Essay: KENNEDY LEGEND & JOHNSON PERFORMANCE

IN his memoirs of John F. Kennedy’s Thousand Days, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalls how his historian father early in 1962 asked Kennedy, among others, to rate previous U.S. Presidents on a scale ranging from “great” to “failure.” It was the sort of thing that fascinated Jack Kennedy, and he started to fill out the form, then decided against it, replying: “A year ago I would have responded with confidence, but now I am not so sure.” When the results of the survey were published, Kennedy was pleased that Truman ranked among the “near great,” amused that Eisenhower stood near the bottom of the “average” class. He was also surprised at Woodrow Wilson’s high rating—fourth on the list, and “great.” He remarked that Wilson, “though a great speaker and writer, failed in a number of his objectives.” And he wondered about Theodore Roosevelt’s “near great” standing. After all, said Kennedy, Teddy “really got very little important legislation through Congress.”

It is strange, and somehow sad, that Jack Kennedy should have set such standards. For his own credentials to presidential greatness certainly do not rest on success in achieving his objectives or in getting significant legislation through Congress. By his own terms, Kennedy’s marked successes can be counted all too quickly: the Cuba missile confrontation, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Peace Corps. No one, of course, can say what he might have accomplished had he lived out his first term and been re-elected to a second. As it is, Kennedy’s biggest achievement lies in the spirit of youth and energy, excitement and excellence that he breathed into the world’s most powerful political office. If he became a legend in life and even more so in death, there was reason for it. By his vast expectations and fierce demands, by his personal life and his consummate style, he brought millions, both at home and abroad, into an unprecedented sense of communion with the U.S. presidency.

Magic & Effectiveness

To Kennedy’s successor it must sometimes seem unjust that he himself is so often measured less by Kennedy’s own standards of performance than by the imponderables of the Kennedy legend. Historians may some day rank both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as “great”; yet it is ironic that Kennedy, who by his own admission wanted to be remembered for getting things done, may instead have made his mark by the magic force of personality, while Johnson, who would love to be admired for himself, may be remembered as a President who was merely stunningly effective.

Kennedy started or foreshadowed Johnson’s program, including the tax cut, the war on poverty, medicare, federal aid to education, the civil rights bill. It can also be argued that Johnson won the huge congressional majority that made his legislative triumphs possible at least in part because of the emotional aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination. With all this conceded, Johnson’s legislative record still stands as an immense achievement. Even with Johnson’s majority, it is doubtful that Kennedy could have mustered the painstaking, patient but relentless manner in which Johnson cultivates, pressures or pleads with members of Congress to get what he wants. Jack Kennedy simply was not built that way, and Congress was always suspicious of him.

Yet the Kennedy legend glows and grows. “I think it will live on,” says Historian Henry Steele Commager. “Kennedy will continue to mean youth, hope, gaiety, wit and charm, and everybody’s image of the gallant young man.” Since his death, more than 90 books about him have been published. Aside from the Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen volumes, they range from The Kennedy Wit (and its sequel, More Kennedy Wit), The Wisdom of JFK, Kennedy Courage to John F. Kennedy and the Latvian People.

Kennedy himself would cringe at some of the fulsome prose, for if he appreciated the value of legend, he also knew when it became tasteless. And he would have applauded a passage in a beautifully done book, John Fitzgerald Kennedy . . . As We Remember Him (Atheneum) to which his family and many friends contributed: “The months following his tragic death were made doubly intolerable by the immediate gush of books, articles, poems, records, songs, photos, olios, burnt-wood plaques, figurines, medals, scrolls, postcards—some of these sincere and touching, many of them opportunistic and bathetic. It was to be feared that the onslaught of this kind of attention might, at the least, obfuscate the truth.” As We Remember Him makes eminently clear that Kennedy needs no embroidery. He had the touch, whether as a little boy who got ants in his pants during a family picnic, or as the young Senator telling his tough old father to “keep out of my politics,” or as President slopping shaving soap over an intelligence report or reading The Adventures of Reddy Fox for his amusement.

Snobbery & Sympathy Rape

Lyndon Johnson, who must live with the Kennedy legend, has of course sought to create a legend of his own. He authorized the publication of his mother’s Family Album, in which Rebekah Baines Johnson noted that a “light came in from the east” at the instant of Lyndon’s birth. The peroration to almost every Johnson speech begins with words approximating these: “I still dream of my boyhood back on the poor, dry soil along the banks of the Pedernales, and . . .” He does not discourage his aides from awarding him unusual powers. Jack Valenti grants him “extra glands” to account for his fantastic energies. Even sober-sided Bill Moyers thinks that Johnson has a special set of “antennae” that enable him to “divine the pulse of the American people.”

But Johnson’s mythogenic capacity is limited; the Lyndon legend has not taken wing. He impresses people, but he does not touch them; he persuades them, but he does not gladden them. His creased face, with its oddly forced smile, cannot displace the memory of Kennedy’s youthful radiance, and his unctuous prosiness cannot match Kennedy’s eloquence. Compared with Kennedy’s graceful dignity, Johnson’s homely touch can be embarrassing—as when he displays his abdominal scar to the nation and the world.

Often the contest seems downright unfair. The Kennedy legend either blithely ignores the fact that he was an inveterate politician or else makes a virtue of it; when that same term is applied to Johnson, it can carry a tawdry implication. In private, John Kennedy often uttered four-letter words, which was considered part of his charm; when Johnson uses the same words he is described as vulgar. Kennedy surrounded himself in high office with family and friends; yet it is Lyndon who is accused of cronyism.

Kennedy was born to great wealth, while Johnson made his own millions; but even in this area, Harvard’s David Riesman detects a certain social snobbery operating against Johnson, a “lack of sympathy with a man who, unlike many poor boys who have done well and forgotten the ladder they climbed, has tried to keep it open to others as well.” By any criterion of word or deed, Johnson did more for Negro rights than Kennedy, and Negroes have shown their gratitude at the polls. But some go to extraordinary lengths to credit Kennedy’s inspiration rather than Johnson’s execution, as for instance Lance Squire, a Chicago civil rights leader, who blames Johnson for being concerned only with expediency and wanting “to feed the Negroes, not free them.”

Kennedy remains a hero to academicians and intellectuals, who deride Johnson, although in legislative terms he has done more for education, or even for art and science, than Kennedy apparently contemplated. But when Kennedy spoke about ideas or culture, he sounded as if he really cared, while Johnson merely seems to be reading a text he neither believes nor quite understands. “I have found nothing more strange or unattractive than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson,” British Journalist Henry Fairlie reported in Commentary. “It is not simply that they object to his policies in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. It is a feeling of strong personal revulsion. ‘He is a slob,’ one of them said to me when I asked him why he disliked the President so much.” Intellectuals are vain, added Fairlie, and “pathetically flattered by power” when power looks glamorous. “The American intellectual, although one should be able to assume he is beyond the age of consent, was raped by President Kennedy.”

Trinity & Dynasty

The difference between reactions to the Kennedy legend and the Johnson performance is even more dramatic abroad than at home. Johnson is regularly described by foreign left-wingers as a “man of blood” or a “cowboy murderer” or a “Texas assassin,” who has “turned Viet Nam into a slaughterhouse.” A middle-reading Athens journalist accuses Johnson of “blatant Goldwaterism.” When it is pointed out that, had he lived, Kennedy would have had to make many of the same moves as Johnson, most foreign critics insist that he would have handled them differently, with more finesse. They concede that Johnson is brilliant in domestic affairs, though they don’t really care much about that, but insist that he is heavy-handed or simply not interested in foreign affairs, particularly as regards Europe.

But the dislike goes beyond rational, or even irrational, argument. Some of it is purely visceral. “I don’t know why,” says an Ethiopian observer, “but I cannot stand to look at his picture.” Says a Turkish businessman, even while trying to display his pro-American sentiments: “Just because Johnson is a boob does not mean that all Americans are boobs.” A Tokyo political scientist can find only one word to define Johnson: shominteki—meaning pedestrian or commonplace.

Kennedy, on the other hand, is described by Japanese Novelist Yukio Mishima as “the shining prince of the Genji tradition, a man with strategy in his mind and poetry in his heart.” The USIS film Years of Lightning, Day of Drums is the biggest hit in Congolese box-office history; West African damsels wear dresses with the portrait of J.F.K. printed on the fabric, and underlined by the caption: “Africa Will Not Forget You.” One of Johnson’s few African solaces is the fact that a Congolese group wrote to the U.S. embassy requesting permission to name a Boy Scout troop after L.B.J.

In Ireland, Brendan Corish, leader of the Labor Party, credits Kennedy with leading the world into forming “the Trinity of Peace, with Pope John XXIII and Khrushchev.” In the past three months, major Italian magazines have carried nine cover stories either on Jack or some other Kennedy, and only one on Johnson. Says Author-Politician Luigi Barzini (The Italians): “Kennedy has attained a superman stature in Italian eyes. He was the man of hope, the man who could have done anything. He was the man who could have brought lasting peace to the entire world.”

Essentially, foreigners loved Kennedy because he represented what everyone wants an American to be—young, handsome, rich. Paradoxically, they also loved him because he was so “un-American,” so “European” in his sophistication and his ease with things foreign. In Johnson they think they see an embodiment of the old American clichés and a reversion to provincialism. Kennedy gave them, in the words of Spanish Philosopher Julian Marias, “a sense of sharing in his historical and political creation,” while Johnson seems remote and devious. Recently a leading West German publisher surveyed some 180,000 boys, age five to 17, on the question of whom they considered the finest example of mankind in leading them toward fulfillment of their ambitions. Kennedy won hands down, running well ahead of “my father,” “my teacher,” and even Soccer Idol Uwe Seeler; Johnson didn’t get a vote.

Paris Match last week observed the second anniversary of Kennedy’s death and mourned the “irreparable loss,” but provided the comforting thought that “the Kennedy dynasty continues.” Beneath a photograph of John-John appeared the caption: “In reserve: a Kennedy for tomorrow.”

But slowly and grudgingly, some Europeans are beginning to accept Johnson’s performance for its own sake. Typical is Britain’s Labor Party M.P. Desmond Donnelly: “Kennedy and Johnson are very different. Kennedy was much more of a seminar figure, while Johnson has no time for seminars. We don’t like him much. We don’t understand him. But he and our own Prime Minister Harold Wilson are much alike, except that Johnson is more decisive. Johnson would have taken old Ian Smith and shaken him and put his face next to Smith’s until Smith’s blood stopped flowing.” Says Encounter’s John Mander: “People very much underrate what Johnson has done. I was talking to a Harvard man one day and I asked him, ‘What did President Kennedy do to make him a great President?’ His answer was, ‘It wasn’t what President Kennedy did. It was what he was about to do.”

The French, who value style above most other virtues, are still infatuated with Kennedy; but they are learning to respect Johnson, though they will never love him. They savor the way he handles De Gaulle, by politely but firmly ignoring him. Until recently it was widely felt in France that the U.S. could not conceivably win in Viet Nam. Today that feeling has been nearly reversed: the French are beginning to realize that Johnson has the will—and the means—to overpower and outlast an enemy to whom the French capitulated.

Revolution & High Noon

A year ago, noted Journalist Raymond Cartier saw Johnson as a “professional politician” completely lacking in “the serene authority of Eisenhower, the charm and romanticism of Kennedy.” Cartier found something almost sinister in the fact that Lady Bird, upon reading “Quiche Lorraine” on a White House menu, scratched it out and wrote in: “Cheese Custard Pie.” Cartier has since come around to an appreciation of Johnson that might satisfy even Johnson. “Because of him, I see America in the process of launching into a second revolution,” says Cartier, “a peaceful revolution brought about with increasing worker ownership of capital, the triumph of free enterprise. Look at America today. She decreases foreign aid and intensifies the offensive in Viet Nam. She is burned at the stake in the United Nations. She hardly asks the advice of anyone any more. Yet her prestige has perhaps never been greater.”

Polls among his own countrymen indicate that Johnson averages a slightly broader base of approval than Kennedy —by Gallup’s reckoning, 72% v. 70%. But the do-you-approve sort of query falls immeasurably short of assessing emotional intensity. Kennedy’s legend is The Legend, and he is its hero; Johnson, at best, is the champion of the consensus. The Great Society, which exists largely on paper, is widely approved, but it has not kindled wide enthusiasm or idealistic fire—and those will be needed, just as much as political skill, if the paper is to become reality.

This week Pollster Sam Lubell reports that about one-third of the people interviewed by Lubell consider Johnson to be a “better President” than Kennedy. The corollary: two-thirds still think that Kennedy was the better President —and if practical accomplishment alone is to be the criterion, that is an odd judgment. The fact is that people want and need legends as well as accomplishments; the ability to lift, to inspire—to become legendary—is in itself an accomplishment no less concrete because it is intangible.

The Kennedy legend and the Johnson performance need not be adversary. The difference between the two men, says Harvard’s Henry Kissinger, is the difference “between a dream and an achievement.” Kissinger sees Johnson as being “in the position of Gary Cooper in High Noon. He has a lot of difficult and lonely decisions which even his critics recognize are necessary but hard to face. If he can bring off what he is trying to do, his image will take care of itself.” It is probably just as well that Johnson does not have Kennedy’s charismatic qualities in addition to his own talent for power and practical achievement. The combination might be too much for American democracy to bear.