Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  When Kennedy agreed to have Schlesinger in Washington as a special assistant to the president instead of in some remote embassy, he gave him an office in the East Wing, where various secondary aides to the president and first lady worked. Except for Schlesinger, Sorensen said, these folks were “inhabitants of another world.” It was symbolic, if not the reality, of the distance Kennedy wanted people to believe Schlesinger would have from the center of authority. When Schlesinger asked Kennedy whether his appointment was firm enough for him to request a leave from Harvard, where he was teaching, Kennedy said, “Yes, but we won’t say anything about this until Chester Bowles is confirmed. I don’t want the Senate to think that I am bringing down the whole ADA [Americans for Democratic Action].”

  Kennedy’s caution about liberals’ visibility in his administration made them unhappy. When Schlesinger mentioned this to Kennedy, he replied, “Yes, I know. . . . But they shouldn’t worry. What matters is the program. We are going down the line on the program.” Schlesinger defined it for him as “an administration of conservative men and liberal measures.” Kennedy agreed, and said that after a year or so, he planned “to bring in some new people.” But then he “reflectively” acknowledged: “It may be hard to get rid of these people once they are in.”

  While Sorensen and Schlesinger might be a kind of intellectual blood bank that provided progressive ideas and tempered liberal criticism, Kennedy needed to make the difficult decisions about who would hold the administration’s highest offices. Defense and Treasury were first on his list of crucial selections. The men he considered for Defense were also seen as suitable for Treasury, indicating that he saw them as pillars of Wall Street or corporate America who functioned comfortably in the boardrooms of industry. His first choice for either Defense or Treasury, and the State Department as well, if he preferred it, was the sixty-five-year-old Robert A. Lovett, a scion of the northeastern establishment. A prominent executive at the Brown Brothers Harriman banking house, Lovett had served in the country’s fledgling naval air arm during World War I and directed the expansion of air forces in the War Department during World War II. He had become undersecretary of state under Dean Acheson in the Truman administration and then Truman’s secretary of defense, succeeding the storied General George C. Marshall. Joe Kennedy, ever mindful of the millions of Americans who had voted for Nixon partly out of concern about having a Catholic as president, urged his son to appoint Lovett to a high cabinet post. Implicit in his recommendation was the belief that Lovett could help Jack disarm the fears about so young a man of such different background from past occupants of the White House.

  In a December meeting at Kennedy’s three-story redbrick townhouse on Georgetown’s N Street, Lovett charmed the young president-elect, candidly explaining that he had not voted for him and considered liberal Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whom Kennedy would shortly make ambassador to India, “a fine novelist.” “No doubt Lovett’s urbane realism was a relief from the liberal idealists, like myself,” Schlesinger said, “who were assailing the President-elect with virtuous opinions and nominations.” In questionable health from chronic ulcers, and probably reluctant to tie himself to a president whose values seemed removed from his and about whom he had serious doubts, Lovett declined Kennedy’s offer of any high cabinet job. Lovett, however, had recommendations for Treasury, State, and Defense that included Douglas Dillon, the sitting Treasury secretary, and Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara for State and Defense, respectively. He did not want to serve, but he was eager to get people in place who he believed could insulate the country from the liberals Lovett feared might shape Kennedy’s policies.

  When Kennedy escorted Lovett to the front door of his house, where reporters waited in the cold to have news of administration appointments, Kennedy told them that he had offered Mr. Lovett his choice of cabinet posts. If he could not get Lovett to join his government, he could still have the advantage of letting the world know that he wanted men like Lovett to serve with him and was seeking his counsel about who would be excellent choices for top cabinet positions. He was telling Wall Street, I’m no radical, but he was also heightening suspicions in the Kremlin that he was just another front man for the capitalists like his father who aimed to destroy communism.

  With Lovett out of the picture, Kennedy was more concerned than ever to convince establishment Republicans to join his administration. He immediately had Bobby Kennedy call Robert McNamara in Detroit, where he had become president of the Ford Motor Company. The forty-four-year-old McNamara had graduated in 1937 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His energy and drive to succeed matched his brilliance as a student. Reared in a lower-middle-class Irish family in Oakland, California, during the Great Depression, McNamara was determined to make a mark in the world of commerce and secure himself and his family from the financial hardships he saw everywhere in the 1930s. After earning an MBA in 1939 at Harvard Business School, where he impressed himself on his professors as an exceptional student, he worked for a year at the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. He hated it. For someone excited by innovative solutions to business productivity and opportunities to build a reputation as a manager, the day-to-day grind of accounting bored him. In 1940, at the age of twenty-four, he seized the chance to become the youngest assistant professor in the history of the Harvard Business School, where he could explore ideas about the efficiency of large enterprises. With the United States at war beginning in 1941, he received temporary draft deferments to instruct Army Air Forces officers in statistical analysis for tracking the resources and capability of the country’s air arm.

  In 1943, he entered the Air Force as a captain serving in the Office of Statistical Control, first in England and then India, where he computed everything from fuel consumption to means of saving planes and crews from various hazards when flying over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and transferred to the Pacific, the theater of principal combat against Japan, he worked for Curtis LeMay’s bomber command, helping design the devastating B-29 firebombings of Tokyo, which killed thousands of Japanese civilians at limited cost to U.S. airpower.

  After leaving the Air Force, McNamara accepted a job at the Ford Motor Company rather than return to Harvard. Married, with two small children and a wife who had been afflicted with polio, he felt the need for a more substantial income than anything the university could offer him. Colonel Charles Thornton, his commanding officer, who had pioneered much of the statistical work the Air Forces relied on in the war, persuaded McNamara to join him and other “Whiz Kids,” as they called themselves, in using their statistical methods to restore the auto company to prosperity. Ford’s revival under the leadership of Thornton and McNamara gave McNamara a reputation as a brilliant manager of a large corporation. His innovative practices, including the design of popular Ford models, made him not only Ford president in November 1960 but also something of an industrial celebrity.

  Bobby Kennedy told McNamara that his brother, the president-elect, wanted him to meet with their brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver. Shriver had married Eunice Kennedy, Jack’s younger sister, and had worked for Joe in Chicago, managing his many properties. Shriver had helped organize Jack’s Wisconsin and West Virginia primary campaigns and had become the head of a committee working to fill high administration positions. McNamara, who hadn’t made the connection that Bobby was Jack’s brother, agreed to see Shriver the following week. But Bobby, making clear that he was speaking for the president-elect, insisted it be that day. When Shriver showed up that afternoon, he explained that Kennedy wanted McNamara to be secretary of the Treasury. The bewildered but flattered McNamara replied, “You’re out of your mind. I’m not remotely qualified for that.” Shriver countered, “Well then, I’m authorized to say, he wishes you to serve as secretary of defense.” McNamara said, “This is absurd. I’m not qualified.” Shriver answ
ered, “Well the president-elect at least hopes you will give him the courtesy of agreeing to meet with him tomorrow in Washington.” McNamara agreed.

  His reluctance to acknowledge his competence to assume a cabinet post was false modesty. What gave him pause was the abandonment, even temporarily, of his proven talent for managing one of the country’s largest corporations and the diminished compensation of a government job. He was his own boss and accepting a cabinet post would make him a presidential subordinate. This was nothing he was willing to rush into. And yet going to Washington from Detroit would put him on a world stage. It was at least something he should consider, and being courted by the new young president-to-be had irresistible appeal.

  Once McNamara had been ushered into Kennedy’s home through the back door, the president-elect repeated Shriver’s offer of the Defense Department post. And McNamara echoed his want of qualifications to serve in the cabinet job, underplaying his war work and management of Ford. “Who is?” Kennedy asked rhetorically. He explained that there are no schools for defense secretaries or presidents, either. But Kennedy had taken an instant liking to the clearly dapper, brilliant forty-four-year-old McNamara and convinced him to meet again the following Monday, after McNamara had had a chance to think over the offer. Kennedy’s appeal dissolved McNamara’s doubts. The man and the mission of serving the national defense excited McNamara’s ambitions to do big things; it was an opportunity to make an indelible mark on history. After conversations with his wife and children, McNamara decided to accept, on the condition that he was free to select his deputies and not be required to frequent the Washington social scene. At their next meeting, McNamara handed the president a letter setting forth his conditions. Jack and Bobby immediately agreed to McNamara’s terms and the appointment was announced to the press waiting outside the house.

  The Kennedys didn’t care much, if at all, about McNamara’s demands. His appointment was serving their political purposes, and besides, they didn’t think he would make much difference in the administration. They accepted what Lovett had told Jack when he asked, “What makes a good secretary of defense?” Good values and a good president, Lovett had replied, adding “and he can’t do much damage. Not that he can do much good, but he can’t do that much damage.”

  It was an astonishing exchange. At the height of the Cold War, when national security had become the country’s greatest concern, the most important official after the president in assuring the nation’s safety was to be someone whom Kennedy didn’t know and who thought himself a total novice at the job. Kennedy’s casualness about the appointment spoke volumes about his assumption that McNamara would be of small consequence in controlling the national defense. McNamara, however, who could not imagine becoming an ornament, accepted the post on the assumption that he could make a difference. He had mastered every professional challenge he had faced in his life and he believed that this would be no different.

  Initially, McNamara was just another new face in Washington. The first time Schlesinger met him, at a Georgetown party a few days before the inauguration, he was “a quiet agreeable man with rimless glasses looking like a college professor.” Schlesinger failed to catch his name. “That’s Bob McNamara,” Steve Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, told him. In time, everybody would come to know a man most everyone saw as fiercely ambitious, aloof, calculating, and combative. He would become a much more influential figure in the administration than Kennedy assumed, but for the moment he would be off in the Defense Department managing an impenetrable bureaucracy.

  Kennedy was more focused on choosing his national security adviser, who would work at the White House and have more direct access to and interaction with the president. His choice was McGeorge Bundy, another Republican, and the youngest Harvard College dean in the university’s history. Bundy’s identity as a Republican also served Kennedy’s initial need for bipartisanship, but Kennedy saw him as likely to be a larger part of national security and foreign policy discussions than any of the cabinet officers. Kennedy considered cabinet meetings a formality that wasted valuable time. But he relished conversations with someone as smart, accomplished, and realistic about the world as Bundy seemed to be.

  Kennedy knew Bundy’s history, or perhaps pedigree is a better word. He was a descendant of the Boston Lowells. Kennedy could not help but imagine his father’s satisfaction at knowing that a Brahmin would now work for an offspring of Boston’s Irish. The irony of that relationship, however, was of distinctly less consequence in bringing Bundy to the White House than Kennedy’s regard for him as one of the brightest men he had ever known. Bundy’s reputation for brilliance—notable as the applicant who had the highest score in history on Yale’s entrance exam, a Harvard Junior Fellow, someone too gifted to bother with a traditional Ph.D., and the Harvard dean who had mastered the university’s temperamental prima donnas—had found confirmation for Kennedy when he interacted with him as a Harvard trustee in the fifties. At five foot ten and 160 pounds, with clear plastic-frame glasses, a receding hairline, and round face with steely blue-gray eyes, Bundy was hardly a physically imposing figure. But no one who met him could dismiss him as some ordinary bookish academic too cerebral to make much of a mark on the world. His brilliance, sharp wit, precise thought, ability to think on his feet, and talent for cutting through rhetorical nonsense from politicians, journalists, and fellow academics made him a formidable adversary and an extraordinary colleague. All who knew him may have feared or loved him, but above all, they found him unforgettable.

  At Harvard, Bundy had seen himself as one cut above his faculty, and in government, he would see himself as a kind of circus master, disdainful of congressmen and senators, the many know-nothings from the hinterlands who he thought were best ignored in the making of foreign policy, and the army of bureaucrats who could be troublesome and needed to be circumvented. Bundy quickly developed a reputation as someone who, in the familiar phrase, did not suffer fools gladly. When a Defense Department official provided a too long-winded, somewhat self-serving account of how he had uncovered a Joint Chiefs war plan hidden from the White House, Bundy snapped, “Is this a briefing or is it a confessional?” He snidely called a national security colleague he saw as too philosophical “the theologian.” He was no more patient with the press corps: “A communiqué should say nothing in such a way as to feed the press without deceiving them,” he advised Kennedy’s press secretary. Bundy’s arrogance would leave a trail of angry Washington colleagues and commentators who would later dish out verbal payback.

  Kennedy’s eagerness to have so intelligent a man at his side had led him to consider asking Bundy to become secretary of state, but having so young a secretary—Bundy was only forty-one—seemed likely to trouble people at home and abroad; they were already on edge about a forty-three-year-old president, and so Kennedy dropped the idea. Kennedy then suggested that Bundy become undersecretary of state for political affairs, but he withdrew that proposal when his choice for secretary objected. Kennedy then asked Bundy to become undersecretary for administrative affairs, but Bundy thought it would be less interesting than running Harvard College. Serving as special assistant for national security affairs, however, was irresistible; it presented an opportunity to make a significant difference in an administration that would be primarily focused on foreign affairs. One Harvard colleague, however, doubted the wisdom of putting Bundy so much at the center of power. Sociologist David Riesman thought that the “arrogance and hubris” that had made Bundy so effective as Harvard’s “perfect dean . . . might be very dangerous” for the nation. Decisions about war and peace were best left to humbler men.

  Because Kennedy intended to maintain the closest possible control over defense and foreign policy, Bundy was slated to carry a heavy load of responsibilities. To help him deal with the extensive daily challenges Kennedy envisioned for his office, he invented the job of Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, or Deputy National Security Adviser.

  Kennedy chose
Walt W. Rostow to fill the post. The forty-four-year-old Rostow was another one of the brilliant academics Kennedy had become acquainted with as senator from Massachusetts and a Harvard overseer. He was the offspring of a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His parents were socialists who named the second of their three sons Eugene V. Debs Rostow after the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World union. Also enamored of their adopted country, they named their other two sons Ralph Waldo Emerson Rostow and Walt Whitman Rostow. Rostow earned a Yale B.A. by the age of nineteen, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1935–36, and completed a Ph.D. in economics in 1940, when he was only twenty-three. He served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA, during World War II, and after the war became an economic adviser to the State Department, where he helped develop the significant reconstruction and relief impetus of the Marshall Plan to defend Western Europe against communist subversion. Between 1950 and 1961, Rostow was a professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speechwriter for President Eisenhower, and a counselor to Kennedy on international affairs. In 1960, he published Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which outlined a path to national prosperity for developing countries. It was an early statement of Rostow’s commitment to winning the international competition against communism. “I was glad I lived long enough to see the demise of communism,” he said in 1992.

  During Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, Rostow, who was a prolific writer, provided JFK with memos on everything from foreign aid to arms control, space, policy toward Asia and Africa, and the United Nations. He helped Kennedy coin the phrase “Let’s get this country moving again” and ingratiated himself with Kennedy and his backers by warning, “If the Republicans win, this country will have gone round a corner from which there may be no return.” It was the sort of hyperbole that campaigns feed on, but overstated rhetoric could be a problem in responding to overseas threats, as Kennedy would see when Rostow later counseled him on Vietnam. Nonetheless, Kennedy was greatly impressed with Rostow’s capacity to write so extensively about so many different topics. Kennedy told him once, “Walt, you write books faster than I can read them.”