The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  I asked him, in his Virginia home, if he ever thought of his family legacy as a burden, something that hampers him, by now, more than it helps. “I can’t think of my brothers that way. I’m just grateful for all the things they taught me, all the experiences we shared. For the rest, you just have to take that.” It was mid-February of 1981, and defenders of the new Reagan administration had claimed they were heirs to whatever was good in the Kennedy presidency—leaving the actual Kennedy to take blame for all that was bad. Arthur Laffer, the prophet of Reagan’s “supply side” economics, continually invoked the 1963 tax cut as the cause of America’s last spurt of prosperity. Kennedy laughed at that: “It is one thing to have a tax cut while maintaining inflation at less than 3.6 percent for three years. It is another matter to impose one with double-digit inflation.”

  Columnist George Will, who threw a party for the incoming Reagan administration, said that the Republicans now uphold President Kennedy’s tough stance against the Russians, the determination to close a defense gap. Edward Kennedy tries to recapture his own name, but is resigned about the prospects of success: “President Kennedy believed the nation must be strong; but he was willing to take imaginative steps like the nuclear test ban.” When I press him on the differences between John Kennedy in 1960 and Robert Kennedy in 1968, he says that naturally both men changed with the experience of new things. But Robert underwent especially deep changes in his last years? “He certainly did.” One is to presume that John Kennedy would have taken the same course—though it is hard to imagine him at a Cesar Chavez rally.

  Edward Kennedy has to keep living three lives at once—or keep giving an account of the lives the other men lived for him. Walking through his empty house, crammed with pictures of the family, one realizes how much of his life has already been lived for him, off in directions he can neither take, anymore, nor renounce. At one time, the same-and-different Kennedy smile coming from so many faces clustered on mantel or shelf must have intensified his presence, replicating every aspect of family influence he could bring to bear. Now they seem to drain him—he seeps off into their fading images.

  His divorce proceedings have been announced. Only one son is living with him at the moment, and he is at school. Today the Senator’s press secretary, Robert Shrum, has come out for lunch with us. Otherwise Kennedy lives here alone. But his family is never far from his conversation. He has just come back from a visit with his mother in Florida, where the February rain and cold kept most people from swimming—but not the ninety-year-old Rose. “When she took me to church, there was no one at the altar with the priest, so she said, ‘Teddy?’ You would have been proud of me, Bob, serving mass.” I said I would not know how to serve Mass in the new liturgy, not since Latin went out. “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” Kennedy rattles off, in schoolboy tones. Shrum takes up the next response, and I the third. We all agree the “Suscipiat” was the toughest response, and prove our point by variously misremembering it.

  It was an unnaturally warm day in February: I had seen three chairs lined up before the front door when I parked my car—like deck chairs on a liner, each with its own giant blanket. I went in through the open door and found Shrum, who said, “The Senator likes to be outdoors every minute he can.” We sat down like a silly version of the three leaders lined up at Yalta, to talk about nuclear disarmament. Kennedy favors a comprehensive test ban (CTB): “President Kennedy took the initiative which led to the first test ban. We need to have some of that imagination.”

  Is CTB feasible? “In 1974, I explained my proposal to Brezhnev in Moscow, and he said, ‘If you had that in your pocket, I could sign it right now’—which surprised me. When I went back in 1978, I asked him why the Russians were opposing our CTB proposal. He said, ‘You have changed the terms, from five years to three years. You have added to the number of on-site inspections’—the agreement to have any on-site inspections was a breakthrough that we wasted. ‘You have changed from no explosions allowed to none above three kilotons.’”

  Why did Kennedy think these changes had been made? “Brzezinski told me we had to get SALT II first, and go for CTB later.” In fact the Carter administration, like the Nixon administration before it, resented Kennedy’s dealings with Russian leaders as an infringement on their own power to make foreign policy. Kennedy is one of the few men who can be welcomed by foreign leaders as a kind of surrogate President—which infuriates real Presidents. He can hurt his own proposals simply by advancing them in his own name. He continues to live inside the pressures that made Robert fear the cause of peace would be hurt with President Johnson if a Kennedy carried its banner. When Edward Kennedy took up the cause of wage and price controls in the 1980 election, he guaranteed that President Carter would never consider that course. Such power to initiate is easily translated into a powerlessness to conclude.

  I asked Kennedy if his belief that wage and price controls were needed had been dispelled by the election. “No.” Will you continue to call for them while President Reagan actually takes off controls? “I believe in deregulation. We deregulated the airlines and that was even more successful than it appears—part of the savings were eaten up by the increase in fuel costs. But there are forty or so more areas where we can deregulate.” Why beat one’s head against a wall? If the mood is for deregulation, then deregulate—something, at least, gets done.

  Did Kennedy feel the liberal cause was badly damaged by Reagan’s triumph, by the loss of so many of Kennedy’s liberal colleagues in the Senate? He denies that any overwhelming mandate was won. After all, who can expect an incumbent to win with thirteen percent inflation? “Twelve Democratic Senators lost by less than four percent.” A few votes here or there and the Senate would still be Democratic. Yet Kennedy is a centrist politician. He says President Reagan should be given a chance to show whether he has a cure for the nation’s economic troubles. “I hope he does. We are looking for grounds of agreement. Maybe President Reagan can bring about voluntary price restraint.” He does not sound very hopeful. “Well, I guess it can be done; but that would take a tremendous investment of the government’s time and energy. I asked Helmut Schmidt how he controls prices in Germany. He said it takes two hundred hours of his personal time during the working year, to keep after labor and business—I wonder how he keeps track of the exact hours?”

  Attempts at accommodation with the Reagan people are part of Edward Kennedy’s temperament. But a man who could not elicit co-operation from the preceding Democratic administration is unlikely to get much from a White House stocked with right-wing types who think of him as the personification of the Left, or as the heir to certain historical stands—the defense-gap shrillness, the tax cut—they want to detach from him and claim as their own. Besides, any chumminess with them would offend his own constituency, labor and blacks and the tattered remains of the New Deal generation. Kennedy shows no desire or design for forging an entirely new coalition. In fact, Gary Hart—one of the few liberal Senators to survive the 1980 election—expressly excludes Kennedy as “old fashioned” when he talks of forming a new Democratic program in the Senate. He thinks Kennedy’s appeal is based on nostalgia, something that does not stir young politicians trying to build new careers.

  If the Right transfers irrational grudges against this or that Kennedy to Edward, the Left nurses an intermittently hopeful disappointment at his failure to live up to its dreams for him. A few liberals are continually running him for President, and he must encourage them (mildly) to protect his eroding position in the Senate. His problem, for a long time, was how to keep running for President without actually having to run. In 1980, that difficult juggling act became an impossible one. President Carter gave him no “out” of loyalty or partnership with the Democratic incumbent. And Carter’s disastrous personal polls left him no excuse to be drawn from party discipline. All those who had waited for years to see Kennedy run told him, in effect, that it was time to put up or shut up. I saw how these converging pressures worked during the su
mmer of 1979 (that period of “malaise” when President Carter retreated to his mountaintop and consulted every important person in his party except Kennedy). In May, I rode from Washington to Baltimore with Douglas Fraser of the United Auto Workers, Kennedy’s principal noncongressional ally in the campaign for governmental health insurance. Kennedy was announcing his health plan, to put it in competition with the President’s—and he expected Fraser to be with him in the Senate caucus room when he answered press questions. But Fraser said he could not come unless Kennedy was a declared candidate for President. “If you are not going to take on Carter, I may have to live with him for another four years.” Carter was cultivating Fraser with phone calls and White House meetings, which gave labor access and leverage. Fraser would sacrifice that to stand with a campaigning Kennedy, but not to help a mere Senator promote this bill with a slim chance of passage. At some point, even to advance his Senate projects, Kennedy had to say yes to all those begging him to run.

  Fraser was dutiful, rather than begging; he still doubted Kennedy could live down Chappaquiddick. But he joined with Kennedy when he announced. Others were less calm in their advocacy. Multiply the kind of pressure Fraser was exerting a thousandfold, and one sees that Kennedy really had no choice to make in 1980—he had to run for President. He was not free not to. His own lack of enthusiasm for the task showed in the poor preparation he had made. He was only running because everyone assumed Carter had to lose; why prepare for a rough race? Kennedy wants the presidency, if it comes to him by the pressure of events; but he does not have the fire in his belly to rule, like John Kennedy, or the determination of an underdog, like Robert in 1968. Edward rented a private “Air Force One,” early in the fall of 1980, and campaigned as an incumbent. The same forces that left him no real choice about running debilitated him when he began the campaign. He was trapped in a race he could not win because he would only undertake a race he thought he could not lose.

  It is hard for some to realize that Edward Kennedy is hobbled by his own apparent power. They saw him deliver a stunning speech to the 1980 Democratic convention, and watched the crowd on the floor go crazy with affection for the man and his heritage. Many of those who merely accepted Jimmy Carter as a candidate almost fanatically desired Edward Kennedy. He speaks to them with a voice no one else can equal. That was apparent not only at the party convention of 1980, but at the midterm meeting of Democrats in Memphis two years earlier. Kennedy stole that show with a single speech, in some ways a more powerful one than the televised 1980 address.

  President Carter, fearing a mini-convention revolt in 1978, dispatched his entire White House operation to Memphis; then came himself, to sit meekly in two “workshops” while people criticized his record (“Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson sitting there letting others attack his performance?”); and gave a speech too fervent in its rhetoric and too tepid in its delivery. Jerry Rafshoon produced a presidential movie to awe the crowds. Eleven White House aides were given the job of countering Kennedy’s single appearance at a health-care discussion. To an overflow audience in the largest hall off the convention floor itself, the moderator admitted the reality behind the discussion of various health programs: Governor-Elect Bill Clinton of Arkansas said there had been a change in the program, that they were really going to discuss “the relative merits of Georgia peanuts and Massachusetts cranberries.”

  Joseph Califano led off for the White House, arguing that the economy would not allow any more in health care than the administration was proposing. Kennedy, following, thundered against that timid position. His prepared text, distributed to the press, distilled all his long advocacy on the subject. Charts showed his plan’s feasibility. And then, his voice rising, face reddening, Kennedy abandoned his text, stepped forward of the lectern, his voice booming out unaided to the back rows, shouting that every family has disabling illnesses, the Kennedys had, but Kennedys can pay, and Senators have illnesses, but Senators have ample health insurance, but what of people without these advantages, isn’t what’s good enough for Congress good enough for any American citizen? The audience was up with him, shouting too, euphoric, happily angry. All the exaggerated talk of Kennedy style seemed vindicated. All the memories of his family’s suffering, and its sense of caring, all the happier times of social concern at the heart of Democratic politics, made Democrats feel good again—all but dour White House aide Stuart Eisenstadt, who glowered at this demonstration against his boss.

  And then the convention went off to vote with Carter on the key measure before it. There had been a moment of rapturous nostalgia, outside the everyday world of political bargaining. They were happy to forget the price tag while Kennedy orated—and were careful to remember it when the vote came. Kennedy was gone from Memphis by the time the real action took place. He had done his job. He had kept alive some memories. The deals were cut without him.

  A pattern is emerging. Kennedy is at his best when he is not in the running. That is true not only in Memphis, or at the New York convention; the reporters following him in 1980 noticed a sense of freedom growing on him as his chances faded. He performed best when he was showing his mettle as a survivor, not bidding to take over. Forced by fame, by his name, toward power, he tightens up. Allowed to back off, he relaxes. This is not surrender. He still takes a role, subordinate, one where he can maneuver against the pressures that would make him succeed. He seems to be acquiring a sense of power’s last paradox—that it is most a prison when one thinks of it as a passepartout. When one thinks of it as a prison, one is already partway free.

  Epilogue

  Brotherhood

  There are secret aspects, beyond divining, in all we do—in the makeup of humans above all; aspects mute and invisible, unknown to their own possessors, brought forth only under the incitements of circumstance.

  —MONTAIGNE

  There is something twistable in the hand about power—something tricky and unpredictable, “amphisbaenic,” backward-striking. And that is as it should be. Remember, after all, what power is—getting others to do one’s will. There is something obviously unhealthy in the concept of a whole world ready to do one nation’s will. Yet America has yearned toward that unnatural condition, trying to force on others the relation of children to a parent. The American mission preached by recent Presidents—most fetchingly by John F. Kennedy—would benignly coerce others “for their own good,” freezing the exercise of their wills in a state of incomplete development.

  Power, if it is just the mobilization of resources by one’s own will, has no internal check at all. Economy dictates the best use of resources, and to have any identity at all is to will one’s own good. Such power must push out endlessly—which means it is not free. It must spread ever wider its periphery of influence—which means it will be dispersed. But power as the interaction with other wills is fundamentally suasive, which means it must surrender in order to rule. This formulation sounds paradoxical, yet we all have intimate experience of its truth.

  A parent can have every resource of coercion, along with the will to coerce, in dealing with a child; he or she can “ground” the child, spank, take away toys, allowance, privileges. But this combination of resources with will does not equal power, in the sense of getting another to do one’s will, if the child keeps saying no. One can kill the beast in a frenzy of impotence brought on by the attempt to use power at its utmost reach of determination. But real power depends on the checking of such unilateral ferocity of purpose, such indiscriminate use of available physical resource.

  The parent who exerts his or her power over children most drastically loses all power over them, except the power to twist and hurt and destroy. This power to destroy—to wound, to sever bridges, to end lives—is easily wielded; and we tend to call this real power since it has such an instant, spectacular effect, dependent only on our will. We can all smash a TV set, a computer, a friendship, a marriage. Few of us can build a workable computer or rewarding marriage. Any idiot can wreck what only a genius can make
.

  In the case of political order, obedience comes to a leader only if he shows the respect for his followers that encourages opinions of right and interest in them—i.e., the belief that they ought to follow him, and that it will help them to do so. Thus Machiavelli, celebrating the ruthless prince, said that his highest skill was in gaining a reputation based on the solid opinion of his subjects. Even when the prince inspires fear, it must be a respectful fear without hatred. Helots and mercenaries, like compelled allies or satellites, weaken the state they seem to aggrandize. “Therefore the best fortress there can be is not to be hated by the people; for if you have fortresses, but the people hate you, the forts cannot save you.” American politicians, including the Kennedys, tend to remember these truths when recruiting domestic support. But the ideal of foreign power has been to approximate our assertiveness to our powers of destruction, to equate ability to destroy with right to control. There, our will is being tested, not other wills recruited.