JFK: Liberal or Conservative?

In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy, who at age 43 was the second youngest man elected to the U.S. presidency, spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation of Americans. Nearly three decades later, when 46-year-old William J. Clinton took the oath of office, we had all seen the black-and-white photo of a teenaged Clinton shaking hands with JFK. To democrats, it seemed symbolic of further torch passing. In reality, it was a handshake and nothing more.

History is written by the victors. Sadly, JFK’s assassination prevented him from joining that club. With his death, the historians took over, distorting the man and his legacy. When the handsome Irishman isn’t portrayed as a lecherous bed-hopper who turned the White House into a brothel, he is held up as the embodiment of modern liberalism.

In JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll makes the case that the 35th president’s true heir was not the democrats that followed him as commander-in-chief (Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Clinton, and Barack Obama), but Ronald Reagan who, like Kennedy, opposed oppressive government regulations, favored tax cuts to boost an ailing economy, stood firm against Communism, and held a deep religious faith.

In his lifetime, Kennedy rejected the “liberal” label. As a newly elected Senator in 1953, he told The Saturday Evening Post that he was “not a liberal at all,” adding “I’m not comfortable with those people.” A friend, Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, remembered Kennedy as regarding “those people” with “Genuine contempt. He really was – contemptuous is the right word for it.” Nor did liberals think highly of him. In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt told a TV reporter that she would do all she could to prevent a “conservative” like Kennedy from winning the democratic presidential nomination.

Kennedy did win the nomination, and went on to face his republican opponent, vice president Richard Nixon, in a series of televised debates. Unfortunately, the debates are remembered less for what the candidates said than for how they looked.

“I don’t believe in big government,” Kennedy told the American television audience. The democrat and supposed liberal who, in producer Don Hewitt’s view, “looked like a young Adonis,” also took a hard line against Communism, warned of criminal control of labor unions, and vowed to prevent Red China from gaining admittance to the United Nations. Nixon, plagued by five o’ clock shadow and a pool of perspiration on his lower lip, promised higher salaries for government employees, expressed a need for more taxes, and warned that Kennedy’s support for the opponents of Fidel Castro was “dangerously irresponsible.” As Nixon related in his memoirs, “Kennedy conveyed the image – to 60 million people – that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.”

Free trade and tax cuts took precedence over liberalism’s pet issues during the Kennedy administration while the later presidency of “conservative” Richard Nixon was characterized by wage and price controls, the first presidential visit to Moscow, and the opening of relations between the U.S. and Red China.

Kennedy’s politics were influenced, Stoll believes, by his spiritual beliefs. The author argues that religion played a bigger role in Kennedy’s life than we’ve been led to believe. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Two of Kennedy’s aides, Kenneth O’ Donnell and David Powers, remember that “Kennedy was a more deeply religious man than he appeared to be or wanted to appear to be.” If he did not always live a Christian life away from the prying eyes of the media, he did something else when no photographers were present: he prayed and attended church services.

“The informing spirit of the American character has always been a deep religious sense,” he once said. Kennedy also quoted Alexis de Tocqueville: “Where there is no respect for God, can there be much for man?”

There’s little question that the definition of “liberalism” has changed in the five decades since JFK was in the oval office. It could be argued that liberalism once meant protecting the minority from the majority and letting the individual flourish. Now, the respect for man that de Tocqueville spoke of has been replaced by respect for mankind which, for today's leftists, is a collectivist stance that ignores the individual and defines everyone according to race, gender, economic class, and sexual orientation. Everyone is now part of a separate group that eyes with suspicion the group to which they don’t belong. And each group wants to know what their country can do for them, not what they can do for their country.

That is not the America that JFK, Conservative, or even JFK, the liberal of an earlier era, bravely led for too short a time.


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Right wing Bob?

American Masters, the PBS series that may be the finest program on television (an honor it claims quite easily in this age of reality based shows about fat people losing weight, and narcissistic showcases like American Idol), spotlighted Joan Baez in a recent episode. Baez, who turned 71 this year (she shares a birthday with Richard Nixon), was a bestselling recording artist and the subject of a Time cover story when Bob Dylan was still a struggling Woody Guthrie wannabe. He was writing songs and making quite an impression in Greenwich Village folk clubs, but, it could be argued, his success was assured only after Baez dragged him on stage to sing with her. Soon, he was the “voice of a generation” that protested the Vietnam War and followed Martin Luther King’s lead in demanding equal rights for blacks. Dylan would reject that role and even snicker at those who marched and carried signs, but Baez was and would remain an activist, jeopardizing her life and career. She spent time in jail and visited the war zone while bombing was in progress. It was, she noted, the kind of situation that could even make an atheist believe in God. She came from a family of Quakers and was brought up to be a pacifist, something Dylan never claimed to be. The man himself, looking old and grizzled, appeared several times. He said he was flattered to be the subject of her self-penned “Diamonds and Rust,” though in her biography she claimed it had been written about her husband, David.

It was my interest in Dylan more than Baez that made me tune in to the American Masters segment. If Baez is a typical leftist, Dylan is not, assuming he’s a leftist at all. A website called Right Wing Bob makes the case that he's quite the opposite. Despite having praised Barack Obama, there is evidence to suggest this voice of the counterculture (when there was such a thing) is something of a conservative. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan claimed his favorite politician, circa 1961, was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater who accepted the 1964 republican presidential nomination with his now infamous speech extolling the benefits of extremism (“Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.”) To the liberal camp supporting Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, Goldwater was a warmonger and a right wing extremist whose conservative principles were woefully out of touch with the modern world. To Dylan, whose songs like “Masters of War” seemed an indictment of such a man, Goldwater was reminiscent of Tom Mix, the all-American cowboy of dozens of B westerns in Hollywood’s silent age.

Even when Chronicles appeared in 2004, a good 40 years after Goldwater’s overwhelming loss to LBJ, some readers obviously liberal in their politics, dismissed Dylan’s statement as disingenuous. Clearly, the man who wrote “The Times They Are-A Changin’” was joking, right?

Dylan didn’t seem to be joking in a 1968 interview with Sing Out when he refused to be pinned down on the Vietnam War. “I know some very good artists who are for the war,” he said, and cites a painter friend, a man he admires, who even considered enlisting to fight in the jungles. When he says he never argued with his friend about his stance, the interviewer pressures him, but Dylan refuses to budge, eventually asking a question of his own that undoubtedly raised eyebrows of readers on the left. “Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

One thing that definitely separates Dylan from many of his left leaning admirers is his belief in God. Even before his very public conversion to Christianity in 1979, God was in his songs and his thoughts. In 1978, Dylan told Phillip Fleishman, “The whole world is a prison. Life is a prison; we’re all inside the body. . . Only knowledge of either yourself or the ultimate power can get you out of it. . . Most people are working toward being one with God, trying to find him. They want to be one with the supreme power, they want to go Home, you know. From the minute they’re born, they want to know what they’re doing here. I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t feel that way.”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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