Although late United States president John F. Kennedy is celebrated for grandly noble rhetoric (his inaugural address, his speech near the Berlin wall, and more besides), his most penetrating judgment was a quite pithy remark about political success. That ran to seven words only: "there's no such thing as turn".
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Fortune favours the brave, winner takes all, nice guys finish last – there's no such thing as turn.
What Kennedy meant by that comment is outlined in a remarkable, retrospective insiders' account of his four-year-long presidential election campaign in 1960. That is The Road to Camelot, by Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie. Why Hillary Clinton should have read and heeded Kennedy's advice is set out in the best of many books on her failed, doomed campaign in 2016. That is Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
The first couplet of writers are old, looking back wryly on distinguished careers. The second are young, with everything to play for. The first story chronicles an unlikely, razor-thin win; the other, an equally unlikely, shattering defeat.
Neither book is up to the standard of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's Game Change (about the 2008 election), Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes (1988) or Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President (1968), Both books, though, are full of inside information for political junkies or connoisseurs. Moreover, both offer critical lessons for any students or practitioners of public administration who might seek to mind their leaders.
When I worked in Parliament House, we were persuaded that good ministers picked good staff (folk like us), while bad ministers did not know how to. Kennedy proved the truth of that maxim. His campaign was lean, committed, loyal and highly competent. Only two staff in his headquarters were given titles, one (Pierre Salinger) because the media needed to know where to turn for a story, the other (Robert Kennedy) to remind anyone silly enough to think otherwise that he was the boss. Kennedy's staff were smart and the quality of their intellect was esteemed, with the candidate honest enough to refer to Ted Sorensen as his "intellectual blood bank". They were also famously discreet: not leaking, not gossiping, not big-noting themselves.
A few staff took on specialist roles. When the brains trust around Kennedy criticised him for putting up with a rough-and-tumble, meat-and-potatoes Boston pol, Dave Powers, the president was said to have replied that Powers did more than any intellectual ever could: in taking his boss for a swim to soothe his chronic back pain; in cheering him up with a regular joke; and in obtaining jovial female company. Any latter-day "body man" has a soft job by comparison.
Kennedy's team worked for a candidate who was not only rich, handsome, intelligent, witty and so on. He was also ruthlessly self-critical, able to stand away from his own performances, not one to sugar-coat anything, disinterested in the proper sense of that word. When briefed, Kennedy made a point of focusing on what his staff were leaving out. He managed to be recklessly cavalier about his sexual peccadilloes, while remaining clear-eyed and hard-headed in appraising his own political performances. The Kennedy authors tactfully note "at least three situations that would have been extremely embarrassing and damaging" had they been picked up during Kennedy's campaign.
The enduring lesson for putative minders: find a boss who both earns and shows respect. According to Allen and Parnes, reciprocal respect (or "purpose-driven loyalty", in their phrase) was hard to sustain in Hillary Clinton's campaign. Few staff dared to criticise their candidate, or suggest she was on the wrong course. Clinton thought it was "up to the people she paid to find the right message for her", rather than crafting her own version of America's future. Senior staff fretted about being sacked or "layered over" (a lovely American neologism). The campaign headquarters was divided into silos, speechwriting degenerated into a "bizarre and bazaar-like" farce, and both hoarding information and passive-aggressive infighting were tolerated. "Nobody had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary." Bobby Kennedy, if not John, would have fired incompetent staff like that in a heartbeat.
Kennedy's campaign was not letter-perfect but he had the basic precepts down pat. You had to start early, years before your competitors, not worrying about peaking too soon, running out of steam or becoming too easy a target. You let no public challenge go unanswered. (Clinton's husband Bill applied that lesson with his "war room" in 1992.) You allowed your father to pour money into the campaign. Kennedy once noted his father was too mean to pay for a voter landslide. If you had a thin Senate record, had remained silent about the McCarthy witch hunts, engaged only belatedly with civil rights, found your Catholicism often a drag on the line and lied about your health, then all those problems could be sloughed aside with relentlessly hard work and a dollop of charm. "Superman comes to the supermarket", as Norman Mailer observed.
By contrast, Shattered depicts a candidate concerned about hecklers, "happiest at off-the-record events with small groups", unsure why the mood among the working-class white segment of her electorate was shifting. Both Kennedy and Clinton wanted the job for personal as well as political-cum-policy reasons; both felt entitled. Only one, though, remained in touch with the people. Minders might note the need for their bosses to know, intuitively as well as academically, what – and who – they really stand for. Being someone rather than doing something is not an answer. They might also remind themselves that data-filled rooms deform and distort politics more than smoke-filled rooms used to.
Allen and Parnes complain that Clinton's campaign was "driven so much by the science of analytics and so little by the art of political persuasion". They stigmatise that approach, I think rightly, as the political equivalent of painting by numbers. Graphs, charts and formulae were the currency more than bumper stickers, yard signs, advertising brochures or staff on the
By contrast, Kennedy made more than three dozen stops in one primary state alone (Wisconsin), and spent weeks traipsing up and down West Virginia. His team did combine polling trends to project trends, but also employed more old-fashioned techniques. They kept bundles of cash in a suitcase under a hotel bed (again, in West Virginia) and had mastered all the scruple-free, bare-knuckle tricks of getting out the vote. (Kennedy won Illinois by 8800 out of 4.6 million votes cast.) Kennedy kept and used more than 70,000 index cards, naming and tagging voters in personal contact with his campaign.
The lesson there for the minders is to remind their bosses about the merits in showing up on the ground, everywhere, every day. Pressing the flesh matters; listening counts for more again. Moving from talking about "I" and "you" to "we" is part of that deal. Locking up the party machinery, scaring off other candidates and feeling entitled, as Clinton did, do not suffice. There's no such thing as turn.
Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.
The Road to Camelot, by Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie, is published by Simon & Schuster (May 2017).
Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is published by Crown (April 2017).
