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Subject: Camelot (Not): JFK's Misunderstood Legacy;Kennedy Influenced the Kid from Hope
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 05:02:45 EST
Message-ID: <11.1992Nov16.050246@AmeriCast.com>

Camelot (Not): JFK's Misunderstood Legacy;Kennedy Influenced the
Kid from Hope - but Not How You Think<By Michael R. Beschloss=

NO SOONER were the ballots counted than pundits - and eminent
Democrats - began declaring Bill Clinton a reincarnation of John
F. Kennedy who would usher in a restoration of Camelot.  This was
inevitable. For most of us, the snowbound inaugural of January
1961 is our only unambiguously happy memory of a Democrat assum-
ing the  presidency.  Furthermore, the connection between Kennedy
and Clinton was graven upon the American mind this year by
never-before-shown footage of the 35th president greeting the
16-year-old Arkansan in the Rose Garden of the White House, as if
anointing his distant successor.

Now that the election is over, the more instructive aspect of the
JFK-Clinton connection is how the young man was affected by his
boyhood hero - and what the Kennedy experience can teach us about
what to expect of our 42nd president.

Clinton first became seriously aware of JFK in July 1956, just
before his 10th birthday in Hot Springs, Ark.  Having bought
their first television, Virginia and Roger Clinton turned on cov-
erage of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

Fascinated, the young Clinton saw the 39-year-old Kennedy narrow-
ly lose the vice presidential nomination in a contest against the
two senators from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr.
(whose namesake son Clinton selected for the post). As a ninth-
grader in the fall of 1960, Clinton was one of few Hot Springs
High School students to support Kennedy and was thrilled when JFK
entered the White House after carrying Arkansas's eight electoral
votes.  During his thousand days, Kennedy paid lavish attention
to Arkansas, making him especially present in the newspapers that
Clinton read so avidly. Kennedy visited Arkansas twice, including
a visit one month before his murder, to dedicate the Greers Ferry
Dam. Kennedy's attentiveness was due in large part to the Arkan-
sas congressional delegation, which included Kennedy's old Senate
colleagues J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, and John McClellan, with whom Kennedy had
investigated labor rackets, as well as the omnipotent chairman
Wilbur Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee.<It was on
Wednesday morning, July 24, 1963, that Kennedy walked into the
Rose Garden and greeted the American Legion's "Boys Nation" group
that included the young Bill Clinton. Although he concealed it,
the president was in ill humor. He had just spent breakfast fend-
ing off attacks from four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
who were irate about the nuclear test ban treaty that Kennedy's
negotiators were completing in Moscow.  With more prescience than
he realized, the president welcomed Clinton and his peers by say-
ing, "No group could be more appropriately visiting here now. We
want you to feel very much at home."

After this trip, Clinton spoke to his mother of devoting his life
to public service, marveling that someone of his age and back-
ground could be so fortunate as to meet the president. This in-
stinct was only enhanced by the emotional impact of Kennedy's as-
sassination four months later. Kennedy's Catholicism, his absorp-
tion in international affairs and an old Kennedy family relation-
ship with Georgetown University were influences on Clinton's de-
cision to matriculate there in September 1964.  That fall, JFK
worship was so strong, especially at Georgetown, that one of
Clinton's classmates began taking afternoon naps after hearing
that this was what his hero had done. Moved by Kennedy's rhetoric
and his oft-stated commitment to "excellence," Clinton pored over
Kennedy-era memoirs when they were published. By the spring of
1965, when Sen. Robert Kennedy came to speak at Georgetown with
two of his children in tow, Clinton was president of his class
and served as his escort.

The Kennedy who arguably made the more profound impression upon
Clinton was Robert. Clinton was taken with RFK's opposition to
the Vietnam War and his passion for social justice. It was far
more in the manner of Robert Kennedy than his elder brother that
after the riots following Martin Luther King's murder in 1968,
Clinton pasted a red cross on each side of his white Buick and
raced food to Washingtonians huddled in church basements. In the
fall of 1991, Clinton returned to Georgetown University and read
RFK's statement that each time citizens stand up for an ideal
they send forth a tiny ripple of hope. Clinton asked the audience
"how long it's been since you heard an American president say and
believe these things."

As a presidential candidate in 1992, Clinton had no particular
need or desire to fabricate an image. He knew that there was no
premium for a candidate who seemed to wrap himself in John
Kennedy's toga. In 1984, Gary Hart was so needled for aping JFK's
language and mannerisms that one of his aides wrote in an inter-
nal memo, "Gary over-evokes the JFK image. People resent it be-
cause Gary does not seem authentic." Although his audiences prob-
ably did, Michael Dukakis never tired of comparing himself to the
earlier Democratic nominee from Boston who had chosen a Texas
running mate.

Last spring, Clinton cited Kennedy's Peace Corps in defense of
his own plan to establish a national service trust fund that
would finance college educations in exchange for a promise to
serve the country. On MTV in June, he recalled that in the 1960s
"we believed that politics was something that was good" and "that
things like the Peace Corps, which Kennedy started, made you a
better person . . . . A lot of the things that Kennedy proposed
connected people my age to the government."

At the Democratic convention, Clinton's handlers did not mind
suggesting subtle parallels with JFK - the surprise post-
nomination appearance in the hall, the film of the Rose Garden
handshake. During the fall campaign, references to the victor of
1960 were more subliminal - the hoarse candidate insisting, "We
can do better," and that "we get America moving again." Just be-
fore the election, Clinton recalled JFK's statement at the end of
the 1960 campaign that the "mystery of democracy" was about to
reexpress itself.<Just as scholars in 1960 used the FDR experi-
ence to foresee how Kennedy would perform in the White House, the
Kennedy experience offers us clues about the Clinton presidency.
Clinton comes to the White House more committed, better informed,
more programmatical and more intellectually absorbed by issues
than Kennedy was in November 1960. (In his effort to compare
Clinton to Kennedy, JFK's close aide Theodore Sorensen wrote re-
cently that Kennedy too submitted "bold new programs" to Congress
in early 1961, which may be a rare example of the use of an in-
coming president to elevate the reputation of the past one.)

After a largely indifferent 14 years in Congress, Kennedy was
thought by none of his peers to be a commanding Senate leader;
few would have called him a "policy wonk." Clinton's fellow
governors voted him the most effective in the country. Like Ken-
nedy, Clinton arrives at a moment of national hope and good feel-
ing. He will be able to call on the kind of emotional support
from American youth that Kennedy generated.  Concerned like Ken-
nedy that as a new arrival on the world scene he might unsettle
leaders on Wall Street and in allied capitals, Clinton might be
tempted to appoint establishment figures who may not share his
ultimate purposes; as with JFK's periodic annoyance with the
orthodoxy of his secretary of state Dean Rusk, Clinton may come
to regret it.

Clinton will not be hamstrung by the hairbreadth national majori-
ty and the Republican-Southern Democrat coalition in Congress
that obstructed Kennedy. But Kennedy had the advantage of having
a Senate leader, Mike Mansfield, who was inclined to defer to the
president.

By contrast, Clinton faces Democratic leaders in the House and
Senate who, although at least outwardly delighted by his victory,
have grown accustomed to leading their party singlehandedly from
Capitol Hill, as well as restless interest groups more numerous,
diverse and better organized than in the early 1960s. He will
benefit from skills at brokerage and persuasion that, if the de-
cade in Little Rock gives any indication, resemble not Kennedy's
gentlemanly diffidence but the zestful horsetrading and
consensus-building of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that
yielded such impressive results.

Of New Frontier Washington, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in "A
Thousand Days" that a city "somnolent in the Eisenhower years had
come suddenly alive . . . . There was the excitement which comes
from . . . the release of energy which occurs when men with ideas
have a chance to put them into practice." We can expect Clinton
to bring to Washington the same passion for excellence, the arts
and public service that JFK did, but with one wrinkle: Insecure
in his origins, Kennedy was inclined to surround himself socially
with the rich and wellborn, encouraging a kind of royal court.
Clinton should prove to be far more inclusive.

A cardinal problem that the two presidents share is that of dam-
pening expectations. There was so much talk during the 1960 cam-
paign about a "100 Days" that would rival FDR's in 1933 that Ken-
nedy had Sorensen include in his inaugural address a warning that
"all this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor in the
first 1,000 days .  Pigs invasion - which so impaired Kennedy's
presidency - was launched on his 87th day in office.

Clinton confronts a Congress, press and public who will not be as
patient as they might have been in 1960. Within a very short
time, he must fulfill promises to stimulate the economy, provide
health care, reduce the deficit. He will have to deal with inter-
national crises that have been simmering during the past half-
year. He will have to make military and foreign policy choices
more basic and difficult than those facing any president since
Truman - and sell them to the public.

One may endorse the notion that JFK had an important impact on
Bill Clinton and that his record foreshadows important aspects of
the next administration without compelling the new president to
be measured against the nostalgic memories of a lost prince. As
John F. Kennedy's first two Democratic successors lamentably
discovered, the cost of running against a legend can be very
high.<02:12 11-16C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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