In 1961, John F. Kennedy made a bold statement at a Democratic Party dinner.
“If all of you had voted the other way…I would not be President of the United States.”
This dinner took place in Cook County, Chicago. This county’s results were contested by Republicans because the county swung the state of Illinois, and without Illinois and Texas, John F. Kennedy would have lost the election. In fact, the election was so close that if only 11,871 voters switched their votes, John F. Kennedy would never have been elected. Nixon really was predicted to have won, considering that he had just served as vice president for popular president Dwight Eisenhower for the past eight years. In fact, going into the first televised debate ever, Richard Nixon was the campaign favorite to win the election. However, what Kennedy pulled off afterwards can tell us not just more about this upcoming election in 2024, but also a lot more about the way our whole culture has shifted today.
Richard Nixon refused to wear makeup on screen, and, even though he had been hospitalized due to a knee injury, refused to withdraw. John F. Kennedy, on the other hand, spent the weeks leading up to the debate tanning, and put on more makeup before the debate went live. The result was that Richard Nixon looked pale and exhausted, and Kennedy looked like our next president. The next day, Kennedy was the favorite to win the election.
This event summed up John F. Kennedy’s campaign strategy, which was inspired by his father (a Hollywood executive in the 1920s). John F. Kennedy didn’t just use the endorsements of Hollywood liberals like Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford to win votes, he also hired a production company to follow him around to capture fans obsessing over him. No major politician had dared to appear on a late-night program before. Kennedy appeared on “The Tonight Show.” Even in office, Kennedy continued to carefully construct his persona. He hired the director Franklin Schaffner and producer Fred Coe to help improve his performance in front of the press.
“He learned the nuances of political discourse so well that [it] often seemed he was simultaneously directing himself,” Ron Simon wrote in Time in 2017.
Flash forward half a century or so, and The New Yorker has recently published an article on celebrity endorsements.
“Many of Obama’s celebrity backers endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, but election analysts later argued that this may have been counterproductive, contributing to a sense that the candidate was élitist,” wrote Tyler Foggatt. “Donald Trump, a celebrity himself, seemed to be running a kind of anti-celebrity campaign, goading celebrities into speaking out against him.”
Suddenly, we have Donald Trump’s election campaign, where he doesn’t want to appear elitist, and has a noted disorganization to his appearance and his words. Not to mention the fact that he is a complete political outsider who likes making note of that fact. It works. Just like John F. Kennedy, Trump barely won the 2016 election. What happened? Did everyone stop wanting their candidates to act presidential, or in this case, does correlation not equal causation?
To answer the latter question first, no. Donald Trump’s win was not despite his speaking style and appearance. Rather, he won because of it. The question of what happened is a larger one, and I’d like to connect it with the culture at large.
In 1961, Publishers Weekly released a list of the ten bestselling novels in the United States, including books by writers like J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, and John Steinbeck. By 2017, if you ignore that the same list included such books as the children’s novel “Wonder,” one of the many “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books, and Dr. Seuss, then you would see that the majority of the other fiction books on the list were just thrillers. In 1961, the most popular movies in the United States and Canada included “La Dolce Vita” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” In 2017, every movie was made for kids, except for “Hidden Figures” and “Dunkirk.” In 1961, there were two adventure movies (and not a single action one) on the list, while in 2017, over 3 in 4 of the most popular movies list were action and adventure movies.
What we can see from all of these lists is that, suddenly, there is no distinguishing between the creators of our most popular works and us. Other than Christopher Nolan, the creators of these works of art are completely ignored. You read a thriller novel because it is supposed to be thrilling. You read a Steinbeck novel because Steinbeck wrote it. Somewhere along the way, we stopped wanting our media to be smarter than us. We almost unconsciously started seeing John Steinbeck’s superior intelligence as a problem. Thus, we stopped wanting Steinbecks and just wanted thrillers. We stopped wanting intelligent romantic comedies that were defined by their hard-to-replicate Hollywood wit, and we just wanted formulaic comic book action.
Thus, we shifted from wanting our president to be superior to us in their “presidential-ness” to just being one of us who seems good enough. In fact, maybe to us, them being superior is actually a negative, as it makes them unrelatable, and thus not one of us. Just like someone would want a book to be entertaining instead of smart, they could want a president to be relatable instead of qualified.
I can’t speak to if the culture switched first and then the presidency, or if it was the other way around, or if the two were so interconnected that it was impossible to separate them, but doesn’t it all fit with the fact that John F. Kennedy won by being a political elite who proved that he knew what he was talking about, and Trump won by offering up pure relatability? In fact, you could even argue that Trump’s strategy was to prove that he could not be presidential at all. Here’s where we get to a contradiction. As you can see, Trump and Harris have both adjusted their strategies this third time around.
They are both going on podcasts, because that’s what people listen to. Whereas John F. Kennedy separated himself from the people, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are desperately trying to blend in with them. The difference between Harris and Trump is that Trump’s ethos is the same: he is just like us. Harris, on the other hand, is trying to prove that she isn’t like us in that she is qualified to be president. When conservative media outlets call Kamala Harris disingenuous and say that she is a bunch of preprogrammed DNC talking points, they are picking up on something very real. She is trained, and she is putting on a performance because, through all of this, she is proving to us her intelligence.
She can’t not use the fact that she is far more experienced and intelligent than Donald Trump. She can’t pretend to be relatable. She is far smarter and more qualified than the average American. However, that used to be what we wanted as a nation. After all, why shouldn’t John F. Kennedy be praised for wearing his makeup and constructing his persona? It actually requires a lot of intelligence to direct yourself as you learn the nuances of political discourse. Not only did such an intelligent strategy pay off, John F. Kennedy is now seen as the most iconic president ever. Yet, at the time, all he had to show for such an impressive campaign were 24,000 more votes in the places that mattered than Richard Nixon.
Henry Kaplan is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu