OVERBY ON KENNEDY AND THE MEDIA

OVERBY ON KENNEDY & THE MEDIA

By Charles L. Overby

When I was a student at Ole Miss in the 1960s, I never gave a second thought about who had been president 50 years earlier. I probably could have done the math and figured out it was Woodrow Wilson.

Things were different for students at Ole Miss this year. They were inundated with news stories and television documentaries about the president of 50 years ago: John F. Kennedy.

In anticipation of that media attention, Curtis Wilkie and I decided to teach a fall journalism course on “Camelot, the Kennedys and the Media.” Wilkie is a legendary newspaper reporter and author who covered the White House and politics for the Boston Globe.

Neither of us had covered John Kennedy, but Curtis had covered both of his senatorial brothers, Robert of New York and Edward of Massachusetts. There is a great video clip of a young, clean-shaven Curtis standing beside Robert Kennedy in 1967 as Kennedy investigated hunger and poverty in the Mississippi Delta.

This class was a natural extension of the class we taught last fall on presidential elections and the media. Next fall, Curtis and I plan to teach a course on presidents and the press, from John Kennedy to Barack Obama.

Why do the Kennedys matter? They ushered in the modern era of politics, making image and style an important part of every political campaign. They mastered television just as it was becoming important.

The key to understanding John Kennedy and his brothers was learning about Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. He set high goals for himself and his sons.

He was shrewd, demanding and generally got what he wanted. He wanted his son to be president, and he got it. In fact, all three of his sons ran for president — unprecedented in American history.

He became one of the 12 richest Americans, making fortunes in the stock market and in real estate.

Joe Kennedy understood the importance of public relations and passed this along to his sons. He told his children, “It’s not what you are that counts. It’s what people think you are.”

Kennedy’s cozy relations with media owners and key reporters allowed him to influence what was written about him and his family.

Kennedy gave each of his children $1 million, and he was willing to spend part of his fortune getting his sons elected.

No question, money played a key role in John Kennedy’s rise to the presidency, but that shouldn’t obscure how smart he was. He was one of the few presidents to write books other than personal memoirs. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the other presidents who were accomplished authors.

Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Profiles in Courage.” One of the leading senators whom Kennedy profiled was L.Q.C. Lamar, the most accomplished Mississippi public servant of all time.

Lamar, who taught at Ole Miss, was a U.S. Senator, Interior Secretary under President Grover Cleveland and the only Mississippian to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lamar captured Kennedy’s attention because he was the first Southern senator after the Civil War to work to heal relations between the North and the South.

Kennedy was helped by his close association with members of the press. Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, gave Kennedy an early boost and promoted his book for the Pulitzer Prize. We know now that Krock was paid for various projects by Joe Kennedy while Krock was working for the Times.

Another close friend of Jack and Jackie Kennedy was Joseph Alsop, an influential columnist who was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. Alsop frequently dined with the Kennedys in small gatherings, and the Kennedys would travel from the White House to Alsop’s Georgetown house for dinner.

The relationship between Alsop and young congressman Kennedy got off to a rocky start. Kennedy, a bachelor at the time, complained to Alsop that there were no young available women at his dinner parties. That convinced Alsop that Kennedy was not a serious person, and he quit inviting him.

After Kennedy married Jackie and entered the Senate, he became more serious. Alsop was completely charmed by the Kennedys. Robert Merry, who wrote a superb biography of the Alsop brothers (Stewart was a columnist for the Saturday Evening Post), said , “Joe was smitten by the entire Kennedy clan. The charm, class, beauty, confidence--all struck Joe’s fancy.”

Those stylistic traits became obvious when Kennedy was elected president — a sharp contrast to the aging departing president Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie.

Inauguration Day captured the essence of Jack Kennedy. His inaugural speech was one of the most memorable in history with lines still quoted by people today. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” Kennedy said. “Ask what you can do for your country.”

Also: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Every president since then has reached for such soaring rhetoric, without success.

Kennedy’s style and idealism quickly met with the realities of the world. The grim specter of nuclear war hung over Kennedy. Although nuclear war today seems almost unthinkable, the U.S. had used nuclear weapons just 16 years earlier to end World War II.

Kennedy was not optimistic that he could avoid a nuclear war. Asked by a dinner party guest at Alsop’s house what he thought the odds were of a nuclear war, Kennedy said, “Of course, if you think simply about the chances in history, you have to quote the odds at somewhere near even that we shall see an H-bomb war within the next 10 years.”

When JFK took office, five hot spots threatened to break out in war: Berlin, Laos, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan) and Cuba.

As it turned out, Cuba dominated Kennedy’s early foreign policy efforts.

Some thought Fidel Castro was just what Cuba needed to escape the problems of a dictatorship. It was fascinating to watch a clip of Ed Sullivan interviewing Castro in Havana for his popular Sunday night variety show.

The failed Bay of Pigs invasion showed Kennedy at his worst — indecisive, weak, unprepared to deal with the nuances of world affairs.

Although the Bay of Pigs was considered Kennedy’s worst failure in office, Kennedy’s job approval rating actually went up 10 points to 83 percent after the Bay of Pigs disclosure.

Kennedy remarked to a friend, “It’s just like Ike. The worse you do, the better they like you.”

Several factors contributed to this unlikely increase in popularity: he didn’t try to hide, he took personal responsibility, he was fighting communism, and he didn’t have to encounter a strident critical press.

Even with his approval ratings up, Time magazine put Kennedy’s early efforts in perspective: “Last week, as John F. Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his administration, the U.S. suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic. First came the Russian man-in-space triumph. Then the shockingly bungled invasion of Cuba. Finally, and belatedly, came the sickening realization that U.S.-backed Laos was about to go down the Communist drain.”

Kennedy learned from his mistakes. He realized that he could not rely on his current CIA and military leadership, and he needed to broaden the group of people who helped him make important decisions.

If the Bay of Pigs was Kennedy’s first big foreign policy disaster, the battle to admit James Meredith to Ole Miss was his first domestic crisis. Kennedy and his attorney general, Robert Kennedy, had hoped to get Meredith enrolled with minimal federal force and with the cooperation of Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett.

The minimal strategy ended in two deaths at Ole Miss after Barnett withdrew his pledge to maintain public safety. Kennedy finally ordered federal troops to the Ole Miss campus, but the damage had been done.

Lessons learned from the Bay of Pigs and Ole Miss helped Kennedy deal more successfully the following year with the Cuban missile crisis and with civil rights in Alabama and nationwide.

Kennedy’s learning curve on civil rights is clear following Ole Miss. Prior to Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, Kennedy took a cautious, pragmatic approach to civil rights.

He did not want to alienate powerful Southern senators like Jim Eastland of Mississippi and Richard Russell of Georgia because they held the keys to passage of his legislation.

But after Ole Miss, Kennedy learned that half measures would not achieve anything.

As a result, he became the first president to declare to the American people that racial discrimination was a moral issue, not a political issue.

Kennedy’s willingness to put the full force of the federal government against segregation marked a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.

So what remains of the Kennedy legacy today?

Space exploration.

The ban on nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere and in outer space.

The Peace Corps.

Civil rights, aided by Lyndon Johnson’s ability to get Congress to pass legislation proposed by Kennedy.

The idealistic view that public service is good.

Is that enough to make Kennedy a great president? Probably not. He was killed less than three years after he took office, so his agenda was unfinished. But he achieved more in less time than any other president.

With the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, was the Kennedy administration really a time of Camelot?

Camelot was never linked to Kennedy until after he was assassinated. It was a term that Jackie Kennedy pushed to writer Teddy White, who had an exclusive interview with her for Life magazine a week after Kennedy’s death. She emphasized, “There’ll be great presidents again — and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me — but there’ll never be another Camelot again.”

As White dictated his story from the Kennedy’s kitchen in Hyannisport, the Life editors thought there was too much emphasis on Camelot. But White insisted, and Camelot became what people remembered from the interview.

Years later, White wrote that Camelot was an incorrect description of the Kennedy years. In his book, “In Search of History,” he wrote, “So the epitaph on the Kennedy administration became Camelot — a magic

moment in history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when writers, artists and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back. Which, of course, is a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed.”

White wrote that he incorrectly saw Kennedy as a hero. “I would never again, after Kennedy, see any man as a hero. A passage in my own life had closed with a passage in American politics.”

Camelot or not, John Kennedy inspired Americans with his idealism and style. That image will remain alive for years to come.

But 50 years from now, it is unlikely JFK will receive major attention.

History is fickle and evolves from decade to decade. In 50 years, it is far more likely that students at Ole Miss will be asked to remember President Obama as the first African-American president than the president who served for only 1,000 days. The author is the former chairman of the Freedom Forum, Newseum and Diversity Institute. For 22 years he was chief executive officer of the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation about the press and the First Amendment. He was CEO of the Newseum from 1997 to 2011 and supervised the building of the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. He also was CEO of the Diversity Institute from its beginning in 2001. Overby has traveled to six continents speaking about media issues and promoting First Amendment freedoms. Before joining the Freedom Forum, Overby was a reporter and editor for 17 years. He was executive editor of The Clarion-ledger when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1983.