In terms of style, too, the candidates could hardly have been more different. While Nixon “imports histrionics into politics” with “vulgar rhetoric” and he “even weeps,” Kennedy’s manner was by contrast “studiously unemotional, impersonal, antihistrionic.” Taken together, it meant that Kennedy and Nixon stood “in sharp contrast” to each other, leaving voters with a decision about whether the country should “muddle along” or “recover control over our national destiny.” For Nixon “the Presidency seems essentially a source of private gratification.” For Kennedy it was “a means of public achievement.” That was the real choice of character facing the people in the election of 1960.19
The success of Schlesinger’s pamphlet threw the Nixon campaign into a panic. Wealthy Republican donors immediately banded together to set up Free World Press just to publish a hastily written rejoinder, John F. Kennedy: What’s Behind the Image? by Victor Lasky, a former journalist at the New York World-Telegram and Sun who had previously written a book about the Alger Hiss case. “The Nixon camp had all this material,” Lasky told the New York Times, going off message. “They could have done this months ago.” The impetus, Lasky said, “came last month” after publication of Schlesinger’s “pro-Kennedy analysis, Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference?” The Times called Lasky’s book a “literary attack on Senator Kennedy and his family,” quoting him as saying that the Democrat was “everything that the liberals say Nixon is,” and adding intemperately that the candidate’s brother and campaign manager, Robert F. Kennedy, was “a fascist.” Schlesinger himself came under attack in the book as “Kennedy’s leading apologist among intellectuals” and the “liberal demonologist” author of “an agit-prop-like contribution to the Kennedy cause.” The Nixon campaign immediately handed out copies at events and press conferences. But published on November 1, the book was too late to counter Schlesinger’s narrative. Between John F. Kennedy: What’s Behind the Image? and Nixon or Kennedy, clearly it was Arthur Schlesinger who made the biggest difference.20
“No political leader can guarantee anything, and no one can guarantee any political leader,” Schlesinger had concluded at the end of Nixon or Kennedy, “but the election of Kennedy, like that of Wilson in 1912 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, would plainly keep open vital options in our life.” The question for Schlesinger himself was whether he had done enough in the campaign to keep open vital options in his own life. Looked at in the fall of 1960, a best-selling book and regular phone calls with the candidate’s wife seemed to add up to a most vexatious and disappointing campaign. The only light relief came when William Buckley, iconoclastic founder of National Review, had a “Democratic” real donkey sent to Schlesinger at 109 Irving Street accompanied by a caustic note about Kennedy or Nixon. Marian Schlesinger, thinking on her feet, had it sent back on the grounds that their underage son had signed for delivery; Buckley thereafter kept the animal and named it “Arthur.” Practical jokes aside, having been a central figure in 1952 and 1956, Schlesinger was only too aware that he had been marginal this time around. “I was sorry, of course, not to have taken a greater part in the campaign,” he recorded despondently in his journal at the election’s conclusion. “I love the drama of campaigning—the airplanes and motorcades, the hotel rooms and telephone calls and speeches crises, the policy conferences and the tense decisions and the constant air of excitement and anxiety and passion and fatigue. I missed it all terribly.” Only now did Schlesinger the academic understand the extent to which he had developed a near addiction to the narcotic of political battle.21
An anxious period followed as he waited to see if a job was in the offing. Always somewhat highly strung, he was plagued by his shredded nerves, particularly when it looked as if Kennedy was shunning liberals and appointing a predominantly conservative administration. Dining with his friend Philip Graham in Washington, DC, on November 16, he completely lost his temper when Graham was “euphorically insistent” on Douglas Dillon as secretary of the treasury. “Phil and I had our first serious wrangle in years,” Schlesinger wrote, “and I left for the airport in a state of extreme irritation.” Graham “charmingly” phoned the next day to make up, but it was Dillon, a Republican who had served in the Eisenhower administration, who got the Treasury job.22
Schlesinger was no more reassured about the prospects of liberals in the Kennedy administration when he finally saw the president-elect again in December. There were a few minutes of awkwardness as the unathletic professor attempted to throw a football with three-year-old Caroline (“The Kennedys apparently believe in breaking them in early”) before matters turned to senior political appointments. One by one, JFK batted away Schlesinger’s suggestions, including Averell Harriman, who had been on the phone to Arthur a great deal in the previous weeks. (“Too old hat,” Kennedy said dismissively.) JFK did try to reassure him that liberals “shouldn’t worry” as “we are going down the line on the program.” But then came the killer punch. “How about you?” Kennedy asked. “Wouldn’t you like to be an ambassador?” When Schlesinger quickly responded that he didn’t think so, Kennedy joked that he would like to be one himself, but then put the question again: “Are you sure you wouldn’t want one?” Schlesinger held his ground, repeating that he “didn’t think so” (carefully constructed so as not to absolutely refuse an incoming president), but it was a deeply dispiriting and disquieting experience. Afterwards, he reflected that Kennedy had torpedoed the liberals. “My broad impression is that he is much more on the defensive,” Schlesinger recorded, and “much more impressed, for example, by the need to appoint people who will get along with a conservative Congress.” He listed all the names of liberals who had been overlooked for cabinet positions, and added sadly, “Hence (perhaps) the desire to export Galbraith [who had been offered the ambassadorship to India] and Schlesinger.”23
After two weeks of anxious thumb-twiddling and marking Harvard term papers, Schlesinger finally got a hint that a place might still be found for him in the White House. On December 15, the day before the new president announced his brother as attorney general, Bobby Kennedy took Schlesinger to lunch. “As we were chatting,” Arthur recalled, “he abruptly asked me what I intended to do for my country.” Flustered, Schlesinger mentioned that there had been mention of an ambassadorship, which prospect had not “attracted me much.” RFK then asked whether it would be okay “if he suggested to his brother that I come down as a Special Assistant to the President and serve as a sort of roving reporter and trouble shooter.” Schlesinger could not hide his relief and excitement. “I would of course be delighted to come,” he enthused, saying that the “assignment could not have appealed to me more.” Kennedy promised to bring it up with his brother, telling Schlesinger that he would “probably” hear from JFK in the new year.24
Bobby’s idea thrilled Schlesinger. For one brief moment it looked as if the job might even be better. Just after Christmas, Galbraith went down to see JFK at Kennedy’s winter house in Palm Beach, Florida, and came back reporting that Schlesinger was being considered for national security advisor. A few days later, the job went to their Harvard colleague, McGeorge Bundy. “This is all right,” Arthur told Marietta Tree, clearly disingenuously, despite his having had no previous interest or expertise in national security issues. Earlier in the letter, he had complained about those who were “Democrats and actively worked for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket” being overlooked, and thought any young person “might well conclude that they will have a better chance for preferment under a Democratic administration if they remain Republicans or neutralists.” Bundy was precisely such a person: a Republican until 1960, he had voted twice against Stevenson and played no role in Kennedy’s campaign in 1960 other than endorsing him. But as dean of arts at Harvard and part of a family that had a long tradition in foreign affairs, his was the kind of appointment Schlesinger identified as “designed to win applause in the respectable press.” Kennedy had discussed several assistant secretary positions at the State Department with him
before finally offering administrative affairs. Bundy turned the post down, partly on the advice of his Harvard colleague, Henry Kissinger, who warned him, “You don’t want that.” Kennedy then offered Bundy the position as national security advisor, thereby trumping his other Harvard colleague, Arthur Schlesinger. “He was so good that when he left I grieved for Harvard and I grieved for the nation,” commented one colleague, the Harvard sociologist David Riesman, “for Harvard because he was the perfect dean, for the nation because I thought that very same arrogance and hubris might be very dangerous.”25
At least Bundy’s elevation gave Schlesinger a lesson in how to play his own cards. Once Bundy was appointed, word now came through that Kennedy wanted to offer Schlesinger an assistant secretaryship at the State Department, putting him in charge of cultural affairs. Schlesinger promptly turned it down, which brought another message from Kennedy saying that “he didn’t mean the State Dept idea too seriously, that he is still thinking of me in terms of the White House.” More concretely, Kennedy told him that “he wants to talk about it” during a planned visit to Cambridge on January 9, 1961.26
That meeting would turn out to be one of the political high points of Schlesinger’s life. Kennedy was coming to Cambridge to address the Massachusetts Legislature and to attend a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. He didn’t want to hold political meetings inside the university, so Fred Holborn, Kennedy’s legislative assistant and soon to be special assistant to the White House, asked Schlesinger if they could use his house.
“This was an exciting day for the Schlesingers,” Arthur recorded in his journal. “Secret service men vetted the house; Harvard and Cambridge police surrounded it; and around 2 p.m. a small crowd of curiosity seekers and fans began to collect.” Kennedy arrived at 2:20 p.m. “Inside,” Marian Schlesinger recalled, “he shook hands with members of the household shyly lined up in awe to greet him, various children and their lucky best pals, and two sweet Irish cleaning women.” Then he went into the living room, “sat on the couch” and began interviewing people. At one stage during the afternoon, Kennedy needed to use the telephone privately, so Arthur sent him upstairs to the room into which, it turned out, Marian had “thrown all the general refuse of the family,” thinking no one, “much less a future president of the United States,” would venture. “He was so charming,” Marian recalls, “so outgoing and friendly.” He could “not have cared less” that she had been “found out.”27
During the course of the afternoon, various Harvard people arrived to see the new president. Mac Bundy rode his bike, which he nonchalantly left propped against the gate. Others, including Schlesinger, were less cocksure. But during a brief lull in the proceedings, Kennedy turned to his host and finally asked the question Arthur had been waiting to hear: “Are you ready to work at the White House?” Schlesinger was suitably modest, telling Kennedy, “I am not sure what I would be doing as Special Assistant, but if you think I can help, I would like very much to come.” Kennedy, with that charming lightness of touch that was already a trademark of his political style, replied, “Well, I am not sure what I will be doing as President either, but I am sure there will be enough at the White House to keep us both busy.” Schlesinger asked if he should now formally apply for leave at Harvard; Kennedy told him to wait until after Chester Bowles was confirmed as assistant secretary of state for political affairs, as “I don’t want the Senate to think that I am bringing down the whole ADA.” That meant Schlesinger being kept at arm’s length until after the inauguration; most tellingly, Kennedy did not ask Schlesinger to work on the inaugural address, which he planned to finalize in the coming week. That left Arthur in Cambridge quite literally in the cold.28
Another anxious period of waiting followed. Arthur and Marian went to Washington to watch the inauguration. At a party given by Kennedy’s sister, Jean Smith, the new president asked them cheerfully whether they had found a house in Washington yet, a remark, Arthur wrote, that “gave me some relief, because I had heard nothing about my supposed White House appointment since the talk in my house in Cambridge three weeks earlier.” He returned disconsolately to Harvard, now thinking about the semester ahead, as “silence resumed” from the White House. Only at the end of January did the call finally come through. The Senate had confirmed Bowles’s appointment, so now the president wanted to announce Schlesinger’s own appointment. He should call Ralph Dungan, the special assistant in charge of personnel.
“Your appointment as what?” Dungan asked him when he called.
“As I understand it, Special Assistant to the President,” Schlesinger replied, exasperated.
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Dungan retorted unhelpfully, but told him to report the next Monday anyway.29
By the time Schlesinger arrived at the White House on Monday, January 30, 1961, Dungan had recovered himself sufficiently to apologize. “Things are happening so fast around here,” he said, “that no one knows what is going on.”
Dungan then called in Richard Neustadt, the author of Presidential Power, who had held the same position under Harry Truman and was now advising Kennedy, and together the two men stood with Schlesinger as he swore his oath of office as special assistant to the president. It was a remarkable point not just in the arc of Schlesinger’s ambition but in that of the 1917 generation. Here was one of its brightest intellectual stars, Harvard luminary, Pulitzer Prize winner, and best-selling writer Arthur Schlesinger, joining forces as a Camelot insider with his generation’s leading political light. A Thousand Days had begun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE GADFLY
“I settled down in an office in the East Wing of the White House and tried to find out what I was supposed to do,” wrote newly minted Special Assistant to the President Arthur Schlesinger Jr. at the end of his first week. “I had the impression that JFK was equally baffled, and he had somewhat more weighty matters on his mind.” It was, Schlesinger would later recall, an “uncertain and confusing” beginning.1
Schlesinger’s own confusion about his role in the White House reflected a debate that would rumble on for several decades among Kennedy staffers and loyalists: What exactly had been the professor’s influence within the White House, at least compared to their own? Certainly some staffers were irritated from the outset when Richard Rovere, Schlesinger’s coauthor of The General and the President, wrote a profile in the New Yorker that installed his friend as “court philosopher” at the White House. “It is an extraordinary assignment, and one that has no precedent in American history,” Rovere enthused, “or, probably,” he went on, overstretching the image, “in the history of any modern democracy.”
Others later would offer a more sour assessment. Press secretary Pierre Salinger dismissed Schlesinger as “not a policy maker” and suggested his “official role was that of White House liaison with United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.” The location of Schlesinger’s office in the East Wing of the White House offered evidence that Schlesinger was a peripheral figure (even though McGeorge Bundy was installed even further away in the Executive Office Building). After all, as a popular TV series later dramatized, the action was in the West Wing. Salinger sneered that the “calmer atmosphere he must have found more congenial to his cerebrations.” Another staffer contemptuously recalled, “You have to understand that Arthur was over in the East Wing, drinking tea with Jackie,” not realizing, presumably, that Kennedy had instructed Schlesinger to use the First Lady as a way to circumvent the kind of toxic jealousies so perfectly illustrated by that petty remark. Even so, the room allocation stung. “He complained a little bit,” Christina Schlesinger, his daughter, recalls. “His office was in the East Wing and, as you know, the West Wing is where everything was happening.”2
Still, Schlesinger was habitually in conversation with the president, usually at the end of each day, when part of his job was to round up issues from across the board to make sure that Kennedy knew what he needed to know. A memo written a month after Schlesing
er moved into the White House, unimportant for its details, gives a vivid insight into how this function worked.
“These are the points left over from last night,” Schlesinger wrote on March 6, 1961:
1. You wanted to tell Adlai Stevenson to talk to Dr. Nkrumah [president of Ghana] and get some idea what Nkrumah means to say in the UN tomorrow.
2. Bolivia: check Stepansky—what is holding his [ambassadorial] appointment up? If there is a problem, consider the possibility of shifting Loeb from Peru to Bolivia.
3. Israel: what has happened to inspection of atomic installation?
4. Egypt: what about the plan to save the ruins at Assuan.
5. Iran: letter to the Shah.
6. You wanted to talk to Rostow [deputy national security advisor] about organizing a citizens committee on the foreign aid program.
7. Eisenhower-Khrushchev minutes: you wanted to circulate?
Two other points:
1. George McGovern is holding a Food for Peace press conference this afternoon to discuss our Latin American trip. He wants me to appear with him . . .
2. Is there anything you want me to do about the electoral commission? I have been in touch with Dick Neustadt . . .3
Speechwriting was among Schlesinger’s other duties. Not the least of the sensitivities to navigate here concerned Ted Sorensen, the president’s principal speechwriter. If a draft speech was unsatisfactory, Kennedy might give it to Schlesinger, but, recalls Richard Goodwin (Sorensen’s embattled deputy), he would say, “Rework this a little, but don’t tell Ted I asked you.” Sorensen always fought hard to keep his rival away from speech drafts. He later claimed Schlesinger’s most important role, as well as being “a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches” (note the subtle dig of the qualifying adjective), was to act as a “constant contact with liberals and intellectuals both in this country and abroad.”
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