More ‘Secrets of the White House’

Presidents Harding and Kennedy would seem to have scarcely anything in common but their tenure of office—nine hundred and a thousand days respectively—yet there is one curious and extended parallel between the two men. Both had been for a period overwhelmingly popular, and both had lost a considerable amount of their popularity at the time they died. Harding was elected by the greatest majority given a Presidential candidate in a century. Two years later in the mid-term elections his party lost seventy seats in the House of Representatives. In Harding’s day periodic polls charting a President’s popularity had not come into vogue, but just before Kennedy died his popularity rating had sunk to 55 per cent and seemed on the way to dropping further.

Yet with their deaths came an abrupt shift of feeling. To Americans, lacking the dynastic continuity of a monarchical tradition, the death of a President in office is apparently a great psychic shock to which they react as if they themselves were guilty of bringing it about. First there is atonement, then apotheosis; and that has been true from Lincoln to Kennedy. Cardinal Cushing hypostasized the late President as a man who “lived and died for us.”

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Francis Russell

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Presidents Harding and Kennedy would seem to have scarcely anything in common but their tenure of office—nine hundred and a thousand days respectively—yet there is one curious and extended parallel between the two men. Both had been for a period overwhelmingly popular, and both had lost a considerable amount of their popularity at the time they died. Harding was elected by the greatest majority given a Presidential candidate in a century. Two years later in the mid-term elections his party lost seventy seats in the House of Representatives. In Harding’s day periodic polls charting a President’s popularity had not come into vogue, but just before Kennedy died his popularity rating had sunk to 55 per cent and seemed on the way to dropping further.

Yet with their deaths came an abrupt shift of feeling. To Americans, lacking the dynastic continuity of a monarchical tradition, the death of a President in office is apparently a great psychic shock to which they react as if they themselves were guilty of bringing it about. First there is atonement, then apotheosis; and that has been true from Lincoln to Kennedy. Cardinal Cushing hypostasized the late President as a man who “lived and died for us.”