Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00MUSIC
00:15David Cameron at his lovely kitchen.
00:18Tony Blair at his lovely tennis and his children.
00:22Vladimir Putin stripped to the waist with a hunting knife,
00:26scampering with the bears.
00:29Nicholas Sarkozy and his lovely...
00:32Carla Bruni.
00:34When did it start, this business of politicians selling themselves,
00:38not on the basis of their ideas or their policies,
00:42but on what they get up to in their spare time
00:45when they're not being politicians?
00:48Their lifestyles.
00:50Well, look no further.
00:52It started here at Cape Cod,
00:55with Jack and the Kennedys.
00:59This is the story not of the presidency,
01:02not of a mythical king shot down in his prime,
01:05but of how John F Kennedy kicked his way to power
01:09as the little-known senator for Massachusetts.
01:12I believe that the times require imagination
01:16and courage and perseverance.
01:19I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier.
01:25But the 1960 presidential race saw the triumph of style over substance,
01:31the influence of vast sums of money
01:34and the cynical manipulation of voters.
01:37You might say it marked the beginning of modern politics.
01:41Let's not be too snotty about this.
01:45Kennedy, as a Catholic, was an outsider
01:48and felt he had to do anything to kick his way to power.
01:52But what happened in that 1960 campaign
01:55did change democratic politics everywhere,
01:58and not for the better.
02:23I have one.
02:25Hyannis Port is a quiet, relaxed sort of place.
02:30On 8th November 1960, it was boiling with tension.
02:35The eyes of America, the eyes of the world,
02:39were fixed on the group of houses known as the Kennedy Compound,
02:44one of the richest, most powerful, most ambitious families
02:49in American political history,
02:51are huddled together in front of their television screens,
02:55almost visibly shaking with tension,
02:58because the result of the closest presidential election campaign
03:03in American history is still in the balance.
03:09That Kennedy had got this far was down to one thing,
03:13the brilliance of his groundbreaking election campaign.
03:17At the beginning of 1960,
03:19half of America had never even heard of him.
03:21Now, barely ten months later,
03:23he was on the brink of becoming president.
03:43Our story starts here,
03:45in the small, out-of-the-way state of West Virginia.
03:49In April 1960,
03:51this would be the most important place in America for John F Kennedy.
03:57He was attempting to win the Democratic nomination for president.
04:01He'd already shown he could succeed in New England
04:04and amongst fellow Catholics in Wisconsin.
04:07Now he had to travel to America's heartland
04:10to show the sceptical bosses of the Democratic Party
04:13that he could win over the ordinary Joe
04:16and working-class Wilma of mainstream America.
04:23It looked quite a hard sell.
04:25JFK was a wealthy East Coast socialite,
04:2943 years old, blessed and charmed,
04:32groomed by his millionaire father, Joe.
04:38The Kennedys were well-connected New England Catholics
04:41whose links with the Democratic Party went back two generations,
04:45and they had a war chest of millions to spend
04:49on getting Jack to the White House.
04:53The family's brimming confidence reflected that of most of the country.
04:59Well, 1960 is more or less smack in the middle
05:02of what could well be described, I think,
05:05as the most prosperous, self-congratulatory moment
05:08in all of American history.
05:12But not everywhere shared in the prosperity.
05:16Hard, scrabble states,
05:18with economies dominated by farming, coal mines and unions,
05:22were shut out and struggling.
05:25Places like West Virginia.
05:31When the Kennedy bandwagon rolled in here in the spring of 1960,
05:35JFK had his work cut out.
05:41In certain areas, you were running as high as 30% unemployment.
05:48And we were going through a period of time
05:51when mechanisation was taking over in the mines,
05:54and unemployment was part of the price we had to pay.
06:00If a Catholic millionaire could win here,
06:03he could win anywhere. High stakes.
06:07Kennedy had a formidable opponent for the Democratic nomination,
06:10Hubert Horatio Humphrey,
06:13the veteran senator for Minnesota.
06:16He entered the primary contest with a 20-point lead.
06:21More and cheaper power sources,
06:23better school buildings and laboratories,
06:25and greatly expanded land, water, timber conservation practices
06:29in appropriate areas.
06:31These are not expenditures, my friends, these are investments.
06:35They build dividends.
06:38I wonder if a certain Gordon Brown ever read Hubert Humphrey's speeches.
06:45Let us pause and say a few words about Hubert Humphrey.
06:50Poor, brave, visionary and extremely tough.
06:56He'd cleaned up his state and kicked out the crooks
07:00and kicked out the Communists.
07:02He was the first person to raise the subject of civil rights
07:06on the floor of the Democratic National Convention 12 years earlier
07:10against everybody's advice.
07:13He was experienced, radical, an extraordinary, unusual politician
07:19who did not deserve what was about to happen to him.
07:28What was about to happen was the birth of a new kind of politics.
07:34Humphrey's ideas would be drowned out by a rich, glamorous operation
07:39the like of which West Virginia had never seen before.
07:45Humphrey was bumping around the state in an old bus with a broken heater
07:50while his wife Muriel offered the journalists, cold and irritated,
07:55her recipe for beef soup.
07:59Kennedy, meanwhile, was flying overhead,
08:03offering the journalists cold martinis in a private jet bought for him by Daddy.
08:11Humphrey had a truly terrible election slogan,
08:15Over the Hump with Humphrey.
08:18But by now, poor old Humphrey was feeling pretty humpy himself.
08:24Ted Sorensen was Kennedy's speechwriter and one of his closest aides.
08:29He'd prepared the ground in West Virginia.
08:32Nobody campaigns like the Kennedys campaign.
08:36And John F Kennedy went into every hill and hamlet and hollow in West Virginia
08:43and he presented himself to the people there as someone who cared about them.
08:49Well, I was in Raleigh County, Beckley, West Virginia for a week during the primary
08:56and contrary to what I expected, because it looked on paper to be a very strong Humphrey area
09:03with the United Mine Workers, what I found was that much more work was being done on the Kennedy side.
09:10What are your plans as elected president for the situation existing in the coal mines in West Virginia?
09:17Well, I think that, and I've been in the Congress now for 14 years,
09:21and the fact is that in my own state of Massachusetts we've had a similar problem
09:25because we've lost all our textile industry.
09:27I think there are at least four or five things the government can do.
09:30Kennedy had that ability, wherever he went, was to talk to these individuals
09:37and they would tell him the problems they had and he would listen and he made them the promise,
09:43I'll make things better for West Virginia, just work for me, vote for me.
09:50Kennedy's yeezy charm disguised one of the most ruthless tacticians in modern American history.
09:58Like every modern politician, he recognised that elections can be won and lost
10:03through the influence of the press.
10:07That was the first time I was out on a presidential campaign, so it was all new to me.
10:13But Kennedy would almost casually walk up to you after an event somewhere and say,
10:20that was a good lead on your story, and you thought to yourself,
10:24man, the candidate's reading what I'm writing, and it was a form of flattery that went very far.
10:31Kennedy knew exactly how to use journalists to his advantage
10:36because he'd worked as a reporter before going into politics.
10:40He was also splashing out cash to secure local voters with Dash
10:46and no apparent embarrassment at all.
10:49He had a hugely wealthy operation and was, frankly, buying support everywhere he could go.
10:59Humphrey was no angel. In one district, he too tried to buy a little bit of help,
11:05but the shadowy figures he'd offered the money to quickly returned it in a satchel.
11:11The Kennedys had offered a great deal more.
11:14Indeed, Humphrey found all his financial support draining away,
11:19partly because the Kennedys had warned the donors that if they stuck with Humphrey,
11:24it would be regarded as an act of war,
11:27and they would be punished if the Kennedys won the presidency.
11:33Humphrey was being outsmarted and outspent.
11:40Kennedy had a budget of $34,000 just for TV advertising.
11:45Humphrey had nothing like that.
11:48For his last TV ad, he had to raid the $750 stash his wife Muriel had hoarded for their daughter's wedding.
11:58He felt as if he were a mom-and-pop store, as we say, alongside some giant supermarket,
12:04and so he was overwhelmed by the Kennedy money and organisation.
12:10Humphrey or JFK?
12:14Muriel or Jackie?
12:18West Virginia was rapidly falling to the Kennedy glamour and succumbing to the Kennedy machine.
12:26But there was still hope for Humphrey.
12:28Kennedy was Catholic and West Virginia was overwhelmingly Protestant.
12:34America had never had a Catholic president,
12:38and 24% of Americans said they wouldn't consider voting for one.
12:43Kennedy had to convince the people they'd got nothing to fear from a Roman Catholic candidate.
12:49The question is whether I think that if I were elected president,
12:54I would be divided between the two.
12:57The question is whether I think that if I were elected president,
13:02I would be divided between two loyalties, my church and my state.
13:06Let me just say that I would not.
13:08I have sworn to uphold the Constitution in the 14 years I've been in Congress,
13:13in the years I was in the service.
13:15The Constitution provides in the First Amendment that Congress shall make no laws
13:19abridging the freedom of religion.
13:22It was a question that wasn't going to go away easily.
13:27But West Virginia was a carefully chosen battleground.
13:32Here, Kennedy knew that concerns about his religion would be offset by something else.
13:39His record as a World War II hero.
13:43In August 1944, John Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal
13:48for courage, endurance and leadership.
13:52As a young naval officer, John Kennedy had rescued his men
13:56after their boat, the PT-109, had been cut down in the South Pacific.
14:03Exploiting this story was the key that unlocked West Virginia,
14:07a state that continues to provide one of the highest proportions of volunteers
14:12for the US military.
14:22In 1960, a third of the male voters in West Virginia were war veterans.
14:28There were more drop-in centres for veterans than there were high schools,
14:33so the Kennedy campaign bombarded it with newspaper and broadcast messages
14:38about Kennedy's wartime heroism.
14:41And it worked.
14:43Kennedy the Catholic became Kennedy the decorated warrior.
14:48But it wasn't enough just to be a war hero.
14:52The other man had to be seen to be a coward.
14:56That's why Franklin Roosevelt Jr, a Kennedy supporter and son of the legendary FDR,
15:02was pressurised by the Kennedys into publicly suggesting
15:06that Hubert Humphrey was a draft dodger in World War II.
15:11It wasn't true. It was a cruel and vicious lie.
15:15Humphrey hadn't served in the Second World War
15:18because he had a double hernia and couldn't.
15:21But as soon as the smear of cowardice was well-lodged in the voters' mind,
15:28Kennedy denied any involvement, washed his hands,
15:34and sailed on.
15:36Well, it was a dirty trick, but as FDR said, well, look at the record.
15:40He was a hero in World War II.
15:42His brother had died in that gallant flight over the English Channel.
15:46And Humphrey had not served.
15:48As folks said, Humphrey had spent the war defending a pharmacy in South Dakota.
15:55Kennedy won easily in West Virginia.
15:59Money, glitz, organisation, dirty tricks, media manipulation.
16:07Well, you may say, so what?
16:10Can we expect anything else from politicians?
16:13One, two, three, four.
16:17Humphrey's thoughts about the Kennedy style
16:20should give us all pause for thought.
16:26To elect a president,
16:28it's more important that he be good of heart,
16:33good of spirit, than that he be sly.
16:38He should be a man of his word.
16:42He should be good of heart, good of spirit,
16:46than that he be slick or clever or statesmanlike looking.
16:52Has the leader given you something directly from his heart?
16:59Or has it all been planned in advance, all been scheduled?
17:04Is it efficient?
17:07I read in the paper that the Hubert Humphrey campaign is disorganised.
17:14And I think, thank God!
17:18MUSIC
17:36After the primaries, the scene shifts to Los Angeles
17:40for the 1960 Democratic Convention,
17:43the most expensive such gathering there had ever been.
17:48In hotel suites and smoke-filled rooms,
17:51the same ruthless cutting edge was shown by Kennedy
17:54as in the small-town main streets and far-off smoky valleys.
17:58His way of campaigning had won him every primary he'd entered,
18:02and he had the support of delegates from all over the country.
18:06Even now, other candidates, senior, nationally known politicians,
18:11barely grasped how he'd upended their old rules.
18:16Most delegations aren't run by United States senators in Washington.
18:21Those delegations consist of local mayors and legislators
18:26and county chairmen and party leaders.
18:30That's where Kennedy had been at the grassroots level.
18:34And by the time he had a big lead in the number of delegates,
18:42it was too late for the others to catch up to him.
18:45That's exactly how Obama beat Mrs Clinton.
18:48On Tuesday, Senator Kennedy met...
18:50Of all his enemies in LA in 1960,
18:53none was tougher, rougher or more dangerous than the Texan senator,
18:57Lyndon Baines Johnson,
18:59who thought he'd swat the upstart New England posh boy like a horsefly.
19:04Senator Johnson, running behind, took the initiative
19:07and challenged Kennedy to a debate
19:09before the combined Texas and Massachusetts delegations.
19:12After first hesitating, Kennedy accepted
19:15and he appeared before the heavily pro-Johnson crowd.
19:18He listened to one of the most blistering attacks made against him
19:21during the entire campaign.
19:23Johnson was the Senate majority leader,
19:25but he hadn't fought any primaries,
19:28and somehow the upstart didn't seem to notice
19:31the verbal thrashing LBJ thought he'd just administered.
19:36He replied confidently.
19:39...full of affection for him,
19:41strongly in support of him for majority leader,
19:43and I'm confident that in that position
19:45we're all going to be able to work together. Thank you.
19:52I remember the roll call vote listening to it on the radio in 1960,
19:56and it wasn't decided that Kennedy was going to be the nominee
19:59until the very last state in alphabetical order
20:02was polled on the floor.
20:04It was the state of Wyoming, which in any alphabetical list,
20:07the United States is the last one, and it cast its vote for Kennedy
20:10and that was it, put him over the top.
20:20It was a new dawn, was it not?
20:23After 1960, getting selected to run for president
20:27meant that primaries, not connections, mattered most.
20:31A good thing, surely.
20:34Except that it put the top job beyond the reach
20:38of those who didn't have the vast sums of money
20:41required for the professional organisation,
20:43the jet travel and months of campaigning.
20:47Great candidates would be shut out,
20:49left staring helplessly upwards from the dusty tarmac.
20:54All Kennedy's work paid off
20:56and he became the Democrats' candidate for the presidency.
21:01But immediately he had to take one very difficult decision.
21:04Who was going to be his running mate?
21:07All the rival candidates were possibilities,
21:10but Kennedy chose the man most useful to him,
21:13the man who happened to be his most outspoken critic.
21:18That was a dangerous thing to do.
21:21Johnson would bring Kennedy lots of parts of the United States
21:24he couldn't reach by himself,
21:27but Kennedy was putting his old rival very close to the presidency.
21:32Doesn't matter, said Kennedy to his friends.
21:36I'm 43. I'm not going to die in office.
21:42Hug your enemies.
21:44Choosing LBJ was a smart move.
21:47He made JFK more appealing to the South.
21:50And, as we'll see, the Southern Democrats were the most likely
21:53to cause trouble when it came to civil rights.
21:56The great domestic test lying ahead for Kennedy's America.
22:01And so to the final round.
22:05Richard M Nixon was the choice of the Republican Party.
22:08He had served as Vice President of the United States since 1953.
22:12Now he was a candidate for the presidency.
22:15Understudied to the hugely popular Eisenhower for eight years,
22:19Richard Milhouse Nixon was tough, experienced and the favourite to win.
22:26One of the big beasts of the Republican Party,
22:29he'd been observing the rise of the senator from Massachusetts with interest.
22:37In the draft of his speech accepting the nomination, Nixon wrote,
22:41This election must not be decided on the basis of money,
22:44who has the most glamour, who has the slickest organisation,
22:47who has the best PR experts.
22:49It must be decided by the facts.
22:57Nixon still had good reason to be confident that he, not Kennedy,
23:02would be the next President of the United States.
23:07Nixon was the favourite.
23:09A poll was taken which showed that most people thought Nixon would beat Kennedy.
23:14Another poll showed that most members of the Democratic National Committee
23:19thought Nixon would beat Kennedy.
23:21Nixon and Kennedy had been elected to Congress in the 17th century.
23:25They had offices across the hall from each other.
23:28Nixon was only four years older than his rival.
23:33And in 1960, Nixon wasn't regarded as particularly right-wing.
23:38His policies were moderate.
23:42So did Kennedy take on Nixon with different ideas,
23:46as his defeated Democratic rivals might have done?
23:49No.
23:51Kennedy's proposals were almost a mirror image of Nixon's tax cuts
23:56and minor reforms to social welfare and education.
23:59This shouldn't be a surprise.
24:02After all, Kennedy had admitted that he was a realist, not a liberal.
24:06The atmosphere he set during this campaign would matter more than his party's platform.
24:12A lesson for all modern politicians everywhere.
24:16If at all possible, avoid talking about details.
24:21Ideology. Forget it.
24:24Your political philosophy may inspire one voter
24:29but frighten another or two more.
24:33So don't write a programme.
24:36Paint a mood.
24:38Nixon emphasised his experience
24:41and, securing Eisenhower's friendly legacy,
24:45he offered reassurance and stability.
24:48All he had to do was not rock the boat.
24:53Kennedy's slogan seemed empty.
24:55Getting the country moving again.
24:57What it meant was youth and energy
25:00and what that meant was me.
25:03Just me.
25:06New America, new Democrats.
25:09Plenty would learn that game in the years to come.
25:13Kennedy understood that he was a personality
25:17and that what people were interested in
25:20was not simply the policy statements
25:23but the man and the whole package he came in.
25:35Pleasure to have you here.
25:36I want you to meet my daughter Caroline
25:39and my wife Jackie.
25:42How do you do?
25:43I'm glad you had a chance to see something of the Senate
25:46and now to see our house where we've lived a year
25:49and since Caroline was born.
25:53I think it was inevitable for politics.
25:55The television age had brought to politics
26:00much more of a focus on the person and the personality
26:03and it's not a question of whether it was good or bad
26:06because it happened.
26:07Sel Jack.
26:09He's handsome, young, vibrant,
26:12photogenic, witty, charming, and it worked.
26:17The selling of Jack had been orchestrated all along
26:21by his father, Joe,
26:22who'd learned while making millions of dollars in business
26:25that if you don't market a product properly, it won't sell.
26:29It was an example every politician followed after 1960.
26:35Joe Kennedy, Jack Kennedy's father,
26:37famously said he was going to sell Jack like soap flakes
26:41Do you think that something bad happened in politics
26:45during that 1960 campaign as a result?
26:48You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
26:51These are things you just have to deal with
26:53because you can't turn back the clock,
26:55you can't pretend these things never got invented.
26:57In America, it has become increasingly important
27:00to have this kind of high visibility.
27:03So many of the people who command political attention nowadays
27:09come out of some other venue, out of Hollywood
27:12or out of the sports world or out of the business world
27:15because they have made tons of money.
27:18And so Joe Kennedy understood the importance of public relations
27:24and he said at one point,
27:25you put Jack on the cover of a magazine
27:28and it'll sell out overnight.
27:39My, my, my, can anybody fly this plane home?
27:45And get down, hurry down, there's people waiting for you
27:52Yeah, why, why, why won't anybody fly this plane home?
28:10Of course, politicians have always sold themselves
28:13on the basis of image, grand houses or log cabins or wood chopping.
28:19What was different about Kennedy
28:21was that he wasn't simply selling himself as a brave man, though he was,
28:27or as a clever man, though he was,
28:29or as somebody with particularly interesting ideas.
28:33He was selling a lifestyle.
28:37And that's very different.
28:42It was said of the Kennedys that they created illusions
28:46and called them facts.
28:48But sometimes the facts were simply false.
28:51As Election Day grew nearer,
28:53nothing that damaged JFK's radiant image was allowed.
28:59John Kennedy's health was central to the way that he sold himself.
29:03He was the sun-kissed, super-fit, active, young New England boy.
29:08The trouble was, this was not true.
29:11Not only did he have agonising back problems,
29:14more importantly, he had a form of Addison's disease,
29:18which is an adrenal disease which in those days was often fatal.
29:22And he was dealing with it by carrying everywhere with him
29:26a little bag of hypodermic syringes and pills.
29:30When he was challenged about Addison's disease,
29:33he flatly denied that he had it or ever had had,
29:36and his doctor, Janet Travel, backed him up.
29:39As his medical records, released here at the John Kennedy Library
29:4440 years after his death, make absolutely clear,
29:48he and she were lying.
29:51There was a cover-up.
29:53There are all these pictures of him, you know, touch football,
29:57and on the sea, on the ocean, yachting,
30:01and vigorous, the word vigour,
30:04in the Massachusetts dialect, as they used it.
30:08He was the embodiment of vigorous youth.
30:11But in fact, he was someone with lots of medical problems.
30:16So it's so interesting as to how the image and the reality,
30:20there was a serious gap there,
30:22but they managed to carry that off brilliantly.
30:27MUSIC PLAYS
30:45They could carry it off by tapping into America's latest boom industry.
30:50This was the era of Madison Avenue,
30:54and commercials on billboards, radio and TV.
30:59Kennedy's advertising agency was Guild, Bascom and Bonfigli.
31:03They merged with the company that later became Saatchi & Saatchi,
31:07creators of some of the most famous political advertising of all time.
31:13Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
31:17Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
31:21Do you want a man for president Who's seasoned through and through
31:26But that's a doggone season That he won't try something new
31:30A man who's old enough to know And young enough to do
31:34Well, it's up to you, it's up to you It's strictly up to you
31:38What they lacked in sophistication,
31:40the early JFK commercials made up for in hummability.
31:44Within days, it seemed the entire country was singing along to the Kennedy theme tune.
31:49It's strictly up to you It's Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
31:53Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
31:56Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
32:02Kennedy!
32:05It does seem to me, and this is not an original observation with me,
32:08that there has been a certain degradation of the level of political seriousness in political campaigns
32:15as major complicated issues get reduced to 15-second or 30-second television advertisements
32:22or now internet advertisements.
32:25That kind of thing can't enhance the complicated process of political decision-making.
32:34Nixon would have agreed. He refused to be sold like a commodity.
32:39He said, I am and I'm going to be Nixon.
32:43I will not change to please TV or Madison Avenue.
32:47I am going to be what I am, for good or bad.
32:55But no campaign can entirely ignore the big issues.
33:01In July 1960, polls concluded that across America,
33:04an overwhelming majority regarded relations with Russia as being the primary problem facing the nation.
33:12There's all this anxiety about a potential nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
33:17Three years earlier, the Soviets had launched their space satellite, Sputnik.
33:21Ever since, America feared that if the Soviets were ahead on rocket technology,
33:25they must be ahead on nuclear missiles as well.
33:30The fact that the country was in a dispirited mood over the fact that the Soviets had eclipsed us with this Sputnik
33:38and there was a lot of anxiety that there was going to be a missile gap,
33:42the United States was going to be behind the Soviet Union in technology of this kind.
33:48Both Nixon and Kennedy knew this wasn't true.
33:52Secret intelligence reports showed the US was well ahead.
33:56As Vice President, Nixon couldn't reveal the truth for fear of compromising government security.
34:04But Kennedy was always looking for political advantage.
34:08He made many speeches demanding more missiles, even though he knew they weren't necessary.
34:15This administration failed to recognize the changing nature of our times,
34:20and we now see the Soviet pennant on the moon.
34:23And what is true of outer space is true in every area of national security.