Everything about Kennedy's politics conveyed a sense of urgency. He ran on a "missile gap" that never existed and governed based on a heightened state of tension with the Soviets that he labored to create. He constantly spoke the language of "danger" and "sacrifice," "courage" and "crusade." He installed the first "situation room" in the White House. His first State of the Union address, delivered eleven days after his inaugural, was a "wartime speech without a war." Kennedy warned that freedom itself was at its "hour of maximum danger." "Before my term has ended we shall have to test again whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain."16
Kennedy's adrenaline-soaked presidency was infectious, and deliberately so. His administration launched a massive campaign to encourage the construction of fallout shelters, with various agencies competing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the conversion of schools and hospitals into nuclear bunkers. We think of those duck-and-cover drills as icons of the 1950s, but it was under Kennedy that they reached the climate of extreme paranoia so often parodied today. The administration distributed fifty-five million wallet-sized cards with instructions on what to do when the nukes started raining from the sky. If, as the New Left so often claimed, the mobilization of "youth" in the 1960s was spurred by the anxiety of living under the shadow of "the bomb," then they have JFK to thank for it.
Even Kennedy's nondefense policies were sold as the moral analogue of war. He justified more education spending — as Johnson would after him — on the explicit grounds that we needed to stay competitive with the Soviets. Kennedy's tax cuts — aimed to counteract the worst stock market crash since the Depression — were implemented not in the spirit of supply-side economics (as some conservatives are wont to insinuate) but as a form of Keynesianism, justified in the language of Cold War competition. Indeed, Kennedy was the first president to explicitly claim that the White House had a mandate to ensure economic growth — because America couldn't ignore Khrushchev's boastful threat that the Soviet Union would soon "bury" the United States economically.17 His intimidation of the steel industry was a rip-off of Truman's similar effort during the Korean War, itself a maneuver from the playbooks of FDR and Wilson. Likewise, the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents were throwbacks to FDR's martial CCC. Even Kennedy's most ambitious idea, putting a man on the moon, was sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science.
Particularly in response to Kennedy's crackdown on the steel industry, some observers charged that he was making himself into a strongman. The Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce likened him to a dictator. Ayn Rand explicitly called him a fascist in a 1962 speech, "The Fascist New Frontier."
It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist. And if by fascist you mean evil, cruel, and bigoted, then Kennedy was no fascist. But we must ask, what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit the fascist playbook: the creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glamorize the state and its programs, invocations of a new "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader.
Kennedy promised to transcend ideology in the name of what would later be described as cool pragmatism. Like the pragmatists who came before him, he eschewed labels, believing that he was beyond right and left. Instead, he shared Robert McNamara's confidence that "every problem could be solved" by technocratic means. Once again the Third Way defined ideological sophistication. In his 1962 Yale commencement address, President Kennedy explained that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of today's challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems," he insisted at a press conference in May 1962. These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.18
Once again, Kennedy's famous declaration "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" is seen today as a fine patriotic turn of phrase. Liberals in particular see it as an admirable call to service. And it is both of these things. But what is often missed is the historical context and motivation. Kennedy was trying to re-create the unity of World War II in the same way FDR had tried to revive the unity of World War I. His declaration that we should put a man on the moon was not the result of Kennedy's profound farsightedness, nor even of his desire to wallop the Russians. Rather, it was his best option for finding a moral equivalent of war.
HE DIED FOR LIBERALISM
All of this went down the memory hole after Kennedy's murder. Kennedy the nationalistic Third Wayer was replaced by Kennedy the fighting liberal. The JFK of Camelot eclipsed the one who tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.
Woodrow Wilson's grandson Dean Francis Sayre delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in homage to the fallen leader. "We have been present at a new crucifixion," he told the assembled dignitaries. "All of us," he explained, "have had a part in the slaying of our President. It was the good people who crucified our Lord, and not merely those who acted as executioners." Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that the president had an organic and mystical bond with the people. He is "chosen to embody the ideals of our people, the faith we have in our institutions, and our belief in the father-hood of God and the brotherhood of man." Five days after Kennedy's death, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, capped his address to a joint session of Congress by asking that Americans "put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence" and turn away from "the apostles of bitterness and bigotry."19
Even after the nature of the assassination was more clear, the notion that "hate" and America's collective sin killed Kennedy endured. Washington's Methodist bishop, John Wesley Lord, declared that the nation needed to "atone" for Kennedy's death. Rather than naming monuments after Kennedy, the nation could more appropriately "thank a martyr for his death and sacrifice" by redoubling its commitment to liberal politics.20
Most historians view Kennedy and Johnson as representing the last gasp of traditional progressive politics, ending the era that began with Wilson and ran through the New Deal and the Fair Deal to the New Frontier and the Great Society. Programmatically, that's largely right (though it lets the very liberal Nixon off the hook). But the Kennedy presidency represented something more profound. It marked the final evolution of Progressivism into a full-blown religion and a national cult of the state.