Hoping for Audacity

Two years into his term, chastened by events and buffeted by criticism from the left wing of his party, the young President hinted at a steep learning curve. “The responsibilities placed upon the United States are greater than I imagined them to be,” he acknowledged. “And there are greater limitations on our ability to bring about a favorable result than I had imagined… It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments.”

Fifty years after his election, John F. Kennedy’s frank appraisal of the limits of presidential power is not the only parallel between the first Catholic President and the first African American to occupy the Oval Office. During the 2008 Democratic slugfest, both Caroline and Ted Kennedy portrayed Barack Obama, then a relatively unknown Senator from Illinois, as a latter-day New Frontiersman, able to marshal long-dormant energies and inspire the young, in particular, to put service before self. Other comparisons suggested themselves. Backed by a stylish wife and photogenic children, each promoted a message of generational change. Kennedy owned television, while Obama prefers social networking to the East Room press conference. Even before assuming office, Kennedy, the self-professed “idealist without illusions,” had complained about liberals who “want their arses kissed all the time.” It is a sentiment Obama might well second.

(See intimate moments with the Kennedy family.)

For all this, their presidencies are necessarily different. “For it is the fate of this generation… to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make,” Kennedy asserted in his second State of the Union address. Yet the Cold War of which he spoke bred a popular consensus notably absent from today’s murky conflict between Western modernity and those who seek martyrdom by targeting the theologically suspect.

Kennedy’s election was a source of pride to ethnic and blue collar voters, a group stubbornly resistant to Obama’s appeal. JFK operated outside the alternate universe of the Internet, without the constant distraction of made-for-cable controversies. New tools of communication have, paradoxically, contributed to the fragmenting of America, even as they have discouraged the search for political common ground and supplied a soapbox for conspiracists and rumor mongers.

The fringe has always been with us, of course. The Kennedy presidency was less than a year old when the National Indignation Convention met in Dallas. The convention’s final speaker evoked hearty applause by upbraiding alleged moderates in their ranks who were content merely to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. “I’m for hanging him,” he told his fellow indignants.

(See a never before seen photo of JFK.)

The later coarsening of public life makes the early ’60s sound like the Era of Good Feelings. Today’s extremism wears a pinstripe suit. Case in point: when U.S. Steel in the spring of 1962 double-crossed the Kennedy White House by raising prices after workers had accepted a hold-the-line contract, the President applied a rhetorical blowtorch to company executives. His brother, the U.S. Attorney General, convened a grand jury to investigate the price hikes. Big Steel backed down, and the Administration was tagged as antibusiness. But no one likened Kennedy’s jawboning to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, an analogy used by Wall Street moneyman Stephen Schwarzman in characterizing Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on private-equity firms. Many in the CNBC Nation cheered him on.

As for the economic crisis that has hijacked the Obama presidency, economists agree that his actions, many grounded in equally unpopular decisions made by the Bush Administration, have restored stability to the markets. The much loathed—and even more misunderstood—Troubled Asset Relief Program, far from costing taxpayers $700 billion as estimated, may yet produce a small profit. With Detroit automakers showing renewed signs of competitiveness, fewer sneers are directed at “Government Motors.” Even AIG is contemplating life after life support.

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The President’s decision to let the liberal barons of Capitol Hill write much of his initial economic-stimulus program will be debated for decades. Beyond dispute is the difference between teachable moments and sustained instruction of the sort that caused Harry Truman to define the chief power of the modern presidency as the power to persuade. Many Obama supporters remain baffled by a seeming passivity that has enabled the President’s harshest critics to seize the initiative and frame the debates over health care, climate change and the economy. At his professorial best, Obama could explain better than anyone else why the current economic situation differs from past recessions. In the process, he might also refute popular fears that the U.S. is a nation in decline.

The President’s disdain for a media culture with little patience for complexity is both understandable and perilous. In sharp contrast with Kennedy and his twice-a-month press conferences, Obama seems less vivid a presence than he did on his Inauguration Day. A perfunctory pair of Oval Office addresses did little to advance his agenda or reassure restive allies. At times Obama conveys the impression of one who is above the grubby, not always rational demands of presidential salesmanship. Perhaps, like JFK gleefully anticipating a 1964 re-election campaign against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, he is counting on his opponents to render themselves unelectable.

(From the Archives: See 1962’s Man of the Year, JFK.)

That history hasn’t repeated itself in other ways merely demonstrates how distorting is the lens of nostalgia. As a rule, Presidents work within the political consensus they inherit. (They get to Mount Rushmore by shattering that consensus and replacing it with one of their own, but that’s another matter.) JFK took office 28 years after FDR began to transform the relationship between average Americans and their government. Starting in 1933, power and wealth flowed inexorably to a federal government expanding to meet the challenges of global depression and global war. A sense of collective purpose, a solidarity born of adversity faced and overcome, bonded members of the Greatest Generation. Their shared values included trust in government and a reflexive rallying to the President in times of crisis. When Kennedy’s brainy team of advisers bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the President’s approval numbers actually rose, to 83%. “Jesus, it’s just like Ike,” JFK quipped. “The worse you do, the better they like you.”

Obama, by contrast, entered the presidency exactly 28 years after Ronald Reagan declared government more problem than problem solver. By 2009, confidence in Washington had been dulled by decades of deception, media scorn and a popular questioning of authority at all levels. FDR promised his countrymen freedom through government. Reagan offered them freedom from government. If Obama’s health reforms have failed to catch fire with much of the public, it is because millions of Americans harbor a Reaganesque skepticism about government’s ability to deliver on its best intentions.

(See “Hope, Change and Struggle: An Artist’s View of the 2008 Presidential Campaign.”)

Ultimately, Kennedy’s claim to historical significance rests less with his legislative scorecard than with the way he grew into his responsibilities. Elected as a conventional Cold Warrior, exploiting a nonexistent missile gap, he had an obsession with Fidel Castro’s Cuba that culminated in the white-knuckle days of October 1962, when the human race contemplated its own annihilation. Out of this near death experience came Kennedy’s famed June 10, 1963, Peace Speech at American University. One day after he opened the door to a nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, the President watched a televised replay of Alabama Governor George Wallace symbolically trying to block entrance to Negro students enrolling at the University of Alabama.

(See Six Degrees of Obama.)

“I want to go on television tonight,” Kennedy told advisers. So hasty were the arrangements that at the time he went on the air, neither his speech nor the civil rights bill it was meant to promote was fully written. Much of the President’s appeal was improvised, with a passion wholly missing from his earlier comments on the subject. In the last summer of Kennedy’s life, his approval rating dropped to 59%, albeit for the best of reasons. In accepting both the moral obligations of leadership and its political consequences, the author of Profiles in Courage demonstrated the courage to change.

Afghanistan, a bloated federal budget and the increasingly discredited policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” offer President Obama obvious opportunities to emulate Kennedy’s example. How he responds will go far toward determining, 50 years hence, whether the Obama presidency is remembered for “Yes, we can” or “Maybe we could have.”

Smith, who has headed five presidential libraries, is a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

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