Obama's JFK Test

The newest revelation of Iran's nuclear sneakiness echoes what the world faced in 1962 when the Soviets furtively put missiles into Cuba, but John F. Kennedy's problem was a faceoff for a few days compared to the complex struggle that will play out over the coming months.

Yet the key issue is the same--testing an American president's skill and resolve by an adversary who may be interpreting a rational and measured approach as weakness.

Back then, JFK faced an imminent threat to the American mainland that demanded immediate response. Obama's challenge has a less concentrated time frame, but in what is being described as "the Cuban Missile Crisis in Slow Motion," he will have to rally support for what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls "a line in the sand" to stop Iranian nuclear nose-thumbing at the world, getting them to "pursue a new course or face consequences."

The first signs are promising. In putting Tehran "on notice" yesterday, the President invoked the carrot-and-stick formula that JFK used and, just as Kennedy ignored military advice to "bomb Cuba back into the Stone Age," Obama rejected the notion of "victory" in today's crisis.

"This isn't a football game," he said. "So I'm not interested in victory, I'm interested in solving the problem."

The President's words suggest he understands the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When it was over, Robert Kennedy wrote in his memoir, his brother "permitted no crowing" and ordered that "no interview should be given, no statement made, which would claim any kind of victory."

As Obama tries to rally support from such unlikely allies as Russia and China in devising ways to pressure Iran, he will do well to recall Robert Kennedy's prediction that "we could have other missile crises in the future--different kinds, no doubt, and under different circumstances. But if we are going to be successful then, if we are going to preserve our own national security, we will need friends, we will need supporters, we will need countries that believe and respect us and will follow our leadership."

Almost half a century later, nothing has changed.

Fear Factor: Pearl Harbor to 9/11

Today is a reminder for those who live in one of the few places in the world where feeling safe is commonplace of what it's like suddenly to live with fear, to have the ground stop feeling solid under your feet.

Older generations experienced this epiphany in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. Their children were baptized by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now a new generation tells Peggy Noonan how they were transformed by the "life-splitting event" of eight years ago:

"Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, 'a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack,' and a crowded theater was 'a source for concern.' Every one of them used the word 'bubble': the protected bubble of their childhood 'popped'...The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down."

Each generation takes a different lesson from its trauma. The Greatest had to grow up overnight and go off to fight in foreign places or stay behind to work in war plants and live with meat and gas rationing.

The Baby Boomers took the shock of nuclear reality in the 1960s to start a "youthquake" against their parents' values about gender, race, sexuality and fighting an ideological war in Vietnam.

What will this generation make out of its loss of innocence? The memorials at Ground Zero are still unfinished, but by presidential decree, today will be the first 9/11 anniversary to be commemorated as a National Day of Service and Remembrance, encouraging a tribute of sacrificing for the common good through volunteer work.

Such efforts won't get any headlines, but they are a much more traditional American way of responding to shock and awe than retreating into rancor, mistrust and selfish squabbling.

RFK: Tears for a Tough Guy

Forty years ago tonight, hours before Robert Kennedy was killed, I was campaigning as a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention. When a man rose to spew out Kennedy hatred, I cut him off and said, "I'm running to stop the war. If McCarthy drops out, I'll vote for Kennedy."

Two days later, from an office window, I was looking down at a line of people more than a mile long inching toward St. Patrick's Cathedral on a brutally hot day to view RFK's body lying there.

Watching became unbearable, and I went down with others to wheel a plastic barrel on a dolly and hand out paper cups of water. The air was heavy with heat and tears. Without words, there was an occasional meeting of eyes in shared sadness. In that year of political murder and chaos, we were mourning the loss of more than one man.

Robert Kennedy had been his brother's fierce protector, enforcer, campaign manager, Attorney General and, after the assassination, keeper of the flame. But like JFK before him, in the last days of his life, he became something more.

In late 1963, stunned by grief, he was enraged with me for publishing excerpts from a book of family essays about his oldest brother Joe, who died in World War II. "He keeps sending me rockets." Pierre Salinger said sadly. "If he needs to fight with someone now," I answered, "it isn't going to be me."

The book was in the Library of Congress for all to see, but I sent RFK the copyright of the article, along with a contribution to the Presidential library, and he was mollified to the point of writing back that he was "touched" by an editorial I had written about JFK's death.

Later we skirmished over excerpts from a guileless book by Red Fay, a JFK buddy, but soon afterward RFK, by then Senator from New York, came to lunch in our magazine's dining room to make peace and went into the kitchen afterward to charm the chef by comparing notes on their Irish ancestors.

In 1967, appalled by the unending war in Vietnam, I was among those urging him to oppose Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries. He declined, on the grounds that it would look like a personal vendetta, and we turned to Senator Eugene McCarthy.

When Kennedy declared his candidacy, many of us reluctantly stuck with McCarthy, a vain, arrogant man who had nonetheless been there when it counted. But during the campaign, RFK found his voice, just as his brother had in 1960. If he had lived, he would have won the presidency.

At his funeral Mass, Ted Kennedy said, "My brother need not be idolized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life [but] be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

"Those of us who loved him, and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will someday come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"

Before the year was out, Ted Sorensen called about a memoir RFK had written about the Cuban Missile Crisis. My company bought all the rights for $1 million, which would go to trust funds for his children. We ran it in McCall's and arranged for publication throughout the world.

Looking back from another century, Robert Kennedy's book could have served as a primer for George W. Bush in confronting his pseudo-nuclear Iraq crisis. With missiles 90 miles from our shores, JFK rejected military advice for an air strike or invasion, lined up support from the United Nations, gave the Russians every chance to back down and, when they did, ordered that there be no gloating about victory. No CIA “slam dunk,” “Mission Accomplished” or “Bring it on!”

Robert Kennedy played a crucial part in those thirteen days, and like his brother before him, was still learning and growing during his all-too-few years. Looking at today's politicians, that alone is cause for tears.

Lieberman, Leper-to-Be

The former Democrat, then Independent, now Republican sheep dog for John McCain refuses to go gentle in that good night, today barking lies about Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal.

Obama, Joe Lieberman says, proposes "a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet."

The Democratic nominee-to-be has proposed no such "without preconditions" thing, but that doesn't stop Lieberman from indicting his former party as having gone gutless, in contrast to the good old days of the Cold War when Kennedy was misled by hawks into the Bay of Pigs disaster and then, as Ted Sorensen tells it in his new memoirs, had to use an exquisite combination of brains, toughness and diplomacy to keep the world from blowing up during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But as Gilda Radner used to say, never mind. When Obama is in the Oval Office next January and Democrats have a solid majority in the Senate, Chairman Joe of the Homeland Security Committee may find himself a very lonely former Democrat, former McCain advisor and former Chairman.

Wakeup Call on the Red Phone Ads

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been running dueling commercials about who is better suited to be President when the phone rings at 3 A.M. with news of a terror attack.

Wrong question. While it's important to have a White House occupant who will respond, rather than keep reading "My Pet Goat" to school children, that moment will call for coordinating a response based on intelligence, military and diplomatic information and advice rather than pulling an answer from a backlog of experience in his or her head.

Good judgment, intelligence and emotional balance are the qualities that will be needed. (Read Robert Kennedy's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis for an idea of how it's done.)

What's crucial is what happens before the red phone rings. Whoever takes office next January will have to overhaul a politically decimated, dysfunctional Homeland Security apparatus headed by a Director who uses physiological metaphors about possible threats and keeps putting his foot in his mouth as he does.

In the White House, the new President will need a staff with brains and expertise rather than cunning on how to win the next election.

Any candidate who claims to be a savior when the phone rings in the middle of the night is selling snake oil.

The Experience a President Needs

Democrats will surely nominate a senator, and if John McCain can't go all the way, Republicans will name a former governor or super-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists that a president needs executive experience to run the Executive branch.

History suggests otherwise. In 1960, Richard Nixon used that argument against John F. Kennedy and, in the early months of JFK's Administration, it looked like Nixon might have had a point as the new President mishandled the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But Kennedy trumped his inexperience with two crucial qualities: He took responsibility for his mistakes and learned from them, in contrast to George W. Bush, whose resume as an executive did not help him do either, and Nixon who... But you know the rest of that story.

Instinctively Kennedy surrounded himself with the best people ("You can't beat brains," he would say) and insisted on hearing all sides of an argument before he made a decision, as he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those qualities would satisfy even Giuliani, who wrote a book about leadership but has had trouble practicing his own principles, as his Bernard Kerik albatross and the bitter 9/11 complaints of New York fire fighters suggest.

For a President Obama or McCain, the first days in the Oval would not be a test of management skills. What will count is their vision for America and determination to translate it into political reality. Voters are instinctively doing the right thing by focusing on that.

Giving Thanks for President Kennedy

For anyone over 50, tomorrow will be not only Thanksgiving but the day JFK died 44 years ago. He has been gone now for almost as long as he lived and, in these days of White House infamy, not nearly as much in the national mind as his antagonist, Richard Nixon, whose all-time low approval ratings have just been eclipsed by George W. Bush.

A few years after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wistfully told me that her husband was being remembered too much for how he died rather than what he had lived for. She was right. It was too soon then for Americans to appreciate what they had lost.

In 1960, I had made an unintentional contribution to Kennedy’s election. After my magazine ran a piece by Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Advice to the Next First Lady,” the producers of the “Tonight” show called me to ask Mrs. Roosevelt if she would appear with Jack Paar. To my surprise, she agreed.

On the way to the studio, I asked Mrs. Roosevelt, who had supported Adlai Stevenson during the convention and been visibly cool to JFK, what made her decide to take part in a talk show. “I want to help elect Senator Kennedy,” she said.

On the “Tonight” show, she did just that, comparing Kennedy to FDR during his first campaign in 1932, inspiring voters and responding to their enthusiasm, and predicted he would make a fine President. In Kennedy’s hairline victory, her testimonial may well have been significant, and he didn't disappoint her.

John F. Kennedy was the last president in memory who was still learning while in office. He admitted mistakes and profited from them.

Despite misgivings, he went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba after being told Americans would be greeted as liberators and withdrew when he realized he had been misled, accepting “sole responsibility” for the fiasco.

As the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he put that lesson to use by overruling “experts” who wanted to bomb or invade Cubs and trusting his own instincts to avoid disaster.

After November 22, 1963 I wrote an editorial attempting to define the deep grief over his shocking death-—that beyond his attractiveness and intelligence, there was the loss of a leader “who was still growing—-in understanding, in skill, in compassion, in commitment."

Today's leading contenders for the Presidency are, for the most part, as cool and rational as Kennedy was when he was running for the office. For all our sakes, we can only hope that whoever wins can attain the stature he did in the thousand days he spent in the White House.