The Kennedy-Trump election we needed

September 2, Labor Day, unofficially opens the US election season. The upheavals  of the preceding six weeks underline the political whirlwind ongoing since 2016.. Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee and Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. folding his tent to support Donald Trump have only added to the turbulence.  

Two summer  books, JFK, Jr., An Intimate Oral Biography (Gallery Books 2024) and Apprentice in Wonderland (HarperCollins 2024), respectively commemorate the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s tragically preventable death and pull back the curtain on how a reality (supposedly spontaneous) prime time television series catapulted Trump into the White House. More importantly, these volumes enable us to imagine a brighter story.. 

What would have happened if, as JFK, Jr’s friends maintain in the oral history, he, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, would have run for president as the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump in 2016 (when he would have been 55 years old)? To me. without Clinton’s drawbacks and blunting Trump’s breaks, JFK, Jr. would have won. What better a country would the US have turned into, at home and abroad.

Hillary Clinton lost as much because of her shortcomings as the FBI’s last-minute decision to reopen an investigation into her emails. The night before Inauguration Day 1993, I attended the traditional concert honoring President-Elect Bill Clinton. Both Clintons graduated from Yale Law School in 1972. Their classmates dominated the outing. I recall them calling Hillary the “smart” one.  I did not know either of the Clintons.  I do recall vividly Bill strutting around campus with a perpetual smile and making friends with everyone interested.  So I assume smart meant book smart.  My brief encounter with Mrs. Clinton on a reception line at a Yale Law School Alumni Association event in Washington, DC reinforced my view.

I shook hands with the First Lady and told her, at a time of controversy (it seemed always something), that she should use humor as a weapon against her adversaries.  FDR especially and JFK had succeeded in that manner. She stared at me with an icy look that cut right through me.   

Her performance as a candidate showed not only an inability to connect with voters, necessary to inspire  (see Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), but a lack of judgment. She called Trump supporters “deplorables.”  As President Obama has said, a candidate must venture into opposition territory, to show respect for voters and perhaps earn support. Clinton relied on computer models, rather than political sense, to her detriment.  For example, she never campaigned in Wisconsin and lost a must-win state.. 

Donald Trump won because he played a decisive, successful real estate mogul on television, namely, on NBC’s  reality series, The Apprentice, and because of the connections he made there.  David Frum’s article five years ago in the Atlantic quoted the show’s producers to the effect that they edited the footage to make Trump seem decisive; they replaced Trump’s worn and peeling furniture for the show’s Board Room.  They glossed over his multiple bankruptcies.  

The new book adds two facts.  Trump ran for president for the excitement of center stage, where he thought he belonged.   Jeff Zucker, a program executive at NBC during the Apprentice, had become president of CNN by the time of the 2016 campaign.  Admitting that he did this for the cynical reason of increasing his network’s ratings, Zucker had CNN broadcast Trump’s rallies live and unfiltered.  CNN showed pictures of the empty podium, as viewers awaited Trump’s grand entrances. The network treated him as a president and gave him priceless free publicity. How many votes did Trump gain in close states that he carried?

Through JFK, Jr., a  compilation of his friends’ recollections, we  get  to know him, beyond the little boy on television saluting his father’s casket riding by.  Those  images and later news coverage of him as an adult would have convinced CNN that hyping him, not Trump, would bring the ratings the network so craved. The oral history shows that, like his father, JFK, Jr., comfortable in his own skin,  had the gift of humor. He laughed at himself. I remember seeing those qualities and his charisma in his speech to the 1988 Democratic Convention.  Growing up without a father, he developed empathy for the downtrodden and a modesty that led him to commute via subway and rollerblade. He would have served the public, not his own pocket.

To paraphrase John Greenleaf Whittier, The saddest words of mouth and pen/ Are, “It might have been”.