CHALLENGED: Kennedy spoke in Cadillac Square!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

In a challenge to our system, Trump spoke of prisons and jails: Way back in 1960, Labor Day could still be said to be the start of the White House campaign. 

As Labor Day approached that year, Candidate John F. Kennedy was all tied up in Washington. Candidate Nixon was already out on the stump as part of the general White House campaign. But Senator Kennedy had to attend to his duties in a previously scheduled Senate summertime session.

Finally, he was released! In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White described what happened next:

WHITE (page 251): He took off by chartered jet from Friendship Airport in Baltimore on Friday afternoon, September 2nd, as if he meant to swallow the country at a gulp. Friday evening he campaigned in Maine; by Saturday noon he was campaigning in San Francisco; Saturday night he flew to Alaska and then, with only four hours’ sleep, turned the big jet back to the continent and urged it on all day to Detroit, where on Monday, Labor Day, he would officially open his campaign. There, in recent times, Democratic candidates for the Presidency have always opened their campaigns with an appearance at Cadillac Square before the union men of Detroit’s assembly lines, who mass in thousands to hear the candidate make his traditional appeal for labor’s support.

The candidate "arrived two hours late, at 10:15, on Sunday evening at Detroit International Airport," White reported in his influential, iconic book. The candidate "attended a coffee reception at the Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel and then went to bed."

The next day was Labor Day! After three (3) breakfasts and several other ceremonial meetings, it was "out to Cadillac Square in the brilliant sun to address the cheering mass." 

At that point, the day's real stumping began. According to White, the Labor Day picnics were several in number. On the Democratic Party side, this was Labor Day 1960:

The Michigan State Fair first, for five minutes; then the Labor Day Picnic at Pontiac, Michigan (where he received a ceremonial Indian headdress); then the long drive to Flint, Michigan, and another Labor Day Picnic and another speech...; then an airplane flight in the dusk (he had now switched to his own Convair, the “Mother Ship” in which he was to remain for the rest of the campaign) to Muskegon airport; a seven-mile drive through a defile of cheering people holidaying on Labor Day to Pere Marquette Park, where he addressed another Labor Day Picnic, his voice hoarsening by now...and then on to the Dew-Drop Inn of Muskegon to give the Democratic candidate of Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District a lift. A short speech—mainly historical, intertwining Michigan’s history with the history of the Democratic Party—and then out to the airport, taking off at eleven in the evening and arriving in Pocatello, Idaho, at two in the morning...

That was Labor Day 1960 on the Democratic Party side. Due to the invention of new technologies, communication with "cheering masses" of voters is much easier now. 

This past Friday, as the Labor Day weekend began, Candidate Trump spoke to a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania-but what came next was a modern form of campaigning. As we noted yesterday, the candidate appeared as the sole guest on successive Fox News Channel programs—on the hour-long, Saturday and Sunday night broadcasts of the Fox News Channel primetime program, Life, Liberty and Levin.

The Fox News Channel is, by far, the most-watched of our nation's three major "cable news" channels. As we noted in this report, Nielsen reported these viewership numbers for the month of July:

Average primetime viewership, July 2024 
Fox News Channel: 3.5 million
MSNBC: 1.2 million
CNN: 856,000

According to those numbers, Fox came close to doubling the primetime viewership of MSNBC and CNN combined. It was in that context that Candidate Trump sat for two hours of conversation on this high-profile cable news program.

As we noted yesterday, what followed wasn't exactly an "interview," at least not as assessed by normal journalistic standards. An antagonist might even say that what followed barely qualified as "conversation."

The candidate spoke at remarkable length on these hour-long programs. Very few questions were asked, and quite a few of those "questions" barely qualified as such. As we noted yesterday, these were the first three "questions" Trump was "asked" on the Saturday night broadcast:

Question 1, 8:02 p.m.

LEVIN (8/31/24): ...Your book is heavy with firefighters, police officers, coal miners, people who drill for oil, truckers—common people. So let me ask you this:

You spent most of your life around these people. You were a developer. You were a builder. Electricians, plumbers, construction workers of every kind. You created thousands and thousands of middle-class jobs with pensions, medical insurance and so forth and so on. 

Why do you think your opponents get away with claiming to represent the little guy, the middle class, the blue collar worker, when they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with them? And you've spent your entire life around them?

Question 2, 8:11 p.m.

LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.

You spent a lot of time on the border. You spent a lot of time working on the border, thinking about the border. Litigating to get the money to build the wall on the border. Opposition from people like Kamala Harris. 

She says if this so-called "bipartisan border bill" hits her desk, she will sign it. Not a single Republican in the House supported it. Three Republicans in the Senate—it was negotiated in secret. 

She never tells us what's in the bill. "Catch and release"—you put an end to that. That's in the bill. It would be a statute.

[...]

She's hiding out from the press.  Is she a liar? Is that why she's hiding out from the press? She doesn't want to tell the American people just how radical she actually is?

Question 3, 8:18 p.m.

LEVIN (holding up Trump's book): It's a fantastic book. [At] 45books.com, you can order it directly. I'm going to tell you, there's so many—I can't possibly cover it all.

TRUMP: No, I know. 

 LEVIN: But you loved being president. You can see it. You were excited about it. You were engaged about it. 

Those were the first three "questions." By the time those questions had been "answered," it was 8:28 p.m. and the Saturday evening program was already half over!

In effect, the candidate was delivering his stump speech, much as Candidate Kennedy had done in Cadillac Square. By now, the existence of "cable news" channels allowed the candidate to deliver his speech to millions of voters at a time, not to the smaller "cheering mass" which greeted Candidate Kennedy.

A critic could say that the rise of this new medium has created a type of challenge to our struggling American systems. That critic could refer to the stream of apparent misstatements delivered by Candidate Trump on this pair of hour-long programs—and to the way his host reacted, or failed to react, to these apparent misstatements.

Let the word go forth to the nations! Candidate Kennedy may also have made some misstatements when he spoke in Cadillac Square! If he did, no one was present to challenge or "fact-check" his statements on an immediate basis. The cheering mass would have heard what the candidate said without journalistic intervention of any immediate kind.

That said, there's little chance that Candidate Kennedy murdered sleep or mangled accuracy to anything resembling the extent that Candidate Trump seemed to do in his pair of hour-long broadcasts last weekend. 

We'll add this observation:

As can be seen from those first three questions, the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin cast himself in the role of advocate during those broadcasts, rather than in the more traditional role of objective journalist.

Tomorrow, we'll look at one of the many statements Candidate Trump made in the course of those two hour-long broadcasts. The statement in question came early in the Saturday program, at 8:07 p.m. 

Given the nature of the candidate's uninterrupted, rambling presentations, it's hard to say exactly where any particular statement began and ended that night. In this case, a mere seven minutes into the program, the statement in question might be said to have started with these remarks about Candidate Harris:

TRUMP (8/31/24): I saw today she wants to build a wall. She fought me, for years, on the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall, but she was one of the people that fought me—one of the Democrats, but one of the people. And you look at how she's changed, and it's so phony, because— 

And all of this stuff— You know, with politics, it's usually their first thought, that's where they are. And her first thought is Marxism...

From there, it was on to familiar claims about the emptying of prisons and jails in Venezuela. These claims have been fact-checked a million times by now. Levin just sat there and listened.

(Further warning: Har Harris flipped on building a wall? As we'll note tomorrow, we'd say it isn't as simple as that.)

On Labor Day 1960, Candidate Kennedy made a speech in Cadillac Square, then journeyed to a series of Labor Day picnics. On Labor Day weekend 2024, Candidate Trump went on a major "cable news" program and spoke at remarkable length to a large number of voters.

He was taking part in a new kind of "journalism." It's a journalism which poses a major challenge to the basic functioning of the American system.

Can our system, such as it is, survive this kind of journalism? As we struggle toward November's election, some of our most important legacy mainstream news orgs don't seem strongly inclined to wonder or to ask.

Tomorrow: Emptying prisons and jails!