The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  And so he joined the new Administration. He came full-blown, a man of definite characteristics. By a curious irony he arrived, in Washington’s mind, a full-scale intellectual, though in Harvard’s mind the super administrator, a man who often took the side of the individual against the bureaucracy (though eventually in Washington some of the men around him would realize that he was, above all, the administrator, the supreme mover of papers. “Clerk of the world,” said Mark Raskin, a disenchanted man who once worked for him on disarmament. Raskin had been hired as an opening to the far left, but it never worked, Raskin leaving early as a bitter critic of the government’s directions, firing off letters and documents critical of the Administration. “Please stop identifying yourself as a former White House aide,” Bundy enjoined him). He was bright and he was quick, but even this bothered people around him. They seemed to sense a lack of reflection, a lack of depth, a tendency to look at things tactically, functionally and operationally rather than intellectually; they believed Bundy thought that there was always a straight line between two points. He carried with himself not so much an intellectual tradition as a blood-intellectual tradition, a self-confirming belief in his origins and thus himself, all of this above partisanship. “I was brought up in a home where the American Secretary of State is not the subject of partisan debate,” he once said during the McCarthy period when Acheson was under attack. It was the Establishment’s conviction that it knew what was right and what was wrong for the country. In Bundy this was a particularly strong strain, as if his own talent and the nation’s talent were all wrapped up together, producing a curious amalgam of public interest and self-interest, his destiny and the nation’s destiny; a strong conscious moral sense of propriety, which he was not adverse to flashing at others, and a driving, almost naked thrust for power all at once. Partly as a result, he had what one friend called a “pugnacious morality.” McGeorge Bundy, then, was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country; in their minds they become responsible for the country but not responsive to it.

  Thus, foreign policy was not a chord running through the country and reflecting the changes, and in 1964 and 1965 when Martin Luther King, Jr., began to make public speeches criticizing the war, the entire Establishment turned on him to silence him. They assured him that he knew about civil rights, but not about foreign policy; he was not an expert and they were. He remained bitter about this put-down to the day he died, feeling that he had in effect been told that, Nobel Prize or not, there were certain things that were not his business. Others who were in the Administration felt similarly excluded. “Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people,” Galbraith would recall years later. “We knew that their expertise was nothing, and that it was mostly a product of social background and a certain kind of education, and that they were men who had not traveled around the world and knew nothing of this country and the world. All they knew was the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist. But that made no difference; they had this mystique and it still worked and those of us who doubted it, Goodwin, Schlesinger, myself and a few others, were like Indians firing occasional arrows into the campsite from the outside.”

  The other strain running through Bundy, not surprisingly, given the first strain, was a hard-line attitude which was very much a product of the fifties and the Cold War, the ultrarealist view. That this attitude also made one less vulnerable to attacks from the right about softness on Communism did not hurt; it dealt at once with totalitarians abroad and wild men at home. Force was justified by what the Communists did; the times justified the kind of acts which decent men did not seek, but which the historic responsibilities made necessary. This was very much a part of Bundy, a willingness to accept the use of force and to concentrate his energies on operational tactical questions.

  As Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Bundy soon became the invaluable man in the Kennedy Administration. Keeping the papers moving, reminding the President when a decision was coming up, occasionally helping to channel a promising young man in State who might give a slightly different viewpoint to the President, protecting the President against people who wanted his time but were not worthy of it, making sure that people who needed his time got it, learning quickly what the President’s tastes, needs, reservations were, always moving things. In his own words, the traffic cop. Doing it with style, which would show at an early press conference. Kennedy usually did well on these occasions, but this time he was hampered by a lack of news to reveal. Someone suggested that Kennedy’s decision to reverse the last Eisenhower decision—to bring home the dependents of U.S. troops overseas—would be a dramatic announcement. But the Kennedy decision had not yet been cleared through the bureaucracy, and normally something like that takes weeks and weeks. While others were talking about whether it could be done, Bundy was on the phone, calling Douglas Dillon at Treasury and then the Pentagon and then State, saying, “The President would like to announce today that . . . Do you see any objections?” In five minutes he was back, it was all cleared, all very nifty. So he was busy, protecting the President against the bureaucracy, cutting through the red tape where he could. Being above the petty factional and emotional fights of the bureaucracy, being of course neither a man of the right or of the left but disinterested and realistic, which meant that all things being equal, he was more a man of the status quo than anything else. The changes he would bring, the openings, would be very small, more tactical than anything else. He was not, for example, a great help on the question of disarmament; he stood aside on that one, as did Rusk, while the Defense Department, with John McNaughton and McNamara, was far more helpful.

  He was invaluable, functioning very easily. At meetings the President would ask him to sum up, and then, looking for all the world as if he had not even paid attention, Bundy would instantly give the quickest, most incisive, most complete summing up imaginable. He was a great list man, too. They always needed prospective names, and Mac of course had the list, a job here, a committee there. Mac knew who should go on it, how far left or right it could go, who was acceptable, who was not. Mac was a terrific memo writer, facile, brief and incisive. It was not, as publication of documents would later prove, exactly something which would make the literary world envious, but to be a good memo writer in government was a very real form of power. Suddenly everyone would be working off Bundy’s memos, and thus his memos guided the action, guided what the President would see. For example, friends think that he killed the ill-conceived, ill-fated plan for a multilateral nuclear force, first by determining the crucial bit of evidence, and then by a memo. It was a major policy decision and it was done in typical Bundy fashion. He was against the MLF from the start, it jarred the cleanliness of his mind, and he bided his time as the evidence on the proposal came in; then he dispatched Richard Neustadt of Columbia to make a special investigation, knowing that Neustadt, a specialist in operational procedure, would be appalled by it, which Neustadt was, and thus Bundy summed up the case pro-MLF and anti-MLF, which left the MLF bleeding to death on the floor, speared, as it were, by a memo.

  State was of course large and unwieldy (Acheson liked to tell of how much it had grown; when he became Secretary he had gone by to see Cordell Hull and had suggested that that venerable gentleman come by and meet the Assistant Secretaries. “Well, Dean, you don’t mind if I refuse,” Hull answered, “I never was very much good in a crowd . . .”). This natural clumsiness, coupled with Rusk’s cautiousness, soon created a problem in the bureaucracy. Kennedy was quickly dissatisfied with State, and Bundy, sensing the vacuum, moved deftly to fill it. He began to build his own power, looking for his own elite staff, a mini State Department of very special experts who could protect the President and give alternative answers. They could move papers quickly, some
thing State could never do, and through an informal network at Defense and CIA, they could exploit sympathetic friends and thus create an informal inner network in the government. State, after all, was given to missing deadlines with papers and then answering with last year’s myths. Bundy created an extraordinary staff, bright young men summoned from all areas of the government and academe. They were Robert Komer and Chester Cooper from CIA, Carl Kaysen from Harvard, Jim Thomson from Bowles’s staff, Michael Forrestal, Francis Bator. He worked well with them, and exhibited the rare quality in Washington, in Thomson’s words, “of being able to evoke whatever excellent existed in a person. Every encounter was like a mini Ph.D. exam.”

  Bundy tried to hide his disdain for Rusk as best he could, though in rare moments it would slip through. (It was said that Rusk held his counsel so closely that no one, including the President, was privileged to hear it, and sometimes Bundy would tell the story about a meeting of the six top officials, with Rusk asking all the others to leave so he could talk to the President. When they were alone, the President asked Rusk what it was, and Rusk said, “Well, if there weren’t so many of us in the room . . .”) Rusk, the least incandescent member of the group, bore it well. He resisted the impulse to react to stories being told about him, but at times the anger and irritation would flash through. “It isn’t worth being Secretary of State,” he once told Dick Goodwin, “if you have a Carl Kaysen at the White House.” Substitute for the name Kaysen the name Bundy.

  The latter, of course, did not worry about the rumors of his growing power and influence; he delighted in them, knowing that the reputation that you are the man to see feeds on itself, and makes you even more so. He loved power and did not shrink from it, rather the opposite was true, there was an enormous thrust for it; it sometimes seemed almost naked; the knowledge that he had this reputation bothered him some, yet his own instinct carried him forward. He was known at the White House as a tough infighter; at the beginning of the Administration, Schlesinger and some of the other intellectuals had pushed for Bundy’s Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger to serve as a special consultant on European questions, since Kissinger was said to be very good on the Germans and the Germans always needed reassuring. For a time Kissinger traveled from Cambridge to Washington, though he was not entirely sure whether he wanted to be in or out, and Bundy did not, to say the least, encourage Kissinger’s visits. Eventually they stopped. In 1969, when Kissinger arrived permanently in Washington under Nixon to take the same seat that Bundy had held, it was also announced that Dr. Richard V. Allen, a right-wing figure of some renown, would be Kissinger’s assistant. Asked by friends how he would treat Dr. Allen, who was considered somewhat warlike (in those days Kissinger was not considered warlike), Kissinger answered, “I will handle him the way Mac Bundy handled me.”

  The early White House years were golden years for Bundy. He seemed to gloss over the problems of the world, it was a dream realized, the better for him, the better for the nation. Some of those who knew him felt that although he was not a negative figure, there was something lacking: his thinking and performance were too functional and operational, he was not considering the proper long-range perspective, instead he was too much the problem solver, the man who did not want to wait, who believed in action. He always had a single pragmatic answer to a single question, and he was wary of philosophies, almost too wary (during the great Vietnam debates of 1965 he would call George Ball, a more philosophic man, “the theologian”). But pragmatic thinking is also short-range thinking, and too often panic thinking. A government is collapsing. How do we prop it up? Something is happening; therefore we must move. Thus, in 1965 Bundy was for getting the country into the Dominican mess, because something had to be done, and then very good at extricating us when he realized that extrication had become the problem, though as he and the men around him would learn, not all countries were as easy to get out of as the Dominican Republic.

  Chapter Five

  For all the style and excitement of the new team, and all the great promise, 1961 was a terrible year for the Kennedy Administration. The young President had arrived in the White House with a far slimmer margin of victory than he hoped, a mere 100,000 votes. It was not one of the great mandates, rather a margin which seemed to strengthen his enemies more than his friends, and the mandate of getting America moving again was questionable. America might move at his demand, but in which direction? And in what way could he move it? By building more and heavier missiles? Turning around an irrational policy on China? Bringing the nation together by accelerating long-neglected commitments to American Negroes? His nomination, his campaign, his election had meant many things to many people; now they waited, and many would find themselves disappointed in that first year. He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people. It had all been deliberately done; he had understood television and used it well, knowing that it was his medium, but it was done at a price. Millions of people watching this driving, handsome young man believed that he could change things, move things, that their personal problems would somehow be different, lighter, easier with his election. As President, Kennedy was faced with that great gap of any modern politician, but perhaps greatest in contemporary America: the gap between the new unbelievable velocity of modern life which can send information and images hurtling through the air onto the television screen, exciting desires and appetites, changing mores almost overnight, and the slowness of traditional governmental institutions produced by ideas and laws of another era, bound in normal bureaucratic red tape and traditional seniority. After all, although he had said in his campaign that he wanted to get America moving again, he had not mentioned that the people must allow for the conservatism of Judge Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee; he had implied that he could do it, it would move. In many ways he was as modern and contemporary as an American politician can be, more practiced at the new means of campaigning than any other major figure (he was frankly bored by the traditional power struggles of the Senate; it was not where the action was, or at least the action he sought). So, elected, he was charged with action against a bureaucracy and a Congress which regarded him and his programs with suspicion, the suspicion varying in direct proportion to the freshness and progressiveness of his ideas. In his first major struggle, the great battle to expand the House Rules Committee, a classic conflict of the two forces, Kennedy finally won. But his victory was more Pyrrhic than anything else; it exposed the essential weakness of his legislative position, the divisions in his party, and as such, enemies on the Hill would feel encouraged in their opposition. The lesson, not immediately discernible in the early part of the decade but increasingly important as Americans came to terms with the complexity of their society, was that it was easier to stir the new America by media than it was to tackle institutions which reflected vested interests and existing compromises of the old order. In a new, modern, industrial, demographically young society, this was symbolized by nothing so much as congressional control by very old men from small Southern towns, many of them already deeply committed, personally and financially, to existing interests; to a large degree they were the enemies of the very people who had elected John F. Kennedy. He was caught in that particular bind.

  But there were other problems too. The Administration came in committed to greater defense spending, to ending the missile gap, and the first year would see an intensification of the Cold War as the Administration and the Soviets tried to gauge each other. In terms of the Cold War, 1961 would be a difficult year: there was the Bay of Pigs in April, followed by the escalation in the arms race, the bullying by Khrushchev in Vienna, the growing tensions in Laos, the outbreak of violence in the Congo, the almost daily conflicts over the Berlin Wall, the preliminary reports that Vietnam might be a problem. All this took some of the edge off the excitement of the job, and Kennedy’s oft-quoted comment was that the most
surprising thing about coming to office was that everything was just as bad as they had said in the campaign. A less quoted remark, underscoring the difficulties inherent in events outside his control, came when Carl Kaysen, a White House expert on disarmament, brought in the news that the Soviets had resumed atmospheric testing. The President’s reaction was simple and basic and reflected the frustrations of that year. “Fucked again,” he said.

  All the setbacks would seem minor compared to the Bay of Pigs, which was a shattering event, both within the Administration and outside. It would seriously disturb the balance of the first two years of the Kennedy Administration; it would almost surely necessitate a harder line both to prove to domestic critics that he was as tough-willed as the next man, and to prove to the Russians that despite the paramount foolishness of this adventure, his hand was strong and steady. By necessity now, an Administration which had entered almost jaunty, sure of itself, a touch of aggressiveness and combativeness to it, a touch of wanting to ease tensions in the world, would now have to be more belligerent both for internal and external reasons, and it would not be for another eighteen months, when the Kennedy Administration had already deepened the involvement in Vietnam, that it would begin to retrieve a semblance of its earlier balance.

  In a way it was a test run for the Vietnam escalations of 1965, and it would be said of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson that both had their Bay of Pigs, that the former’s lasted four days and the latter’s lasted four years. But the component parts were there: serious misreading of aspirations of a nonwhite nation; bringing Western, Caucasian anti-Communism to a place where it was less applicable; institutions pushing forward with their own momentum, ideas and programs which tended to justify and advance the cause of the institution at the expense of the nation; too much secrecy with too many experts who knew remarkably little either about the country involved or about their own country; too many decisions by the private men of the Administration as opposed to the public ones; and too little moral reference. And finally, too little common sense. How a President who seemed so contemporary could agree to a plan so obviously doomed to failure, a plan based on so little understanding of the situation, was astounding.