Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Kennedy replied effusively, thanking Schlesinger for “your very helpful comments and corrections,” and saying that “I have, to the extent possible, followed every one of your suggestions, and they were of considerable help in sharpening the manuscript.” Specific changes included making it clear in chapters where “there is disagreement as to whether their position was necessarily the right one” and an effort “to eliminate some of the overstatement.” Kennedy concluded warmly with “sincere thanks for your very real help.” The tone of the letter and the detailed response and changes Kennedy made suggest genuine gratitude. However, Schlesinger’s “strong language to save time” may have annoyed Ted Sorensen, the coauthor. Even though only Kennedy’s name appeared on the title page of Profiles in Courage, the book was a collaborative work with Sorensen, who was JFK’s assistant and speechwriter. “JFK worked particularly hard and long on the first and last chapters, setting the tone and philosophy of the book,” Sorensen would recall, “I did a first draft of most chapters, which he revised with a pen and through dictation.” When Kennedy sent Schlesinger the manuscript, the senator noted, “unfortunately, I have not yet completed the introductory and concluding chapter.” The first draft that Schlesinger was reading was likely as much Sorensen’s as Kennedy’s. Thus when Arthur replied, thinking that he was speaking truth to power, he was in fact speaking truth to a staffer, and one, moreover, with a reputation for intellectual arrogance and a thin skin.

  Schlesinger’s tone, pitch perfect for a senator, had taken apart a staffer’s work in front of his boss. Sorensen and Schlesinger would go on to have a prickly relationship, as each strove to be Kennedy’s premier intellectual influence (Sorensen was closer to JFK; Schlesinger, as a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, more distinguished). That rivalry would continue even after the president’s assassination in 1963 as each competed to write the first and definitive insider’s account of Kennedy’s life and work. It is no stretch to see the roots of this long-standing rivalry in the letter that Schlesinger sent Kennedy after reading Sorensen’s first draft of Profiles in Courage.6

  Kennedy continually turned to Schlesinger for historical advice during the 1950s, including working closely with him as chair of a special committee to choose five senators whose portraits would be placed in the Senate Reception Room. Politically, however, the relationship took longer to gel. Freed by Stevenson after the 1956 defeat, Schlesinger gently played the field among Democrats who were considering a run in 1960. There were the early meetings with Lyndon Johnson, who wanted Schlesinger to help him be “sensitive to liberal criticism.” As late as February 1960, Johnson was still writing, “I hope you will continue to let me have the splendid products of your wonderful mind and deft hand.” Schlesinger also enjoyed friendly relations with Hubert Humphrey, the liberal senator from Minnesota, for whom he occasionally wrote speeches, including a highly successful one delivered at the 1960 Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And all the time, there remained the seemingly perennial question of Adlai.7

  Over Christmas 1959, on the eve of the primary season, the “Hamlet” of the Democratic Party was still worrying away about whether he needed to issue a statement saying that “if the convention wants me, I could not, of course, decline the nomination.” Patiently Schlesinger warned against such a statement, explaining that it “would only magnify the impression of coyness.”8

  Dealing with the Stevenson problem is how Schlesinger became useful to Kennedy. In the lead-up to the campaign, Kennedy had certainly made an effort to court Schlesinger, inviting him and his family to Hyannis Port (“less grand than I had imagined”) for sailing and political gossip. Schlesinger found him “exceedingly open,” enjoying what, he recorded in the summer of 1959, “was, indeed, the freest, as well as the longest talk I have ever had with him.” Once the primary season got underway, however, the two men were only occasionally in touch, so it was not until May, with Kennedy ahead but not by enough, that Schlesinger came into play. On May 14 the candidate phoned Schlesinger to ask him to intercede with Stevenson. “He does not see why Stevenson won’t help him,” Schlesinger recorded. Clearly neither did Arthur, because the following day he went to Libertyville, Illinois, to see Stevenson. Would the governor support Kennedy? he asked. Stevenson tried to wriggle off the hook. “It would look as if I were jumping on the bandwagon,” he protested. “It would look as if I were angling for a job.” But would you at least let Kennedy come see you?” Arthur pressed. Stevenson reluctantly agreed. The meeting a week later was a disaster. “AES did not intend to do anything for the moment,” Schlesinger noted. “Jack said that he was not much impressed by AES’s account of why he did not wish to act; but supposed this to be because he did not wish to disclose his real reason—that, if he said nothing, there might still be a possibility that he would emerge out of the scramble as the candidate.”9

  Kennedy may not have convinced Stevenson, but he had converted Schlesinger. “I have come, I think, to the private conclusion that I would rather have Kennedy as President,” Arthur confided to his journal at the beginning of June. “Stevenson is a much richer, more thoughtful, more creative person; but he has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality.” Kennedy, in contrast, “gives a sense of cool, measured, intelligent concern with action and power.” But, Schlesinger added, “I cannot mention this feeling to anyone.”10

  In the end, Schlesinger agreed that he would come out for Kennedy in a public letter that would include his friends John Kenneth Galbraith, Joseph Rauh, and Henry Steele Commager. But the announcement was woefully bungled, leading to extreme distress and embarrassment for Schlesinger. On June 5, Adlai Stevenson stayed overnight with the Schlesingers in Cambridge, during which visit the governor expressed his feeling that “talk from the Kennedy camp” about him was “quite aggravating.” Schlesinger by and large was not politically deceitful, his views often expressed unsparingly in the face of personal relationships. That summer, for example, he would infuriate Felix Frankfurter, whom he had known since childhood, for the way in which he characterized the associate justice’s behavior on the Supreme Court in The Politics of Upheaval. But on this occasion, for whatever reasons of embarrassment or last-minute indecision, he declined to inform Stevenson of his thinking. Only forty-eight hours later, the Chicago Sun-Times in Stevenson’s home state broke the story that Schlesinger and other “eggheads” were jumping ship. “I felt sick about it,” Arthur wrote, “and still feel guilty and sad.” He issued a public statement saying that Stevenson was best qualified to be candidate, but as the governor was not a candidate, he was supporting Kennedy. He also wrote to Stevenson, who replied “rather casually, I thought; a little cool and hurt?” (Stevenson would write graciously on June 13 to Marian, however, who had stayed loyal to him, that “I am distressed by all that has happened, and that I should be the cause of any embarrassment to Arthur whom I love as dearly as ever.”) Schlesinger would continue to think that “Kennedy, with his cool, sharp mind and his Rooseveltian political genius, would be the better president,” but he admitted to feeling “guilty and unhappy over appearing to abandon AES,” not least when Stevenson’s candidacy briefly sparked as some Democrats got cold feet about Kennedy’s youth and Catholicism. All told, Arthur reflected wearily, “Politics requires a toughness in human relations which in this case I find hard to achieve.” No wonder he left for the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that July “with considerable trepidation and in considerable bafflement,” not least with a harangue from Marian, still a Stevenson loyalist, ringing in his ears. “Can’t you control your own wife,” Bobby Kennedy teased, “or are you like me?”11

  It was the second time that Schlesinger had felt buyer’s remorse with Jack Kennedy. In 1956, Kennedy reported to his father about the vice presidential nomination, “Arthur Schlesinger wrote to me yesterday and stated that he thought it should be done and that he was going to do everything that possible he could.” Yet at the convention that summer Arthur had found hi
mself “shouting wildly for Kefauver.” Now in 1960, he harbored similar doubts, even wondering whether Kennedy had duped him both politically and personally. “I believe him to be a liberal, but committed by a sense of history rather than consecrated by inner conviction,” he wrote grandly, returning to the pseudo-religious language of The Age of Roosevelt. “I also believe him to be a devious and, if necessary ruthless man. I rather think, for example, that Ken [Galbraith] and I were in a sense had by him; that he sought our support when he considered it useful before the convention to have liberal Democratic names behind him, but that, if he thinks our names would cause the slightest trouble when he starts appealing to Republicans, he will drop us without a second thought.”12

  Certainly that was the tenor of a piece run in the August 29 edition of Newsweek, which reported that Schlesinger was “hurt” by Kennedy’s failure to use his speeches and that relations between the two men were “strained.” Schlesinger immediately wrote a letter for publication refuting the story as “not true” and deprecating the impression that the rumors had come from him. “To invent statements of a defamatory sort and then to attribute them to the person defamed is enterprising but hardly responsible journalism,” he fumed. Yet while the story may have overstated the case, the essential point that Schlesinger, and the liberals more broadly, felt excluded was on the mark. Writing to Kennedy after an ADA national board meeting to pick a presidential endorsement, Schlesinger reported, “I was prepared for apathy on the part of grassroots liberals. I was not prepared for the depth of hostility which evidently exists.” He then went on unsparingly to catalogue that hostility in great detail, freely admitting to JFK that “It may be that after this you won’t want to hear anything from me for the rest of the campaign, which I would wholly understand.”13

  In fact, Kennedy did the opposite and sought Schlesinger out, inviting him to the Cape and generally treating him “with his usual affability” and “utmost cordiality.” Others within the campaign, however, took great care to keep Schlesinger at arm’s length that fall. Ted Sorensen, Schlesinger would later write, “had come to feel that no one knew the candidate’s mind so well or reproduced his idiom so accurately [and], justifiably proud of his special relationship, he tended to resent interlopers.” Schlesinger was not the only unwelcome gatecrasher, as Archibald Cox, the Harvard law professor whom Kennedy had asked to head up his Brain Trust, discovered. Cox complained bitterly about Sorensen’s unwillingness to use any of the material his thirty or so academic writers generated for the campaign trail. “It was one of the few elements of discord within the campaign,” Sorensen would later admit. To get around the Sorensen problem, Schlesinger at the beginning of October sought out John Bartlow Martin, his old Elks Club compatriot from the ’52 and ’56 campaigns, to ask for advice about his position. Martin, a less prickly character than Schlesinger, had reached an accommodation with Sorensen, providing JFK’s principal speechwriter with the kind of “editorial advance” for speeches that he had pioneered for Stevenson in 1956. Now he urged Schlesinger to find a similar compromise. Sorensen had asked Arthur to submit drafts for major speeches, such as the Al Smith Memorial Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, on October 19, but “it was evident,” Schlesinger complained, “he wanted them done at a distance.” Such speeches could not be “written in a vacuum,” Schlesinger told Martin, so he was going to say no and “apply myself to other things.” Martin urged him to hold fire and comply with Sorensen’s request on the grounds that eventually as “fatigue caught up with them, they would need more outside help, and I would be the logical person to join them.”14

  Schlesinger took Martin’s advice and wrote the Al Smith speech, but eventually he felt compelled to raise the matter directly with Kennedy at a meeting in the candidate’s duplex apartment in The Carlyle in mid-October. “We talked a bit about my situation,” Schlesinger recorded afterward. “Jack said that this had to be looked at coolly. He would like me along—might need me, since his own people were getting tired and running out of ideas—but there would be certain publicity reactions which had to be taken into account. He feared that my joining the group would be played up as ‘Kennedy’s team is collapsing and Stevenson’s ace speech writer is coming to take over.’ ” His suggestion in the end was purely pragmatic. “Ted is indispensable to me,” he told Arthur, but if you want to get material to me directly, “communicate through Jacqueline.” It was, Arthur wrote later, a channel designed “to simplify his relations with immediate staff.” That October he would soon be taking regular calls “from Jackie Kennedy (who seems to have become my channel of communication with the candidate) . . . [saying] Jack had asked her to call me.” It was the beginning of a relationship that would be accepted by all parties as another direct means of access not just to the candidate but shortly thereafter to the president.15

  In the end, perhaps Schlesinger’s most important contribution to the campaign was not any speech, but rather the production of a short book, Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?, which became an immediate bestseller. The aim of the book was simple: to dispel “the favorite cliché of 1960” that the two candidates “are essentially the same sort of men, stamped from the same mold, committed to the same values, dedicated to the same objectives—that they are, so to speak, the Gold Dust Twins of American politics.”16

  Kennedy or Nixon touched on differences of party and policy, but around two-thirds of the book focused on the central issue of comparing the two candidates as men. The likes of Eric Sevareid, one of Ed Murrow’s “boys” at CBS, had complained that “The managerial revolution has come to politics and Nixon and Kennedy are its first completely packaged products. The Processed Politician has finally arrived.” It may have been true, Schlesinger conceded, that both men “take a cool, professional pleasure in politics for its own sake,” but “beyond this, Kennedy and Nixon seem to me vastly different in their interests, their skills, and their motivations.”17

  The portrait he drew of Nixon showed Schlesinger writing at his most brilliant and polemical best. The Republican was “unique among major American politicians of this century” because his “name invokes no substantive position at all.” He was “in his way, a serious political personality; yet he stands for almost nothing.” His qualities were those of “an almost disembodied alertness and intelligence.” And, Schlesinger went on, “Because [Nixon] has no political philosophy, he has no sense of history . . . he is disembodied, not only in relation to any inward substance of conviction, but also in relation to the past experience of his own country.” He was “a lonely man” who lacked “an instinct for dignity—for one’s own dignity, and for the dignity of others.” The key to Nixon was “provided by the word to which he has been long devoted—the word ‘image.’ ” Nixon was “not a bad man.” He would “make a better president than men like [Barry] Goldwater,” but, echoing T. S. Eliot, “he remains a strangely hollow man.” And what happens, Schlesinger asks, “to such a man in the moment of stark crisis when public issues become irreducible and nothing can meet them except a rock-bottom philosophy of politics and life?”18

  Kennedy on the other hand “could hardly be more different” from Nixon. “If both men appear at times cool in their attitude toward issues,” Schlesinger suggests, “this is, I would say, because Kennedy reasons about them and Nixon doesn’t much care.” Kennedy possessed “a genuine, rather than a manipulative, interest in issues and ideas.” While not “precisely an intellectual himself, [like] Franklin D. Roosevelt, he can enjoy the company of intellectuals with perfect confidence in his capacity to hold his own.” His habits of thought were “unusually detached, consecutive, and explicit.” His mind was “a first class instrument, strong, supple and disciplined.” He was not faultless: “Kennedy’s record on McCarthy, as I told him at the time, seemed to me discreditable.” But the experience had provoked in him a process of clarification about “his conception of the place of individual freedom and due process in a democracy.” So while Kennedy may
not have been with them by instinct, Schlesinger reassured his liberal readers, “Today he seems to me a committed liberal.” This allegiance had come through “intellectual analysis” rather than “spontaneous visceral reactions in the usual pattern of American liberals. . . . But his conclusions are no less solidly grounded or less firmly held.”