Are Cheney and Bobby Kennedy relics of another time?

Cheney and Kennedy shaped U.S. politics in starkly different ways. Their legacies reveal how much American power and party identity have changed

Interview requests

Today’s column is prompted by two recent items from the American political scene, neither of which is specifically about Donald Trump.

Former vice-president Dick Cheney died of natural causes on Nov. 3, and Nov. 20 marked the 100th anniversary of the late senator Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy’s birth. While in California campaigning for president in June 1968, Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian immigrant who was angered by Kennedy’s support for Israel.

Both Cheney’s death and Kennedy’s anniversary generated some interesting discussions. Let’s take a look at them.

Cheney

Some of the obituaries characterized Cheney as the most powerful vice-president in American history, ascribing this to two factors. One was his vast prior experience in the minutiae of government, which made him invaluable to the inexperienced George W. Bush. And the other was his complete lack of ambition in terms of aspiring to the top job. To the extent that presidents feel personally threatened by ambitious vice-presidents, Bush had nothing to worry about where Cheney was concerned.

As for the “most powerful” designation, it’s hard to be definitive. But it’s certainly true that many vice-presidents had little or no substantive influence, and were sometimes kept out of the loop on critical matters. Two examples will suffice.

Harry Truman was completely unaware of the atomic bomb’s existence until after he’d been sworn in as president following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. To say that this dropped him in at the deep end is a massive understatement.

And Lyndon Johnson had been a very powerful Senate majority leader before he became John F. Kennedy’s vice-president. But he wasn’t a major player in the administration. Indeed, historian Sheldon Stern believes that Johnson never knew the full details of the compromise that resolved the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Stern puts it this way: “Johnson went to his grave in 1973 believing that his predecessor had threatened the use of U.S. military power to successfully force the Soviet Union to back down.” Whether this misapprehension influenced Johnson’s subsequent Vietnam policy remains a matter of speculation.

Cheney, regardless of whether he was actually the most powerful vice-president, certainly had immense influence, particularly during Bush’s first term. And when he left office in January 2009, some people considered him akin to the devil incarnate. Terms like “war criminal” were used to describe his actions in the wake of 9/11, and it was suggested that he be arrested and shipped to The Hague should he ever venture outside the United States.

To rub salt in the wound, antagonism subsequently emerged from an unexpected source. To a significant chunk of his hitherto loyal Republican base, Cheney became the misbegotten architect of American involvement in fruitless foreign wars, shedding American blood and treasure in pursuit of misdirected and futile nation-building.

Wielding great power in dangerous times can come back and bite you. It certainly did in Cheney’s case.

Kennedy

In a recent extended essay, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Ruy Teixeira floated the idea of Bobby Kennedy as a model for Democrats wanting to reconnect with the working class and win back voters who have deserted them in recent years. The Kennedy they have in mind is the version he presented during his 1968 presidential campaign, and the implicit assumption is that it was genuine rather than purely opportunistic.

Raising the authenticity question isn’t a matter of being overly cynical. Bobby Kennedy was indeed something of a chameleon. In the early 1950s, he’d been a staffer for Red-hunting Joe McCarthy; as the campaign manager for JFK’s 1960 presidential run, he’d been a single-mindedly ruthless operator; as attorney general in the subsequent administration, he’d been his brother’s protective wingman; and after his brother’s assassination, he’d been the ambitious politician with his eye on the presidency.

The 1968 version of Bobby Kennedy was a passionate believer in civil rights and the need for effective anti-poverty action. But he was also an unequivocal, unconditional patriot. Speaking to an audience at the University of Alabama, he had this to say: “All of us, from the wealthiest and most powerful of men to the weakest and hungriest of children, share one precious possession: the name American.” Nowadays, many Democrats would dismiss rhetoric of that sort as naïve cheerleading, or worse.

Along with an opposition to racial preferences of any kind, Kennedy spoke of the inherent dignity of work as opposed to welfare: “Work is a mundane and unglamorous word. Yet it is, in a real sense, the meaning of what the country is all about.”

Summarizing their vision of “shock therapy,” Kahlenberg and Teixeira pull no punches: “Nearly 50 years later, Kennedy’s campaign shows what law-and-order, work over welfare, anti-racial preferences, pro-working class, unabashedly patriotic Democratic politics should look like.”

But could that fly in a party that’s become dominated by culturally radical elements of the professional classes while also being indebted to identity-based interest groups? Whatever its merits, abolishing DEI in favour of colour-blind meritocracy would be a very tough internal sell.

It’s hard to escape a stark bottom line. Cheney and Bobby Kennedy are relics from another time.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.