War stories
Since the earliest days of the republic, presidents have spun heroic tales starring themselves. Does Kerry's version measure up?
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION stayed relentlessly on message all week, and that message was simple: John Kerry fought for his country in the Vietnam War, and he'll fight for it today. Kerry as veteran was the convention's dominant narrative. When he stepped to the lectern Thursday night to start his speech, he announced with a salute, "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty."
Personal stories have long been at the center of American presidential politics, whether conveyed through broadsides and torchlight parades or TV ads and scripted conventions. Campaign biographies have poured off the presses since the early 19th century (Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one for his Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce), and from Nixon's "Checkers" speech in 1952 and Adlai Stevenson's "Man from Libertyville" ads in 1956 to "The Man from Hope" in 1992 and beyond, campaigns have harnessed the powers of television to project their candidates' biographies into America's living rooms. Stories are the way candidates get their messages out. Stories simplify, and they stick in our minds. Stories are what our political system runs on.
Speaker after speaker in Boston drew upon his or her personal story in addressing the convention -- Dick Gephardt recalling his milk-truck-driving father; Teresa Heinz Kerry speaking of her confrontation with apartheid in South Africa; Barack Obama, the overnight success of the gathering, mixing Kenyan heritage and Ivy League polish to bring the crowd to its feet, and composing a new variation on the theme of immigrant families and their American ascent. A generation ago Democratic conventions were riven by credentials fights and platform squabbles. Today divisions are forgotten and the delegates are washed by a warm stream of life stories.
This year, the Democrats have chosen two of the most durable and effective narratives in American politics to sell their ticket -- the war hero story of John Kerry and the self-made man story of John Edwards.
The war hero is the most successful stock character in American politics, the first-born model of the presidency in the person of George Washington, renewed again and again over the decades. Jackson, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy are just some of the most obvious examples, but many others had their military credentials stamped before moving to the White House. For them, as for Kerry, military service was seen as evidence of fitness to be Commander in Chief. Some of them could claim this right by virtue of their having commanded large forces in desperate battle -- as Washington, Grant, and Ike all did. Others could claim a different kind of legitimacy through a record of physical courage, the sort Teddy Roosevelt displayed as he charged up San Juan Hill, or Kennedy and Kerry showed in commanding small vessels in Pacific wars.
A good war story is a valuable asset, but it can also be a treacherous thing. Consider the case of Andrew Jackson. His victory in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 lifted the nation's spirits and its opinion of itself -- Jackson and his frontier soldiers had vanquished an impressive force of British professional soldiers fresh from their victories over Napoleon. (Never mind that the victory came after the peace treaty was signed.) This signal victory became the foundation of Jackson's later career, and carried him to victory in 1828 over the very un-martial John Quincy Adams. Yet war is an ugly business, and Jackson's opponents during that campaign pointed to some of his harsher acts as a general -- summary executions, atrocities against the Indians -- in the "coffin handbill" that set forth these accusations in detail, illustrated with stark images of coffins signifying those who died at Jackson's orders.
Ulysses Grant, too, had to deal with charges that he had held human life cheap, and allegations that he had on occasion been drunk while in command. John Kerry, by drawing so much attention to his own war story, runs the risk of having it sniped at (how bad were those wounds, really?) or simply mocked (as in the jibjab.com music video lampooning both Bush and Kerry, in which those three Purple Hearts become a running gag). Kerry's war story is more complex than most, because he returned from the war to protest against it. But that aspect of his life was given much less weight in the Fleet Center.
Heroism in war may be the most useful personal story to bring to national politics, but the rags-to-riches saga of the self-made man is the most distinctly American tale. John Edwards has told the nation of his humble Carolina roots, of working his way through college and law school and building a successful career as a lawyer who fights for the injured and the voiceless. Kerry said on Thursday night that Edwards's life "is the story of the American dream." The story has power because it tells us something about America that we want very much to believe -- that it really is the land of opportunity. Presidential contenders, even those from privileged backgrounds, have adopted the theme. In the 1840 race, the Whig party portrayed its nominee, William Henry Harrison, as a man of "log cabin" roots and values, in spite of the fact that he had been raised in comfort on the Virginia plantation of his father, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Abe Lincoln's frontier upbringing, the most famous of humble presidential childhood's, was marked by earnest efforts at self-education and a prodigious capacity for manual labor, such as splitting rails for fences (a pursuit that was later lionized by his followers, who would even parade along the street in a zigzag pattern to recall the herringbone pattern formed by the split-rail fences). The Republican New York
Such stories build over time -- Harrison's ersatz log cabin prepared the way for Lincoln's real one, Lincoln's up-by-the-bootstraps path to the practice of law set a precedent echoed by Edwards. Kerry's Vietnam service builds off Kennedy's PT boat and Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill. The present-day story gains power by playing off the reverberations of its predecessors.
Kerry's war service and Edwards's upward mobility are well founded in fact. But whether literally true or heavily embellished, such personal narratives only become truly useful in a race if the candidate can tie his story to the larger set of issues that voters really care about -- war and peace, jobs and the economy. Kerry and Edwards used the convention week to try to build those links -- Kerry tying his past war service to our present foreign conflicts and threats, Edwards tying his own upbringing to the theme of "two Americas," rich and poor. Their success in November will depend upon how persuasively they can develop those story-lines.
But others are going to be spinning stories, and counter-stories, too. The Bush administration, one of the most disciplined press operations ever seen in Washington, showed great gifts early on for controlling the story -- developing their favored narratives, tightly controlling access, punishing leakers and critics with swift retribution (a practice that has now turned into a narrative of its own). Doubtless the Republicans will give much more attention to Kerry the protester, with his claims of American "atrocities" in Vietnam, and try to deflect voters' attention from swift boats to other, less glorious parts of the Kerry story (his mostly undramatic Senate service, his wife's wealth, past moments of political opportunism).
At the Republican convention in New York, Bush will be recasting his own story. Before the White House, the central moment of his life was his renunciation of alcohol at age 40 and the deepening of his religious conviction. In 2000, this narrative both resonated with many voters, in particular committed Christians, and relegated his less impressive earlier years to the bin of irrelevancy. Sept. 11 and its aftermath allowed him to assume a new role in a new story, that of wartime leader, and he has seized the chance.
But with both the logic and the course of the Iraq war under fire, Bush may need to find still another story in which to play the protagonist. It is unfortunate for him that Kerry's service in Vietnam stands in such sharp contrast to Bush's National Guard service, with its odor of privileged escape from combat duty and sketchy accounts of actual duties performed. It only exacerbates the problems that arise from the continuing carnage in Iraq and his "mission accomplished" play-acting.
It may be that in order to win reelection Bush will need to display the kind of narrative flexibility that his campaign has castigated as "flip-flops" in John Kerry. That's just the sort of ironic twist that makes for a satisfying story.
Evan Cornog is associate dean for planning at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and author of "The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush." 