Just when it looked like we were about to be free from the curse of the Kennedys comes news that Caroline Kennedy is interested in taking Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.
It could be worse: At least New York Gov. David Paterson apparently is not considering appointing one of her drug-addled cousins. And, actually, Kennedy could be a boon for the Senate – if she chose to follow in her father’s footsteps instead of her Uncle Teddy’s.
First, she would have to understand her father’s record, which the evidence suggests she does not. If she did, how could she have endorsed Barack Obama as president and compared him to her late father? Historians agree that President John F. Kennedy was not a liberal; many describe him as a conservative. As Tom Wicker of the New York Times said, “We are not talking about George McGovern here.”
To the contrary, JFK was a hawkish cold warrior who attacked Richard Nixon during the 1960 campaign for being soft on communism. Most telling, JFK did not oppose Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist pursuits and even managed to be absent when his fellow senators voted to censure McCarthy. JFK almost certainly would consider Obama dangerously naïve.
How Caroline Kennedy could compare her father – the president who urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” – to Obama, whose message is that citizens don’t demand enough from government, is simply inexplicable.
Fiscally conservative, JFK favored a balanced budget and had to be persuaded, when a recession loomed in the early days of his administration, that a modest deficit would provide the necessary economic stimulus. In 1962 Kennedy announced an across-the-board reduction in personal and corporate income tax rates.
President Kennedy recognized the value of limited government. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was a special assistant to JFK, recalled that “our staff was small; Kennedy used the Roosevelt model. I can’t believe it when I read how so-called presidential assistants have to make appointments to see the president weeks in advance.”
The irony of Caroline Kennedy comparing her father to Obama is that JFK’s greatest failure may have been his reluctance to deal with civil rights. In an appeal to black voters during the 1960 campaign, he promised that if elected president he would sign an executive order ending discrimination in federal housing. But it was nearly two years later that Kennedy finally honored his pledge. a gesture Martin Luther King, Jr. correctly characterized as “too little, too late.”
When King asked the president to order the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban bus segregation, Kennedy declined to do so. When black ambassadors reported being refused service in Maryland and Delaware restaurants, Kennedy suggested they fly from Washington to New York.
Yet a contributing factor to Kennedy’s failure was that the House and Senate were both controlled by Democrats who strongly opposed civil rights legislation. “I can’t get a Mother’s Day resolution through that [expletive] Congress,“ Kennedy lamented.
If his daughter were appointed to the Senate and later served under a Republican president, would she side with the obstructionist Democrats – or would she recall her father’s difficulties and, unlike Obama, be willing to cross the aisle?
It is perhaps understandable that Caroline Kennedy has only a sketchy understanding of her father’s record. She was a few days shy of her sixth birthday when he was killed, and what she has been told of his presidency undoubtedly came from the family’s hagiographers. Worse, she is probably convinced that her buffoonish Uncle Teddy is continuing the family legacy when, in fact, JFK’s political positions bore more similarity to Ronald Reagan’s.
Caroline Kennedy cannot support Obama and follow her father’s lead. If appointed to the Senate, she will either fall in step with the lamentable policies of today’s left wing, or she will build upon the conservative principles that guided her father’s decisions. The former is likely; the latter is a long shot. But if she were to surprise, the people of New York and the rest of the country could be well served by another Sen. Kennedy.
Melanie Scarborough is an award-winning commentary writer whose work has appeared in more than two dozen newspapers, magazines, and books.
