Primary races today similar to JFK’s time

The political churning underway – especially among Democratic presidential rivals during the closing days of the Iowa caucus race – is nothing new. It was the “same song, second verse,” and probably could have been reported of the 1988 contest or further back to the campaign leading to the Democratic convention of 1960.

That, of course, was when John F. Kennedy plowed through one primary after another to win the Democratic nomination over contenders Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon B. Johnson and eventually went on to defeat Richard Nixon by a paper-thin margin in the election for the presidency.

It makes one wonder what’s different today in the heated political races of Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry or John Edwards, all with their eyes on the Democratic convention and winning the party’s nomination. All four know how unpredictable conventions – and their results – can be.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once described a convention as “far too fluid and hysterical a phenomenon for exact history. Everything happens at once and everywhere, and everything changes too quickly. People talk too much, smoke too much, rush too much and sleep too little. Fatigue tightens nerves and produces susceptibility to rumor and panic. No one can see a convention whole. … At the time it is all a confusion; in retrospect it is all a blur.”

Schlesinger’s comments are included in a biography – yet another – of JFK, this one written by Robert Dallek and titled “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” Dallek’s version of Kennedy’s climb to the White House via the Senate in 1953, which officially began the love affair between JFK and millions of Americans, contains some choice recollections and quotes that bear repeating over and over: “The great majority of senators – past and present – were unexceptional,” Dallek writes. “In 1935, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis told Harry Truman after Truman became a Missouri senator that initially, ‘you will wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you will wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.'”

Dallek opined that if Kennedy did not know the quote when he joined the Senate, he soon came to agree with it. “His fellow senators were cautious, self-serving, and unheroic, more often than not the captive of one special interest or another,” writes Dallek, adding that they were all too ready to cut deals and court campaign contributors to ensure their political futures.

Kennedy enjoyed the legendary comment from Senate Chaplain Edward Everett Hale: “Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?” “No,” he replied, “I look at the senators and I pray for the country.”

Again, it makes one wonder what’s different today. Just read these words from JFK right after he secured the nomination, as cited in Dallek’s biography: “Too many Americans have lost their way, their will and their sense of historic purpose. It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership – new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities … the choice our nation must make [is] a choice between the public interest and the private comfort – between national greatness and national decline. … All mankind waits upon our decision.”