Historical Figures Who Outlived JFK

Today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is fascinating to consider some of the historical figures who outlived him.  The point here is not to satisfy a morbid curiosity, but to make a point about history.  "The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote, "It's not even past."  Memories of the past shape current events, and people who took part in historic events often live long enough to reshape those memories.

Just hours before he died, Kennedy called former vice president John Nance Garner (who served under Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941) to wish him a happy 95th birthday.  Here are other major figures who were still alive on the fateful day:

• Winston Churchill (d. 1965)
• Charles deGaulle (d. 1970)
• Herbert Hoover  (d. 1964)
• Harry Truman  (d. 1972)
• Dwight Eisenhower (d. 1969)
• Douglas MacArthur (d. 1964)
• Gen. Bernard Montgomery (d. 1976)
• Adm. Chester Nimitz (d. 1966)
• Hellen Keller (d. 1968)
• Margaret Sanger (d. 1966)
• Upton Sinclair (d. 1968)
• Norman Thomas (d. 1968)
• John Steinbeck (d. 1968)
• Bernard Baruch (d. 1965)
• Joseph P. Kennedy (d. 1969)chu

Assassination

Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?

The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.

You would be doing your country - and the world - a great service.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 4, 2022

 Many Americans want to assassinate Putin.  At Politico, Steven Kinzer writes:

We’ve tried it repeatedly. Often we have failed, but even when we seem to have succeeded, the long-term consequences have been terrible. An order from the Oval Office to assassinate a foreign leader would not break a taboo. It would only be the latest in a series of self-defeating blunders.

So far as is known, Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to order such assassinations. He began by targeting Premier Zhou Enlai of China. During the 1950s, Eisenhower and nearly every other policymaker in Washington considered the “Red Chinese” to be maniacal fanatics bent on world conquest. When Zhou announced in 1955 that he would travel to Bandung, Indonesia, for a momentous conference of Asian and African leaders, the CIA saw a chance to kill him. Zhou chartered an Air India jet for his flight to Bandung. It exploded in midair, killing 16 passengers. But Zhou had not boarded. China called it “murder by the special service organizations of the United States.”

... 

Americans are impatient by nature. We want quick solutions, even to complex problems. That makes killing a foreign leader seem like a good way to end a war. Every time we have tried it, though, we’ve failed — whether or not the target falls. Morality and legality aside, it doesn’t work. Castro thrived on his ability to survive American plots. In the Congo, almost everything that has happened since Lumumba’s murder has been awful.

Ranking Presidents

From C-SPAN:

As the nation marks Presidents Day 2017, C-SPAN is releasing the results of its third Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which a cross-section of 91 presidential historians ranked the 43 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.

As in C-SPAN's first two surveys, released in 2000 and 2009, Abraham Lincoln receives top billing among the historians. George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt retain their top five status, while Dwight Eisenhower moves into the top five for the first time.

Former President Barack Obama enters the ranks for the first time in the #12 position. Notably, his leadership category ratings range from #3 for "Pursued Equal Justice for All," to #39 for "Relations with Congress." His predecessor, George W. Bush, has benefitted somewhat from the passing of years: His ranking at #33, is up three places from our 2009 survey. Dwight Eisenhower also advanced three spots since 2009, moving to the #5 position from #8 overall. Bill Clinton remains unchanged at #15.

The biggest presidential loser from our 2009 survey is Andrew Jackson, who was #13 in 2009, and who now stands at #18 overall.

Three presidents continue to hold the same bottom rankings as they did in 2000 and 2009: James Buchanan remains in last place at #43, preceded by Andrew Johnson (#42), and Franklin Pierce (#41).

Note that they rank even lower than William Henry Harrison, who served for only one month. The most-average U.S. president, as rated by our historian participants is Ulysses S. Grant, who ranks 22 out of 43 presidents.

A team of academic advisors has guided C-SPAN for each of its three surveys: Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University; Dr. Edna Greene Medford, Professor of History, Howard University; and Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and biographer. The team approved the ten criteria, the same used in C-SPAN's 2000 and 2009 Surveys, consulted on the list of invited participants, and supervised the reporting of the results. Full rankings for each of the 43 presidents as well as shareable/social media graphics are available at www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2017 .

Forgetting Presidents

A release from Washington University in St. Louis:

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation's collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released today by the journal Science.

 

...

Findings showed several consistent patterns in how we have forgotten past presidents and offer a formula to predict the rate at which current presidents are likely to be forgotten by future generations.

Among the six presidents who were serving or had served most recently when the test was first given in 1973, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald R. Ford are now fading fast from historical memory, whereas John F. Kennedy has been better retained. The study estimates that Truman will be forgotten by three-fourths of college students by 2040, 87 years after his leaving office, bringing him down to the level of presidents such as Zachary Taylor and William McKinley.

...

America's memory for Johnson and Reagan, like that for most presidents, is destined to fade along a quick and predictable trajectory as new elections inexorably push them and their memories further down the list of the most recent and currently best-remembered presidents, the study suggests.

While most collective memory research conducted thus far has explored how we as a nation remember historic events, such as the Holocaust or the 9/11 terror attacks, this study is among the first to focus on how we forget salient events of the past over generations and to obtain estimates of rate of forgetting over time.

"Our results show that memories of famous historical people and events can be studied objectively," Roediger said. "The great stability in how these presidents are remembered across generations suggests that we as a nation share a seemingly permanent form of collective memory."


Journal Reference:
H. L. Roediger III And K. A. Desoto. Forgetting the presidents. Science, 28 November 2014: 1106-1109 DOI: 10.1126/science.1259627

The National Guard, Armed Forces, and Civil Disorder

Events in Ferguson raise the question of the role of the armed force in domestic unrest.  From Charles Doyle and Jennifer Elsea, "The Posse Comitatus Act and Related Matters: The Use of the Military to Execute Civilian Law," Congressional Research Service, August 16, 2012:

Section 333 of Title 10 permits the President to use the Armed Forces to suppress any “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” if law enforcement is hindered within a state, and local law enforcement is unable to protect individuals, or if the unlawful action “obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” This section was enacted to implement the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee for equal protection. It does not require the request or even the permission of the governor of the affected state.

The provision lay dormant after the end of Reconstruction until 1957, when President Eisenhower ordered a battle group of the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock 246 and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard 247 in order to enforce a court order permitting nine black students to attend a previously white high school. The proclamation to disperse cited both Sections 332 and 333 of Title 10, U.S. Code.248 By federalizing the Arkansas Guard, the President effectively deprived the governor of forces that had several days previously been used to enforce the governor’s view of law and order.249

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson followed the Little Rock precedent to deal with resistance to court-ordered desegregation in a number of Southern states. In 1962, after the governor of Mississippi attempted to prevent black student James H. Meredith from registering at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, President Kennedy sought to enforce the court order  with federal marshals.250 When marshals met with resistance from state forces and later a  riotous mob, President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and ordered active Army troops  already gathered in the area to take action.251 The President’s proclamation to disperse named the governor and other state officials as forming the unlawful assemblies obstructing the enforcement of the court order, citing as authority both Sections 332 and 333.252 President Kennedy followed a similar course of action to confront state resistance to court ordered desegregation in Alabama twice in 1963.253 President Johnson cited the same authority in 1965 to deploy troops, both regular Army and federalized National Guard, to Alabama to protect civil rights marchers as they made their way from Selma, AL, to Montgomery.254

• 246 PAUL SCHEIPS, THE ROLE OF FEDERAL MILITARY FORCES IN DOMESTIC DISORDERS, 1945-1992  (2005), at 40. 

• 247 Exec. Ord. No. 10,730, 22 Fed. Reg. 7628 (Sept. 24, 1957).  

• 248 Proclamation No. 3204, 22 Fed. Reg. 7628 (Sept. 24, 1957).  

• 249 Robert W. Coakley, Federal Use of Militia and the National Guard in Civil Disturbances, in BAYONETS IN THE  STREETS, 17, 30 (Robin Higham, ed. 1989). The governor had ordered the National Guard to enforce segregation by  preventing students from entering any high school that had previously been used exclusively for students of another  race, in defiance of a federal court order. See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 34.  

• 250 See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 86-87.  

• 251 Id. at 87-93; Exec. Ord. No. 11053, 27 Fed. Reg. 9693 (Oct. 2, 1962).  

• 252 Proclamation No. 3497, 27 Fed. Reg. 9681 (Oct. 2, 1962).  

• 253 Proclamation 3542, 28 Fed. Reg. 5705 (June 12, 1963); Exec. Order No. 11,111, 28 Fed. Reg. 5709 (June 12, 1963); Proclamation 3554, 28 Fed. Reg. 9861 (Sept. 11, 1963); Exec. Order 11,118, 28 Fed. Reg. 9863 (Sept. 11, 1963).  

• 254 Proclamation No. 3645, 30 Fed. Reg. 3739 (Mar. 20, 1965); Exec. Ord. No. 11,207, 30 Fed. Reg. 3743. The governor was enjoined by court order from interfering with the march, and he refused to call out the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers on the grounds that he did not want the state to foot the bill. See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 162-63. 

The GOP and the South

At RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende takes on the notion that the GOP gained ground in the South only because of racial appeals that started in the mid-1960s:

In 1956, Eisenhower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the vote in the South, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent. He once again carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53 percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama. This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the administration had opposed the school board.

Nor can we simply write this off to Eisenhower’s celebrity. The GOP was slowly improving its showings at the congressional level as well. It won a special election to a House seat in west Texas in 1950, and began winning urban congressional districts in Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia with regularity beginning in 1952.

Perhaps the biggest piece of evidence that something significant was afoot is Richard Nixon’s showing in 1960. He won 46.1 percent of the vote to John F. Kennedy’s 50.5 percent. One can write this off to JFK’s Catholicism, but writing off three elections in a row becomes problematic, especially given the other developments bubbling up at the local level. It’s even more problematic when you consider that JFK had the nation’s most prominent Southerner on the ticket with him.

But the biggest problem with the thesis comes when you consider what had been going on in the interim: Two civil rights bills pushed by the Eisenhower administration had cleared Congress, and the administration was pushing forward with the Brown decision, most famously by sending the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to assist with the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

It’s impossible to separate race and economics completely anywhere in the country, perhaps least of all in the South. But the inescapable truth is that the GOP was making its greatest gains in the South while it was also pushing a pro-civil rights agenda nationally. What was really driving the GOP at this time was economic development. As Southern cities continued to develop and sprout suburbs, Southern exceptionalism was eroded; Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.

Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK Calls Former Presidents

On October 28, 1962, JFK called former president Hoover, Truman, and Eisenhower about the apparently successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 It is hard to believe, but all three old men would outlive the youthful chief executive.