Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  At the same time, Kennedy invited Columbia University political scientist Richard Neustadt, who had just published a widely discussed book, Presidential Power, to write a transition plan for him as well. Neustadt, who knew that Kennedy had also directed Clifford to develop a strategy for taking control of the government, asked how he should coordinate his efforts with Clifford. Kennedy instructed him to ignore Clifford. “I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers,” Kennedy told him. “If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”

  Kennedy knew that the most effective presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts—had consulted various advisers but at the end of the day had relied on their own counsel to make the most important decisions of their terms. As Harry Truman had said, “the buck stops here.” It was the president who had the responsibility for choosing between the options available to him. Besides, for someone as young and inexperienced as he would be on entering office, Kennedy needed to insure against impressions of him as a cipher, a novice simply following the lead of subordinates who thought they knew better than their chief.

  Neither Clifford nor Neustadt expressed an interest in becoming a part of the new administration, which pleased Kennedy. Tall, handsome, with the looks of a matinee idol and a reputation as a political miracle worker who had engineered Truman’s 1948 upset victory, Clifford would be a competitor for center stage with any president who brought him into the White House. Moreover, Kennedy saw Clifford as someone whose ambition for control would provoke clashes with other advisers and create unwanted tensions in a new administration trying to develop policy initiatives. Kennedy joked that Clifford wanted nothing for his services “except the right to advertise the Clifford law firm on the back of the one-dollar bill.” Kennedy had no interest in surrounding himself with yes-men, but he was determined not to be intimidated by veterans of earlier administrations, who found their way into the White House and believed themselves better prepared to lead the country than he was.

  As for Neustadt, Kennedy had no plan to appoint him to some White House job that carried greater importance than the one he had held during the Truman presidency in the Bureau of the Budget. A personal encounter with Neustadt in December 1960 leads me to think that Kennedy’s decision disappointed him. Neustadt spoke to a lunch meeting of Columbia College faculty, including myself, a new instructor in the history department. I have vivid memories of Neustadt speaking to us at the university’s Faculty Club from notes written on the back of an envelope about a recent meeting with the president-elect on plans for the transition. Listening to the professor, who seemed like a consummate Washington insider, I could not imagine Neustadt not wanting to become part of Kennedy’s White House and a contributor to the young president’s development of exciting New Frontier programs.

  Kennedy saw Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice president–elect, as a prime example of someone convinced he had greater understanding than Kennedy of how to set the direction of the new administration. Vice presidents had traditionally been men of limited influence in the government. John Adams, the first vice president, described the position as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Woodrow Wilson asserted, “In explaining how little there is to be said about it, one has evidently said all there is to say.” During the 1960 campaign, when Eisenhower was asked to name a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that he had adopted as president, he replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” Eisenhower’s comment spoke more about his reluctance to back Nixon’s reach for the White House than Nixon’s performance as vice president.

  As the former Senate majority leader and a domineering personality who hated being anything less than top dog, Johnson arrived in the vice presidency determined to transform the office into something more important than it had been, though he was mindful of how Nixon had used the office to make himself into a credible presidential candidate. Johnson’s twenty-seven years in Washington, first as a secretary to a Texas congressman, then as a congressman for eleven years and a senator for twelve, had been a case study in mastering the Capitol’s congressional politics and making himself a prominent national figure. Many astute Washington insiders wondered why he would trade his powerful Senate post for the less consequential VP job. But Johnson believed that his days as a dominant majority leader were coming to an end: If Nixon became president, he would be less cooperative with a Democratic-controlled Senate than Eisenhower had been; if Kennedy won the White House, Johnson assumed that he would be a secondary player with a Democrat as president. Better to be second fiddle to Kennedy as vice president than to be just one of several senators eclipsed by his party’s new leader.

  But presiding over the Senate and casting rare tie-breaking votes—a vice president’s only constitutional duties—was not Johnson’s idea of how he would serve in Kennedy’s White House. Within days of becoming vice president, he asked Kennedy to sign an executive order giving him “general supervision” over a number of government agencies and directing cabinet secretaries to copy the vice president on all major documents sent to the president. Seeing Johnson’s request as the opening wedge in a campaign to make himself a co-president, Kennedy simply dropped the memo in a drawer, where it was left to languish along with Johnson’s ambitions for a larger role in the administration. In a 1964 interview with Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie Kennedy recalled Jack and Lyndon together vying or “fencing” with each other about “political things. And I always thought Lyndon was arguing with him or being rude, but Jack was sort of parrying with such amusement, and he always sort of bested him. Lyndon would give a big elephant-like grunt,” grudgingly conceding that he was the subordinate in the relationship.

  Kennedy’s determination not to be the captive of any individual or set of advisers partly rested on a reading of Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume The Age of Roosevelt, a reconstruction of the first years of FDR’s presidency. Schlesinger’s history provided Kennedy with a useful model of how to manage advisers. Roosevelt had encouraged competition for influence among his closest associates. It was his way of compelling them to turn to him for final decisions on all the big issues of his presidency. Kennedy intended to do the same.

  Moreover, he was determined to be an activist president, a chief executive who placed “himself in the very thick of the fight,” a president unlike Harding and Coolidge in the twenties and now Eisenhower. Ike’s contemporary reputation for passivity was overdrawn, but it was the conventional wisdom of 1960, and it was the sort of leadership that Kennedy believed current sentiment wished him to shun. The moment demanded a president more like the two Roosevelts and Truman—someone who would risk “incurring” the “momentary displeasure of the public” by exercising “the fullest powers of the office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was the picture of a president less interested in domestic affairs and day-to-day battles with congressmen and senators to pass legislation than in formulating and executing foreign policies to protect the nation from external threats and find ways to assure immediate and long-term peace.

  But whatever Kennedy could take away from the experience of the Roosevelts and Truman to make himself a successful president, it was clear to him that there were no hard and fast formulas for presidential effectiveness, and that circumstances and his own temperament would determine his fate. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian who had designed Truman’s containment policy, believed that Kennedy’s personal attributes set him apart from other political leaders and gave him the wherewithal to be a great president. Kennan, who agreed to become ambassador to Yugoslavia after discussing the job with Kennedy, described him as “the best listener I’ve ever seen in high position anywhere.” He was not a poseur or classic political glad-hander who loved to hear the sound of his own voice and craved the adulation that was expected in response. “He asked questions modestly, sensibly,” Kennan recalled, “and listened very patiently to what you
had to say and did not try, then, to tell jokes, to be laughed at, or to utter sententious statements himself to be admired.” He did not “monopolize” a conversation but tried to learn from it—“a rare thing among men who have arisen to very exalted positions.”

  At the start of his term, Kennedy believed that most of those who would serve with him could make a significant difference in shaping his administration. He was determined to seek out the best and the brightest for the top White House jobs and then talk them into taking on the sometimes thankless work that carried risks to their reputations and peace of mind—not to mention the diminished public pay compared with what they could earn in the private sector. But to Kennedy and the people he brought into his administration, public service was a calling that gave them satisfaction and served the national well-being—at least that was the ideal that drew others to work for a president they believed was about to make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of Americans and people everywhere.

  Yet the strengths that Kennedy personally and the men advising him brought to the presidency provided no guarantee of a successful administration. Like all his White House predecessors, Kennedy faced uncertain events that could bedevil his time in office. But like the most successful of these men, Kennedy understood that presidential effectiveness required a capacity for imaginative thinking or flexibility that could help him master unforeseen challenges. He also appreciated that whether he could rise to that standard in every circumstance was an open question.

  Yet however wise he might prove to be in response to unexpected events, he never fully faced up to personal limits that threatened to jeopardize his presidency. He was a compulsive womanizer. In the context of the times—a privileged young man growing up in the thirties, forties, and fifties—sexual escapades were not uncommon, especially among social lions in the country’s great urban centers, and doubly so for someone as handsome and charming as Kennedy, who had enjoyed standing in Washington for years as perhaps the city’s most desirable bachelor. Moreover, he was mindful of his father’s reputation as a ladies’ man, despite Rose Kennedy’s strict religious belief in the sanctity of marriage vows. As Jack was about to marry Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, his father told one of Jack’s closest friends, “I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married. Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others.”

  Yet marrying Jackie, as she was called, was irresistible. From his first meeting with her in 1951, she impressed him as an ideal mate. She came from a Catholic Social Register family, and she was clearly beautiful, intelligent, delightfully charming, self-confident, and wonderfully poised. At twenty-two, she was thirteen years his junior and somewhat worshipful of the worldly-wise celebrity senator, who could fulfill whatever fantasies she may have had of a glamorous life with a Washington star. Their marriage in September 1953 at the Newport, Rhode Island, estate of Jackie’s stepfather was described in the press as the social event of the year.

  More than love drew Jack to marriage, however. As an ambitious politician who had his eye on higher office, Kennedy believed that he had to marry, however much he enjoyed his bachelorhood and freedom to sleep around. Yet he did not see marriage as a deterrent to multiple partners. It had not ended his father’s womanizing.

  As Joe foresaw, his son’s philandering did not subside. He remained as promiscuous as ever. Lem Billings, Jack’s closest friend, recalled the “humiliation” Jackie “would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on Kennedy’s Senate staff in the fifties and resisted his overtures, described him as “a very naughty boy.” Her rejection of his advances made him more respectful of her, and moved him to speak openly to her about women in general and his reckless behavior in particular. “I once asked him,” she said, “why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally, he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”

  Kennedy’s response speaks loudly about the sources of his actions. His frenetic need for conquests was not the behavior of a sexual athlete. It was not the sex act that seemed to drive his pursuit of so many women, but the constant need for reaffirmation, or a desire for affection and approval, however transitory, from his casual trysts. It is easy to imagine that Jack was principally responding to feelings of childhood emptiness stemming from a detached mother and an absent father. As the mother of nine children, including a disabled daughter who followed Jack’s birth by only a little more than a year, Rose struggled to attend to her two oldest sons. Busy building his fortune and compelled by business demands to travel widely, Joe was more a family patriarch than a hands-on father closely interacting with his children.

  Kennedy’s affinity for womanizing found an extended outlet in an eighteen-month affair with a young White House intern beginning in the summer of 1962. The publication in 2012 of Once Upon a Secret, a recounting by Mimi Beardsley Alford of her relationship with Kennedy, when she was just nineteen and twenty, provides the most revealing details ever into his sexual escapades. A companion on summer trips with him and on occasional weekends at the White House when Jackie was away, Mimi offered him a reliable retreat from the demands of his duties.

  His time with Mimi also appealed to his attraction to risk-taking. Unprotected sex once led to an unrealized scare of pregnancy. Not to mention that Mimi’s nights at the White House and presence on trips suddenly made her visible to White House insiders and journalists, which created risks that could have politically touched off a ruinous scandal. Given the assumptions of the time that the mainstream press would not write about a president’s sex life, Kennedy was confident that he could avoid any public attack on his character. But he could not be sure. And he was mindful that as president he could be more than embarrassed by accusations of philandering. He either knew or at least understood James Monroe’s observation that “national honor is the national property of the highest value” and that every president is the temporary custodian of that property.

  Alford remembers Kennedy’s affair with her as “a reckless desire for sex.” But, according to her account, something else was at work: Their relationship wasn’t “romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate. But there was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never once kissed. . . . In fact I don’t remember the President ever kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex.” Her function, as she recalls, was to provide “good company . . . because he hated to be alone but also because he found a change of pace in someone like me—young full of energy, willing to play along with whatever he wanted.”

  And what he wanted occasionally was to give expression to “his demons and . . . his more sinister side.” During a visit with him to Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, California, where a raucous Hollywood party was in full swing, Alford refused to try a “popper,” an amyl nitrate capsule that “purportedly enhanced sex.” Unwilling to take no for an answer, Kennedy “popped the capsule and held it under my nose.” She “panicked and ran crying from the room” when the drug caused her heart to race and hands to tremble. Sometime after, Kennedy was “guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House pool,” involving long-time aide Dave Powers: He challenged Mimi “to give Powers oral sex” while he watched. Although she was “deeply embarrassed afterward” and Kennedy apologized to both her and Powers, it did not stop him from asking her at a later date to do the same thing with his younger brother Ted Kennedy. She angrily rejected the suggestion. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she told him. “Absolutely not.”

  What Alford didn’t quite understand was
how dependent Kennedy had become on her and how these callous actions expressed the anger he fixed on her as the object of his dependence. In some unspecified way, she filled a vacuum in his need for mothering, affection, and attention as well as for a release from presidential obligations. “He always asked . . . about her social life.” When she told him that she had begun dating someone she thought was “really nice,” he said, “Ah Mimi, you’re not going to leave me, are you?” It was true words spoken in jest. At their last meeting in November 1963, Kennedy embraced her and said, “I wish you were coming with me to Texas,” which was ruled out by Jackie’s presence on the trip. “I’ll call you when I get back,” he added. Reminding him that she was getting married, Alford recalled him saying, “‘I know that,’ . . . and shrugged. ‘But I’ll call you anyway.’” He seemed to need her more than she needed him—however sad she was at ending their remarkable affair.

  As he entered the presidency, Kennedy had to be mindful of the risks to his public reputation from revelations about his closely guarded health problems and his affinity for extramarital affairs. Attempting to hide these personal weaknesses became an additional challenge to the daunting problems that now awaited him in the Oval Office.