The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  He served overseas in London, gaining experience in foreign affairs, though like most influential Americans who would play a key role in foreign affairs entering government through the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, the group which served as the Establishment’s unofficial club, it was with the eyes of a man with a vested interest in the static world, where business could take place as usual, where the existing order could and should be preserved. He saw the rise of Hitler and the coming military importance of air power; when he returned to America he played a major role in speeding up America’s almost nonexistent air defenses. He served with great distinction during World War II, a member of that small inner group which worked for Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George C. Marshall (“There are three people I cannot say no to,” Lovett would say when asked back into government in the late forties, “Colonel Stimson, General Marshall and my wife”). That small group of policy makers came from the great banking houses and law firms of New York and Boston. They knew one another, were linked to one another, and they guided America’s national security in those years, men like James Forrestal, Douglas Dillon and Allen Dulles. Stimson and then Marshall had been their great leaders, and although they had worked for Roosevelt, it was not because of him, but almost in spite of him; they had been linked more to Stimson than to Roosevelt. And they were linked more to Acheson and Lovett than to Truman; though Acheson was always quick to praise Truman, there were those who believed that there was something unconsciously patronizing in Acheson’s tones, his description of Truman as a great little man, and a sense that Acheson felt that much of Truman’s greatness came from his willingness to listen to Acheson. They were men linked more to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country. Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security). Averell had, after all—there was no getting around it—run for public office and won; he seemed too much the politician and too much the intriguer for them. Perhaps not as bad as Roosevelt, but not exactly one of them, either.

  In 1947, after Acheson had resigned as Undersecretary of State, Marshall (who was then head of State) chose Robert Lovett as his successor, and in 1950 he became Secretary of Defense. If the torch had been passed in earlier years to Elihu Root and Teddy Roosevelt and then to Stimson and Marshall, by 1960 Lovett was next. He had become, now as the sixties were about to begin, the great link to the Stimson-Marshall era. Acheson was a link too, but somehow Acheson had been scarred during the McCarthy era; it was not so much that he had done anything wrong as the fact that he had been forced to defend himself. By that very defense, by all the publicity, he had become controversial. He had been in print too often, it was somehow indiscreet of Dean to be attacked by McCarthy. Lovett was cleaner and he seemed to represent a particularly proud and, more important, successful tradition. For the private men felt they had succeeded admirably: they had taken a great dormant democracy, tuned it up for victory over Japan and Germany, stopped the Russian advance in Europe after the war and rebuilt Western Europe under the plan whose very name was more meaningful to them than to most others. The Marshall Plan had stopped the Communists, had brought the European nations back from destruction and decay, had performed an economic miracle; and there was, given the can-do nature of Americans, a tendency on their part to take perhaps more credit than might be proper for the actual operation of the Marshall Plan, a belief that they had done it and controlled it, rather than an admission that it had been the proper prescription for an economically weakened Europe and that it was the Europeans themselves who had worked the wonders. Yet it seemed as if history had come their way: just as they had predicted, the Russians proved untrustworthy and ungentlemanly (by 1944 there had been growing tensions between Roosevelt and some of his national security people over Soviet postwar aims; the national security people had held a view more parallel to that of Churchill) and had tried to expand in Europe, but Western democratic leadership had turned them back. They were not surprised that a cold war ensued; its very existence made their role, their guidance more necessary than ever. Without the Cold War—its dangers, tensions and threats—there might have been considerably less need of them and their wisdom and respectability. The lesson of history from Munich to Berlin was basic, they decided: one had to stand up, to be stern, to be tough. Lovett himself would talk of those years in the late forties as almost miraculous ones, when the American executive branch and the Congress were as one, when the Marshall Plan, the Point Four program and NATO had come about and been approved.

  The men of that era believed, to an uncommon degree, that their view of history had been confirmed; only a very few questioned it. One of their eggheads, George F. Kennan, became in the fifties increasingly disillusioned with the thrust of American policy, believing that those men had exaggerated Soviet intentions in Western Europe, and had similarly exaggerated their own role and NATO’s role in stopping them. But Kennan was too much of an intellectual; he had been useful to them in the early part of the Cold War, but he became less useful as his own doubts grew; besides, he was not a central member of their group—Lovett was.

  So that cold December day Kennedy was lunching with a man who not only symbolized a group, the Establishment, and was a power broker who carried the proxies for the great law firms and financial institutions, but was also tied to a great and seemingly awesome era. If Kennedy, as he always did in that period, complained that he knew no experts, that was no problem; the Establishment had long lists and it would be delighted to co-operate with this young President, help him along. It was of course above politics. It feared the right (the Goldwater campaign of 1964 was an assault on the entrenched powerful Eastern money by the new and powerless Southern and Western money; it was not by chance that the principal villain for them at San Francisco had been Nelson Rockefeller), and it feared the left; it held what was proclaimed to be the center. More often than not it was Republican, though it hedged its bets. A few members were nominal if cautious Democrats, and some families were very good about it—the Bundy family had produced William for the Democrats, and McGeorge for the Republicans—and it was believed that every major law firm should have at least one partner who was a Democrat. In fact, on the question of Kennedy and Nixon there had been an element of indecision in the Establishment world. One had a sense of the Establishment in an election year being like a professional athletic scout watching a championship match, emotionally uninvolved with either competitor, waiting until it was over and then descending to the locker room of the winner, to sign him on, to offer him the club’s facilities—in this case the trusted, respectable, sound men of the Establishment.

  Kennedy believed in the Establishment mystique; there had, after all, been little debunking of it in early 1960. Rarely had there been such a political consensus on foreign affairs: containment was good, Communism was dangerous, there was of course the problem of getting foreign aid bills through Congress, bills which would help us keep the Third World from the Communists. Besides, he was young, and since his victory over Nixon was slimmer than he had expected, he needed the backing of this club, the elitists of the national security people. And he felt at ease with them: after Chester Bowles and Adlai Stevenson and all the other Democratic eggheads pushing their favorite causes, Lovett, who seemingly pushed no causes and had no ideology, was a relief.

  The two took to each other immediately. When Kennedy asked Lovett what the financial community thought of John Kenneth Galbraith’s economic views (Galbraith being one of the President’s earliest and strongest supporters), he was much amused when Lovett answered that the community thought he was a fine novelist. And when Lovett told Kenn
edy that he had not voted for him, Kennedy just grinned at the news, though he might have grinned somewhat less at Lovett’s reason, which was Lovett’s reservation about old Joe Kennedy. In a way, of course, this would have made Lovett all the more attractive, since much of the Kennedy family’s thrust was motivated by the Irish desire to make these patricians, who had snubbed Joe Kennedy, reckon with his sons; this meeting was, if anything, part of the reckoning. (“Tell me,” Rose Kennedy once asked a young and somewhat shocked aristocratic college classmate of Jack Kennedy’s back in 1939 as she drove him from Hyannisport to Boston, “when are the good people of Boston going to accept us Irish?”)

  The meeting continued pleasantly, Caroline darting in and out, carrying a football, emphasizing to Lovett the youth and the enormity of the task before this man. Lovett had a feeling that he was taking too much of the President-elect’s time, but he found that just the opposite was true. Kennedy tried hard to bring Lovett into the government, to take a job, any job (earlier Kennedy had sent Clark Clifford as a messenger with the offer to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, which Lovett had turned down). Lovett, who had not voted for Kennedy, could have State, Defense or Treasury (“I think because I had been in both State and Defense he thought he was getting two men for the price of one,” Lovett would later say). Lovett declined regretfully again, explaining that he had been ill, bothered by severe ulcers, and each time after his last three government tours he had gone to the hospital. Now they had taken out part of his stomach, and he did not feel he was well enough to take on any of these jobs. Again Kennedy complained about his lack of knowledge of the right people, but Lovett told him not to worry, he and his friends would supply him with lists. Take Treasury, for instance—there Kennedy would want a man of national reputation, a skilled professional, well known and respected by the banking houses. There were Henry Alexander at Morgan, and Jack McCloy at Chase, and Gene Black at the World Bank. Doug Dillon too. Lovett said he didn’t know their politics. Well, he reconsidered, he knew McCloy was an independent Republican, and Dillon had served in a Republican Administration, but, he added, he did not know the politics of Black and Alexander at all (their real politics of course being business). At State, Kennedy wanted someone who would reassure European governments: they discussed names and Lovett pushed, as would Dean Acheson, the name of someone little known to the voters, a young fellow who had been a particular favorite of General Marshall’s—Dean Rusk over at Rockefeller. He handled himself there very well, said Lovett. The atmosphere was not unlike a college faculty, but Rusk had stayed above it, handled the various cliques very well. A very sound man. Then a brief, gentle and perhaps prophetic warning about State: the relations between a Secretary of State and his President are largely dependent upon the President. Acheson, Lovett said, had been very good because Truman gave him complete confidence.

  Then they spoke of Defense. A glandular thing, Lovett said, a monstrosity. Even talking about it damaged a man’s stomach. In Lovett’s day there had been 150 staffmen, now there were—oh, how many?—20,000; there were fourteen people behind every man. An empire too great for any emperor. Kennedy asked what makes a good Secretary of Defense.“A healthy skepticism, a sense of values, and a sense of priorities,” Lovett answered. “That and a good President, and he can’t do much damage. Not that he can do much good, but he can’t do that much damage.” They discussed men of intelligence, men of hardware, men of the financial community, men of driving ambition. The best of them, said Lovett, was this young man at Ford, Robert McNamara, the best of the new group. The others, people like Tom Gates, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, were getting older. Lovett had worked with McNamara in government during the war, and he had been terrific: disciplined, with a great analytical ability, a great hunger for facts.

  Then the meeting was over, and the young man guided the older man through the throng of waiting reporters, saying that he had asked Mr. Lovett to come down and have lunch with him to see if he could get him for State, Defense or Treasury. (That night Lovett’s old friend Arthur Krock, the New York Times columnist, called him to ask, “My God, is there any truth in it—it’s going all over town,” and Lovett answered, “Oh, I think he was just trying to make me feel good.”) Since it was cold and there were no taxis, Kennedy gave Lovett his own car and driver, having failed to give him State, Defense or Treasury.

  Chapter Two

  If lower Manhattan Island and State Street, Boston, and the rest of the world of both Louis Auchincloss and John O’Hara read of the Kennedy-Lovett meeting with considerable reassurance, the first sign that the man in the White House, though young, Irish and a Democrat, knew his shortcomings and that they could deal with him, then there was at least one man who learned of it with a haunting sense of confirmation of what he had always feared. This was not someone who had run against Kennedy or opposed his nomination, but curiously enough someone who had worked very hard for Kennedy’s election and was technically his chief foreign policy adviser—Chester Bowles of Connecticut, liberal icon, whom Kennedy had so assiduously cultivated and pursued just one year earlier, and whose views on all matters of foreign policy Kennedy had seemed, at that moment, to share with such great devotion. Now Bowles watched from a distance what was happening as Kennedy prepared to take office; his phone did not ring often, and what he knew about the Kennedy-Lovett meeting was largely what he read in the New York Times. He sensed that the young President-elect was flashing his very considerable charms at Robert Lovett, just as he once had done with Bowles himself.

  It had been very different in 1959. Then Jack Kennedy had readied himself to run in his party’s primaries, and he had done this as a good liberal Democrat. He was by no means the most obvious of liberals, being closer to the center of his party, with lines put to both the main wings. He knew from the start that if he was going to win the nomination, his problem would not be with the professional politicians, but with the liberal-intellectual wing of the party, influential far beyond its numbers because of its relations with, and impact upon, the media. It was a section of the party not only dubious of him but staunchly loyal to Adlai Stevenson after those two gallant and exhilarating defeats. That very exhilaration had left the Kennedys, particularly Robert Kennedy, with a vague suspicion that liberals would rather lose gallantly than win pragmatically, that they valued the irony and charm of Stevenson’s election-night concessions more than they valued the power and patronage of victory. That feeling of suspicion was by no means unreciprocated; the New Republic liberals were well aware who had fought their wars during the fifties and who had sat on the sidelines.

  The true liberals, those derivative of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, were at least as uneasy about Kennedy as he was about them, sensing that he was too cool, too hard-line in his foreign policies, too devoid of commitment. To them, Kennedy seemed so much the new breed, so devoted to rationalism instead of belief that even his first biographer, James MacGregor Burns, had angered the Kennedy Senate staff, particularly Theodore Sorensen, by suggesting that Kennedy would never risk political defeat on behalf of a great moral issue. They felt he had made too many accommodations in deference to the Cold War climate and adjusted his beliefs; he in turn thought them more than a little naÏve and unrealistic about what was then considered a real Soviet threat. As a young congressman, then very much his father’s son, he had been capable of being pleased by Richard Nixon’s defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, a race marked by the shabbiest kind of Red-baiting. In Massachusetts, where McCarthyism was a particularly emotional issue, dividing the Catholic mass and the intellectual elite, he had carefully avoided taking a stand. He was in the hospital in December 1954 at the time of the Senate vote on McCarthy, but it was said that he had intended to vote for the censure; his evasion of the issue, however, combined with liberal suspicion of both his father’s wartime beliefs and his own Catholicism, did not endear him to traditional liberals. As he moved toward becoming a presidential candidate, he had decided first to ease
liberal doubts. He wanted Stevenson’s support, but that would not come. Since he sensed that Stevenson, though playing Hamlet, rather badly wanted the nomination, Kennedy moved after the next-best thing, the support of Chester Bowles, a hero of the liberal left.

  Bowles seemed so attractive a figure that even in 1958, when Kennedy talked with friends about his own future and candidly admitted that he planned to run for the Presidency, Chester Bowles’s name hung over the conversation. Kennedy thought he had a very good chance at the nomination, certainly better than Symington, Humphrey or Johnson, he said, citing the political liabilities of each. At the moment it looked very good, he confided, and the only real problem was that 1958 was likely to be a good Democratic year and might produce new candidates who could become instant national figures. Two men in particular might pose a real threat: Richardson Dilworth of Pennsylvania, an aristocratic liberal, and Bowles, then contending for a Connecticut Senate seat. Both, he said, could carry the New Republic crowd, the intellectuals and the liberals, and they had as good or better a claim on the constituency which he sought; but unlike him they were Protestants, and thus might serve the purpose of his enemies, many of whom were uneasy about his Catholicism. It was a revealing conversation, about the way he saw the road to the nomination, and the cold and tough-minded appraisal of the problems he faced.

  The twin threat did not materialize. Bowles was unsuccessful in securing the nomination; he was not particularly good at dealing with professional politicians like John Bailey, head of the Connecticut party, who was deeply committed to Kennedy, and Dilworth made the mistake of declaring that Red China ought to be admitted to the United Nations, a statement which contributed mightily to his defeat in Pennsylvania. Dilworth’s brand of candor was somewhat different from the Kennedy candor, which was private rather than public, in that he would freely admit in private what he could not afford to admit publicly (such as telling Bowles and Stevenson after the election that he agreed completely with their positions, that our own policy on China was irrational, but that he could not talk about it then—perhaps in the second term).