness was a new frontier. But few intellectuals saw the contempt mixed with his coolness when it came to manipulating them. When Kennedy suggested that Walter Lippmann be offered an ambassadorship, Schlesinger replied that he might do the administration more good as a columnist. Kennedy worked always to turn journalists into unofficial spokesmen for his administration, and he succeeded with a great many of them. They were there to help him arrange reality, to make style become substance, to define power as the contriving of appearances.

  But Kennedy could not have shaped his dazzling facade of style unless he had a genuine feel for many of its components. He liked the kind of glamour he was now in a position to dispense. The largely imaginary English society he had read about was his to “recreate,” given all the resources of the White House. The very thinness of his grasp upon Regency England helped him enact a simulacrum of it, without regard for recalcitrant historical particulars. His imagined England was a world of playboy-statesmen, and America’s more purchasable intellectuals wanted nothing better. They lined up to celebrate the second coming of a secondhand Lord Melbourne.