A Marvel of Mid-20th-Century American Political Culture

 

"Americans celebrated New Year's Eve [December 31, 1959] at home, private parties, restaurants, and bars. In Chicago, the city's best establishments charged between $20 and $50 per couple for an evening of entertainment. In Kansas City, the Hotel Muehlebach charged a $7.00 minimum - dinner and drinks were extra. At the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, each guest paid a minimum of $12.50."

Rising Star, Setting Sun: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and the Presidential Transition That Changed America (Pegasus, 2018), by journalist John T. Shaw is a serious study of a major moment in 20th-century American politics. It also offers, as in the anecdote quoted above, a partial snapshot into an almost forgotten era, an opportunity for a kind of cultural nostalgia to accompany the political nostalgia his topic so easily invokes.

Prior to 2020-2021 (still in the future when Shaw wrote this book), American presidential transitions between leaders of rival political parties were widely hailed as both symbolic rituals and real expressions of American democratic constitutional governance.  Even so, from the very first such experience in 1801, through such traumatic times as 1961 and 1933, the actual experience had ben fraught with interpersonal unpleasantness and major political challenges. The previous experience in 1953, in which Eisenhower had participated as president-elect, had been noted for its coldness, and Shaw may not be wrong in seeing in outgoing President Eisenhower's gracious approach in 1960-1961 a conscious effort to avoid any such recurrence.

Rising Star, Setting Sun is both a comprehensive treatment of the specific challenges of our uniquely American way of transitioning from one party's governance to another's, it also offers detailed insights into the lives, careers, and characters of the President-elect (the Rising Star), John F. Kennedy, at that time the youngest man ever elected to the White House, and the outgoing (Setting Sun) President Eisenhower, at that time the oldest man ever to leave the White House. I remember the 1960 election, the transition, and the 1961 Inauguration well, and the generational dimension of the transition was indeed always very much in mind during that period.

Shaw paints an appealing picture of mid-20th-century America, in which - despite the personal dislikes and philosophical differences between the outgoing and incoming administrations, the deep-seated social and political consensus that characterized that era both facilitated and celebrated a transition that was efficient, orderly, peaceful, and, indeed, friendly. He also rightly highlights the two great political speeches the transition produced - Eisenhower's Farewell Address, with its prescient warning about the "military-industrial complex," and Kennedy's rhetorically inspiring and bellicose Inaugural Address.

While echoing the contemporary canticles of praise for the behavior of thr two principals and for the process they set in motion, Shaw also notes how it "revealed flaws in a system that was informal and ad hoc." Since then, of course, the process has been significantly institutionalized. As has everything else about the presidency, the transition process has grown overwhelmingly into a complex and costly bureaucratic endeavor of its own.

Yet, as we now increasingly understand, our much celebrated tradition of efficient, orderly, peaceful, and (at least in front of the cameras) friendly presidential transition remains somewhat ad hoc - or, better, ad personam. So much of what we have taken for granted in terms of the efficient, orderly, peaceful, constitutional, and democratic governmental operation ultimately depends ont he character and personalities of the political actors involved. Like the rest of our governmental life, presidential transitions really reflect and depend for their success or failure on the political actors leaving and entering the stage.

Shaw wrote before the 2020-2021 debacle. So he was not overtly creating a contrast. His was a straightforward study of how well a very consequential presidential transition was effected by those involved. Perhaps inadvertently, he has offered us a nostalgic account - not just of a mid-20th-century simpler way of life and lower prices - but of a more morally serious society and the kind of leadership it was then capable of producing.