Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Clarence Dillon moved from small business to Wall Street and made a $190 million fortune as the head of the investment banking firm Dillon Read. He used his largess to travel widely in Europe, where he bought the winemaking estate Chteau Haut-Brion on 104 acres in Bordeaux that had been owned by Talleyrand. Douglas Dillon was born in Switzerland and graduated second in his class from Groton, by then a virtual spawning ground for bankers with a commitment to public service. Tall and shy, he suffered like Kennedy from repeated bouts of poor health when he was growing up, including a ruptured spinal disc that forced him to work standing at a tall desk. In World War II he saw combat as a navy officer on Black Cat bombers and withstood kamikaze attacks. After the war he became chairman of Dillon Read. With six residences in the United States and abroad, Dillon lived like a Renaissance prince, with Renoirs on his walls and the finest Haut-Brion claret on his table.

  It was only after he turned to government service that Dillon finally escaped the firm grip of his father. Kennedy and Dillon first took each other’s measure at various Harvard gatherings and shared a “patrician reserve and almost British sense of understatement.” Through Kennedy’s membership on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he tapped Dillon’s State Department expertise on international problems such as aid to India. They also had a mutual friend in Ben Bradlee, who had served as Dillon’s press officer at the embassy in Paris.

  Kennedy admired Dillon’s quiet style, quick mind, and nondoctrinaire approach to economic policies. “We both had rather rapid minds,” said Dillon, who noticed that Kennedy’s decisions “were well taken. He wasn’t pushed into doing things too rapidly.” Dillon was particularly impressed with Kennedy’s sense of history when he said during their initial meeting about the cabinet post, “Liberal governments have foundered on the reef of financial instability, and I will not let that happen to my government.”

  More than any other appointee, Dillon brought credentials that helped solve some urgent problems inherited by Kennedy as he prepared to take power. The U.S. balance of payments was precarious; investors were depleting U.S. gold reserves, which threatened to weaken the dollar, at least in part due to fears of a free-spending Democratic administration. Kennedy believed Dillon’s appointment to Treasury would reassure the international financial community and stabilize the dollar.

  “Kennedy was a deeply conservative fellow financially,” recalled Dillon. “His father had tremendous influence on his background thinking.” The preoccupation with the balance of payments was right out of Joe Kennedy’s playbook. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Joe Kennedy believed that “lack of confidence” would drain America of gold, attitudes that were stamped on JFK and remained a preoccupation throughout his presidency.

  Dillon’s selection predictably disheartened the liberal wing of the Democratic party. No one was more disappointed than John Kenneth Galbraith, who had counted on influencing presidential policies since Kennedy first consulted him as a young senator mulling how to vote on economics legislation.

  Canadian-born Galbraith was difficult to miss, not only because of his six-foot-eight-inch height, but also because of his trenchant views on economics. He had a “pacifist father” who bred livestock and instilled in Galbraith an urge to help impoverished people “on the edge of despair” during the Depression. Galbraith earned a doctorate at Berkeley and worked briefly in the Roosevelt administration before joining the Harvard faculty, the beginning of a sixty-year association with the university. He was a disciple of John Maynard Keynes, sharing his belief that increases in government spending could stimulate growth and ease unemployment.

  Galbraith was one of the most prominent liberals to line up behind Kennedy in the campaign’s Cambridge brain trust. He was the author of The Affluent Society, a harsh indictment of the impact of American advertising on consumer spending, and his ideas for the candidate ran at full throttle. “Along with people who like to hear themselves talk,” he wrote to Kennedy, “there are unquestionably some who are even more inordinately attracted by their own composition. I may well be entitled to a gold star membership in both groups.” Kennedy enjoyed Galbraith’s drollery and didn’t hesitate to fire back. When Galbraith objected that the New York Times described him as arrogant, Kennedy replied, “I don’t see why. Everybody else does.”

  Kennedy’s election thrilled Galbraith, who proclaimed “a government of the rich by the clever for the poor.” There was talk that Galbraith might be named secretary of the Treasury or chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But Kennedy knew that Galbraith’s views were too extreme for either of those jobs. Cy Sulzberger predicted “suicides on Wall Street” if Galbraith were named Treasury secretary. “They think Galbraith is mad.” When Kennedy asked Lovett about Galbraith, the veteran investment banker deadpanned, “He’s a fine novelist.” (Ironically, Galbraith would publish The McLandress Dimension in 1963 under the pseudonym “Mark Epernay,” a novel that skewered the Kennedy State Department as a fount of clichés and bad ideas.)

  Less than a week later, Kennedy tapped Galbraith as ambassador to India, a prestigious post where he could do the least damage to the American economy. But Galbraith would not be silenced. With a stream of colorful letters and regular visits back home, he would continue pushing his views. To Dillon, Galbraith would be like a mischievous phantom darting around the edges of the administration’s sober economic policies—a situation that Kennedy would find endlessly diverting.

  Galbraith’s Cambridge soulmate was Arthur Schlesinger. Together they were Kennedy’s biggest egghead trophies, since both had been highly visible supporters of Adlai Stevenson, the liberal standard-bearer and twice-failed Democratic candidate for president. Just as Kennedy needed Republicans after his election, so were the “kinetic Democrats” (Schlesinger’s term for progressive party activists) crucial to securing the nomination and energizing voters in the general election. Many liberals were wary of Joe and Bobby Kennedy’s association with Joe McCarthy. But the enduring misgiving centered on Jack. When the Senate censured McCarthy (67 to 22) for his abusive tactics in 1954, Jack was the only Democratic senator who failed to cast a vote.

  Schlesinger was willing to accept JFK’s flimsy excuse that he couldn’t join the voting because he was recuperating from his back surgery. (Even from afar, Kennedy knew enough about the case against McCarthy to cast a vote, and he was accustomed to having staff members vote on his behalf, sometimes when they were unfamiliar with his precise position.) To Schlesinger, Jack was nearly infallible. They were exact contemporaries who first became friendly in 1946 when Schlesinger was teaching history at Harvard and Kennedy had just been elected to Congress.

  JFK instantly understood the value of this twenty-nine-year-old who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson. As Kennedy began asking Schlesinger for ideas and advice, the ambitious academic was captured by his charm, his “skeptical mind,” and “laconic tongue.” Schlesinger grew to admire the “inward and reflective quality” of JFK’s intelligence, and Kennedy used Schlesinger as a kind of liberal tuning fork whose perfect pitch enabled Kennedy to adjust his own position on the political scale as circumstances required.

  Schlesinger was born in Ohio but lost all trace of the heartland (much like his friend Bill Walton) in the urbanity of Cambridge, where he grew up as the precocious son of Harvard’s celebrated social and cultural historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger. Slightly built and bespectacled, with a wicked wit and writerly flair, young Arthur distinguished himself as a student and then a teacher at Harvard, though he never received an advanced degree. His great passion was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

  While Kennedy was more politically conservative than Schlesinger, the two men shared a strong sense of irony, a playful regard for the vagaries of the human condition, and an openness to people and experiences. During the campaign, Kennedy took impish pleasure when his academic allies were thrown in with hard-bitten political veterans, described by Time correspondent Hugh Sidey as “brawling Iris
hmen.” During a rally in Boston, Kennedy spotted Schlesinger and Galbraith in the crowd. Later, on the campaign plane, Kennedy asked Sidey, “Did you see Arthur and Ken trapped in the middle inhaling all the cigar smoke?” Said Sidey, “He enjoyed and respected them and their brains, but he understood the limits of intellectuals. He needed the stimulus but he needed the down to earth O’Donnells and O’Briens as well.”

  One after another of Schlesinger’s suggested appointments for the Kennedy administration fell on deaf ears: Stevenson for secretary of state, former Connecticut governor Chester Bowles as ambassador to the United Nations, and Galbraith for Treasury. Recognizing Schlesinger’s frustration, Kennedy tried to mollify him. “We’ll have to go along with this for a year or so,” JFK told Schlesinger. “Then I would like to bring in some new people.” With that, Schlesinger began to grasp the dimensions of what he called Kennedy’s “profoundly realistic mind.”

  Schlesinger’s wife, Marian, believed that her husband “would have loved to have had Mac Bundy’s job,” but settled for a more nebulous designation as “special assistant,” what Galbraith described as “a good address but no clear function.” The notion of an adviser with no definable responsibility initially disquieted Schlesinger. “I am not sure what I would be doing as Special Assistant,” he said. “Well,” cracked Kennedy, “I am not sure what I will be doing as President either.” Schlesinger took the job knowing, as he told Eleanor Roosevelt, “that no American historian has ever been privileged to watch the unfolding of public policy from this particular vantage point.”

  “In Jack’s mind he must have perceived that Arthur was someone to evaluate his presidency,” said William vanden Heuvel, who worked as an aide to Bobby Kennedy. “To give an inside role like that shows an aspect of Kennedy’s self-confidence.” As Kennedy himself explained it to O’Donnell, “I’ll write my own official history of the Kennedy administration, but Arthur will probably write one of his own, and it will be better for us if he’s in the White House, seeing what goes on, instead of reading about us in the New York Times and Time magazine up in his office in the Widener Library at Harvard.”

  Schlesinger’s most burdensome task, one that originated early in the presidential campaign and continued in the White House, was as the middleman between Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson. “Adlai was not in the inner circle,” said Schlesinger, “but Jack Kennedy always wanted to know what Adlai thought.” Schlesinger never tired of insisting how compatible Kennedy and Stevenson should have been despite their seventeen-year age difference. Both had graduated from Choate, and Stevenson was a Princeton man. Their homes, Schlesinger observed, had the “same mood and tempo,” they attracted “the same kind of irrelevant European visitors,” had “the same gay humor” and “style of gossip,” as well as “the same free and wide-ranging conversation about a variety of subjects” and “the same quick transition from the serious to the frivolous.”

  Despite such natural affinities, Kennedy and Stevenson were forever uneasy with each other: the slightly plump, balding elder statesman and the dashing usurper. In Kennedy’s presence, Stevenson stiffened, and “became sort of prissy and overzealous,” Schlesinger recalled. Kennedy “never saw Stevenson at his best . . . pungent, astute and beguiling.” Behind Stevenson’s back, Kennedy dismissed him as unmanly and weak. When criticizing the State Department, JFK once said, “They’re not queer, but well, sort of like Adlai.” Stevenson saw “a certain amount of arrogance in Jack Kennedy” that he found distasteful, according to Stevenson’s sister Elizabeth Ives.

  Neither Kennedy nor Stevenson forgot the slights they inflicted on each other during the presidential campaign. Kennedy lobbied hard through intermediaries, particularly Schlesinger, for Stevenson’s support before the convention. As an inducement, Kennedy dangled the possibility of secretary of state, the job Stevenson coveted next to the presidency. “Had [Adlai] come out for Kennedy . . . he could have had anything he wanted,” said Schlesinger. Four years earlier, Stevenson had encouraged Kennedy to make a bid for the vice presidential slot. Although Kennedy had lost narrowly, his prominence at the 1956 convention, followed by extensive campaigning, had set the stage for his own presidential bid.

  But in 1960 Stevenson remained stubbornly neutral. He felt that he had provided the intellectual framework for Kennedy, who had used Stevenson’s people and ideas to develop his own campaign. Stevenson still hoped for a draft by his diehard supporters, led by Eleanor Roosevelt. (Kennedy regarded the Stevenson followers with an amused curiosity, remarking to Charley Bartlett, “I don’t have a cult. Why does Adlai have a cult?”) Kennedy’s youth and inexperience also gave Stevenson doubts. “I do not feel he’s the right man for the job,” Stevenson told British journalist Barbara Ward. “I do not really think he is up to it.”

  At the convention, Bobby Kennedy pressed Stevenson hard to nominate Jack. “You’ve got twenty-four hours,” Joe Kennedy snarled to Stevenson aide Bill Blair. Not only did Stevenson refuse, he visited the convention hall on the eve of the balloting, provoking a “wild demonstration” that incensed Kennedy, who concluded that Stevenson had “behaved indecisively and stupidly.”

  Still, Stevenson pined to be secretary of state, and Schlesinger kept pressing his friend’s case. But Kennedy didn’t want a man with his own following that could form a separate power base. JFK was eager to run his own foreign policy, so he selected Dean Rusk, a Georgia poor boy turned Rhodes scholar known for his reliability and lucidity but lacking force and imagination.

  The best offer Kennedy could make was ambassador to the United Nations, which he elevated to cabinet status to soothe Stevenson’s injured pride. Stevenson initially rejected the overture, and complained that it was a “second-rate job,” which irritated his friends as much as it did Kennedy. “You must never again say to anyone . . . that Jack gave you this appointment to ‘get rid of you,’” Agnes Meyer, the wife of the Washington Post owner, wrote to Stevenson. “From now on you must play ball.” Stevenson begrudgingly accepted the job, but his resentment remained, leaving Schlesinger resigned to his fate as intermediary for the next three years: “on the phone between the two of them, trying to translate one to the other.”

  SIX

  “Kennedys were everywhere,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger. “It was the first rally of the new frontier.” The occasion was a party at the cream-colored home of Jack’s sister Jean and her husband, Steve Smith, just three nights before the inauguration. The Smith residence at Thirty-first and O Streets in Georgetown was the epicenter of the movable Kennedy compound, with the rest of the family in rented houses down the street and around the corner. Jean and Steve put up a heated tent over their garden, where guests dined and danced to Lester Lanin. The evening “had all the glamour of a Hollywood premiere,” the Washington Post reported.

  The crowd was quintessentially Kennedy, a mixture of scholars, movie stars, and men who would hold top positions in the new administration. Robert McNamara arrived just after Milton Berle and Jimmy Durante. Frank Sinatra walked in with the wife of black singer Nat King Cole; when a reporter asked Sinatra if she was his date he snarled, “Where do you come from, Romania?” Eunice Shriver wore straw beach shoes with her evening gown because she had sprained her ankle earlier in the day. Her friend Deeda Blair, who had worked hard on the campaign, was astonished to be seated between JFK and Sinatra, while Marian Schlesinger marveled at “the beautiful nymphets imported from New York.”

  The hostess, Jean Kennedy Smith, embodied what Ken Galbraith called “the agreeable enthusiasm of youth.” She was thirty-two, the second youngest among the siblings. She had the family’s strong jaw, but her blue eyes conveyed a slightly winsome look, and her manner was low key. A graduate of Manhattanville College, she had a sharp intelligence and quick wit that made her the Kennedy sister most compatible with Jackie. Both women had been pregnant during the campaign, and Jean had given birth to her second son in the fall.

  Jean’s husband, Steve, was educated by the Jesuits at Georgetown and
worked at his family’s tugboat company in New York. His Irish immigrant grandfather had been a three-term congressman from Brooklyn. Smith inherited political instincts as well as the sort of business acumen that the Ambassador felt the family needed. As Lem Billings said, “Listening to the Kennedy brothers talk about business was like hearing nuns talk about sex.”

  The chain-smoking Smith was handsome, wiry, and intense. He proved to be a resourceful strategist during the campaign. “He rowed to his objective on silent oars,” said Jack Kennedy, remarking on his brother-in-law’s famously taciturn but effective style. In the new administration, Smith would be assigned to the State Department as a troubleshooter.

  Jack came alone to the Smith dinner dance because Jackie was still in Palm Beach, conserving her strength and waiting until the last moment to leave Caroline and John, who would stay at the Ambassador’s home with baby nurse Luella Hennessey and nanny Maud Shaw while the private quarters of the White House were being redecorated. The President-elect was beaming and euphoric, urging his little brother Teddy to sing “Heart of My Heart” and his navy buddy Red Fay to perform “Hooray for Hollywood.” But the performances fell flat, Fay recalled, because “people were having too much fun getting to know each other.”

  When Jackie flew north the next day, accompanied by Mary Gallagher and Pam Turnure, she slipped into town “almost unnoticed except by a small handful of waiting photographers, Secret Service men and fellow air travelers.” Nobody came to the airport to greet the future first lady, who was driven away by a Secret Service man in a bright green Mercury. Jack was in Manhattan having lunch with Democratic elder statesman Averell Harriman. Jackie’s mother, along with all the Kennedy “womenfolk,” were busy at the National Gallery of Art standing in receiving lines to greet six thousand women. It was just the sort of gathering Jackie disliked, and that she had been told to avoid.