Kennedy’s own attitude toward Schlesinger was often more difficult to gauge. Evelyn Lincoln, who as the president’s personal assistant saw life in the Oval Office close up, judged that Kennedy “admired Schlesinger’s brilliant mind, his enormous store of information, and his ability to turn a phrase,” but felt that “Schlesinger was never more than an ally and assistant.” Robert Kennedy said, “He didn’t do a helluva lot, but he was good to have around.”
David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest also says Kennedy appointed Schlesinger to assuage the disappointed Stevenson Democrats, and to gain credibility with the liberals whom he disdained as elitist and ineffectual. Schlesinger often worried that Kennedy was no liberal; certainly the president was easily irritated by those such as Chester Bowles and Adlai Stevenson within his own administration, who were liberals. “Boy, when those liberals start mixing into policy,” Ben Bradlee recalled the president complaining, “it’s murder.” Schlesinger became an important via media for the White House with “those liberals” because, unlike most of them, Schlesinger believed Kennedy’s tactic was to use conservative figures “to execute a liberal policy.” Moreover, if he was an ambassador to the liberals outside the administration, inside it his roving role was to be the in-house liberal who acted, in the words of Patrick Anderson, a press secretary to Robert Kennedy, as “an intellectual gadfly, skitting here and there to seek out new ideas and sting the slothful bureaucratic beast into action.”4
Yet while Kennedy sometimes ignored Schlesinger’s policy advice, as will become clear, the president, far from being “baffled,” actually seemed to have a very clear idea about why he wanted Schlesinger around. “He wanted to be remembered as a great President,” Anderson again points out, “and he therefore thought it was wise to have in attendance a great historian.” Kennedy often commented to Sorensen, “history depends on who writes it.” As a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of two vast histories of Democratic presidents, and moreover, a contemporary who had abandoned Stevenson to come out for Kennedy at a crucial moment, Arthur had credentials for the job that were second to none.5
Schlesinger, predictably, took the historian’s role seriously. Writing to Carl Bridenbaugh, a distinguished colonial historian, Schlesinger explained, “My primary commitment is to writing and scholarship and I hate the thought of suspending work on the Roosevelt series,” he disclosed. “On the other hand, no American historian has had the good luck to be able to watch an unfolding of public policy from this particular vantage point, and I did not feel I could decline such an opportunity.” In The Age of Roosevelt, he had recounted how Robert F. Sherwood, FDR’s speechwriter and later author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, had struggled to fathom FDR, commenting, “I could never really understand what was going on in there.” Now Schlesinger, believing that he could succeed where Sherwood failed, wanted the new president to give future historians the strongest possible lead.6
When, within days of Schlesinger’s arrival, Kennedy raised with him the question of which papers a president might properly take away at the end of his presidency, the new special assistant used the opportunity to write him a three-page memo on the importance of maintaining the historical record—in effect a mission statement. “The answer is that you are expected to take away all your papers,” Schlesinger began, pointing out that while cabinet members could establish a distinction between personal and public papers, “it is not feasible to establish such a distinction in the case of the President [because] the various aspects of Presidential personality are not easily separable, and even his most official acts are sufficiently tinged with his private personality to rate as personal papers.” President Eisenhower, for example, had “removed everything except a few routine files.” Writing the history of the Kennedy administration, Schlesinger went on, would depend on two fundamental points.7
First, “It is obviously essential that the Presidential files contain as near as possible to a full record.” Schlesinger had been involved in helping draw up a new White House Filing Manual. Critical to its success, however, was the question of Kennedy’s handwritten notes and instructions. “Mrs. Lincoln should be asked never to mail a handwritten letter without making a xerox copy for the files,” he urged, “and she should always copy handwritten postscripts on the carbons of typed letters.” A similar procedure was needed for times when “someone brings you a paper, you write ‘OK, JFK,’ and he takes it away.” “All this,” Schlesinger urged the president, “is for your own protection as well as for the historical record.” (In July 1962, Kennedy would take that advice one step further by installing a tape system in the Oval Office, but not to Arthur’s knowledge.)
Second, the question arose over “kiss and tell” accounts of the administration. “I think you should make it clear to anyone who seems to have a literary glint in his eye that you expect nothing will be written about the Kennedy administration without prior discussion with you,” Schlesinger urged. This latter point also gave him the opportunity to clarify his own position. “As for myself, I might add that I do not regard myself as being here on an historical mission,” he told Kennedy, somewhat ingenuously. “I have no work of contemporary history under contemplation, except to finish The Age of Roosevelt; and that, unless you wish me to do so, I plan nothing personally in the way of collecting materials on the Age of Kennedy.”
On this second point, Kennedy soon put Schlesinger right during an exchange the two men had after the Bay of Pigs invasion a few weeks later. Kennedy agreed that he did not want aides recording White House conversations and keeping diaries, but in Schlesinger’s case, that was to be his most important job. “We’d better make sure we have a record over here,” Kennedy instructed, “so you go ahead.” From then on, Schlesinger would keep 8x4–inch cards in his pocket wherever he went, transferring his notes to foolscap on the weekends, ready to put them at Kennedy’s disposal when the time came. Eventually they would become the basis for his own book, A Thousand Days. He regularly sat in on meetings in the Oval Office and meetings of committees (although not Ex-Comm). His frequent presence contributed to the “gadfly” reputation, but he was history-making as much as policymaking. “Schlesinger scooped up information like a vacuum cleaner,” Time magazine would later say.8
As part of this process, Schlesinger looked for ways to enhance the historical record in further innovative ways, as Ted Sorensen recalled. “At the urging of the eminent historian on his staff, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., he [JFK] agreed that procedures should be established to record the firsthand recollections of participants in crucial events while our memories were still fresh,” Sorensen wrote. Kennedy “never found time to do it,” because he was, Sorensen judged, “in some ways deliberately elusive in his approach.” But Schlesinger continued to prod and nag Kennedy throughout his presidency. In March 1963, in a memo entitled “Your Obligation to Future Historians,” Schlesinger, as the “representative of the historical interests of the Administrations,” wrote to “beg” him “to dictate the circumstances” of major decisions “while they are still fresh in your mind,” and to adopt the habit “to set aside five or ten minutes every afternoon to note the major events of the day.” At the same time, and aside from any account he might write himself, Schlesinger also wrote to the president about an official history of the administration, which, he advised, could either be produced by a single “house historian,” or else by a series of specialists who would write about specific topics as case studies in presidential decision-making (an idea Schlesinger had developed with Richard Neustadt). “You decided,” Schlesinger wrote in exasperation, “that you did not want either a continuing White House historian or ad hoc specialists brought in from the outside to write up specific episodes.”
The most obvious explanation for Kennedy’s casual attitude is that he believed Schlesinger had the matter under control. In 1963 Schlesinger, as probably America’s most famous historian, had seen the administration
from the inside. Kennedy’s reputation, the president himself seems to have decided, was safe in Arthur’s hands. That conclusion had not been a given. “Those bastards, they are always there with their pencils,” Ben Bradlee recalled Kennedy saying after reading The Ordeal of Power, speechwriter Emmet Hughes’s insider account of the Eisenhower administration. This epithet, uniquely for Kennedy, did not apply to Schlesinger, “whom,” Bradlee concluded, “he admired as a historian, [and] liked enormously as a person.”
Schlesinger would have multiple goes at writing and shaping that history, including his White House journal, oral history interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy, his 1965 book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, a biography of the president’s brother Robert Kennedy, and a stream of reviews and articles about Kennedy, particularly after revelations were made about the president’s health and private life. In all of these works, it seems fair to say that he would honor the implicit understanding made between the two men in 1961 that his role would be to protect the president’s legacy and establish the Age of Kennedy as a worthy successor to the Age of Roosevelt. Schlesinger was not so much court philosopher, as Richard Rovere had suggested, but Kennedy’s court historian.9
In February Schlesinger wrote to his friend, the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, “I wish you would come over this spring, before the bloom goes off the rose.” Sure enough, Schlesinger quickly found himself thrust into the middle of the first major crisis of the Kennedy administration, and on the wrong side of the president. It had all started well, with Schlesinger making his first trip abroad as a member of the administration. George McGovern, newly appointed as head of the understaffed Food for Peace program, was leaving for talks in South America. Kennedy offered to lend him a special assistant and, wrote Schlesinger, “knowing my interest in Latin America, he wondered whether I was the person to go.” Schlesinger’s interest in the region went back to his wartime days in OSS, when he had tussled over Latin American issues and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy with the Communist Maurice Halperin. He had written frequently on the area ever since, so was an obvious choice to accompany McGovern. But the invitation was also an introduction to the way things worked for those who served at the pleasure of the president and a reminder that no one still quite knew what to do with Schlesinger. “I had no real choice but to go,” the troubled special assistant grumbled, “though JFK put it up to me in a manner which would have permitted me to decline.”10
Schlesinger did not know McGovern well, but as fellow historians they quickly found common ground that would prove the basis of a long friendship. He was unnerved to discover that “like everyone else” in the Kennedy administration, McGovern was five years younger than himself, “a fact,” he recalled later, “which continued to disconcert one who had been accustomed to regarding himself as the youngest man in the room.” As well as this personal connection, the trip did provide some political and social insights for Schlesinger. He was, for example, deeply shocked by the poverty on display in the favela slums of Rio de Janeiro. “Once one becomes sensitized to the existence of favelas, one begins to see them everywhere,” he wrote. “The result is to give a sinister undertone to the quality of life in this lively and lovely city. . . . No doubt all this has value as reminder of morality; the favela in Rio is certainly a constant symbol of the skull beneath the skin.” Even more telling was the political reality of the intensity of hostility among hemispheric elites toward the Castro regime in Cuba. In a meeting with the Bolivian president, Victor Paz, Schlesinger (having left McGovern in Brazil) carefully outlined the administration’s line that while the Cuban revolution had begun as a national revolution, it had now been seized by forces from outside the hemisphere that wanted to establish a Communist state. “What could the hemisphere do with this focus of infection?” Schlesinger inquired of the president. “Castro must be eliminated,” the president answered, “without hesitation.”11
The notion of eliminating Fidel Castro was one already transfixing the Kennedy administration by February 1961. The previous year, President Eisenhower had approved a plan to establish training camps in Guatemala, where CIA operatives would prepare Cuban exiles to overthrow the regime. Kennedy, having inherited the operation, came under great pressure from the CIA to push the plan to its logical conclusion. That meant US assistance, including air strikes, for an invasion. When Kennedy asked Schlesinger to look into the Cuban situation, Schlesinger was aghast at how thin plans for the operation were. As early as February 11, 1961, two months before the operation actually took place, he was writing to the president in a top secret memorandum that while a “plausible argument” existed for action if only focusing on Cuba, “as soon as one begins to broaden the focus beyond Cuba to include the hemisphere and rest of the world, the arguments against this decision begin to gain force.” However well disguised the action might be, it would be ascribed to the United States. There would be “a wave of massive protest” and “at one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world [and] fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.” Such drastic action should only be taken, he concluded, “after we had exhausted every conceivable alternative.”12
Schlesinger now embarked on a two-pronged strategy that would, first, make clear his opposition to the operation and, second, should the operation go ahead, make sure that the political implications of such an action were fully considered and the president protected. After returning from his Latin America trip, he immediately asked Kennedy if he could “look into” the question of “launching a comprehensive campaign” to learn the facts about the Castro regime. “Such a campaign,” he advised, “would seem an indispensable preliminary to any hard decisions on Cuba.” Kennedy gave him the go-ahead to prepare a white paper on Cuba. Writing it gave Schlesinger even more concerns about any planned invasion.13
With his customary ability to write both effectively and quickly, Schlesinger turned around the white paper in a week. “The function of this document,” he explained when circulating the first draft, was “to win over those who had some initial sympathy for the Cuban Revolution, to give them reasons for a change of mind and thus to provide them a bridge by which they can return to the hemisphere.” The issue was not one of “criticizing [Castro’s] right to have his own internal social and economic policy.” Obviously Castro’s “internal regimentation, etc., is bad, but by itself it would not serve as an occasion for intervention.” Instead the launch of such drastic action would turn on the question of “Castro’s subservience to the Communists and his intervention in the affairs of other Latin nations.”14
The white paper itself was a blend of social science analysis, journalism, and purple prose. “The people of Cuba remain our brothers,” it concluded. “We acknowledge our own past omissions and errors in our relationship with them. In future we pledge them our active support in their brave efforts to achieve freedom, democracy and social justice for their nation.” It was “not too late” for the Castro regime to “sever its links with the international movement, to return to the original purposes . . . and integrity of the Cuba Revolution.” But if Castro did not turn away from Communism, “we are confident that Cuban patriots will arise against this new tyranny.”15
While working on the draft, he continued writing to Kennedy to urge caution and restraint. “The military aspects of the problem,” he warned, “had received more thoughtful attention than the political aspects.” Indeed, “it did not seem to me that the political risks had been adequately assessed or that convincing plans had been laid to minimize them.” What, for example, would the president himself say in any press conference following an operation? “It would seem to me absolutely essential to work out in advance a consistent line which can hold for every conceivable contingency,” he advised. “Otherwise we will find ourselves in a new U-2 [spy plane] imbroglio, with the government either changing its story midstream or else clinging to a position
which the rest of the world will regard as a lie.” Moreover, Schlesinger confided to the president, he had an overwhelming sense of “danger of our being rushed into something because the CIA has on its hands a band of people it doesn’t quite know what to do with.” He reported back a comment by Allen Dulles, director of the CIA: “We have a disposal problem. If we take these men [Cuban exiles] out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the US, and we can’t have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.” “Obviously this is a genuine problem,” Schlesinger judged, “but it can’t be permitted to govern US policy.”16
Kennedy took the paper away to Palm Beach on the weekend of March 25 and met Schlesinger in the Oval Office the following Tuesday. “He was surprisingly generous in his comment,” Schlesinger recorded. “He made a few specific criticisms . . . wondered whether [one] phrase was snide and suggested its omission. As usual, he was temperate, quick and effective.” As Schlesinger was leaving, he finally steeled himself and asked the president the most important question:
“What do you think of this damned invasion?”
“I think about it as little as possible.”
Schlesinger left somewhat cheered after the two men “agreed that the critical point—and the weak part of the case for action—lay in the theory of an immediate local response to a landing.”17
The State Department published the pamphlet at the beginning of April. The New York Times devoted an editorial to it, describing the pamphlet as “a document of high quality” and pointing out that “it is noteworthy that the document makes no threats.” According to “informed sources” (which surely referred to Schlesinger himself), the paper reported, “the pamphlet was written largely by Mr. Schlesinger,” although the same source emphasized, “President Kennedy devoted many hours to the pamphlet personally, going over it with Mr. Schlesinger.”18
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