Victor Davis Hanson: Kennedy Treated LBJ Worse Than Biden Treated Harris

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Well, Victor, I was thinking about Zachary Taylor, and then off the top of my head I was going, I know the name for some reason, and I did have to look him up. It was the campaign down into Mexico. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, he was brilliant. Brilliant.  

Winfield Scott was a brilliant strategist, but the best tactician on the battlefield was Zachary Taylor. He won an incredible battle at Monterrey and Palo Alto in Mexico. He was from a Virginia planter family that moved to Kentucky, I think.  

He was only president for 16 months, from 1849 to 1850. It was a very tumultuous time that he came in. There was a gold rush in California that all of a sudden made this obscure place have more capital than most states because of the amount of gold and silver they were mining.  

In addition to that, there was the height of the Mormon uprising, or so-called Mormon tensions, in 1850.  

In addition to that, there were the vestigial remnants of the Missouri Compromise and the question of how you bring states into the Union. He was a Southerner who owned slaves and was originally from Virginia. 

His 16 months were characterized by unity. I don’t know how he was nominated because he was up against Henry Clay in the Whig Party and Winfield Scott, his superior in the Mexican War, but he was very popular. He was known for humane conduct. He treated Mexican prisoners very well. That was all in the headlines.  

He was 65 years old. He had problems with his stomach his whole life, and he died. 

This was a period, if you look at it, Martin Van Buren, [James] Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan. These five or six presidents were considered, with the exception of Polk, who was only there for one term, mediocre or a low point. People argue over who was the worst president in United States history, Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan. 

But of those people, he was the most famous because he had single-handedly outfought the Mexicans and had won that war, and he was on everybody’s list of famous people. He was kind of just a caretaker.  

Nobody knows much about him because he was there for, I think, the third-shortest presidency up to that time, and he died.  

So you can’t think of anything he did other than try to calm tempers down about the admission of states. As a Southerner, the North supported him because he did not demand that for every California or New Mexico admitted, there be a similar slave state. He kind of squashed the idea that they were going to let in Cuba. They wanted to let in Cuba as a slave state. 

John F. Kennedy, who was president from 1961 to Nov. 22, 1963, the thousand days that the Left called Camelot, had three cycles of public attitudes toward him.  

He was a senator for one term from Massachusetts. Joe Kennedy basically bought it all and put money into the campaign. Joe Kennedy Jr. was considered the brilliant one. He was killed in World War II on a weird experimental bombing mission involving a radio-transmitted bomber. He was supposed to pilot it, jump out, turn on a radio navigator, and it would be like a big cruise missile, but it blew him up. 

Then JFK was almost killed in World War II on PT-109. He broke his back, swam to an island, and then he was rescued. So he was a war hero. He was up against, basically, Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Adlai Stevenson had lost twice to Eisenhower, so he was still running around, you know. 

But Kennedy, people were suspicious of him in the Democratic Party because, remember, the Democratic Party was anchored by 11 segregationist states of the old Confederacy. So you had people like Strom Thurmond, [Herman] Talmadge, and all of those Southerners, and they didn’t trust a New Englander. So he appointed Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, and they just humiliated him. The Kennedys hated him. 

Camelot meant that you were getting the brain trust from Harvard, so Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers, etc., and they were going to use science and technology.  

Basically, he had one great achievement, and that was he stared down the Russians, who tried to place nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles in Cuba. He put up a blockade, and we came almost to a nuclear war, but they backed off. 

What we didn’t know at the time was that they backed off not just because Kennedy stood up to them, but because he also said we’ll take all of our Atlas liquid-fueled rockets with nuclear tips out of the Turkish border. So it was not quite what everybody thought. 

Then he tried to advance civil rights, but he got very irritated with Martin Luther King because he was running in 1963. In November, he was less than a year away from re-election, and it wasn’t clear he was going to be re-elected. He didn’t know what to do. So he was always telling Martin Luther King, Slow down. I have all these Southerners. I need those 11 states. 

Then he was killed. 

So he was kind of an ineffective president, very charismatic, good-looking, Jackie, and all of that. That first stage of people being suspicious of a Catholic or the Kennedy family when he was running… He had one of the narrowest races, and there were always accusations that Joe Kennedy had called up Mayor [Richard] Daley in Chicago and gotten an extra 100,000 votes that won Illinois for Kennedy.  

They did the same thing in Texas and made Texas go for him, and he won in the Electoral College. He only won by about 100,000 votes. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. So do you think that was true about Mayor Daley? 

I don’t know. Wow.  

Victor Davis Hanson: I think it was more likely in Illinois than Texas, but I’m not sure. It’s part of American mythology that Joe Kennedy helped buy the election. 

[Richard] Nixon was very magnanimous. He said it won’t work if you question the results. So he bowed out and gave a concession speech immediately. 

But other than the idea that he stood down communism and didn’t get us into Vietnam, he had about 20,000 advisors there. We don’t know whether he would’ve gotten us in or not. He was also big on space exploration. Those were his three things. 

He was a different type of Democrat. He believed in capital gains tax and income tax reductions, so the economy wasn’t too bad. Then he got killed, and LBJ could get civil rights through because he went to all those buddies of his in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and elsewhere and said, “You’re going to vote for civil rights, or you’re not going to filibuster if we have the votes.” That’s how it got passed, through Johnson. 

But Johnson had been kind of a shady character. We’ll talk about him next time. None of the Kennedys in their right mind thought that when they put Johnson in there, he’d ever be president. He would never have been president after Kennedy’s second term. They wouldn’t have allowed that. He really was embittered. 

There was a guy named Vaugh Meader who imitated Kennedy. You can’t have missiles in Cuba. No missiles in Cuba. 

One of the jokes was, “Has anybody seen Lyndon around? Is Lyndon doing anything?” Ha ha ha. 

They made fun of him. He was very bitter about that. But the Left came to like him because he got through all of the affirmative action and related programs from 1965 to 1967. 

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: That was the beginning of the whole Great Society liberal twenty-two trillion-dollar redistributive program. 

Sami Winc: Yeah, it sounds like the Kennedys treated Lyndon Johnson kind of like the Bidens treated Kamala Harris, handing off impossible things. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Worse. 

Sami Winc: Worse? You think it was worse? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. 

I mean, you mean making her Space Czar and Border Czar? 

Sami Winc: Border Czar when the Left has no border policy whatsoever. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, when there’s no border, they make her Border Czar, and then when they neuter the space program, they couldn’t even get a… They abandoned those guys up in space. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Then you make her Space Czar, and she hires actors, little boy actors, to impress herself. 

I don’t know how we… We’re very lucky. [Otto von] Bismarck said that only fools and drunks … He had a quote to the effect that he doesn’t understand how America gets out of its predicaments. Only fools and drunks could do that. And we always get into a crisis like Kamala Harris, and then we get out of it. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. The last thing, though. Kennedy’s campaign was famous for the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Did you watch those debates? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. 

And the thing about them, there’s a theory, or it’s not really a theory because they took polls. The people who heard the debate on radio thought Nixon won. But Nixon had what they called a five o’clock shadow. He had black hair and white skin, and he had to shave three times a day. He was kind of a hunched-over guy. He looked like this, you know. Didn’t have much of a neck. 

Kennedy actually looked kind of sickly, but he was not in great health. Kennedy had Addison’s disease, and he was yellow. He had a broken back and was very ill. He had suffered some venereal diseases. He was completely indiscreet. We know that he was having sexual relations with interns while he was president in the presidential bed. One staffer wrote about it. 

He would’ve made Bill Clinton look like a rookie in terms of illicit sexual behavior. 

But anyway, before the debate, he got his cortisone shot and his tan, and he looked great. Nixon looked like he had a five o’clock shadow and was hunched over. 

If you listened on the radio, it was like, Formosa is a very complex question about the two islands, and we have a plan. 

And then Kennedy would go… 

But if you watched it on TV, Kennedy looked robust, even though he didn’t say much. 

So now he’s in a period where people look back at it, especially on the Left during Me Too, and ask, “Who was the most promiscuous, callous cad who was ever in the White House?” Probably one of the Kennedys, JFK. 

Then you look at Teddy. Teddy didn’t do that legacy any good. He was a near alcoholic and a promiscuous cad himself. 

So I don’t know. 

But I give Kennedy credit that [Harry] Truman and Kennedy, before Johnson, were more Cold War fighters. There was Adlai Stevenson, who was a radical leftist, but when you look at Kennedy and Truman, they hadn’t gone crazy yet. 

Sami Winc: He was the better man to have in that case? Is that what you’re saying? 

If you had to have a Democrat… 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. Nixon. 

Sami Winc:No, if you had to have a Democrat… 

Victor Davis Hanson: Oh, I would’ve voted for Nixon. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: My grandfather was Swedish, my mother was a Democrat, and my father… I was like seven years old, and my maternal grandfather liked Nixon because he said he was a great poker player. He was forced to vote for Kennedy by my parents, I think, because they were Democrats. 

I was about six or seven years old on my grandfather Frank’s birthday, and I said, “Hey, Grandpa Frank, who are you going to vote for, Nixon or Kennedy?” 

My mom said, “Don’t ask him that. That’s rude.” 

“Well, you know, I have something to say. I’m voting for Nixon. I’m a little worried that he’s not conservative enough, Victor. But he’s a very good poker player. He can play poker and cards, and he knows about the world. He’s not flashy. That’s my kind of guy.” 

And my mom said, “Oh my God. Why’d you say that, Victor?” 

“No. We were getting along fine.”

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Then my mom said, “Frank, you’re going to vote for a Republican like Nixon? Tricky Dick?” 

“Well, if he’s tricky, he knew things.” 

I loved my grandfather. He was a great man. 

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