Historian lifts the curtain on 'obsessed' Trump's war on JFK's legacy

President John F. Kennedy created two key foreign policy initiatives — the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — in order to help the world's least fortunate and simultaneously improve America's image.

The Peace Corps sends volunteers to developing countries to help with healthcare, education, infrastructure, women's rights and entrepreneurship. USAID offered assistance with healthcare, education, environmental protection and building democratic institutions.

Under President Donald Trump, the Peace Corps has undergone massive staffing cuts and USAID has been slashed practically into non-existence. Thousands of the laid off public servants remain unemployed, having lost careers in agencies that saved 91 million lives (USAID) and 25 million lives (if one solely regards the Peace Corps' partnership with PEPFAR, created by President George W. Bush, to distribute AIDS vaccines). Even as Trump obsesses over renaming the living memorial to the assassinated Kennedy after himself,

When I spoke with historian Dr. Barbara A. Perry about her upcoming book "Reconcilable Differences," we broached how Kennedy was very proud of those two programs, believing they would both make Earth a better place for all humans and strengthen America's position in geopolitical negotiations. He was heavily swayed in these foreign policy beliefs by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw the Peace Corps as an opportunity to provide young people with stimulating life experiences. Perry shares this story in her book, and dives further into other ways that Roosevelt helped cultivate the young Kennedy. For instance, in the interview below, Perry and I begin by contrasting the Kennedy-Roosevelt view on women's rights with that of Trump and his supporters.

After all, Kennedy and Roosevelt recognized women should be paid equally for the same work as men, while Trump denounces efforts to monitor these things as "DEI" and "woke." Our conversation starts by contrasting the attitudes of the Kennedy-Roosevelt era and those of the Trump era.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.

Women's rights: Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump

Rozsa: Given that Kennedy and Roosevelt worked hard to guarantee equal pay for equal work for women, how would you say President Donald Trump and his supporters reflect on their legacy by denying that this problem exists and supporting business deregulation?

Perry: I would say that those like Trump and his supporters who think that this is now a solved problem — that women are making as much as men and are being paid equal wages for equal work — are just wrong about the current situation, and indeed they apparently don't know about history and the long arc of this problem. Going back to the Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt era, when the president set up the Commission on the Status of Women, it was to try to find equality for women, particularly in the world of employment. Eleanor Roosevelt had been fighting for that since the 1920s. There wasn't much of a public record for any politician at that point, because even though an Equal Rights Amendment had been put forward in Congress in the 1920s, there really hadn't been very many votes in which politicians could make a stand.

So I think it's really positive in their legacy for both Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt to have been supportive of equal pay for equal work for women in the workplace, particularly because at that time women only made about 60 cents on the dollar in the same kind of job as a man. And it's still not at 100 percent parity. The last I read, it was certainly better than it was in the 1960s — up maybe in the high 80-cent range or the low 90-cent range — and that's good, but wouldn't it be nice if it were directly equal, or if women even made a little bit more? Certainly we would want it dollar for dollar. So I think those who think the problem has been solved don't understand the history of it.

And despite the fact that we had the first Equal Pay Act for women, put together by this Kennedy commission, passed by Congress and signed into law by him in 1963 — not too long before his assassination, and sadly after Mrs. Roosevelt had passed away in November of '62 — we still haven't come as far as we need to. There was a very famous case that came to the Supreme Court from a woman named Lilly Ledbetter in the early 2000s. And the first law that Barack Obama signed in the White House, within a few days of being inaugurated in 2009, was the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act. In her work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, she didn't realize at the time that she was being underpaid compared to her male counterparts in the same kinds of jobs.

She only realized that after she and these male colleagues had retired. I guess they were discussing, or she knew about, what they were getting in their retirement benefits, and it was way more than she was receiving, because she had been paid at much lower levels. Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned gender discrimination in the workplace, there was a very short period of time in which someone needed to report that they were being underpaid relative to male colleagues, and she had long ago missed it because she didn't realize it was happening. And so the court decided — with Alito, by the way, writing the opinion — "Well, that's what the law says, so sorry, Ms. Ledbetter, we can't do anything for you." And from the bench, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, "Well, something that could be done is for Congress to change that law." And led by Hillary Clinton, Congress did change that aspect of the law, and that's why it's named for Lilly Ledbetter.

Rozsa: That is a fascinating story. You've talked about Presidents John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but you have not discussed Trump and what he has done in terms of equal pay for equal work — a cause that I doubt he has ever espoused in his career.

Perry: I think it's safe to say that gender and equal rights between the genders are not issues that he is concerned with or has been concerned with. In fact, it's clear from how he treats women and how he speaks about women that that's not something that is an interest of his, or a societal problem that should be solved by government action. You also mentioned that this is a long-time view of Republicans, to move away from government regulation. Ronald Reagan said it famously in his first inaugural address about the situation the country was in — the recession at the end of the Jimmy Carter years. It was truly bad; interest rates for mortgages were up in the 16, 17 percent range.

So we think it's bad now if it's 7 percent, but it was really just onerous at the time, and we had high unemployment and inflation, so things were not going well. And Ronald Reagan, as he was being inaugurated and giving his address, said, "In the current situation" — meaning given the very bad state of the economy in 1981 — "government isn't the solution to our problems. Government is the problem." So he was very much in that Reagan conservatism, going back to the Barry Goldwater years of the 1960s, and 20 years later proposing lower taxes and fewer government regulations. I grew up in the '60s and '70s, and I knew my parents' stories from the Great Depression era, when my dad's family lost their home. They couldn't pay their mortgage, so they had to go live with family and take food from the local government.

So I knew that sometimes people get into situations no matter how hardworking they are. My grandfather lost his job and they just couldn't make ends meet. My parents would speak to me about FDR and how he saved the country in the Great Depression. My dad was a World War II veteran, and they very much admired his leadership during World War II. So I grew up thinking that government can do good things and can help people when they're in trouble. I've known a lot of people over the years who are against the government — "Get the government off our backs." And I always say, "Yes, they say that until the tornado wipes their house away, or the wildfire hits their house, or the hurricane knocks down their business." One of my examples is James Baker, the former secretary of the Treasury and a good friend of the Bushes, particularly Bush 41, who had a terrible tragedy happen in his family.

His very young granddaughter drowned when she was sucked into a defective pool drain. I can remember seeing him and his daughter, the mother of this granddaughter, on a talk show — I think it was Larry King at the time — saying, "We're here in Washington to talk to members of Congress to see if we can get regulations for pool drains, so there won't be defective pool drains and other families won't have to go through this tragedy." Because they were Reagan-Bush Republicans, I would say if you asked them at some point, they would probably say, "Yes, get the government off our backs. We don't like government regulation." Or impaled by a lawn dart: from the 1960s, that was a popular game, sort of like horseshoes, but with spikes instead of horseshoes.

You would throw this six-inch metal prong, I guess, that had plastic feathers on it.

You'd try to get it into a circle and get it to stick into the ground. And kids were being injured and maybe even killed by being impaled by lawn darts. So, as I say, it's all fun and games until someone's impaled by a lawn dart — and of course those were then banned from public sale. You could go back to the Food and Drug Administration and how food was being processed in the 1920s and people were getting sick from it, or drugs that shouldn't be taken to market. We wouldn't have regulations if somebody hadn't seen a need for them. So the Trump anti-government view is directed at regulations that they don't like. Then, of course, there are regulations of pregnancy, or women's reproductive health, where conservatives do want government to engage with people and tell them what they can or cannot do.

And in the case of Trump, again, he's not one to be concerned about women's rights, equal rights, or eliminating racism from the workplace, including through things like DEI. So he doesn't have a track record of that. In fact, his family has a track record of racism, and he personally has a track record of misogyny.

Foreign policy: Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump

Rozsa: I appreciate you being so thorough in that regard. I now want to juxtapose Trump and Kennedy in another respect. Can you elaborate on why Kennedy and Roosevelt felt the Peace Corps was so important, and what it says about the Trump movement's priorities that it has gutted similar Kennedy programs like USAID?

Perry: Yes. Part of the reason — and maybe it could be the sole reason — for Kennedy having supported the concept of the Peace Corps... He did not develop the concept. It was developed in Congress before he became president, by other members of Congress. But to his credit, he thought it was a good idea. Famously, when he was campaigning for president in 1960, he came in very late to a rally of students at the University of Michigan. They had waited and waited to see him, they were all ginned up, and they were hanging from trees and telephone poles. At one point he said, "We're thinking about starting this Peace Corps, where we would send young experts like yourselves, who've just come out of college with various skills, into" what were then called third world countries. Now we would say developing countries.

And he said, "How many of you who are studying medicine, for example, would volunteer to do that?" And this big roar went up from the students. So in March of 1961, a couple of months after he became president, he signed an executive order to create the Peace Corps. Eventually it was developed by Congress, but he set it up and put his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, in charge of it as director. I think part of the reason that's so important to keep in mind is that it's the height of the Cold War, and we are fighting the communists, led at that time particularly by the Soviet Union and by what was called Red China, or Communist China, as it had become known in the late 1940s and early '50s, when the communist revolution succeeded there. So we were trying to stave off the spread of communism, which was very much against the United States and our form of democracy.

Kennedy knew that the Soviets were sending their engineers and doctors and teachers and agricultural specialists to these third world countries, because we were in a fight to get every country we could to our side. Any country that wasn't already aligned with the communists or with us — if they were neutral — we wanted to persuade to come to our side. Well, so did the Soviets and the communists. So I think that was the main reason he went forward with it. Another, more idealistic way of thinking of it is that he himself was young — only 43 when he was elected president, still the youngest man ever elected president. Teddy Roosevelt was 42 when he became president, but that was rising up from the vice presidency when McKinley was assassinated.

So Kennedy still holds that record. He was youthful in his appearance, particularly in contrast to Eisenhower, whom he replaced in the White House, who at 70 was at that point our oldest president — kind of different from now. Eisenhower looked old. He had been sickly in office, and Kennedy, while he had his own private illnesses and his fairly public back issues, still looked really hale and hearty and youthful. I think he wanted to be appealing to young people and believed in young people. He himself had joined the military — volunteered even before we entered World War II. He and his older brother signed up for the Navy and then requested combat duty. He lost his brother in Europe in the war, and Jack Kennedy almost lost his life in the South Pacific.

So he was very much supportive of public service and thought this would be a way to encourage young people to come into public service, but also, again, to meet this Cold War need. And I should tell you, I have a cousin who's 13 years older than I am. She graduated from Saint Louis University in 1964, the first in our family ever to earn a college degree — a very smart woman. The first thing she did was sign up for the Peace Corps. She had been an English major, so she signed up to teach English in the outback of Ethiopia, in a little remote village. But in addition to doing that, she was also giving out vaccines and helping with medical care. So it worked in her case. He recruited her and many others into the Peace Corps.

And Eleanor Roosevelt, as someone who had really blossomed in her education and her personality by studying abroad in London as a young woman, knew how important it was to travel the world. Certainly as she got older and became first lady, she traveled around the globe, and continued to do that almost to her dying day. So she knew the importance of international experience — learning another language, if you can, and carrying the message of American democracy around the world, which she had done so well.