The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Thus the coming of Dean Rusk. One pictures the process. The Establishment peers sit around and ponder who its candidates should be. Slowly varying possibilities are checked off. Most of the best-known are too old. The young President seems to want a Democrat and that eliminates a good many other names. And finally the name that comes to the fore is Dean Rusk, a man who is nominally a Democrat (he holds his job at the Foundation not so much through the courtesy of the Rockefellers as through John Foster Dulles, who got it for him). Knows the military, knows strategy, plays the game. So, quietly, the campaign for Rusk was put together and his qualifications tallied: not too young, not too old; a Democrat, but not too much of one; a Southerner but not too much so; an intellectual, but not too much so; worked on China, but no problems on that—in fact, good marks from the Luce people, who watch the China thing carefully. The acceptable man.

  The Kennedy investigation into Rusk was marginal. There were a few phone calls, one from Richard Goodwin, a bright young man on the White House staff, to a reporter who had served in the China-Burma-India theater, a vast area which had contained the then Colonel Rusk. What about Rusk? Well, he was considered a good guy out there, not making enemies with the British like Stilwell, soothing tempers when Stilwell ruffled them, but he disapproved of the way the British treated the wogs. And he had a slight reputation as a ladies’ man. “Great,” said the New Frontiersman, “Kennedy will love that.” The first and last hint of Dean Rusk the swinger. “What about the China thing,” Goodwin asked, “was he involved in any of that?” “They never laid a glove on him,” answered the reporter, which delighted Goodwin, though later, in a very different era, he would note upon reflection that this should have been a tip-off, the fact that Rusk could have lived through those years and not be touched by the great events. An enigmatic figure before entering the government, he was an enigmatic figure during it (not surprisingly, the best article ever to appear about him was written late in his second term, by Milton Viorst in Esquire under the title “Incidentally, Who Is Dean Rusk?”). Luckily for Rusk, the Kennedy people did not check all of Rusk’s speeches made when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950, for that might have jarred them slightly. There was one which, even given the temper of that particularly rigid time, was a horror, the blood virtually dripping off the teeth of the Chinese-Russian aggressor. It was a speech which might have made the cool Kennedy wince, an affront to his distaste for zealotry.

  By chance, Rusk happened to be with Bowles at a Rockefeller Foundation meeting in Williamsburg when he got his first call from Kennedy.

  “What do you think he wants to talk to me about?” he asked Bowles in a note.

  “He’s going to ask you to become Secretary of State,” Bowles wrote in answer.

  Rusk met with Kennedy the next day and later phoned Bowles.

  “How did it go?” asked Bowles.

  “Forget it,” said Rusk. “We couldn’t communicate. If the idea of my being Secretary of State ever entered his mind, it’s dead now. We couldn’t talk to each other. It’s all over.”

  “I doubt it,” said Bowles.

  They were both right.

  After Rusk had been offered the post as Secretary of State, he retained one doubt about accepting, which was financial. Unlike most good Establishment candidates, he had no resources of his own, neither by inheritance nor by dint of working in a great law firm for six figures a year. (This was a recurrent theme, the financial burden caused by serving in government, and some men, like McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, though not lacking in resources from their New York firms, had to put a sharp limit on the amount of time they spent in Washington in each tour. In Gilpatric’s case the problem was the enormity of alimony caused by two previous marriages.) Rusk, who had just bought a new house in Riverdale, mentioned this problem to Averell Harriman, and while it was not a situation which Harriman had ever faced personally, he enjoined Rusk not to worry. “For God’s sake, man, when you leave State you’ll be overwhelmed with offers, you’ll be rich,” he said. But Lovett was aware of the financial problem, of Rusk’s limited resources, and he moved quickly to bolster Rusk’s position. Rusk, he said, was entitled to some termination allowance in view of accrued pension rights which he would abandon by leaving the Foundation. A very generous settlement was made, and sped by both the Establishment’s connections and resources, Rusk left for Washington.

  On being told that Chester Bowles would be his Undersecretary, Rusk had said again and again how pleased he was with the news. They would, he said, have a Marshall-Lovett relationship—Rusk as the Old Man, Bowles as Bob Lovett. It was an odd idea, for although there were a lot of things in this world that Chester Bowles was guilty of, few would accuse him of being in style, thought or outlook like Bob Lovett. Not surprisingly, the Rusk-Bowles relationship never became a reality, since Rusk worked under a President with whom he could not communicate, and above an Undersecretary who made the President uneasy; none of the three was on the same wavelength as the others. When Rusk and Bowles did communicate it was not always happily (when Bowles returned from Southeast Asia in 1962 and suggested the neutralization of Vietnam, Rusk turned to him, quite surprised, and said, “You realize, of course, you’re spouting the Communist line”). It ended very badly, with Bowles being driven from the Department with no small amount of humiliation involved, after one attempt to fire him failed and after Bowles staved off another himself, much to the annoyance of Joseph Alsop, one of his headhunters. In his column, Alsop said that this proved that Bowles was a eunuch, since he did not know when he was fired. The second attempt to fire him, in the reorganization of the State Department late in 1961 which subsequently became known as the “Thanksgiving Day Massacre,” was a bit more successful, though just as messy, Rusk telling Bowles that he hated to do it, but that Kennedy was behind it, and Kennedy telling Bowles he hated to do it, but Rusk was behind it. Bowles was shifted to a meaningless post at the White House and eventually to his second tour as ambassador to India, an ideal place in the eyes of the Kennedys, since he could listen to the Indians and they to him. He served once again with distinction, and when he retired in 1969 a small group of old friends and enemies gathered at the State Department to bid him farewell. The last toast was proposed by Dean Rusk, in a speech of extraordinary grace in which he talked about Bowles’s constant, relentless youth, the freshness of his mind, and the fact that he had more ideas in a day than most people have in a year.

  The Kennedy years, which were so glittering for everyone else, were a time of considerable pain for Rusk; more than any other senior official he was not on the Kennedy wavelength. There was no intimacy; the President never called him by his first name as he did the other senior officials. The Washington rumormongers, who sensed these nuances with their own special radar, soon turned on him. They claimed that Rusk would go, a rumor mill fed by Kennedy’s own private remarks reflecting doubt upon the Secretary. Even today the photographs of that era bear testimony to the incompatibility: the Kennedy people standing at attention waiting for some foreign visitors, all young and flashy, and Rusk—surprisingly tall—and his wife, both dowdy and older and more tired, looking like the representatives of a previous Administration, or perhaps simply the chaperons at the party. Rusk’s own description of himself, voiced not without some pride, was that he looked like the neighborhood bartender. He knew that Georgetown cut him up, that he did not fit in, and occasionally, when he was relaxed and far from Washington on a trip, a fierce populism would surface against the silky world of Georgetown, the columnists and the writers and the lovely women who did not know the difference between the editorial page and the society page and all of these people who made their living destroying a man’s reputation. There was other, subtler evidence too: Jackie Kennedy’s intimate, graceful letter to Ros Gilpatric, thanking him for a book of beautiful poems and mocking the idea that a gift of such rare sensitivity might have come from “Antonio Celebrezze or Dean Rusk.”

 
The Kennedy-Rusk relationship failed on more serious levels. Rusk, who always did things through channels and by the book, was never able to adjust to the freewheeling, deliberately disorganized Kennedy system, and was more formal in his view of the world than Kennedy. In almost every sense the relationship was exactly what Lovett had warned Kennedy that it should not be. Years later, as the war progressed and Rusk seemed to many of the Kennedy people a symbolic figure, a betrayer of the Kennedy dream, he would be attacked by the very people who had praised the brilliance of the Kennedy selection process. There could be no one to blame but the President himself, and those who had applauded the idea of the weak Secretary of State had gotten what they wanted and deserved. Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

  Thus had the liberals lost the important job in the Administration, though of course they could never admit this. Rather, the main literature of the era was liberal (Schlesinger, Sorensen), and in it there is no note of how Kennedy manipulated the liberals and moved for the center, partly because of a reluctance to admit that it happened, a desire to see the Kennedy Administration as they would have it, and partly to claim Kennedy for history as liberal. Curiously, the closest thing to an admission for the liberals of the era can be found in a novel by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Triumph, in which, describing Worth Campbell, a character based on Dean Rusk, Galbraith wrote:

  And when the Democrats returned, his old friends mentioned him as a man who should be used. He could serve a function but little understood in liberal administrations. These administrations need liberals for domestic tasks—not even a moderate conservative can be Secretary of Labor or of Health, Education and Welfare. But for foreign policy it is essential to have men who inspire confidence. This liberals do not do. Unless immediately on taking office they allay suspicion by taking an exceptionally strong stand in the Cold War, they will be suspected of a tendency, however subjective, towards appeasement of the Communists. The smallest gesture of conciliation will confirm this mistrust. Accordingly liberal administrations must place conservatives in charge of foreign policy or best of all, nonpolitical experts. Thus their need for men like Worth Campbell . . .

  Chapter Four

  It was a glittering time. They literally swept into office, ready, moving, generating their style, their confidence—they were going to get America moving again. There was a sense that these were brilliant men, men of force, not cruel, not harsh, but men who acted rather than waited. There was no time to wait, history did not permit that luxury; if we waited it would all be past us. Everyone was going to Washington, and the word went out quickly around the Eastern seacoast, at the universities and in the political clubs, that the best men were going to Washington. Things were going to be done and it was going to be great fun; the challenge awaited and these men did not doubt their capacity to answer that challenge. Even the campaign quote of Jack Kennedy seemed to keynote it. He had used it again and again, moving swiftly through small towns in the New Hampshire winter, closing each speech with the quote from Robert Frost: “. . . But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” History summoned them, it summoned us: there was little time to lose.

  We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good. Robert Frost, who had occasionally dropped by the Eisenhower White House to complain about the lack of leadership, sensed it. At the inaugural he said that a great new Augustan age was upon us, though he also challenged the new President to be more Irish than Harvard (not realizing that Harvard would produce a fine new breed of aggressive policy makers). It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

  The Eisenhower stock could not have been lower; the country, which had taken reassurance from him at the beginning and relaxed in his easy presence, and which after the Korean War tensions had been ready for a father figure, was now restless. In Eisenhower’s last year in office, James Reston wrote a column in the Times which reflected the disappointment with Ike. Interviewing his friend Uniquack, Reston asked, “Who’s going to win the election?” Uniquack answered that Kennedy would win because “every President in this century has a double letter in his name. William McKinley—two l’s in William, Theodore Roosevelt—two o’s. Then there were Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and of course, Harry.”

  “What about Eisenhower? Wasn’t he President?”

  Uniquack: “We must await the judgment of history on that.”

  Golf had long symbolized the Eisenhower years—played by soft, boring men with ample waistlines who went around rich men’s country-club courses in the company of wealthy businessmen and were tended by white-haired, dutiful Negroes. (Although almost everything John Kennedy did, thought, read, believed, liked was described and examined in minute detail by the public, one thing which was little known and deliberately obscured about the new President was that he was an excellent golfer, a far better player than the outgoing General.)

  In contrast, the new men were tough—“hard-nosed realists” was a phrase often used to define them, a description they themselves had selected. They had good war records; they were fond of pointing out that they were the generation which had fought the war, that they had been the company commanders, had borne the brunt of the war and lost their comrades. This gave them special preparation for the job ahead, it was the company commanders replacing the generals, and even here was seen virtue. Actually, most of it was a myth. It was Walt W. Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, who had made this point, and typically, he had not been a company commander—he had picked bombing targets in Europe. While there were men in the Kennedy Administration who had been company commanders, they had little power in foreign policy. Rusk had been in the service but had been a staff colonel; Robert McNamara had been a semi-civilian doing statistics in the War Department; McGeorge Bundy had been an aide to a family friend who was an admiral; John McCone, head of the CIA, had made millions in shipbuilding (of the top people in national security, only the President had a distinguished war record). But their image was of virility; they played squash and handball to stay in shape, wrote books and won prizes (even the President had won a Pulitzer prize), climbed mountains to clear their minds. Many of them read poetry and some were said to be able to quote it.

  Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one). There was a sense of involvement even for those who were not a part of the excitement; the social columns of the major newspapers were closely read to find out who went to which cocktail and dinner party. We soon found out, however, that they did not go to many cocktail parties. They didn’t have time for that, for the idle chitchat. There were too many outsiders; they preferred, instead, dinner parties among their own, drinking a limited amount of good wine instead of too much hard liquor. The bright, quick repartee was reported, who had said what to whom.

  The President himself was of course the object of the greatest fascination, and we craved details on what he read, what he ate, where he and Jackie went; all of that was news, and started, or ended, trends. It caused James MacGregor Burns to write with s
ome irritation:

  He is not only the handsomest, the best dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; his eye seizes instantly on the crucial point of a long memorandum; he confounds experts with superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipresent; no sleepy staff member can be sure that he will not telephone—or pop in; every hostess at a party can hope that he will. He is omnipotent; he personally bosses and spurs the whole shop; he has no need of Ike’s staff apparatus; he is more than a lion, more than a fox. He’s Superman!