The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  McNamara, Bundy (who had been too powerful for Pusey at Harvard), Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, Sargent Shriver. Did they need a Texan? Everyone who met Bill Moyers came away impressed—a Kennedy-style Texan, with perhaps too much of the Bible in him, but that would change. A general? They had Maxwell Taylor, a good general, soldier-statesman, an intellectual who read books avidly and had even written one. They said he had resigned in the Eisenhower years in protest against the archaic defense policies, but they were wrong—he had not resigned, he had retired after serving the full four years, and then he had written his book. But the book was so critical that it seemed as if he had resigned—a small but very important difference which went unnoticed at the time. Still, he was their general; if Harvard produced generals it would have produced Max Taylor.

  It was an extraordinary confluence of time and men, and many people in the know quoted Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to them at the first Cabinet meeting. He, the outsider, like us, looked at them with a certain awe, which was no wonder, since they had forgotten to invite him to the meeting, and only at the last minute, when the others were arriving, did someone remember the Vice-President and a desperate telephone search went on to find him. They were all so glamorous and bright that it was hard to tell who was the most brilliant, but the one who impressed him the most was “the fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair.” The fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair! A terrific line, because it once again delineated Johnson, who, Vice-President or no, seemed more a part of the Eisenhower era than this one. What was not so widely quoted in Washington (which was a shame because it was a far more prophetic comment) was the reaction of Lyndon’s great friend Sam Rayburn to Johnson’s enthusiasm about the new men. Stunned by their glamour and intellect, he had rushed back to tell Rayburn, his great and crafty mentor, about them, about how brilliant each was, that fellow Bundy from Harvard, Rusk from Rockefeller, McNamara from Ford. On he went, naming them all. “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” said Rayburn, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

  So they carried with them an exciting sense of American elitism, a sense that the best men had been summoned forth from the country to harness this dream to a new American nationalism, bringing a new, strong, dynamic spirit to our historic role in world affairs, not necessarily to bring the American dream to reality here at home, but to bring it to reality elsewhere in the world. It was heady stuff, defining the American dream and giving it a new sense of purpose, taking American life, which had grown too materialistic and complacent, and giving it a new and grander mission. (That special hubris about the American age remained with some of the Kennedy people long after it had all gone sour and indeed come apart. In 1968, when the horror of the war and Gene McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire had finally driven Robert Kennedy from his role of Hamlet to announcing that he would become a candidate, Theodore Sorensen wrote for his announcement speech: “At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.” The sentence absolutely appalled all the younger Robert Kennedy advisers, who felt it smacked of just the kind of attitude which had gotten us into Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite their protests, it stayed in the speech.) The United States playing a new role, mighty and yet good. Not everyone, of course, was stirred by it. If there was a lack of modesty in the Kennedy beginnings, there were intellectuals who felt a more modest, limited sense about their own nation and its possibilities. In 1957, at a special symposium of American scholars, Walt Rostow, who would come to symbolize during both the Kennedy and the Johnson years the aggressive, combative liberal nationalism of the era, had made his case for an American national interest earlier in the symposium. Then David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, quietly warned against the dangers implicit in much of what Rostow had suggested (the Rostow idea that the American perspective of the world had not kept pace with American power in it and over it), which struck Riesman as jingoism. The Civil War, Riesman said, was “deadly serious as an omen of bellicosity and bigotry,” and he thought a humbler and more modest view of American society and its potential role in a diverse world was called for, as well as recognition of the failure of American culture here at home, the failure of the quality of American life, an understanding that not all indices of American life could be found in the booming statistics of the GNP. He felt that something was desperately missing. Commenting on “a kind of blandness that I somehow see as inhuman,” he noted that “when I see a French or Italian movie, the faces seem more alive and expressive than American faces in equivalent films. The very rich are perhaps unhappy in all countries. Their faces are often sour, fearful and suspicious. In America, millions are among the very rich in international terms, while the white-collar workers and many of the factory workers seem to me to be unhappy also—ill at ease in Zion.”

  It would not be the last time Riesman was prophetic: in 1961, when the Kennedy team was already on board and there was great enthusiasm over the new theories of counterinsurgency (Rostow, his antagonist in the 1957 symposium, became one of the great propagators of antiguerrilla warfare) and Vietnam had been chosen as a testing ground, Riesman remained uneasy. In mid-1961 he had lunch with two of the more distinguished social scientists in the Kennedy government. On the subject of Vietnam the others talked about limited war with the combativeness which marked that particular era, about the possibilities of it, about the American right to practice it, about the very excitement of participating in it. All of this smacked strongly of the arrogance and hubris of the era, and Riesman became more and more upset with the tone and the direction of the conversation, until finally he stopped them and asked if they had ever been to Utah. Utah! No, they said, not Utah, but why Utah, had Riesman ever been there? No, Riesman answered, but he had read a great deal about the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and it occurred to him that his friends did not know much about America, about how deep the evangelical streak was. “You all think you can manage limited wars and that you’re dealing with an elite society which is just waiting for your leadership. It’s not that way at all,” he said. “It’s not an Eastern elite society run for Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.”

  He left them after lunch, uneasy about the direction the country was taking. He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend. They were, he thought, provincials. Brilliant Atlantic provincials.

  It was only natural that the intellectuals who questioned the necessity of American purpose did not rush from Cambridge and New Haven to inflict their doubts about American power and goals upon the nation’s policies. So people like Riesman, classic intellectuals, stayed where they were while the new breed of thinkers-doers, half of academe, half of the nation’s think tanks and of policy planning, would make the trip, not doubting for a moment the validity of their right to serve, the quality of their experience. They were men who reflected the post-Munich, post-McCarthy pragmatism of the age. One had to stop totalitarianism, and since the only thing the totalitarians understood was force, one had to be willing to use force. They justified each decision to use power by their own conviction that the Communists were worse, which justified our dirty tricks, our toughness.

  Among those who felt that way was Riesman’s opponent in the debate, Walt Whitman Rostow, who had authored one of the best of the campaign phrases—“Let’s get this country moving again”—and he was now safely ensconced in the White House. Kennedy had intended to funnel him to State, but Rusk, who had accepted most of Kennedy’s other appointees, and half the former Democratic governors of America, had finally put his foot down. He found Rostow particularly irritating—this verbose, theoretical man who intended to make all his theories work. So Rostow was shif
ted to the White House, under McGeorge Bundy, who was already installed in a better slot than he had expected.

  At first there had been some talk about Bundy getting a position at State, but he had quickly turned down an offer to become Deputy Undersecretary of State for Administration, saying that he did not feel it was worthwhile to leave Cambridge, where he was a dean, to come to Washington to be a dean. Kennedy thereupon offered him the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, but since Bundy did not appear to know much about it, the job not carrying with it the power and prestige that the McNamara years would bring to it (prestige in part due to McNamara’s tendency, conscious or unconscious, to usurp the powers of the Secretary of State, and Rusk’s tendency to let him do it), he turned it down. He was then made Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, where by the force of his personality, intelligence, and great and almost relentless instinct for power, he was to create a domain which by the end of the decade would first rival and then surpass the State Department in influence. Since he ended up with a job far better than he had expected, his support of Kennedy during the campaign having been somewhat less active than other professors’, and though he was not a great admirer of Rostow and shared some of the doubts of Rostow’s colleagues, he quickly paid a debt to Kennedy by adding Rostow to the White House staff, sure that he could handle him there.

  For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle not just Rostow, and the job, but the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the brightest light in that glittering constellation around the President, for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything. If this was the quality of the young President, then no one else exemplified it more than Bundy, who seemed on the surface to be the sharpest intellect of a generation, a repository of national intelligence. Even Kennedy talked of Bundy with a certain awe: what a pleasure it was to work with him all day, he could sense what you wanted before you ever knew it yourself. “You can’t beat brains,” Kennedy said of Bundy. He was young and vigorous, and besides intelligence, he had style too. He was an egghead, but he was safe. Although he was a Republican, he had been for the Kennedy candidacy—was there any greater guarantee that he would rise above petty partisanship to serve the nation, the right idea of nation? He was not committed to the myths of the past, he was committed only to the existence of a strong, free, democratic America in a stable world.

  Bundy was a man of applied intelligence, a man who would not land us in trouble by passion and emotion. He was an aristocrat and a Brahmin, and yet, more than that, not a prisoner of the Brahmin world; he had gone beyond that closed little arena to play in a larger sphere. He was admired for his cool, lucid mind, the honed-down intelligence, the brilliance of the mathematician, the insight of the political-science scholar at Harvard. He had been a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age and perilously close to being president of it (“Sic transit gloria Bundy,” quipped the classicist John Finley when Nathan Pusey was chosen). The early Washington years seemed to confirm the Bundy legend. He was at the center of things, darting in and out of the President’s office (“Goddammit, Mac,” someone heard Kennedy say, “I’ve been arguing with you about this all week long,” and that was power—being able to argue with the President all week long). He was a Kennedy favorite, that was clear, and in 1962, when he was offered the presidency of Yale (a job which might have tempted him in another time, and which eventually went to his close friend Kingman Brewster), Kennedy was, there is no other word for it, effusive about not losing him. In a rare show of emotion, Kennedy declared that the possibility of Bundy’s leaving the White House was out of the question.

  He was above self-interest, as others, politicians, labor leaders, Negro leaders, were not (“Bundy’s devotion to duty is consonant with his upbringing,” said the Saturday Evening Post in 1962). In contrast to the austere quality of his work style, he was considered charming at dinner parties, engaging and witty, and people marveled at the difference between the professional Bundy and the social Bundy. While the latter seemed almost gay and irreverent—if not warm, at least open—the professional Bundy was all steel and work and drive; the smile was hard, almost frozen. There was also a lack of willingness to resist a put-down when someone was inept or slowed him down, and at times there seemed to be a certain cruelty about him, the rich, bright kid putting down the inferior. “Stop whining,” he told one high State Department official, and the official upon reflection decided that he had, in fact, been whining, though the put-down did not make him like Bundy any more. When in 1961 Daniel Ellsberg at Defense discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a War Plan, which told how they would go to war, and more important, that they had carefully hidden this fact from civilians, including among others the Secretary of Defense, he was dispatched to the White House by his superiors to inform Bundy. Feeling that the manner in which he had uncovered the plan and the secrecy around it were almost as significant as the plan itself, Ellsberg began by trying to explain how he had come across it. Bundy quickly interrupted him. “Is this a briefing or is it a confessional?” he snapped. It was the kind of put-down that many others in the government would feel, and thus in later years, when Bundy began to develop his problems and his reputation slipped, there was a surprising number of people who took no small pleasure in it. He had left more scars than he intended, in contrast to McNamara, who tended to retain a far higher degree of personal loyalty from his subordinates.

  Yet these stories would surface later; if one was put down by Mac Bundy in those days, he did not boast about it. That would have been a sign of being on the outside, for Bundy was a favorite, if not the favorite of the taste makers, a man who had nevertheless entered the White House with Walter Lippmann promoting him for Secretary of State. That is to say, he was not the favorite man of Capitol Hill and the bureaucracy, which he treated with an icy disdain, the former as if it did not exist, the latter as if it existed to be circumvented, telling friends that he was a traffic cop on the job, trying to short-circuit the government machine. Rather, he was the favorite of that predominantly liberal part of Washington which sets the tone of the city, deciding who is good and who is bad, who is in and who is out, what is legitimate and what is not, who has power and who does not. He made himself accessible to the right elements of the press, columnists linked with the establishment such as James Reston or Joseph Alsop, or Henry Brandon, a reporter for the London Sunday Times who sometimes seemed almost a part of the high level of government. That this small segment of the press did not constitute the press itself did not bother him, and some of the newer journalists such as Sander Vanocur, the White House correspondent for NBC, complained regularly that Bundy snubbed reporters representing such proletarian outlets as the National Broadcasting Company. (His feelings about the press, its uses and values were probably best illustrated by a note he sent to Pierre Salinger on the occasion of the latter’s communiqué at the time of Diem’s death: “Pierre, Champion! Excellent prose. No surprise. A communiqué should say nothing in such a way as to feed the press without deceiving them.” Later there was some question about whether he had said “feed the press” or “fool the press,” and Bundy insisted he only wanted to feed the reporters.)

  Men like Vanocur and James Deakin, a highly respected reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who, interviewing Bundy, heard him say, “This is very boring,” did not come to love Bundy at all, and there was a feeling of many in Washington that Bundy was in all his dealings too much the elitist. But even here he worked successfully, he was a cool operator who held most of the press at bay, and yet at the same time saw his reputation grow, so that at the height of those years, just
before it all began to sour, Joseph Kraft, one of the best political writers in America, a taste maker himself and the kind of columnist a Bundy would talk to, wrote of him:

  The central fact, what I want most to say, is that Bundy is the leading candidate, perhaps the only candidate for the statesman’s mantle to emerge in the generation that is coming to power—the generation which reached maturity in the war and postwar period. His capacity to read the riddle of multiple confusions, to consider a wide variety of possibilities, to develop lines of action, to articulate and execute public purposes, to impart quickened energies to men of the highest ability, seems to me unmatched. To me, anyhow, he seems almost alone among contemporaries, a figure of true consequence, a fit subject for Milton’s words:

  A Pillar of State; deep on his

  Front engraven

  Deliberation sat, and publick care;

  And princely counsel in his face . . .

  That, of course, was the high point. It was written in the summer of 1965 and published in the fall, and by then the war was deepening, and the doyens of the Establishment were already losing control; only two and a half years later, in 1968, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, some key figures in the Establishment were looking for a candidate who would be both respectable and against the war, and they narrowed it down to Eugene McCarthy or Nelson Rockefeller. They decided to put together as many blue-chip names as they could on an important list and thus begin sending out waves of dovish respectability. The man originating the idea was Kingman Brewster, Bundy’s closest friend, the president of Yale, a cool and skillful politician, caught between the enormously conflicting pressures of his ties to the Establishment and of the growing anger and rebelliousness of his students, the sons of the Establishment. So when Brewster called one of the top officials in the McCarthy campaign to see if the idea was acceptable, he was told the idea sounded all right and they should go ahead. Brewster then asked for names for the list. “Well, what about your friend Mac Bundy?” the McCarthy official asked.