As some people have pointed out, there are some interesting parallels between President John F. Kennedy and current President George W. Bush.
While imperfect, the analogy is indeed apt in many ways.
Both were ardent tax cutters. Both were scions of a wealthy aristocratic New England family.
Both were elected in a year ending in “0” (1960 and 2000). Both won in a very close, controversial and disputed race (it’s still believed by many that there was massive vote fraud in Chicago, giving Kennedy Illinois and the presidency). In so doing, both retook the White House from eight years of a previous popular president of the opposite party, against whose vice president they ran and won (Eisenhower and Nixon for Kennedy, Clinton and Gore for Bush). Both were elected a few years after their party took over the Congress from their rival party, and (while this one hasn’t yet been borne out for Mr. Bush, it’s looking increasing likely) both led a realignment that made their party the national majority for years to come.
Interestingly enough, there may soon be another parallel.
Kennedy embarked the nation on our first (though hopefully not last) grand expedition to another world–earth’s moon, in a history-making speech in the first few months of his young presidency.
While President Bush may be a little late to the table in terms of timing (three years into his presidency), there are rumors that he is about to make a similar announcement–perhaps to go back to the moon, hopefully with a program less ephemeral than Apollo was or even, in the hopes of some, to Mars.
If he does this with vigor and commitment, many will indeed point out this new, exciting similarity to the JFK presidency–a president who boldly set his nation off into the cosmos, a man of vision who saw mankind’s destiny in the stars, who was willing to expend vital political capital to ensure a posterity for humanity off the planet as well as on, initiating a future in which man would go “where no man had gone before.”
The only problem with this parallel is that it would be a false one, because in fact Jack Kennedy was none of those things. Like many of the myths of Camelot, the notion of Kennedy as space visionary is a sham.
The charming youthful president with the beautiful and cultured wife was in fact a womanizer who hung out with mobster molls and prostitutes. The vigorous sailor and touch football athlete at Hyannisport was in fact often bed ridden and perhaps addicted to pain medication from back injuries. The hero of the Cuban missile crisis put the nation’s security at risk by exposing himself to blackmail.
It’s now well established that Kennedy never cared about space per se. What he cared about was beating the Russians to the moon, for its symbolic value. From White House tapes, in a conversation with then-NASA administrator James Webb in late November, 1962 (almost exactly forty one years ago), he said:
“Everything that we do should be tied into getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians. We ought to get it really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top priority program of the agency and one… of the top priorities of the United States government,” he said.
“Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I am not that interested in space,” Kennedy said. “I think it’s good. I think we ought to know about it.
“But we’re talking about fantastic expenditures,” Kennedy said. “We’ve wrecked our budget, and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, is to do it in the time element I am asking.”
This was in response to a plea by Webb to be allowed to give ample resources to other space exploration activities besides Apollo.
No president has ever been a true visionary of space, a Thomas Jefferson of the high frontier. Johnson carried on the Apollo program from Kennedy, but that was partly out of respect for a martyred president, partly out of the same motivation to gain some propaganda advantage over the Soviets in the Cold War, and partly out of a desire to industrialize the south, but none of these reasons were sufficient to keep him from making the decision to end the program in 1967, after it became clear that we were going to win the race by the end of the decade. It continued to fly through 1972, but no new lunar hardware was built.
Nixon was often blamed for the end of Apollo, but he was guilty only of failing to reverse the Johnson administration’s decision. Jimmy Carter had no interest in it, and his vice president, Walter Mondale, tried repeatedly to kill the Space Shuttle when he was a Senator in the 1970s.
Republicans, in fact, at least since Reagan (who initiated the space station program in 1984), have been more supportive of visionary space initiatives. The current President’s father announced a new space exploration initiative in July of 1989, but a recalcitrant Congress, in combination with an overambitious NASA, conspired to kill it.
So if, in fact, the current president Bush makes an announcement, whether on December 17th, the hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight (as is rumored) or in January in the State of the Union address, and it is truly meant to be a long-duration activity, rather than a war by peaceful means (it’s hard to imagine us being in a space race with Al Qaeda), it will actually be a first.
If indeed President Bush turns out to be a space visionary, it won’t be another parallel with JFK–it will be actually be counterevidence against the analogy.
Of course, considering that this coming Saturday is the fortieth anniversary of the day that President Kennedy was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas, with President Bush overseas in late November of the third year of his presidency, amidst hostile protestors marching in the streets chanting their irrational hatred of him, it should be our most fervent hope that he can avoid the most tragic parallel of all.