The Use and Abuse of Heroes

How do you not honor a national hero? Take an unassuming man with no passion for preening and make him and yourselves a little ridiculous by trying to plaster his name and his image all over the map. A handful of Reaganauts in Congress are now hyperventilating over the failure of the Washington Metro system to change its station signs to read Reagan National Airport. But they are not the only ideological camp followers making fools of themselves these days. To honor the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the designers of his Washington memorial have taken a war leader and turned him into a victim. Then there was the fit thrown earlier this year by the Camelot faithful over the use of the voice and the words of John F. Kennedy in an ad promoting the Republican tax cut. Kennedy’s brother called it “indecent”; Kennedy camp-followers called it a sacrilege; some called it robbing his grave.

These are all misguided efforts to build shrines to large people that in the end make them look smaller and cast a dim light on their followers. It is these, of course, who cause most of the trouble, seeing the past through the lens of the present, and using their heroes to fill their own needs. Too much adoration, of all the wrong kind, can wreak havoc with truth, and with history. What least becomes a national legend? The overwrought love of fans.

Consider the appalling sculptures at the Roosevelt memorial (FDR-PC to its critics), which show what can happen when a great man from an earlier era is strained through a Clintonesque filter. Gone is the president’s cigarette holder, signature symbol of his buoyant vitality. Gone is wife Eleanor’s little fur tippet, that female fashion rage of the 1940s which featured fox skins complete with their little fox paws and fox eyes. Gone, too, is the Commander in Chief; gone the atomic bomb that he helped to develop; gone the triumphant war machine he unleashed. There are no boys of Pointe du Hoc here, examples of courage and fortitude. In their place is a long queue of Depression victims, looking hopeless and hapless, waiting no doubt for a federal subsidy. With the nation he led reduced to a cluster of victims, only one thing remained to round out the picture — to make of its leader a victim himself, by unveiling the wheelchair he always kept carefully hidden. The chair is less bad, though, than the FDR who sits in it, looking vacant and boneless and small and diminished, the very image of the common man that he was not.

Neither was John Kennedy the liberal that the more ardent keepers of his flame would have us believe. “If President Kennedy were alive today, he would vigorously oppose President Bush’s irresponsible tax cut,” his brother and daughter asserted. Maybe so, but the real John Kennedy ran for office in 1946 as a “fighting conservative,” had kind words to say about Joe McCarthy, worried (with Ronald Reagan) about Communist infiltration of American unions, and ran in 1960 on the argument that Dwight Eisenhower had not built up the military forces enough. He also befriended Richard Nixon and rejoiced in his 1950 Senate win against Helen “Pink Lady” Douglas (giving Nixon a fat donation from his and Ted’s father), and told friends he was prepared to vote for Nixon against a field of Democrats in the 1960 election, if he could not get his party’s nomination for himself. “He hated the liberals,” his friend Benjamin Bradlee told Christopher Matthews. As president and before, he dismissed them as “honkers,” which his biographer Richard Reeves described as “his private term for the most liberal Democrats, particularly those from New York City and Cambridge, Mass.”

A fiscal conservative, Kennedy enraged the liberals of his day, among them the first Albert Gore. “What do you think I should do about a tax cut?” Reeves quoted Kennedy asking. “Forget it!’ said the man from Tennessee.” Kennedy did not forget it but went on to cut taxes. Where would he stand now: With the tax cutters or with his brother, a honker in extremely good standing, if not the finest flower of the breed? Democrats have taken to shrinking their heroes, tenderizing them like so many veal cutlets, pounding away with their mallets till all the sinew is gone. They cling to them because they were, and are, popular, hoping to use that popularity to promote their current agenda. But if their heroes had run on that agenda, they would not have been so popular. And their names would not be worth much today.

The Kennedys have always been proprietary about JFK’s record, as if his public life were their private possession. Jacqueline Kennedy used to try to suppress, discourage, or censor books written by friends of her husband that showed him being funny, profane, and irreverent, apparently not realizing that it was because he was funny, profane, and irreverent that he was so loved by the country. The flip side of this Kennedy reverence project is the far-reaching Ronald Reagan Legacy Project. Both seem intent on conjuring up a sense of awestricken worship of men who were very tough politicians, who knew how to laugh at themselves and their rivals, and who loved nothing more than a fight. It is right that the Reaganites should want some big things named after their hero — the aircraft carrier christened earlier this year in honor of the president who built a 600-ship navy is more than fitting. But what in the name of all that is holy led them to think that he, or anyone, should bounce Alexander Hamilton from the ten-dollar bill? Or to think that a fearful wrong will have been done to him and to history if his name is not put onto something in every county in every one of the United States? Reagan himself would doubtless have nixed this, being all too aware of the potential for ridicule. But true believers are frequently lacking in senses of irony, or even of proportion. When representative Bob Barr recently threatened to cut off funds for the Washington Metro system if its signs weren’t changed quickly, he picked a fight with the equally anti-Reagan local Democratic politicians that only made all of them look ridiculous. Were he able to, Reagan, who did not see himself as an object of worship, would no doubt join in the ridicule.

There is an unnatural hunger for reverence in keepers of the Reagan and Kennedy flames. Both men appear “special,” and both fill particular needs. John Kennedy was the last in a string of larger than life Democrats; the last Democrat to serve in the White House without public embarrassment; the last Democrat to serve as president before things began to go very wrong for his party. Reagan was not only the first true conservative to serve in the White House, he was the only one ever to score as a national hero, to take on and neutralize the national media, and appeal to the public over its heads. Before Kennedy came Democrats such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Harry Truman, who were noted world statesmen, if not wholly successful. After him came a string of people too small for the office, or compromised figures, like Lyndon Johnson and the Clintons, and his brother Ted. Before Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, wiped out in a national landslide, and Richard Nixon, run out of office in disgrace. After Reagan, the right endured a long string of failed expectations, national figures who failed to inspire, congressional leaders outfoxed by Bill Clinton, Republican speakers shot down. Kennedy looms like a giant over all subsequent Democrats. Reagan towers over conservatives, both past and present; the only one gifted with media magic.

The past ten years have been perplexing for partisans, filled with defeats and false dawns: There was the Democratic sweep of 1992-93, which failed to turn out as expected; the conservative takeover of 1994-95, which quickly disappointed; the forced accommodation between Clinton and Congress; the absolute tie of the 2000 election. In times of confusion, people look back to their moments of triumph and clarity, and to the people who put them there. John Kennedy is the Democrats’ last link to a past that is both triumphant and usable; Ronald Reagan is the conservatives’ lone model of popular leadership. Democrats fear if this last link should be broken — if conservatives try to wrest Kennedy from them — then they will have nothing. Conservatives fear that unless they quickly establish their hero as a Great Man in the most concrete and tangible manner — Kilroy was here! — liberals will somehow wipe out his memory.

Invested so much in its own private terrors, neither side can see things as they are. Thus FDR-PC gives most of its space and all its heart to the father of the national safety net, suggests he was an environmentalist and a friend of “diversity,” and reduces his foreign policy to a single statement, “I hate war.” Well, he may have hated it, but he certainly waged it with gusto, and war is the core of his claim upon history. Making FDR into a sensitized tree-hugging pacifist creates a sense of destructive dissonance, as does the recasting of John Kennedy as a Ted Kennedy liberal. Democrats can’t see the past as it is because they refuse to acknowledge how very unlike their heroes they are. To do so would be to admit that some of their failures are their own fault, that there are reasons why they lose elections — why they have now lost the Congress for three cycles in a row, and the presidency six times out of the last nine.

Conservatives, meanwhile, cannot see how far they have come, refusing often to take “yes” for an answer. They cannot believe that Reagan is winning, that his stature is all but insured. Somehow, they have internalized the view of their critics: In their minds, it is forever 1981, and silver-haired, silver-tongued Clark Clifford is holding forth in the Georgetown salon of the Harrimans, telling an audience of establishment hotshots that the conservatives’ hero is an “amiable dunce.” Memo to Reaganauts: Clifford is dead. Dead and gone. Dead and (almost) forgotten. Dead and discredited, dead and disgraced, dead and exposed as self-seeking and corrupt, as well as a poor judge of political horseflesh. And while he was sinking, Reagan was rising, into the top tier of political leaders, one of the few (with FDR, his great hero) to have single-handedly altered the trajectory of this nation’s political discourse. Even the liberals have been coming around. Historian Fred Greenstein now finds Reagan a “towering political presence” who “presided over a fundamental reorientation of public policy in the realm of taxes and spending” and “played a significant part in the peaceful termination of a global conflict that threatened the survival of mankind.” Doris Kearns Goodwin, a liberal with a fondness for large-hearted patriots, says of Reagan: “Boy, this guy was president!” These things count for more than the signs in the Metro. If only his friends could see.

“The name of Ronald Reagan and his legacy are under attack and need to be defended,” claims the director of the Legacy Project, explaining the need to put Reagan’s name everywhere. But this “incontinent lust of a Washington-based coterie to celebrate him,” in George Will’s phrase, ignores the fact that Reagan’s legacy grows more secure with each passing year. Op-ed page skirmishing over Reagan’s tax and foreign policies is hardly an “attack.” Nor is it “indecent” to use the words, or even the voice, of John F. Kennedy to back causes and programs his younger brother dislikes. These things are not sacrilege; nor are they assaults on the ill and the dead. They are, in a word, politics — a trade based on argument, which both these men entered into freely, even joyfully, and in which they thrived. They would be neither shocked nor offended that people take issue with some of their judgments, or interpret their words in ways that are politically useful. They would likely expect this, having done the same things themselves. They would not expect worship, or wholesale agreement, but would have faith enough in their overall records to trust in the judgment of history. They deserve our respect, but not our worship, which ought not to go to political figures.

Washington is becoming a capital with too many memorials and much too much reverence; with too many things named for too many people. FDR had it right in the first place when he said that the only memorial he wanted in Washington is the plain marble block with his name and dates on it that sits across the street from the Navy Memorial, proof again that the people who most deserve memorials are those who don’t care if they have them. It is the Bill Clintons of the world who fret over legacies, not those who have accomplished great things. Ronald Reagan also had it right when he signed a bill (that his fans are now trying to overturn in his honor) prohibiting the erecting of monuments on the Mall to anyone not already dead for a quarter century. This wise measure was designed to let partisan fevers run their course, to prevent spectacles like the Metro sign war, in which embittered diehard liberals and Reagan’s more overwrought friends both look silly and spiteful.

No one comes out looking terribly noble in these furious legacy wars. Roosevelt looks like the victim he wasn’t; Kennedy like the honker he wasn’t; and Reagan, who never cared much who got credit for anything, comes out looking like someone terribly hungry for attention. The propagandists themselves are caricatures of their respective parties’ worst flaws. Democrats win with candidates who seem steely, and perhaps a little bit macho, yet they have made their heroes seem softer and sissified. Conservatives win when they are sunny and funny, yet they seem obsessive and paranoid in their effort to honor Reagan. A better understanding of their heroes would help both parties. If the Ted Kennedy Democrats could really see how far they have slipped out of John Kennedy’s mainstream, they might win more fights and elections. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to cultivate the traits most lacking in the Reagan Legacy Project — a sense of proportion and humor, and the ability to sense when they don’t wear well with others and why.

The way to honor one’s political heroes is by trying to become more like them. But these people have gone in a different direction, scaling their heroes down to their size. In politics, the slaps of your foes may annoy and distract you, but this is expected, and natural. Nothing can do you quite as much damage as the embarrassing passions of friends.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.