Seriously, Now, a Jock for President?

Jack Kennedy understood that the most important, probably the only dynamic culture in America, the only culture to enlist the imagination and change the character of Americans, was the one we had been given by the movies. Therefore a void existed at the center of American life. No movie star had the mind, courage or force to be national leader, and no national leader had the epic adventurous resonance of a movie star. So the President nominated himself. He would fill the void. He would be the movie star come to life as President. That took genius.

--Norman Mailer

February 1985. A former movie star stands before a joint session of Congress to deliver his fourth State of the Union address. He is the most successful President since John Kennedy, whose time was cut short by a bullet. Not successful in the way that historians judge these matters--we won't know about that for years, perhaps decades--but successful, certainly, in the terms that journalists and critics use: on top of the job, enjoying himself, staying out in front and communicating the way a President should. Some professionals in the business of watching Presidents are saying that he is good at this job because he once made his living as an actor. What was once thought a liability is, perhaps, his greatest asset. He can stay with a script, and he can deliver every line with conviction. Without the actor's discipline, he would never have become the Great Communicator, which is what some pundits like to call him. The morning after his State of the Union address, the Today show invites two potential Presidents into its studios to discuss the speech. One of them is a former professional football player and the other is a former professional basketball player. They are asked to comment on the President's proposals for simplifying the tax structure.

Now, wait a minute, you think. Ordinarily, you can accept just about anything morning television throws at you. The rules of logic are suspended before breakfast. But something of unusual significance seems to be going on here--something that could carry large consequences. There is a former movie star in the White House, and here are two rising young political stars, widely talked about as possible Presidential candidates in 1988--running, perhaps, against each other--and they are former jocks. There isn't a lawyer or a general or an up-from-the-ranks political pro in sight.

Bill Bradley, the Democratic Senator from New Jersey, and Jack Kemp, a Republican Congressman from Upstate New York, agree that the President is on the right track with his tax-simplification plans. Bradley, of Princeton and the New York Knicks, was a perfectionist as a shooter, passer and player of defense--cool and methodical, a team player and a star at the same time. Kemp was the tough and resourceful quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, in the days before the A.F.L. and the N.F.L. merged. His team won back-to-back title games, and in the second, Kemp was voted the Most Valuable Player. He was the kind of quarterback more highly-regarded by other ballplayers than by the press or the fans. Not smooth and flashy, like Namath or Marino; all he did, the other players say, was beat you.

Today, Jack Kemp is the darling--and the early Presidential choice--of his party's right wing. He is widely associated with a range of economic positions that can be categorized as "supply side." The tax cut of 1981 was first proposed as the Kemp-Roth Bill, and when Ronald Reagan compromised enough to make the cut 25 rather than 30 percent, Kemp went to the White House and gave him hell for it.

He flies around the country, giving speeches in support of his vision of a bright new economic day: incentives, production, lower taxes, a rising tide that lifts all boats. He speaks with absolute conviction and no prepared text. His pitch can be compressed into a few lines that he uses over and over: "Generally speaking, when you subsidize something, you get more of it. In this country, we subsidize unemployment and we tax work." He is a very effective speaker, and many former liberals who are looking for a way to reformulate their creed find something to study in Kemp's simple message of optimism, hope and hard, rewarding work.

His full head of hair is turning gray and his face is fleshier than it was when he was calling plays, but it still shows more chin than jowl. The eyes are a level, penetrating blue-gray, the kind of eyes that always seem to be looking down-field for the open man--or the main chance.

Ask Kemp if he is running for President and he will say, "Ask me again in '86." His supporters desperately want him to run. They see only one formidable opponent in his way, the Vice-President. Kemp's people believe that in a charisma showdown with George Bush, their man would blow him away.

"I think he's running," one political consultant in Washington says. "You can see it when it happens, and it's happening to him."

Bradley may not be running--yet--but it seems almost a matter of fate that someday he will. When he was 21 years old, he was the subject of a long and admiring John McPhee profile in The New Yorker. In that article, Bradley's former high school principal said of him, "With the help of his friends, Bill could very well be President of the United States. And without the help of his friends, he might make it anyway."

If Kemp is the most visible and glamorous of the neoconservatives in today's somewhat murky political alignment, then Bradley is one of a handful of conspicuous neoliberals. He shares most of their assumptions, which come down to a belief in Government as a referee and a protector in the last resort but not as the supplier of everything. Bradley is for the same kind of high-tech solutions to the problems of economic growth that Gary Hart favored. Like Kemp, he is sponsoring his own tax-simplification plan, which is called Bradley-Gephardt. He got there, actually, before Kemp.

Going by looks, Bradley is farther than Kemp from the days of playing a boy's game for money. His face is soft and he has a slight set of wattles that sag over the knot of his inevitable rep tie. His hair is thinning. The flesh around his eyes is creased, no doubt by work, for he is as serious about the job he has now as he was about basketball. As his coach once said, "Others can run faster and jump higher. The difference between Bill and other basketball players is self-discipline."

But even with the creases fanning out around them, the eyes convey tremendous intensity and intelligence. Bradley may have had the best eyes of anyone who ever set foot on a basketball court. He could always find the open man.

These days, even if he is not running for President as hard and as openly as Kemp seems to be, it is easy to imagine the Democratic Party's needing Bradley and issuing the call. He is a vastly popular Senator from exactly the kind of state--part industrial, part high-tech, part inner city and part suburb--that the Democrats need if they are going to take the White House again in this century. And he comes with the glamor ready-made.

It is not farfetched, then, to imagine a campaign, in 1988 or later, in which the former basketball star runs against the former football star. The people who seem to know how these things work are the people who run the great engine of our time--television. And the morning after the President made his speech, with all the politicians across the wide land to choose from, the people at Today picked Bill Bradley and Jack Kemp to talk about it. You'd have to be bold or stupid to bet against the intuition of the people who run television news.

In fact, if you survey the political landscape these days, you'll be hard-pressed to deny that the network people are on to something. Each week, it seems, more and more athletes are being drawn into the political arena. There is speculation that Tom Seaver may run for the Senate from New York--the Democrats need a glamorous candidate if they are to beat Al D'Amato--and Steve Garvey is rumored to be interested in Senator Alan Cranston's California seat. Tom McMillen, a former journeyman N.B.A. basketball player, is talking about running for the House of Representatives from Maryland. And even some coaches are getting in on the action. The state of Georgia held its breath last summer while Vince Dooley pondered whether or not to run for the Senate. And he could have been elected, not because of his ideas (which he never got around to formulating) but because his Bulldogs had been national champions. To Georgians, he is a proven winner.

Everywhere you look, the athletes are running, to the point where it may be jocks for President the next time around.

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Writing in The Washington Weekly, Craig Stoltz and Tom McNichol recently lamented the advent of the political jock, noting that once upon a time, "political accomplishment brought fame. Now the process has been reversed.

"Perhaps," they continued, "it's because professional sports are so much like big business, and that big business is so much like the media, and the media are so much like politics. But for whatever reason, the transition from locker room to Oval Office seems very reasonable these days."

The authors concluded their provocative essay with a warning: "Bradley and Kemp are really only playing the same game with different balls. They have tried to skip quietly from one boyhood dream to another, and so far, the fans have done nothing but cheer. But there is a darker side to all of this. If, in 1988, the two men wind up on opposite ends of the Presidential ballot, voters may have the best excuse (continued on page 166) Jock for President? (continued from page 74) ever for writing the whole thing off as just another Big Game."

Implicit in all this is a long-standing intellectual bias. When you say that someone is just an athlete, the implication is "dumb jock," which is one of our last socially permissible prejudicial stereotypes. You cannot say "shiftless black" or "homosexual hairdresser" or "emotional woman" anymore. You cannot even imply it. But you can say "dumb jock" in the best faculty clubs in the country and get away with it.

This feeling that a previous career in sports is at worst a liability or at best an embarrassment to the man with political ambitions is strong enough that both Kemp and Bradley have tried to play down their past glories. (Sometimes, however, the temptation to capitalize on the previous identity is irresistible. During his first campaign, there was a 30-second spot that showed Bradley balling up an unwanted piece of paper and tossing it effortlessly into the wastebasket. Kemp still wears his two championship rings. They are so big that you don't have to be very close to notice them.) Both men work hard to convince the voters and the press that they are not "just athletes." With Bradley, this sense of a separate identity is almost obsessive. "I loved my game," he said before his first campaign, "and I'm proud of what I did in it. But I've wanted people to vote for my presence, my touch, my positions. I've wanted them to see that I'm new and controlled by nobody and have a chance to do things because of that. I don't want votes because people used to catch me on TV a couple of nights a week."

Bradley can afford to be arch about his career in basketball. He was an outstanding student at an Ivy League school, went on to become a Rhodes scholar and has even written a tolerably good book. Kemp, who went to Occidental as a physed major and did not begin his political education until he was well established as a pro football player, is less vigorous about downplaying his background. But he, too, works at it. He often says that "it wasn't until fairly late that I discovered that there is more, you know, to life than just pro football."

So even the Presidential jocks themselves seem a little ambivalent about this blurring of athletic and political glories, or feel that they ought to pretend they are, anyway. So, too, do some of their most ardent supporters. "Jack is no dumb jock," Irving Kristol, the most influential of the neoconservative intellectuals, once hastened to tell a writer who asked about his candidate and sometime protégé. "He's very smart and a very quick study. There's a lot more than a football player there."

Perhaps Kristol and even Kemp and Bradley themselves protest too much. Perhaps, given the political and cultural realities of our times, a career in sports is a first-rate way to prepare for the Presidency--especially when you think about what kind of job being President really is.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, "The President doesn't have time to shit or shave." Nobody has had a tougher time of it than Lincoln--enemy troops across the river--but the job hasn't gotten easier, either. The pressure of that office is tremendous and unceasing, and it takes a strong man to stand up to it.

But pressure is something an athlete, especially a professional, learns not merely to live with but to use to advantage. In sports, the man who can perform in the clutch is more highly regarded, in a way, than the man with great physical gifts who nevertheless chokes in the big game. Many athletes, particularly the old pros who have been around long enough to have lost track of entire seasons, need the pressure to play up to their ability.

"If you can't stand the heat," Harry Truman said, driving home the lesson for all time, "get the hell out of the kitchen." The best Presidents have taken a kind of fierce joy in political combat. One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt and his cousin Teddy. Or of John Kennedy, with his Irish zest for the battle.

But after Kennedy, we ran into an almost unbroken string of Presidents who did not like political combat, who were too insecure to make the distinction between political and personal enemies. And since they were also unable to make the distinction between themselves and the state, they considered opposition to them and their policies something close to treason.

Ballplayers, on the other hand, learn early how to compete and keep their heads about it. They know that hate is not productive, that it gets in the way. Intensity, however, is desirable, and athletes learn how to turn that on and off. Notice the way the football players mingle on the field after the game, when the clock and the intensity have finally wound down.

Kemp thinks this is one of the most valuable lessons he brought out of sports. "I learned a competitive attitude in football, and I still have it. But I also learned to tolerate opposition. And I think that is very important when you are competing in the realm of ideas. I can argue tax policy with somebody without hating him or taking it personally. It's easy for me, because I come from a job where every Sunday, some of my best friends were trying to knock my head off."

Of course, for Presidents these days, it isn't just political opposition that must be reckoned with; it is also the press. No recent President has been prepared for the constant scrutiny and second-guessing of the media.

If anything could prepare you for that, it might be playing quarterback on a cold, windy day in Buffalo, with your throwing hand numb because some 300-pound tackle has just stepped on it with his cleats. You call a short-pass pattern, miss a crucial first down by inches and then read, the next day, that some guy who writes a column for a living says you should have gone long, because he saw an open man down-field.

Athletes must learn very early how to deal with the press, and most develop a healthy cynicism about it. As one of Bradley's former teammates on the New York Knicks said, "You know, people who are in sports, we don't look at it as being something real special, the way the fans and the reporters do. I mean, it's what we're doing. A job. We try to do our best because we have to or we don't keep it."

Which is to say, athletes don't take the press as seriously as the press takes itself--an attitude that would make life easier for any President.

A final asset that a ballplayer brings to politics is an appreciation for the intricate chemistry of teamwork. This is especially true of athletes who have belonged to teams like the Knicks Bradley played for and the Bills Kemp quarterbacked--teams that won by successfully blending the available talent and not simply by having the best players at every position. Bradley was a dedicated member of a team that won without superstars, that is still widely considered the best team in the history of the game.

Dave DeBusschere, the other forward on that club and Bradley's roommate, remembers him this way: "Bradley was not a player of overwhelming strength, overwhelming speed or versatility. Nor was he a player of physical stature, a great one-on-one player or a tremendous rebounder. Yet his presence on the basketball court had an overwhelming influence on the outcome of the game.

"Besides being the finest open shooter I've ever seen in my 12 pro seasons, his ability to complement each member of the team was incredible. Not only was he totally aware of the game plan but he had the tremendous knack of exploiting opponents' weaknesses and his teammates' strengths. He was the ultimate, consummate team player."

A man with that kind of experience might even know how to get his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense to agree in public.

Kemp was a player of a different sort, according to his old teammates; he was the kind of quarterback who called his own plays. "You didn't talk in his huddle," one of them remembers, "you listened." Somehow, that has a reassuring ring after all we have heard about some of our Presidents' being manipulated and pushed around by their advisors.

If, as the saying goes, a man is part of all he has been, then it is important that we know how a would-be President has spent the rest of his life. In his youth, was he a man who hustled for votes, learned the devices of the law, soldiered in pointless wars or played games for glory?

Bradley and Kemp, in their 20s, were not hustling votes. They were playing games. But, oddly, playing games has made them better vote getters and potential leaders than early years spent running for the state legislature and then the state senate and then the House of Representatives, perhaps, accumulating the usual political baggage along the way.

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More than 20 years ago, in the same week, Kemp and Bradley were both making headlines. The news was in the sports pages, not the front pages, but the experience must have deeply influenced and molded both of them.

Bradley was still an amateur then, playing for a mediocre Princeton team that had ridden his remarkable skills to glory and was playing against Michigan, the nation's top-ranked team, in Madison Square Garden. No serious observer gave Princeton a chance. Still, the press had hyped the game mercilessly, and everyone was wondering about Bradley. He was coming from the Ivy League, after all, where the competition was not first water. How would he fare in the big time?

Less than a minute into the game, Bradley hit a jump shot and he knew it could happen. When he fouled out, with only about five minutes to play, Princeton was up by 12. He had scored 41 points, and the Garden fans gave him a three-minute ovation for what many considered the finest individual performance ever seen in that arena. Bradley sat down and Princeton went on to lose by a single heartbreaking basket at the buzzer.

Four days earlier, up in Buffalo, the Bills had beaten the San Diego Chargers in one of those brutal, unspectacular games that so often seem to occur when the two best teams face off at the end of a football season. It was 20-7 and, by most accounts, it wasn't that close. Cookie Gilchrist, the huge Buffalo fullback, ground out the yardage, and Kemp threw conservatively--no interceptions in his 20 attempts, ten for completions. One of them went more than 50 yards, to Glenn Bass, in the fourth quarter. On first and goal, Kemp, who was small even for a quarterback, was stopped when he tried a sneak. On the second try, he put it in. That iced the game.

That was in the last week of 1964. Both men went on to other athletic glories. Kemp led the Bills to another championship the next year. Bradley returned from Oxford to play ten seasons for the Knicks, two when they were N.B.A. champions. But the satisfactions of that one week must be with them still. Kemp had been playing professional ball for almost eight years. He had been cut by three teams in the N.F.L., had played briefly in Canada and, despite a successful season with the San Diego Chargers, had been sent to Buffalo on waivers, for $100. The week before the championship game, he had been on the bench. But he had his vindication in front of more than 40,000 fans.

Bradley had something more subtle (he is in every way a more subtle man than Kemp) to prove. He was an Ivy Leaguer, a brainy white kid with great numbers, but the competition was suspect. And Bradley wanted to prove--to himself as much as anyone--that he could play at the highest levels, first at the Garden and then when he turned pro.

It is here, I think, that we come up against the best argument not that athletes can play politics successfully--they already do--but that it might actually be a good thing.

Voters need something to work with, and it is clear, more and more, that issues alone won't do. By Election Day, any two political opponents will be saying pretty much the same thing. And even if a candidate makes a specific, unambiguous promise (Reagan's pledge to end deficit spending, for instance), he probably won't make good on it, for one reason or another. Voters correctly perceive that Presidents deliver only rarely. (According to Jeff Fishel, author of Presidents and Promises, they never do.) And they seem increasingly inclined to understand that and forgive, as long as the President behaves Presidentially. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan promised to balance the budget, and though neither came close, voters passed up opportunities to throw them out of office--most likely because they liked the way those Presidents handled themselves.

But voters need a reason to choose one candidate instead of another. Democracy hangs on the willing, eager exercise of that franchise. And in this age of nonbinding party loyalty and campaigns as extended TV drama, voters seldom base their choices on issues or principles; voters vote for the man. It is a truth that civics teachers would prefer to deny. But the qualities of a good candidate these days are not often found in the realm of ideas or even in politics. They are charismatic.

And if it's true that we choose our leaders on the basis of our perceptions of their character, then more than ever, we need a way to get some reliable sense of the man. Image makers and emotional manipulators will attempt to fill that need with 30-and 60-second TV spots showing candidates walking along deserted beaches, thinking about the words of Tennyson or Thucydides, presumably. We will see them with tousled hair, playing with children and worrying about the threat of nuclear war. We will see them wearing hard-hats and looking with concerned faces at a bunch of old tires and rusting drums in toxic-waste dumps. We will see them with their wives and families, their mothers and fathers, their faithful dogs.

Napoleon said that he wanted first to know if a general had luck. If you want to know the same of a candidate--and more--then his days in sports would be a good place to look. Better to look at old game films than at slick TV ads to see how your man handled pressure. Catch a glimpse of the style that showed then, when advisors and speechwriters couldn't help him. You might learn something important about a candidate who once went out in front of a crowd of strangers and, as they say, put it all on the line. You could see something real there.

If Kemp were to run against Bradley in 1988, voters could rely on something better than TV spots and campaign promises and make a real choice. Although on many issues the two are not far apart, there are vital differences in their characters, styles and personalities; we know that from the way each man approached his game.

Kemp was physical, combative, inspirational, hot. As one teammate recalls, "Jack didn't run out of bounds to keep from getting hit. He'd lower a shoulder and put one on you, even when he was giving away 50 or 60 pounds."

Bradley was methodical, mentally tough, intelligent, disciplined and cool. He never lost his composure. He shot when he was open and passed when he saw the open man. He never beat himself. "The greatest thing about Bill," one of his teammates remembers, "was his dependability. He was money in the bank."

The athletic careers of those candidates--those two big games in the same week, all those years ago--give a voter more to work with than all the televised ads and campaign literature in the world.

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We are going to have more and more celebrities in politics. That is a fact, a piece of the way we live. Actors and jocks and TV preachers--take your pick, make the best choice you can. And as you do, consider that a successful athlete has at least earned his celebrity by sweat and, in some cases, pain. He did not get where he is because he picked the right script or had a nice voice or a pleasant face.

Consider, too, that pro athletes have already experienced fame, felt the heat of the limelight and presumably know how to handle the part of public life that calls for a star.

Kemp and Bradley and other political jocks have lived close to the center of American myth. They wrote their own scripts and they paid their own way in the currency of hard work and discipline. They played games, to be sure, but games can reflect life--better, certainly, than any $1000-a-plate dinner. And, if you believe in luck, in the special grace that comes unaccountably to a few people for reasons that can never be fathomed--and how can any American not believe in that?--then a winning athlete will look to you like someone who has that thing, whatever it is.

And, finally, think about it this way: It might make sense to have for President someone who has already been a hero.

"Pressure is something an athlete learns not merely to live with but to use to advantage."