A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  8. THE KENNEDY MIND: II

  The character of his reading and quoting emphasizes, I think, the historical grain of his intelligence. Kennedy was in many respects an historian manqué. The historical mind can be analytical, or it can be romantic. The best historians are both, Kennedy among them. Why England Slept, with its emphasis on impersonal forces, expressed one side; Profiles in Courage, with its emphasis on heroes, expressed the other. But, even in his most romantic mood, Kennedy never adopted a good-guys vs. bad-guys theory of history. He may have been a Whig,* but he was not a Whig historian. He had both the imagination and the objectivity which enabled him to see the point in lost causes, even in enemy fanaticisms. In a review of Liddell Hart’s Deterrent or Defense in 1960, he praised the author’s credo: “Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.” Liddell Hart was addressing these remarks to statesmen; they work just as well for historians.

  Kennedy rarely lost sight of other people’s motives and problems. For all the presumed coolness on the surface, he had an instinctive tendency to put himself into the skins of others. Once during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy, returning to New York City on a Sunday night from a visit with Mrs. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, dropped in at Voisin’s for dinner with a couple of friends. At a neighboring table, a man obviously drunk, began in a low but penetrating voice to direct a stream of unprintable comment at him. Kennedy’s companions raised their own voices in the hope that he would not hear, but to no avail. Finally one made a motion to call the headwaiter. Kennedy laid a hand on his sleeve and said, “No, don’t bother. Think how the fellow’s wife must be feeling.” His friend looked and saw her flushed with embarrassment. He later reacted with comparable dispassion to de Gaulle and Khrushchev.

  He liked to quote Lincoln: “There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of Government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” When something had enough steam behind it to move people and make an impression on history, it must have some rational explanation, and Kennedy wanted to know what that rational explanation was. The response of the fifties that it was all a struggle between good and evil never satisfied him.

  But it was not a case of tout comprendre, tout pardonner. Though he saw the human struggle, not as a moralist, but as an historian, even as an ironist, irony was never permitted to sever the nerve of action. His mind was forever critical; but his thinking always retained the cutting edge of decision. When he was told something, he wanted to know what he could do about it. He was pragmatic in the sense that he tested the meaning of a proposition by its consequences; he was also pragmatic in the sense of being free from metaphysics. In his response, too, to the notion of a pluralist universe, Kennedy was a pragmatist—if one may make sensible use of this word, which came into political vogue in the first years of the Kennedy administration and then was oddly revived in the first years of the Johnson administration with the implication that the Kennedy years had not, after all, been pragmatic but were somehow ideological. They were not ideological, though they could perhaps be termed intellectual.

  The historical mind is rarely ideological—and, when it becomes so, it is at the expense of history. Whether analytical or romantic, it is committed to existence, not to essence. Kennedy was bored by abstractions. He never took ideology very seriously, certainly not as a means of interpreting history and even not as part of the material of history. If he did not go the distance with de Gaulle in reducing everything to national tradition and national interest, he tended to give greater weight in thinking about world affairs to national than to ideological motives. Like de Gaulle, but unlike the ideological interpreters of the cold war, he was not surprised by the split between Russia and China.

  If historic conflicts infrequently pitted total good against total evil, then they infrequently concluded in total victory or total defeat. Seeing the past with an historian’s eyes, Kennedy knew that ideals and institutions were stubborn, and that change took place more often by accommodation than by annihilation. His cult of courage was in this sense ethical rather than political; he saw the courage of “unyielding devotion to absolute principle” as the moral fulfillment of the individual rather than as necessarily the best way of running a government. Indeed, he took pains to emphasize in Profiles that politicians could also demonstrate courage “through their acceptance of compromise, through their advocacy of conciliation, through their willingness to replace conflict with co-operation.” Senators who go down to defeat in vain defense of a single principle “will not be on hand to fight for that or any other principle in the future.” One felt here an echo of St. Thomas: “Prudence applies principles to particular issues; consequently it does not establish moral purpose, but contrives the means thereto.”

  The application of principle requires both moral and intellectual insight. Kennedy had an unusual capacity to weigh the complexities of judgment—in part because of the complexities of his own perceptions. The contrast in Profiles between the courage of compromise and the courage of principle expressed, for example, a tension deep within Kennedy—a tension between the circumspection of his political instinct and the radicalism of his intellectual impulse; so too the contrast between the historical determinism, the deprecation of the individual and the passive view of leadership implied in Why England Slept and the demand in Profiles that the politician be prepared, on the great occasions, to “meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience.” All this expressed the interior strain between Kennedy’s sense of human limitation and his sense of hope, between his skepticism about man and his readiness to say, “Man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

  All these things, coexisting within him, enabled others to find in him what qualities they wanted. They could choose one side of him or the other and claim him, according to taste, as a conservative, because of his sober sense of the frailty of man, the power of institutions and the frustrations of history, or as a progressive, because of his vigorous confidence in reason, action and the future. Yet within Kennedy himself these tensions achieved reunion and reconciliation. He saw history in its massive movements as shaped by forces beyond man’s control. But he felt that there were still problems which man could resolve; and in any case, whether man could resolve these problems or not, the obligation was to carry on the struggle of existence. It was in essence, Richard Goodwin later suggested, the Greek view where the hero must poise himself against the gods and, even with knowledge of the futility of the fight, press on to the end of his life until he meets his tragic fate.

  9. THE CONTEMPORARY MAN

  After Kennedy’s death, Adlai Stevenson called him the “contemporary man.” His youth, his vitality, his profound modernity—these were final elements in his power and potentiality as he stood on the brink of the Presidency. For Kennedy was not only the first President to be born in the twentieth century. More than that, he was the first representative in the White House of a distinctive generation, the generation which was born during the First World War, came of age during the depression, fought in the Second World War and began its public career in the atomic age.

  This was the first generation to grow up as the age of American innocence was coming to an end. To have been born nearly a decade earlier, like Lyndon Johnson, or nearly two decades earlier, like Adlai Stevenson, was to be rooted in another and simpler America. Scott Fitzgerald had written that his contemporaries grew up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” But the generation which came back from the Second World War found that gods, wars and faiths in man had, after all, survived, if in queer and somber ways. The realities of the twentieth century wh
ich had shocked their fathers now wove the fabric of their own lives. Instead of reveling in being a lost generation, they set out in one mood or another to find, if not themselves, a still point in the turning world. The predicament was even worse for the generation which had been too young to fight the war, too young to recall the age of innocence, the generation which had experienced nothing but turbulence. So in the fifties some sought security at the expense of identity and became organization men. Others sought identity at the expense of security and became beatniks. Each course created only a partial man. There was need for a way of life, a way of autonomy, between past and present, the organization man and the anarchist, the square and the beat.

  It was autonomy which this humane and self-sufficient man seemed to embody. Kennedy simply could not be reduced to the usual complex of sociological generalizations. He was Irish, Catholic, New England, Harvard, Navy, Palm Beach, Democrat and so on; but no classification contained him. He had wrought an individuality which carried him beyond the definitions of class and race, region and religion. He was a free man, not just in the sense of the cold-war cliché, but in the sense that he was, as much as man can be, self-determined and not the servant of forces outside him.

  This sense of wholeness and freedom gave him an extraordinary appeal not only to his own generation but even more to those who came after, the children of turbulence. Recent history had washed away the easy consolations and the old formulas. Only a few things remained on which contemporary man could rely, and most were part of himself—family, friendship, courage, reason, jokes, power, patriotism. Kennedy demonstrated the possibility of the new self-reliance. As he had liberated himself from the past, so he had liberated himself from the need to rebel against the past. He could insist on standards, admire physical courage, attend his church, love his father while disagreeing with him, love his country without self-doubt or self-consciousness. Yet, while absorbing so much of the traditional code, his sensibility was acutely contemporaneous. He voiced the disquietude of the postwar generation—the mistrust of rhetoric, the disdain for pomposity, the impatience with the postures and pieties of other days, the resignation to disappointment. And he also voiced the new generation’s longings—for fulfillment in experience, for the subordination of selfish impulses to higher ideals, for a link between past and future, for adventure and valor and honor. What was forbidden were poses, histrionics, the heart on the sleeve and the tongue on the cliché. What was required was a tough, nonchalant acceptance of the harsh present and an open mind toward the unknown future.

  This was Kennedy, with his deflationary wartime understatement (when asked how be became a hero, he said, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat”); his contempt for demagoguery (once during the campaign, after Kennedy had disappointed a Texas crowd by his New England restraint, Bill Attwood suggested that next time he wave his arms in the air like other politicians; Kennedy shook his head and wrote—he was saving his voice—“I always swore one thing I’d never do is—” and drew a picture of a man waving his arms in the air); his freedom from dogma, his appetite for responsibility, his instinct for novelty, his awareness and irony and control; his imperturbable sureness in his own powers, not because he considered himself infallible, but because, given the fallibility of all men, he supposed he could do the job as well as anyone else; his love of America and pride in its traditions and ideals.

  Of course there was an element of legerdemain in all this. Every politician has to fake a little, and Kennedy was a politician determined to become President. He was prepared to do many things, to cut corners, to exploit people and situations, to “go go go,” even to merchandise himself. But many things he would not do, phrases he would not use, people he would not exploit (never a “Jackie and I”). Even his faking had to stay within character. This sense of a personality under control, this insistence on distancing himself from displays of emotion, led some to think him indifferent or unfeeling. But only the unwary could really suppose that his ‘coolness’ was because he felt too little. It was because he felt too much and had to compose himself for an existence filled with disorder and despair. During his Presidency, when asked about the demobilization of the reserves after the Berlin crisis, he said, “There is always an inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country. . . . Life is unfair.” He said this, not with bitterness, but with the delicate knowledge of one who lives in a bitter time—a knowledge which stamped him as a son of that time. His charm and grace were not an uncovenanted gift. The Kennedy style was the triumph, hard-bought and well-earned, of a gallant and collected human being over the anguish of life.

  His ‘coolness’ was itself a new frontier. It meant freedom from the stereotyped responses of the past. It promised the deliverance of American idealism, buried deep in the national character but imprisoned by the knowingness and calculation of American society in the fifties. It held out to the young the possibility that they could become more than satisfied stockholders in a satisfied nation. It offered hope for spontaneity in a country drowning in its own passivity—passive because it had come to “accept the theory of its own impotence. This was what Norman Mailer caught at Los Angeles in 1960—Kennedy’s existential quality, the sense that he was in some way beyond conventional politics, that he could touch emotions and hopes thwarted by the bland and mechanized society. Unlike the other candidates, Mailer wrote that Kennedy was “mysterious.” He had “the wisdom of a man who senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risking his life.” Even his youth, his handsomeness, the beauty of his wife—these were not accidental details but necessary means of inciting the American imagination. With Kennedy, Mailer thought, there was a chance that “we as a nation would finally be loose again in the historic seas of a national psyche which was willy-nilly and at last, again, adventurous.” The only question was whether the nation would be “brave enough to enlist the romantic dream of itself . . . vote for the image of the mirror of its unconscious.” This was the question, I believe, which frightened the nation when it began to fall away from Kennedy in the last days before the election.

  Mailer soon repudiated his portrait when, as he later complained at interminable length, Kennedy personally let him down by declining to become the hipster as President. Yet there can be no doubt that Kennedy’s magic was not alone that of wealth and youth and good looks, or even of these things joined to intelligence and will. It was, more than this, the hope that he could redeem American politics by releasing American life from its various bondages to orthodoxy.

  No man could have fulfilled this hope, and Kennedy certainly did not. He himself regarded the Mailer essay with skeptical appreciation.* He knew that as a President of the United States he had no choice but to work within the structure of government and politics—though he did not yet know how beautifully that structure was organized to prevent anything from happening. What Mailer left out was the paradox of power—that the exercise of power is necessary to fulfill purpose, yet the world of power dooms many purposes to frustration. Nonetheless the Mailer rhapsody conveys something of the exhilaration which accompanied the start of the Kennedy Presidency. The Presidency itself would show how national vitality could in fact be released—not in an existential orgasm but in the halting progression of ideas and actions which make up the fabric of history.

  V

  Gathering of the Forces

  CAPE COD IS NEVER MORE POIGNANT than in the last still blue and gold of autumn. The November sun is luminous, the sky and sea are aquamarine, and the light is the light of Greece. It was one of those translucent days on the third day after election when my wife and I drove down from Cambridge to Hyannis Port for luncheon.

  The frenzy of August had gone, though people stood in quiet clusters at each end of the Kennedy block on Irving Avenue. The compound itself was tranquil and secluded in the drowsy sunlight. The Kennedys were out for a stroll on the dunes. In a moment they returned, Jack in tweed jacket, sweate
r and slacks, hatless and tieless, swinging a cane and looking fit and jaunty, and Jacqueline, her hair slightly blown in the breeze, glowing in beauty from the walk. One could only think: What a wildly attractive young couple. It took another minute to remember that this was the President-elect of the United States and his wife.

  We sat in the living room and, except for Kennedy, sipped Bloody Marys while we chatted about the election. Jackie said, “I cast only one vote—for Jack. It is a rare thing to be able to vote for one’s husband for President of the United States, and I didn’t want to dilute it by voting for anyone else.” Kennedy at this stage seemed more perplexed than bothered by the narrowness of his victory. He attributed the thin margin to the prevailing sense of prosperity and peace—people did not realize how precarious both were—and to anti-Catholic sentiment. He was particularly surprised by the result in Ohio. “Cuyahoga County just didn’t produce what we counted on,” he said. “I can carry states like that only when I come out of the cities with a big margin.” As for New York, he declared himself thoroughly fed up with the organization and especially with Mike Pendergast, the state chairman, and Carmine De Sapio, the leader of Tammany Hall. They had refused, despite previous assurances to him, to permit Governor Lehman and Mrs. Roosevelt to speak at the meeting at the Coliseum the Saturday before election; and they had done their best to keep him away from the rally put on that day by the reform Democrats. So far as he was concerned, he said, he was through with them.

  But the campaign did not detain him long. What concerned him as we went in for lunch was the Presidency. He brandished a collection of memoranda on the issues of transition prepared, he said, by Clark Clifford and “Professor Neustadt of Columbia.” These papers were “shrewd and helpful,” he said, but the hardest problem of all would be “people”—finding the right men for the right jobs. He wished Galbraith and me to collect our Cambridge ideas and send them along to Sargent Shriver, whom he had asked to take charge of recruitment. He named four men he particularly wanted in important positions—Orville Freeman and Mennen Williams, Frank Coffin of Maine and George McGovern of South Dakota. He meant to build up the job of American Ambassador to NATO and wondered whether Thomas K. Finletter might be interested. He expressed concern over the downward turn in Latin America: would Adolf Berle be the man to undertake advance planning on hemisphere policy? (All these names, of course, were well calculated to appeal to a liberal guest.) He mentioned Stevenson only to say that he looked forward to receiving his foreign policy report. He solicited opinions about a variety of people without disclosing his intentions toward them.