Historian in Chief How Presidents Interpret the Past to Control the Future Edited by Seth Cotlar and Richard J. Ellis University of Virginia Press / Charlottesville and London University of Virginia Press © 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2019 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cotlar, Seth, editor. | Ellis, Richard (Richard J.), editor. Title: Historian in chief : how presidents interpret the past to control the future / edited by Seth Cotlar and Richard J. Ellis. Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018051550 | isbn 9780813942520 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780813942537 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Presidents—United States—Attitudes—History. | United States— Historiography. | Collective memory—United States—History. | Political culture—United States—History. Classification: lcc e176.1 .h5556 2019 | ddc 306.20973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051550 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 I Slavery, Political Parties, and the Making of a New Constitution 1 George Washington: His Own Historian 2 Slavery, Voice, and Loyalty: John Quincy Adams as the First Revisionist David Waldstreicher 57 Martin Van Buren, the Democratic Party, and the Jacksonian Reinvention of the Constitution Elvin T. Lim 80 Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Archives: Slavery, the Cooper Union Address, and the Election of 1860 Jonathan Earle 103 3 4 Edward Countryman 29 II Reimagining American Power and Responsibility 5 6 Theodore Roosevelt’s Historical Consciousness and Lincoln’s Generous Nationalism Kathleen Dalton 123 A Scholar and His Ghosts: Woodrow Wilson as Historian in the White House John Milton Cooper Jr. 142 vi / Contents 7 The Ordeal of Paris: Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, and the Search for Peace Charlie Laderman 161 III Reckoning with Liberalism and the New Deal 8 9 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Problem of Historical Time David Sehat 187 Profiles in Triangulation: John F. Kennedy’s Neoliberal History of American Politics Jeffrey L. Pasley 205 10 Ronald Reagan’s Allegories of History Rick Perlstein 11 Barack Obama’s Use of American History James T. Kloppenberg 230 243 Notes on Contributors 271 Index 275 9 Profiles in Triangulation John F. Kennedy’s Neoliberal History of American Politics Jeffrey L. Pasley Though still one of the most familiar names in popular history and selling briskly in multiple formats at the John F. Kennedy Library, it has been a long while since scholars or journalists took Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Profiles in Courage very seriously. In the decades since baby boomers stopped getting the book as a graduation gift, it has become far better known for the controversy over its authorship, launched by columnist Drew Pearson and chin-stroked over by Kennedy watchers ever since. Yet the traditional concern with parsing John F. Kennedy’s percentage of authorship, in an openly staff-produced book, misses the larger significance of Profiles in Courage. Understood in a broader context than who really deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957, Profiles in Courage represents one of the most striking and detailed uses of history in the history of presidential politics. Along with its accompanying publicity campaign, the book mapped out and helped shape the future development of American politics, especially in the Democratic Party: by reading John F. Kennedy’s own centrist, nationalistic, and individualistic values and triangulating strategies into the American past, it sought to legitimate and ennoble them for the present and future.1 Kennedy’s prominent place in the popular historical imagination of post1960s America had often obscured the political mythology he helped shape for himself as he rose to power in the 1950s. Attending to the details of Profiles in Courage helps us recapture that. Though in the short run, in the wake of his assassination, Kennedy’s memory seemed to authorize the liberal statism of Lyndon Johnson and his youngest brother, his longer-term legacy was different. Quite a few of the young politicians who grew up reading Profiles in Courage and became national figures in the Democratic Party would 206 / Jeffrey L. Pasley turn out to be the neoliberal government reinventors and triangulators of the 1980s, 1990s, and after. Although none were as good as the original at the “Kennedy-esque” soaring oratory, Gary Hart, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama had all the boyish good looks, middle-straddling policies, and cult of political “courage” to show for it. The fascination with the Kennedys as pop cultural icons has often tended to obscure and overshadow John F. Kennedy as an actual political figure, and Profiles in Courage is no exception. Scholars tend to disregard popular history when they are not trying to write it, so the political project of the book has been missed. Released in early 1956 just as that year’s presidential race was shaping up, it was part of a long Kennedy family campaign to give Jack’s reputation the weight he would need to be a successful national contender. His youthful playboy image and relative lack of political accomplishments needed to be countered with evidence of his seriousness. The theme of “courage” called back to the lovingly fostered stories of Kennedy’s wartime heroism; copies of John Hersey’s 1944 New Yorker article on the P.T. 109 incident had been distributed by all of his campaigns from the beginning. It silently ignored a pre-presidential political career that was far more ambitious than heroic, and invoked the Hemingway-style quiet machismo—“grace under pressure”—that Kennedy and the popular publishing industry greatly admired and promoted. The use of history was even more appealing to Kennedy himself. Despite his swinging lifestyle and tousled-haired image, Jack was considered the intellectual of the family and had first come into the public eye with a book of historical interpretation: Why England Slept, on the appeasement policy of the 1930s. Politically, however, there was much more to Profiles in Courage than rubbing shoulders with Hemingway and Churchill.2 Triangulating Race and Region The courage that Kennedy and his aide and amanuensis Ted Sorensen celebrated in Profiles was specifically political courage, not really Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” at all. All of the examples in the book were senators “whose abiding loyalty to their nation triumphed over all personal and political considerations.” Most of Kennedy’s senatorial vignettes revolved around a political sacrifice made, typically by crossing party and regional lines in some way, at the cost of a lost campaign or criticism from erstwhile allies, in the name of maintaining the stability and power of U.S. institutions, especially Profiles in Triangulation / 207 the presidency. Usually (but not always) the choice defined as less courageous was loyalty to party, home, or cause, with the subject’s stand carefully defined as brave and sacrificial even when long-range ambition was also at work. First up in the book is John Quincy Adams, praised for being the only New England Federalist to support the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson’s embargo Act of 1807, which devastated New England’s maritime economy. “You are supported by no party,” Kennedy quotes Adams’s father writing to him. “You have too honest a heart, too independent a mind, and too brilliant talents, to be . . . trusted by any man who is under the domination of party maxims or party feelings.” John Quincy Adams was apparently the only one of the Profiles for which JFK did much of the research and writing himself, rather than academic researchers or Ted Sorensen, and his section perhaps best encapsulates the kind of putatively high-minded but ambitious triangulation that Kennedy both admired and tried to practice. Siding with Thomas Jefferson may have cost John Quincy Adams his Senate seat, but it also put him in line, as a newly minted Democratic Republican, for a string of diplomatic posts, including secretary of state, that eventually led to the presidency.3 Similarly, though Kennedy would have to play down some of his isolationist father’s conservative connections later, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s loyal friends—New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a fellow conservative Democrat, and arch-Republican publisher Henry Luce, owner of Time and LIFE—were instrumental in the heavy, adulatory publicity Jack Kennedy the man, politician, and author received throughout his life.4 Profiles in Courage was published in early 1956 just as that year’s presidential race (and more relevant for Kennedy, the process of publicly mentioning contenders for the second spot on the Democratic ticket) was beginning. Glowingly reviewed in publications large and small, national and regional, it was excerpted in the New York Times and popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest and Collier’s. In May, only a few weeks before the Democratic Convention, one of the Golden Age of Television’s most respected live anthology shows, Kraft Television Theatre, lavishly dramatized a chapter of the book, with seventy-six actors, twenty-eight sets, and Senator Kennedy himself on hand to open and close the hour.5 The book’s usable history worked hard on particular Kennedy political problems, finding worthy historical precedents for Jack’s own patterns. Party discipline and respect for seniority had never suited him. As a young senator, Kennedy had angered Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson by constantly 208 / Jeffrey L. Pasley straying on party-line votes and setting his sights for higher office almost immediately. More seriously, he had been the only Democrat not to vote for the censure of Republican demagogue Joe McCarthy, a Kennedy family friend and fellow Irish American whose rabid anti-Communism actually suited Jack the presidential candidate’s tough foreign policy stance. Kennedy’s chapter on John Quincy Adams emphasized the nationalism and expansionism of his younger years rather than his late-life stint as “Old Man Eloquent” doggedly fighting slavery in the House of Representatives. The younger John Adams became the original model of the brainy son of New England privilege brashly forging his own path in the nation’s capital. “Arriving in Washington,” Kennedy wrote, “[John Quincy] Adams promptly indicated his disregard for both party affiliations and customary freshman reticence.” The chapter did double duty by taking on the Kennedy-cognate task of mainstreaming a politician from New England, possibly the North’s most distinctive and alienating region for outsiders.6 Kennedy also sought to mainstream the South, despite his genuine but somewhat nominal support for African American civil rights. In common with most 1950s northern Democrats who were not “A.D.A. [Americans for Democratic Action] liberals,” John F. Kennedy still looked for votes from the southern segregationist wing of the party. (“ADA liberal” was generally a term of abuse in the Kennedy family, at least before they brought ADA cofounder Arthur Schlesinger Jr. onto their staff to placate and occasionally misdirect liberals.) Indeed, like his rival Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy generally kept to the right on race issues of even moderately liberal southern figures in the party like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver. Stevenson, for his part, was often wrongly seen and remembered as a liberal because of his urbane, “egghead” image and fan base of educated reformers in New York and other cities, a confusion between style and substance that was not uncommon in that milieu. Though the cool approach to civil rights was at least partly strategic, neither of the Democratic aristocrats took much personal interest in the matter. Kennedy, writes biographer Robert Dallek, “could not empathize, and only faintly sympathize, with pains felt by African Americans. . . . The only blacks he knew were chauffeurs, valets, and domestics, with whom he had minimal contact.” Along with legislative procedure and constitutional interpretation, history was a convenient way for Kennedy to clasp the South to his bosom without completely alienating white liberals and blacks, whose votes would be crucial in the North. In Profiles in Triangulation / 209 Profiles, Kennedy wooed the segregationist South not by defending racism, slavery, or Jim Crow, but by finding common cause with southerners and their allies (including many racists and slaveholders) at moments when they could be depicted as principled, noble, and nationalistic; sometimes two out of three was good enough. This wasn’t too difficult, as the leading academic historians of the day tended to take the same approach.7 The most popular and paradigmatic of Kennedy’s profiles, used in a separately published magazine article, adapted for a television special even before his presidency, and then adapted again for the follow-up television series, concerned Senator Edmund G. Ross, a Kansas Republican whose departure from a party-line vote saved President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee from impeachment. Kennedy and Sorensen played Ross’s defiance of his party as a pure sacrifice for the good of the Republic. This was a revealing reinterpretation. The real life Ross was a former Democrat, who, while he had been a fiery “Free State” editor and Union officer, was like many other former Democrats in developing qualms about the Radical Republicans’ willingness to use federal government authority to remake southern society and punish the ex-Confederates. In other words, Ross had much in common politically with Andrew Johnson himself, making his vote an act of ideology as much as courage. He also stood to lose all his influence over Kansas patronage appointments if Johnson was removed. While the failed Johnson impeachment eventually helped finish off Ross as a Kansas Republican, he had a long career ahead in Democratic politics, including a stint as territorial governor of New Mexico. While not unbrave, Ross’s defection from Radical Republicanism actually followed the arc of the Democratic Party and the country in the late nineteenth century toward less activist government and a reconciliation of northern and southern whites that was indifferent—or much worse—to the fate of former slaves and their children.8 These attitudes were far from completely absent from the 1950s world in which Profiles in Courage was written. Kraft Television Theatre chose the Ross chapter as the one to stage. Ace screenwriter Wendell Mayes (an Oscar nominee for Anatomy of a Murder) turned out a Dunning school epic about the horrors of Reconstruction that went much farther than the book in depicting a “a shattered, hungry South” beleaguered by “the curse of a vengeful North,” with carpetbaggers luring the freed slaves to vote Republican with candy, promises, and “jungle rhythms.” Even that Senator Kennedy did not find it strong enough, penciling his own words into the narrator’s dialogue about 210 / Jeffrey L. Pasley the “fanatical” plans of Thad Stevens (played by villain specialist Victor Jory) to give suffrage to “the liberated slaves, whether they were ready for it or not, and to crush the South, its political leaders and its economy, whether it was constitutional or not.” Ted Sorensen was still concerned that the show might hurt Kennedy with southern viewers and voters. He forced Mayes to rewrite Act II of the show “to avoid concentration on the race issue.”9 The type of courage that does stand out in Kennedy’s southern stories was a certain flinty, attractively obstinate amorality that allowed the senator in question to focus on higher national interests over the carpings of various hacks and fanatics. While pontificating moralists were not absent from Profiles, making a strong stand on social and moral issues did not count for much. The two antislavery heroes in Kennedy’s book were Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston, whose manly southern indifference to the moral questions is emphasized in favor of mini-melodramas about two lions in winter (actors Brian Keith and J. D. Cannon chewed the scenery gloriously in the 1964–65 television series) angrily shaking off the reins of party discipline and thrashing around at the secessionist upstarts in their midst. The book and television script find Benton, a slaveholder fighting to save his Senate seat from proslavery forces back in Missouri and defend the Compromise of 1850, declaring himself “the natural enemy of all rotten politicians” and a man who would rather sit down with cholera victims than the “gang of scamps” who criticized him. As Kennedy doubtless saw himself, Benton and Houston are depicted as personally free of racial prejudice, but primarily motivated by nationalistic rather than humanistic concerns: the unforgivable sin of proslavery extremists was not racism but the danger they posed to the expanding territorial integrity of the United States.10 The stories of northerners like Edmund G. Ross who went soft in the fight against slavery and racism were used to turn the abandonment of regional and party loyalties, in the interests of national influence, into stories of dramatic sacrifice. It was the well-triangulated approach of a historianpolitician who supported African American civil rights but still sought the good opinion of southern whites. In his chapter on Daniel Webster, Kennedy lauded Black Dan’scourage in not following his conscience and supporting the Compromise of 1850 instead, at the behest of his old friend Henry Clay. Unlike the last stands of Benton, Houston, and Webster, which really did ruin them each politically, Kennedy’s triangulations always seemed to work out for the better of his reputation. In 1954, he came out for the Profiles in Triangulation / 211 St. Lawrence Seaway, a free trade project many believed would divert business from the port of Boston and put many Kennedy constituents out of work; speechwriter Ted Sorensen pulled out a Daniel Webster quote for the occasion. Instead of ignominy, Jack was rewarded with a Meet the Press appearance and increased national standing.11 Politicians above Party The Kennedy ideal of political courage valorized leaders who flouted democratic pressures from party ideologues or their own constituents in the name of more “responsible” measures favored by national elites in Washington, D.C., or else followed the whims of their own consciences. Kennedy threw another bouquet to the South in his profile of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi, a proslavery racialist college professor turned Confederate general. Lamar won Kennedy’s plaudits for agreeing to the deal that officially ended Reconstruction, and giving a nice eulogy for an opponent, abolitionist senator Charles Sumner (despite still accepting none of Sumner’s ideals), thus healing the nation with no mention of the fate of southern blacks. Lamar’s other claim to “courage” was a fiscally responsible vote against a free silver bill that was popular among his impoverished constituents. Lamar’s “sacrifices” included never losing his place in Mississippi’s white oligarchy and becoming the first ex-Confederate on the Supreme Court.12 A more defensible Kennedy favorite was Progressive Republican George W. Norris of Nebraska, suggested by Ted Sorensen, whose father had worked with Norris and had some relevant letters and clippings in his possession. Norris had many exploits, but what Sorensen and Kennedy chose to highlight were his habit of undermining whatever political party he happened to be working with at a given time: leading the overthrow of the old Republican boss of the House of Representatives, Joe Cannon, then filibustering Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s Armed Ships Bill, and finally earning true Kennedy family honors by crossing back over again to support Al Smith, a “wet” Catholic Democrat, in 1928, even though Norris himself was a long-time “dry.” As quoted by Kennedy, in the book and other venues, Norris wanted to “abolish party responsibility and in its stead establish personal responsibility.” Severely underplayed or left out entirely was the economic liberal statism that actually tied all of Norris’s zig and zags together—he was especially devoted to the old Progressive crusade for public ownership of utilities, and 212 / Jeffrey L. Pasley later (after Profiles in Courage drops the story) left the Republican Party for good in the 1930s to become an ardent New Dealer and legislative founder of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Norris managed to avoid any tragic sacrifices until, after serving forty consecutive years in Congress, he ran for reelection one last time as an independent in 1942. Norris’s last stand demonstrated one of the dangers of his brand of “personal responsibility” politics to the causes he supported; his candidacy split the liberal vote, and facilitated the victory of shouting conservative Kenneth S. Wherry, a selfdescribed “fundamentalist” Republican who thought all government programs were socialist (including the Marshall Plan) and earned latter-day infamy as a leader of the Cold War campaign to purge homosexuals from the federal bureaucracy.13 On the one hand, the underlying message of the celebration of bi-, non-, and antipartisanship in Profiles in Courage was simply that elite rule was best, as long as the great men had integrity and intelligence, as they always did in Profiles in Courage. This was a natural enough attitude for a politician to the manor born like John F. Kennedy, and one that suited the increasingly imperial powers of the United States in the Cold War era. In one of Profiles’ more honest passages, the introductory chapter that by all accounts he was most directly involved in writing, Kennedy struck a decidedly martial note, admitting that the purpose of political “courage” as he understood it was enabling a leader to use power (even force) harshly and broadly “for future glory” whether the people understood and supported it or not: “In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy.”14 On the other hand, and on a more self-conscious level, Kennedy was simply trying to produce an inspirational book that would help readers see the good in the American political tradition and hold politicians in higher estimation. This was a recurring theme of the barrage of articles that Ted Sorensen wrote under Kennedy’s byline, for a hilariously bewildering array of publications. If popular respect for politics and politicians was not increased, “Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts” wrote in the Alumnews, a local Catholic newsletter in Cleveland, “we cannot fail to have mediocre people making the vital decisions that affect us all. Our best young men and women will not choose a career in which they can look forward only to abuse and scorn.” The reader might infer it was a good thing that at least one Harvard-educated Pulitzer Prize–winner was still available.15 Profiles in Triangulation / 213 From a twenty-first-century vantage point, it is refreshing to see a politician campaigning with such relative high-mindedness, but Kennedy’s elision of power, celebrity, and political philosophy from the possible list of motivations for going into politics is striking. As the popularity of Profiles in Courage attests, Kennedy was tapping into something deep in the heart of American political culture, a self-image of political individualism and a concomitant, almost automatic suspicion of parties, partisanship, and political organization that defies the assumptions of midcentury political scientists and contradicts the polarization found in mass voting behavior. As an early Americanist by trade, it is hard not to notice the way that many of the approvingly quoted sentiments in Profiles in Courage echo the “republican virtue” ideal of patriotic leadership espoused at least on some occasions by the founding elite of the United States. Kennedy and Sorensen were undoubtedly not invoking this tradition consciously—historians were only just then unearthing it—but it does show the depth of the independent ideal Kennedy and Sorensen were appealing to. An advocate for European-style mass-membership parties with coherent social visions and policy agendas, the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham lamented in 1965 “the failure of political organizations more advanced than the 19th-century middle-class cadre party to develop in this country,” underlying which was a “deeper failure of any except middle-class social and political values to achieve full legitimacy.” Instead, Americans were gripped with an “ideological individualism which continues so deeply to pervade our political culture.” Burnham was still active at the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and his analysis was still in full force.16 The problem, with the founders and with JFK, was that this ideal could be self-serving as well as noble, suitable for elevating the man above the people who elected him, and the executive authority he commands over other parts of the government and the political process. This dovetailed with the longtime concern Kennedy had, going back to Why England Slept, with whether democracies could be strong and stable enough to compete with totalitarian states. The Cold War era answer in circles like the Kennedys was quite possibly not, and this was one force behind the ever-expanding powers and pretensions of the presidency. If floating above parties was the political ideal within the world of Profiles in Courage, the real world of the 1950s had to be satisfied with gentrifying the parties that existed. Kennedy’s message clearly had a strong appeal to young, educated professionals, who were a growing force in the Democratic Party 214 / Jeffrey L. Pasley in the 1950s, and who had increasingly less patience for the grubby, transactional politics and unquestioning partisanship of the urban ward-heeler and other denizens of the regular Democratic Party organizations. The gentrification movement took off in New York and other cities, where “amateur Democrats” organized themselves into reform clubs to take on their local party bosses and organizations. The club activists felt that candidates and officeholders should act on their principles, not for money, patronage, or just to keep their party in power. Conceiving themselves as liberals but lacking much substance to their ideas, they flocked to the genteel banners of the relatively conservative Adlai Stevenson in response to stylistics: according to the political scientist James Q. Wilson’s sociological study of the clubs, the members found Stevenson poised, urbane, and witty, “a true intellectual, and more than that, a true American aristocrat.” As Thomas Jefferson or John Adams might have put it, Stevenson came off as a “natural aristocrat,” a product of inborntalent, good breeding, and a fine education, the son of a vice president. Adlai the “egghead” was catnip to young professionals who were just then emerging from the higher ends of America’s rapidly expanding system of educational meritocracy, culminating in prestigious universities and professional schools. Kennedy himself was regarded as a bit of an arriviste by many of the club people, who looked down on his youth, Catholicism, and what seemed to them his crass use of his family’s wealth in politics. Yet Kennedy himself was drawn to Stevenson, and partly by attaching himself to the Democratic front-runner, and partly with the message of Profiles in Courage, Kennedy would eventually win the urban amateurs and people like them over. An important Stevenson-Kennedy connection was Harvard history professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Stevenson speechwriter and cofounder of ADA, whose switch to Kennedy in 1960 gave JFK cover with self-styled Stevenson liberals.17 With Profiles in Courage in the bookstores, 1956 was John Kennedy’s year to move in on the Stevenson constituency and help out with its gentrification of the Democratic Party. Contrary to Nixonian myths about organized crime and the city machines fixing elections for Kennedy, his relationship with such elements of the party was actually quite distant and hostile. While hardly a reformer himself, Kennedy had little taste for the rough Irish pols who dominated Democratic politics in Massachusetts and many other northern places, and in most cases the bad feelings were mutual. He avoided dealing with them as much as possible, but if he did it was often to Profiles in Triangulation / 215 confront and make them foils. In 1956, he personally involved himself in the overthrow of Massachusetts state Democratic chairman William “Onions” Burke. Burke had engineered a favorite-son victory for Representative John McCormack over Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 state presidential primary, and made the mistake of casting Stevenson and his supporters as left-wing Communist sympathizers who “ought to be down in Princeton listening to Alger Hiss.” Kennedy personally drove out to western Massachusetts, where “Onions” had his namesake onion farm, and told Burke he was out as state chairman. Then Kennedy and his aides furiously lined up candidates to run against Burke and his allies on the state committee, and pushed them through to start “a new era for the Democratic Party in Massachusetts.” Jack’s chief Boston political cronies, Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, thought the battle with Onions was a political coming-of-age for Kennedy, and credited the reflection and study of great leaders that went into Profiles in Courage with granting Jack newfound wisdom and toughness.18 It would be unwise to uncritically accept the word of John F. Kennedy’s two most devoted sycophants, but it seems clear that Profiles in Courage did help set his course for the next few years. Appealing to young people and professionals against the old parties and party leaders, even if they were nearly the same age as he was and just looked older, Kennedy pursued a candidate-centered style of campaigning that his victories would popularize. After riding his wave of prestige publicity into the 1956 vice-presidential race against the wishes of Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador Kennedy, and other party elders, Jack was selected to give the speech nominating Stevenson at the Democratic Convention, as a way of softening the rejection. He adopted the suprapartisan rhetoric of Profiles in Courage for the occasion, amped up with his own heroic notions of the presidency. He cautioned the delegates not to “forget the grave responsibilities” they possessed. “We are selecting the head of the most powerful Nation on earth, the man who will literally hold in his hands the power of survival or destruction, of freedom or slavery, of success or failure for us all.” Hence they needed a man “who must be something more than a good candidate, something more than a good speaker or a good politician, a good liberal or a good conservative.”19 Later, during a Stevenson-sanctioned floor fight over the vice presidential nomination, Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut put Kennedy’s name in nomination with explicit reference to his appeal to “the large number of independent voters” who lurked in the electorate. The older “ardent Democrats” 216 / Jeffrey L. Pasley on the convention floor needed to be “realistic” and let the “fresh and clean breezes” of JFK blow over them. Kennedy lost the veepstakes to the original front-runner for the second spot, Estes Kefauver, but with the Democratic ticket destined to be crushed by Eisenhower and Nixon in the fall, he was the unquestioned star of the party thereafter, if not yet its accepted leader.20 To a degree that has been understandably overshadowed by the many, many more sensational events that followed the Kennedy family through history, one of John F. Kennedy’s most durable legacies has been the inexorable rise of candidate- (as opposed to party-) centered presidential politics that came in the wake of his success as a politician and pop-culture icon. By emerging in the public eye based on media coverage, and then becoming the first president perceived to gain the nomination by damaging more established contenders in the primaries (only a handful of states held them in 1960, but Kennedy’s defeats of Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia were considered decisive), Kennedy established candidate-centered campaigning as the norm in American presidential politics, sapping significant prestige and influence from the national party organizations. After Eugene McCarthy and President Kennedy’s own brother both followed his example in 1968, only to have the nomination end up with the party establishment’s candidate, Hubert Humphrey, reforms were brought in that damaged the party organizations institutionally, making primary campaigns driven by the media and especially by the candidates themselves loom larger and larger in the process. After the Kennedys, the national party organizations would increasingly act as little but conduits for campaign funds and advertising, in competition with many others. Nominations would be determined entirely in the primaries, with the candidates’ personal organizations controlling every aspect of the campaigns, including (by the late twentieth century) even the national party conventions.21 “Edward Youngfellow” and the New Economics: Kennedy’s Neoliberalism Part and parcel of the trend toward a candidate-centered politics pitched to the professional classes, especially in the Democratic Party, was the declining prestige and coherence of the party’s ideological program. In the 1950s, that meant the New Deal liberalism that had reshaped U.S. government and American society in the previous two decades, especially as it was further Profiles in Triangulation / 217 developed by the Truman administration. Combining Keynesian economics, infrastructure development, protection of labor rights, and federal government interventions to support housing, education, old-age pensions, and other basic forms of social welfare, the New Deal order would actually see its greatest expansion under Kennedy’s immediate successors, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The New Deal proper was largely entailed away from southern blacks by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s southern allies, but through the pressure of the civil rights movement and its attendant Supreme Court decisions, African Americans would come to be included in the New Deal coalition, too, as beneficiaries as well as voters. Yet before he and his brother became the fallen saviors of 1960s liberalism, John F. Kennedy was a committed centrist, at best. He famously outflanked Nixon to the right in 1960 on national security, accusing the Eisenhower administration of allowing a “missile gap” to develop, and his conservatism actually went much deeper than that. His roots were in the Irish Catholic right of the northern Democratic Party, traditionally hostile or indifferent to public schools and other government programs that were often (correctly) perceived as Protestant assimilationist plots and unfriendly to the aspirations of competing ethnic groups, especially African Americans and Jews. He was also a child of wealth who, by his own admission, never personally experienced the Great Depression or took any serious personal interest in domestic affairs. Like his father, he was a fiscal traditionalist who pined for balanced federal budgets and chafed at the popularity of New Deal social programs among his constituents. Part of John F. Kennedy’s anti-Communism was antistatism. In a speech at Notre Dame in 1950, he condemned “the resignation of major problems into the all absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state” as “the scarlet thread that runs throughout the world.” The “New Frontier” he offered the country in 1960 was distinctly one that pointed toward individual striving and away from New Deal liberalism, despite the shared adjective.22 The ideological groundwork for this move, including the manly but soaring rhetoric that ennobled it, was laid by Profiles in Courage and its offshoots. Kennedy, Sorensen, and their collaborators fashioned a history of American politics that almost completely omitted the New Deal or any other kind of social reform cause, or indeed any struggles for equality or democracy, from the annals of American political courage. On the contrary, as we have seen, the reverse was usually true. Only southern slaveholders got to stand 218 / Jeffrey L. Pasley up, sideways, against slavery. By the same token, racism was only addressed in a one-page tribute to a southern Democrat. In the “Other Men of Courage” chapter at the end of the book, Kennedy saluted forgotten presidential candidate Oscar Underwood of Alabama for favoring (or rather, not opposing) a failed anti–Ku Klux Klan platform plank at the 1924 Democratic convention, the “Klanbake” where the Klan marched outside the hall and actively politicked within it.23 The only other major chapter not mentioned so far celebrated another of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s curious friends, “Mr. Republican” Robert A. Taft. Taft had given a speech in Ohio questioning the constitutionality of the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trials a few days before the executions in 1946. This was at a time when it was not uncommon for the old isolationist Republicans, including the aforementioned lavender-baiter Kenneth Wherry, to voice surprising sympathy for the defeated Germans. “The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record we shall regret,” Taft told the assembled at Kenyon College. He suggested exiling the Nazi leaders as Napoleon Bonaparte had been. According to Kennedy, these were sentiments shared by “a goodly number” of Americans at the time, but only Taft was brave enough to say so in public. More than likely, one of the goodly number was old Joe Kennedy, whose views on many topics were quite close to those of Mr. Republican. The private political understanding between the two had helped Jack beat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (even amid a Republican landslide) in the 1952 Senate race. Lodge was a supporter of the Truman administration’s internationalist foreign policy, and Joe had activated the angry Taft forces in Massachusetts against Lodge through Basil Brewer, the editor of the New Bedford Standard-Times. The word had gone forth that young Jack was stronger against the Reds than Lodge.24 The Profiles in Courage Taft tribute shows how much more palatable such triangulations could seem when projected between the lines of inspirational historical stories. The political intentions become more obvious when the papers relating to the drafting of the book are examined. Originally the preface to the book was to contain an epistolary dialogue between Kennedy, or “Senator Edward Youngfellow,” and “Senator J. P. Oldtimer,” who urges him to vote against some unnamed “national” bill, possibly a defense appropriation or a potentially economically dislocating infrastructure project like the St. Lawrence Seaway, because his constituents were against it. For “Oldtimer,” politics was about democracy, not the individual senator’s Profiles in Triangulation / 219 ideas of right and wrong: “How can you come along and say you know better than they that it’s in their interest. That’s a mighty dangerous doctrine, son—smacks of aristocracy and demagoguery. . . . When you’ve been in the Senate as long as I have, you’ll understand that you don’t play the game that way, no matter how noble and courageous it looks to the newspapers.” Of course, Kennedy’s whole strategy was to look noble and courageous and attractive to the national media and its audience and to the idealistic young middle-class professionals, joiners of Stevenson clubs, and eager readers of Profiles in Courage who admired a high-minded approach to politics and government. Their interests hardly seemed to match up with the union workers, the indigent elderly, and others who were perceived to be most dependent on New Deal–era government programs in any case. Piously, Kennedy replied to “Oldtimer” by quoting Edmund Burke and arguing that, along with “party responsibility,” he had “a personal responsibility” to “my nation and my conscience,” not owed “to our constituents” alone but to “our God as well.” If the mores of party and Senate did not change and allow “independent conduct or insurgent members,” they would “wither and waste away until no one would be left but those few whose ideas had never changed.” All of this may have been too on-the-nose, because while the Burke quotation and a few of the specific points appeared in Kennedy’s published first chapter, the Youngfellow-Oldtimer dialogue and its explicit attack on the played-out politics of Democratic Party elders were replaced with Hemingway and “grace under pressure.”25 Without contesting the nobility and attractiveness of such sentiments, they need to be seen in the context of the Kennedy goal of building a political profile against potential Democratic primary opponents such as Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington of Missouri, and especially the man who was then the liberal torchbearer for civil rights and the expanding New Deal order, Hubert Humphrey. Throughout the mid-to-late 1950s, Kennedy and Sorensen were producing a steady stream of articles and columns for the popular press that first previewed and then reechoed and expanded on the themes of Profiles. Particularly telling was a cover article on the future of the Democratic Party for LIFE magazine (almost a Kennedy family album by this point) published in early 1957 in the wake of Adlai Stevenson’s defeat. “Author Kennedy,” as he was coyly identified in the cover caption, called in essence for the gentrification and nationalization of the Democratic Party, de-emphasizing the 220 / Jeffrey L. Pasley “Grand Alliance” of workers and farmers and retooling itself in ways that would appeal better to suburbanites and youth and the newly urbanized South. Building on his new fame as a historian, Kennedy spun out a capsule history of American political parties. His historical analysis was that the Democrats needed to retire “the tired or tarnished holdovers from another era”—the Senator Oldtimers and Onions Burkes and tut-tutting liberals he had sparred with or been suspected by in the past—or they would go the way of the Federalists and Whigs. The Federalists had rested on their accomplishments in government and refused to face the future, Kennedy argued, while the Whigs had flopped “by going to the other extreme to seek favor by appealing to the current demands of every group in the nation.” Kennedy implicitly offered himself as the type of new Democrat who could counter the modern Republicanism of Eisenhower and Nixon, said to be making dangerous inroads into the Democrats’ bases in the South and the cities, including the African American vote. It was all illustrated with a cartoon spanning two pages with various types of Democrats running to the right side of the spread to collect ice cream bars from a truck labeled “Ike and Dick’s Frozen ‘Good Times.’ ”26 According to Kennedy, the Democrats needed to avoid both radicalism (as they traditionally had, often more effectively than their opponents, before the mid-1930s) and conservatism—the party should not be “ ‘the captive of the A.D.A.’ or the ‘victim of Confederate vengeance.’ ” Nor should it fall back on simply propitiating its parochial interest groups, “the farm vote, the Negro vote, the veterans’ vote, and all the rest.” Interestingly, the “Negro vote” for the Democrats was a relatively new development at that point, and only in the immediately previous Democratic administration (Truman’s) had African Americans’ problems gotten much serious attention. Yet already they were being triangulated against.27 Given this swipe at what would later be called identity politics, it should be noted that one parochial interest group Kennedy was eager to cultivate was the female voter. As JFK’s 1958 senatorial reelection campaign and expected presidential run loomed, the cycle of Profiles spin-offs turned to women. In a heavily publicized January 1958 article for the women’s magazine McCall ’s, “Three Women of Courage,” Kennedy honored “womanhood” (said the newspapers) by adding Jeannette Rankin, Anne Hutchinson, and Prudence Crandall to his Hall of Fame. The article did double-duty by both diversifying the ennobling quality of courage and including a remarkably Profiles in Triangulation / 221 tousled-haired mug shot of Jack. (Not that McCall’s was ever going to takes it feminism too far: adjacent to Kennedy’s article in that issue of were a screed against sex manuals and a featurette on how folksy entertainer Burl Ives met his wife.) Rankin was a natural Profile in Courage: she was the first woman in Congress, but did not make Kennedy’s cut for that. Instead, she was another heroic isolationist like Bob Taft, having voted against U.S. entry into both world wars. Besides this continuing theme of sympathy for a certain type of Republican, there were subtle political messages in the other choices as well. By including Prudence Crandall, a Connecticut teacher persecuted for opening her school to African American girls, Kennedy addressed racism for the first time, without the need of a black character. (The McCall’s people still sent out a special release to the black press.) With Kennedy facing questions about the electability of a Catholic from several quarters of the party, including the liberals, the story of Anne Hutchinson’s stand against religious intolerance had some obvious utility, although Hutchinson herself would perhaps have been shocked to learn she had helped a papist win power.28 In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy weaved the themes and rhetoric of Profiles in Courage in with other elements that were better remembered later—a new generation of leader with better hair poised to “get the country moving again.” In doing so, he took the Democratic Party out from under the New Dealers and liberals—and then the country from Richard Nixon—by exploiting recent innovations that would become mainstays of presidential campaigning because of him: primaries and the network-controlled television debates that have been inflicted on us in every election cycle since the Nixon-era reforms. Strikingly, Kennedy directly reinvoked and in some ways closed out his Profiles in Courage campaign just before he took office in a speech to the Massachusetts General Court in January 1961. In front of the Bay State’s assembled pols, history seemed to virtually demand a policy of triangulation against the midcentury Democratic Party: “For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us—recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state—our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions.” I will only mention the first: “were we truly men of courage—with the courage to stand up to one’s enemies—and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one’s associates—the courage to resist 222 / Jeffrey L. Pasley public pressure, as well as private greed?” That democracy and corruption could be treated as equally in need of courageous resistance said volumes about the kind of elitist leadership Kennedy advocated.29 The top-down orientation showed in his preferred approach to economic policy as well. John and Robert Kennedy’s “New Economics” was much discussed in the early 1960s, but has been remembered only sporadically and selectively since then. While Keynesian in its theoretical foundations, the Kennedy approach was frankly labeled “Supply-Side Economics” by one of its architects, Council of Economic Advisers chair Walter W. Heller, who distinguished it from the Ronald Reagan version only in terms of Heller’s less Panglossian revenue estimates. In response to the occasional economic doldrums of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their sense that the president might be required to address them, the Kennedys became attracted to the idea that cutting taxes might be the most effective and congenial way to stimulate the economy. Top tax rates would be lowered, ideally but not necessarily as part of a package of reforms that would also close various business loopholes, as a way to put more money back into the private economy. Early twenty-first-century conservatives are wrong to claim John F. Kennedy as the father of their movement, based solely on his interest in tax cuts, but perhaps not completely wrong. By deleting the New Deal from political history in Profiles in Courage, Kennedy had imaginatively restored the laissez-faire status quo of the old Democratic Party his father Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy grew up in, as close to Hoover as F.D.R. on economics. Kennedy’s new economic approach did not turn back the clock that far, but it did display great interest in boosting the economy through its most powerful economic players and winning the favor of the business community.30 Understood in his full 1950s context, then, John F. Kennedy presaged the future of the Democratic Party on policy as well as methods. Kennedy, and often Profiles in Courage itself, was quite literally the inspiration for the wellcoiffed baby boomer–aged “Atari Democrats” who emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s with rise of Gary Hart, and came to power in the 1990s in the guise of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and many of their Democratic Leadership Council associates. For a time, their preferred term for themselves was “Neoliberal,” popularized by one of their favorite magazines, the Washington Monthly, edited by an old Kennedy hand named Charles Peters. Drawing on younger, white, educated elements of the party, Neoliberals did not espouse Reaganomics per se, but they loved JFK-style “tax reform,” Profiles in Triangulation / 223 criticized Washington’s sclerotic bureaucracies, and represented what then seemed to be a new market-oriented departure in Democratic politics. Their new Democratic Party was to become much closer to corporate interests, especially in banking and technology, and less friendly to government entitlement programs and by then traditional Democratic constituencies like the unions and African Americans. The type of government programs they did like were Kennedy-inspired “national service” programs such as Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps, and its education initiative Teach for America (TFA), designed to send college students into poor school districts where they could help reform the public school system. TFA graduates in turn became the backbone of the charter school movement that has ended up privatizing large chunks of many big-city public school systems.31 Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, it was Al Gore’s father, the ardent southern New Dealer Senator Albert Gore Sr., who registered one of the clearest and strongest reactions to Kennedy’s economic approach. Gore was the kind of Democrat who rhapsodized about the TVA and wept when the Interstate Highway System was opened to his hometown of Possum Hollow. As an influential member of the Senate Finance Committee, Gore was nonplussed to be accosted by President Kennedy at Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1962 funeral, of all places, about supporting a tax cut to get the economy moving again. (In June, Kennedy had proposed 40 per cent cut in the corporate tax rate and substantial relief for the top income tax brackets.) Later Senator Gore was awarded an impromptu lobbying ride on Air Force One over the same issue. Presciently, he argued that tax cuts would force spending cuts, and once that train was rolling, it would be impossible to stop. Democrats would be better off defending “the value and validity” of federal spending “or the balance of public sentiment would be lost to the conservatives” through the tacit admission that there was something fundamentally wrong or unnecessary about public expenditure. JFK complained that Gore was being a “son of a bitch” about his economic program, and Gore in turn expressed his dismay with a “Democratic administration” pushing “a trickle-down tactic as old as Herbert Hoover.”32 Television Afterlife Kennedy’s neoliberalism has been obscured by the course of events during and after his presidency that forced his policies and especially his reputation 224 / Jeffrey L. Pasley steadily leftward. Southern violence against the civil rights movement forced the Kennedys to be more aggressive domestically, and the failures of President Kennedy’s early experiments with Cold War confrontation, which transformed Soviet missiles from a campaign talking point into a terrifying reality in Cuba, inspired a growing interest in disarmament and world peace that might or might not have brought U.S. involvement in Vietnam to an earlier close. Profiles in Courage was caught up in this process, too, its commercial exploitation potential renewed by the Kennedy presidency and even more so by the president’s untimely death. It was brought to the screen again by television producer Robert Saudek, creator of the prestigious Omnibus series, hosted by Alistair Cooke and featuring such improving fare as Shakespeare plays, dramas about Abraham Lincoln, and classical music conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Omnibus was often held up as a shining example of quality programming in an age when tube executives were writhing under the brickbats of Federal Communications Commission head Newton Minow (Adlai Stevenson’s law partner), who famously condemned TV as a “vast wasteland.” In the months leading up to the assassination, Saudek was working on an ambitious adaptation of Profiles in Courage as a weekly drama for NBC. Work was suspended in November 1963 but then awkwardly resumed a few months later so the show could premiere in time for the 1964 fall television season, with public interest in John F. Kennedy higher than ever.33 The series extended and expanded Kennedy’s vision with a wider array of heroes and an increased sense of social concern, especially about bigotry and violence, worries that Saudek’s program shared with the other early 1960s drama series (for example, Twilight Zone, Wagon Train) it often resembled in style and casting. The additions were drawn from stray mentions in the book and ancillary articles or from Ted Sorensen’s notes, so they could be billed as “selected by President Kennedy.” The fallen president’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford got a turn as Missouri’s Alexander Doniphan, saving the lives of Joseph Smith and other Mormon leaders during the 1838 “Mormon War,” and the 1915 Leo Frank lynching case was also dramatized, bringing antiSemitism into the issue mix. David McCallum of Man from U.N.C.L.E. played the youngest and most dashing John Adams ever put on screen, defending the accused British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. The politics of Profiles in Courage were somewhat updated to fit the civil rights year of Profiles in Triangulation / 225 1964. Nonsenators such as Anne Hutchinson and Prudence Crandall (from the McCall’s article) got spots in the series, and one episode even centered on a nonwhite character, Frederick Douglass. L. Q. C. Lamar was mercifully left behind, and the Edmund G. Ross story was no longer set against a Birth of a Nation–style version of Reconstruction. Yet, if anything, the changes made Profiles’ nationalist, centrist, freemarket approach to politics, government, and economics stand out even more starkly. The Douglass and Crandall episodes both managed to make radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison into a sinister fanatic and secondary villain, played by a character actor who had a recurring role as a ghost U-boat captain on Voyage in the Bottom of the Sea that quite suited actor Alfred Ryder’s ghoulish demeanor. Andrew Johnson got a particular admiring hour, in addition to the Ross impeachment saga, with Walter Matthau, decked out in a curly Andrew Johnson wig, hamming hard. Grover Cleveland, played by the future Archie Bunker, Carroll O’Connor, got an entire episode for courageously standing against veterans’ pensions for war widows and orphans. “Government lives by the people,” Cleveland mansplains to his young wife—Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 from Get Smart!—but pensions for dependents would mean “people lived off the government . . . and that would be wrong.” The TV version of Profiles lasted only one season. Perhaps too many other episodes featured elderly actors lecturing the supporting cast as the colorless likes of Oscar Underwood, Robert Taft, and bonus codger Hamilton Fish, facing down injustices that either could not be shown or properly explained. Yet true to its source material, the show managed to tell twentysix stories from American political and social history in which New Deal liberalism played no role, and radicalism no constructive one. It was all too appropriate material for the middle-American classroom staple many of the films became, distributed to the educational market through the Social Studies School Service. It paved a straight path, now largely forgotten, from the conservative Democratic Party of Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland, through John F. Kennedy, to the cautiously triangulating, instinctively centrist one of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. 226 / Jeffrey L. Pasley Notes 1. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), xxi–xxii (hereafter cited as PiC). Perhaps the use of ghostwriters and research assistants was just one more way in which the Kennedys were ahead of their time, but to the modern eye accustomed to the idea that books published under the names of wealthy, important people in nonliterary walks of life are almost inevitably staff productions, there is not much to see here as a scandal The heavy contributions of Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown University history professor, Jules Davids, and Jack’s chief aide and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, along with a host of others, were acknowledged up front in the original 1955 preface. There definitely was some political interference involved in the book winning the Pulitzer Prize over the heads of the selection committee, but it seems quite unlikely to be the only time that politics was ever played in a journalistic prize competition, or the only type of politics that could be played. 2. Though covered to some extent in almost all of the hundreds of texts covering John F. Kennedy’s rise to power, the literature on Profiles in Courage itself is surprisingly sparse, perhaps conveying something about how self-selectively blind scholars are about the cultural and political force of popular history. Two that flog the Hemingway angle are John Hellman, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 63–85; and John Michael, “Profiles in Courage, JFK’s Book for Boys,” American Literary History 24 (2012): 424–43. For unusually full and balanced historical accounts of Why England Slept, Profiles in Courage, and other Kennedy literary productions, see Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980). 3. PiC, 18, 29–48; Parmet, Jack, 330–33. 4. Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 328. The New York Times in those days called itself an “Independent Democratic” paper that “placed chief emphasis on the word ‘Independent.’ ” It endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 primarily as a bulwark against radicalism, but turned to Republicans Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, and Dwight Eisenhower after that, before finally coming back to the Democrats with our hero in 1960. New York Times, Oct. 1, 1936, linked at “New York Times Endorsements Through the Ages,” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/23/opinion/presidential -endorsement-timeline.html. 5. O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, 285–89; Harry Harris, “ ‘Profiles in Courage’ Brings Praise to Kraft,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 17, 1956, 18. 6. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004), 189–92; quotation from PiC, 37. 7. Dallek, Unfinished Life, 170, 180, 215–17. 8. PiC, 115–32; Ralph J. Roske, “The Seven Martyrs?,” American Historical Review 64, no. 2 (1959): 323–30; Eugene H. Berwanger, “Ross and the Impeachment: A New Profiles in Triangulation / 227 Look at a Critical Vote,” Kansas History 1, no. 4 (Dec. 1978): 235–42; Mark A. Plummer, “Profile in Courage? Edmund G. Ross and the Impeachment Trial,” Midwest Quarterly 27 (Sept. 1985): 30–48. For a biography of Ross, see Richard A. Ruddy, Edmund G. Ross: Soldier, Senator, Abolitionist (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014). 9. Profiles in Courage television adaptation [1956], act 1, pp. 4, 9B, act 2, revised, p. 2, John F. Kennedy Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; Memorandum on Suggested Changes in TV Script [1956], Theodore C. Sorensen Papers, Subject Files 1953–1960, Kennedy Library; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 17, 1956, 18. 10. PiC, 29–48, 86–88, quotation on 45. Ironically, William Nisbet Chambers’s excellent biography of Thomas Hart Benton, Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West: Thomas Hart Benton, 1782–1858 (Boston: Little Brown, 1956), quite possibly a source for Kennedy’s researchers, was one of the final scholarly jury selections that the Pulitzer Prize board of newspaper editors leapfrogged over to give the biography prize to Profiles in Courage. Parmet, Jack, 394–97. 11. PiC, 18, 57–108; Dallek, Unfinished Life, 182–83; Ted Sorensen, Kennedy: The Classic Biography, new ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 58–59. 12. PiC, 139–62. 13. Ibid., 170–92, quotation on 187; Ted Sorensen, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 146–47. On Norris’s liberalism, see Richard Lowitt, “ ‘Present at the Creation’: George W. Norris, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the TVA Enabling Act,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 48 (Jan. 1976): 116–26; Richard Lowitt, “George W. Norris and the New Deal in Nebraska,” Agricultural History 51, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 396–405. On his defeat and the rise of Kenneth Wherry, see Harl A. Dalstrom, “The Defeat of George W. Norris in 1942,” Nebraska History 59, no. 2 (June 1978): 231–58; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80–99; Wherry’s obituary, New York Times, Nov. 30, 1951, 1, 24. 14. PiC, 17. 15. “Politics and Citizenship,” Alumnews (Nov.–Dec. 1958): 2–3, in Theodore C. Sorensen Papers, Subcollection 1, Series 1: Subject Files, 1953–1960, Box 3: Articles, Kennedy Library. A similar item in Box 5 is “Politics as a Career,” from the University of Florida Peninsula, July 1957. 16. On the antipartyism of the founders and its continuing power in American political life, see, among others, Ralph Ketcham, Presidents above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1984); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Ronald P. Formisano, “Political Character, Antipartyism and the Second Party System,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 683–709; Walter Dean Burnham, The Current Crisis in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Quotation from Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American 228 / Jeffrey L. Pasley Political Science Review 59 (1965): 28. Burnham’s take on the 2016 election was published on the London School of Economics website: “In 2017, Trump and the UltraRight Wrecking Crew Will Continue to Roll Back History,” USAPP (blog), Dec. 29, 2016, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/12/29/in-2017-trump-and-the-ultra-right -wrecking-crew-will-continue-to-roll-back-history/. 17. James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat: Club Politics in Three Cities, new ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), esp. 52–58. 18. Kenneth P. O’Donnell, David F. Powers, with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 103–17. 19. Ruth Aull and Daniel M. Ogden Jr., eds., Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, August 13 through August 17, 1956 (Richmond, VA: Beacon Press, 1956), 342. 20. Ibid., 435–36. 21. Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Martin P. Wattenberg, The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics: Presidential Elections of the 1980s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1984, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1994). There are always political scientists and journalists ready to argue for the continued relevance of parties in presidential politics, and there are plenty of good arguments for that position. Yet it seems indisputable that candidates using their personal organizations to contest primary campaigns has become the default mode of presidential candidate selection. On the Democratic side, there has not been a successful non-incumbent presidential candidate who started the nomination campaign as the front runner with party regulars since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republican Party has done a bit better holding its organizational choices in place, with the two George Bushes, but Trump 2016 will likely stand for some time as the most catastrophically unexpected example of candidate-centered presidential primary politics in history. 22. Dallek, Unfinished Life, 142–43. 23. PiC, 207–8; David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 666. 24. PiC, 193–205, quotations on 200–201. 25. Manuscripts: Profiles in Courage, Related papers: Item 4-materials for introduction and conclusion, John F. Kennedy Personal Papers, Kennedy Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPP-031–004.aspx. The dialogue (and its replacement) was called to my attention by Hellman, Kennedy Obsession, 63–64. 26. Senator John F. Kennedy, “A Democrat Says Party Must Lead—Or Get Left,” LIFE, Mar. 11, 1957, 155–78. 27. Ibid., 171–72. 28. McCall’s, Jan. 1958, 36–36, 54–55; Christine Sadler to Ted Sorensen, Jan. 7, 1958, and other material in Articles file, Sorensen Papers, Kennedy Library. Profiles in Triangulation / 229 29. Address of President-Elect John F. Kennedy Delivered to a Joint Convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The State House, Boston, Jan. 9, 1961, MR65–221, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary .org/Asset-Viewer/OYhUZE2Qo0-ogdV7ok900A.aspx. 30. Walter W. Heller, “Kennedy’s Supply-Side Economics,” Challenge 24, no. 2 (1981): 14–18. Robert Dallek’s account of Kennedy’s tax policy emphasizes its Keynesian side, and the administration’s effort to break through older prejudices against deficit spending. Yet Dallek also invites the reader to “recapture the boldness” of the Kennedy tax cut requests, which he compares to “Republican advocacy under Reagan and both George Bushes.” Dallek, Unfinished Life, 507, 583–589. 31. For conservatives claiming Kennedy, see Ira Stoll, JFK, Conservative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2013); Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic, JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity (New York: Portfolio, 2016). We badly need a full scholarly history of the Neoliberals or “Atari Democrats” of the 1980s, but until that time, see Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). On Charles Peters and the Washington Monthly, see his memoir Tilting at Windmills: An Autobiography (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988). For a balanced account that covers the Neoliberals’ impact on public education, see Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York: Anchor, 2015). “Neoliberalism” is used here in a much more specific way than is typically found in academic discourse, to denote a certain faction of the U.S. Democratic Party rather than the global reimposition of capitalist values over the past fifty years, as summarized in such works as David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Yet the “Atari Democrats” could certainly be seen as part of that larger trend, and some of them key players. 32. Albert Gore, Let the Glory Out: My South and Its Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 154–60, 170–72; Kyle Longley, Senator Albert Gore, Sr.: Tennessee Maverick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 170–71. On the 1962 proposals, see Dallek, Unfinished Life, 506–508. 33. On Robert Saudek and the PiC television series, see Daniel Marcus, “Profiles in Courage: Televisual History on the New Frontier,” Film & History 30 (2000): 38–49, and the extensive materials on the series in the Sorensen Papers, Kennedy Library. All the details about the plots and cast of the various episodes below are based on video recordings of the series in the author’s personal collection, obtained from the Social Studies School Service of Culver City, CA.