Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506270024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I'm old enough, in other words, to remember the pre-assassination Kennedy. And the John Kennedy of life was no John Kennedy as he's remembered today.
Today, he's venerated. But during his 34 months in the White House, Kennedy had fiascoes, like the Bay of Pigs, as well as successes, like staring down Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet missiles in Cuba. Timid on such issues as civil rights, Kennedy had trouble getting even a modest domestic agenda through Congress.
The surge of landmark legislation from the '60s came not under Kennedy but in the wake of Kennedy's death, under successor Lyndon Johnson. Moreover, much of what's often assumed today to be the legacy of the Great Society is of even more recent origin, stemming from the presidency of Republican Richard Nixon.
And the pre-assassination Kennedy was, in some quarters, an object of intense hatred. Academics and elite Easterners may have been charmed by Camelot's glitter. Out in the hinterlands, where suspicion of Kennedy's Catholicism and Ivy League ties ran deep, you didn't have to be around long to hear venomous denunciations of the man.
Criticizing presidents is a venerable, and on balance valuable, American tradition. Indeed, other 20th-century presidents came to be bitterly despised by large segments of the American public. But not from the first, and not without a fairly clear connection to developments during their administrations.
It was the Depression, for example, that made Herbert Hoover a one-term president. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson lost favor after prosecuting unpopular and costly wars in Korea and Vietnam respectively. Franklin Roosevelt, though elected four times, was bitterly attacked by those who felt aggrieved by his policies.
By contrast, the vitriol against Kennedy was curious for its lack of evident cause. He neither put the pope on retainer as his personal adviser, nor made war on the status quo, nor presided in a time of economic troubles. Nevertheless, the vilification of Kennedy began even before he took office and did not cease until his death.
A similar point could be made about Bill Clinton. Clinton's chief - and quite possibly disabling - flaw is an inconstancy born of disinclination to press any issue if it might upset somebody. He has shown little propensity, alas, for giving deliberate offense, desperately as some folks stand in need of offending.
I can see how Clintonesque ineffectuality might lead to disappointment, disillusionment, denial of a second term - the fate of, say, a George Bush, politically defeated but not personally despised. But how, with Clinton as it did with Kennedy, does mere ineffectuality sustain for some such abidingly intense hatred of the president?
I'll offer, tentatively and speculatively, a couple of possible answers: age, and the fact that both Kennedy and Clinton were plurality presidents. (Clinton also shares with Kennedy a reputation for philandering; the dissimilarity, however, is that the reputation in Kennedy's case didn't gain widespread currency until after his death.)
Neither Clinton in 1992, nor Kennedy 32 years earlier, received 50 percent of the popular vote. This may have contributed to an uneasy sense, in some people to the point of conviction, that their elections weren't quite legitimate. (In Kennedy's case, there also was evidence of vote fraud in Illinois, although as it turned out he didn't need to win Illinois to carry the Electoral College.) This may have diminished the gravitas of the office that normally accords presidents a reservoir of respect.
In addition, Kennedy was at 43 the youngest man ever elected president; Clinton, at 46, wasn't much older. Such relative youthfulness may also have diminished said gravitas. Perhaps, too, hatred is motivated by envy, and envy is likelier when its object is little or no older than oneself.
At any rate, it's hard to imagine the election of a grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower, at age 62, or an avuncular Ronald Reagan, at age 69, giving rise to the kind of freewheeling personal attacks that seem to have arisen against a youngish Bill Clinton nowadays, and as they arose toward a youngish John Kennedy nearly 35 years ago.
by CNB