Perhaps to soften the blow of McCone’s appointment, the following week Kennedy invited Schlesinger and his wife, Marian, to dine together with himself and the First Lady in the Residence. “JFK was, as usual, exceedingly relaxed, pungent and charming,” Arthur wrote afterwards. “The talk, as usual, encompassed a tremendous range of subjects, with swift transitions from one to another.” The two experiences—McCone and dinner with the Kennedys—in many ways summed up Schlesinger’s experience of life as a special assistant in the White House. There was no question that he had regular and privileged access to the president, which he greatly enjoyed. Most days, when he called by the Oval Office, Kennedy usually beckoned him to join whatever conversation was already ongoing. (“The Vice President was sitting by his desk, but he invited me in. We talked about the CIA.”) Save for his brother Bobby, JFK always maintained a certain aloofness in personal relations. “He and I,” remarked even Ted Sorensen, “continued to be close in a peculiarly impersonal way.” As Robert Dallek shrewdly observes, “There was no one who could readily describe himself as a close Kennedy friend—not any of the White House insiders, not Sorensen or Schlesinger, nor any of the three members of the Irish mafia, O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Powers.” But within these parameters, Schlesinger had his own easy relationship with Kennedy. He was not instrumental in Sorensen’s technical way, nor a “jock” in the social bantering way of the Irish boys. (Sometimes he was able to make a joke out of the latter: “As the prime example of physical unfitness in the White House, I have given the draft everything I could,” said the note from “Arthur ‘Butch’ Schlesinger Jr.,” which accompanied a draft speech for the Football Hall of Fame.) Yet the president was also a keen historian, so he enjoyed having Schlesinger around to discuss books and ideas. Kennedy relished Schlesinger’s effortless ability to draw some interesting parallel between events of the day and, say, those of the Founders or Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland. Kennedy would often invite Schlesinger in at the end of the day, when the two men would enjoy a drink, often a daiquiri, and chat about whatever was on the president’s mind, particularly what he was reading at the time.5
Schlesinger himself understood that the easy and informal relationship was part of the problem too. Having arrived at the White House in January with little or no idea “what I was supposed to do” and with JFK “equally baffled,” Schlesinger never quite found a place in the formalized structure of governance, because, in fact, his position was essentially ad hoc. Galbraith had perceptively diagnosed this problem from the outset. “I had a long talk with Arthur Schlesinger who is unhappy and uncertain concerning his White House assignment,” Galbraith had noted in his diary in February 1961, with Arthur only days in the door. “He has a good address, but no clear function. It will soon straighten out, but it confirms my view that no sane man should ever take a staff position as distinct from some line responsibility in Washington. One should get his power, not from the man above but from the job below. One should be not one of the people the President wants to see but one that he must see.”6
Clearly Schlesinger was one of the people the president wanted to see. That ensured that Arthur always got a hearing and entered into policy debates. And when he caught the president’s ear, his influence could be great, as with the two July 7 memoranda that helped shift decision-making during the Berlin crisis, or when, as for the 1962 state of the union address, he was able “to give a philosophical coherence” to the speech and added his own paragraph “to tie the program together and relate it to the New Frontier.” Moreover, as perhaps the most liberal voice among Kennedy’s advisors, he was the embodiment of his own philosophy of government, vigorously promoted after the Bay of Pigs, that a president needed to hear as wide a variety of voices as possible in the decision-making process.7
Yet the limitations and frustrations of his role were obvious too. When Schlesinger’s ideas captured the president’s attention, his influence could be marked. But when those ideas fell flat, Schlesinger was often stuck. On some issues, it was simply a question of the president telling him to keep his nose out. (“Ted Sorensen called me urgently that morning to say that the president . . . did not wish me to touch on government-business relations,” Schlesinger wrote, for example, in June 1962. “I explained that I was sticking to foreign policy.”) But neither was there any institutional weight to fall back on. When an assistant secretary of state felt that he was not getting a fair hearing on an issue, he had the collective brain and muscle of the State Department to draw on in order to reframe the argument and push it through other venues. Moreover, echoing Galbraith, if the issue was within that person’s administrative bailiwick, they could be marginalized, but still stood more chance of avoiding being entirely cut out of the decision-making process.
Schlesinger, on the other hand, was a one-man band. Not only was he ultimately dependent on the patronage of the president, he was constantly having to build alliances, as he did with Henry Kissinger and Abram Chayes over Berlin, on an issue-by-issue basis. That was harder for him than for other key figures in the White House such as McGeorge Bundy or Theodore Sorensen, not least because each of these had their own staff to provide back-up and advice. As a consequence, Schlesinger might often find himself out of the loop at any given moment, as for example he often was when debate arose over one of the most consequential foreign policy issues of the decade.8
Vietnam had been an international problem since at least the Paris Peace conference of 1919, when a young Ho Chi Minh had tried to petition President Woodrow Wilson about Vietnamese independence from France. After his Communist Viet Minh forces occupied Hanoi in 1954 and proclaimed a provisional government, the Eisenhower administration had gambled on supporting a newly formed South Vietnam and its unproven leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in the region. Diem quickly proved arbitrary, incompetent, and out of touch with most of his people, including the Buddhist majority. In 1959, Eisenhower had authorized US military advisors to accompany South Vietnamese Army battalions on operational missions. Thus began active American military engagement that would last until 1973. When Kennedy assumed office, in the words of one White House aide at the time, US interest in Vietnam “was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned.”
The one person for whom that statement was not entirely true was the new president himself, who could claim to know as much about the situation as any Democratic politician in Washington. He had first visited Vietnam as a young congressman in 1951 and maintained a close interest thereafter. He had been scathing about French attempts to crush Ho Chi Minh, recognizing, moreover, that any free and fair vote would likely sweep the Communists to power. To act “apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure,” he remarked presciently after that early visit to the country.9
“Kennedy,” writes Fredrik Logevall in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Embers of War, “more than most national political figures of the time might have gone against the grain and ordered a full-scale review of Vietnam policy.” Yet the closest the new president came to that reevaluation came in 1961 when he sent his most trusted military figure, General Maxwell Taylor, and White House aide Walt Rostow to report on South Vietnam. With the regime teetering on the brink of collapse, Kennedy gave them clear instructions. He wanted to know now whether the United States was any better off than the French had been ten years earlier. The implication in the question could hardly have been clearer: was he heading toward “foredoomed failure”?10
Later on, Schlesinger would identify the Taylor-Rostow mission as a crucial turning point in Vietnam, and he attached blame for its failure to Dean Rusk and State. “The very composition of the mission,” he would write, “headed by a general, with a White House aide as deputy and no figure of comparable rank from the State Department, was significant. It expressed a conscious decision by the Secretary of State to turn the Vietnam problem over to the Secretary of Defense.” Kennedy acquiesced to the shift in responsibilit
y, Schlesinger suggested, “because he had more confidence in McNamara and Taylor than in State.” The effect, however, was to “color future thinking about Vietnam in both Saigon and Washington with the unavowed assumption that Vietnam was primarily a military rather than a political decision.”
At the time, however, Schlesinger seems to have taken little interest in Vietnam. He had a conversation with Kennedy after Taylor and Rostow submitted their report, during which he listened to the president’s concerns about committing troops. “They want a force of American troops,” Kennedy said, “but it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer: and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.” But Schlesinger’s own views remained opaque. Unlike with Cuba, Berlin, and nuclear testing, he had limited interest in southeast Asia. There seem to have been no urgent memos to the president, no briefings to favorite journalists, or prodding of various department officials. Was this because he already had his influence through other means, particularly after his old friend and mentor Averell Harriman became assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs that November? As likely, it was his Eurocentric worldview coupled with the fact that even Laos was more important than Vietnam at the time and neither loomed that large. There was also an element of pique. When Kennedy wanted another perspective on Vietnam and the Taylor-Rostow report, it was not to Arthur Schlesinger that he turned, but his other Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith, US ambassador to India, whom he also sent to Saigon to take a look.
These missions offer an insight into one way in which Kennedy used the academics in his administration. When he wanted to know what was going on in Vietnam, he sent Walt Rostow, a professor at MIT and an anti-Communist hawk. When he needed a counterbalancing view, he asked Galbraith of Harvard to visit. What all of these professors, including Schlesinger, offered the president was an ability to analyze and write at the highest levels of expression. Not only were they rigorous thinkers and good stylists, but each was unafraid to reject the pieties and conventional wisdom of the day, giving the president access to the thoughts of clever men who were prepared to say what they thought even if each saw only part of the problem. Kennedy thought they gave him a vital edge. As Jackie recalled, when Schlesinger returned from Europe after the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK had been so anxious to read his report that he left in the middle of a reception for a visiting head of state to read it.11
Galbraith, like Harriman, now warned Kennedy that the Vietnamese regime was a disaster. “The only solution must be to drop Diem,” he urged in his cable. Given the friendship and political alignment among the three men, it is not unreasonable to imagine that Schlesinger concurred, but he remained curiously indifferent on the issue. Yes, when Galbraith was in Washington shortly before heading off to Saigon the three had discussed the matter. Again, Schlesinger recorded their views—Harriman on how the State Department always underestimated the dynamics of revolution, and Galbraith’s opinion that “our trouble is that we make revolutions so badly”—but Schlesinger did not bother to express his own opinion. Certainly there seems to have been no ill will toward Galbraith personally; the two men met for breakfast, lunch, and dinner regularly during those few weeks that Galbraith was in Washington, coinciding with the visit by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. On one occasion he even managed to hook Galbraith up with the Hollywood actress Angie Dickinson (who quickly made herself scarce after he attempted to kiss her; she was rumored to have a bigger presidential fish on the hook). Schlesinger’s uncharacteristic reticence may have reflected a genuine lack of interest in the subject, or he might have simply deferred as he usually did to a person he liked and respected on an issue where he believed that he himself had little expertise. Whatever the answer, it is an odd lacuna in Schlesinger’s political career that he opted out at one of the crucial turning points in American foreign policy, but also it is an indication of the limitations of his role as special advisor without any particular portfolio.12
The anxieties Schlesinger had about his first year as a special assistant in the White House came to a head as 1961 turned to 1962. That January, the president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, inquired whether Schlesinger would be returning from leave in the fall. If he did not, he would be expected to resign his professorship. His departmental chair, Robert Wolff, who had been a couple years ahead of Schlesinger as a student and served with him in OSS, brought the additional unwelcome news that he had lost his intellectual history courses (among the most popular in the school).13
Schlesinger felt the dilemma keenly. On the one hand, he was only just finding his feet at the White House, which, for all its occasional frustrations, had its exhilarating moments. He was playing a role in major international crises and (as he did that January) sitting next to greats like composer Igor Stravinsky, who at dinner whispered conspiratorially to him, “I am drunk.” A year earlier, Schlesinger explained to Pusey why he wanted to extend the six-month leave of absence he had taken for the 1960 election to the maximum allowable two years. “I felt that I could not in all conscience reject a job at the White House,” he reported. “No professional historian in all our history has ever been privileged to see events from this vantage point, and I know I would always regret it if I declined the opportunity.” But he would be back in 1962, he assured Pusey, because his “basic commitment is to writing and scholarship, and I would hate to suspend ‘The Age of Roosevelt’ for a longer period than eighteen months.”14
Schlesinger now asked Mac Bundy for advice. Only a year and a half earlier, Bundy as dean of arts had been writing to Schlesinger to inform him that his Harvard salary was going up to $18,000 per annum. Now the two men were working together at the center of government in the White House. But did the president really need him? Bundy told him that Jerome Wiesner, an MIT professor and the president’s science advisor, had come to him immediately beforehand with a similar question, so he would ask Kennedy about both of them. After an anxious wait, Bundy gave Schlesinger an answer. “According to Mac,” Schlesinger recorded, glowing, “JFK said that he would be sorry to see Wiesner go but he imagined that he could find another scientist to take his place, but I was irreplaceable.” Then he caught himself and added, “I expect that the presidential reaction has been improved by Mac’s generosity” (not a quality for which Bundy was renowned). Nevertheless, fortified by the endorsement, Schlesinger concluded, “It is probable that he [JFK] would like me to stay; and since I do not feel that I have come close to exhausting the value of the experience for myself, or the fun, I feel that I should do it a little longer.” He now raised the issue with Kennedy himself, who told him, “I think you would be more useful down here than teaching those sons of privilege up there.” Schlesinger set out for Cambridge on January 16 to tell Pusey in person, from whom he received a cold welcome. “At one point he burst forth against scholars and government, suggesting that he regarded it as a corrupting relationship.” Many others echoed that view with Schlesinger much in mind, not the least of whom was Arthur Schlesinger Sr. He was deeply upset at his son resigning his Harvard professorship. To him it was the essential condition of whatever else Arthur did. To cut that tie was to risk the danger of being nothing more than a political hack. Arthur resigned anyhow, quickly receiving a letter to confirm that at a meeting of the president and fellows on February 5, 1962, “the resignation of Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. as Professor of History and Associate of Adams House was received and accepted to take effect June 30, 1962.” The decision, breaking Arthur Sr.’s heart, would be a source of tension between the two for the rest of the father’s life. “It was sorrow,” recalls his grandson Stephen Schlesinger, a student at Harvard, “sorrow for my father not following the strict routine of a scholar. That’s what he thought life was about.”15
If Schlesinger needed reassurance from other quarters that he had done the right thing, i
t came courtesy of Bobby Kennedy. Waiting at Andrews Field to board a flight to Montevideo for an Organization of American States conference, he was summoned to the phone. “The president is mad at you,” RFK told him. “I have just been talking to him, and he said, ‘Let’s check that with Arthur.’ I said that you had gone off to South America. He blew up at that and said he knew nothing about it, and that everyone was leaving him.” Schlesinger was nonplussed and offered to return immediately to the White House. “No, you go ahead,” Bobby told him. Afterwards, Schlesinger reflected that he “could not make out how seriously to take Bobby’s rendition of this.” But he also admitted to himself that “in a way [I] was a little relieved, since I had somewhat the impression . . . that the President might be getting impatient about his liberal advisers.” Better a cross JFK missing him, after all, than a president who couldn’t care less whether he was there or not. Confident in that knowledge, Schlesinger boarded the plane for Uruguay.16
For Schlesinger it was the start of a marathon tour involving three continents. He traveled first to South America for the conference in Punta del Este, before flying to Asia for a meeting of the US-Japan Committee on Educational and Cultural Cooperation in Tokyo, followed by a tour of India with George McGovern of Food for Peace. Then he moved to Europe, where he went to Rome and Berlin with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, before rounding off his trip with talks in Paris and London. In total, he was out of the United States for forty-two days. During that same period, JFK would fight hard with the State Department to reduce the length of a tour the First Lady had planned for India (Schlesinger’s visit was part of the “advance”), complaining that they were “trying to make this jaunt to India last forever, and I don’t want Mrs. Kennedy overscheduled.” In the end, that visit was settled at nine days. But it is an indication of the demands put on White House staff that Schlesinger was expected to be away from home for well over a month. To help alleviate the burden, his wife Marian was at least allowed to join him for the second half of the tour.17
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