Debunking Camelot

EARLIER THIS YEAR, it became publicly known that John F. Kennedy '40 made tapes while he was in the White House--not show tunes or Bach, but conversations secretly recorded, no different from Richard Nixon. The messianic figure who called a country to seek a New Frontier seemed to have been dumped back in the old hinterlands of presidential spying; the cool and courageous war hero was bugging his own family, as dirty a deed as tackling during touch football.

But Garry Wills, in a piece for The New Republic prior to the publication of The Kennedy Imprisonment, observed that popular response to the tape revelation was surprisingly muted: there was almost no outcry at all. Kennedy taped because he was by nature a historian, some explained, not because he was paranoid or a sneak. What was a sin in someone else became a virtue in Kennedy. Exasperated at this double standard, Wills could only wonder it "the strange emotional investment that many people have in the Kennedy myth." Clearly, people do not like to be told that their super-heroes are scumbags.

And this is pretty much what Wills wants to tell them in The Kennedy Imprisonment. You've been worshipping at a false shrine all these years, he is shouting to the legions of believers--your boy wonder was worse than just style without substance, he was style on top of sludge; not a great public leader, but a great public exploiter. The book is not a balanced or objective "analysis" of the Kennedy phenomenon. It is a merciless debunking of the Kennedy myth, fueled by intense indignation against every sucker who swallowed it.

Now myths need to be examined, explained, dismantled. But how equipped for the task is someone who is deeply offended by the myth, someone so aghast that he almost ends up belittling its real impact? The Kennedy myth had, and continues to have, a strong impact on people, evidence that it fills some important psychic need. Although Wills' book is excellent for its assessment of the Kennedys' lasting, and crippling effect on American politics, it is on too high a moral plane to ever come down and grapple with the myth on its own terms. He derides the idea of heroes in the White House but does not adequately address our very real national desire to have them there.

Armed with his Montaigne and Johnson and Machiavelli, Wills criticizes, on both moral and pragmatic grounds, what he sees as the Kennedy's crude and immature conception of power. If only he did not seem to enjoy disemboweling John Kennedy so much. Wills eloquent eulogy to Martin Luther King (and King's rival conception of power) would seem more in character; so would his ongoing vindication of Ted Kennedy. The Teddy question accounts for some of the book's weakest moments, with Wills at times making himself the judge in a brother-to-brother competition for the Character Award. No doubt the world has been overly harsh on Ted and easy on John, but to turn the tables around so completely--pounding relentlessly on the false authorship of Profiles in Courage--is not the solution. As Montaigne, I think observed, two wrongs don't make a right.

AS FOR WILLS' anti-myth; it goes something like this John F. Kennedy was basically a power-hungry adolescent, recklessly acting out James Bond style fantasies in the White House. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an ill-planned, impossibly romantic stunt, Kennedy's own baby rather than an Eisenhower inheritance. The Cuban missile crisis was a false "triumph"--manufactured by Kennedy in the first place, it nearly led to nuclear war as Kennedy tried to live up to his rhetoric and humiliate Khruschev. Whether it was his obsessive pursuit of women--which, one might say, made Kennedy's administration as illustrious for its 1000 nights as for its 1000 days--or his obsessive pursuit of Castro, the important thing was always that he prove to the world he had balls.

He touched up the PT 109 story to increase his heroism, and pocketed a Pulitzer Prize (through his father's influence) for a book he did not actually write. A reader of second-rate adventure books, he became the darling of the intellectual and had them singing hosannas to the glorious power of the presidency. Finally, he got us into Vietnam with gusto, saw it as the perfect testing ground for his beloved counter-insurgency techniques.

But there was damage that went beyond John's term. Wills discusses the implications of Kennedy's "charismatic" leadership, borrowing the term from German sociologist Max Weber. It is leadership grounded in a faith in a person, rather than in traditional and legal authorities. The charismatic leader has little regard for formal institutions and structures, by-passing them in order to assume the reins of power himself. Not only were the consequences of this style of rule disastrous in the Bay of Pigs crisis--Kennedy deprived himself of the military oversight of the plan which would have pointed up its flaws--but they were also destructive for succeeding presidents: With all the Kennedy minions swarming around, Lyndon Johnson felt like an intruder. So he responded by assembling his own set of cronies, fashioning his own personal role:

The real impact of Kennedy on his successors was not so much on inflation of the office they succeeded to, but the doomed way they imitated his attempt to rule against the government. Inheriting a delegitimated set of procedures they were compelled to go outside the procedures too--further delegitimating the very office they held.

A pattern was thereby set up which Wills believes finds its culmination in President Reagon's promise to get government off the backs of the American people.

And the Kennedy's also influenced the electorate, creating "charismatic expectations" which each president must now try to fulfill. Our whole notion of the presidency has been altered by the Kennedy myth, leading writers (such as James David Barber) to incorporate Kennedy's own power-hunger as a standard for measuring succeeding presidents, Kennedy, Wills argues, triggered a glorification of the powers of the presidency.

IN ADDITION to wanting to trace the family's effects on the country. Wills wants to trace the effects on the remaining son. The "imprisonment" referred to in the title mainly applies to Ted, and Wills reveals that the term occurred to him as he watched Ted noticeably tense up while shaking hands with a woman. As if doing penance for a nation's (and a family's) mistreatment of him, Wills shows Ted trapped by each of the elements of the Kennedy mystique: sex, family, image, charisma and power. The other Kennedys died in the splendor of youth, before the faces and the myths had time to wrinkle. But Ted has endured, and now:

...has no one but ghosts at his side, and they count more against than for him, eclipse him with bright images form the past. Where they were praised too fulsomely, he is bound to be judged too harshly. He inherits the illusions of his brothers' following with the accumulated venoms of their foes; and both tend to disinherit him.

If the heavily metaphysical weight which Wills attaches to Kennedy's lackluster performance in the 1980 primaries is not completely convincing, it is at least more interesting than Wills' suggestion that Ted's lapses of marital fidelity are more forgivable than John's: Arguing that Ted's were less cold-blooded and more human than John's "calculated regimen of sex." Wills asserts that "there is a sense in which this gives Joan somewhat less to complain of than Jacqueline had," Ladies?

The more profound imprisonment which Wills is concerned with, however, concerns certain conceptions of power that America seems to cherish. To John Kennedy, "power had only two components--ample resources, and the will to use them." If the military budget is big enough and the president is man enough, than we are unstoppable. The unique conditions which existed in Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs (all of which signalled a certain failure to overthrow Castro) were hardly taken into consideration. Why bother? Of course, there is a lesson to be learned from The Kennedy Imprisonment, a lesson which Wills rightly thinks the country should take to heart: Don't equate power with physical strength or with talking tough. America was guilty of hero-worship when it embraced the Kennedy's but we are also guilty of hero-worshipping ourselves, or believing in our special "claims" or "right" or destiny or mission.

The Kennedy arrogance is a perfect expression of American arrogance. And we expect the world to treat us like we've treated John Kennedy. Our reluctance to acknowledge the special conditions in Latin America, our desire to cramp the world within the confines of an anti-Soviet ideology--these are the bars of the Kennedy imprisonment.