The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  The new awe for the presidential role rubbed off on the President’s very working space:

  The whole White House crackled with excitement under John Kennedy, but the soundproof oval office, the very center and stimulant of all the action, symbolized his own peace of mind. The tall French windows opened onto the completely renovated flower garden of which he was inordinately proud. Even on gloomy days the light pouring in through those windows on the blue rug and freshly painted cream-colored walls bathed his ash splint rocking chair and two beige couches, brought in for more friendly talks, in a quiet glow.

  Breathless description of that office became a set piece in post-Kennedy hymns to the presidency. In his later book, The Kennedy Legacy, Sorensen said that the Nixon people first began to use capital letters for the Oval Office. He forgot Theodore White’s 1961 book:

  But the exercise of the President’s power must be framed by reason, by the analysis of reality as it can only be seen from the President’s desk—and by leading other men to see this reality as he alone perceives it. A hush, an entirely personal hush, surrounds this kind of power, and the hush is deepest in the Oval Office of the West Wing of the White House, where the President, however many his advisers, must sit alone. The Oval Office, thirty-five feet long by twenty-eight feet, four inches wide, is almost too peaceful and luminous a place to echo to the ominous concerns that weigh upon the man who occupies it. Its great French windows, eleven and a half feet high, flood it with light, so that even on somber days it is never dark. From the south windows the President can, in leafless winter, see through the trees all the way to the Washington Monument and beyond; he can, by craning, see west to the Memorial where Lincoln broods. The three windows on the east open out on the lawn, on the rose garden and the brilliance of flowers in spring and summer; when he chooses the President can enter or leave the Oval Office by one of these east windows, which opens as a door, going to or from his private dwelling place in the heart of the White House. The tones of the room are as perfect as its proportions. The gray green expanse of carpeting, into which is woven the Great Seal of the United States, is keyed to the same pastel tonality as the cream-beige walls and the beige drapery. The room changes somewhat from President to President, as it has changed from Eisenhower to Kennedy. Where in Eisenhower’s time the room possessed an uncluttered, almost overpowering openness as one approached the seven-foot, four-inch dark walnut desk at which Eisenhower (as all other Presidents since 1902) sat, it has been softened now with two new curving cream-white sofas before the fireplace that invite the visitor to a respectful closeness with the President.

  There is more—much more—of the description; pages more. It culminates at the principal cult object within the shrine, the Presidential Telephone: “The telephone is silent—it rings with few or no incoming messages, it quivers, generally, only as he exerts his will through it.”

  Hugh Sidey, in his 1963 book on John Kennedy, called the last chapter “The Oval Office”:

  There was an awesome presence in that Oval Chamber which was then quiet, cool, sunlit—the very heart of this nation’s meaning, the very core of freedom, thirty-five feet long by twenty-eight feet, four inches wide. To an outsider the feeling of awe is always there—any man who walks into that office senses it. I wondered if the President ever got used to it, and then I decided that he never does either.

  Earlier Sidey had described it as “the biggest office in the world,” and in his book on President Ford he would call it “the epicenter of power.” But the prize for bedazzlement by the room goes to John Hersey, in the book he wrote about his old Yale football coach, Gerald Ford:

  This room was an egg of light. I had seen that each person who came into it was lit up in two senses: bathed in brightness and a bit high. I had clearly seen each face, to the very pores, in a flood of indirect candlepower that rained down from a pure-white ceiling onto the curving off-white walls and pale-yellow rug and bright furnishings in shades of gold, green, and salmon. But there were also dazzling parabolas of power here; authority seemed to be diffused as an aspect of the artificial light in the room, and each person who came into this heady glow seemed to be rendered ever so slightly tipsy in it and by it—people familiar with the room far less so, of course, than first-time visitors, some of whom visibly goggled and staggered and held on tight as they made their appeals; but even the old hands, even the President’s closest friends, and even the President himself, sitting in a bundle of light behind the desk of the chief, seemed to me to take on a barely perceptible extra shine in the ambiguous radiant energy that filled the room.

  Hersey takes us on tour, as others have, but spares us the dimensions-down-to-inches. He likes the furniture, especially a grandfather clock whose “forceful ticking inexorably marked the moments of history—and of nonhistory—in this room of light.” The office itself was now a superhuman dwelling place, as Theodore White made embarrassingly clear in his genuflections at the shrine: “For the laws of Congress cannot define, nor can custom anticipate, the unknown—and this is where the great Presidents must live, observant of the law yet beyond the law, Chief Executive and High Priest of American life at once.” (Italics added)

  Charisma, in the Weberian sense, is not transferable—even to members of the “graced” leader’s own family. But later Presidents would be measured by the expectations Kennedy raised. He did not so much elevate the office as cripple those who held it after him. His legend has haunted them; his light has cast them in shadow. For the cult of power launched by Neustadt continued into the seventies. The “in” book on the presidency during that decade was James David Barber’s Presidential Character (1972); and no work better illustrates how the fads of an academician’s graduate school days remain his dogmas in later life. His first scholarly work is the outgrowth of those fads, and he is inclined to defend that work against later evidence. Barber tests presidential character entirely by Neustadt’s norms, and especially by the capacity to enjoy the exercise of power. The subchapter on Roosevelt’s character is titled, “Franklin’s Growth to Joy in Work.” We are told that his upbringing gave him the self-confidence that led to a “hunger for results.” This makes for contrast with Eisenhower and Coolidge, who are “guardians of the proper system,” working through channels. Barber’s Eisenhower fails, like Neustadt’s, by the dutiful rather than joyful exercise of power: “Why then did Eisenhower bother to become President? Why did he answer those phone calls on the golf links [those symbolic golf links]? Because he thought he ought to. He was a sucker for duty, and he always had been. Dutiful sentiments which would sound false coming from most political leaders ring true from Eisenhower.” The Coolidge-Eisenhower type is not result-oriented: “Its political weakness is its inability to produce, though it may contribute by preventing.” Nonetheless the nation’s “unfinished business” accumulates under this type. So: “Eventually some leader ready to shove as well as to stand fast, someone who enjoys the great game of politics, will have to pick up the pieces.”

  Another leftover of the sixties was Arthur Schlesinger’s claim that John Kennedy was a late developer, but one who showed great capacity for growth through experience, making him an “existential” leader who learned by doing. All these notes are struck in the Barber sections on Kennedy. The Roosevelt-Kennedy type has a “sense of the self as developing, demonstrated externally in evidence of openness, experiment, flexibility, and growth.” Though Kennedy did not develop during his congressional years, his response to the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis showed that he was capable of growth in office. “Along the way he discovered what he believed.” He demonstrated “the capacity to incorporate experience.” Thus “the inner confidence he had acquired as a youth freed him to grow as President, through one crisis after another, to a grasp of the full potentialities of the office.” Naturally, those potentialities involved a sense of enjoyment in power, one radiated to others: “Jack left people feeling they could do better and enjoy it.… He found Earth an exciting place
to live, and said so. His emphasis on arousing democracy to action is obvious from ‘Ask not.…’”

  Barber’s addition to the Neustadt-Schlesinger cult of enjoyed power was the set of four categories he set up for “typing” modern Presidents. This was meant to be a predictive tool, though Barber’s later use of it for that purpose has been wrong when not hedged. Jimmy Carter read the Barber book on the way to the presidency, and felt he could be the type implicitly praised throughout, the “active-positive” Roosevelt-Kennedy type; and Barber gave cautious support to that expectation. Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, dutifully reported that the President enjoyed his time in the White House.

  Barber does not say where he picked up his four categories. One would think his scientific claims called for methodological explicitness. But he just posits the types by fiat. True, one of the “baselines,” as he calls it, was almost a given at the time he wrote:

  The second baseline is positive-negative effect toward one’s activity—that is, how he feels about what he does. Relatively speaking, does he seem to experience his political life as happy or sad, enjoyable or discouraging, positive or negative in its main effect. The feeling I am after here is not grim satisfaction in a job well done, not some philosophical conclusion. The idea is this: is he someone who, on the surfaces we can see, gives forth the feeling that he has fun in political life?

  At this point, presumably by some mixing of his file cards, Barber attributes to Henry Stimson the quote I gave above on page 178 from Theodore White, on the enjoyment of power as the test of a leader. Aside from that mixup, Barber’s “baseline” is pure Neustadtism.

  Barber might have graded all Presidents along this single line, as a continuum; in fact, he ends up doing that. But he has methodological aspirations that require the creation of separate boxes, so this baseline must be intersected at right angles with another, the “active-passive” one that grades a man on his energy or lack of it, depending on his “stance toward environment.” It might seem that the two things run parallel rather than at right angles. After all, the enjoyment of power and the exercise of it are naturally concomitant; and one who dislikes it will not be active in using it. But the actual cases Barber discusses suggest that he is distinguishing self-image from reciprocal expectations of others. That is made clear in the psychobiographical episodes Barber uses—which, in turn, reveal that another sixties fad has been taken over for pseudo-scientific exploitation. Positive or negative attitude toward oneself, positive-negative attitude toward one’s environment—what are they but the two basic attitudes, yielding four “life positions,” of Transactional Analysis as that was popularized in Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964) and Thomas Harris’s I’m OK—You’re OK (1967). Though Barber pretends not to be judgmental in ranking his four types, he clearly sees them in the order of preference set by Berne and Harris. The person who “feels good about himself and others” is the adult. The other types are deficient.

  Harris’s “I’m Not OK—You’re OK” is the child’s world, of low self-esteem and high regard for others. In Barber that becomes the active-negative presidency of Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, where there is active striving to win approval, but the very striving tends to defeat its object: “Active-negative types pour energy into the political system, but it is an energy distorted from within.”

  Harris’s “I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK” is the adolescent’s disillusioned state, tending toward withdrawal if not autism. This becomes Barber’s passive-negative (or Coolidge-Eisenhower) type, which “does little in politics and enjoys it less” because of “low self-esteem based on a sense of uselessness.” Presidents of this type tend “to withdraw, to escape from the conflict and uncertainty of politics by emphasizing vague principles (especially prohibitions) and procedural arrangements”—all those damn Eisenhower committees.

  Harris’s “I’m OK—You’re Not OK” is the rebellious adolescent stage tending toward crime. Whom could Barber put here? Not Richard Nixon, who committed crimes in office—he has already been slotted as a childish “active-negative.” Actually, no Presidents really fit this slot, so Barber pulls a fast one on us, tacitly redefining his norms rather than spoil the quadripartite symmetry of his scheme. He puts Taft and Harding in this category because they had “low self-esteem (on grounds of being unlovable, unattractive).” That should make them negative types, not positive—but he introduces a second note to keep them from slipping over to keep company with Eisenhower and Coolidge. He says they have a “superficial optimism” that somehow survives the low self-image. In other words, they have high expectation of others—which should, by parallel with the other types, put them in the active as well as the positive category! They are being forced into the mold, to keep the mold intact.

  Harris’s “I’m OK—You’re OK” is the healthy adult world in which people joyfully take up “the wager of action.” That obviously is Barber’s ideal—the Roosevelt-Kennedy “active-positive” presidency combining “high self-esteem and relative success in relating to the environment.” The whole rickety structure was put together to give a quasi-systematic justification for the Neustadt presidency: “The man shows an orientation toward productiveness as a value and ability to use his styles flexibly, adaptively, suiting the dance to the music. He sees himself as developing over time toward relatively well defined personal goals—growing toward his image of himself as he might yet be.”

  What is consistent in Barber’s analysis comes from the Neustadt continuum. What is inconsistent comes from the Berne-Harris categories. Even Neustadt, in a later edition of his Presidential Power, finds it useless to consider Johnson and Nixon along with Wilson and Hoover as exemplars of a single type: “I admire but am doubtful of a scheme that crowds these four into a single square.” He would doubt more, probably, if he reflected that Barber also put John Adams in that square. The differences are so much more important than the similarities that the grid becomes distortive, even if one assumes that Barber has “correctly” assigned people by his own norms. Yet even that assumption is dubious. Barber has clearly read the biographical evidence with a bias toward “typing” people. Intimates of Dwight Eisenhower would be amused to learn he had a low self-esteem; yet that is what is called for, if he is to fit Barber’s purposes, so that is what he acquires. The man condemned for being dutiful is given the duty of fitting in. He might comfort himself with the fact that he shares room in this low category with that other President who lacked self-esteem, George Washington.

  All this might be dismissed as games academics play, except for the fact that Barber’s book was taken fully as seriously as Neustadt’s—testimony to an intellectual need for the glorification of Kennedy (and power) at the expense of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. What Stevenson lacked was the “balls” (in Joseph Alsop’s words) to shake the nation out of Eisenhower’s lethargic grip. It was not enough for Neustadt’s liberals to be liberal. They had to be liberals in love with power. To suspect power was to doubt oneself; and self-doubt reduced a man to Adlai helplessness.

  Barber’s book is just one vivid example of the way the Kennedy appetite for power was used to grade all subsequent Presidents, none of whom has earned the “A” rating of active-positive. A contributing reason for their failure may be the very establishment of such a grading system.

  15

  Delegitimation

  The White House is small, but if you’re not at the center it seems enormous. You get the feeling that there are all sorts of meetings going on without you, all sorts of people clustered in small groups, whispering, always whispering.

  —LBJ TO DORIS KEARNS

  “Camelot” ended in November of 1963. But its effects were just beginning to be felt. The Kennedys have been a presence in the White House ever since, bedeviling later occupants. Charisma, the uniquely personal power, delegitimates institutions. Rule by dazzlement cannot be succeeded by mere constitutional procedure. Reinhard Bendix states the problem: “Such a transformation from cha
rismatic leadership to traditional domination occurs most frequently when the problem of succession must be solved. In a strict sense that problem is insoluble, for charisma is an inimitable quality that some higher power is believed to have bestowed upon one person. Consequently a successor cannot be chosen at all. Instead, the followers wait in the hope that another leader will appear who will manifest his own charismatic qualification.”

  No sooner was President Kennedy dead than his followers began to think and speak of a restoration. Lyndon Johnson was at best an interlude, at worst a usurper—intrusive, in any case; out of the proper order of things. The loonier Left tried to involve Johnson in the assassination itself. Others more vaguely blamed Texas for the President’s death, and made the Texan successor guilty by association. For some, Johnson had murdered, if nothing else, a style. For William Manchester, it was an abomination to have a vulgarian inside that magic egg of blinding whiteness, John Kennedy’s Oval Office.

  Awareness of these criticisms dulled the political instincts of Lyndon Johnson. A man as large as Paul Bunyan in the Senate had been pre-shrunk in a White House where Kennedy aides snickered at him. And even when he came to power, he could take no revenge upon them. In fact, he had to woo them, ask for their help, try to maintain a continuity of authority. And the more he tried to do this, the less could he be his own uninhibited self. His salty style had to be toned down. He tried to assume an alien dignity that came across, on TV, as acute discomfort. His insecurities were exposed by this situation, as by no other. George Ball rightly observed of him, ringed by Kennedy’s Rhodes Scholars, that Johnson did not suffer from the lack of a good education but from his sense of lacking a good education.