The question is our future. President Kennedy once said in response to similar arguments, "We are great, but we can be greater." We can be better if we face our future, rejoice in our strengths, face our problems, and by solving them, build a better society for our children.77 Judging by the postdebate polls, swing Democrats were unmoved by Mondale's tactic, though some JFK loyalists were again furious that Reagan was appropriating Kennedy for his own purposes. Ted Kennedy fumed about it with friends, and a hundred academics purchased a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to protest Reagan's use of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy as "a flagrant distortion of reality."78 Distortion or not, the technique, combined with a rebounding economy, clearly worked. On November 6, 1984, President Reagan not only won 58 percent of the popular vote and forty-nine states-all but Mondale's Minnesota-he attracted the backing of 26 percent of Democrats. Mondale received a miniscule 7 percent of the Republican vote by comparison.79 There would be no Kennedy revival in 1984, unless one considered Reagan himself the Kennedy substitute.

President Reagan's public relationship with Senator Edward Kennedy ran hot and cold, depending on the issue of the day, and Kennedy rarely aligned himself with any major administration initiative. In particular, Kennedy fiercely opposed Reagan's tax cut, Central American policy, and many key appointments. Even today, conservatives have not forgotten Kennedy's key role in sinking Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Kennedy's 1987 Senate speech about "Robert Bork's America" contained a litany of horrors that would descend upon America if Bork took a high court seat.80 But privately, a very different relationship unfolded between Kennedy and Reagan, one that was usually initiated by Ted and included the whole Kennedy family. The record of the Reagan White House is replete with examples. On the thirteenth anniversary of Bobby's assassination, the congressionally approved Robert F. Kennedy Medal was awarded in honor of the late senator's service and presented to Ethel Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden. The ceremony was preceded by an informal Oval Office meeting with Mrs. Kennedy and her children as well as Senator Kennedy. In what would become standard for these events, Reagan was exceptionally eloquent and generous in his remarks, saying in part, "[Robert Kennedy] wrote to his son, Joseph, on the day of President Kennedy's death, 'Remember all the things that Jack started. Be kind to others that are less fortunate than we and love our country.' And it is the final triumph of Robert Kennedy that he used his personal gifts to bring this message of hope and love to the country, to millions of Americans who supported and believed in him." Ted Kennedy responded, "Let me thank you, Mr. President, for this great honor that you have given to Robert Kennedy. And it is appropriate that he should receive it from you, for he understood so well that the common love of our country transcends all party identification and all partisan difference. And you should know that after he debated you on international television in 1967, my brother Bob said that Ronald Reagan was the toughest debater he ever faced and, obviously, he was right. [Laughter]"81 Rose Kennedy visited Reagan in the Oval Office, accompanied by Ted, and Reagan wrote her a letter on her ninety-second birthday.82 He taped a television commercial for Eunice Shriver, JFK's sister, for her "Special Olympics"-and attended a White House ceremony for the Special Olympics winners, followed by warm correspondence between Reagan and Shriver about this annual event.83 At Ted Kennedy's request, Reagan permitted Ted Reardon, a devoted friend of President Kennedy's, to be buried close to JFK at Arlington.84 On November 22, 1983, the twentieth anniversary of the assassination, at Ted Kennedy's invitation, President and Mrs. Reagan attended a memorial mass for President Kennedy at Georgetown's Holy Trinity Church. The church was packed with the surviving principals of the New Frontier as well as JFK's extended family, and the solemn sense of loss was again palpable. Caroline read from her father's speeches and Ted Kennedy took the opportunity to thank the Reagans, who "have been very kind to our family on this and other occasions."85 Perhaps remembering his own close call, Reagan issued a stirring statement about the Dallas tragedy and the long-lasting "trauma and grief" of that day.86 Senator Kennedy later asked the president for his backing in raising an endowment for the JFK Library. Reagan agreed to meet with Caroline and John Jr., who noted in a letter to Reagan that their father was unable to do what other former presidents do as a matter of course-make the calls and visits necessary to secure the financial future of his library and museum.87 President Reagan took a personal interest and agreed to speak at an event on June 24, 1985, at Ted Kennedy's McLean, Virginia, home. It became the site of Reagan's most moving tribute to JFK: It is a matter of pride to me that so many men and women who were inspired by his bracing vision and moved by his call to "ask not," serve now in the White House doing the business of government. Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president; I didn't. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it's true, when the battle's over and the ground is cooled, well, it's then that you see the opposing general's valor.

He would have understood. He was fiercely, happily partisan. And his political fights were tough-no quarter asked, none given. But he gave as good as he got. And you could see that he loved the battle.

Everything we saw him do seemed to betray a huge enjoyment of life. He seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump aboard and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey; it's unthankful not to ...

And when he died, when that comet disappeared over the continent, a whole nation grieved and would not forget. A tailor in New York put up a sign on the door: "Closed because of a death in the family." The sadness was not confined to us. "They cried the rain down that night," said a journalist in Europe. They put his picture up in huts in Brazil and tents in the Congo, in offices in Dublin and Warsaw. That was some of what he did for his country, for when they honored him they were honoring someone essentially, quintessentially, completely American. When they honored John Kennedy, they honored the nation whose virtues, genius, and contradictions he so fully reflected.

Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy's death; five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then and his thousand days in the White House.

And sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book: Nothing is ever lost in that great house; some music plays on.

I've even been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, "And another thing, Eleanor!" Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a fellow saying, "Bully! Absolutely ripping!" Walk softly, now, and you're drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter.

I don't know if this is true, but it's a story I've been told. And it's not a bad one because it reminds us that history is a living thing that never dies. A life given in service to one's country is a living thing that never dies-a life given in service, yes.

History is not only made by people; it is people. And so, history is, as young John Kennedy demonstrated, as heroic as you want it to be, as heroic as you are.88 Ted, Caroline, and John Jr. all wrote Reagan to thank him for his extraordinary tribute. But the most memorable lines had been written just after the Oval Office meeting with Reagan by John Jr., in a postscript that cemented the warm mutual feelings that had developed between families of different partisan stripes: "I was not one of the 'irritated Democrats' when you quoted my father. I thought it was great! Please quote him all you want!"89 Much of this tale of two clans is simply smart political relationship building in the snake pit of Washington, where the era of good feelings ended with President James Monroe. As Jimmy Carter learned too late, genuine friendships in your own party and across the aisle can make a difference when a president gets into a tight spot. Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy were naturally congenial and enjoyed bipartisan repartee. Unlike many prominent politicians of our own era, they could usually separate their public statements-the ones predetermined by ideology and partisanship-from after-hours personal relationships. They also shared a love of the game and an intimate knowledge of the Oval Office's hothouse. Families that have made it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have much in common, since they are members of the most select club in the country. It may also be true that Reagan understood that a cordial relationship with the Kennedys would give him more leeway to cite JFK in his speeches without fear of rebuke from Ted or others.

Reflecting on the ties that developed between his parents and the Kennedys, Ron Reagan, Jr., detected shared admiration for those who performed well under the hot lights of the public stage. "My parents were show folk, basically, and while the Kennedys didn't come from Hollywood, they understood that leadership required good performance. There was a respect and appreciation for the way the Kennedys handled the public spectacle. Ted Kennedy became a very good friend of my mother's and would call to check up on her, particularly when my father was out of office and ill. They became rather close and my mother was very fond of him."90 Whatever the basis of their reciprocated esteem and friendliness, it worked politically for both families, especially the political patriarchs, Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. It was the kind of bipartisan arrangement that is difficult to achieve today, when the personal and the political are one and the same.

Despite the loss of Republican control of the U.S. Senate in 1986 and the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal that cost him much of his effectiveness throughout 1987, President Reagan enjoyed an economy robust enough to support a rebound in popularity, just in time for the 1988 presidential election. Reagan had a favorite, his onetime foe, George H. W. Bush, who had been his loyal vice president for eight years. On paper, Bush was an odd combination of the Boston-Austin, Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Born in Massachusetts, Bush had developed his political career in Texas, though he was unlike the Bay State's JFK or the Lone Star State's LBJ. Bush had no well-defined style or base, but he was fortunate to have Reagan, and as the election unfolded, that was all that mattered.

Bush's political career was long, varied, and intertwined with that of every modern president. The son of a senator, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, Bush won his first elected post in February 1963 as chairman of the Harris County (Houston, Texas) Republican Committee. But he had his eye on something much bigger: the U.S. Senate seat of liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough. Conservatives who dominated Texas politics were unhappy with some of Yarborough's views, and it was mainly this dispute between John Connally's conservative faction and Ralph Yarborough's liberal faction that would, at Lyndon Johnson's urging, draw President Kennedy to the state in November 1963. Had the assassination never happened, Republican Senate nominee Bush might well have defeated Yarborough in 1964. Texas was turning increasingly Republican-the GOP's John Tower had captured LBJ's vacated Senate seat in a 1961 special election-and the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, which squeaked to victory in the Lone Star State in 1960, probably would not have won the same massive majority (63 percent) that Johnson on his own secured in Texas in 1964. But Johnson's presidential coattails sank Bush's first Senate bid, and he lost 56 to 44 percent.

Bush was persistent. He won election to the U.S. House from a conservative Houston district in 1966, and with his strong familial Capitol Hill ties, became the first freshman in sixty years to gain a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. The GOP House caucus was a sharp spur in Lyndon Johnson's side, but Bush was careful to maintain his family's good relations with the president.91 In January 1969, when Johnson yielded the presidency to Nixon, Bush broke away from the inaugural ceremonies and went to the airport to help see off LBJ and Lady Bird.92 The Johnsons never forgot this kindness, extended at a time when Johnson's popularity was at low ebb.

Of course Bush knew Johnson's influence in Texas would still be considerable in 1970, when Bush intended to try again to defeat Yarborough. It was to be a reasonably good Republican year in the South, and Bush would probably have succeeded in his quest-except conservative Democrat Lloyd Bentsen took out Yarborough first, in a Democratic primary. Bush went down to his second Senate defeat against Bentsen by 54 to 46 percent.

The resilient Bush became the Nixon-appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1971, and then the chairman of the Republican National Committee as Nixon began his second term in 1973. Defending Nixon during Watergate was not a choice assignment, but Bush managed to avoid being tarred. President Ford considered Bush for vice president, before choosing Nelson Rockefeller, and sent Bush instead to head the U.S. liaison office in the People's Republic of China. His last assignment for Ford, extending a year until Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency, was to head the CIA. In 1976, Ford again thought about Bush to replace Rockefeller as vice president, but Bob Dole was selected.

Bush had hoped Carter might keep him on as CIA director, and if that had happened, Bush might never have become president. Instead, Carter gave him a pink slip. Out of office for the first time in a decade, Bush set his sights on the White House in 1980, announcing his candidacy in May 1979. After winning Iowa and a few other contests, he yielded to Reagan and was eventually asked to join the GOP ticket as a safe backup to a failed effort to make Gerald Ford Reagan's running mate.

In 1988, Bush's moment had finally arrived, though politically he was not in a commanding position at first. There was a natural desire for change after eight turbulent years under Reagan, and Bush was the personification of the status quo. Democrats sensed impending victory, and other Republicans saw an opportunity to dislodge Bush by presenting themselves as standing for both change and continuity. Bob Dole was foremost among them, and he bested Bush in Iowa, where the sitting vice president did so poorly he placed third, behind the evangelical preacher Pat Robertson. With the critical help of Governor John Sununu in New Hampshire, Bush turned it around in the Granite State and became the Republican nominee presumptive.

Yet Bush's general election poll ratings were still dismal, and a bevy of Democrats was attracted to compete for their party's nomination. Once again, several of them decided that modeling their candidacy after John F. Kennedy-and presenting themselves to the voters as the next JFK-was the ticket to victory. Gary Hart came back for a second bite at the apple, and was the presumed frontrunner, until his extramarital affair with Donna Rice was revealed in May 1987.93 Delaware senator Joseph R. Biden, in the first of two unsuccessful campaigns for president, seized the Kennedy mantle by consciously applying JFK's inaugural dictum about defense policy to domestic concerns: "In the spirit of another time, let us pledge that our generation of Americans will pay any price, bear any burden, accept any challenge, meet any hardship to secure the blessings of prosperity and the promise of America for our children."94 Biden invoked John Kennedy so often that the other candidates kidded him about it, suggesting that in Oklahoma, for example, he might want to announce, "Ich bin ein Sooner."95 Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri was another "neo-Frontiersman," as the New York Times dubbed the Kennedy imitators. Gephardt frequently compared his ambitious agenda to JFK's moon landing challenge. The eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, was governor of Kennedy's Massachusetts, so the comparisons were inescapable. Dukakis declared that he would follow JFK's example of negotiating with the Soviet Union-though Kennedy's record was full of Cold War clashes and superpower competition. Like Hart and many other Democrats, Dukakis attributed his involvement in politics to JFK's inspiration. Clearly, there was an emotional tie for the famously unemotional Dukakis, who was seen wiping away tears at the dedication of a Bay State park to President Kennedy.96 Kennedy fever mainly touched the Democrats, but it was occasionally apparent on the Republican side, too. One of Bush's early opponents for the GOP presidential nomination, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, possessed a persona and appearance that had often reminded people of Kennedy. As he campaigned, Kemp claimed Kennedy had set the precedent for a full follow-through on Ronald Reagan's much discussed but never implemented "Star Wars" missile defense system:97 "John F. Kennedy didn't just talk about researching and testing [for] putting a man on the moon. John F. Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, we should not just research and test [the Strategic Defense Initiative]. We should research, test and deploy SDI."98 And the Reverend Pat Robertson, also in the race, used Kennedy's Catholicism to deflect criticism of his evangelical Protestant faith. His final newspaper advertisement in Iowa featured JFK's photo, and reminded readers that Kennedy had been criticized for his religion.99 Of course, Kennedy was not a priest, and he had been elected to the House and Senate; Robertson, a preacher, had never held any elected office, though his father had been a United States senator.100 The best-known intersection of John F. Kennedy and the 1988 campaign occurred on October 5 during the vice presidential candidates' debate. In fact, it was the single most celebrated moment of that entire political year. George Bush's choice for the second office, Indiana senator Dan Quayle, had had a difficult couple of months and was seen by some as insufficiently qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. In an effort to dispel that impression, Quayle had been noting in speeches that he had had almost as many years in Congress (twelve) as JFK had served when he ran for president (fourteen). In 1960, of course, Kennedy had been widely criticized for moving too soon with too little preparation for the White House, but almost three decades and an assassination later, JFK was untouchable and, figuratively at least, he had an honored place on Mount Rushmore. Fair or not, Quayle was not perceived by anyone to be in Kennedy's league. The Republican aspirant had been warned by his staff against utilizing the comparison to JFK, but he had either discounted the advice or forgotten it.101 Quayle's opponent for vice president, Democratic senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas-the man who had defeated Bush for Senate in 1970-had noticed Quayle's invocation of JFK. During the debate, panelist Tom Brokaw of NBC asked Quayle if he had a plan in mind for what he would do if he became president.

QUAYLE: Let me try to answer the question one more time ... because the question you are asking is what kind of qualifications does Dan Quayle have to be president ... ? I would make sure that the people in the Cabinet and the people that are advisors to the president are called in, and I would talk to them, and I will work with them ... I will be prepared not only because of my service in the Congress, but because of my ability to communicate and to lead. It is not just age, it's accomplishment; it's experience. I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency ...

BENTSEN: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy ... [Prolonged shouts and applause]

QUAYLE: That was really uncalled for, Senator. [Shouts and applause]

BENTSEN: You are the one that was making the comparison, Senator-and I'm one who knew him well. And frankly I think you are so far apart in the objectives you choose for your country that I did not think the comparison was well taken.102 Quayle never really recovered from this exchange. He became vice president because Bush soundly defeated Dukakis by 53.4 to 45.6 percent, though it is possible Quayle cost Bush a percentage point or two.103 More damaging for Quayle, the image of a not-ready-for-prime-time player stuck, reinforced by other verbal gaffes he committed while in office.104 When Quayle sought the presidency himself in 1999, he fared so poorly-finishing eighth in the well-known Ames, Iowa, straw poll-that he withdrew and backed George W. Bush. Ironically, Quayle had more governmental experience than any other 2000 Republican presidential contender, including Bush, but it was too late for experience to do Quayle much good. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Quayle became the second Republican, after Richard Nixon, whom John Kennedy defeated in a nationally televised debate.

Unlike President Reagan, President Bush rarely mentioned John F. Kennedy in his public speeches and comments. Perhaps the 1988 Quayle incident was part of the explanation; any JFK reference by Bush could be turned by comics or political opponents into a dig at the vice president. Perhaps the Kennedy strategy was also too closely associated with Reagan. Once in office, Bush put some distance between his approach-a "kinder, gentler" one-and Reagan's more hard-edged ideology. It is also true that the policies Reagan tied to Kennedy were no longer on the front burner. Instead of tax cuts, Bush agreed to a tax increase as part of a 1990 budget deal, a decision that violated his "no new taxes" campaign pledge and would harm his reelection bid. Moreover, the JFK-Reagan Cold War rhetoric became passe when Communism collapsed in 1989 throughout the Soviet empire.

It is also true that Bush's father, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, had not been keen on the Kennedy clan, and he had surely made his views known to his son, the future president. In April 1969, the elder Bush, then a former senator, sent a letter to Clover Dulles, the wife of JFK's former CIA director, expressing disgust with the Kennedy brothers' handling of the Bay of Pigs episode: I recall in the summer of 1961, after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, you were away and we called Allen to come for supper, and he accepted. That afternoon he called and asked if he could bring a friend, and we said "surely." So he brought John McCone, whom we had known well, but had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen's. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said, in good spirit, that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came [the] next day. We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them. [Misspellings corrected here.]105 Occasionally, though, Bush gave a nod to Camelot. His inaugural pledge to honor the old virtues of patriotism and community service, and his call to Americans to give of their time and energy to do what government cannot, struck some as reminiscent of John Kennedy's "ask not" entreaty.106 Bush's robust foreign policy, from Panama to Kuwait to the former Soviet and Eastern European republics, was in the Kennedy tradition. And though not as frequent as in the Reagan administration, Bush extended courtesies to the Kennedys, such as a proclamation in honor of Rose Kennedy's hundredth birthday in 1990.107 As with his predecessors, Bush could not avoid leftover controversies from November 22, 1963. Bush lived in Houston in 1963, and he actually called the Dallas office of the FBI soon after the assassination to report an individual who had made a threat against the life of President Kennedy.108 From time to time, conspiracy theorists have sought to tie Bush to the assassination itself, based on references to Bush here and there in the voluminous records of the assassination. Not a shred of convincing proof of Bush's involvement has ever been produced, and this claim appears even more specious than the insinuation than LBJ was behind John Kennedy's murder.109 Actually, President Bush made a positive, if limited, contribution to the effort to reveal all the facts about the assassination when he signed the Assassination Records and Collection Act (ARCA).110 This law, passed by Congress in 1992, was a direct result of the public's demand for full disclosure by the government after the release of Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 movie JFK. Near the twentieth anniversary of the release of JFK, I asked Oliver Stone how his film had approached the body of evidence accumulated about the Kennedy assassination. He admitted that he had employed artistic license to go beyond the known facts. "I view the JFK assassination as the Moby Dick of American stories," Stone said. "It is the great mystery and is the white whale ... I felt like Ahab going after the white whale ... There were just too many weird things that happened ... All you can say is [my movie is] a countermyth. We can't prove it." A filmmaker has no obligation to produce a historically faithful documentary, and in that, Stone is on solid ground. Still, Americans-especially those too young to remember November 22, 1963-often interpret Stone's film as a cross between documentary and expose. Stone's own term "countermyth" ought to be part of the advertising for all showings.111 President Bush may or may not have seen Stone's film during its original release, but his ARCA signing statement shows that he had some reservations about the structure of the board that would review JFK-related documents, and more broadly, a former CIA director was probably not enthusiastic about shining sunlight into some of the dark corners of the agency he loved. Nonetheless, he was presented with the bill as his reelection campaign drew to a close, and given the substantial popular support for it, Bush affixed his signature on October 26, 1992.112 Ten days later, Bush would be ousted as president by a man who idolized President Kennedy. Enforcement of the Assassination Records and Collection Act-and preservation of the Kennedy legacy-would pass to Bill Clinton.

afMrs. Reagan, now in her nineties, relayed to us through her son Ron Jr. that she does not remember any such conversation taking place. E-mail from Ron Reagan, Jr., May 10, 2012.

agThis was not just a first-term phenomenon; my own study of presidential citations, detailed later in the book, shows that Reagan continued to cite President Kennedy with frequency in his second term.

18.

Clinton Grabs Kennedy's Torch

Rarely if ever in american history has one president hero-worshipped another president the way Bill Clinton idolized John F. Kennedy.

On July 24, 1963, seventeen-year-old Bill Clinton was an Arkansas delegate to Boys Nation in Washington. He had met with his state's U.S. senators on the trip but was most looking forward to a brief audience with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. The youthful Clinton had long identified with the Democratic Party and its new star. He recalled sitting in front of the TV set, "transfixed," as JFK fought a losing battle to be Adlai Stevenson's 1956 running mate at the Democratic National Convention. In 1960, encouraged by a couple of Democratic teachers in a heavily Republican county, Clinton had sided with Kennedy in a ninth-grade civics class debate.1 And he had been delighted that November when Arkansas, and the country, voted for JFK.

Now in close proximity to his president, Clinton planned to make the most of the moment. The future president positioned himself at the front of the line so that, even if Kennedy "shook only two or three" hands, his would be one of them. After receiving a Boys Nation T-shirt, JFK strode down the steps and outstretched his hand. Sure enough, Bill Clinton's hand met his.2 And fortuitously for Clinton, a black-and-white movie camera recorded the second that the thirty-fifth president met the forty-second. That brief segment of film would show up again in TV ads and a Democratic National Convention video presentation in 1992. The torch had been passed yet again.

The Rose Garden handshake was much on Clinton's mind after he was told of President Kennedy's assassination. His calculus teacher broke the news to the class, and Clinton recalled a man "so full of life and strength" four months earlier. He also remembered a classmate from that afternoon who remarked that "maybe it was a good thing for the country" that JFK was shot-her feelings no doubt stemming from civil rights controversies that had rocked Arkansas since the 1950s.3 After Clinton moved to Washington to attend Georgetown University in 1964, he became friends with a dormitory floor mate, Tommy Caplan, who had interviewed JFK in 1960 and later convinced members of his administration to establish a pilot project for a "junior Peace Corps" so that youngsters could correspond with their peers in developing countries. Inevitably Clinton and Caplan pursued their common interest as friends, from visiting President Kennedy's grave to exploring the National Archives, where JFK secretary Evelyn Lincoln was cataloging the late president's personal items for history. Mrs. Lincoln showed the young men President Kennedy's famous rocking chair and many other mementos.4 "[The JFK assassination] was the first real tragedy that any of us had ever confronted," Caplan recalls. "It wasn't that Bill Clinton and I uniquely talked about it, we were probably two of the only people who had any direct connection to the [Kennedy] White House."5 Caplan's comments reinforce the notion that Clinton's brief encounter with Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden helped guide his destiny.

Like John Kennedy had been, Bill Clinton was a young man in a hurry. His years at Georgetown were followed by a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University (though he failed to get a degree in the end), law school at Yale, and a quick return to Arkansas to begin his political career with a close but losing run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974. His marriage to Yale classmate Hillary Rodham in 1975 was quickly followed by his election as state attorney general in 1976 and successful campaign for governor in 1978. At age thirty-two, Clinton was one of the youngest governors in American history, marking Clinton as a comer.

From time to time, Clinton quoted JFK in his speeches,6 but the governor of this socially conservative Southern state gave a wide berth to Ted Kennedy's presidential candidacy in 1980. Clinton stuck with Jimmy Carter, much to the dismay of his friends from the 1972 McGovern campaign.7 But politically, Clinton could hardly have done otherwise.

The irony is that Carter's growing unpopularity, combined with the White House's decision to send thousands of Cuban refugees to be housed in Arkansas, created a Republican tidal wave in 1980 that swept Clinton out of office after a single two-year term.8 Reagan's coattails elected the GOP's Frank White to replace Clinton as governor, and his once-bright future seemed shattered. Clinton had contributed to the debacle himself, trying to do too much all at once, instituting a hated increase in the car tax and assembling a staff that looked and acted too liberal for Arkansas.9 As Clinton himself later wrote, "I organized the governor's office without a chief of staff ... President Kennedy had organized his White House in a similar way, but his guys all had short hair, boring suits, white shirts, and dark, narrow ties. [Clinton's top staffers] all had beards and were less constrained in their dress code."10 But Clinton quickly demonstrated the resilience that would mark his political exploits. In a campaign noted for its emphasis on humility, listening instead of talking, and redemption, Clinton worked his way back into Arkansans' favor. Assisted by a deep recession that hurt Republicans in the 1982 midterms, the youthful ex-governor ousted Frank White to secure a nonconsecutive second term. Clinton never let down his guard again, and he never faced another serious challenge in Arkansas, winning gubernatorial reelection in 1984, 1986 (when the term was lengthened to four years), and 1990.

In the midst of his fourth term, Clinton seriously considered a presidential run. Preparations were well under way, and the national press corps was called to Little Rock in July 1987 to hear Clinton's long-awaited announcement. But Clinton had long before chosen to emulate the seedier side of John F. Kennedy, and his many sins of the flesh caught up with him. Not long after his gubernatorial defeat in 1980, journalists in Arkansas had received tips about Clinton's extramarital activities. Sure enough, Clinton eventually hinted that he had first "brought pain" into his marriage at about that time.11 (Close observers of Clinton say it started long before then.) Over the years, the evidence had mounted-inescapable proof both to Clinton's fellow politicians and those closest to Clinton in his political circle. At National Governors Association meetings in Washington and around the nation, Clinton's fellow state chief executives would sometimes make bets on which young woman in the room would be approached by their Arkansas colleague, who usually was not accompanied by his wife. The governor's Arkansas staff was loyal, but it was impossible for them to overlook the accumulating evidence that was close at hand. The night before Clinton's scheduled presidential announcement, his gubernatorial chief of staff, Betsey Wright, reviewed a lengthy list of women who had been linked to the handsome governor. After a number of replies from the governor along the lines of "She'll never say anything," it was obvious that Clinton had a big problem. Looking back, decades later, Wright said, "I felt betrayed. He lied to me. He lied to a lot of people about [adultery], not least of whom was himself."12 Two months before Clinton's announcement, in May 1987, Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart had been forced out of the race in the midst of an extramarital scandal, and Hart had been asked, "Have you ever committed adultery?"13 Given the widespread, substantive rumors about Clinton's womanizing, the question was inevitable, and the answer was unavoidable. To the considerable surprise of the gathered media, a subdued Clinton accepted reality and declared that he would not run, citing the classic excuse that he wanted to spend more time with family.14 Even at that time, the scuttlebutt throughout the national political community was about Clinton's extramarital affairs. This experience was just a hint of what was to come, and amazingly, the highly intelligent Clinton learned little or nothing from his brush with private life revelations.

The year actually got worse for Clinton. He was invited to give the main nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, potentially a great opportunity to shine and position himself for the future. Instead, Clinton showed he lacked John F. Kennedy's flair when it came to rhetorical ability. Clinton's address quoted JFK in its final paragraph: In closing, I want you to remember that in November, when Michael Dukakis is elected president, we will observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of President Kennedy's death. But Mike's victory will be a tribute to the life and legacy of John Kennedy, to the boundless optimism, the grace, the courage, and the sheer joy with which he urged us forward. The great Israeli statesman Abba Eban began his memorial tribute to President Kennedy with this simple, stirring statement: "Tragedy is the difference between what is and what might have been." Michael Dukakis has spent his entire public life closing the gap between what is and what might have been.15 It was Clinton's best paragraph, not because of the Kennedy passage but because it began, "In closing ..." Clinton talked much too long, with little apparent emotion, and the crowd turned restless with delegates and guests loudly talking over the Arkansas governor in a thousand private conversations. The magic words "in closing" generated Clinton's only real ovation. A few days later, arranged by a couple of backers with Hollywood ties, Clinton appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In a prearranged gag, when Clinton sat next to him, Carson pulled out an hourglass to set a time limit on the governor's gab. A good laugh washed away much of the convention embarrassment.16 As it happened, Clinton was fortunate his White House dreams were deferred. Peace, prosperity, and a popular GOP incumbent probably would have defeated any 1988 Democratic nominee, though a more appealing candidate than Michael Dukakis might have made the contest closer. With his long governorship very likely in its final term, and no U.S. Senate vacancy in sight, Bill Clinton realized that 1992 might well be his best shot at the presidency.

George H. W. Bush's sizable winning margin in 1988 and subsequent victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War led most Democrats to think he would be unbeatable for reelection. Yet a mild recession in 1991 gave Clinton reason to think otherwise. Moreover, as a small-state governor with some obvious personal baggage, he benefited from the decisions of party heavyweights such as New York governor Mario Cuomo and New Jersey senator Bill Bradley to skip the 1992 race. Against the odds, Clinton took the plunge in October 1991 and launched his campaign.

One of his themes from the start was to emulate, as he put it, "John Kennedy's ethic of mutual responsibility, asking citizens to give something back to their country ..."17 Clinton soon announced that one of his presidential goals would be the creation of a "Democracy Corps" of American legal, financial, and political specialists sent abroad to augment the Peace Corps.18 Clinton's campaign speeches contained many references to JFK and his policies, from investment tax credits to spur business expansion to the need for religious tolerance.19 Much like Jimmy Carter had done in 1976, Clinton even reversed roles with JFK-going to Notre Dame as a Southern Baptist to appeal for Catholic votes.20 "Clinton always thought of Kennedy as a performer [and] Clinton viewed Kennedy as a kind of 'third way' [moderate] Democrat," says James Carville, Clinton's chief campaign strategist.21 Thus, Clinton's gestures, speech patterns, and less liberal, more pragmatic politics show a clear Kennedy influence.

As the early front-runner, Clinton was expected to win the New Hampshire primary, even though another candidate given to Kennedy allusions, former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, was also running. The first hurdle was Clinton's Vietnam-era draft record, which was decidedly un-Kennedy-like. In order to avoid the unpopular war, Clinton had used his connections to evade the military draft and was less than forthcoming about the details.22 PT 109 it was not. Of course, prominent Republicans such as Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had used multiple deferments to skip Vietnam service, and future president George W. Bush and the incumbent vice president, Dan Quayle, had joined the National Guard. All had connections of some sort within the system, and they used them, like many thousands of potential draftees in that era. But while legal, and given the nature of the war, somewhat understandable, these actions were not admirable in a political context.

Clinton's draft controversy was chicken feed compared to the full feast on the table laid by Gennifer Flowers. The onetime Arkansas lounge singer stunned the political world in January 1992 with an allegation that she had had a longtime affair with Clinton. Her charges were published in the Star, a supermarket tabloid that paid Flowers for the story, but they were given credence thanks to her tapes of private phone conversations with Governor Clinton about how she should handle questions concerning their relationship. Flowers held a full-blown press conference carried live on CNN to present her evidence, and many analysts at the time thought Clinton was finished politically. As Newsweek put it, "Old CW [conventional wisdom]: Hooray, the new JFK. New CW: Uh-oh, the new JFK."23 Clinton fought back, with unconvincing, misleading blanket denials and with a more effective, not-so-secret weapon, Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a joint appearance on 60 Minutes, the Clintons presented the image of a modern couple that had worked through problems in their marriage, with Hillary insisting she was not "some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."24 Once the front-runner, Bill Clinton finished second behind Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary. But he had survived the crises that threatened to eject him from presidential politics, and he declared himself to be "the Comeback Kid" as he declared "victory" with his second-place showing. Clinton won the Democratic nomination mainly because there was no convincing, credible alternative to him in the race. What did not kill Clinton made him stronger-at least until the Monica Lewinsky scandal during his presidency. Though there would be many other lower-level rumors and allegations about Clinton's past and present womanizing in 1992, some of them likely true, he never again faced scrutiny so intense that his candidacy was endangered.25 Volumes have been written about the Clintons' marriage, but it may not be all that different from the one that existed between President and Mrs. Kennedy. John Kennedy and Bill Clinton loved their wives, had children with them, and understood they were great assets politically. At the same time, both men were driven by their own apparently uncontrollable desires and demons to commit adultery on a regular basis, oblivious to, or uncaring about, the pain this caused their spouses. For their part, the wives placed a high priority on protecting the children, as well as preserving their marriages and their status. Jackie and Hillary were often angry at their husbands, and privately lashed out at them in various ways, Jackie with her free-spending habits and frequent absences from White House duties, and Hillary by her berating of Bill in private settings. Still, the wives stood by their husbands stoically in public, maybe hoping in vain for maturation in their behavior as they grew older. Politics is careerist for couples, and political marriages are partnerships that benefit husbands and wives. The professional bargain that is struck can often outlast the intimate bonds of a spousal relationship.

The personal aspects receded as the strange politics of 1992 continued to unfold. A sputtering economy erased the polling heights once enjoyed by President Bush. Triumph in the 1991 Persian Gulf War seemed a long time past, and the Clinton campaign adopted the perfect slogan to reflect the public's anxieties: "It's the economy, stupid!" Bush and his campaign team, expecting Clinton to collapse under the weight of various scandals, did not take the Democrat seriously until it was too late. "Can you imagine Bill Clinton sitting there?" Bush quipped a few months before the election, pointing toward his chair in the Oval Office as his closest advisers laughed.26 The overconfidence was supplemented by a lack of energy and focus on Bush's part that may well have been a consequence of Graves' disease, an immune disorder caused by an overactive thyroid gland that was diagnosed in the president in 1991. His friend and campaign manager Fred Malek recalled, "[During the '88 campaign] I would get calls from [Bush] two or three times a week around seven A.M., with kind of a rat-tat-tat of different recommendations that he wanted me to think about and follow up. I'd get calls a couple of times a week to come up to the vice president's residence after work and chat with him and Barbara ... He was just full of ideas and thoughts and initiatives. Contrast that with 1992 when I came back and had frequent contact once again. It was altogether different. He wasn't reaching out. He wasn't doing those things. Of course, he was president then and had a full-time job. But it was quite clear there was a profound change in his energy and demeanor."27 Just as consequential as the economy and Graves' disease was the independent candidacy of the billionaire businessman Ross Perot. Bush's fellow Texan aimed most of his fire at Bush, double-teaming the president with Clinton. Polls, studies, and opinions differ about whether Perot's sizable 19 percent of the November voteah enabled Clinton to win with 43 percent (to Bush's 37)-or whether by then, Clinton would have won an outright majority against Bush had it been a two-man contest. Certainly, polls at the time showed Clinton thumping Bush in a head-to-head matchup.28 Clinton's own superbly focused campaign played a role in his remarkable yearlong resurrection. The Gallup poll had Clinton in third place, behind both Perot and Bush, as late as June 1992.29 Yet Clinton never let Bush up off the mat on the economy, and Perot eliminated himself from serious consideration by withdrawing in July after some bizarre charges about Republican plans to disrupt his daughter's wedding. (Perot reentered the contest in early October, but by then he had forfeited any real chance of winning.)30 This process of elimination left Clinton, even with his credibility problems and the strong scent of scandal, as the only possible route to change in the country's direction.

Clinton seized the opportunity and converted himself from the second coming of JFK the womanizer to the reincarnation of JFK the inspirational leader. Like Kennedy, Clinton fared well in debates, mastering the art of "feeling the pain" of people in distress. "You ought to read my mail," Clinton told Rolling Stone. "People my age writing me, saying they haven't felt this way since Kennedy was president ..."31 In Clinton's campaign proposals and speeches, President Kennedy, as the journalist Joe Klein suggested, "made Clinton seem larger-large enough, ultimately, to unseat the incumbent President of the United States."32 His nominating convention in New York City in mid-July was consciously designed to evoke Kennedy parallels, not least because a Hollywood producer on his team had studied the films of the 1960 Democratic National Convention.33 An elaborate tribute to Robert Kennedy featured his son, Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Senator Ted Kennedy.34 When Clinton broke with tradition and appeared in the convention hall on the night he officially won the nomination-usually, candidates appear only to give an acceptance address on the closing night-Clinton explained his reasoning to the cheering delegates: "Thirty-two years ago another young candidate who wanted to get this country moving again came to the convention to say a simple thank you."35 The next night, a film was shown on national television and in the hall to introduce Clinton just before his big speech; the emotional highlight for excited delegates, and probably for the audience at home, was the brief clip of Boys Nation delegate Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. In the film, Clinton's mother drove home the point: "When he came home from Boys Nation with this picture of John Kennedy and himself shaking hands, I've never seen such an expression on a man's face in my life. He just had such pride. And I knew then that government in some form would be his goal."36 (On Clinton's first day in office, he took pride in showing his mother precisely where he had stood in the Rose Garden when he shook JFK's hand.)37 The selection of Senator Albert Gore as vice president reinforced the theme of generational change. Even the convention's musical theme, Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," was designed to contrast Clinton's youthfulness and energy with President Bush's age (sixty-eight) and his alleged personal and policy exhaustion.

Whatever the precise combination of factors that elevated him, Clinton's almost lifelong ambition to be president became a reality on November 3, 1992. At forty-six, just three years older than John F. Kennedy was when he entered the White House, Clinton was the seventh president to succeed JFK. The twenty-two years in age that separated Clinton from his predecessor Bush was the second largest in American history, only exceeded by the twenty-seven-year age gap between JFK and Eisenhower.

Clinton's embrace OF John F. Kennedy was no campaign gimmick or passing fancy. The news media sensed it and emphasized the theme. Within forty-eight hours of the election, the incoming Clinton White House was being compared to Camelot in TV news programs.38 Time stressed the Kennedy-Clinton parallels in naming Clinton its 1992 Man of the Year.39 The public caught the wave, with a sizable plurality in a Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll saying the past president most reminiscent of Clinton was, of course, JFK.40 And the nation's premier satirical program, Saturday Night Live, produced a skit with Madonna singing "Happy Inauguration Day" to an actor portraying Bill Clinton, in a takeoff of Marilyn Monroe's sexy rendition of "Happy Birthday to You" for JFK.41 The Clinton administration began with a symbolic nod to the new president's idol. On inauguration eve, January 19, 1993, President-elect and Mrs. Clinton joined Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., to visit the graves of JFK and RFK in Arlington Cemetery.42 Clinton placed a long-stemmed white rose on each grave.43 To no one's surprise, President Clinton's inaugural address the next day contained echoes of President Kennedy's. "Let us begin anew," said both men. JFK asserted, "Now the trumpet summons us again," as the torch was passed to a new generation, with Kennedy asking what "you can do for your country," with God's work on earth being our own. Clinton intoned: "We have heard the trumpets. We have changed the guard. And now, each in our own way and with God's help, we must answer the call."44 Clinton also became the first president since JFK to invite a poet to participate in the inaugural ceremony; Maya Angelou succeeded Robert Frost in this special role.45 Though Bill Clinton's devotion to JFK was real, he also certainly understood the political advantages of the juxtaposition. However, at least at first, Clinton might not have fully realized the risks inherent in competing with a heroic myth. Immediately, Clinton's workmanlike but uninspiring inaugural address was held up to JFK's gold standard and found wanting. The historian Garry Wills called Clinton's language "flimsy" next to Kennedy's: "Great writing is something you can lean your weight against; it will resist ... Flimsy language 'gives,' as if you were putting your hand through stage scenery."46 Throughout his presidency, Clinton was often called articulate but not eloquent. John Kennedy possessed an unusual gravitas-perhaps a combination of handsome visage, vocal distinctiveness, natural wit, and the ability to turn a memorable phrase (with wordsmith Ted Sorensen's considerable aid). JFK also instinctively knew that in politics, at the presidential level, less is more. By contrast, Bill Clinton personified his generation's rhetorical (and other) excesses. More is better; extra words can create escape hatches; phrases must be inserted to cover all constituency bases. With the possible exception of one powerful speech after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the only universally memorable public utterance from the Clinton years is the pitiful and untruthful, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."47 Given Clinton's embrace of all things Kennedy, it is not unreasonable to think about the Clinton presidency in Kennedy-like terms, both in similarities and differences. Both men were resilient: Kennedy bounced back from serious illnesses, and Clinton came back from defeats for Congress and governor, as well as surviving enough scandals to sink a battleship. Of course, Kennedy never lost an elective contest, primary or general, unless one counts the vice presidential nomination at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. Nor did Kennedy have to struggle to rise to the top; he was to the manor born. Clinton didn't have a father like Joseph Kennedy. His real father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., died in a traffic accident even before Clinton was born, and Clinton-originally named Blythe III-took his surname from his sometimes angry, wife-beating stepdad, Roger Clinton. JFK floated into prep school and Harvard, but Clinton had to work very hard to travel from Arkansas to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law.

After choosing two different pathways to the presidency-Kennedy the Senate, Clinton a state governorship-they entered office with many opponents questioning their legitimacy. To this day many Republicans insist that JFK and LBJ stole the 1960 election with vote fraud in Illinois and Texas, while Clinton had difficulty overcoming his low 43 percent plurality of the vote in 1992.

The most telling similarity between the two administrations may be the trouble both Democrats had getting their programs through a heavily Democratic Congress. In both cases, an alliance between Republicans and conservative Democrats frustrated many of their legislative initiatives, including health care. Kennedy's Medicare proposals had to wait for LBJ's term, while Clinton's "Hillary-care" effort collapsed entirely. Clinton ended up in a far worse situation, since his failures early in his administration produced GOP control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm election and for the rest of Clinton's tenure. Two government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 were the result of executive-legislative deadlock, although eventually Clinton and Republican leaders were able to reach compromises on some topics, such as free trade, welfare reform, and crime control. Even had he completed two terms, JFK would never have had to face a Republican majority in either house, given his era's Democratic dominance on Capitol Hill.

Every White House has its share of crises, and there were elements of Kennedy's in the early 1960s that still resonated for Clinton in the 1990s. Bill Clinton had to deal with an early domestic disaster that paralleled JFK's Bay of Pigs fiasco: the Waco tragedy. Just three months after Clinton assumed the presidency, seventy-six people (including more than twenty children and two pregnant women) were killed after a fifty-one-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. This Protestant sect's flock was under the control of an unstable cult leader, David Koresh. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI, supervised by Attorney General Janet Reno, were the government agencies directly in charge of the situation. Clinton himself delegated final decision-making authority on Waco to Reno. Even though he had actually wanted to hold out longer to try more peaceful means of conflict resolution, he gave in to the insistence of Reno, among others, for a more aggressive approach. In retrospect, Clinton would regret this, though he continued to back Reno publicly.48 Both sides at Waco were exceptionally well armed, and soon after the final assault began, the entire complex was consumed by fire. The government asserted the conflagration was a result of arson by the Davidians themselves, while the surviving sect members insisted that the FBI's equipment and tactics led to the calamity. In any event, much of the public was horrified by the results-and some Americans were radicalized by it. The Waco siege figured prominently in the motives cited by Timothy McVeigh, the convicted (and later executed) Oklahoma City bomber. McVeigh chose April 19, 1995-the second anniversary of Waco-to explode his car bomb at the city's federal building, killing 168 people including many children, with roughly seven hundred injured.49 Waco occurred for Clinton at almost precisely the same moment in his young presidency that the Bay of Pigs invasion did for Kennedy (April 1619). New presidents can make mistakes, trusting too much in their advisers' judgments, and these tragedies are classic examples. Just as the Bay of Pigs led in some ways to the Cuban Missile Crisis-the Russians became convinced Kennedy was weak and they could take advantage-so, too, did Waco lead to a greater catastrophe at Oklahoma City. Nonetheless, for both JFK and Clinton, a by-product of their early missteps was a strengthening of their two presidencies, and the subsequent crises enhanced their position. JFK had no greater triumph than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Clinton's skillful comforting of the shell-shocked residents of Oklahoma City is the moment some mark as the beginning of his political recovery after the 1994 Republican midterm landslide, on his way to a successful reelection.50 The connections between and among presidents, even those serving decades apart, are inevitable. For example, President Clinton replaced the last remaining JFK appointee on the Supreme Court in 1993. Kennedy friend Byron "Whizzer" White, having served three decades, retired and was replaced by Clinton's choice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Foreign policy ties among presidencies are especially strong. Containing the Soviet Union was an overriding focus for every White House occupant from Truman through Bush. Clinton was the first to benefit from the absence of the Cold War-though it was soon replaced by the threat of terrorism. As much as Cuba bedeviled JFK, the island nation ninety miles to the south of Florida proved to be a major irritant for Clinton. Thirty-eight years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had to deal with the fallout from the repatriation of a six-year-old Cuban refugee, Elian Gonzalez. The boy's mother had drowned while trying to escape to the United States from Cuba, but Elian made it and was placed with relatives. The boy's father, still in Cuba, then demanded his return, and the American courts eventually agreed. In a raid on the Miami home of Elian's relatives in April 2000, the youngster was seized and sent back to Cuba by U.S. government agents, again supervised by controversial attorney general Reno. A famous photo shows Elian hiding in a closet, terrified by the appearance of an armed-to-the-teeth law enforcer.51 This angered many Cuban Americans, a key voting bloc, and the searing incident may well have cost Al Gore far more than the 537 votes by which he lost Florida and the White House in the fall 2000 election.

A poignant JFK-Clinton link was forged on Vietnam, as Clinton brought to a final conclusion the greatest foreign policy mistake of the 1960s. As the first opponent of the Vietnam War to be elected president, and having evaded military service, Clinton was handicapped in his role as commander in chief in the eyes of some. His 1993 initiation of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and lesbians in the military was deeply controversial at the time, in part because of Clinton's draft record. But Clinton saw an opportunity to bring the era of divisiveness over American involvement in Vietnam, begun in earnest during the Kennedy administration, to an end. Clinton was encouraged by a letter he had received as president-elect from JFK and LBJ's defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, a primary architect of the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia. McNamara referred to Clinton's Oxford roommate, Frank Aller, who resisted the Vietnam draft and committed suicide in 1971: "For me-and I believe for the nation as well-the Vietnam War finally ended the day you were elected president. By their votes, the American people, at long last, recognized that the Allers and the Clintons, when they questioned the wisdom and morality of their government's decisions relating to Vietnam, were no less patriotic than those who served in uniform."52 With the help of Vietnam veterans in Congress from both parties, Clinton pursued normalization of relations with Vietnam. In 1995, diplomatic relations were established between the former foes, and shortly after the 2000 election, Clinton journeyed to Vietnam for the first official state visit by a president of the United States.

Dramatic events aside, the underlying foundation for the popularity of both Kennedy and Clinton as president was a strong economy. JFK's tax cut in public memory is attributable to Republican praise of it, not Democratic support. Clinton was associated with the opposite, an income tax increase, which he engineered in 1993.53 (Clinton also signed GOP-sponsored tax reductions in estate and capital gains levies in 1997.)54 Both Kennedy and Clinton were considered fiscal moderates; they were tight-fisted in some ways and ran up relatively small deficits, or in Clinton's case, eventually achieved a balanced budget.55 What mattered most, however, was that the gross domestic product expanded at a fast clip under JFK (5.5 percent) and Clinton (5.8 percent), while joblessness averaged just under 6 percent for Kennedy and 5.2 percent for Clinton.56 Whether their policies were wise or they were just lucky, both presidents are linked in history with prosperity. Nothing leaves a better impression on the American public than a robust economy.

Another direct JFK-Clinton bond could be seen in the establishment of AmeriCorps.57 President Clinton fulfilled a campaign promise by further applying the idea of the Peace Corps to opportunities for domestic service, from after-school tutoring to environmental protection.58 Young people who work 1,700 hours over the typical eleven-month term of service earn a living allowance and up to $5,550 that can be applied to college or graduate school. When he signed the AmeriCorps legislation in September 1993, the Peace Corps' first director, JFK brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, was on hand and lent Clinton one of the pens Kennedy had used to sign the Peace Corps bill in 1961.

Bill clinton had a luxury denied to President Kennedy-eight full years in office. After the 1994 Republican landslide, Clinton looked very vulnerable to defeat for reelection. But by the time 1996 arrived, the economy was rebounding vigorously, and there was little question that Clinton would beat Republican nominee Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1976 GOP vice presidential nominee. A triumph JFK had hoped for was earned by Clinton, as he swept 379 electoral votes and won the popular vote by 8 percentage points (49 to 41 percent), with Ross Perot again on the ballot and securing about 8 percent.

Clinton's second term turned out to be anything but a victory lap, though. Instead of building "the bridge to the twenty-first century" that he had talked about on the campaign trail, Clinton mainly answered for scandals in his past and present. The problems, many stemming from Clinton's gubernatorial tenure, had been mounting throughout his White House years. Less than a year into his presidency, some Arkansas troopers and other state employees began talking to various news media outlets, claiming they had facilitated Governor Clinton's extramarital affairs in Little Rock and elsewhere.59 Precisely a year after the inauguration, Attorney General Reno acceded to Republican demands and named an independent counsel, Robert Fiske, to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton's investment in an Arkansas real estate development called Whitewater, which had been discussed during the 1992 campaign and became a press obsession in 1993 and 1994.60 A few months later, a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, filed a civil lawsuit claiming Governor Clinton had made explicit sexual advances toward her, including exposing himself, in 1991.61 The water was rising behind a dam that, fortunately for Clinton, would not burst until after he was safely reelected.

Just short of a year into Clinton's second term, the die was cast when former solicitor general Kenneth Starr, who had replaced Robert Fiske as the independent counsel in 1994, received permission from Janet Reno to expand his investigation beyond Whitewater. His focus was on some explosive information he had received-that President Clinton had carried on an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky from November 1995 until March 1997. On January 17, 1998, Clinton gave sworn testimony for the Paula Jones lawsuit. In the deposition, he denied having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. Within a few days, the story was fully public, virtually wiping out all other news and dominating the headlines until 1999.62 In front of reporters and TV cameras in the White House, an angry President Clinton wagged his finger and repeated his denial in the most-replayed video clip of his tenure ("I did not have sexual relations ...").63 The country avidly followed a presidency that became a high-stakes soap opera. By August Clinton was forced to admit to a grand jury (the first ever in which a president appeared in his own defense) and then to the nation in a televised address that he had had "a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate."64 By this time, Clinton knew that Ken Starr had accumulated evidence of the affair; as it happened, the proof included a blue dress worn by Lewinsky during one of her encounters with Clinton that was stained with his semen.65 Clinton continued to insist that he had not lied in the Jones deposition because of his use of the present tense-that is, denying only that the affair was a current one. By that time, he was no longer seeing Lewinsky. Clinton also claimed that because only fellatio was involved, no real sexual relations took place-an assertion that produced widespread scorn and gave late-night comedians a ratings boost.

On September 9, 1998 Starr delivered to Congress a scathing, explicit report about his four-year investigation. Having lied under oath, Clinton was an impeachment target in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. On December 16 President Clinton became the second chief executive, after Andrew Johnson, to be impeached by the House, which justified its action on the basis of Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice. There was never any chance Clinton would be convicted by the Senate, since a two-thirds vote (67 senators) was required for conviction and there were only 55 GOP senators. Clinton's long ordeal officially ended on February 12, 1999, when the Senate failed to convict on any charge. Two months later Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by a federal judge, and he was eventually compelled to pay Paula Jones's lawyers $90,000 in compensation for the extra work they performed because of Clinton's false testimony.66 Separately, Paula Jones had also been awarded $850,000, though all but $200,000 of that was for her legal expenses.67 Clinton paid from a legal fund he had established, but admitted no wrongdoing in her case. In a final indignity, handed down just a day before he left the White House in 2001, Clinton's law license was suspended for five years by the Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Responsibility, and Clinton had to pay an additional fine of $25,000.68 While Clinton was a diminished president after the airing of his very dirty laundry, the Republicans did themselves no favor either. The public wanted Clinton censured, not ousted from office, and the electorate punished the GOP for overplaying its hand, depriving the party of expected gains in Congress during the 1998 midterm election. The Republicans lost five seats in the House, and added no seats in the Senate, despite early expectations that they would gain substantially in both houses. Instead of Clinton leaving office, it was Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich who resigned his post, forced out by an unhappy GOP caucus that learned he had been conducting an extramarital affair at the same time he had been capitalizing on Clinton's woes.69 The nation learned anew that hypocrisy is often the lifeblood of politics.

The contrast between the standards for presidents applied in the 1960s and the 1990s is stark. John Kennedy's sexual shenanigans in the White House were likely more frequent and every bit as outrageous as Bill Clinton's. JFK carried on an affair with a young intern, too, and did so more or less openly in front of trusted staffers.70 The moral reprehensibility is clear in both cases, but the accepted norms under which the men operated were akin to night and day. In JFK's time, public men, even presidents, were given a free pass by the press on their dalliances, while Clinton had had lesson after lesson on the dangers of adultery during his governorship, his 1992 campaign, and his pre-Lewinsky White House days. Clinton paid dearly for pretending that he was above the rules that applied to his contemporaries. And of course JFK, for all his talents, could never have survived the press and legal scrutiny of the 1990s.

Bill clinton May have duplicated some of JFK's bad behavior, but he was determined not to make Jimmy Carter's political mistake. Clinton stayed close to Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy family throughout his presidency.71 Substantively, the Clinton-Kennedy intersection was health care. While in the end, the Clinton plan to provide health insurance for every American would not be passed, Clinton took care to consult with Senator Kennedy and gain his imprimatur for the approach he and Mrs. Clinton were taking.72 And Kennedy, who had dreamed of universal health care coverage for decades, did his best to advocate for the Clinton plan, especially within the balky Democratic Senate caucus.73 On a personal level, the ties between the first families were strong and well tended. No doubt the Kennedys were delighted that a JFK acolyte who cited President Kennedy at every turn was in the White House. They had already accepted that Ted would never run again, and the younger Kennedys were years away from any potential presidential bid. Thus, there was little direct competition or jealousy, unlike the case of Carter, who had been seen as supplanting or even usurping the Kennedys' place of honor. For good measure, Clinton appointed Jack and Ted's sister Jean Kennedy Smith as U.S. ambassador to Ireland.74 He spoke at the memorial service for Robert Kennedy on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his assassination and offered a moving tribute to JFK at the formal dedication of the John F. Kennedy Library Museum.75 He celebrated the quarter-century mark of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Peace Corps.76 He was everywhere the Kennedys asked him to be.

Few were surprised when the Clintons vacationed at Martha's Vineyard with the Kennedys in August 1993. Jackie Kennedy was the official hostess for a five-hour sailing luncheon, and she was joined by daughter, Caroline, and brother-in-law Ted, among others.77 Just a few months later, in January 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. A heavy smoker for most of her life, she died on May 19 at home in New York, just sixty-four years old, surrounded by her family. President Clinton said upon her death, "Even in the face of impossible tragedy, she carried the grief of her family and our entire nation with a calm power that somehow reassured all the rest of us."78 Most Americans paused to remember an elegant First Lady who had endured the unspeakable. Homes were again filled with the images of Camelot's sparkling years, and the four black November days that ended it. She was buried next to President Kennedy and her two children who did not survive infancy, with the eternal flame she had lit thirty-one years earlier providing light and warmth.

If there can be fortune in early death, it was in Mrs. Kennedy's passing away before her son, John Jr., aged thirty-eight, was killed on July 16, 1999, in the crash of a small plane he was piloting to a family wedding. John's wife and her sister also died. The crown prince of Camelot, as he was often called, was expected to enter politics eventually, perhaps even aspire to the presidency. News channels provided round-the-clock coverage of the search for his plane at sea as Americans came to terms with yet another awful Kennedy heartbreak. Born late in the month his father was elected president, John Jr. had never lived a day without being a public person. If his father's had been, in the words of historian Robert Dallek, "an unfinished life," John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s was a life of enormous potential, now never to be realized on the public stage. As his uncle Ted said at his funeral, "Like his father, he had every gift but length of years."79 For Americans of the second half of the twentieth century, John Jr.'s enduring image would always be the innocent courage and unknowing loss of a little boy saluting his daddy's coffin.

With the deaths of Mrs. Kennedy and her son, President Kennedy's legacy was, more and more, slipping into the past. But it was still a past often invoked. For his entire term, President Clinton never failed to revel in his moment with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. For six of his eight years, he hosted the Boys Nation group, joined by the Girls Nation delegation, at the White House. Clinton would bring out special guests, such as Vice President Gore or Senator Kennedy or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and regale the youngsters with stories of his special day in 1963. Once, he recalled that his Boys Nation group had passed a resolution against racial discrimination just before the trip to the White House. President Kennedy thanked them, noting "that we had shown more initiative than the nation's Governors," who had recently refused to do something similar at their national conference. "We [of Boys Nation] loved it, but the Governors didn't like it very much, and it got [President Kennedy] in a lot of hot water with them."80 Most of all, President Clinton would take the time to shake hands and pose for a photograph with each delegate. As Clinton wrote in his autobiography, "I hope some of those photos turn up in campaign ads someday."81 When evaluating the unusual historical relationship between John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, it is vital to remember that the bond was created by Clinton's memory of a moment. A brief handshake may be enough for a powerful political commercial, but it hardly suffices to explain anything. The two were of dissimilar generations and mindsets, and the challenges they faced as president were dramatically different. The old Lloyd Bentsen line, "I knew John F. Kennedy, and you're no John F. Kennedy," applied almost as well to Bill Clinton as it had to Dan Quayle. The two Vietnam Waravoiding Baby Boomers had little in common with a man shaped by World War II.

In Clinton's case, it was more about hero worship than anything else. He adopted JFK as a role model in his youth, and while he may have striven to be like Kennedy, Clinton was his own person, and certainly no photocopy of Kennedy. Clinton was as smart and politically shrewd as the thirty-fifth president, but less polished and suave. Instinctively and generationally, Clinton was more liberal than Kennedy on a host of issues, his positioning as a "New Democrat" notwithstanding. How could Clinton not be more to the left? JFK had not lived to see the counterculture sixties, the cynicism-producing disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, the economic failures of the seventies, and the defining movements for women's rights, gay rights, and the environment-all of which molded the nineties version of Bill Clinton. Just to cite one direct result of cultural changes: The Clinton administration was packing to leave the White House as First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was her husband's RFK during his presidency, was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. In the 1960s, no one-least of all Jackie-could ever have imagined that Jacqueline Kennedy would run for office.

Aside from the pure adulation that Clinton felt for Kennedy, there was a clever political calculation. Clinton understood well that Democrats-and most of the country-had longed for a Kennedy restoration since the 1963 assassination. But they wanted a credible, nonthreatening restoration. Ted Kennedy seemed too liberal and scarred by Chappaquiddick. So Clinton became the next best thing: the same age as JFK when he died, quoting Kennedy frequently and ardently, full of vigor and New Frontierlike proposals, a moderate presence compared to the leftist candidates that had dominated the Democratic Party in many recent presidential cycles. This image can be sustained for the duration of a campaign, but it fades into the reality of the presidency, when Americans live with a man day in, day out for eight years and get a better sense of the individual behind the political pose.

Bill Clinton truly was no John F. Kennedy, and Kennedy was not Clinton's doppelgnger. Clinton was Clinton, with all the good and bad his own persona dictated. Judging by his postpresidential popularity and the positive retrospective view most people have adopted about his policies (as opposed to his regrettable personal failings), Clinton carved a distinctive path. It was a legacy quite different than John Kennedy's, but still agreeable to the electorate for the most part.

Presidents and presidential candidates often express admiration for certain White House predecessors. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are relatively uncontroversial choices (slave ownership aside for the first two). A couple of sons of former presidents, John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush, had the fondest affections for their fathers. Men who succeeded to office through the death of a president will invoke their patron's name habitually. Occasionally, a chief executive will make a past president a role model for a combination of political and policy reasons, as Gerald Ford did with Give-'Em-Hell Harry Truman or as Ronald Reagan chose to do with small-government proponent Calvin Coolidge. Youthful idolization led Bill Clinton back to John Kennedy.

Citing President Kennedy has been a staple for all modern Oval Office occupants, of course. A couple of graphs can illustrate the number of times every post-JFK president invoked Kennedy in public. The top chart shows the total number of times each president publicly mentioned JFK in speeches, press conferences, and the like, while he served in the White House. The second chart plots the same thing, but from year to year: As one would expect, Lyndon Johnson mentioned the man who made him vice president and originated many of his programmatic objectives with great frequency. JFK's rival, Richard Nixon, barely cited JFK, and neither did Gerald Ford. The first Democratic president since LBJ, Jimmy Carter, brought Kennedy into play more than Nixon and Ford, but less than a third as often as Johnson. John Kennedy was linked frequently to Reagan's central proposals so there was a JFK revival in the 1980s. George Bush the senior rarely referred to Kennedy. And then along came Bill Clinton, who managed to summon the Kennedy name and legacy so often he exceeded Johnson's mountainous total.

This was a genuine impulse in Clinton, but it was also a conscious strategy by a young Democratic candidate and president to link himself to the Kennedy era's hopes and dreams-and older voters' memories of them. Clinton's mainly popular two-term presidency is a measure of his success in capitalizing on JFK's style and rhetoric.

ahPerot was the second most successful independent presidential candidate in U.S. history, after former president Theodore Roosevelt, who garnered 27.4 percent of the vote in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party.

19.

G. W. Bush: Back to the Republican Kennedys

A freakishly close vote in Florida set the stage for one of the most contested elections ever. Once the November vote was counted, Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, led Republican nominee George W. Bush, the Texas governor and son of President George H. W. Bush, by 540,000 votes in the national tally (out of 105 million cast). But in the all-important electoral vote, Gore had 267, three short of victory, Bush had 246, and the decisive 25 electoral votes were the Sunshine State's-where Bush and Gore were virtually tied. It took a hotly disputed recount and ultimately a divisive Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore1 to resolve the matter. Democrats viewed the Court ruling as partisan, with the five most conservative justices siding with Bush against the four more liberal justices' preference for Gore, but in the end, Bush was declared the winner by an astonishingly tiny 537 votes in Florida-2,912,790 for Bush to 2,912,253 for Gore. This gave Bush a final electoral count of 271 votes, one more than the minimal majority needed for election.2 Thus, the offspring of president number 41 became president number 43, a Bush restoration after just eight years. Compare this to the twenty-four years that separated the two chief executives from the Adams family, John Adams who left office in 1801 and John Quincy Adams who entered the White House (after losing the popular vote) in 1825. Both of the Adamses served only one term, but George W. Bush would get two. The dozen years of Bush White House occupancy compares to less than three for the Kennedy family. The Bush family also accumulated eight years in the vice presidency (the senior Bush), fourteen years in the governorships of Texas and Florida (George W. and Jeb), ten years in the Senate (grandfather Prescott of Connecticut), and four years in the House (Bush senior). The Kennedys have had no governorships, but three senators (John, Robert, and Edward) plus scattered House service by several family members and a lieutenant governorship (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby's daughter, in Maryland).

There is no real comparison: The more successful family dynasty by far, at least to this point, has the surname of Bush. No one would have guessed this in the 1960s, and it is one of history's sleight of hand tricks. Demography has played as much a part as destiny. In population, wealth, and influence, the Sunbelt has come to dominate the Frostbelt, and thus has the Texas house of Bush outstripped the Massachusetts line of Kennedys. Patriarch Joseph Kennedy's dreams of a long period of Kennedy dominance were dashed by war (Joe Jr.), bullet (Jack and Bobby), scandal (Teddy), and accident (John Jr.). Younger generations of Kennedys, including new congressman Joseph Kennedy III of Massachusetts, may try to even the score, though the Bushes have potential competitors, too, such as Jeb's politically active son George P. Bush-and Jeb Bush himself.

Yet, fifty years on, the short Kennedy presidency is far more admired by the public than either of the Bush tenures, and the iconic legacy of JFK's short White House stay greatly overshadows three full terms of the Bush family. George W. Bush was superficially a good deal like John F. Kennedy. Both had famous and powerful fathers, came from well-heeled, privileged backgrounds, had Ivy League educations, were elected president in squeakers, and saw foreign policy dominate their terms. Yet even Bush jokes frequently about his lack of eloquence and frequent malapropisms. Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the life of the party and led the nation culturally from the White House. Though gracious hosts, George and Laura Bush were famous for going to bed by 9:30 P.M. whenever possible. It may well be that Bush's serious, sober personal style was preferable to JFK's wild living for governance. Still, the public's imagination is rarely captured by bland temperance.

Concerning his presidential agenda and the Kennedys, George W. Bush was more like Ronald Reagan than his father. The second Bush was a determined tax-cutter, unlike his dad, who had famously violated his campaign pledge, "Read my lips, no new taxes," by raising taxes during his term. In seeking across-the-board cuts as part of his early legislative program, Bush copied Reagan in citing JFK before Congress and on the stump. The tax cuts were needed, said Bush, "to, in President Kennedy's words, 'get this country moving again.'"3 In his most significant early achievement-but one with damaging consequences for the burgeoning national debt-Bush won $1.35 trillion in tax cuts, which he supplemented with still more tax breaks in both 2002 and 2003.4 Other than tax cuts, the closest parallel in the Bush presidency to JFK's was a militarily assertive foreign policy. Just as with Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, the Bush administration was not prepared for its first-year crisis, the terrorist attacks on September 11.5 But in the aftermath of failure, both administrations were transformed; they reevaluated and recalibrated to prepare for the crises to come. In Bush's case, the decision to strike back in Afghanistan (and later, much more controversially, in Iraq) as well as the actions taken to protect air travel and the homeland defined his White House years. Kennedy and all Cold War presidents were able to use the clear and present danger of a well-defined threat (the Soviet menace) to marshal public opinion and congressional support for their goals. While it came at a high price, terrorism in the twenty-first century returned purpose and clarity to American politics-and restored a natural enemy-that had been lacking since the fall of the Soviet empire. The "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, along with terrorism generally) enabled Bush to focus his energies on enemies that unified Americans, at least temporarily. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein became Bush's Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.

In the view of many, though, this led to the kinds of excesses in the name of national security that had emerged during the Cold War era. The powers of the National Security Agency were broadened to permit eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals domestically, and the FBI's powers were expanded in a wide-ranging new antiterrorism law, the PATRIOT Act.6 The "imperial presidency" of JFK's era was back, and civil liberties were restrained to meet the threat posed by another "ism"-terrorism this time rather than Communism. President Bush insisted that his national security reforms did not trample civil liberties in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War, and in his memoir, Decision Points, he specifically cited the excesses under the Kennedy administration: "Before I approved the Terrorist Surveillance Program, I wanted to ensure there were safeguards to prevent abuses. I had no desire to turn the NSA into an Orwellian Big Brother. I knew that the Kennedy brothers had teamed up with J. Edgar Hoover to listen illegally to the conversations of innocent people, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson had continued the practice. I thought that was a sad chapter in our history, and I wasn't going to repeat it."7 Bush was not so publicly critical of the Kennedys while in office, and certainly not in the opening stages of his administration. To the contrary, he believed his success in securing one of his major goals, an education law called No Child Left Behind, depended heavily on Senator Ted Kennedy. As governor of Texas, Bush had also skillfully wooed powerful Democrats such as Texas House Speaker Pete Laney and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, so he had confidence his technique of bipartisan camaraderie might work in Washington.

For the first film screening in the new Bush White House, the president and Mrs. Bush chose Thirteen Days, a movie about JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The guest of honor was Ted Kennedy, and he brought much of the family with him. The occasion was to prove the power of what President Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, called "the amazing soft power of a kindly invite." As Fleischer pointed out, Bush recognized "there were two Ted Kennedys. There was the Ted Kennedy that ... could take to the floor of the Senate and give the most impassioned, powerful speech anyone has ever heard and he will fight you tooth and nail. The other Ted Kennedy was the one who will reach a compromise with you and reach across the aisle. Both Kennedys existed on any given day ... Bush knew if he could get the compromising Kennedy to be with him, chances were very good that his legislation was going to make it through the Senate. Kennedy was that type of old bull."

At the time, Bush insisted his gestures of friendship for Senator Kennedy had no connection to legislative deal making, but the ex-president's memoirs noted, "The movie hadn't been my only purpose for inviting Ted. He was the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that drafted education legislation. He had sent signals that he was interested in my school reform proposal ..." That night Bush told Kennedy he wanted to be known as "the education president" and emphasized, "I don't know about you, but I like to surprise people. Let's show them Washington can still get things done." The next morning, a note from Kennedy to Bush arrived, reading in part, "Like you, I have every intention of getting things done ... We will have a difference or two along the way, but I look forward to some important Rose Garden signings."8 That same year, while No Child Left Behind was still being negotiated in Congress, President Bush marked the seventy-sixth anniversary of the birth of Robert Kennedy by dedicating the main Justice Department building on Constitution Avenue in Washington to RFK. Before an assemblage of Kennedys and surviving New Frontiersmen, Bush hailed the special relationship between JFK and RFK: "No man ever had a more faithful brother."9 Asked by a reporter whether the renaming was an attempt to curry favor with Ted Kennedy, Bush laughed and replied, "I'm not quite that devious."10 But he was. By year's end, Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind, accompanied by praise from the Massachusetts senator: "President Bush was there every step of the way."11 The Bush-Kennedy infatuation did not last, and could not. The ideological demands of their very different political parties tore apart the relationship, with Kennedy campaigning for Democrats in 2002, opposing Bush's conservative Supreme Court picks, and clashing repeatedly with the administration over the Iraq War. Still, George W. Bush had learned a lesson his predecessors had also absorbed. When trying to influence public opinion or make congressional deals stick, the Kennedys, past and present, were good allies to have.

Even Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, who was not a man much given to open sentiment, realized the emotional effect a Kennedy appearance could generate. In September 1963 President Kennedy appeared at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and Cheney was there to see JFK ride in an open motorcade a couple of months before Dallas. "He had inspired us all," Cheney later wrote, "and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described."12 Kennedy footprints have been found here and there in the Bush White House years even as the Bushes gave Republicans the opportunity to tout their own dynastic family to rival the Democratic royals. For much of the Bush presidency, JFK had been in eclipse, rarely mentioned and seemingly becoming a distant memory for most Americans. And then something-or someone-unexpected happened in 2008, reviving the Kennedy image and promise. His name, of course, was Barack Obama.

20.

Full Circle: The Twinning of Barack Obama and John Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy was one of the first to imagine an African American president in the nation's near future. On May 26, 1961, in an interview with Voice of America about the ongoing attacks on integrationist Freedom Riders in the South, Attorney General Kennedy made a startling prediction: "There's no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States, certainly within that period of time."1 While RFK was eight years too optimistic, the Kennedy family's close association with civil rights causes made the Obama campaign irresistible for many of JFK and RFK's closest relatives.

The Kennedys chose to back a politician whose background could not have been more different from that of the privileged JFK. Barack Obama was a mixed-race child with an absent Kenyan father and a mother whose peripatetic personal journey meant his upbringing in Hawaii and the Philippines was often less than stable.2 But young Obama got on the right track at age ten when he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents. His natural abilities took him to Occidental College and, by transfer, to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1983. From this point Obama's future more precisely resembled Kennedy's in key respects. At Harvard Law School, Obama began to travel in elite circles and served as the first African American editor of the law review, later returning to Chicago to practice civil rights law. JFK's family was full of politics, so he was schooled in the art from birth, while Obama's political training was provided by a stint in the Illinois State Senate from 1996 to 2004 as well as a failed bid for Congress in 2000.