Robert Kennedy

It was a popular Washington sport: find the past president who best explained Donald Trump. There was a touch of Andrew Jackson’s populism, a dash of Richard Nixon’s skulduggery, a sprinkling of Ronald Reagan’s myth-making. But now all that is over, who are the closest matches to Joe Biden?

A huge portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging in the Oval Office makes the obvious connection between two men who inherited epochal crises and prescribed epochal remedies. But the room’s other contents suggest an affinity between the oldest man ever elected president and the youngest: John F Kennedy.
Biden keeps a photo of himself meeting Pope Francis behind his desk, leaving no one in any doubt he is the second Catholic president. Kennedy was the first. Biden displays a bust of Robert F Kennedy, the 35th president’s brother and attorney general, beside the fireplace. The Oval Office also contains a 332g moon rock brought back by the Apollo missions, the posthumous realisation of Kennedy’s dream.
So it was that in his first prime time TV address, last week, Biden pivoted from the coronavirus pandemic to exult in America landing a rover on Mars. He did not add that China, which last month put a spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, intends to put a rover on the surface too. A space race is under way between two global superpowers. Sound familiar?
“It is very hard to exaggerate how much all of JFK’s beliefs and policies were shaped by the cold war,” argues Lawrence Haas, author of a new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire. “In the case of space, he was far less interested in the magic of space than he was in losing the space race to the Soviets.

“He greatly feared the impact of Soviet advances on America’s competition with the Soviets for influence throughout the developing world. This was a time when countries and peoples across several continents were choosing sides: whether to be loyal to freedom and democracy and through that to the United States or communism and through that to the Soviet Union.
“JFK obsessed over America’s image in the world. He took office when the United States was behind the Soviets in space and he agonised over it, certainly through 1961 and didn’t begin to relax about it until at least 1962 and then into 1963 when we were really making advances in the aftermath of his announcing the goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely to earth by the end of the decade.”
In a 1962 memo to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who chaired the National Space Council, Kennedy asked if America had a chance of beating the Soviets. Haas adds: “Whether it was space or civil rights or a whole variety of other domestic issues, JFK crafted them through the prism of foreign policy in general and the cold war in particular.”
‘An alternative model of governance’
Kennedy, a former senator, became president aged 43 at an inauguration featuring Robert Frost. Sixty years later to the day, Biden, a former senator, became president aged 78 at an inauguration featuring Amanda Gorman. Both poets sought to project optimism about the future but inherited a sense of American hegemony under existential threat. More