Ironically, as Nixon fought to keep the White House in his final days, he argued that the nation could not endure another failed presidency, specifically citing Kennedy's assassination and Johnson's early exit.73 When he resigned, he elevated his handpicked vice president, Gerald R. Ford, to the nation's highest office.ac Americans immediately recognized that he was a pleasant, uncomplicated man who had none of the neuroses that had troubled LBJ and Nixon. After more than a decade of trauma, citizens welcomed a chance to heal.74 Nonetheless, Ford started with a self-inflicted wound only a month after taking the presidential oath, a complete pardon for his disgraced predecessor for any and all crimes he may have committed in office. Having lost his honeymoon glow, Ford plummeted almost overnight from 71 percent to 49 percent in the Gallup poll.75 He then rode a roller-coaster of recession, oil shocks, foreign crises, and intraparty rebellion as he filled out Nixon's term.

As did his predecessors, the new thirty-eighth president had a direct connection to the thirty-fifth. Ford had served on the Warren Commission and was an unwavering advocate of its conclusions during his presidency and throughout his long life.76 Nonetheless, Watergate had jimmied open the Pandora's box of CIA and FBI horrors, raising suspicions about their possible role in the Kennedy assassination, and both the electorate and lawmakers demanded to know more. In part to try to head off more intrusive investigations, President Ford appointed a commission in 1975, headed by his newly confirmed vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, to "determine the extent to which the [CIA] had exceeded its authority."77 The resulting, rather limited, report disclosed the CIA's illegal mail opening and surveillance of dissident groups domestically. It also dealt with some lingering questions about John Kennedy's assassination, though its findings were clearly designed to reinforce those of the Warren Commission. In addition to insisting that "there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement" in JFK's murder, the Rockefeller Commission denied any CIA connection to Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.78 Further, the Rockefeller Commission took an extraordinary action in the wake of the March 1975 public screening of Abraham Zapruder's home movie. Keep in mind that the Zapruder film had been kept out of the public domain for more than eleven years-something that would almost certainly prove impossible today in the Internet age, with its much higher public expectations for prompt disclosure. Conditions had been very different in the 1960s. Immediately after the assassination, Zapruder made several copies of his soon-to-be-famous 8-millimeter amateur film. He turned over one copy to the Secret Service and sold the original to Time-Life for $150,000 plus a percentage of future proceeds. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed the original from Time-Life during the trial of Clay Shaw, which led to the widespread distribution of bootleg copies among assassination researchers. In 1969, an optical technician named Robert Groden obtained a copy of the film and spent four years improving and enhancing its images. Groden's extremely graphic version shocked the public when it debuted on ABC television in March 1975. In addition, the "back and to the left" movement of President Kennedy's head when it was struck by the fatal bullet appeared to contradict the Warren Commission's insistence that JFK had been shot from behind.79 So the Rockefeller Commission convened a panel of military and medical experts to refute the impressions left by the Zapruder film. They cited experiments "conducted at Edgewood Arsenal [Maryland] [that] disclosed goats shot through the brain evidenced just such a violent neuromuscular reaction ... [A] head wound such as that sustained by President Kennedy produces an 'explosion' of tissue at the area where the bullet exits from the head, causing a 'jet effect' which almost instantly moves the head back in the direction from which the bullet came."80 At a time when the manifest sins of the federal government had been exposed in both domestic and international affairs, Americans were disinclined to accept such findings at face value. Moreover, the heavily Democratic Congress, just elected in the wake of Watergate, was unwilling to leave the investigation to the Republican executive branch. Shortly after the appointment of the Rockefeller Commission, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to create a special eleven-member committee to examine the CIA, headed by Idaho's Democratic senator Frank Church.81 The Ford administration was not pleased, and pointed to Church's presidential ambitions.ad Whatever political dimensions existed, the well-staffed Church Committee produced plenty of damaging revelations about the CIA-and more than a few about the Kennedy administration.82 The first indications of the Kennedy-authorized assassination attempts on Fidel Castro came from the Church Committee, encouraging the belief that JFK was killed by Cuban agents intent on retaliation.83 Moreover, a staff leak from the committee generated the first sordid story of Kennedy's extensive, irresponsible White House philandering. JFK's long affair with Judith Campbell, including her ties to mob boss Sam Giancana, was laid bare in December 1975 press reports.84 Kennedy's secrets, carefully protected by his friends in the media for many years, started oozing out, shocking many Americans who had accepted the post-Dallas image of sainthood conferred upon the dead president.85 Other tales of Kennedy's adultery reached the front pages, such as his two-year affair with socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, and the Kennedy family's exertions to cover up JFK's sexual shenanigans became controversial, too.86 By 1976, the political cartoonist Charles Brooks could publish a drawing, unthinkable in the 1960s, of a very full garbage pail labeled "John F. Kennedy's Secret Sex Life While President" behind a phony castle marked "Camelot."87 In the sixties, a barrelful of worshipful books about JFK were written by former Kennedy aides and friends and eagerly published to good reviews and sizable sales.88 Now revisionist history was taking hold, and new volumes told a fuller, seamier truth about John F. Kennedy. The cynical 1970s were a decade when illusions of all sorts would be shattered, and JFK was no longer immune from severe criticism and personal exposure.

This skeptical era as well as prevailing political conditions combined to produce a full review of the Warren Commission's conclusions. President Ford was not in favor of it, but if anything, his opposition made Democratic congressional efforts to reopen the investigation more determined. The public's intense response to the Zapruder film-both to the gruesomeness of its 486 frames and the questions raised in viewing JFK's and Connally's physical reactions to the bullets-added to the demand for a new inquiry. So, too, did revelations that the CIA had gone to considerable lengths to counter and discredit some authors of books proposing conspiracy theories about November 22, 1963.89 In 1976 the House of Representatives established its Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), discussed in an earlier chapter. Because this was an internal House action, President Ford had no voice in the matter, and he was already distracted by a difficult and ultimately losing election campaign. It would take the committee three years to complete its work, concluding that a conspiracy of some sort had existed in JFK's murder. The committee issued its report and twelve volumes of appendices in 1979.90 Eerily, given his Warren Commission membership, Gerald Ford became the target for the first fully executed assassination attempts on a sitting president since JFK. Both would-be assassins were women and both struck in California during September 1975. Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the notorious Charles Manson gang that had brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969, tried to kill Ford in Sacramento on September 5. Fromme pointed a .45-caliber automatic pistol at Ford as he was shaking hands near the state capitol, but an alert Secret Service agent grabbed her just in time. She was a mere two to three feet from the president and might easily have fatally wounded Ford.91 Some two weeks later, on September 22, Ford was visiting San Francisco when Sara Jane Moore fired a .38-caliber pistol at the president from across a crowded street. She missed Ford by a few feet, mainly because a former Marine, Oliver Sipple, deflected her arm at the last moment.92 The bullet was a highly destructive one similar to a dum-dum, and after striking a planter box and ricocheting off the pavement, it wounded a taxi driver in the groin. Adding to the Secret Service's frustration, Moore had been arrested only two days earlier for illegal possession of another gun, and she was questioned by agents to see if she was a threat to Ford. The gun was confiscated, and in a serious error, Moore was released the day before Ford arrived. Fromme and Moore were not known to the Secret Service prior to September 1975-though at the time, almost thirty-nine thousand Americans were in the Service's active file of potential assassins, including three hundred considered so dangerous that they were under surveillance in an operation code-named Watchbird.93 In a fascinating twist, Ford's fall 1976 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter planned to use the memories of these assassination scares-as well as a reference to the city where JFK was killed-to suggest that Ford was a survivor who had helped America turn the corner from a difficult decade. In a nearly five-minute commercial set to upbeat patriotic music entitled "I'm Feeling Good about America," Ford continued giving a speech despite a loud firecracker blast. The narrator said, "Neither the cherry bombs of a misguided prankster, nor all the memories of recent years can keep the people and their president apart." The scene then shifted to Dallas; Ford stood and waved through the open top of his automobile, as the narrator continued: "When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there's a change that's come over America."94 At the last minute, Ford's campaign leaders, fearing adverse public reaction, got cold feet and substituted generic footage of Ford for the "cherry bomb" and Dallas segments of the advertisement before it aired.

Ford proved more durable than his presidency, living longer than any other American president and dying in 2006 at age ninety-three. But the nation looked back at his tenure with some fondness. Republicans saw that Ford helped the country, and their party, recover from the Nixon scandals, while Democrats focused on the social liberalism (pro-choice on abortion, in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment) embraced by Ford and his wife, Betty.

In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Foundation gave Ford, then eighty-eight, its "Profiles in Courage" award for putting the nation's interests above his own career when he pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974-the highly controversial decision that almost certainly cost Ford an elective term of his own. Presenting the award to Ford was Senator Ted Kennedy, who in 1974 had said that the president's pardon showed that he was "clearly out of touch with the vast majority" of Americans.95 Accepting the honor, Ford offered a telling observation that applied to JFK as well as himself: To know Jack Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word [courage]. Physical pain was an inseparable part of his life, but he never surrendered to it-any more than he yielded to freedom's enemies during the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. President Kennedy understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No adviser can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age-old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval.96 Ford also left behind a somewhat surprising call for the complete release of all classified documents relating to the Kennedy assassination-an entreaty yet to be heeded, since fifty-thousand-plus pages of information, including key CIA records, are still kept from the public.97 In a conversation with a trusted journalist, Thomas DeFrank, Ford gave permission to publish the following comment after his death, which DeFrank did in 2007: "The time has come to do it, but you have to be forewarned: there are some stories that'll come out that were never verified that could be harmful to some people ... I'll just say some people that are known. You know how that happens-somebody investigates, somebody asks questions, and they make a statement. They're never verified, it's rumor, et cetera. That's gonna happen, and that's too bad."98 Unfortunate or not, the revelations are a part of history, and after fifty years of delay, few will disagree with Ford's suggestion.

zAccording to LBJ White House aide James Jones, President Johnson was privately rooting for Rockefeller to become the next president. Nixon was an old adversary, so he would never have been Johnson's preference, but the surprise was that Johnson preferred "Rocky" to his own Democratic vice president. "I think he felt that Hubert [Humphrey] was maybe too nice to be president," Jones told me. "He thought [Rockefeller] was the most talented." Personal interview with James Robert Jones, November 22, 2011.

aaThe Chappaquiddick tragedy would dog Kennedy throughout the rest of his life, and it did in fact help to sink the one presidential bid he would launch in 1980.

abJackie had in fact refused repeated offers from President Johnson and Lady Bird to come back, though we will never know whether it was because of her opinion of LBJ or because the timing simply wasn't right.

acIn the previous century only two presidents have had a shorter tenure of office than JFK's two years and ten months. Warren Harding served about two years and five months before dying on August 2, 1923, while Gerald Ford occupied the Oval Office for about two years and six months, beginning August 9, 1974.

adChurch ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976.

16.

The Carters and the Kennedys: Democratic Hatfields and McCoys

Not long after John Kennedy's assassination, Democrats almost everywhere began to assume that at some point there would be a "Kennedy restoration"-another Kennedy in the White House. Bobby was the natural successor, but after his murder, all eyes turned to Edward. However, in 1968, while in mourning, and in 1972, following Chappaquiddick, Ted declined to run, much to the delight of Richard Nixon. To the surprise of many, burdened by family responsibilities, scandal's hangover, and probably concern for his own safety, Teddy refused to run in 1976, too. This was Kennedy's great missed opportunity to be president. While Chappaquiddick would still have been a considerable impediment for him, Richard Nixon's fall, a bad economy, and a weak, appointed GOP president might have given him enough openings to win.

Instead, a little-known former one-term governor of Georgia burst onto the scene with narrow wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, and before anyone knew all that much about him, Jimmy Carter was the Democratic candidate for president and the favorite to win in November. Carter's amazing rise was a product of the public's intense desire to find someone who was untainted by scandal and unfamiliar with the sordid ways of Washington. In that sense, Carter represented a clean break with the past.

Carter could not be called the inheritor of the JFK mantle in any tangible sense. If anything, the election of a man from the South recalled Lyndon Johnson, and the outcome contradicted the widespread expectation since Kennedy's assassination that somehow, some way, the next Democratic president would reinstate and continue what had been lost on November 22, 1963. Perhaps Carter's inability to fill the bill made his conflict with the Kennedys inevitable. Unavoidable or not, it came, and helped to destroy the Carter White House in time.

Carter's one true-if slight-connection to John Kennedy was through his mother, Lillian. She had been an alternate delegate to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and brought home the very emotional story of RFK's tribute to his assassinated brother. "My mother was very deeply committed to the Kennedys, much more than I was, I have to say," Carter told me during a recent interview. "My favorite president in my lifetime was Truman." At age sixty-eight, "Miss Lillian," as she was known, joined JFK's Peace Corps and spent two years in a small village in India between 1966 and 1968. And as preposterous as it sounds today, the younger Jimmy Carter had often been compared to John Kennedy.1 From certain angles there was a slight resemblance in hair, face, and smile, and a practiced gesture or two, which Carter and his supporters were more than happy to emphasize. Nothing has changed since; most Democrats who have run for president in the past half century have tried to evoke Kennedy comparisons.

Astonishingly, Carter had never even met a Democratic president when he was elected, and he felt no real obligation to defend their administrations. Carter put distance between himself and the immediate past president from his party, the still-unpopular Johnson-which necessitated a call of apology to his widow, Lady Bird Johnson (Carter was quoted in Playboy as saying, "I don't think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did-lying, cheating and distorting the truth ...").2 By contrast, Carter was more willing to embrace John Kennedy. Despite recent revelations about his private life, Kennedy retained the affections of much of the public. More important, JFK's story met Carter's political needs in 1976. Many of the attacks on Carter were reminiscent of those on Kennedy, such as those centered on religion. Carter's fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity was as alien to many Americans in 1976 as Catholicism had been for most Protestants in 1960. Given the JFK precedent, and the arguments Catholics made during the Kennedy-Nixon contest, it was a special irony that Catholics appeared especially suspicious of the Baptist Carter. In attempting to assuage Catholics, Carter cited Kennedy's campaign address to the Protestant ministers in Houston. Speaking to a meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities in early October 1976, Carter said Kennedy's prediction that one day a Jew or a Baptist would also be questioned because of his faith "has come to pass. I welcome the scrutiny, and I have not the slightest doubt that this year, once again, our national tradition of tolerance and fairness will prevail ..."3 Carter also invoked President Kennedy to rebut the "inexperience" charge, reminding voters that JFK was viewed as not ready for the presidency and insufficiently trained in senior office. Like Kennedy in 1960, Carter was relatively young (fifty-two), and eleven years younger than President Ford. From his acceptance address at the Democratic National Convention to stump speeches around the nation, Carter echoed Kennedy's call to "get the nation moving again."4 In addition, Carter used Kennedy to ease the concerns of Northern liberals about electing a Southerner from a state with a troubling history on race. Carter's predecessor as governor had been the segregationist clown Lester Maddox, who won election in 1966 mainly on the strength of barring African Americans from his chicken restaurant.5 So Carter reminded audiences around the country that Georgia had provided an even larger percentage of the vote for Kennedy than Massachusetts (62.5 percent, more than two points higher than the Bay State). Of course, this was due to Georgia's diehard, postCivil War devotion to the Democratic Party, not a love for JFK. The Democratic streak in the Peach State ended in 1964, when Georgia became one of only six states to choose Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson.

Even as he was praising John Kennedy and using him for his own purposes, Jimmy Carter was clashing with other Kennedys. One of Carter's opponents for the Democratic nomination was JFK's brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps. Shriver naturally claimed the Kennedy mantle when announcing on September 20, 1975.6 Surrounded by Kennedy relatives, Shriver invoked JFK's legacy and made clear that, with Ted Kennedy out of the race, he was the closest thing to a Kennedy in the ring. There were no memorable confrontations with Carter, though, since Shriver's bid was as uninspiring as it was brief. Shriver garnered only 8 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and he was quickly out of the contest.7 There were other "Kennedy moments" during the 1976 campaign. Jackie Kennedy, who had avoided most overtly political events since Robert Kennedy's assassination, made an appearance at the Democratic National Convention, not to give a speech but simply to sit in the VIP section. Bedlam ensued, and practically the entire convention assemblage, on the floor and the bleachers, moved as one thunderstruck herd in her direction.8 An early indication of the friction that would define Carter's relationship with Senator Edward Kennedy emerged. Perhaps feeling a bit of replacement envy, Kennedy charged Carter with being "intentionally ... indefinite and imprecise" on a host of issues.9 Carter responded by asserting that he "didn't have to kowtow to anyone" to get the Democratic presidential nomination. Carter also all but admitted that he had used some salty language privately in rebutting Ted Kennedy: "I don't have to kiss his ass."10 Senator Kennedy no doubt remembered that exchange. He may also have taken note of the occasional odd statement by Carter about President Kennedy. For instance, in a widely publicized July 1976 interview in the Atlantic Monthly, Carter made this comment: "I can see in retrospect what President Kennedy meant to the deprived people in this country and abroad ... He never really did that much for them, but he made them think he cared."11 The Kennedy clan was not the sort to let an insult pass without eventual retribution.

Meanwhile, Carter found John Kennedy helpful in yet another critical way. He studied the 1960 debate tapes for tips to use in his four encounters with President Ford.12 Ford carefully reviewed the JFK-Nixon face-offs, too. After all, these were the only presidential debates in American history up to that time, and the precedent had led Ford and Carter to their own debate pact. The relatively green Carter needed to show he could endure high-pressured scrutiny and stand toe to toe with the incumbent, and Ford was desperate to regain some ground after every poll showed him well behind Carter after Labor Day.13 Contemporaneous notes and reports indicate that both men studied the gestures, facial expressions, and other visual cues of the 1960 candidates closely.14 The lesson of Kennedy's debate triumph-achieved as much by style as substance-had not been lost in the ensuing sixteen years. Meanwhile, Nixon still served as an example of what not to do.

Just as JFK would not have been elected without his face-offs with Nixon, Jimmy Carter might well have lost his close battle with Ford had it not been for the incumbent president's "free Poland" gaffe in a mid-October debate. Thanks to an improved economy and fading memories of the Nixon pardon, Ford had been gaining steadily on Carter, but his mistake in appearing to suggest the Soviet Union did not control Eastern Europe derailed the Republican's momentum. Ford's own polling showed how badly the mistake, and his refusal to clarify it quickly, cost him.15 Some observers believed that if the campaign had been a week or so longer, Ford would have had time to recover fully and surpass Carter, at least in the Electoral College.

Like John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter gained the White House on a thin mandate. On November 2, 1976, Carter was elected with just 50.2 percent of the national vote and a close Electoral College margin of 297240 over President Ford. His majority was built on a sweep of the South (save Virginia) plus all the Dixie Border States except Oklahoma. Twenty states were decided by five percentage points or less-the hallmark of a highly competitive, truly national contest.ae What had seemed an easy prospective victory in the summer became a nail-biter in the fall, and Carter recognized he had not done as well as he had hoped or expected. When Mississippi finally fell into his column and put him over the top in the wee hours of election night, Carter pledged to be a better president than he had been a candidate.16 Almost all Democrats in the House and most in the Senate had won easily, far outpacing Carter's vote totals, and so they felt no special obligation to the new president they barely knew.17 Despite a long campaign, Carter was nearly unknown to Washington when he arrived to take the oath of office in January 1977. He would need the help of longtime Capitol Hill power brokers, including Ted Kennedy, to succeed, but more often than not, Carter did not receive the assistance-or failed to ask in time-honored Washington ways. The thirty-ninth president didn't enjoy after-hours schmoozing with legislative barons, and even worse, he thought of the U.S. Congress as a national version of the part-time Georgia legislature. As Carter would learn to his dismay, he could not dictate even to a heavily Democratic Congress, especially when he was a stranger in their midst. Many members of Congress, including Ted Kennedy, were much more liberal than Carter and, now that Democrats again ruled the roost in Washington, they were determined to extend the New Deal and Great Society in ways that a budget-balancing Carter disliked. The seeds of conflict were sown even before Carter had unpacked his bags.

Little of this was apparent on January 20, 1977, as Carter began his presidency in a moment of hope and good feelings, but also amid stark national limitations that did not seem evident at John Kennedy's inauguration sixteen years earlier. JFK's boldness and high-flying rhetoric at a time when the United States was utterly preeminent in the world were replaced by Carter's subdued delivery, his modest goals of governmental competence and simple ethics, and the admonition that "we cannot afford to do everything."18 Vietnam, Watergate, oil shocks, and inflation had humbled America and the presidency itself. The most memorable part of the day was not Carter's address but his open walk with the entire Carter family from the Capitol all the way to the White House-a decision that worried, indeed horrified, the Secret Service.19 Once he reached the Oval Office for the first time as president, Carter was surprised to find that the desk was not the one he had seen in pictures from John Kennedy's time. In his memoirs, Carter recalled that his first decision as chief executive was to restore the Kennedy era's "Resolute desk," the nineteenth-century gift from Queen Victoria to America; it was stored at the Smithsonian but was quickly brought to the White House.20 President Carter's White House staff was dominated by his "Georgia Mafia," including campaign aides Hamilton Jordan (appointed chief of staff) and Jody Powell (press secretary). Yet the new Democratic president also needed experienced hands, and he relied on at least a few recycled appointees from the Kennedy years. JFK's secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance, became Carter's secretary of state, for example, and Harold Brown, who held a middle-rank post in Kennedy's Defense Department, became Carter's secretary of defense. Probably the best known of the Kennedy aides tapped by Carter was the JFK counselor and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, designated now to be director of the CIA. Alas, this appointment was not to be.

Sorensen had backed Carter and helped to smooth tensions with liberals, and Carter was clearly grateful. But prior to confirmation, it was revealed that Sorensen had registered for the military draft as a conscientious objector who would serve only in a noncombat role. Another charge was that he had removed classified papers from the White House at the end of the Kennedy administration. Carter quickly withdrew the nomination,21 a decision that still rankled Sorensen more than three decades later: "Do not exaggerate [Carter's] admiration of me, inasmuch as he pulled the rug out from under me soon after appointing me ..."22 With these few exceptions, though, Jimmy Carter's time in the White House marked a considerable change from the struggles that had gripped JFK and his three immediate successors. America seemed ready for a blank slate, and the nation appeared determined to move on. Events, however, tugged the nation backward. A persistent energy crisis that began in the Nixon-Ford years deepened and dragged the economy lower. The Watergate-inspired end to the imperial presidency kept Carter on a shorter leash than his predecessors, and he was stripped of some of the majesty of the executive office. After the multitude of Nixon scandals, Carter had to be very sensitive to any appointee's behavior that could be construed as unethical. In addition, the Vietnam hangover made Americans wary of any attempt by Carter to take military action and commit the country to prolonged involvement abroad. If not real isolationism, the public's sentiment was akin to fear of flying after a rough crash landing. Most citizens had had their fill both of the world and of politicians, and were far less inclined to "ask what they could do for their country."

At first Carter believed that a large Democratic Senate majority would help speed his programs to passage. But he hadn't counted on the determined opposition of Ted Kennedy as his term wore on. "The first year that I was in office Kennedy had the best voting record of any member of the House or Senate in supporting my proposals," Carter recalled. In time, however, Kennedy began derailing bills that had originated in the Oval Office-even some he mostly agreed with in principle. President Carter cited Medicare as a major example. "The last two years I was in office he was always opposing anything I did, even including comprehensive health care. He blocked my effort to apply Medicare to all ages step-by-step, which would have been, and still is, the best approach to comprehensive medical care. I had the money to move Medicare to cover not only old people, but also the first number of years of life, like [ages] one to five, and then I had a step-by-step proposal to cover every age group in the nation. It was a very good program and we had the money to do it then. But he blocked it and he was powerful enough that his opposition prevailed." President Carter didn't sugarcoat his view of his erstwhile foe from Massachusetts: "Ted Kennedy was a pain in my ass the last two years I was in office-the worst problem I had [during] the last two years."23 Kennedy's obstructionism notwithstanding, Carter's personal failures, such as an uninspiring oratorical style, the inability to deal successfully with Congress on many big agenda items, and his devotion to minutiae in the Oval Office (including assigning use of the White House tennis courts), did not help his presidency. But mainly Carter was overcome by events that spun far out of his control, from high inflation, interest rates, and unemployment to the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter appeared incapable of dealing with these problems, and the United States took on the image once more of the pitiful, helpless giant. Jimmy Carter was vulnerable in 1980, and politicians in both parties sensed it.

Into the breach stepped Ted Kennedy. After having refused to run for president in the three previous elections, he startled the political world by announcing his candidacy on November 7, 1979. It was easy to see why Kennedy made the race: Most liberals and labor unions were clamoring for him to oust Carter, and virtually every national poll for a year or so had shown Kennedy defeating Carter handily, often by as much as two to one.24 President Carter's popularity had fallen into the twenties, and he was widely seen as an ineffective leader. By August 1979 Kennedy had made the decision to challenge Carter, and some Democrats made the incorrect assumption that it was all over but the shouting. Instead, a feisty Carter focused again on Ted Kennedy's posterior. Having asserted in 1976 that he did not have to kiss Kennedy's ass to become president, Carter now said privately (at a White House breakfast with some Democratic members of Congress) that he would "whip his ass." "When I went to Alaska, the governor gave me a whip," Carter remembered with a chuckle.25 The president proceeded to do just that in a difficult primary campaign. The personal antagonism between Carter and Kennedy would grow to the point where it directly contributed to Carter's landslide defeat in the fall of 1980. As Carter harshly sized it up, he was running against someone who "felt entitled to be president because of the tragic legacy of his brothers" but had done little to earn the office on his own.26 After a lunch with Vice President Walter Mondale, Carter wrote down his view of Ted Kennedy in a diary: "As a student he was kicked out of college; he's my age but unsuccessful; as majority whip in the Senate, he was defeated after his first term; his preoccupation [is] with national health insurance while never able to get the bill out of his own subcommittee in twelve years ..."27 A special moment intervened before the battle commenced, an opportunity for President Carter to use his shared office with John Kennedy to draw distinctions with Ted-and perhaps to assert why the incumbent was a more fitting White House occupant than JFK's brother. On October 20, 1979, the John F. Kennedy Library was dedicated in Boston, and as tradition dictates at these occasions, the sitting president was the main orator. In rare form, Jimmy Carter rose to the rhetorical challenge in front of a strongly pro-Edward Kennedy assemblage. Every inch the president, he gave a moving address. Carter first tweaked Ted with the words of Jack, to the loud laughter of the gathered dignitaries, including Ted: In a press conference in March 1962, when the ravages of being president were beginning to show on his face, he was asked this two-part question: "Mr. President, your brother Ted said recently on television that after seeing the cares of office on you, he wasn't sure he would ever be interested in being president." And the questioner continued, "I wonder if you could tell us whether, first, if you had it to do over again, you would work for the presidency and, second, whether you can recommend this job to others?" The president replied, "Well, the answer to the first question is yes, and the second is no. I do not recommend it to others-at least for a while." As you can well see, President Kennedy's wit and also his wisdom is certainly as relevant today as it was then.28 Carter skillfully wove together Kennedy's great goals of civil rights at home and peace abroad with his own emphasis on human rights and arms control. He also pointed out the main difference created by the energy crisis, economic scarcity, and the public reaction to Vietnam: America could no longer do whatever it wanted, and the nation's president had far less maneuverability than in John Kennedy's time. The abundant resources and optimistic national character that defined JFK's years were absent in the 1970s. Perhaps again with Ted in mind, Carter insisted, "The world of 1980 is as different from what it was in 1960 as the world of 1960 was from that of 1940." Carter continued, But ... the essence of President Kennedy's message-the appeal for unselfish dedication to the common good-is more urgent than it ever was. The spirit that he evoked-the spirit of sacrifice, of patriotism, of unstinting dedication-is the same spirit that will bring us safely through the adversities that we face today. The overarching purpose of this nation remains the same: to build a just society in a secure America living at peace with the other nations of the world.29 The crowd was hushed as the usually unemotional Carter told an intimate story about November 22, 1963: On that November day, almost sixteen years ago, a terrible moment was frozen in the lives of many of us here. I remember that I climbed down from the seat of a tractor, unhooked a farm trailer, and walked into my warehouse to weigh a load of grain. I was told by a group of farmers that the president had been shot. I went outside, knelt on the steps, and began to pray. In a few minutes, I learned that he had not lived. It was a grievous personal loss-my president. I wept openly for the first time in more than ten years-for the first time since the day my own father died. People wept in Boston and in Paris, in Atlanta and in Warsaw, in San Francisco and in New Delhi. More than anyone had realized before that day, the spirit of this young American president had taken hold of the hearts and the imaginations of countless millions of people all over the world.

At the time, the tragedy in Dallas seemed an isolated convulsion of madness. But in retrospect, it appears near the beginning of a time of darkness. From Vietnam to Cambodia, from Los Angeles to Memphis, from Kent State to Watergate, the American spirit suffered under one shock after another, and the confidence of our people was deeply shaken.30 Had Carter been this eloquent regularly, had he more often explained the forces shaping the United States and the globe persuasively, his presidency might have thrived to a much greater degree, with or without the opposition of Ted Kennedy.

Even at this intentionally unifying event, there were overt signs of the Carter-Kennedy feud. "I remember when I went to the Kennedy library, it was my Southern custom that when I met a woman, I went to kiss her on the cheek," President Carter observed. But when he reached out to Jackie in that way, "She flinched away from me. And that may have been because of the women's liberation movement or something like that. I didn't pay much attention to it, but one of the Washington Post reporters wrote an article about it. And one of Robert Kennedy's sons, before I spoke, had some fairly negative things to say about me. But I was president, I just grinned and ignored it. I felt that maybe I didn't need to respond to that."31 Edward Moore Kennedy formally announced for president in Boston's Faneuil Hall on November 7, but he had damaged himself a few days earlier in an interview on CBS with the journalist and Kennedy family friend Roger Mudd, when the senator could not seem to answer in a coherent fashion a simple question: "Why do you want to be president?"32 Nonetheless, Kennedy came galloping out of the gate when he attacked Carter's leadership in his announcement: "For many months we have been sinking into crisis. Yet, we hear no clear summons from the center of power. Aims are not set; the means of realizing them are neglected. Conflicts in directions confuse our purpose. Government falters. Fears spread that our leaders have resigned themselves to retreat. This country is not prepared to sound retreat. It is ready to advance. It is willing to make a stand. And so am I." Kennedy's candidacy launch was given massive coverage, as would be expected, but-perhaps anticipating an eventual showdown with Carter-reporters had swarmed Kennedy's public events for much of the president's term. "He became an almost constant problem for me," Carter noted. "Every time Kennedy spoke he got more coverage than I did as president. You know, the Kennedy family had [broad] access to the news media, and still does, as a matter of fact."33 Yet despite a lifetime of political experience, Kennedy had forgotten that a candidate looks best before he becomes a formal contender; the above-the-fray statesman being pursued by partisan admirers who hope he will run is always superior to the grubby politician lusting after high office while soliciting votes in the trenches. Ted Kennedy was also well to the left of an American electorate growing more conservative in the late 1970s. This gave Carter the opportunity to claim that he, not Ted, was the true inheritor of John Kennedy's moderate-conservative political philosophy, which included fiscal responsibility and a strong defense. While Carter acknowledged Ted was "blood kin" to Jack, he asserted that, based on critical issues facing America, "I feel a very close kinship with President Kennedy also." As Carter put it, in retrospect, "There's no doubt that John Kennedy was more [of a] pragmatist than Ted Kennedy. I think Ted was more of a pure liberal. I was very conservative on improving the military and on balancing the budget. But I was deeply committed to human rights, so I had kind of a mixture. So I was much more compatible with John Kennedy's basic philosophy than Ted's."34 Carter supporters and many news organizations were soon reviewing the unflattering story of Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. The character issue generated by Chappaquiddick and many whispered reports of Kennedy's extramarital activities would follow the candidate every day of the campaign, just as he had always feared. And passions ran so high that the Secret Service took extraordinary precautions to try to preserve Kennedy's life. A pair of bulletproof vests-one built into a raincoat and the other constructed as an undergarment-became a frequent part of Kennedy's wardrobe, especially in parades.35 While Kennedy remained safe, his candidacy was mortally wounded by an event no one could have foreseen. Just three days before Kennedy announced, American hostages were taken in Tehran. Few understood at the time how this would work against Kennedy, in combination with the late-December Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The twin foreign crises gave Carter the excuse to run a presidential "Rose Garden" campaign, as he ignored Kennedy's attacks and created nonpartisan headlines with regular White House briefings about vital international concerns. In the first months, as is usually the case, the public rallied around the commander in chief while he focused on battling foreign enemies, not Ted Kennedy. The weekly "death to Carter" rallies in Iran had the unintended effect of elevating a previously unpopular president.

Sure enough, Carter rode the Rose Garden wave through Iowa in January, where the caucuses gave Carter a landslide 59 percent victory, and New Hampshire in February, where Carter defeated Kennedy 47 to 37 percent in a state next door to Massachusetts. Carter proceeded to sweep the South in March and even won critical Illinois, where Kennedy once seemed to have had a large edge, by 65 to 30 percent on March 18. Early on, it appeared that Kennedy had failed and Carter would be renominated-a realization that conversely freed up Democrats to express their underlying unhappiness with the president. On March 25, aided by Jewish support generated by a Carter administration vote in the United Nations against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Kennedy shocked Carter by capturing New York, 59 to 41 percent, and he won neighboring Connecticut as well. A small but significant Kennedy win in Pennsylvania followed in April. Even though Carter won almost all of the May primaries in friendlier territory, the season ended on a disastrous note for the president. On June 3 Ted Kennedy won California by 8 percentage points and New Jersey by 18, as well as New Mexico, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. Overall, Carter had garnered 9.6 million votes in the primary contests (51 percent of the total) to Kennedy's almost 7 million (37 percent), and Carter had far more than the minimum number of delegates needed to secure the nomination, but the senator's strong finish gave him the incentive to refuse to withdraw. Instead of quitting, Kennedy launched a new campaign to have the Democratic National Convention pass a rule to "unpledge" the delegates-that is, free them up to "vote their conscience" in an open convention.36 It was yet another nightmare for President Carter, an extension of the divisive internecine battle all the way to the edge of the general election, with little time for the wounds to heal before he faced the Reagan challenge. The Republican had cleanly wrapped up his nomination in May, when his most serious challenger, former CIA director George H. W. Bush, gave way. Reagan had not completely reunited the GOP, but the party's delight at President Carter's continuing troubles-and its sense that victory was possible-kept dissension to a minimum.

This was hardly the only worry on Carter's plate. The U.S. economy continued to exhibit severe weakness, and his efforts to free the hostages in Iran took a tragic turn.37 Convinced that the leaders of Iran were not seriously pursuing negotiations, Carter gave his approval to a secret April 1980 rescue mission. The well-trained troops never reached Tehran, though, because of a terrible helicopter accident in the Iranian desert, which killed eight men, aborted the mission, and gave a huge propaganda victory to the hostage takers.38 Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had become disenchanted with Carter and opposed the mission as reckless, resigned in protest.39 Discouraged by the disaster in the desert and understanding he needed to take responsibility, Carter asked press secretary Jody Powell to get him the speech President Kennedy had made after the Bay of Pigs invasion.40 In a press conference at the end of April, Carter delivered a statement not unlike that of JFK: "It was my responsibility as president to launch this mission. It was my responsibility to terminate the mission when it ended ... There is a deeper failure than that of incomplete success, and that is the failure to attempt a worthy effort, a failure to try. This is a sentiment shared by the men who went on the mission."41 Long afterward, Carter would say, when asked to name his regrets about his presidency, he most wished he had sent along an extra helicopter on the rescue mission. Whether that would have resulted in a successful hostage rescue will forever be unknown, but this incident, as much as any in Carter's last year, solidified his image as that of a struggling leader whose bad luck or incompetence made solving the country's deep-seated problems all but impossible.

Carter's summer of misery culminated at the mid-August Democratic Convention in New York. What should have been a celebration of a hard-earned nomination instead became a soap opera about Ted Kennedy. The entire first day was devoted to the Kennedy effort to open up the convention, which was ultimately defeated. The convention's second day was consumed by speculation about how Kennedy would handle the end of his campaign. That night, Kennedy gave his answer in a fiery speech; along with his 1968 eulogy of his brother Bobby, it may have been his best. Recounting his views of what the Democratic Party stood for, Kennedy mounted a rhetorical tour de force that concluded with these lines: "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."42 The Kennedy delegates went wild, and the convention was at a standstill for a lengthy period. While Kennedy had run an ineffective campaign and had often been an inarticulate candidate, his final effort exceeded anything Carter could deliver in his acceptance address.

As expected, Carter's speech at the convention's conclusion was mainly forgettable. Worse, Kennedy decided to sulk about his defeat, and he put his pique on display that evening in an exceptionally damaging way. Having missed Carter's address, Kennedy drove over from his hotel for the traditional end-of-convention love feast on stage, when all the party's grandees, whatever their real feelings, are expected to join hands in victory salutes and give unity smiles to network cameras and voters at home. With balloons and confetti falling, Carter spied Kennedy on the platform and sought him out for the traditional raising of the arms. Embarrassingly, the incumbent president chased the vanquished challenger all over the stage but never got what he sought. TV anchormen detailed every humiliating second for the millions watching, as Carter's convention finale flopped. Here is how Carter himself later described it: "Ostentatiously, Kennedy refused to shake my extended hand, and this became one of the main news stories from the convention ... [A]fter much reflection, I have concluded that there is little I could have done to prevent Kennedy's attempt to remove me from the political office that he considered his justifiable family heritage." Carter confirmed this opinion during our 2013 conversation: "Ted Kennedy just felt that he should have been president, that he was the descendant of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and therefore he deserved to be president."43 President Carter was never able to put the pieces of the Democratic coalition back together. Senator Kennedy campaigned for Carter and the Democratic ticket as the autumn wore on, and a "Carter-Kennedy Unity Celebration" was held in mid-October at which nice things were said and pleasant gestures were made. Just as at the JFK Library dedication a year earlier, Carter made John Kennedy one of the prime subjects of his address, in an attempt to woo Edward Kennedy and his followers. Carter even presented a watercolor of JFK, given to Carter by artist Jamie Wyeth during the 1976 campaign, as a gift for the JFK Library. But nothing could soften Kennedy's negative view of the president. "After I got the nomination, I met with Ted Kennedy twice privately, to see what he wanted, what I could do to assuage him, how I could get him to support me," Carter remembered. "And he was very cool toward me personally. He was determined, after he lost the nomination, that I would not be elected. I think Kennedy was very happy when Reagan was elected. Kennedy was very bitter toward me for the rest of his life."44 The electoral damage done by Kennedy's split with Carter was lasting. Many Kennedy Democrats defected to Republican Reagan or the moderate independent candidate, Congressman John Anderson of Illinois, which partially explains Reagan's carrying of Massachusetts and a host of normally liberal Northeastern and Midwestern states. Just 61 percent of Kennedy's voters from the Democratic primaries stayed with the party and backed Carter in November. A remarkably high 28 percent cast a ballot for Reagan, and 11 percent voted for Anderson. Voting studies indicated that Anderson took votes from both Carter and Reagan, uniting some Democrats and Independents disappointed with the president's performance as well as some Republicans who believed Reagan was too conservative. Overall, however, Anderson's presence was probably more damaging to Carter; the independent often joined Reagan to double-team the incumbent, who seemed increasingly enfeebled.45 One question that can never be definitively answered is whether Ted Kennedy, America's foremost liberal, was secretly pleased that his nemesis Carter, a moderate, lost to Reagan, the most conservative president in generations. In a 1980 diary entry, Carter puzzled about the truth of Kennedy's intentions, asking, "We were uncertain about Kennedy's ultimate goal. Was it to be elected himself, or did he just want to prevent my reelection?"46 While Kennedy fought Reagan's programs and nominees with relish throughout the Californian's White House years, aides of both men noted their warm personal relationship for most of that time.47 If the personal is the political, then we have our answer.

Whatever the truth about Ted Kennedy's outlook, it is difficult to dispute that the Kennedys had played a role in the destruction of the two Democratic presidencies succeeding JFK. For Jimmy Carter, one nagging question remained: How did Ted Kennedy manage to block key Carter initiatives in the Senate? The president offered an intriguing theory, that Senator Kennedy had a private alliance with Democratic Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia. "My impression is that Kennedy promised Bob Byrd that if he was elected president that he would appoint Byrd to the Supreme Court."48 Both Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter came to be seen by the Kennedy clan as usurpers. Policy was ostensibly at the heart of the opposition provided by both Robert and Edward Kennedy to LBJ and Carter, yet some measure of jealousy and resentment may also have been motivations. The elite band of national players, certainly including the Kennedys, is not known for small egos and tiny vanities. That a Kennedy could help to end a Democratic presidency in 1980 was a measure of the continuing power of the name; that a Kennedy would once again fail to attain the highest office suggests the limitations of the family name. Perhaps an unintended consequence of John F. Kennedy's large legacy in the popular imagination was that no other, lesser Kennedy seemed worthy of the White House.

In a comparative way, the manifest failures and deep unpopularity of the Carter presidency enhanced the memory of the Kennedy White House. Whereas Kennedy presided over a soaring, preeminent American economy, Carter represented a nation whose financial system could no longer produce the bounty of the 1960s. JFK scored a foreign policy triumph for the ages in the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Carter's longest-lasting international episode was the humiliating Iran hostage saga. (The Panama Canal treaty and the Camp David peace between Israel and Egypt were Carter coups, but most Americans have to search their memories for them, while the wounds from Iran remain fresh thirty years later.) John Kennedy's rhetoric and policies inspired the people of his time and generations to come; despite many notable achievements, little of what Jimmy Carter did or said as president is remembered. Doom and gloom, and a weary, exhausted persona, came to define Carter in his time. Fortunately for Carter, his lengthy post-presidency, filled with humanitarian acts and global efforts to conquer disease and strengthen human rights, have added considerable luster to his record. In 2002 the former president received the Nobel Peace Prize. Partly, the award came to Carter because of his many peace-keeping and election-supervising missions abroad, which are often potentially perilous, putting him at greater risk than he felt he was as president. "I have had two or three threats to my life after I came home [to Georgia] from the White House. When I go on an overseas trip almost invariably, I get a report from the Secret Service that where I'm going is very dangerous," Carter revealed. "And sometimes they ask me not to go, and I go anyway. They and I both just laugh about it. So I have been more concerned about my safety in doing the Carter Center's business overseas than I ever was in the White House."49 President Carter was the fourth arguably unsuccessful chief executive to follow JFK, and the combined calamities of LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter elevated Kennedy's mainly successful tenure further. Could no one else get it right? Ronald Reagan would finally provide an answer that pleased most Americans. Few would have thought at the outset that a sixty-nine-year-old conservative Republican would eventually offer the closest approximation to Kennedy's White House, but the conventional wisdom would be transformed during the 1980s.

aeCompare this to the mere four states decided by 5 percent or less in the 2012 presidential contest between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

17.

Reagan and Kennedy: Opposites Attract

At first glance, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan might appear to have had little in common other than the presidency. Democrat Kennedy was the youngest elected president and Republican Reagan the oldest. Kennedy came from inherited wealth, while Reagan grew up poor. Kennedy's whole adult lifetime was devoted to politics, while Reagan had a long first career in Hollywood. Kennedy was a pragmatic, generic Democrat, while Reagan was the leader of an ideological crusade among conservatives to take control of the Republican Party.

All these differences hold true, yet among Kennedy's successors in the White House, none came closer to embodying the "Kennedy mystique" than Ronald Reagan. Perhaps a bit of it was the shared Irish blood; a genealogical tracing linked the Kennedy and Reagan clans, which were both related to the famed tenth-century Irish king Brian Boru.1 Confident and self-assured, comfortable in his own skin, Reagan governed with qualities reminiscent of JFK. No characteristic linked the two presidents more than a playful, self-deprecating sense of humor-a trait lacking in almost all other modern occupants of the Oval Office.2 Reagan was a Democrat for much of his life, and he was bound to a place and a culture that Kennedy loved well-Hollywood. Perhaps as a consequence, no two modern presidents have ever been so comfortable in front of the camera; both were naturals, with their communication skills key to their success as chief executive.

Ideologically, they were not as far apart on many issues as observers would first have guessed. The Kennedy tax cut became the model for Reagan's. To the extent that social issues were addressed in the early 1960s, Kennedy was as much a traditionalist as Reagan. Both Kennedy and Reagan were Cold Warriors, with a hard-line stance against the Communists from Russia to Cuba. Still, both negotiated major arms control treaties during their time.

Perhaps the parallels make sense because Kennedy and Reagan were generational contemporaries. JFK is frozen in time in his forties, but he would have been sixty-three years old when Reagan took office at age sixty-nine. They were shaped by the same domestic upheavals, world wars, and social norms. And they were both blessed by fate and family with winning personalities and great good luck in the political arena.

The transformation of Ronald Reagan from loyal FDR Democrat to Goldwater Republican may have been a natural evolution promoted by second wife Nancy Reagan's conservative stepfather, the neurosurgeon Dr. Loyal Davis.3 But it was also a by-product of Reagan's transition from Hollywood B-movie star to the national spokesperson for General Electric, beginning in 1954. Reagan's eight years of hosting General Electric Theater on TV and touring the nation as a GE representative, giving speeches to conservative, business-oriented audiences, encouraged the development of Reagan's Republican political perspectives.

By 1956 Reagan was campaigning as a Democrat for President Eisenhower's reelection campaign, and he continued to play the role for Vice President Nixon in 1960 despite having worked hard for Nixon's 1950 Democratic opponent for U.S. Senate, Helen Gahagan Douglas. In a revealing letter to Nixon dated July 15, 1960, Reagan made clear that he had already fully embraced the philosophy that would become his presidential trademark: Unfortunately, [Kennedy] is a powerful speaker with an appeal to the emotions. He leaves little doubt that his idea of the "challenging new world" is one in which the Federal Government will grow bigger and do more and of course spend more. I know there must be some shortsighted people in the Republican Party who will advise that the Republicans should try to "out liberal" him. In my opinion this would be fatal.

One last thought-shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx-first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy."4 Reagan's comparison of JFK's views to those of Marx, Hitler, and long-ago kings is outlandish, given Kennedy's moderate to conservative presidency, and it would be contradicted by President Reagan's own firm embrace of some of JFK's foreign and domestic policies. Yet Reagan's 1960 anti-Kennedy broadside has become a standard rhetorical theme in GOP evaluation of Democrats over the decades-evocative of the party's modern-day critique of Barack Obama (though Obama is unquestionably well to the left of JFK). Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale tried to use this letter to Nixon to discredit Reagan in 1984, an effort that failed badly, further reinforcing Reagan's fabled "Teflon" coating.5 The usual rule in politics is that invoking Hitler in order to smear opponents results in backfire and backlash. The letter was not made public in 1960, and for that, Nixon could be grateful.6 During the 1960 campaign, Reagan was apparently shown photographs of JFK "going in and out of hotel rooms with different women." Perhaps reflecting lessons learned in Hollywood, Reagan opposed their use in the campaign, reportedly saying, "We have to base elections on issues and a candidate's ability to lead. There are bad husbands who are good leaders, and there are good husbands who are bad leaders. Those photos are about a personal matter between Mr. Kennedy and his wife."7 Even more to Reagan's credit, once he shifted to the GOP, he made no attempt to curry favor with JFK's popular Democratic administration. The GE platform kept Reagan in demand, and he held little back, attacking Washington on everything from JFK's alleged kowtowing to the "roughnecks of the Kremlin" to "welfare statism" at home. Reagan also claimed that some told him, "I was the most popular speaker in the country after President Kennedy. And after a while I noticed something very interesting. I would go into a city and find out at the other end of town, there'd be a member of the Kennedy cabinet. After a while I realized it was deliberate. I guess I was getting too much attention to suit them."8 It may be that the Kennedy White House saw what millions of Republicans were starting to recognize: Ronald Reagan offered Kennedyesque glitz and glamor with a conservative flavor.

There may have been something to Reagan's allegation about a Kennedy vendetta against him. Michael Reagan has asserted that General Electric "was in the midst of negotiating some government contracts" when "Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States, bluntly informed GE that if the company wished to do business with the U.S. government, it would get rid of General Electric Theater and fire the host ... Within forty-eight hours of Bobby Kennedy's call, the show was cancelled and Ronald Reagan was out of a job."9 The irony here is that had Reagan continued to host General Electric Theater, he probably wouldn't have run for governor of California, or become president. Could the Kennedy administration have started Reagan on his elective path to the White House?

To no one's surprise, Reagan changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1962. He went all out for Barry Goldwater in 1964, giving the most memorable televised defense of the GOP presidential nominee in the entire campaign on October 27, 1964, near the campaign's conclusion.10 This effort endeared Reagan to conservatives everywhere, and the response encouraged him to seek the governorship of California in 1966. This midterm election year was a perfect environment for Reagan's tough rhetoric about welfare, crime, student protests, and government waste. The anti-LBJ undercurrent helped Reagan soundly defeat two-term Democratic governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the father of future governor Jerry Brown. Reagan's long climb to the presidency had begun in earnest.

As a new governor, Reagan's trajectory intersected once more with the Kennedys. In May 1967, CBS decided to pair him up with Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a transcontinental debate about Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy. Reagan was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War-though not the manner in which Lyndon Johnson was waging the conflict-while RFK was beginning his turn to become a fierce critic of Johnson and Vietnam. An estimated 15 million Americans watched the face-off between Reagan in Sacramento and Kennedy in New York City, with students in London asking tough questions of them both. Reagan took the confrontation seriously, commissioning a lengthy memo from his staff and rehearsing with aides a day before the event, but Kennedy did no preparation. As a consequence, Reagan scored big, robustly defending the U.S. role abroad while Kennedy appeared hesitant and meek. It was no surprise that Kennedy remarked afterward, "Who the fuck got me into this?"11 Had Reagan been the cunning sort, he might have seen his debate victory as revenge for RFK's earlier role in his firing from General Electric.

Already impressed with Reagan, Republicans took further note of him after the Reagan-RFK face-off. Finally, they had a champion who could best a Kennedy on television. The contrast with the 1960 JFK-Nixon debates was stark. Even though Reagan had served only a few months in his first office, whispers began that Reagan should run for president in 1968. He hesitated at first, and two other governors-Michigan's George Romney and New York's Nelson Rockefeller-became the main rivals for former vice president Nixon. By the spring, however, with Romney out of the race and Rockefeller faltering, Reagan warmed to the idea and assumed "testing the waters" status. But Nixon was too far ahead. Reagan secured over 20 percent of the vote in just two primaries, Nebraska on May 14 and Oregon on May 28. He was accorded "favorite son" status in California and garnered 1,525,000 votes on June 4, 100 percent of the total on the GOP side, though this received little attention in the aftermath of the shooting of Robert Kennedy late that night. Because of California, though, Reagan actually outpolled Nixon, 1,696,000 (37.9 percent) to 1,679,000 (37.5 percent) in all the 1968 primaries combined. By the time of the convention, Reagan had considered joining forces with Rockefeller in a "stop Nixon" coalition, but it was far too late. Nixon already had a majority (692) of the delegate votes, to Rockefeller's 277 and Reagan's 182.

The presidential bug had burrowed deep into Reagan's core, however. He ran for and won reelection as governor in 1970, and looked to 1976. Wisely, Reagan decided not to run for a third term as governor in the heavily Democratic year of 1974, when he might well have lost, and planned instead to target the politically weak incumbent president, Gerald Ford. In a titanic battle that went right to the 1976 convention, the more moderate Ford defeated Reagan by a close delegate tally of 1,187 to 1,070. When Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in November, Reagan, at age sixty-five, figured his time had passed. If Carter served eight years, Reagan would be seventy-three in 1984, probably too old to win nomination or election.

During the Carter years, Reagan stayed in the public eye and delivered a series of radio broadcasts focused on contemporary political issues. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report on JFK's murder in 1979, Reagan may have surprised some of his listening audience by laying out the case for a Communist conspiracy: I'd like to comment on a conspiracy theory in the Kennedy case that seems to have been overlooked ... [H]ave we hesitated to investigate the possibility that Oswald might have been carrying out a plot engineered by an international agency? Even the original investigation by the Warren Commission seems to have ignored some obvious clues and been rather in haste to settle for Oswald as a lone killer.

Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald gave up his American citizenship and moved to Russia. He learned the Russian language before he defected. Someone must have helped him do this. Once in Russia, he married the niece of a colonel in the Soviet spy organization, the KGB. Thanks to that marriage, he lived at a level of luxury above that of the average citizen in Russia. While he is supposed to have recanted his favorable views on the USSR, it does seem strangely unlike the Soviets that he was allowed to return to the United States with his Russian wife ... The Warren Commission was evidently unimpressed with the fact that he was an enthusiastic member of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Nor did the commission find it significant that two months before the assassination, he went to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and was seen in the company of two known Cuban agents. After his arrest, his wallet was found to contain the addresses of the Communist Daily Worker and the Soviet embassy in Washington. It has been reported by more than one source that President Johnson and the commission were fearful that evidence of a Communist conspiracy involving, as it would the Soviet Union and/or Cuba, would anger the American people and lead to a confrontation, possibly even to war. It is also reported that the FBI files indicate there might have been a Communist conspiracy involving Oswald, but that the commission was unwilling to pursue this. The files further show that the Justice Department and the Warren Commission wanted to establish Oswald as alone in the case, and to get this conclusion to the American people as quickly as possible. Maybe someday, a new investigation will start down that trail.12 Shortly after this, history began to turn in Reagan's favor. First, Reagan had underestimated his staying power within the Republican Party. The increasingly conservative GOP base, fed up with leaders they considered too ideologically unreliable (such as Nixon and Ford), championed the California conservative who had won their hearts two decades earlier. President Ford's loss took the steam out of the moderate wing, whose central political argument had always been that the party got victory in exchange for tempering its right wing. As President Carter sank lower and lower in the popularity polls, Republicans believed they could take the chance of nominating Reagan despite his age and sharp rhetoric. The script for the old actor was set, and with just a few rewrites, the year 1980 unfolded as the fulfillment of Reagan's long-held dreams. JFK had been elected president at his first chronological and political opportunity, and Reagan was elected at his last. After a scare from George H. W. Bush with a loss in the Iowa caucuses, Reagan swept to the nomination and (after seriously considering Gerald Ford for the ticket) chose Bush as his running mate. Burdened by a bad economy, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Ted Kennedy challenge, President Carter was doomed and lost badly to Reagan in November. A new Irish American presidency was born.

Personally and politically, in the oddest kind of yin and yang, the Reagan White House and the Kennedy White House would complement each other. LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter labored in JFK's long shadow. Reagan enthusiastically sought to forge a legacy partnership, using selective policies and a warm bond with President Kennedy's surviving family.

The release of the fifty-two remaining American hostages by Iran on inauguration day helped President Reagan get off to a hopeful start. In a final insult to the departing chief executive they had helped to destroy, the Iranians had made sure the hostages did not leave their control until a few minutes after Carter had left office. In a conciliatory gesture, Reagan asked Carter to greet the ex-hostages in Germany. A celebratory inaugural evening on January 20, 1981, featured Frank Sinatra, once one of JFK's closest Hollywood pals, as chairman of the inaugural committee. The many other stars in attendance or performing for the Reagans reminded some of Camelot-though not the seamier side that saw Sinatra facilitate the extramarital affair between Kennedy and Sam Giancana's mistress, Judith Campbell.

Like Carter, Reagan chose JFK's Resolute desk for the Oval Office. As the president settled in, observers noticed that similarities in style linked Kennedy and Reagan. Both had a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed joke telling, some of it off-color, using it to break the ice in groups large and small. By nature, both enjoyed the social side of the presidency, welcoming legislative leaders and Washington's grandees to parties and after-hours drinks. The contrast with Jimmy Carter, who did not enjoy schmoozing and preferred quiet work and family time, was unambiguous. Reagan and Kennedy focused on the big picture, the top priorities, and left the details to staff. And both had a firm, realistic grasp of what they wanted to accomplish. Unlike JFK, though, Reagan had a faithful marriage to, and a full partner in, Nancy Davis Reagan, and he would soon need her strength in overcoming a personal and national nightmare with echoes of Dallas.

Ronald Reagan's presidency nearly ended before it had really begun. On Monday, March 30, 1981, Reagan left the White House and arrived around 1:50 P.M. at the Washington Hilton hotel to address a large group of AFL-CIO representatives. An uneventful speech followed, and Reagan made his way out at 2:27 P.M. through a side passage. The presidential limousine was just ten yards from the door, and a small press contingent waited on the exit's side to film Reagan and shout a few questions. Reagan turned toward them, smiled, and waved, but didn't stop (fortunately, since that would have made him an easier target). In that instant, shots rang out from the press line. John Hinckley, Jr., had managed to insinuate himself in the knot of reporters and photographers, armed with a Rhm .22-caliber revolver loaded with "Devastator" exploding cartridges.13 Uncannily, the gun had been purchased in a Dallas pawnshop, a mere mile from Dealey Plaza.14 Hinckley managed to get off six shots in 1.7 seconds before being subdued by bystanders and Secret Service personnel. In addition to wounding a Secret Service agent, a D.C. policeman, and Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, Hinckley shot the president by means of a bullet that ricocheted off the limousine and hit Reagan in his left underarm, as he was still in midwave while being pushed into the bulletproof car. This one-in-a-hundred shot was nearly enough to kill Reagan, as the bullet hit a rib, tore into a lung, and lodged a mere inch from his heart. Brady, shot through the head, was disabled for life. The agent and policeman, though seriously wounded, recovered.15 Just as in Dallas, the assassination's events occurred in the blink of an eye. Only those closest to Kennedy's car immediately knew the awful truth on November 22, 1963, and on March 30, 1981, even Reagan and his Secret Service agents in the limo did not at first realize that the president had been hit. While speeding back to the White House, Reagan started coughing up red blood, thought at first to have been a result of a rib broken in pushing him hard into the backseat. The right call-to go to George Washington University Hospital-was made by Jerry Parr, head of Reagan's Secret Service detail, the man who had shoved the president into the limo just in time to avoid a possible shot to Reagan's head. As in the case of JFK, the car reached the hospital in about five minutes.16 Had they gone back to the White House, Reagan probably would have died. Walking into the hospital, the president nearly collapsed from internal bleeding and was rushed to treatment for critically low blood pressure. Once stabilized, the surgery began to remove the bullet-which was not then known to be a Devastator and could have exploded during the operation. Before the surgery, a distraught Nancy Reagan had arrived. Mrs. Reagan's recollections of her trip to GW Hospital included a flashback to Dallas: "As my mind raced, I flashed to scenes of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Texas, and the day President Kennedy was shot. I had been driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles when a bulletin came over the car radio. Now, more than seventeen years later, I prayed that history would not be repeated, that Washington would not become another Dallas. That my husband would live." She could have added, "That I would not become the next Jackie Kennedy." Mrs. Reagan never spoke about the assassination attempt with Mrs. Kennedy, who did not call or write Mrs. Reagan during the period of the president's shooting and recovery. Possibly it was too painful a memory for Mrs. Kennedy to invoke.17 Upon seeing his wife in the hospital, Reagan quipped in his usual self-deprecating way, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Shortly before being anesthetized, Reagan looked up at his doctors and said, "Please tell me you're Republicans!" The head surgeon replied, "Mr. President, today we are all Republicans."18 Given Reagan's age and the seriousness of the wounds, it was touch-and-go for a while, with a difficult recovery behind the scenes. The president was unable to return to the White House for thirteen days, and once there, was still mending for weeks more.19 The nation was not told at the time how badly off Reagan had been, and he put on the actor's face whenever out in public. Although he was back making speeches by the end of April, Reagan was on a reduced schedule of activity for months, and some felt his full vigor did not return until the autumn.

Meanwhile, the nation was in shock. At first, the public was told that Reagan was unharmed. Shortly thereafter came the dreadful truth, and real fear that Reagan would die from a gunshot wound. The confusion and contradictory announcements-including a widely broadcast claim that Jim Brady had died-led many to suspect that we were purposely not being given all the facts. In yet another echo of 1963, Vice President Bush was in Texas, and some speculated that he was being rushed back to Washington to take control. Bush's absence from D.C. led to the famous not-quite-right declaration by Secretary of State Alexander Haig that he, Haig, was next in line and "in control" at the White House.20 Reagan's midday assassination attempt generated immediate comparisons to JFK's murder in Dallas. Regardless of partisan affiliation, Americans were in total disbelief that this could have happened again.21 Just as with Kennedy, many wondered about the motive of the assassin. Like all presidents, Reagan had many domestic and international opponents who may have nursed grievances about the 1980 election results. International intrigue was never far from our minds in the era of superpower confrontation. Could foreign agents be involved? The Cold War was still icy and Reagan had been fiercely anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban. And then there was Iran, whose hatred of the Great Satan was undiminished by the transfer of power from Carter to Reagan.

But it quickly became apparent that there were no complicated plots, second shooters, or grassy knolls attached to this sordid event. John Hinckley was more akin to Garfield's loony killer Charles Guiteau than to Lincoln's cause-motivated John Wilkes Booth. Mentally ill, Hinckley had stalked both Carter and Reagan in an attempt to impress the actress Jodie Foster, his imagined girlfriend. That Hollywood's president would be felled by an assassin trying to win over a Tinseltown star was among the more bizarre aspects of the case. Foster had played an underage prostitute in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, and the film had become a Hinckley obsession. The attempted assassination of a senator running for president was part of the plot, and in Hinckley's warped mind, a similar effort in real life against a sitting president would make him a national figure worthy of Foster's affections.

Hinckley was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity-a highly controversial decision-and he has mainly remained in mental institutions for most of the last thirty years.22 When Hinckley appeared in court about a month after the shootings, he was forced to wear a bulletproof vest, and spectators underwent a triple security check, two metal detectors, and a frisking. Authorities were clear on their motive: to prevent "another Jack Ruby" from killing the accused.23 Hinckley was not the only one to receive extra protection. Almost immediately after the attempted assassination, temporary Secret Service protection was extended once more to Senator Ted Kennedy.24 There were no specific threats, but the Capitol Hill police and Secret Service anticipated the possibility of a deranged copycat being "inspired" to take action.

Not unexpectedly, the Secret Service insisted that its procedures had not been at fault on March 30. The Service's spokesman, Jack Warner, noted that the agents "were competing with a bullet" and "the fact that we live in a democracy has to be taken into account." A few days after Reagan was shot, Warner told a reporter, "We do not at this time anticipate any changes in procedure."25 Reagan's close friend and White House counselor Edwin Meese (later U.S. attorney general) noted he had known the president for many years and he would not lower his public profile on account of his nearfatal experience. Neither Warner nor Meese properly calculated the determination of Nancy Reagan, who, according to former White House aide Mike Deaver, gathered key staffers and Secret Service officials together and demanded improvements in presidential security.26af Whether that discussion happened or not, the Secret Service eventually accepted that changes were in order, just as they had done after Dallas. The failure to have an agent check press credentials and watch spectators at the Washington Hilton rope line, or to have the president's exit more carefully shielded, was nearly fatal. In a July 1981 report on the assassination attempt, the Treasury Department, which supervises the Secret Service, admitted that the Warren Commission's recommendations for improving the Service were never fully implemented. Greater protection would require "significantly increased manpower and financial resources" as well.27 At the Washington Hilton-known to this day inside the Secret Service as "the Hinckley Hilton"-the president is now driven into a special interior entrance before disembarking. In fact, whenever possible, especially at unsecured sites, presidents since Reagan avoid walking in full view of unscreened people; most present-day presidential arrivals and departures are "covered" and unseen, with presidents shielded from unanticipated attacks.

As with Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI had not connected the dots-and quickly the Secret Service tried to shift blame to the Bureau. Hinckley had been arrested in October 1980 at the Nashville airport by alert screeners for the illegal possession of firearms, specifically three revolvers, a box of .22-caliber ammunition, and a pair of handcuffs in his luggage. A judge fined Hinckley $62.50 and let him go on his way. Even though President Carter was in town for a campaign stop, the FBI never questioned Hinckley closely or reported the incident to the Secret Service. Sometimes, a coincidence is more than a happenstance, and that was the case with Hinckley and Carter together in Nashville.28 Mrs. Reagan was so distraught over nearly losing her husband that she consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, about the president's schedule; events would be postponed or canceled to accommodate the astrologer's advice. Quigley's assistance was not known until 1988, when embittered ex-Reagan chief of staff Don Regan, who had been fired by the Reagans, released a book.29 But as questionable a "science" as astrology is, few Americans faulted the traumatized First Lady when her habit became public. Understandably, Mrs. Reagan did not think she could fully trust the Secret Service alone to keep her husband safe.

The Secret Service's resistance to change and defensive justification of its "procedures" in the face of obvious evidence that they did not work is typical of bureaucracies everywhere. It is true, as President Kennedy once said, "If anyone wants to do it [kill me], no amount of protection is enough. All a man needs is a willingness to trade his life for mine."30 But as the country learned in both 1963 and 1981, the Secret Service is obligated to work ever harder to make its most valuable protected official as safe as humanly possible. Every security slipup is potentially fatal. Presidents know this, and while they do not usually express concern for their safety publicly, they are aware of the dangers. It is the First Family that suffers the most, though. Both Mrs. Reagan and son Ron Jr. separately urged President Reagan not to seek a second term, fearing further attempts on his life.31 Reagan's remarkable presence of mind and humor in a life-threatening moment won over the country and gave his presidency a big boost in poll ratings and congressional support. He chose to use this painfully won political capital to get his economic program passed. But perhaps the greatest postassassination impact was on Reagan himself. He believed that his life had been spared by God for larger purposes-a belief apparently encouraged by another assassination survivor, Pope John Paul II, who was nearly killed in May 1981 while riding in the open "popemobile" in Vatican Square.32 The harsh world of politics has little time for might-have-beens. Ronald Reagan was lucky-the first incumbent president to be hit by a bullet and survive-while John Kennedy was not. Yet the Reagan experience reminds us that President Kennedy's personal and political path would have been altered had he been wounded but survived on November 22. Assuming full recovery, Kennedy would certainly have used the inevitable popularity spurt to unfreeze some of his legislation in Congress, quite possibly the civil rights bill. His reelection would virtually have been assured, and by a large enough margin to have carried in much friendlier Democratic majorities in the legislature. Whether he would have pursued a war on poverty and the other components of what became LBJ's Great Society is a mystery. Kennedy was more cautious than Johnson in some ways. Still, the assassination attempt would have rearranged his plans and perhaps his thinking in ways that are not predictable. The varying trajectories of the bullets marked for Kennedy, and the one that struck Reagan, remind us that an inch one way or the other can make an enormous difference in history.

Other than a successful congressional effort to tighten up the insanity plea by shifting the burden from the prosecution to the defense, the only significant piece of federal legislation that can be directly tied to the March 30, 1981, shootings came not from Reagan but from another victim, James Brady. While he remained the titular press secretary throughout Reagan's eight years in office, Brady was too severely impaired to return to the job. Nonetheless he and his wife, Sarah, went to work on designing gun control legislation that eventually passed a dozen years after the shooting. As president, Reagan had always opposed gun control measures, but on the tenth anniversary of his near-assassination, Reagan endorsed the Brady bill.33 The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was signed into law by President Clinton in November 1993. For the first time, it required background checks for most firearms purchases.34 Ronald Reagan began his presidency with no honeymoon bump; Gallup measured his job approval at just 51 percent after ten days on the job-the precise proportion of the vote he had received in November. While he gained steadily, the events of March 30 sent his job approval soaring to 67 percent in Gallup and above 70 percent in some other polls.35 Reagan and his staff knew just what to do. On April 28, the recovering president appeared before a joint session of Congress to a hero's welcome and marshaled his and the nation's emotion: "The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know. You have given us a memory that we'll treasure forever. And you've provided an answer to those few voices that were raised saying that what happened was evidence that ours is a sick society ..."36 And from there, Reagan made clear that he wanted to cash in his new political chips for his domestic agenda of across-the-board tax cuts as well as defense spending increases to contain the Communists. By summer's end, the president had most of what he desired. The legislation was delivered to his California ranch and he signed it with a flourish.37 Ronald Reagan had an unusual rhetorical ally in achieving his fiscal and international goals-John F. Kennedy. It is extraordinary how often Reagan employed JFK's words to his own ends. As one scholar wrote: "... while [Reagan] quoted [Franklin] Roosevelt 76 times between his 1980 inauguration and his 1984 reelection, he cited John Kennedy on 133 occasions. (By contrast, he referred to Hoover once, to Nixon sixteen times, and to Coolidge [one of Reagan's favorites] in only twenty-four instances.) Even Abraham Lincoln appeared only sixty-seven times-nine fewer than Roosevelt, sixty-six fewer than Kennedy. All but a handful of these references to Kennedy were highly complimentary."38ag Reagan's recurrent use of JFK was a carefully planned political strategy, on a par with Lyndon Johnson's regular invocation of President Kennedy. It was difficult for Democratic politicians to contradict their patron saint, and John Kennedy's imprimatur made Reagan's policies more palatable to the public. Late in Reagan's first term, the Republican National Committee undertook a study of Kennedy's positions and assembled a "quote file" that could be used by the White House to undergird its proposals. The report opened: Liberal Democrats have sought, for twenty years now, to embellish their policies and proposals with the theme of carrying forward the "vision" of President John F. Kennedy. They would have the American people believe that their big-government, tax and spend, anti-defense, anti-business policies are what JFK would have pursued had he lived.

A review of the actual words of President Kennedy has yielded an astoundingly different story. In reality, from national defense to tax policy, from foreign policy to the federal budget, from the economy to education-the views of JFK ring far closer to those of President Reagan than to those of the self-appointed "torch carriers." The fact is that many Democrats and their media sympathizers have grossly distorted the views of President Kennedy, building a false image, possibly, to play upon the reverence accorded an assassinated President to suit their own ends.

The following quotes reveal a man who was strong on defense, ever-mindful of the Soviet threat, sought tax cuts to stimulate the economy, supported the free market, sought to limit domestic spending and the growth of the federal government and was opposed to racial quotas. Indeed, few of the words of JFK contained here would be alien to President Reagan and, in fact, are amazingly consistent with his views of foreign, domestic and economic policy. They provide fascinating reading.39 In no area did President Reagan use JFK to greater effect than for his tax cuts. It was incontrovertible that Kennedy pushed for slashing the top individual rates from a sky-high 91 percent to 65 percent, a reform that was on track to occur when he went to Dallas and was passed in February 1964.40 From his first month in office, Reagan linked his tax program to Kennedy's, and when Reagan's critics accused him of helping the rich, he quoted JFK's argument, "A rising tide lifts all boats."41 Deficit hawks feared the tax cuts would increase the national debt (as they did), but Reagan used the Kennedy economy to rebut them, employing JFK's words: " 'Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. An economy stifled by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.' John F. Kennedy said that back in 1962, when he was asking for a tax decrease, a cut in tax rates across the board. And he was proven right, because that-the last tax cut, literally, that we've had-actually produced more revenue for government, because the economy was stimulated and more people were working and there was more industry and productivity in America."42 Over and over again, all the way through his reelection and beyond, President Reagan cited the same passages from John Kennedy and the matching statistics about the post-tax-cut growth of government revenue in the 1960s to deflect concerns about federal deficits in the 1980s. Democrats used Ted Kennedy to attempt to seize back JFK's mantle, with limited success. "President Kennedy's tax cut concentrated relief on middle income families. [Reagan's] tax cut would give the most to the wealthiest segment of our society," claimed Senator Kennedy in April 1981. In fact, JFK's tax cut had also done far more for the rich than the middle class.43 Ironically, President Reagan took President Kennedy's side of the tax cut argument and ignored one of the JFK tax cut's chief opponents-none other than Barry Goldwater, Reagan's conservative hero, who believed Kennedy's tax policies would fuel runaway deficits.44 However, what didn't happen in the 1960s, when the United States maintained a stronger position in the world economy and much smaller federal expenditures, unfolded with a vengeance in the 1980s. Reagan's "supply-side economics," built around his tax cuts, greatly expanded federal debt; promised spending cuts never occurred, mainly because of staunch Democratic opposition.45 The Kennedy tax cut legacy was truly double-edged, an economic boost in the go-go sixties and a fiscal fount of red ink in the more complicated eighties.46 Ronald Reagan also employed JFK, with much less success, in his repeated attempts to reduce federal social spending. The president took to quoting the most famous lines from Kennedy's inaugural speech ("Ask not what your country can do for you ..."), but insisting "it's time ... to remember the second part of what JFK said, 'Ask what you can do for your country.'"47 His point was unmistakable-Americans should accept less largesse and fewer federal entitlements. Not even John F. Kennedy could help Reagan with that goal, still unrealized three decades later.

Equal to tax cuts on the list of President Reagan's passions was his fervent anticommunism. Again, President Kennedy was Reagan's faithful rhetorical ally. Except for a relative handful of liberals and radicals in the 1950s and 1960s, there was little sympathy for Communism, and on this, John F. Kennedy was no liberal. In the 1950s he had defended his personal friend, Richard Nixon, on his rigid anticommunism, and had even told associates that if he (Kennedy) could not get the Democratic nomination for president, he would vote for Nixon.48 Opposition to the Reds was a basis for bipartisan unity, and opposing candidates such as Kennedy and Nixon tried to out-do one another in bashing Communism.

Once in the Oval Office, JFK faced crisis after crisis-the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the Khrushchev summit, Soviet missiles in Cuba-generated by the great ideological conflict between East and West. The consensus at the time was that Communism and capitalism were engaged in a life-or-death struggle that would leave one side's philosophy and civilization on the scrap heap of history. Every American adult was familiar with Premier Khrushchev's declaration to the West, "We will bury you!" Even schoolchildren at the time remember that frightening sentence emblazoned on placards fixed to the walls of school buses.49 Civil defense shelters dotted the map in every urban locality and bomb shelters in individual homes were common. Kennedy's rhetoric about Communism was tough and harsh, beginning with his inaugural address: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." President Reagan had many such JFK passages from which to choose.

Reagan's first use of Kennedy was to adopt his own version of JFK's "missile gap" charge. President Reagan's favorite data on defense spending became a staple of his speeches: Under JFK, defense spending accounted for 46 percent of the federal budget, compared to 29 percent for social programs. Twenty years later, just 29 percent of federal money was devoted to defense and more than 50 percent to social spending "that mushroomed during the Great Society."50 Reagan even included an animated graph of this trend, with credit to Kennedy for keeping America strong, in a televised address to the nation on November 22, 1982, the nineteenth anniversary of the assassination.51 Interestingly, Reagan blamed the shift away from defense not just on the Great Society but "neglect in the 1970s," when two of his foes, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, were president: "[T]he 1970's were marked by neglect of our defenses ... Too many forgot John Kennedy's warning that only when our arms are certain beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt they will never be used. By the beginning of this decade, we face three growing problems: the Soviet SS-20 monopoly in Europe and Asia; the vulnerability of our land-based ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missiles]; and the failure of arms control agreements to slow the overall growth in strategic weapons."52 Just as Kennedy's allegation that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the production and deployment of nuclear missiles proved to be false, so, too, was part of Reagan's accusation that post-Kennedy leaders in the 1960s and 1970s had let America fall behind. In absolute terms, defense expenditures had skyrocketed from $53 billion in 1963 to $134 billion in 1980, the year before Reagan took office-Reagan's case depended on the high inflation of the 1970s.53 Whatever the truth of the candidates' assertions, the fear of Communism was such that most voters seemed to side with Kennedy and Reagan, preferring to be prepared rather than sorry.

Like Kennedy, Reagan was a member of the World War II generation, though unlike JFK, he had only served domestically, mainly in a special Hollywood filmmaking military unit.54 Yet Reagan's global views were shaped in part by the events of the 1930s and '40s, just as Kennedy's were. Reagan again found reason to make common cause with JFK by touting Kennedy's 1940 book, Why England Slept: Even after war broke out in Asia and in Europe, our own country was slow to take the steps necessary to defend itself. Warning us of the impending crisis, a young Harvard student, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, wrote a book titled Why England Slept. His thoughtful study holds as true now, forty-two years later, as when it was first published. After describing how a dictatorship with a controlled press and the power to silence political opposition can carry on a vigorous arms program, he noted, "In contrast, in a democracy, the cry of warmonger would discourage any politician who advocates a vigorous arms policy. This leaves armaments with few supporters. Among the reasons for England's failure to rearm in time," Kennedy wrote, "probably the most important was a firm and widely held conviction that armaments were one of the primary causes of war." Well, the Western democracies didn't wake up till it was too late. It took Pearl Harbor to shake Americans from their complacency.

Today, in this era of much more dangerous weapons, it is even more important to remember that vigilance, not complacency, is the key to peace.55 In using Kennedy to compare 1980s Communism with 1930s Fascism, Reagan cleverly linked bipartisan lessons learned by the World War II generation to the modern struggle with "the Evil Empire," Reagan's term for the Soviet Union and its allies.

In Reagan's view, the Communist threat still resembled the one from Cuba and Vietnam, an international conspiracy to extend its influence and take over nation-states that would fall, one by one, like dominoes. In our own hemisphere, Reagan fought the Communists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada with arms and rhetorical ferocity that often included references to JFK. For example, in a televised address to the nation on May 9, 1984, about his policies in Central America, Reagan made Kennedy the star attraction: We're in the midst of what President John F. Kennedy called "a long twilight struggle" to defend freedom in the world. He understood the problem of Central America. He understood Castro. And he understood the long-term goals of the Soviet Union in this region.

Twenty-three years ago, President Kennedy warned against the threat of Communist penetration in our hemisphere. He said, "I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our nation." And the House and Senate supported him overwhelmingly by passing a law calling on the United States to prevent Cuba from extending its aggressive or subversive activities to any part of this hemisphere. Were John Kennedy alive today, I think he would be appalled by the gullibility of some who invoke his name.56 President Reagan's second term placed a special emphasis on defeating the Communist-friendly Sandinistas in Nicaragua, an effort that led his administration into the infamous Iran-Contra scandal.57 In the midst of his efforts to secure congressional funding and marshal public opinion for the anticommunist Nicaraguan "Contras," Reagan addressed the nation and told an anecdote about President Kennedy that defined Reagan's own fundamental mission in international affairs, the containment and eventual elimination of Communism: You know, recently one of our most distinguished Americans, Clare Boothe Luce,58 had this to say about the coming vote: "In considering this crisis," Mrs. Luce said, "my mind goes back to a similar moment in our history-back to the first years after Cuba had fallen to Fidel. One day during those years, I had lunch at the White House with a man I had known since he was a boy, John F. Kennedy. 'Mr. President,' I said, 'no matter how exalted or great a man may be, history will have time to give him no more than one sentence. George Washington, he founded our country. Abraham Lincoln, he freed the slaves and preserved the Union. Winston Churchill, he saved Europe.' 'And what, Clare,' John Kennedy said, 'do you believe my sentence will be?' 'Mr. President,' she answered, 'your sentence will be that you stopped the Communists-or that you did not.' "

Well, tragically, John Kennedy never had the chance to decide which that would be. Now leaders of our own time must do so. My fellow Americans, you know where I stand. The Soviets and the Sandinistas must not be permitted to crush freedom in Central America and threaten our own security on our own doorstep. Now the Congress must decide where it stands. Mrs. Luce ended by saying: "Only this is certain. Through all time to come, this, the 99th Congress of the United States, will be remembered as that body of men and women that either stopped the Communists before it was too late-or did not."59 Reagan's recurrent summoning of JFK's spirit to back ideas not favored by contemporary Democrats provoked a reaction, and from time to time, Senator Edward Kennedy would take umbrage. Perhaps he remembered that Reagan had been a severe critic of JFK in the early 1960s and had backed Nixon enthusiastically. However, the Kennedys were remarkably chummy with the Reagans during the 1980s, and at some level, the family must have been pleased that JFK was mentioned so frequently and prominently by an Oval Office successor, even a conservative Republican.

The keepers of a legacy often try to sand down the rough edges of history, and even rewrite a few chapters to keep a departed statesman relevant to current events he could scarcely have imagined. The truth in this instance is that John Kennedy was conservative (in today's terms) on both economic policy and foreign affairs. The same holds for social policies. Feminism, gun control, gay rights, abortion rights, and environmentalism were fringe advocacy concerns in JFK's day. That is not his modern image, as cultivated and refined by the Kennedy family and Democratic Party leaders, but President Reagan actually hit closer to the mark in reviving the John F. Kennedy who ran for and served as president. It is another inconvenient truth of history.

On the other hand, President Reagan's selective invocation of Kennedy's words and programs was sometimes misleading. Reagan and Kennedy were diametrically opposed on a wide range of matters, not least civil rights for African Americans-which Kennedy finally supported and Reagan mainly opposed.60 Yet the presidency set both men on somewhat the same course to achieve peace and prosperity in their time. That tax cuts were the centerpiece of both men's economic strategy is revealing. So too is the fact that both gradually moved from confrontation to negotiation with the Soviets. Kennedy secured the 1963 test ban treaty and clearly wanted to go much further with Khrushchev in a second term. After complaining that Soviet leaders kept "dying on me"-two of them, Premiers Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, served brief tenures during Reagan's first term-Reagan found a willing partner in Mikhail Gorbachev, and substantial arms reduction progress was made in his second term.61 Ted Kennedy privately urged Reagan in 1985 to seek accommodation with the Soviets by reminding him of his brother's "proudest achievement": "As you know I am off to Geneva this weekend as part of the Senate observer group for the negotiations on arms control [and] want to add my hopes for your success in the forthcoming arms negotiations. Jack always felt that the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, coming as it did on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, was the proudest achievement of his presidency. You above all are in a unique position to be blessed as the peacemaker of the century and the prayers of all of us in Congress and the country are with you in this historic undertaking."62 Arms control was in the interests of both East and West in the 1960s and 1980s. But on the central issue of the Soviet system itself, Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were actually close together, and on the right side of history. That was demonstrated dramatically on several days separated by five U.S. administrations, in events happening at the tense crossroads of East and West, the city of Berlin. Divided since the end of World War II with its German families separated by a military-enforced wall built in 1961, Berlin became the flashpoint for Cold War intrigue, and the site of two great presidential speeches. President Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" declaration of June 1963 underlined the harsh reality of Communist tactics. Ronald Reagan, as a private citizen, had fumed that President Kennedy did nothing to stop the wall's construction. Not long before he began his 1980 campaign, Reagan was still unhappy, complaining about "the lost opportunity in Berlin, when we could have knocked down and prevented the completion of the wall with no hostilities following."63 But by the time Reagan first came to Berlin as president, in June 1982, he was citing Kennedy's "stirring words" to which he added, "We in America and the West are still Berliners ... and always will be."64 On his final presidential trip to Berlin, in June 1987, Reagan delivered an address that was the equal of Kennedy's. Reminding his audience of JFK's speech and others by American presidents, Reagan explained that, "We come to Berlin ... because it's our duty to speak in the place of freedom." Then Reagan made perhaps the most famous challenge of his time in office: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace ... come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"65 In two years' time, as a result of solidarity among nine presidential administrations and constant pressure by the United States and its allies, not to mention enormous sacrifice in lives and dollars, the Berlin wall came tumbling down at last.

In the case of Berlin and hundreds of others, presidents depend on the precedents set by earlier chief executives. Some precedents are followed easily, especially when administrations are of the same party and twinned by the accidents of history, such as FDR and Truman, or JFK and LBJ. Never in modern times, though, has a president of one party utilized the words and policies of a president of the other party as much as Reagan did with Kennedy. It is a circumstance that demonstrates the long-term power and bipartisan appeal of John Kennedy, both his image and his reality.

Of the eight years Ronald Reagan served as president, none produced more Kennedy references than 1984, not coincidentally, Reagan's reelection year.66 By then the Republican had well learned the power JFK's words had to catch the attention of Democrats and Independents.

Democrats had a spirited contest for their party's presidential nomination that featured, among others, two candidates with Kennedy credentials-one who was a national hero and personal favorite of JFK, former astronaut and Ohio senator John Glenn, and another who consciously fashioned himself after John Kennedy, Colorado senator Gary Hart.

Before these contenders could come to the fore, Ted Kennedy had made an early decision not to run, announced on December 1, 1982. He had been thought likely to try again after his defeat in 1980, but he probably realized that the odds were not favorable for victory. Moreover, Kennedy was in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Joan, guaranteeing lots of journalistic inquiries about his often-wild personal life.67 A third factor may have been crucial: His family actively dissuaded him from a second campaign out of fear for his safety.68 Ted had been lucky throughout his 1980 effort, but the nearly successful Reagan assassination attempt surely reminded the Kennedys that two brothers lost to bullets were enough. Some family loyalists talked hopefully of a future quest, once Chappaquiddick had supposedly faded completely from the public's mind, but others began to realize that Ted Kennedy's home would always be the Senate. It was left to a retired president, whose obsession with Edward Kennedy had helped to bring about his own downfall, to offer a postmortem. "The train has left the station" and Kennedy's presidential moment was gone, said Richard Nixon.69 As a five-time national candidate, the canny Nixon knew that other ambitious Democratic politicians had already deferred for years to Ted and would now insist on their turn.

John Glenn moved quickly to seize the Kennedy mantle. He appeared in the Senate press gallery on the day Kennedy withdrew as a possible candidate to suggest that he was the natural heir. Glenn's haste was not appreciated by Ted Kennedy, who had never been as close to Glenn as his brothers had.70 In any event, Glenn was never able to achieve much of a liftoff for his campaign; the quietly spoken moderate could fire his space rockets but not political crowds. After finishing a poor third in New Hampshire, he never won a single primary and dropped out on March 16, 1984.

Though Gary Hart had no strong Kennedy connections like Glenn, he fit the JFK mold better, at least superficially. Hart said he became interested in politics after hearing JFK at a 1960 rally, and by 1972 he had managed George McGovern's presidential campaign. This was Hart's springboard to a Senate seat from Colorado in 1974. Ruggedly handsome, polished, and articulate, the forty-seven-year-old Hart proclaimed himself the man of "new ideas" who could rescue the Democratic Party from its post-Carter doldrums. His main opponent, considered the heavy front-runner at the start, was Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Burdened with defending the Carter record, Mondale was also a Great Society liberal closely associated with Hubert Humphrey, whose Senate seat he had taken when Humphrey was elevated to the vice presidency in 1965. Hart was something of a loner in D.C., while Mondale was well liked in political circles. Yet there was no comparison on the stump between the unexciting, bland Mondale and the energetic, charismatic Hart.

As the campaign began, Mondale had checked all the boxes and taken the stands expected by the various Democratic Party constituencies, such as labor unions and women's groups. His nomination was considered almost inevitable. But as Democrats began to grasp that a rebounding economy was lifting President Reagan toward a second term, they looked for an alternative to shake up the race. Gary Hart loomed large, with his "Kennedy hair," hands thrust in his pockets la JFK, and a practiced rhetorical cadence that was reminiscent of John Kennedy's. The public's innate yearning for a JFK revival had been pretested by Hart's campaign in focus groups. Political impressionists had a field day mimicking Hart mimicking Kennedy.71 Hart stunned Mondale by roaring to a ten-percentage-point victory in New Hampshire, followed by wins in Florida and Massachusetts. Mondale fought back, capturing states where the party organization was strongest, such as Illinois and New York. The party was still deeply split as the primary season drew to a close in June; Hart snagged California, New Mexico, and South Dakota, while Mondale triumphed in New Jersey and West Virginia. Overall, Mondale edged Hart in all primaries combined, 6.8 million votes to Hart's 6.5 million, with the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson pulling in another 3.3 million.

If there was a turning point in such a close battle, it may have been the stripping away of Hart's pseudo-Kennedy persona. Many observers criticized Hart for too much conscious imitation of JFK, and it was found that Hart had remade himself in other small but telling ways, such as shaving a year off his real age, changing his name from Hartpence to Hart, and dramatically altering his signature.72 Never much of a sound-bite politician, Mondale nevertheless borrowed a fast-food slogan when he asked Hart, the man of new ideas, "Where's the beef?"-the punch line of a popular Wendy's hamburger commercial that permitted Mondale to claim Hart's proposals were vague and gauzy and that the candidate was more style than substance.

In the end, Mondale managed to thwart Hart by the slim margin of 224 delegates out of 3,933 at the party's July 1984 convention in San Francisco. Recognizing his own lack of pizzazz, Mondale tried to generate enthusiasm with the historic nomination of a woman, New York representative Geraldine Ferraro, for vice president. But the temporary boost she provided soon evaporated as questions about her family's finances were raised.73 An uphill campaign became even more so.

Reagan's team needed little encouragement to play the Kennedy card, but Hart's defeat enabled them to appeal to Democratic voters attracted to a defeated JFK look-alike. In speech after speech, Reagan quoted Kennedy, and he often added Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and other prominent Democrats for good measure. At his renomination convention in Dallas on August 23, 1984, Reagan enlisted the pumped delegates for audience participation with this theme: THE PRESIDENT. Ten months ago, we displayed ... resolve in a mission to rescue American students on the imprisoned island of Grenada. Democratic candidates have suggested that this could be likened to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan- AUDIENCE. Boo-o-o!

THE PRESIDENT.-the crushing of human rights in Poland or the genocide in Cambodia.

AUDIENCE. Boo-o-o!

THE PRESIDENT. Could you imagine Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, or Scoop Jackson [a hawkish Democratic U.S. senator from Washington state who died in 1983] making such a shocking comparison?

AUDIENCE. No!74 As Reagan traveled from Iowa to Michigan to Connecticut in the fall, he carried the same message: that he was closer to the policies of JFK and other Democratic presidents than the liberal Mondale and his band of "San Francisco Democrats." Reagan especially sought crossover votes from Democrats who believed in an interventionist, anticommunist foreign policy: "Harry Truman believed-with FDR before him and John Kennedy after him-in strength abroad and self-reliance at home. To all those Democrats-and I hope there are many here-who feel that under its present leadership the Democratic Party no longer stands behind America's responsibilities in the world, that it no longer represents working men and women, we say to you: 'Join us.'"75 The technique even worked in Boston. On his way to carrying JFK's Massachusetts for the second time, Reagan would stifle hecklers by quoting JFK, and daring them to interrupt Kennedy's words.76 The only high point of the general election campaign for Mondale came at the first presidential debate, when Reagan lost his place and showed his age-and possibly demonstrated the earliest effects of his then-undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease. (Reagan famously recovered in the second and final debate, joking that he would not exploit his opponent's age and inexperience for political purposes.) Mondale used his brief opening remarks to associate himself with his own version of John Kennedy: The president says that when the Democratic Party made its turn, he left it. The year that he decided we had lost our way was the year that John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon. I was chairman of "Minnesotans for Kennedy"; President Reagan was chairman of a thing called "Democrats for Nixon." Now, maybe we made a wrong turn with Kennedy, but I'll be proud of supporting him all of my life. And I'm very happy that John Kennedy was elected, because John Kennedy looked at the future with courage, saw what needed to be done, and understood his own government ...