* After their conversation Schlesinger wrote in his diary, “It is clear that his [Kennedy’s] measure is concrete achievement, and people who educate the nation without necessarily achieving their goals, like Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, rate below those, like Truman and Polk, who do things without bringing the nation along with them.”
* Charlie Bartlett had also sensed his unease about Bobby succeeding him. While swimming at Camp David that spring, he had suddenly asked Bartlett whether he thought the nominee would be Bobby or Lyndon, adding that he considered Johnson unfit for the presidency. Bartlett said later, “I didn’t have the feeling from this conversation and some others that John Kennedy was particularly thrilled by the fact that Bobby had decided that he would try to succeed him.” He expressed the same reservations to Chuck Spalding, telling him that he thought Bobby was overly ambitious and “hard-nosing it.”
* Typical were his dogged efforts to secure permanent resident status for the Chinese immigrant Toy Lin Chen. He won several temporary extensions of Chen’s visa, submitted and resubmitted private bills, and continued championing the case even when Chen moved to another state. After he had lobbied on Chen’s behalf more than five years, the Senate finally passed a private bill permitting Chen to remain in the country. A grateful Chen sent him a set of sterling silver dessert spoons.
* At another dinner party, Harriman complained that Kennedy was “still trying too hard to get a national consensus before he moved on anything.” Turning to Schlesinger, he said, “I told one of you White House fellows the other day that, whatever you do, whatever compromises you make, you are never going to get the support of the [far-right] John Birch Society. Those fellows [at the White House] think too much about passing legislation and too little about mobilizing the country. Tell them that. Tell them I said that.”
* A December 14, 1962, letter to Kennedy from the president of Frost’s publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, informed him that “Robert had a serious operation on Monday, at Peter Brigham Hospital, where he will be recuperating for several weeks.”
* Burns admitted in 1965 that he might have underestimated him. In fact, he had written a remarkably accurate portrait of him in 1959, and his second thoughts indicated how much Kennedy had changed.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 58
