Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
History
& Civilization:
Editor's
Essay
- The Making of the President 1960:
- a Gustavson-Directed Analysis
- Editor's note: this essay was originally written as part of a Master's Degree
program.
The Making of the
President 1960: a Gustavson-Directed Analysis
Political journalist, Theodore
H. White, won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize (general nonfiction) for his best-seller, The
Making of the President 1960, the first in a series of Presidential campaign analyses
that would include the elections of 1964 and 1972. Impressed by his even-handed account of
her husband’s efforts to win the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy, only one week after
the assassination, summoned White to her Hyannis Port home for what became known as the
“Camelot interview” as the resultant Life magazine article would contain
the first references to the Kennedy administration as "Camelot."
The Making of the President
1960, as its title denotes, offers, from early stirrings to triumphal entry, an
account of the election process four decades ago. But this understates the case.
White’s award-winning book is considered to be something new within the genre of
political reporting. A kind of docu-drama in print, the best-seller successfully weaves
together fact and human interest within what often had been the bone-dry wasteland of
election analysis.
White maintains that several
factors, previously unknown or unappreciated, conspired to make the election of 1960 a
creature born anew: (1) the Black vote, traditionally a Republican asset since
Lincoln’s day, changed allegiance; (2) voter registration drives brought almost 7
million new voters to the polls; (3) the hegemony of the inner-city gave way to the
suburbs; (4) television came into its own as a most potent opinion-molder; and, among
other factors, (5) a coming of age of the World War II generation and a the passing into
history of the New-Dealers.
How White deals with
causation. Gustavson addresses popular, shallow notions of causation, summarizing them
with the man-on-the-street assertion: “Martin Luther – he did it!” Luther,
as historical superman, effecting wondrous changes in society as a one-man act, is dealt
severe blows by Gustavson’s probing inquiries. However, after eviscerating the famous
monk’s claim to history-making “miracles,” Gustavson concedes, “Yet
– Luther did it!” (53). And while it is possible – even quite reasonable
– to tender for discussion similar give-and-take comments regarding John F. Kennedy
and the 1960 Presidential campaign, at the end of the historical day, it is my sense that,
all factors of causation considered, “Kennedy – he did it;” that, on
balance, we witness in Kennedy an example of Gustavson’s “event-making
man,” one who “is actually able to control the events to a degree” and
injects himself into society as “much more than a pawn in the game” (130).
Theodore White seems to agree
with this assessment: on October 28th, 1959 Kennedy and trusted staff met to
begin preparations for a campaign that “in the next year” would “create a
President – and with greater precision, against greater odds, across more contrary
traditions, than had been shown by any group of amateur President makers since Abraham
Lincoln’s backers” (59, 60). The story – in White’s hands, a
docu-drama – of how these “contrary” factors were met, tamed, and then
dispatched to do the Kennedy team’s bidding, made for Pulitzer-Prize quality reading.
The reason for this literary success proved to be, in great measure, White’s ability
to transform elements of causation into a quasi-living thing, an almost palpable sense of
not only “being there” but, moreover, one akin to standing on a mountain-top
with a king’s view, allowing the reader to see far into the past regarding the
distant beginnings of causation. As such, White offers us insight into both immediate and
long-term factors of causation – never suggesting a grand, single cause, always
presenting multiple strands of causation, “rivulets,” to use one of White’s
analogies, descending “from their secret places, like tributaries ambling, rushing
and twisting” (34) toward that great confluence, the Presidency.
It may be proper -- the book
naturally seems to offer this division -- to view White’s “immediate
causes” as those taking place within the year preceding the 1960 election, that is,
the campaign proper; the “long-term causes” would, of course, be all those prior
to this, sometimes, under White’s historian-as-detective’s eye, stretching back
one hundred years or more. For example, White comments on the background to the vital
importance of the Black vote for Kennedy: “Some Negro political leaders claim that in
no less than eleven states [. . .] with 169 electoral votes, it was the Negro community
that provided the Kennedy margin of victory.” The harvesting of these votes White
calls the “most precise response of result to strategy” of the 1960 campaign
(424). How did it come to be? On October 19th, only three weeks before the
election, “Martin Luther King was arrested [. . .] for refusing to leave a
table” in an Atlanta restaurant (385). When King was sentenced to four months of hard
labor for his civil disobedience, Richard Nixon’s advisors drafted a statement
demanding the release of King. Nixon, wanting the Negro vote but not wishing to offend
Southern Whites, vacillated – “he did not act” (378). Contrariwise, the
Kennedy team intuitively and “instantly recognized” the importance of the event.
Kennedy telephoned “Mrs. King in Georgia to express his concern.” She, then,
contacted the press and Black political leaders regarding the phone call; additionally,
Bobby Kennedy “telephoned a plea for King’s release [. . .] to the Georgia
judge” (386) resulting not only in King’s release two days later but massive
Black support for Kennedy at the polls. Today, no one is surprised to hear of strong Black
support for Democratic candidates -- but such support was not the norm in 1960.
Highlighting the poignancy of the event, White offers the reader the long-term perspective
by pointing out that Blacks, out of respect to the man who had freed them one hundred
years before, had traditionally voted en masse for Republican candidates, the opposite of
the situation today and since 1960!
Religion as a social force.
“Social forces,” Gustavson maintains, “are human energies which,
originating in individual motivations, coalesce into a collective manifestation of
power” (28). These “energies” may become, to state the obvious, a force for
good or evil, a fact possibly nowhere more in evidence than the sphere of religion. In
1960, as some men reached for intellectual heights that would culminate in a mission to
the moon, others, still waiting for their personal Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment to
dawn, stumbled, groveled in their own Dark Age of bigotry, intolerance and hatred. And
while these forces of evil find expression in many areas, John F. Kennedy in 1960 reminded
the nation of that mother-of-all-sources of prejudice -- religion.
Of the many fine examples of
leadership exhibited by Kennedy during the campaign, I believe that his handling of the
religious issue was his most masterful. He first addressed this hot-potato topic during
the West Virginia primary. Kennedy’s advisors reported that “West Virginia was
afraid of Catholics.” Though “most” of the Kennedy team advised “raise
no religious issue in public [. . .] religion is too explosive,” the candidate
decided to “attack – he would meet the religious issue head on.” White
strongly asserts that “no sounder Kennedy decision could have been made” (126).
In a stunning turn of events, at least in West Virginia, Kennedy, through skilful,
impassioned rhetoric, transformed the “religious issue” into something positive,
an appeal for patriotic religious toleration:
[. . .] so when any man
stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of President, he is swearing to support the separation of
church and state; he puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he
takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the
Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him – and should impeach him –
but he is committing a sin against God. (128, 129)
Several of the other Democratic candidates had expected, had planned on, West Virginia to
be Kennedy’s last stand. Instead, the Senator from Massachusetts won handily and
caused Hubert Humphrey to drop out of the race. Nevertheless, the “religious
issue” was not yet dead, only stunned. In early September “the Reverend Norman
Vincent Peale had [. . .] given respectable leadership to ancient fear and prejudice”
by questioning the wisdom of placing a Catholic in the Oval Office. Kennedy, who had hoped
to avoid further debate of the topic until closer to election day, on September 12
accepted an invitation to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a conclave of
Protestant ministers. Ted Sorensen, senior aide to Kennedy, mused on the significance of
the speaking engagement: “We can win or lose the election right here in Houston”
(311). Kennedy, rising to the occasion, delivered what may have been his most brilliant,
persuasive and eloquent speech of the entire 1960 campaign:
[. . .] because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has
ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured --
perhaps deliberately in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently
necessary for me to state once again -- not what kind of church I believe in, for that
should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in. [. . .] I believe
in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no
public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope,
the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source [. . .] where
religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act
against all.[. . .] Today, I may be the victim -- but tomorrow it may be you -- until the
whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.
[. . .] I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair,
neither imposed upon him by the nation nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition
to holding that office. [. . .] This is the kind of America I fought for in the South
Pacific and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we
might have a "divided loyalty," that we did not "believe in liberty"
or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened "the freedoms for which our
forefathers died." [. . .] instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and
publications we have all seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the
statements of Catholic Church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other
centuries, and rarely relevant to any situation here -- and always omitting, of course,
that statement of the American bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state
separation. [. . .] But if this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans
lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole
nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world,
in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people [. . .]. (468-471)
Muted, not dead, the “religious issue,” after Kennedy’s eloquence,
made it much more difficult for bigots to operate against him in broad daylight. At
minimum, in White’s words, “he had for the first time more fully and explicitly
than any other thinker of his faith defined the personal doctrine of a modern Catholic in
a democratic society” (313).
The institution of the Presidency as a social force. Operating as a
kind of chicken-and-egg conundrum, the Presidency itself -- all that it has come to mean
in the minds of the American people -- casts a long shadow on the methods and madness of
those who would aspire to that high office. Logically, one would think that it is the
man himself – especially a great man – who should lend prestige to
the office (any who might care to dispute this point are encouraged to consider our less
stellar White House inhabitants, and my point may become more evident). Yet, there is that
tendency, especially among aspirants, to choreograph an appearance and persona more
“Presidential;” to accrue to oneself by a kind of osmosis, by proximity to even
the trappings of the Presidency, the aura of High Statesman.
It is no accident that so many
of our Presidents, in the spirit of Woody Allen’s quip that “90% of success in
life is just showing up” – or hanging around -- found their high-office careers
more than jump-started simply by showing-up-and-hanging-around for four or eight years.
Clearly, Richard Nixon had the upper hand in this area; after all, he was the Vice-President,
the almost-President, the one following-up the train of the real President. And not just
any President – but the beloved and revered IKE who had saved America and the whole
world on D-Day. There should have been more than enough IKE-goodwill spillover to elect
Richard Nixon, especially in prosperous and peaceful 1960 – so much so that after
election day many political pundits described the foregoing events not so much as Kennedy
having won but as Nixon having blown his opportunity (this is beginning to sound like a
certain recent election).
What went wrong? Many things, on “both sides of the aisle,” but Nixon had failed
to capitalize on his proximity to Eisenhower. For example, though Eisenhower was willing
to campaign on behalf of the Republican candidate, Nixon called him in too late, and then
only to barnstorm New York, which analysts proclaimed Nixon could not win. Why the
hesitancy to involve Eisenhower? According to White, simple pride drove Nixon to attempt
the White House prize on his own without outside help. The four television debates further
squandered Nixon’s Presidential mystique. Before the debates, Kennedy was perceived
as “boyish” and, as Nixon was wont to tell, “inexperienced.” But the
Vice-President made several mistakes that would change the political landscape. In a move
calculated to expunge his “pugnacious” image, Nixon too often responded to the
Senator by expressing agreement with his remarks (another similarity to last year’s
campaign). This “defensive quality of Mr. Nixon’s performance” produced for
him the disastrous result of allowing Kennedy to be perceived as his equal; in fact,
merely “the sight of the two men side by side” could only reduce the prestige of
the Vice-President. These factors along with technical stagecraft blunders such as color
of the stage backdrop, lighting, lack of makeup, offering eye-contact to Kennedy rather
than the viewing audience, all conspired to make Nixon appear anemic and “less
Presidential” in contrast to the weighty, dark-suited Senator with solid outline who
addressed the cameras squarely. After the debates, Nixon, having just lost a good measure
of his Presidential mystique, was dismayed to find a Gallup Poll proclaiming “49%
Kennedy, 46% Nixon” (354).
Personal reactions. As I
made my way through this book, an enjoyable journey, I was struck by two primary thoughts.
First, I have great admiration for the “Kennedy machine.” What a well-oiled
machine it was! Its tentacles reached across America forging alliances, making contacts
and political friendships, gathering information, testing, probing -- seeking out the
centers of power in each region of the country. Before Kennedy was a President he was a
General! Few wars have been fought with such skilful strategy as displayed by the Kennedy
team. Its intelligence-gathering ability would inevitably render the efforts of its
opposition as ineffective and obsolete. White expresses as much in his statement:
“The epitaph of the Johnson campaign was written, for this reporter, by a Kennedy
organizer who said with a flat simplicity, ‘Why, do you know, Lyndon actually thought
that Carmine De Sapio and Tammany controlled New York!’” (165). Critics would
claim that the “Kennedy machine” ran on Joseph P. Kennedy’s money; that JFK
was blessed with many trusted, close relatives who could serve as field lieutenants; that
Kennedy’s glamour and “pretty” face, as Nixon lamented, marshaled the
troops. All of these factors played their part, of course, but, to borrow a title of
another book, they do not account for the “ghost in the machine,” that spark of
animation that inspired such loyalty in those who knew him well. What made the
“machine” come to life? I’ve recently been rereading one of my favorite
books, Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark, wherein he comments that, more than other
factors, hope and confidence in the future are the engines which move forward the heavy
wheel of progress. Without such confidence, with no “need to look forward beyond next
March or the next voyage or the next battle” (14), men will build houses of thatch
and wood instead of stone; they will not bother to learn to read and write, much less
desire to preserve their thoughts for posterity -- they will not plants oak trees. What
has been trivialized as the Kennedy “charisma,” I sense is the more substantive
leadership quality of making people believe in themselves and in their future. It is
“charisma” in the classic sense for it is a “gift” – but a gift
that can be developed. However, Kennedy seemed to have possessed this gift as a sixth
sense and intuitively expressed it, not only toward those working with him in the
campaign, but, later, in his reaching out to the American public, in asking for sacrifice
and commitment to lofty goals. Today’s politicians, always ready to reduce the public
to the role of serfs, fail, I think, to recognize the motivational power of requiring
people to become more than they presently are.
However, having expressed my
accolades, another idea hounds me as I read The Making of the President 1960. I am
preoccupied with the sense that I am being sold a sanitized version of events, a
starched-white portrait of the leading figures, especially Kennedy. We, today, four
decades removed from the drama, of course, have the advantage of “20-20
hindsight.” White saw his book in print only months after the election, and
presumably, did not know some of things that we know in 2001. But I cannot accept
that White was ignorant of many items of today’s general knowledge of those events.
For example, the History Channel in recent months (I cannot offer specific credits)
reviewed the 1960 election. It is common knowledge today that Joseph P. Kennedy used his
wealth to purchase/influence some of the votes for his son in the West Virginia primary.
Kennedy, himself, quipped at the time that his father demanded that a budget be strictly
adhered to for he would “be damned if he would pay for a landslide.” Gustavson
asserts that the “educated person [.
. .] can spot the obviously colored” reportings of events (174), the deliberate
attempts to “create a myth” (196). In this spirit, I cannot accept that White,
the great detective-reporter, would have been unknowledgeable of how the primary was
actually won. Similarly, in recent months the television program, Investigative Reports
(I cannot offer specific credits), stated, as it featured an interview with Kennedy
aide, Pierre Salinger, that Kennedy, before the first debate, spent the afternoon with a
prostitute; that Bobby Kennedy sent his brother into the first debate with the war cry,
“Kick him in the b****;” that after the Inaugural Speech, that high-minded plea
for self-sacrifice, Kennedy, upon entering the door of a party in his honor, immediately
blurted out, “Where are the broads?” More could be added here, but it is not
necessary since this is all old news, much of it now part of our general knowledge. My
contention is that, even at that time, for a reporter who had spent months
shadowing the candidate, it was more than likely for White to have known of many such
matters. While it may go too far to view The Making of the President 1960 as a
“partisan piece,” I now see White as one of many reporters of the time who were
seduced and handled very well by the “Kennedy machine.” In fact, White and his
associates became part of the machine. Peter Jennings, several years ago, as he remarked
on the Kennedy years in an ABC documentary (I cannot offer specific credits), stated that
the press’ infatuation with Kennedy was the last time that it would be seduced by a
candidate. This evaluation finds a good measure of confirmation, as reported by Hugh
Sidney, in White’s “Camelot interview”: “Remarkable [. . .] is the
extent to which Mr. White allowed himself to be used as a vehicle for historical
interpretation. Mrs. Kennedy not only [. . .] penciled in changes, but when editors
suggested to White that he had over-played the Camelot theme, his ‘collaborator’
[. . .] shook her head. And she prevailed” (1). Joyce Hoffmann in Theodore H.
White and Journalism as Illusion goes further:
White kept secrets in order to maintain access to his important sources, and he
occasionally allowed his subjects, including John F. Kennedy [. . .] to make changes in
his work before publication. Clinging to the illusion of objectivity, White -- like other
leading journalists in the postwar years -- wrote about the world not as it was but as he
believed it ought to be. [For example, there is] a little-known episode in White's
career when he intentionally obscured the truth about Chiang Kai-Shek's corrupt and inept
Nationalist government because he believed that undermining China's cause would be "a
disservice to democracy." (1)
White has done all of us a service by recounting and providing historical record for many
of the details of the dramatic Presidential campaign of 1960. While it should be noted
that “he slept with the enemy” and even must suffer loss of prestige because of
it, White’s work remains a touchstone for all those who would chronicle future paths
to the White House. Gustavson remarks that even though Americans view “politicians
with considerable cynicism,” she, nevertheless, “still believes that the man who
seeks public office is imbued with an idealistic hope of improving society” (196).
Despite his weakness of the flesh, Mr. Kennedy remains, I think, within this general
consensus of the American public.
- Works Cited
-
- Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation. New York: Harper, 1969: 1-17.
-
- Hoffmann, Joyce. Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion. Online posting.
1995
- http://www.system.missouri.edu/upress/spring1995/hoffmann.htm.
-
- Sidney, Hugh. “The Last Side of Camelot.” Kennedy Assassination Chronicles.
Online posting.
- Fall 1995 <http://home.flash.net/~jfklancr/pdf/Camelot.pdf>.
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