Actually, the differences between them may be more relevant. The only two words about domestic policy in Kennedy’s Inaugural Address were “at home”–added at the last minute. He saw even the issue of civil rights as mostly a matter of how it would be viewed overseas. Clinton, though more personally interested in foreign policy than people think (he first came east from Arkansas to study it), sees his presidency mostly in domestic terms. The White House fears foreign crises because they might “distract attention. " Thirty years is a long time, and the stakes are higher at home and lower, or so it seems, abroad. We knew Berlin. Berlin was a friend of ours. Somalia, you’re no Berlin.
Last week Clinton invited Richard Reeves in for a two-and-one-half-hour discussion of Reeves’s terrific (Kennedy’s favorite adjective) new book on JFK’s presidency which Clinton–and thus much of Washington–is dipping into before bed. Clinton told Reeves that he believes he’s in a Kennedy-like period of activity now, with issues pressing in on him in rapid succession. But the president is almost envious of the clarity of the cold war. Kennedy could rely on a ready-made rationale for every foreign-policy decision–namely, fighting communism. Nowadays, says Clinton, he is forced to explain the reasons behind intervention differently in each circumstance. And the reaction time is much shorter.
George Stephanopoulos says he was struck by an anecdote in Reeves’s chapter on the building of the Berlin wall. Daniel Schorr, then of CBS, was sitting in a Berlin cafe when the first barbed wire went up. He was elated to get his film to New York and on the air within 72 hours, during which Kennedy had leisurely assessed his options. “If it happened now, you would see the first barbed wire going up live on CNN and the president would have to respond in one hour,” Stephanopoulos says. “That could have meant the wall wouldn’t have gone up–or it could have meant nuclear war.”
Kennedy was the first president to exploit TV, but he didn’t live to find out how it might limit his flexibility. To hear the Clintonites, television sounds almost like…communism. “CNN has become a universal intervener. It’s an immediate actor. We’re often forced to respond to them as much as to actual activity,” Stephanopoulos continues. “And we couldn’t have ignored the Khrushchev letter [as Kennedy did during a key moment of the missile crisis] or kept the meetings secret. With CNN filming who’s going in, every meeting has to be a decision meeting; if there’s no decision, the president is seen as ‘indecisive.’ It practically defines our existence here.”
The strange thing is that though Kennedy had days to contemplate how to react, he loathed all meetings and could only be pinned down for an answer when he was on the move. Clinton may have only moments to make a decision before CNN comes on, but he thinks out loud in endless meetings. “They are opposites in terms of patience and impatience,” says Reeves. Kennedy is said to have offered the person talking to him about seven seconds to make an impression. Clinton can talk for seven hours and not notice the time.
Reeves sees similarities between Kennedy and Clinton in their spontaneous, chaotic approaches to management of the White House. But Clinton, according to Reeves, experienced no shock of recognition in reading about Kennedy’s weak staff structure. Stephanopoulos says he’s “reassured about the job the president is doing” after reading the book. “It’s not as ad hoc here, and he [Clinton] is more passionate and much better informed” than Kennedy.
But less ironic. Kennedy was president during a time of Michael-row-your-boat-ashore earnestness, yet his approach to life was defined by ironic detachment. Clinton is president during a time when the culture is saturated in Lettermanesque irony, yet he is full of almost indiscriminate 1960s enthusiasm. Kennedy, the easily bored critic, could rarely sit through a movie without saving, “Let’s haul ass out of here.” Clinton may be eating and doing the crossword puzzle during the movie, but he’s sure to say something nice about it.
Over all it’s good that the president. to use Reeves’s comparison, is an ebullient prom queen to JFK’s cool debutante. The historical division of labor seems about right: Kennedy was better suited to brinkmanship, Clinton to concentrating on health care. The problem is that Clinton could conceivably end up facing his own threat of nuclear peril, this one posed by proliferation. That issue desperately requires leadership before it ends up on CNN. Perhaps the president will take some of the all-purpose advice that Eleanor Roosevelt offered John Kennedy–to show a little less profile, and a little more courage.
