Kennedy and his advisers did not let Americans forget this age difference.
The “New Frontier” bearing of what became the Kennedy administration depended on “vigor,” a word he used frequently in speeches. The young president palled around with Frank Sinatra, rubbed shoulders with astronauts, engaged in rough-and-tumble touch football games with his large family.
And he had a smile and manner that fit perfectly with the burgeoning medium of the time, television.
“Kennedy is so good at this image cultivation that he really is sort of the first celebrity president,” Dr. Steven Watts, historian at the University of Missouri, said.
Kennedy, elected in 1960, would not be the last president to engage changing media to build an image.
Ronald Reagan had a leadership background but also a Hollywood resume and consultants to finesse his media presence. Barack Obama became a trailblazer in using social media as a means of organizing supporters and raising campaign funds.
Draw the image-cultivation line, then, from JFK to Donald Trump, elected last month. Trump, who had his own reality show, proved at ease in front of a camera. His “Make America Great Again” mantra owed much to Reagan’s “Morning in America.”
And his employment of Twitter, for good or ill, showed an embrace of new technology that spread the message of his candidacy.
Dr. James Carviou, an assistant professor of journalism at Missouri Western State University, said that particular medium set the tone for the 2016 campaign.
“The 2008 election was the YouTube election. Video was everything,” he said. “This election had less video. It was really Twitter.”
His colleague in the Department of Communications and Journalism, Dr. John Tapia, viewed this in much the same way.
“I kind of wonder,” Tapia said, “was the tweet the debate?”
Knowing the media
Alf Landon, the Depression-era Kansas governor and Republican presidential candidate in 1936, became an elder statesman for his state and his party. In 1980, Tapia got a chance to chat with Landon.“Interestingly, he said what ruined political communication, in his opinion, was the teleprompter,” the Western professor said. “You’re not interacting with a live audience.”
Times change, as does technology. Landon, in running for president, had none of his speeches televised. He could not imagine sending his 140-character thoughts around the world — instantly — to smartphones.
Dr. David T. McMahan, professor of communications at Missouri Western, believes Trump took advantage of the media’s fascination with his use of Twitter.
“I think it was a happy coincidence, at first,” the professor said. “Then, he said, ‘Wait a second, I’m getting all sorts of free publicity.’”
In his classes, McMahan used research that showed Trump, during one week in September, sending out 31 tweets. That same week, Democrat Hillary Clinton sent out 100 tweets.
Despite her activity, Clinton’s tweets got about 30 percent of the number of retweets as Trump’s, and roughly 23 percent of the number of likes.
In short, said Dr. Robert G. Nulph, Western associate professor of journalism, the Republican candidate knew where and how he could generate attention for his campaign.
“He knows the media is watching his Twitter feed, and that will create a story,” Nulph said. “It’s almost like a drug in your veins. You have to maintain a certain blood level. Well, he maintains a certain news level just by sending out tweets because he knows the press is going to pick that up.”
Carviou added, “There are news stories on CNN where they spend an hour talking about one tweet. The process of discussing the tweet is more contextual that what he tweeted in the first place.”
With this, Trump managed to shape his own image, that of an outsider with deliberate provocations. He resisted the teleprompter, knocking one over, to great headline effect, during a North Carolina campaign appearance.
“Even his campaign, he kind of established them as the establishment. He would go against his campaign, and people loved that,” Nulph said. “The guy is a brilliant marketer.”
Masculine image
Watts, who specializes in cultural and intellectual history, has written biographies about the likes of Walt Disney, Henry Ford and Hugh Hefner. But his colleagues raised an eyebrow when he mentioned an examination of the Kennedy years.So much has been written, they said. What more could be added?
But the University of Missouri professor wanted to reconcile Kennedy’s enormous popularity with his political achievements, which he saw as good but not extraordinary.
“Originally, I attributed all of this to the assassination and the kind of golden view of Kennedy after his terrible death,” Watts said. “Actually, even before his assassination he was terrifically popular.”
The historian found that the cultural image had become the source of much of the popularity. In addition, he discovered that the masculine image portrayed by Kennedy stood as part of the appeal.
This mattered a lot at the time of his election, Watts said.
“In the ’50s there are just lots of complaints throughout the culture that American men are becoming wimpy. They seem to be a pale reflection of the heroic men of an earlier period,” the professor said, noting the perception that suburban lives and bureaucratic jobs had softened males of the time.
Watts’ book on the subject, “JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier,” has just been published. It is available at amazon.com and through other booksellers.
Kennedy’s creation of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, his devotion to male-centric writers like Norman Mailer and Ian Fleming and even his womanizing (whispered about in those days, confirmed in later years) contributed to the image.
Part of the image maintenance became suppressing news of Kennedy’s own health problems, including chronic back woes and Addison’s disease.
“He really did want to keep that from the public because it would undercut the kind of vigorous male figure that he wished to appear in the public limelight,” Watts said.
This image protection appears at odds with the Trump election, the candidate seeming his own worst enemy at times.
“While I would not say that there is a parallel with Donald Trump and John Kennedy, I think Kennedy really created that kind of atmosphere that Trump clearly took advantage of,” Watts said.
©2016 the St. Joseph News-Press (St. Joseph, Mo.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
