Of Myth and Memory

By LANCE MORROW

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call them?

-- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

That exchange was one of John Kennedy's favorites. His instruments were sensitive to the bogus. He might find it very funny that the politicians of 1988 keep trying to summon spirits, notably his own, from the vasty deep of 1960.

Rhetoric comparing 1988 with 1960 has a wistful, if cynical, political purpose. It attempts to make a live political connection through the increasingly important American sacrament of memory. It wishes to mobilize nostalgia in order to give glamour and energy to a dismal, weightless campaign. It is politics as seance.

The real connections between the races of 1960 and 1988 are wispy to the point of mere coincidence. A youngish Democratic candidate from Massachusetts (Dukakis, at 54, is eleven years older than Kennedy was in 1960) with an older running mate, a Senator from Texas, campaigns against a sitting Vice President who for eight years served an aging, popular Republican father figure.

They are surface similarities and no more. But they have a fascination as wishful symbols, and are an index of the powerful changes that have occurred in America and the world in the past 28 years. The real meaning of a comparison between the elections of 1960 and 1988 is the vast difference that separates them.

The elections of 1960 and 1988 are brackets enclosing a period of astonishing transformation -- change that has placed the two campaigns in different eras. In 1960 the candidates for the first time debated on television, and politics began an almost metaphysical transformation: the external world was miraculously reconvened as powdered images upon America's internal screen. Electrons fetched out of the air poured the circus directly into the living room, into the bloodstream -- just as they would inject Viet Nam into the center of American consciousness.

This year represents something close to a dismantling of the American presidential campaign. The candidates perform simulations of encounters with the real world, but the exercise is principally a series of television visuals, of staged events created for TV cameras. The issues have become as weightless as clouds of electrons, and the candidates mere actors in commercials.

Karl Marx said that historical events and personalities enact themselves first as tragedy and then, in their repetition, as farce. Some of the imitations and reincarnations of J.F.K. have had traces of the farcical. In 1984 Gary Hart, during the primaries, slipped into a bizarre physical impersonation that had him descending the stairs of airplanes with just the gingerly J.F.K. inclination of bad back and his right hand tucked into his jacket pocket, the thumb protruding in the way that Kennedy's always did. The American voter began to think of Madame Tussaud's, or of Elvis impersonators.

Dan Quayle, in his debate with Lloyd Bentsen, was heedless enough to bring up Kennedy's name. Bentsen, who has good reflexes, saw the opening: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Michael Dukakis has been more dignified, but more relentless, about comparing himself with Kennedy, or at any rate comparing 1960 with 1988. Again and again, from the Democratic Convention on, he has told audiences, "Twenty-eight years ago, another son of Massachusetts and another son of Texas were our nominees . . ." Dukakis wants to borrow a small radiance of analogy. Ted Sorensen, the author of so many of Kennedy's speeches, including the Inaugural, is recycling the rhetoric for Dukakis. The Kennedy themes recur in Sorensen's Dukakis: "It's time to get the country moving again . . ."

In strange ways, 1960 is sacred in grainy national memory. Americans feel a wistfulness about that election, if only because it was a moment when they and the world were younger. Was the race a classic encounter between two smart and well-matched athletes working the game in its last good moment? Maybe. The drama lingers in images of black and white as a moment of moral sunshine for Americans, or of remembered innocence. The candidates, youngish veterans, connected them to the days of their last good war. The election of 1960 was the end of America's postwar political order and the beginning (starting 1,110 days later) of a long, tumbling historical free fall (assassinations, riots, Viet Nam, Watergate, oil embargoes, hostages in Iran, the economic rise of the Pacific Rim nations, on and on -- glasnost, China) that has created an utterly new world and left America searching for its place therein.

America used to be the New World. Now the world is the New World.

What has happened in the world as a whole between 1960 and 1988, and especially during the '80s, is analogous to what occurred in the U.S. in the years after the Civil War, between, say, 1875 and 1900. The railroads spreading west, the telephone, mass manufacture, elevators, a thousand other new items of technology -- all transformed America, opened its markets and shortened its distances. The world today is becoming a global society, and a much smaller planet, because of satellites, computers, jet travel, the interpenetrations of world markets, and the fact that Communism has grown cold in its extremities.

The nation is no longer moated -- economically, militarily -- by the Atlantic and Pacific. As Viet Nam instructed, what America touches does not necessarily become sacred -- an end of the Wilsonian illusion. America, which once cherished the conviction that God had endowed its national idea, began feeling lost in what might be called the Brownian motions of history -- Brownian movement being the term for molecules that fly about with no discernible pattern or reason. The American pre-eminence in manufacturing is gone. A thousand hypodermic needles are punching through the nation's borders.

Many Americans have been retreating to the shrine of national memory. Never have so many anniversaries been observed, so many nostalgias set glowing, as if retrospection were now the only safe and reliable line of sight. You are, among other things, what you remember, or believe you remember. The past has become a persistent presence in the American mind.

Ronald Reagan, a genius at this kind of thing, managed to recrystalize the national morale through his evocations of a simple and virtuous small-town America. He performed an optical illusion that was the equivalent of having Mickey Rooney, as Andy Hardy, standing tall in the saddle. That has been one trouble with Reaganistic good feeling: a suspicion that it was based upon camera angle.

The evocations of the election of 1960 are a somewhat more youthful play upon the illusion, and more self-serving. Those candidates who have evoked the 1960 election were calling back not a time or place so much as a glamorous man -- John Kennedy.

James Joyce had a lovely phrase in Finnegans Wake: "The hereweareagain gaieties." A Kennedy campaign always had the hereweareagain gaieties, that Irish quality of politics as frolic, overlaid with a unique elegance and a ruthlessness that advanced upon you with the brightest of teeth. No wonder that in the presidential campaign of 1988, Americans feel a nostalgia for the festive in their politics. American politics used to be fun. Once upon a time, lively, funny people practiced the art. In a priceless line about the 1988 race, Robert Strauss, former Democratic Party chairman and an accomplished humorist, said Dukakis reminded him of Cary Grant. Depressingly, Strauss was not trying to be funny.

In gloomy moments, one believes that some alchemy of television packaging and American decline in the world has ruined presidential politics and turned it into a dreary and cynical transaction. After eight years of a former actor in the White House, perhaps it is just as well that neither candidate this time behaves remotely like an entertainer. Who ever said that the President of the United States had to be charming?

The example of John Kennedy said so, and the message is implanted in the collective memory.

BUSH: INTO THE COUNTRY

Chet Atkins, on a stage in the bright sunshine of Jackson, Tenn., is warming up the crowd. He stands with Pat Boone in front of the Old Country Store in Casey Jones Village, named for the famous train engineer who lived there at the turn of the century. Atkins, the genius of American country guitar, is singing now: "Would Jesus wear a Rolex?"

George Bush and Dan Quayle materialize on the stage in brilliant early fall sunshine. Great cheers, but little warmth for Quayle, who walks on like an inexplicable mistake in the illusion.

"Read my lips!" cries Bush. "No . . . new . . . taxes!" Read my lips. George Bush is ever at odds with language, as if he does not regard it as a reliable vehicle of thought. At his worst moments on the stump, his surreal moments, Bush is a sort of amateur terrorist of language, like an eleven-year- old Shi'ite picking up a Kalashnikov assault rifle for the first time and firing off words in wild bursts, blowing out the lamps, sending the relatives diving through the windows. Bush is mostly oblivious to the nuances of language, as if some moral or cultural dyslexia were knotting up the thought (which may explain why he keeps using oafishly wrong expressions like "read my lips" and "kick a little ass"). He seems to regard words as dangerous, potentially treacherous. Odd: it is a tenet of conservative intellectuals that "ideas have consequences." Bush sometimes sounds as if he regards ideas, and words, as an inconvenience and an irritation -- perverse, buzzing little demons that need to be brushed away periodically like flies.

Sometimes Bush's speech has a chameleon quality. One day during a tour through central Illinois farmland, Bush and his wife Barbara rode in a bus with the country singers Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue, all sisters. At a stop in the town of Wenona, Bush told the crowd that the three sisters had been giving a country concert in the bus, and "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven." George Bush, out of Kennebunkport and Houston, out of Andover and Yale, had a little mountain twang in his voice when he said it, standing in twill trousers and a cowboy shirt. Loretta Lynn, the coal miner's daughter out of Butcher's Hollow, Ky., told the crowd she loves George Bush " 'cuz he's country!"

No, he is not. George Bush is a man who seems to be searching for the country. He sometimes seems to have misplaced America, and to be intently seeking it, trying out different accents, different styles of thought, as if seeking his own authenticity. Or perhaps fleeing it. Bush used to be a moderate Republican. Now, inheriting the Reagan legacy, he is constrained to run as a right-winger. He trumpets right-wing "values" -- and panders unapologetically to the Know-Nothing instincts in the crowd, but one listens to him always with a smudge of doubt: Does he really believe that?

Bush went from patrician Connecticut to the Texas oil fields as a young man; he has gone from moderate Republican to right-wing Republican, from one identity to another, from one appointive office to another, and these transitions seem at last to add up to a sense of permanent motion and quest, of search for something that is finally his own. It is possible, of course, that after so many years, he is closing in upon that something right now, and will discover both America and himself in the most spectacular way.

DUKAKIS: FORCE OF GRAVITY

Bush is a puzzling man. Dukakis, in an equally troubling way, seems an unpuzzling man. Study the way that the two men walk. If the candidates would not disclose themselves in other ways, they would surely express a little of themselves thus.

Dukakis trudges. He is a compact and gravid man, like a wrestler, with feet apart and stance wary, as if afraid of being knocked down. He is a man careful beyond the ordinary standards of prudence. He holds the railing tightly as he descends the stairs from an airplane.

Dukakis' vectors point downward, as if gravity were pressing on him especially hard. Even the words that leave his lips seem to have weights on them. When he says, as he often does in a speech, "My friends," the expression carries a curious gravamen of reproof or irony -- but no warmth. His speeches, however, have much of his body's compactness and concision and a certain driving force about them.

One fresh morning on a farm in Idalou, in the flatlands of West Texas, with an ashy-silver half-plate moon in the blue sky, the rally crowd was being warmed up by Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, a charismatic populist with a talent for comic fulmination. Dan Quayle, said Hightower, is so dumb he "thinks Cheerios are doughnut seeds." And: "If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights on George Bush's head."

Dukakis, with his weighty, even slightly oppressive air of self-possession and the small eyes that give his large head a somehow sealed look, like a tank turret even without his famous tank, applauded in an odd slow motion and dipped his left shoulder and gave a slow-motion thumbs-up sign, as if to say, "Way to go, Big Guy!" Then he came forward and started to tell the crowd about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and about how "we can do better" and how 1960 has rolled round again. History, says Dukakis, repeats itself. And at least some of the crowd wanted to bring Hightower back for an encore.

THE PRIMAL IMPRINT OF DALLAS

George Bush's vectors fly upward, as if he were about to launch himself. His rangy walk would be a John Wayne saunter, except that he goes on his toes with a springy stride, with profile high and prowing the wind. It is his father's walk, the dark-suited, dignified swagger that one saw in the early 1950s when Prescott Bush of Connecticut crossed the Senate floor. On a dazzling day, the blue sky washed cloudless, George Bush performed such a swagger at the Columbus airport.

An American scene: the candidate came down the front steps of his plane and walked across an agoraphobia of tarmac to a crowd of red-white-and-blue flag- waving, sign-pumping Republicans gathered behind the rope to cheer. In the Kodachrome sunshine, one saw the sharpshooters on the airport roof and the shiny black Secret Service van with black tinted windows, an agent standing on the tailgate with his hand inside a black nylon bag that concealed his automatic weapon. The sunshine itself became sinister and a chill of premonition crossed the mind -- the dank American underdream -- and in a small spasm of panic one frisked the faces in the crowd, looking for the wrong one. The sudden foreboding had a specific primal antecedent in time and place and noon sunshine: the nerves were reaching back exactly to the imprint made upon the American mind on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. And as one boards the Dukakis plane in San Francisco, a frisky German shepherd pokes around the luggage, sniffing for high explosives.

THE RISE OF TELEVISION

The sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim once said that the contrast between the sacred and the profane is the widest and deepest of all contrasts that the human mind can make. In retrospect, in the churchier precincts of the memory, the election of 1960 has, for some, a numinous glow. The election was the prologue to everything that happened after. It was the American politics before the fall. Its protagonists went on to their high, dramatic fates. Perhaps part of the magic of that race is that we know the tale to its dramatic completion.

One man who helped transform that election campaign into instantaneous myth was Theodore H. White. The Making of the President 1960 was the first of a series of five he wrote. White's description of the 1960 race, as one reads it now, seems an endearing period piece. One cannot conceive of writing such prose now, about the 1988 campaign. White invented the form. He absorbed politics and hymned it in an act of reportage and imagination that was a variation on Walt Whitman. White's descriptions of the 1960 race are bardic, Homeric. Political bosses are "chieftains." The "clashes" between Kennedy and Nixon sound like something that occurred between Achilles and Hector outside the walls of Troy. The premise that gives his narrative its dramatic drive is a broad foundation of certitude about the rightness and pre-eminence of American power and, therefore, the absolute centrality of the presidential race in the drama of the world. It was then a Ptolemaic universe, revolving around the White House. What higher story to tell? Americans did not then lose wars. Presidents did not get assassinated, or lie, or have to barricade themselves in the White House.

Heraclitus said a man cannot stand in the same river twice, the flow of things being what it is; 1960 and 1988 are not only different rivers, they run in different courses altogether. It is startling to remember now that Kennedy's Catholicism was the single greatest issue of the campaign and almost unhorsed him in a race he won by less than 120,000 votes. It is a trivia question to ask which two islands off the coast of mainland China received inordinate attention during the second and third television debates between Kennedy and Nixon (Quemoy and Matsu). Both candidates dedicated to strong national defense. The Soviet Union and the Cold War and the nuclear threat dominated everyone's horizon, with anxieties rising over the U-2 spy plane that the Soviets shot down on May 1, 1960, and the Soviets' launching of Sputnik 1 three years earlier. The rocket that took the satellite aloft punched a hole through American self-confidence and made education a central issue.

In the television debates, the camera was endlessly kind to Kennedy, whose charm passed through the lens and directly into the American consciousness. Nixon fared badly on the camera. It exaggerated the depth of his eye sockets, picked up the sweat on his upper lip and the shadow of his heavy whiskers. Kennedy had the video sense to address the camera, and the American people, while Nixon addressed himself to Kennedy, as a pre-video debater would. Some had thought the 43-year-old Democrat a depthless rich-boy dreamboat who missed too many votes in the Senate. His only previous executive experience ended with his getting his PT boat sawed in half by a Japanese destroyer. But the first debate established him in the public mind as at least the equal of the two-term Vice President.

The professionalism of the media handlers in 1988 invigorates the political process infinitely less than the emotional intimacy of the 1960 campaign. For all its spooky powers, television rarely achieves any ignitions of the personal in a campaign. Never in the 1988 campaign does one see anything like the public passion that was displayed, for both candidates, during 1960. Kennedy had his "jumpers" -- females who forested the parade routes, who swooned and leaped and shrieked. "It was flat-out every day and most of the night, ten or 15 days at a time without a day off," remembers Ted Sorensen. "Today it feels more like a missile exchange instead of war in the trenches. Kennedy would saturate a state. He'd do ten or 15 events a day. Now they do two, usually timed carefully to make the evening network news. There aren't many large crowds now. Kennedy would go after the largest possible crowds."

Herb Klein, Nixon's press secretary then, says, "We'd come into a city concentrating on a downtown noon rally. Pierre Salinger ((Kennedy's press secretary)) and I would compete to get the biggest crowd estimate out of the local police chief. The biggest difference between the two campaigns is that the candidates now are not exposed to the public the way they used to be."

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remarks, "Television has replaced the political party." It controls agenda and voter turnout at the polls, two key traditional functions of the party. In the election of 1880, the political parties were so good at motivating voters that 80% of them voted, despite two weak candidates -- Garfield and Hancock -- and no strong issues.

PHOTO OPS, 1988

Michael Dukakis' campaign caravan, like a sleek, sinuous dragon, all flashing lights, police outriders, limo, station wagons, Secret Service, staff, two buses for the press, sweeps through Sacramento at 8 in the morning, all traffic halted at intersections by leapfrogging police cars with astonishing precision. Not an instant's impedance in the arteries of democracy. The campaign dazzles by to its event and comes to rest at a glistening green public park in the most splendid of California mornings. A soccer field, roped off. Twenty or 30 small boys in their soccer uniforms, their parents and friends on the sidelines. The candidate appears, wearing khakis, red crew-neck sweater and jogging shoes. He saunters in his freighted way across the grass toward the boys, and then, without transition, starts idly toeing a soccer ball toward them, again in that curious slow-motion way he has, his body doing not the act itself but the slo-mo replay. The photographers click away. Dukakis, one thinks, may have made a mistake -- in his outfit, with his large head, he looks like Charlie Brown, and something in his almost rueful body English suggests that Lucy is about to snatch the ball away again just as he kicks. Unfair: a reporter remarks, "This is part of Dukakis' relentless search for a constituency shorter than himself." In a few moments it is over. The kids yell in little voices: "Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Dukakis, Dukakis, yay!" He gives a minichat of greeting. Absolutely nothing has happened. The caravan sweeps away. Next morning, the newspapers carry a picture, sure enough, of Michael Dukakis toeing a soccer ball toward a child.

Or George Bush's long procession of buses pulling off Route 51 in central Illinois one afternoon at 3:30 and sweeping up to the Del Monte canning factory. The press corps (numbering some 120 now) dutifully takes its place not far from enormous piles of corn that are being dumped onto the vast concrete acreage, then pushed by special dozers toward the trench that will catch the corn on conveyer belts and carry it with a kind of clanking Modern Times idiot ingenuity up a ramp to be mechanically husked and then borne inside the maw of the factory to its fate. So much corn has an unexpected rich barnyard kind of smell, a cloying excess of smell. Bush appears with his two oldest grandchildren, walks toward a monster mound of corn and, as photographers record the event, he acts like a man waiting for a train on a platform. Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue appear, dressed in tall spike heels, skintight pedal pushers and Bush T shirts. On the other side of the factory, for the thousandth time that day, the sisters introduce Bush by singing Coal Miner's Daughter, Amazing Grace, The Man from Galilee, and I Saw the Light. The crowds all day, surprised to find someone really famous among them, give the singers squeals of delight and that suddenly sharp liveliness of the eyes, the predatory gladness, that announces recognition of a celebrity. Loretta Lynn!

INVENTING THE MORAL ITINERARY

The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf that was told from Grendel's point of view. There is a scene in which a wandering bard arrives among the drunken cretins and begins to sing beautiful songs to them about what they have accomplished that day in battle. Atrocity becomes glory, bloodletting becomes heroic. It is a shrewd point about mythmaking, and perhaps about the making of the myth of Camelot.

But there is, more and more, a countervailing mood of anti-myth that may also be one of the insoluble dilemmas of American politics. What able man or woman is willing to submit to the inquisitions of the press into private lives, into any previous lives they might have led? Would John Kennedy have survived in the politics of 1960 if his extracurricular adventures had been investigated?

White's book about 1960 is in some ways a hymn and a poem not only to American democracy but to the American landscape and American people, to their varieties and resonances. White's writing then strikes a heroic note that sounds odd to the American ear now. But perhaps a sense of eloquence and size has passed out of history's favor.

A presidential campaign is still a fascinating trajectory, over time and vast landscape. In the very American way, it is a moral itinerary, an idea proceeding across both biographies and territories.

Now the candidate's chartered plane fires back across the continent against the direction of old westering tracks 30,000 ft. below. Inside the plane, the clerisy of "spin," that is, the priesthood of partisans sent around to see reporters after major campaign events and impart the right spin, have done their work up and down the aisles, like Polonius and Hamlet discussing the ! shapes of clouds. The candidate is dozing up front. The jackals of the press have settled into their routines of mild carousal.

The jackals haven't the barnacled, bad-liver look of some who covered the 1960 campaign. They don't, like Teddy White, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, or filtered either. They play poker sometimes, or blackjack, and one throwback even asks for a Jack Daniels. A group clusters around the seats behind and plays a game of Jeopardy on a laptop computer -- in answer to which the candidate's press staff, quite justly, chants in rallentando: "Boring, boring, BORING!" The journalists all have toys White never imagined -- cellular telephones, laptops, tiny portable television sets, all the magic paraphernalia connecting them to the New World that America has entered.

Still, it is the old America too. The plane drops into cold drizzle at Green Bay, Wis., and there a crowd awaits that would have been no different from the people Kennedy or Nixon might have dropped out of the same sky to try to win. The band, a little forlorn in the night, is drums, electronic keyboard piano and electric guitar, and it sounds like a Milwaukee roadhouse on a Saturday night. It plays Happy Days Are Here Again. The scene is fervent and lonely.

Then the plane vacuums up the particles again and again sails east. American landscapes are so resonant -- the sere wrinklings of Nevada mountains that hold the topaz lake, the Badlands, the great agricultural geometries of the Midwest, the stretch of Georgia that Sherman blackened. We fly now steady east, against the time zones, into darkness. At last Boston, below, slides toward us like Christmas, strings of light on velvet. How festive American cities look from the air at night.

KENNEDY AND NIXON: HOW THEY WALKED

Nixon had a fascinating walk. If you put a carpenter's level on his head, the bubble would stay steady as he went along. The action was mostly in his knees, a sort of Bob Hope sidle. Not an athlete's walk and not one powered by an athlete's muscles. The captain on the bridge did not want to know much about engine room and propellers. Smooth.

Kennedy was a coordinated man, and he had a bit of dance in his walk, an athlete's sureness. But who knows? That is part of memory, of the old kinescope that has passed into the sacred. Nineteen eighty-eight makes its way, as it must, in the medium of the present, the decidedly profane.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston