Why John F. Kennedy is the Last President Barack Obama Should Try to Emulate
By Asher Smith
Posted: 02/14/2008
Ray Hu/Staff
The day before the Washington state caucus, the Obama campaign landed a major coup. The popular governor, Christine Gregoire, had agreed to endorse the candidate and to not only campaign for him in the key caucus state, but also to appear in a national television advertisement for Obama. This was a crucial victory, as it helped to demonstrate the Illinois senator’s increasing support among female voters, Hillary Clinton’s supposed base.
The ad is noteworthy for how well it fits the narrative that the Obama campaign is trying to establish. Says Gregoire: “I was inspired to pursue a career in public service by John F. Kennedy…like President Kennedy, Barack Obama is inspiring a new generation of young people to get involved.”
As the primary season roars on, Obama is doing all he can to imprint in the American subconscious that Barack Obama is Jack Kennedy reincarnated. It was the theme of the Kennedy/Shriver love-fest in California leading up to Super Tuesday. It’s even the design of new batches of campaign pins produced by the campaign and its supporters, which picture the ex-president’s face prominently behind that of Obama’s.
This amounts to an unspeakably sad kabuki theater of degradation. Not because Barack Obama can’t measure up to Jack Kennedy’s legacy, but because Barack Obama shouldn’t want to.
To put it bluntly, John F. Kennedy was a moral retrograde, an unaccomplished fraud, an indifferent, callow heir of ill-gotten privilege and literally the spawn of Satan (Jack’s father Joseph could have given Lucifer a run for his money). His footsteps should not be ones that any contemporary politician should be seeking to follow in.
A couple months ago, Barack Obama’s campaign put out a new pin seeking to emphasize the candidate’s values. It features Barack, his wife Michelle and his two daughters embracing and looking happily out at the viewer. The caption above the picture reads “America’s First Family,” a title first bestowed upon the Kennedy’s. Yet not only was Jack Kennedy a noted womanizer, his treatment of his wife and children suggest a personal morality bordering on sociopathic. In a story related by award-winning historian Robert Dallek in his authoritative biography of Kennedy, Jack was informed of his wife’s 1955 miscarriage during a yachting trip in the Mediterranean with Senate buddy George Smathers. After little deliberation, Kennedy elected to continue his island-hopping instead of returning to Hyannisport. His bereft wife could wait — he had to finish sampling the women of the various Greek Isles.
In the grand scheme of things, Kennedy’s moral failings pale in comparison to his failings as a public servant, and it is this that really should have precluded Obama’s embracing of Kennedy as a role model. Barack Obama has gone to great lengths to frame himself as the candidate of big ideas, of “change we can believe in.” Yet on the biggest issue of his time, the defining cause of American history, Jack Kennedy was guilty of extreme cowardice and pusillanimity and, as the 2006 book by noted civil rights historian Nick Bryant explained, was nothing more than a mere “bystander” to the drama raging around him. Kennedy had no moral commitment to civil rights. Instead, he possessed an intellectual understanding of the need for reform, but he lacked the ability to empathize with the yearnings of black America, which is what made white politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson able to stake their careers on the altar of equality.
The biggest gulf between Obama and the man he misguidedly seeks to emulate is one of accomplishment. Barack Obama is the epitome of the ideal self-made American man: Hard work and commitment to excellence allowed him to gain admittance into elite universities, and his dogged work as a community organizer is what propelled him into elected office.
In stark contrast, Jack Kennedy was a creation of his father. Any sense of accomplishment that Kennedy may have had was false. Joseph Kennedy’s money placed Jack in Congress and then the Senate, Ted Sorenson’s pen placed him on the best-seller list and Joseph was not above using indiscreet bribes to further his son’s career (he offered $1 million to Lyndon Johnson in 1956 to run for president against Eisenhower with Jack as his vice presidential nominee). Even when John Kennedy ascended to the Oval Office, he wasn’t out of his father’s influence. Brother Bobby was appointed as attorney general on daddy’s orders, over Jack’s meager and brief protest.
Barack Obama is the man John F. Kennedy pretended to be. For the Illinois senator to try to glom onto turpitude-stained coattails, striving to be worthy of the Kennedy inheritance, is a fool’s errand. He already exceeded it long ago just by conducting his life with dignity and integrity.
Asst. Editorials Editor Asher Smith is a College freshman from Great Neck, N.Y.
