Remember that you are not JFK, and you can’t ever be. So work out what drives you in politics – and how this overlaps with what the American people saw in JFK. If you do this, you’ll find that you both have a deep set of beliefs in social justice driving you, even if he was a polished millionaire and you are a genuine ordinary Joe. So if you take up big battles, like poverty and civil rights, and fight them to victory, you’ll be judged as a great President because you achieved something, when JFK didn’t really achieve much.

And remember to master TV appearances – it’s going to be important to you.

 

JFK was an original, one-off President who probably would have been re-elected had history not intervened in Dallas. LBJ – Lyndon Baines Johnson – was never going to be the country’s most popular President but he could have gone a long way to absorbing the country’s grief as Ronald Reagan did following the space shuttle Challenger disaster in the 1980s. Instead, Kennedy’s family led the nation in mourning with widow Jackie and son John Jr providing the unforgettable images of such an unexpected state funeral.

Whilst Johnson could never have duplicated Kennedy’s charisma, a public display of compassion and understanding ahead of or even during the funeral could have helped Johnson to ‘humanise’ his more aloof persona. Johnson could then have capitalised on his similarity to John Wayne – tall, slow-talking, Stetson-wearing cowboy – to whom the nation, and possibly the world, might have looked for leadership.

 

Nothing boosts your popularity quite like your death. In the month before President Kennedy was killed, Gallup put his approval rating at just 56% – lower than at any point during his presidency.

And yet the outpouring of sympathy and goodwill after his assassination was such that he was later named third most widely admired person of the 20th century after Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa.

A deified former president is a hell of an act to follow. And it wasn’t just that Lyndon B Johnson would inevitably suffer by comparison. He was also unfortunate that his tenure coincided with the demise of political idealism in the US – a turn of events caused as much by the birth of the television era and the Vietnam war as the shooting of a president. Once cynicism sets in among the electorate, it becomes hard to sell them the American dream.

So Johnson shouldn’t have tried. He should have focused on being the boring administrator who gets things done, setting himself apart from the presidential glamour of JFK – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Look at how well everyman ordinariness worked for John Major’s successful election campaign – after following another iconic leader in Margaret Thatcher.

Johnson should eschew the razzamatazz and grandstanding of his predecessor – at which he’d be unable to compete – and revert to a more homespun, grassroots approach to engagement.