The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s short intrusion, America has been ruled for nearly four decades by politicians who served in World War II. The men who appeared in a long succession had been rivals and contemporaries. Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson fought over the prize in 1960. Reagan entered the fray in 1968, just as Johnson dropped out. After Eisenhower, our last President born in the nineteenth century, the new generation came onstage represented by its youngest member, then its oldest—first Kennedy, then Johnson (born three years before Reagan). Nixon (born two years after Reagan) and Ford (Nixon’s exact contemporary) preceded Carter, the exception—the first President in almost half a century not to have seen active military duty in the war (he was still at Annapolis when it ended).

  So, even if Reagan has escaped the Kennedy obsession, it is not surprising that he retains a fondness for the war President, Roosevelt, on whom Kennedy tried to model his performance. It has been considered odd for a right-wing Republican, the enemy of “big government,” to admire the New Deal President. But if that is strange, it should be put beside its sister paradox, that Kennedy, who considered himself the successor to Roosevelt, was also scathing in his criticism of “the bureaucracy,” of big government as a set of procedures resisting the will of a great leader. Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the American people” is a culmination of the anti-Washington “counterinsurgent” tendency that was launched by Kennedy and continued by his rival-imitators. The puzzle in both Reagan’s and Kennedy’s attitude is this: How could they admire so heartily a man who, more than any other, helped create the huge bureaucracy both men expressed such contempt for?

  Roosevelt presided over the two-stage “takeoff” of big government in America. The first stage, the New Deal, doubled the government’s budget over a period of eight years. This is the achievement the right wing has always criticized. It does not seem bothered by a second stage, though it was more important in bureaucratic terms. After the nascent welfare state had doubled the size of government in eight years, the warfare state doubled that larger government in half the time. In both cases, the expansion responded to emergency; and in both cases it refused to go away when the emergency had been met. Roosevelt built in terms of long-term size and continuing expansion. He did not see big government as a necessary evil. If anything, the emergencies supplied an opportunity for developments desirable in themselves. Yet those who admired this man had become, by 1960, critics of the large structure that was his most lasting bequest to the nation. In the eyes of Neustadt and Kennedy, the vigor of Roosevelt’s will somehow discredited the sluggish huge bodies that will had called into being. It is hard for charismatic leadership to prolong itself, even in its own most intimate products.

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  Veralltäglichung

  “Don’t, Boris! You are such a diplomat that it is really tiresome,” said Natasha in a mortified voice that trembled slightly. She used the word “diplomat,” which was just then much in vogue among the children, in the special sense they attached to it.

  —War and Peace

  Franklin Roosevelt himself could not have been a post-Rooseveltian President. Those who wanted to apply his techniques to a world which those techniques had shaped were mistaking their own and Roosevelt’s historic moments. Neustadt tried to teach Kennedy how Roosevelt had circumvented the bureaucracy. But Roosevelt did not circumvent that apparatus; he invented it in the first place.

  Presidents since Kennedy have conceived their task as a David-and-Goliath struggle with the vast machinery of government. Control from within of all those cogs and wheels is impossible—they would just churn the President up. So a series of raids from the outside was called for, hit-and-run tactics, guerrilla government. But Roosevelt had been Goliath, not David, proliferating agencies outward from him, not sending raiders against them. The initiator of programs is not a prisoner of their past record, of precedent and procedure. He controls them by setting their goals, choosing their first personnel, presiding over their authorization. All new systems have energy and focus, from the very effort that brought them into being. The dead hand of the past is not yet felt, since the new department has no past, just a bright unindictable future.

  The very pressure of events gave the early welfare state and warfare state sharp definition. Roosevelt did not have to induce a sense of crisis to get his programs accepted. The Depression was real enough; Congress begged the President for more bills during the busy first three months of his administration. People yearned for him to do something, anything, to meet the crisis—and the demands of that crisis, rather than any ideological program, dictated what measures were taken. Some of these were makeshift, some mistaken, some illegal; but all were aimed, supported, desired. Spontaneity and resourcefulness were given a free hand—but only to create measures soon translated into programs, with set procedures.

  There was the same virtue of definition in war measures. Roosevelt was free to override not only ordinary procedures but basic rights. The public supported the most irregular means of guaranteeing national security—a secret decision like that to build nuclear weapons, or an arbitrary punishment like the imprisoning of Japanese-Americans, or unilateral fiat like the unconditional surrender demand. The Manhattan Project was a spectacular success because, in time of peril, the President could commandeer men and talent, site and materials; he could assign tasks, and cloak the whole matter in secrecy, and use the weapons without consulting the citizenry. In all these ways, war gave Roosevelt quasi-charismatic powers—powers most Americans would shudder to see granted in peacetime. After the war, the spontaneous and arbitrary yielded to settled ways again. Security procedures, for instance, may have been unfair after the war, but they were not arbitrary and secret—Congress reviewed and regularized them. If agencies called up in wartime were to justify their continued existence, they had to do so by standards different from those applied at their inception. The one great exception was the CIA, whose funding was kept unconstitutionally secret, and whose mandate had a wartime character. It is no accident that the presidential itch to use charismatic power to overthrow foreign governments, or spy on Americans, or come up with criminal weapons, found its readiest outlet in the CIA’s activities.

  Crisis enables the charismatic leader to launch, unchallenged, projects that must meet challenge in a postcrisis atmosphere. Charisma, that is, must give its own products continuity by submitting to an “everydayizing” of its claims (Veralltäglichung in Weber, normally translated “routinizing”). The successful routinizer of charisma solves the successor problem by presiding over the dissolution of his own unique first claim. Thus George Washington’s authority was lent, in diluted and diffused manner, to the constitutional procedures he affirmed by his resignation of power. The alternative to this is a jealous retention of crisis powers when the crisis is abating. Then the charismatic leader will not surrender his reign to anyone else, nor submit to the least cutback in his authority—the course of Napoleon, of Stalin, of Mao. The problem of routinizing charisma is presented, in parable form, by the formulaic Western movie. A gun-fighter is called in to handle problems too great for the doddering sheriff. If the gunfighter, having got rid of the evil gang, tries to stay on and rule the town with his gun, then getting rid of him becomes the problem. Nixon’s extraordinary musings on the movie Chisum show that he conceived his own task as charismatic, not regular—as the gunfighter’s, not the sheriff’s. If bureaucratic “big government” gets defined, permanently, as a doddering old sheriff, then each presidential election becomes a call for some new gunfighter to face the problems “government” cannot solve.

  Kennedy’s successors have drifted, steadily, toward this conception of their role. But their appeal to Roosevelt as a model is unjustified. It is true that crises gave Roosevelt quasi-dictatorial power, and that dictatorship in the old Roman sense became respectable again in the thirties. A widespread disillusionment with parliamentary procedures, combined with a fear of the radical Left and
with economic breakdown, led to the call for strong leaders—for Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. This mood even gave a momentary glamour of menace to American figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin or an Englishman like Sir Oswald Mosley. But Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s, was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions. In that sense, Roosevelt resisted even while exercizing “charisma,” relegitimating institutions at a time when other strong leaders were delegitimating them. This made Roosevelt differ not only in historical moment from the Kennedy period, but even more basically from Kennedy’s conception of power. Theorists of “deadlock” in the Eisenhower fifties felt that the lethargy of the public, the obstructionism of Congress, the external menace of communism made it imperative for a President to seize every margin of power available to him: he was facing so many hostile power centers that only the glad embrace of every opportunity could promise him success. No internal check upon one’s appetite for power was needed; the external checks were sufficient—were overwhelming, in fact, unless the President became single-minded in his pursuit of power. But Roosevelt did not have this ambition of seizing power to be used against his own government. He sought power for that government, and set up the very agencies and departments that Neustadt and his followers resented. He created subordinate power centers, lending them his own authority. He began that process of “routinizing” crisis powers that is the long-range meaning of the New Deal. There is something perverse about the “liberal” attack on Eisenhower’s bureaucracy in the nineteen-fifties, which simply revived the Republicans’ first response to the New Deal.

  For Max Weber, charismatic power must always yield in time, either gracefully or by violence, to the everyday order of kingship (traditional rule) or contractual “modern” government (legal rule). And if the course taken is toward legal rule, then it will tend, of necessity, toward bureaucracy, toward patterns of accountability, predictability, oversight, and record-keeping. By contrast with a swift and arbitrary charismatic rule, this kind of government will seem to many “inefficient.” In the same way, due process in criminal law is slower than arbitrary justice. But, outside crisis circumstances, the arbitrary soon becomes indefensible. Everyday conditions call for a regularization of procedures. Reinhard Bendix breaks down Weber’s concept of bureaucracy into five main notes.

  1. Continuity. Crisis-oriented government assembles itself for the moment; and, between crises, tends to dissolve. Its actions are sporadic, ad hoc, responsive to immediate challenge, following the leader’s “inspiration.” A bureaucracy, by contrast, assembles itself, nine to five, every working day. Its normal arena is the normal; it resists crisis-mobilization. This is a fatal reduction if, in fact, apocalypse is just around the corner. But the opposite error is to inflate every apparent crisis into the apocalypse, to think the continuing mandate of government is, as Kennedy said at his inauguration, “the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” Kennedy’s indictment of Eisenhower was that he treated the Soviet menace as a new form of the old struggle between nations, not as a “twilight struggle” with the enemy of all freedom everywhere. Others think that was Eisenhower’s best contribution to a nation he took over at the height of its McCarthyite Cold War period.

  2. Regularity. The charismatic leader is not bound by precedent, informed by meetings, submissive to advisers. But the bureaucracy works on lines set by “what we have always done.” This blunts initiative, though it lets people know, whenever they enter a program, what lies down the road for them in future years. New Deal programs like Social Security gave much of the population an “entitlement” over society’s future resources, and that limits the society’s freedom of maneuver. The government is tied down by long-term commitments, which check the hand of those who want to refashion government from administration to administration. But the same bonds free the “entitled” from uncertainty about what is owed them. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of New York, sidling over toward Richard Nixon in 1968, attacked “big government” this way: “The next President of the United States, as I write, will not be Lyndon Johnson [who had just withdrawn from the 1968 race]. It could be George C. Wallace. How much public money would American liberals be willing to see President Wallace expend for the purposes of increasing the participation in public affairs of those elements in the population he regards as simultaneously deprived and underorganized?” But the discretionary funds of one President are severely limited—precisely the complaint of activist Presidents like Kennedy. The truly “big government” spending is on entitled programs, passed by Congress, that are hard for Presidents to cancel or curtail (a fact of life Ronald Reagan had to learn in the White House). A society becomes unwieldy to the extent that it lays itself open to lasting claims from its subjects. In that sense, “big government” is not despotic, not Big Brother free to do what it likes with the populace. It is not “innovative” to the extent that it has ceased to be arbitrary. Mere size does not make for “inefficiency.” Accountability does.

  3. Delegation of authority. Bureaucracy sets up many loci of authority relatively impervious to a single superintending will. In a bureaucratic order, large government is by definition not centralized government. Thus when Kennedy sent his managers out to tame the bureaucracy, they often found the only way to assert their will was to create new programs responsive to new needs, programs that were superimposed on the old, and became a further obstruction to Kennedy’s successors. Robert McNamara is the finest example of this process. Appointed to whip the military into line, he doubled the military budget in seven years, created counterinsurgency teams that drew the regular army into Vietnam, then departed from government horrified at what he had accomplished.

  McNamara resembled many of Kennedy’s people, and Kennedy himself, in having been formed during the war years of governmental expansion. That was a time of administrative creativity, when McNamara’s planning group multiplied exponentially the production of American airplanes. But such freedom to create left a cumbrous legacy behind, an air force so large that it sought separate status and, by its very extent and expense, limited the choices for a nuclear strategy in the postwar period. By that time McNamara and his Whiz Kids had moved on to the Ford Motor Company, where, again, they were given a comparatively free hand at a time of massive postwar conversion to peacetime production. The opportunity would not easily (if ever) come again for “starting over.” The responsiveness of the entire company to his hand on the tiller called up illusions of control that only McNamara’s second time of Pentagon service would dispel, at great cost to him and to the nation. The man Kennedy praised for “controlling” the Pentagon at last embraced a war that controlled—and broke—him.

  In other areas of government, a similar tale unfolded itself. For special reasons, Robert Kennedy could not control J. Edgar Hoover, and so he built a separate investigative and enforcement machinery at Justice, adding to the bureaucracy rather than “taming” it. The New Frontier’s National Security Council became a second State Department, which clashed with the original one throughout Kennedy’s and subsequent presidencies. The civil rights and poverty initiatives left behind a machinery of “affirmative action” that became a target for later critics of regulation. In all these cases, the refusal to delegate just created further centers of delegated authority. Unwilling or unable to use what was at hand, Kennedy thought he could avoid procedure by using special teams—but each special team created a whole new book of procedures. The Peace Corps, born as a brilliant improvisation, soon had to cope with rules and was mired in its own bureaucratic battles.

  4. Separation of office from the person of its holder. The charismatic ruler must act directly on all parts of his government—or act, at the least, through surrogates who have a close personal tie with him. In a bureaucracy, by contrast, job security is defined irrespective of the particular jobholders. This involves a loss of the personal touch, a loss regretted, for instance, in the contrast between bureaucratic social service
s and the ministration of personal “bosses” in the city machines. But this loss is balanced by a freedom from whimsical directives not subject to appeal. A bureaucracy carries to its logical extreme the principle of “a government of laws and not of men.” It would reduce even the highest officeholder to powers granted all Presidents. Its emphasis lies on the title: President Kennedy, not President Kennedy. The Neustadt school maintained that the presidency is only what each President makes it, that the office is defined by the man, not vice versa. This has led to the intense personalization of the institution. We talk of the Kennedy years, the Johnson era, the Nixon regime in a way that people did not think of the Coolidge era or the Wilson years. This personalization creates charismatic expectations in noncharismatic times, to be followed by inevitable disappointment.

  5. Documentary record. The bureaucracy, in the accusatory phrase, “shuffles paper.” It leaves an inky trail. Bureaucrats, according to their critics, build a record “to protect their ass.” If they did not act with greater resourcefulness, it was because a regulation (proper number supplied here) did not admit personal initiative. This aspect of bureaucracy especially galls those who see attractive shortcuts toward an immediate goal. The awareness of always acting “on the record” limits the bargains that can be struck, the informal arrangements that break logjams. For Presidents in the Kennedy mood, the CIA became the most appealing arm of action precisely because it keeps no public record (and, in the person of Director Richard Helms, destroyed much even of the secret record).

  Both Kennedy and Reagan, from their different vantage points, won applause with their attacks on governmental obstructionism and bureaucracy. Both were praised as raiders against big and unresponsive governmental structures. There is a nostalgic streak in American history that makes its citizens want to run a large empire on the values of the small town. Even as its citizens ask for security, in the sense of guaranteed status, they hymn unconfined opportunity. The market myth makes us think that spontaneity will sort out things according to their merits, without the need for planning and regulation. The individual is supposed to forge his or her own “environment,” unfettered by prior social arrangements. More and more the governmental workings of America have come to reflect the necessities of national size and ambition, while the Presidents express a romantic rejection of that machinery, a denial of the rule of necessity, a promise to escape “back” toward remembered freedoms. For Kennedy’s managers, these freedoms were the take-off opportunities of a burgeoning military establishment in World War II. For Ronald Reagan, the freedoms are those of the Chamber of Commerce’s imagined past, when “enterprise” built character. With both men, however, there was a business model for the resentment toward big government. Kennedy’s ideal was the raider style of his freewheeling father’s rise. For Reagan, it is the corporate talk of opportunity within the confines of “big business.” This lends a different tone and style to the Kennedy Democrats and Reagan Republicans; but this should not hide from us how they both betray the hero they appeal to. They delegitimate government in different ways—but each way is far removed from Roosevelt’s gift for legitimating government by routinizing charisma.