An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Dillon had to be persuaded to accept. Eisenhower warned him against taking the job, urging a written commitment to a free hand lest Kennedy give him no more than symbolic authority. But although Kennedy promised to do nothing affecting the economy without Dillon’s recommendation, he refused to give him any written pledge, saying, “A President can’t enter into treaties with cabinet members.” Kennedy extracted a commitment from Dillon, however, that if he resigned, it would be “in a peaceful, happy fashion and wouldn’t indicate directly or indirectly that he was disturbed about what President Kennedy and the administration were doing.”

  For both economic and political considerations, Kennedy felt he had to balance Dillon’s appointment with a Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) made up of innovative liberal Keynesians who would favor bold proposals for stimulating the economy and would convince Democrats that he was not partial to Eisenhower’s cautious policies. Although he told Dillon that he was appointing the Keynesians for strictly political reasons, Kennedy truly wanted them as a prod to more advanced thinking and a way to educate the public and himself. As he freely admitted, he was unschooled in economics, telling everyone that he had received a C in freshman economics at Harvard (in fact, it was a B) and could not remember much, if anything, from the course.

  Walter Heller was a University of Minnesota economics professor whom Kennedy had met during the campaign through Hubert Humphrey. At his first session with Heller, Kennedy asked him four questions: Could government action achieve a 5 percent growth rate? Was accelerated depreciation likely to increase investment? Why had high interest rates not inhibited German economic expansion? And could a tax cut be an important economic stimulus? Heller’s replies were so succinct and literate that Kennedy decided to make him chairman of the CEA. During a December meeting, Kennedy told Heller, “I need you as a counterweight to Dillon. He will have conservative leanings, and I know that you are a liberal.” Heller wanted to know if Kennedy would ask for a tax cut and whether he would have carte blanche to choose his CEA colleagues. Not now, Kennedy said of the tax reduction, explaining he could not ask the country for sacrifice at the same time he proposed lower taxes. The answer to the second question was yes. Heller also had the advantage of not being from the Ivy League or the Northeast, as James Tobin and Kermit Gordon, the other economists Heller asked to have as council colleagues, were. Kennedy was not well schooled in economics and found much of the theory mystifying, but he had a keen feel for who had the essential combination of economic knowledge and political common sense vital to successful management of the economy.

  Finding a defense secretary who could ease the political and national security concerns of Democrats and Republicans was a bit easier than assembling an economic team. Liberals were not as worried about the impact of a defense chief as they were about a treasury secretary. Besides, with the deepening of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed to pose so grave a threat to the nation’s future, partisanship had become less of a problem. Still, Kennedy remembered the political pummeling the Democrats had taken in the late forties and fifties over Yalta, China, and Korea, and he knew that any misstep on defense could quickly become a political liability. After all, he had made effective use of the missile gap in his campaign and understood that if the opportunity presented itself in the next four years, the Republicans would not hesitate to use a defense failure against his reelection. He briefly considered reappointing the incumbent Thomas Gates, but concluded that it would open him to charges of political cynicism for having been so critical of the administration’s defense policies during the campaign.

  A number of names came before him, but none as repeatedly as that of Ford Motor Company president Robert S. McNamara, a nominal Republican with impeccable credentials as a businessman and service as an air force officer during World War II, when he had increased the effectiveness of air power by applying a system of statistical control. McNamara seemed to be on everybody’s list of candidates for the job. Michigan Democrats, including United Auto Workers officials, and principal members of the New York and Washington establishments described him as an exceptionally intelligent man with the independence, tough-mindedness, and, above all, managerial skills to make the unwieldy Defense Department more effective in serving the national security. “The talent scouts,” McNamara biographer Deborah Shapley writes, “were delighted to find a Republican businessman who had risen meteorically at Ford and who was, at forty-four, only a year older than the president-elect. . . . That a young Republican businessman could also be well thought of by labor, be Harvard-trained, support the ACLU, and read Teilhard de Chardin were all bonuses.”

  Without ever having met McNamara, Kennedy authorized Sargent Shriver to offer him an appointment as secretary of the treasury or secretary of defense. (Dillon had not yet been offered the Treasury job.) When McNamara got a message that Shriver had called, he asked his secretary who he was. (McNamara or his secretary, having never heard of Shriver, wrote him on the calendar as “Mr. Shriber.”) The offer of the Treasury job stunned McNamara, who turned it down as something he wasn’t qualified to handle. He said the same about the Defense post but had enough interest to agree to come to Washington to meet with Kennedy on the following day. McNamara and Kennedy made positive impressions on each other. Nevertheless, McNamara continued to declare himself unqualified to head the Defense Department. Kennedy countered with the assertion that there was no school for defense secretaries or presidents.

  McNamara refused to commit himself at the first meeting but promised to come back for a second conversation in a few days. When he did, he gave Kennedy a letter asking assurances that he could run his own department; could choose his subordinates, meaning he would not have to agree to political appointees; and would not have to participate in the capital’s social life. Bobby, who sat in on the second meeting, said McNamara’s letter made it clear that he “was going to run the Defense Department, that he was going to be in charge; and although he’d clear things with the President, that political interests or favors couldn’t play a role.” He recalled that his brother “was so impressed with the fact that [McNamara] was so tough about it—and strong and stalwart. He impressed him.” McNamara’s letter, Bobby felt, flabbergasted his brother, but because Kennedy saw McNamara as so suited for the job, he accepted his conditions. To pressure McNamara into officially accepting, Kennedy leaked his selection to the Washington Post, which ran a front-page story. (“The Ship of State is the only ship that often leaks at the top,” a Kennedy aide later said.) After McNamara had accepted the appointment, he told Kennedy that after talking over the job with Tom Gates, he believed he could handle it. Kennedy teasingly responded in echo, “I talked over the presidency with Eisenhower, and after hearing what it’s all about, I’m convinced I can handle it.”

  After JFK’s election, many assumed that Kennedy would have to choose Adlai Stevenson as his secretary of state. Stevenson remained the party’s senior statesman and had established himself as an expert on foreign policy. Although in January 1960, Kennedy had promised to make Stevenson secretary of state if he supported his candidacy, Stevenson’s failure to do so had nullified the proposal. After Kennedy got the nomination, however, he encouraged Stevenson’s ambition for the job by asking him to prepare a report on foreign policy problems. This had some practical reasoning behind it—Stevenson was, after all, experienced and knowledgeable about a great deal—but was also somewhat petty and personal. Jack had absolutely no intention of appointing Stevenson. “Fuck him,” Kennedy said to Abe Ribicoff after the election. “I’m not going to give him anything.” Kennedy remained angry at Stevenson for failing to support his nomination, believed he was too equivocal to help make tough foreign policy decisions, and worried that he “might forget who’s the President and who’s the Secretary of State.” Kennedy wanted no part of the arrangement that seemed to have made John Foster Dulles the most important foreign policy decision maker in Eisenhower’s administration.

  Liberal pres
sure to give Stevenson something, however, pushed Kennedy to offer him a choice of three jobs: ambassador to Britain, attorney general, or ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson did not want to go to the U.K. or head the Justice Department, and he felt humiliated at the idea of accepting the U.N., a post with no real policy making authority, telling Bill Blair, “I will never be ambassador to the U.N.”

  In deciding on a secretary of state, Kennedy wanted to ensure that the State Department would be under his control. He asked John Sharon, who had worked with Stevenson on the foreign policy report, for “‘a shit list’—that was his word,” Sharon said, “— of people in the state department who ought to be fired.” But before he could get rid of department bureaucrats who might obstruct his policies, he needed to decide on a cooperative secretary. Chester Bowles, Harvard University dean McGeorge Bundy, and diplomat David Bruce all received brief consideration, but Bowles was too idealistic, Bundy too young and inexperienced, and Bruce too old for the assignment.

  William Fulbright, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, received more serious consideration. Kennedy knew Fulbright from their work together in the Senate and admired his handling of the Foreign Relations Committee. Kennedy “thought he had some brains and some sense and some judgment,” as Bobby put it. “He was really rather taken with him.” But Bobby and their father talked Jack out of choosing him. As a southern senator “who had been tied up in all the segregation votes” and had signed a southern manifesto opposing the Supreme Court’s school desegregation orders, Fulbright seemed certain to stir antagonism among Third World countries, especially in Africa, a sharply contested region of the world in the East-West struggle. Fulbright also had enemies in the Jewish community, where he had aroused hostility with pro-Arab pronouncements. Seeing the international opposition as too great for him to serve successfully and uncertain that he wanted to trade his Senate seat for the administration of an unwieldy bureaucracy, Fulbright asked Kennedy not to make the offer.

  By process of elimination, and determined to run foreign policy from the White House, Kennedy came to Dean Rusk, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rusk was an acceptable last choice, with the right credentials and the right backers. A Rhodes scholar, a college professor, a World War II officer, an assistant secretary of state for the Far East under Truman, a liberal Georgian sympathetic to integration, and a consistent Stevenson supporter, Rusk offended no one. The foreign policy establishment—Acheson, Lovett, liberals Bowles and Stevenson, and the New York Times—all sang his praises. But most of all, it was clear to Kennedy from their one meeting in December 1960 that Rusk would be a sort of faceless, faithful bureaucrat who would serve rather than attempt to lead. “It is the President alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy,” Kennedy had publicly announced the previous January. He called the office “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government” and declared his belief that a president must “be prepared to exercise the fullest powers of his office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was an open secret that Jack intended to be his own secretary of state. Journalists, congressmen, and Kennedy intimates saw Rusk’s selection as confirmation of this assumption and as the principal reason behind the attempt to consign Stevenson to a second-line diplomatic post.

  According to Rusk, an exploratory meeting with Kennedy at his Georgetown home did not go well. He told Bowles, “Kennedy and I could not communicate. If the idea of making me Secretary ever actually entered his mind, I am sure it is now dead.” But Rusk had misread Kennedy’s intentions. He was as close to what Kennedy wanted as he seemed likely to find. His diffidence was transparent. He set no conditions for taking the job; in making no demands about freedom to choose subordinates, he persuaded Kennedy that he would reflect the president’s opinions rather than try to determine them. The Kennedys made much of the idea that people who came into the administration needed to be tough. When Bobby told Ken O’Donnell to check on someone as a possible secretary of the army, he described him as a “hard-working tough guy.” And one of Jack’s initial inquiries about Rusk was whether he was “tough-fibered.” But with Jack and Bobby there to take a strong line on foreign affairs and a tough-minded Bob McNamara at Defense, they could afford to have a pliable secretary of state. It was clear to Kennedy that Rusk would be passive in future policy debates: After he had served as secretary for a while, Kennedy said that when they were alone, Rusk would whisper that there were still too many others present.

  Now Kennedy came back to Stevenson, who badly wanted to serve in some major foreign policy capacity and announced he could work well with Rusk. Still, Stevenson equivocated, and Kennedy came close to withdrawing the U.N. offer. Finally, despite his earlier pronouncements, and the likelihood that he would have little influence on policy, Stevenson agreed.

  If Bobby was genuinely torn about a postelection career choice, his indecision did not last long. His first priority had to have been helping his brother succeed as president. It was inconceivable that after all the hard work to put his brother in the White House, Bobby would now walk away from the tough fights Jack faced as president. As Ribicoff told the president-elect, “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years and I notice that every time you face a crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s an empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be President without using Bobby all the time.” Jack agreed. He told Acheson that “he did not know and would not know most of the people who would be around him in high cabinet positions—and he just felt that he had to have someone whom he knew very well and trusted completely with whom he could just sort of put his feet up and talk things over.”

  The principal question for Jack about Bobby was where he would serve in the administration. At first, there were thoughts of making him an undersecretary of defense or an assistant secretary of state. But on reflection, this seemed like a poor idea. As Dean Acheson told him, it would “be a great mistake. . . . It would be wholly impossible for any cabinet officer to have the President’s brother as second in command. . . . This would not be fair to anybody—and, therefore, if he were to be brought in at all, he ought to be given complete responsibility for a department of government, or be brought to the White House and be close to the President himself.” Bobby, however, wanted no part of a White House appointment working directly under his brother. “That would be impossible,” Bobby told Schlesinger. “I had to do something on my own, or have my own area of responsibility. . . . I had to be apart from what he was doing so I wasn’t working directly for him and getting orders from him as to what I should do that day. That wouldn’t be possible. So I never considered working at the White House.” Even if he had, Jack’s promise during the campaign that he “would not appoint any relative to the White House staff” ruled out giving Bobby such an assignment.

  Jack had actually asked Bobby about heading the Justice Department before he turned to Ribicoff and Stevenson, but Bobby had worried about charges of nepotism. Bobby also expected an attorney general to provoke so much antagonism over civil rights that it would undermine Jack’s political standing for him to take the position. “It would be the ‘Kennedy brothers’ by the time a year was up,” Bobby said, “and the President would be blamed for everything we had to do in civil rights; and it was an unnecessary burden to undertake.” Others reinforced Bobby’s concerns. Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, Drew Pearson, and Sam Rayburn all warned against the repercussions of having Bobby at the Justice Department. And the New York Times, to which Jack leaked the idea of his brother’s appointment, opposed it as politicizing an office that should be strictly nonpartisan and as a gift to someone lacking enough legal experience. But after Ribicoff and Stevenson had rejected offers to become attorney general, Kennedy decided that his brother should take the job, despite Bobby’s doubts.

  Bobby was particularly sensitive to complaints that he had not practiced law or sat on the bench. W
hen Jack joked with friends that he “just wanted to give him a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer,” Bobby upbraided his brother: “Jack, you shouldn’t have said that about me.” “Bobby, you don’t understand,” Jack replied. “You’ve got to make fun of it, you’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics.” Bobby answered, “You weren’t making fun of yourself. You were making fun of me.”

  Once Jack had decided to appoint Bobby to the Justice Department, he tried to minimize the political damage. So Jack, Bobby, and their father encouraged the belief that Joe had forced Bobby and Jack into doing it. Jack told Clark Clifford that his father was insisting on Bobby’s appointment against their wishes. Clifford listened with “amazement” to Kennedy’s description of the family argument and thought it “truly a strange assignment” when Jack asked him to talk his father out of the idea. Clifford went to New York to make the case to Joe, but to no avail. Looking Clifford straight in the eye, Joe said, “Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded, I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.”

  As Bobby later described events, he had decided in December not to take the job. He recalled how he called Jack up to say he didn’t want the job and then told a friend, “This will kill my father.” Jack had refused to talk about it on the phone, and insisted that they discuss it over breakfast the next morning. Bobby and John Seigenthaler, a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean, whom Bobby brought with him, described Jack as determined to appoint Bobby. They recounted Jack’s concern to have a cabinet member who would tell him “the unvarnished truth, no matter what,” when problems arose. “He thought it would be important to him and that he needed some people around that he could talk to so I decided to accept it,” Bobby said later. Remembering Jack’s advice to inject some humor into the account, Bobby also described how Jack then said, “So that’s it, General. Let’s grab our balls and go” talk to the press. But before they did, Jack told him to go upstairs and comb his hair. As they went outside, Jack counseled him, “Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment.” (Bobby remembered Jack telling Ben Bradlee of Newsweek that he had actually wanted to announce the appointment some morning at about 2 A.M. He would open the front door of his house, look up and down the street, and if no one was there, he would whisper, “It’s Bobby.”)