Indeed, Kennedy was almost literally a superhero. It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman's secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit — just like the astronaut "Colonel Glenn" — Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close the "muscle gap."7
Comic book writers weren't alone in making this connection. In 1960 Norman Mailer wrote a ponderous piece for Esquire titled "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Ostensibly a report from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the essay was more like a term paper for a Noam Chomsky seminar. But it does give you a sense of how even leading intellectuals like Mailer understood that they were being offered a myth — and were eager to accept it.8
The original Kennedy myth did not emphasize Kennedy's progressive credentials. Ted Sorensen recalled that JFK "never identified himself as a liberal; it was only after his death that they began to claim him as one of theirs." Indeed, the Kennedy family had serious trouble with many self-described progressives (who, after World War II, were essentially warmed-over communists) because of its close ties to that other prominent Irish-American politician, Joe McCarthy. After Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy was McCarthy's most valued aide. Jack Kennedy never denounced his Senate colleague, who was also a dear friend of his father's. But then, Kennedy was always more of a nationalist than a liberal. While a student at Harvard, he sent the isolationist America First Committee a one-hundred-dollar contribution with a note attached, telling them, "What you are doing is vital."9
World War II changed JFK's perspective — as it did for most isolationists. It also amplified Kennedy's fascination with "greatness." He was awed by Churchill and would lip-synch Churchill's oratory on the I Can Hear It Now albums narrated by Edward R. Murrow.10 In later years, staffers knew they could win Kennedy's ear if they could make him think that greatness was in the offing. His entire political career was grounded in the hope and aspiration that he would follow FDR as a lion of the twentieth century.
JFK famously inherited this ambition from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the pro-Nazi Democratic Party boss who was desperate to put a son in the White House. In 1946 Joe distributed a hundred thousand copies of John Hersey's article on JFK's PT-109 exploits. Soon an entire team of intellectuals was put to work, transforming JFK into the next great man of action. Kennedy's first book, Why England Slept, an expanded version of his undergraduate thesis, was a dish concocted by many chefs. His second, Profiles in Courage, about great men who stick to their principles despite adversity, was essentially produced by a committee chaired by Ted Sorensen and only intermittently supervised by Kennedy himself. Of course, Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer alone.
Kennedy was the first modern politician to recognize and exploit the new clout enjoyed by intellectuals in American society. The old Brain Trusters were economists and engineers, men concerned with shaping earth and iron. The new Brain Trusters were image men, historians, and writers — propagandists in the most benign sense — concerned with spinning words and pictures. Kennedy was no dunce, but he understood that in the modern age style tends to trump substance. (An indisputably handsome and charming man, he obviously benefited from the rise of television.) And the Kennedy machine represented nothing if not the triumph of style in American politics.
Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years — indeed largely because of them — there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else," the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."11
This was the dawn of the third fascist moment in American life, which would unfurl throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, both in the streets and universities — as seen in the previous chapter — and in the halls of government. What ended as bloodshed in the streets began in many respects as a well-intentioned "revolution from above" by heirs to the Wilson-FDR legacy incapable of containing the demons they unleashed.
Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.12
On the eve of JFK's inauguration in January 1960, a Look report, utilizing data from a special Gallup survey, found that Americans were actually feeling pretty good: "Most Americans today are relaxed, unadventurous, comfortably satisfied with their way of life and blandly optimistic about the future." The trick, then, was to rip Americans' attention away from their TV dinners and fan-tailed cars and get them to follow the siren song of the intellectuals. And that meant Kennedy needed a crisis to bind the public mind to a new Sorelian myth. "Great crises produce great men," Kennedy proclaimed in Profiles in Courage, and his entire presidency would be dedicated to the creation of crises commensurate with the greatness he yearned to achieve.13
A vast retinue of brains and activists, nostalgic for the excitement of the New Deal and World War II, shared Kennedy's desire to shake America out of its complacency. In the 1950s Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke for this entire circle of progressives, young and old, when he lamented the "absent discontents" of the American people.14
Kennedy, like FDR, believed he was a true democrat, and it would be unfair to label him a fascist. But his obsession with fostering crises in order to whip up popular sentiments in his favor demonstrates the perils of infatuation with fascist aesthetics in democratic politics. Ted Sorensen's memoirs count sixteen crises in Kennedy's first eight months in office. Kennedy created "crisis teams" that could short-circuit the traditional bureaucracy, the democratic process, and even the law. David Halberstam writes that Johnson inherited from Kennedy "crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White House — the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges." Garry Wills and Henry Fairlie — hardly right-wing critics — dubbed the Kennedy administration a "guerilla government" for its abuse of and contempt for the traditional governmental system. In an interview in 1963 Otto Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who helped found the movement, told the scholar David Schoenbaum that Kennedy's abuse of authority and crisis-mongering certainly made him look like a fascist.15