Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House

by Robert Dallek

  A last consideration for Kennedy as he prepared to launch his administration was assigning some aides to develop a civil rights agenda. He was not keen to face up to a domestic issue that seemed likely to provoke conflicts that would distract him from what he believed were more compelling national security challenges. However, he understood that he could not just put the matter aside and have it fester for the next four years, and so he wanted people in place who would persuade liberals that he was not inattentive to reforms they believed should have a high priority. And he hoped that these advocates could find means to satisfy some of the complaints of aggrieved African Americans.

  The key figure in assembling personnel and a program for the fight ahead was Harris Wofford. The thirty-four-year-old Wofford was a New Yorker devoted to idealistic goals such as world government and equal rights for all Americans. From 1954 forward, after undergraduate schooling at the University of Chicago and law studies at Yale and Howard University, the black college in Washington, D.C., where whites making a statement in favor of integration were in the minority, Wofford had served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His connection to Kennedy began when he wrote the senator to praise his thoughtful speeches on anticolonialism. In the spring of 1959, while writing a commission report on civil rights for Congress and the president and serving as a law professor at Notre Dame, Wofford received a personal invitation from Kennedy to join his presidential campaign. Kennedy’s compelling appeal to him focused on foreign affairs and included a promise to “break out of the confines of the cold war.” Although agreeing only to part-time work for Kennedy, Wofford suggested that Kennedy publish his speeches as a book. The Strategy of Peace, which Wofford edited, became a magnet to intellectuals looking for a candidate with an idealistic foreign policy plan.

  But a need for campaign help on civil rights made Wofford Kennedy’s point man on the issue. “In five minutes tick off the ten things a President ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess,” Kennedy directed him during a car ride to his Senate office in August 1960. It spoke volumes about Kennedy’s wish to put civil rights aside that he wanted only a five-minute tutorial on how to manage the greatest domestic challenge of 1960. Wofford’s recommendation that a president bypass the Congress, where southern committee chairmen formed insurmountable obstacles to effective legislation, and rely on executive action struck resonant chords with Kennedy. Wofford suggested that he criticize Eisenhower and Nixon for not ending discrimination in federally assisted housing, by saying that here was a problem that could have been resolved “with one stroke of the pen.” In collaboration with Shriver, Wofford had persuaded Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King and help arrange the release of her husband from the Reidsville, Georgia, state prison where he had been sent for having an expired driver’s license. In addition, Wofford had helped prepare a statement signed by Democratic senators pledging to carry out their party’s platform pledge on civil rights legislation. Wofford also talked Kennedy into sponsoring a national conference on constitutional rights, at which he promised to support legislation and take executive action “on a bold and large scale,” including the “moral question” posed by equal rights.

  Wofford and other civil rights advocates were disappointed after the election, when Kennedy announced J. Edgar Hoover’s reappointment as head of the FBI. Hoover’s “agents in the South, all white, had been of almost no help to us,” Wofford complained. Hoover’s “antipathy to Negroes and the cause of civil rights was well known.” In the interregnum between the election and the inauguration, Kennedy “gave only passing attention to civil rights.” The economy and foreign dangers were foremost on his mind. Three weeks into the administration, when Chairman John A. Hannah, Michigan State University president and University of Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh, members of the Civil Rights Commission, complained to Kennedy during a White House meeting that no one had been appointed as a special assistant on civil rights, Kennedy said that he had given that post to Wofford. They replied that Wofford told them that he was working on establishing the Peace Corps. “Oh,” Kennedy explained, “that’s only temporary.”

  Within minutes, Wofford received a call to come to the White House. As he waited to see the president, “a solemn-looking man in a dark suit” appeared and asked Wofford to raise his right hand so that he could swear him in. “What for?” Wofford asked. The man didn’t know and said the president would tell him after the swearing-in. Ushered into the Oval Office, Wofford was informed that he was now special assistant to the president on civil rights and instructed “to do these things we promised we were going to do.” Kennedy explained, “The strategy for 1961 would be ‘minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.’”

  Despite Kennedy’s directive to Wofford, the watchword at the White House on civil rights was caution. Kennedy said more than once: These domestic disputes can wound an administration but unlike international conflicts, they can’t kill you. Bobby Kennedy was convinced, however, that controversial rights disputes could create differences that would undermine the president’s ability to lead. When Deputy Attorney General Byron White suggested that the White House coordinate all federal action on rights initiatives, Bobby directed that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which had been established in 1957, take the lead. Moreover, Bobby opposed choosing someone with a high profile on civil rights to head the group; better to keep the whole thing as low-key as possible.

  Wofford seemed like the natural choice for the post, but Bobby saw him as too “committed . . . emotionally. . . . [W]hat I wanted was a tough lawyer who could look at things objectively and give advice—and handle things properly,” he said. Wofford was “a slight madman. I didn’t want to have someone in the Civil Rights Division who was dealing not from the fact but was dealing from emotion and who wasn’t going to give what was in the best interest of President Kennedy—what he was trying to accomplish for the country—but advice which the particular individual felt was in the interest of a Negro or a group of Negroes or a group of those who were interested in civil rights.” Bobby wanted someone who would not automatically agitate protests from southern segregationists complaining that Kennedy was stacking the cards against states’ rights advocates and throwing the White House into a distracting political battle.

  Kennedy’s choice for the post was thirty-eight-year-old Burke Marshall. He was a Yale Law School graduate, working at the Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling, but with no special credentials as a civil rights lawyer; his focus had been on antitrust law for large corporate clients. But people close to Bobby recommended Marshall as a very smart lawyer who could handle a variety of issues. Marshall’s interview did not go very well. His conversation with Bobby generated no chemistry between them. Eager for an appointment to the Justice Department, Marshall was terribly nervous, said little, and left Bobby believing that they couldn’t work well together. But White and Wofford persuaded Bobby that Marshall would be just the sort of deputy he was looking for—very bright, unemotional about the tough issues facing them, and prepared to apply the law objectively. Marshall proved them right when his personal history and low-key, matter-of-fact responses to questions convinced Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, not to oppose his nomination, though he would vote against him. “I’d vote against Jesus Christ if he was nominated for that position,” Eastland told Bobby.

  Executive action on civil rights was also a good place to occupy Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy hoped partly to satisfy his appetite for important assignments by telling him that leadership of the new President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) could blunt southern concerns: Having a southerner as head of a committee charged with combating discrimination in hiring of federal employees and by private businesses with government contracts seemed like a good way to mute southern fears of an aggressive push by the White House for integration. However, the likelihood that Johnson and Bobby Kennedy would have
to cooperate to make CEEO a success put the program in doubt. They would have to overcome an intense dislike of each other that threatened the committee’s effectiveness.

  The president-elect also asked Johnson to head the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which acted as an advisory board to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was essentially a response to the Soviet’s successful launching of the first Sputnik, an earth satellite, which seemed to demonstrate an advantage in rocket technology. As majority leader, Johnson had led the charge to establish a space agency in response to the Soviet achievement, but he resisted suggestions that it be an arm of the U.S. military; it seemed certain to provoke a battle among the armed services for rich budgetary resources. Instead, Johnson created NASA as a civilian agency principally devoted to scientific exploration. He hoped that the emphasis on greater understanding of the universe would forestall an arms race in space. He also expected NASA to have a significant impact on domestic affairs. The federal monies flowing into industries building spacecraft and the domestic sites that housed space operations were economic and political plums that a seasoned politician could use to his advantage. Kennedy saw Johnson’s leadership of the Space Council as an ideal assignment that would provide an outlet for his considerable energy and would serve the administration’s political interests.

  The person most notably absent from Kennedy’s inner circle of advisers was the thirty-one-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, whose interests were much more in art and literature than in politics. She was never included in discussions of domestic or foreign policies or relied on as a sounding board for how to deal with the administration’s daily challenges. Kennedy’s idea of a wife’s function was revealed in an anecdote Jacqueline related to Schlesinger about the deputy defense secretary Roswell Gilpatric and his wife. At a dinner in which Gilpatric’s wife “was saying to Jack . . . ‘I say to Ros when he comes home every night, How can they say those things about you? Aren’t they all awful?’ And he [Jack] said to her, ‘My God, you don’t say that to your husband when he comes home at night, do you? That’s not what you should do. Find one good thing they say, say, Isn’t that great? Or bring up something else that will make him happy.’ And so, that’s how I sensed what he wanted me to be,” Jackie said.

  Occasionally, however, curiosity about current events got the better of her, and she asked “about something painful. . . . I asked him something and it was at the end of the day. And he said, ‘Oh, my God, kid . . . I’ve had that, you know, on me all day and I just. . . . Don’t remind me of that all over again.’ And I just felt so criminal. But he could make this conscious effort to turn from worry to relative insouciance.” On another occasion when she inquired about a foreign crisis, he said, “‘Don’t ask me about those things.’ . . . So I decided it was better to live—you get enough by osmosis and reading the papers, and not ask. . . . And I decided that was the best thing to do. Everyone should be trying to help Jack in whatever way they could and that was the way I could do it the best—you know, by being not a distraction—by making it always a climate of affection and comfort and détente when he came home.”

  She had no desire to imitate Eleanor Roosevelt, who had set the standard for first ladies with high public visibility as an advocate for causes essential to neediest Americans regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. Mrs. Roosevelt had become a spokesperson for human rights everywhere and after Franklin’s death served the world community as America’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But while Jacqueline had no intention of reaching for that exalted status, she also did not want to be like Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower, her two immediate predecessors, who had stayed in the background as conventional wives attending to household duties. By contrast, Jacqueline became a symbol of good taste and high culture—a first lady who encouraged Americans to see their White House as a monument to the nation’s architectural and artistic history. She established the White House Historical Association and oversaw the publication of a historic guide to the White House describing the building’s history and treasures. In 1962, she conducted a televised tour of the House that reached into millions of American homes. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which brought to fruition plans since 1958 for a National Cultural Center, became a permanent legacy of her commitment to American cultural life.

  As he launched his administration on January 20, 1961, Kennedy believed that his appointments to cabinet and subcabinet posts had created a “Ministry of Talent.” McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Dillon, Sorensen, Schlesinger, and all the other academics, lawyers, financiers, industrialists, and public servants taking up residence in the White House and executive offices surrounding it were, in the journalist David Halberstam’s later use of the term, the “best and the brightest.”

  Kennedy was innately skeptical about social engineering and human agency to greatly alter either international relations or domestic affairs. But he also believed that an American affinity for grand designs and bold actions meant that the country wanted leaders who would reach for the ideal rather than settle for the ordinary. “I’m an idealist without illusions,” he told Schlesinger. His Inaugural Address made clear his ambition for an extraordinary administration of great accomplishments. But he also cautioned, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.”

  But with the array of exceptional men he had attracted to Washington, he had high hopes for something more—something better—than what most past presidents had achieved.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Never Rely on the Experts”

  Freezing weather on inauguration day could not dampen Kennedy’s evident satisfaction at becoming the youngest and first Catholic president. Despite the twenty-degree temperature and heavy snow the night before, which had threatened to cancel the outdoor ceremony, Kennedy spoke to the thousands before him wearing neither hat nor overcoat, symbolizing his campaign theme of national strength and renewal. During the evening, he made the rounds of the many inaugural balls, dancing and chatting with friends and supporters until 2 A.M., when he slipped away to a private party at columnist Joseph Alsop’s Georgetown home. He did not return to the White House until 3:40 in the morning. After less than four hours sleep, he began his day, arriving at the Oval Office at eight minutes before nine.

  Kennedy faced the day and the coming challenges of his presidency with confidence. “Did you have any strange dreams the first night you slept in” Lincoln’s bedroom, his friend Charlie Bartlett asked him. “No,” an amused Kennedy replied, “I just jumped in and hung on.”

  He believed that the combined power and prestige of the office, joined to his political skills, boded well for a successful administration. Remembering that Woodrow Wilson had launched his administration by breaking long-standing custom and appearing in person before a joint congressional session to urge passage of tariff reform, Kennedy broke new ground five days after his inspiring inaugural speech by holding the first live televised presidential press conference. Couldn’t “an inadvertent statement . . . possibly cause some grave consequences?” a reporter asked. Kennedy confidently dismissed the concern, saying the country would have “the advantage of direct communication.” Pressed to explain the unusual neglect of domestic affairs in his speech, he answered that the American people are familiar with his national goals, but because his government was new on the world scene, he needed to describe our intentions and hopes to a divided world.

  During swearing-in ceremonies for his cabinet and other presidential appointees, he declared himself confident that their service would advance the well-being of peoples everywhere. The Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, for example, two executive initiatives launched in the first weeks of his term, confirmed his conviction that he could rely on advisers to help him find the means to compete with communist appeals to the hearts and minds of Third World pe
oples and make him a successful foreign policy leader.

  Kennedy’s inspiration for the Peace Corps was partly a response to Nixon’s accusation in their last debate, on October 13, that the Democrats were the “war party” that had trapped the United States in Korea. But the idea had been germinating for months. At a rally on the night of the thirteenth at the University of Michigan, Kennedy issued a call for international service by young Americans that, in Henry James’s memorable phrase, could be “the moral equivalent of war.” While Kennedy needed no one to tell him that mobilizing American ideals could be an effective response to communist cynicism about the United States as an exploitive imperial power, he looked to the country’s history and current ideas for ways to translate this insight into significant programs.

  The Peace Corps was grounded in the idealism of missionaries dating from the nineteenth century, who had been acting on convictions that they were God’s instruments of enlightenment to non-Christians in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In the twentieth century, as U.S. influence expanded around the globe, academics and legislators had been discussing an organization of young volunteers committed to overseas service well before Kennedy asked his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to tell him how this could be done. Against this backdrop, the Peace Corps, Ted Sorensen said, had “a hundred fathers.” And in his response to the president, Shriver pointed to a host of organizations and people, including Democratic congressmen and senators, who had crafted plans for making a corps of volunteers a reality.

  Kennedy believed that no one was better suited to head the Peace Corps than his brother-in-law. The forty-five-year-old Shriver was the offspring of a notable Maryland Catholic family dating back to the American Revolution. A graduate of Yale and its law school, Shriver was an idealist who worked with Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist group, America First, against involvement in World War II. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, however, he joined the Navy as a lieutenant and won a Purple Heart for wounds suffered during combat at Guadalcanal. After five years in the service, he became an executive at Joe Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago, where he met Eunice Kennedy, Joe’s daughter. They married in 1953 and Sarge, as he was called, became a member of Jack’s political team.