Shriver put Louis Martin in charge of recruiting black candidates. During the campaign, Kennedy had made a commitment to hire record numbers of African Americans, so Martin reached far and wide into the Negro community in search of worthy candidates, eventually collecting 750 names. “I had a candidate for almost every job,” he later recalled. “I don’t give a damn what the job was, I came up with a Negro.” Because of who Kennedy’s friends and patronage appointments tended to be, the Talent Hunt had to develop a compensatory bias against Irish Catholics and Harvard academics, selecting from these groups only when there was “offsetting evidence of spectacular excellence.”
Shriver had Yarmolinsky draw up a standard form for rating a job prospect in the key categories he thought important to the president-elect: judgment, integrity, ability to work with others, industry, toughness, and devotion to Kennedy’s programs. The last category was in some ways the most problematic, since most of Kennedy’s specific policy proposals had yet to be formulated—this made it hard to guarantee that prospects were committed a priori to a “Kennedy program.” The “toughness” category provoked the most amusement: When some candidates learned of the “toughness” category, they would phone into the office and declare, “I’m tough.”
Neither Wofford nor Martin nor Yarmolinsky had any real experience working in government. At one point, Shriver brought in a consultant from IBM to help systematize procedures, but after a few days the consultant threw up his hands, concluding that the Talent Hunt was not susceptible to normal corporate streamlining procedures.
If he was not quite systematic, Shriver did try to be as comprehensive as possible in his recruitment effort. After he had accumulated a list of dozens or hundreds of names for a position, his staff would begin the process of evaluation. First, they would call people who knew the prospect under consideration and would ask them to evaluate him or her according to Yarmolinsky’s standard criteria. The Talent Hunt staff would also explore how well regarded an individual was in his field and seek to assess how much he might add to the status of the administration in that field. All this information was dutifully recorded on Yarmolinsky’s forms and duplicated when a candidate appeared qualified for more than one job or department. When enough files for a position had been amassed, Shriver would go through all of them and send the ones he deemed best to Kennedy. Shriver would have the political team of Dungan and O’Brien vet the candidates for the top positions—those designated “confidential and policy-making positions”—before passing their names on to the president-elect.
After Kennedy had made his selections, it was sometimes up to the Talent Hunt to persuade the chosen individuals to accept some of the lower-level positions in the administration. This could be challenging, given the pay cuts recruits from the private sector were being asked to make. But Shriver proved a master of salesmanship, and when the Talent Hunt had concluded, Yarmolinsky spoke “admiringly of his ability to lure men away from jobs they had every reason to hold onto.” The journalist David Halberstam marveled at Shriver’s ability to recruit luminaries, likening him to “a big-game hunter.”
The most urgent need was for someone to serve as director of the Bureau of the Budget (now called the Office of Management and Budget) because almost every policy and program Kennedy might hope to change or implement in his first year in office must necessarily be determined, or at least guided, by the 1961 federal budget. Following McGeorge Bundy’s advice, Shriver met with John Kenneth Galbraith, the towering liberal (both in reputation and actual size; he was 6 feet 8 inches tall) of the Harvard economics department to get ideas. Galbraith in turn recommended his Harvard colleague David Bell, who had worked in Truman’s Budget Bureau as a junior economist and had subsequently worked in Pakistan as an economic consultant. Galbraith wasn’t sure that Bell, at age forty, had the gravitas and experience to direct the bureau but thought him well suited to serve as associate director. Shriver immediately ordered Yarmolinsky to call around for opinions of Bell, then flew to Boston himself to interview the professor.
After meeting with Bell for several hours, it was evident to Shriver that he was Kennedy’s kind of guy and that—his relative youth notwithstanding—he was an ideal candidate to head up Jack’s Budget Bureau. Upon returning from Boston Shriver told Wofford and Yarmolinsky that Bell was “low-key, well informed, experienced, unideological, sensitive, quick, somewhat ironic, and good-humored—just the sort Kennedy responds to best.” Shriver passed on his recommendation of Bell to the president-elect. As Shriver had predicted, Bell and Kennedy hit it off, and Jack was soon announcing the nomination of his budget director.
For treasury secretary, Kennedy chose Douglas Dillon over the objections of liberal advisers Galbraith and Schlesinger, who were appalled to learn from Shriver that the Republican head of an investment bank was being considered for the position. Dillon had also served as a cabinet under secretary in the Eisenhower administration and had even contributed more than $12,000 to the Nixon campaign. But Shriver had brought Dillon to Kennedy’s attention, along with other bank presidents, because he knew the treasury secretary had to be someone with whom the financial community could be comfortable. Schlesinger sought an audience with Kennedy and argued the case against Dillon, recommending instead Averell Harriman, Senator Al Gore, and several congressmen, all of whom favored Keynesian spending to stimulate economic growth. “Oh, I don’t care about those things,” Kennedy responded. “All I want to know is: is he able? And will he go along with the program?”
According to Shriver, Kennedy picked Dillon not only for his government experience but also for his “judgment, his knowledge, his technical competence, and his nondogmatic politics. In other words, Dillon was not an ideological Republican.” After appointing Dillon, however, Kennedy did go on to surround him with Humphreyesque liberal Democrats like Walter Heller, who was named head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In the end, this arrangement—a fiscally conservative Republican surrounded by liberal Democrats—seemed to work for Kennedy, and Dillon soon became one of the cabinet members closest to the Kennedy family.
Other positions were filled more straightforwardly. During the campaign, when Shriver had formed the “Business for Kennedy” Section, he had recruited North Carolina governor Luther Hodges, who had been a businessman before turning to politics, to serve as its chair. Hodges was thus a natural choice for secretary of commerce. Minnesota governor Orville Freeman was named secretary of agriculture, reportedly after another candidate had put Kennedy to sleep with his dullness. Stewart Udall, congressman from Arizona, was made secretary of the interior. Arthur Goldberg, a longtime union lawyer and an old, New Deal–era liberal, was named secretary of labor. After turning down an offer to become attorney general—because, as he told Bobby Kennedy, he thought it would be politically problematic for a Jew to be putting Negroes in Protestant schools in the South—Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff was named secretary of health, education, and welfare.
The appointment that Kennedy seemed to find most important was secretary of state. Shriver’s team had amassed information on dozens of candidates, which they dutifully sent down to Palm Beach, but in the end the short list consisted of Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, UN Under Secretary-General Ralph Bunche, McGeorge Bundy, Senator William Fulbright, veteran diplomat David Bruce, Republican banker (and Truman’s secretary of defense) Robert Lovett, Chase Manhattan Bank president John McCloy, and Rockefeller Foundation president Dean Rusk. Lovett and McCloy withdrew themselves from consideration, but that still left seven candidates. Kennedy stewed over the decision in Palm Beach.
Personally, Shriver’s first choices would have been Stevenson, Bowles, or Bunche, and he conveyed this to Kennedy. But Bunche was not high on Kennedy’s list, and though Bowles might have been, Nixon made clear to Jack not long after the election that he thought Bowles was soft on China. If Kennedy were to nominate Bowles, Nixon warned, he would campaign to have his confirmation blocked in Congress. Stevenson, who was
being promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt, desperately craved the secretary of state job and had at Kennedy’s request written up a report on foreign policy. But ever since the convention, when he had resisted taking himself out of contention for the presidential nomination before the first ballot, Kennedy had considered Stevenson unreliable.
By late November, Kennedy had let Shriver know that Stevenson was no longer a serious candidate but told him not to tell anyone. Still, debates raged within the inner circle about whom Jack should select. At the christening ceremony for the newborn John F. Kennedy Jr. in late November, Shriver watched, bemused, as the priest struggled to silence the arguing long enough to perform the rite. No sooner had everyone quieted down and the ceremony been performed than everyone started up again. Jack and Bobby were arguing with each another, and family friend Bill Walton and political columnists Charlie Bartlett and Joe Alsop were all debating with one another. Walton lobbied for Averell Harriman, whom Bobby dismissed as too old. Bartlett was making the case for Fulbright. Alsop was strongly against both Bowles and Stevenson, whom he considered too liberal, and was promoting David Bruce.
By the second week in December, Kennedy had still not made his selection. His options were thinning and the pressure to make a choice was mounting. According to Bobby Kennedy, the final choice came down to David Bruce and Dean Rusk, the smooth and intelligent Georgian who had been an under secretary of state under Truman. Although the first interview between Rusk and Kennedy did not go well, Jack liked an article Rusk had written for Foreign Affairs and found his understated personality appealing. In the end, almost by default, he named Rusk secretary of state. And as he had done at the Treasury Department, Jack followed the Shriver team’s advice and surrounded the somewhat cautious and conservative-minded Rusk with liberals: Adlai Stevenson was made UN ambassador; Chester Bowles was made Rusk’s under secretary; and Michigan governor Mennen Williams was named under secretary of state for Africa. Rusk deputized Bowles to make most of the top State Department hires and ambassadorial appointments, and Bowles in turn relied directly on Shriver for personnel recommendations. Staffing the rest of the State Department, as Arthur Schlesinger has noted, “involved complicated negotiations among Kennedy, Rusk, Bowles, and the Shriver office.”
The Talent Hunt team ended up playing a particularly significant role in the selection of ambassadors. This responsibility redounded directly to Shriver’s personal benefit in the coming years, when as Peace Corps director he had a whole crop of new ambassadors around the world who were politically indebted to him.
The most sensitive cabinet appointment, of course, was that of Bobby Kennedy to the Justice Department. Shriver had no inkling that Bobby would be given the position of attorney general when he launched the Talent Hunt, and in fact he had concluded that, of all the cabinet departments, it was most important that the head of the Justice Department not appear to be a political, or partisan, appointment. So Shriver set out to compile a list of the best legal minds in the country, irrespective of party affiliation. Little suspecting at first that Jack’s selection would be not political but filial, Shriver did not put Bobby Kennedy on the list. Indeed, as Wofford has written, in no way did Bobby “seem to have the fair and thoughtful cast of mind required of the nation’s chief legal officer.” When Jack made it known that Bobby was a candidate for attorney general, Shriver was privately appalled, but he kept his thoughts to himself and even argued on Bobby’s behalf when confronted with internal opposition within the Talent Hunt. Still, he was hopeful when Jack called one day, requesting Shriver’s list of candidates.
The next day, however, when Shriver presented his list, Jack said, “Why are you giving me these? Bobby will be attorney general.” Shriver’s heart sank. But Kennedy kept wavering back and forth. Bobby himself was resisting. I’ve never had a private law practice, Bobby told his brother, and besides, do you really want to appoint your brother to such a sensitive post? That’s just inviting criticism. So Kennedy called Shriver and asked for still more names. On December 1, Kennedy called Shriver’s friend Bill Blair, the longtime Stevenson adviser, to see if Stevenson would be interested in becoming attorney general. (Stevenson, at this point, had been offered the UN ambassadorship but had yet to accept it.) Stevenson declined.
For this one final time, Joe Kennedy was the final arbiter on a key decision. Although Jack reported “serious reservations” about making his brother attorney general, the Ambassador insisted. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” Joe is said to have responded when Jack presented his concerns, and after some further deliberations, the decision was made. Jack joked that to avoid the brickbats of political columnists and opponents, he would have to make the announcement in the middle of the night. But he made the announcement in the middle of the day on the steps of his Georgetown home, cracking that he had named his brother to the Justice Department so he could get “a little experience before he goes out to practice law.”
Once Bobby was named, one of Shriver’s tasks was to help him fill the Justice Department with top-notch talent. Shriver presented him with a thick sheaf of recommendations. Among the more prominent were Archibald Cox as solicitor general and Burke Marshall as assistant attorney general for civil rights. (Bobby had already named Byron White, Shriver’s Yale classmate and friend, as his deputy attorney general, and White later became Kennedy’s first Supreme Court appointment.)
The recruit Shriver was most proud of was Robert McNamara for secretary of defense. On the day after the election, when Shriver read newspaper accounts reporting that McNamara had just been named head of the Ford Motor Company, he remembered having been impressed, some years before, by a report on McNamara and the other “whiz kids” hired by the Pentagon as management consultants in the 1940s. Thus when Kennedy asked Shriver to head up the Talent Hunt that day in Hyannis Port, McNamara was on his mind, and Shriver asked the president-elect whether he would be interested in considering him for a cabinet position. Kennedy said he would but expressed his doubts about whether McNamara, having just been made head of a major American company, could be lured away from his new job.
Shriver began to investigate and when he interviewed Robert Lovett, who was also under consideration for several cabinet positions, he learned that when Lovett was assistant secretary of war under FDR, he had been the one responsible for hiring McNamara at the Pentagon. When Shriver asked Lovett whether McNamara had been any good, Lovett told him, “the best.” When Shriver asked him what cabinet positions Lovett thought McNamara was best suited for, Lovett told him treasury or defense.
McNamara was a Republican, but he had supported Kennedy for some time. Shriver grew more impressed. When he heard that McNamara was reading one of his favorite theological works, The Phenomenon of Man, he exclaimed with pleasure, “How many other automobile executives or cabinet members read Teilhard de Chardin?” As Wofford recalled, “With each call made about McNamara, we heard further commendation of his judgment, analytic ability, and administrative efficiency. He emerged as a man who could effectively help a president cope with the military-industrial complex which Eisenhower had warned was difficult and dangerous.” Shriver recalled, “We talked with [McNamara’s] competitors, with labor leaders, with golf club caddies, with his Ford Automobile Company driver.”
Shriver made a strong case to Kennedy that if he could persuade McNamara to join the administration, it would “symbolize the new administration’s power to draw top talent, even from the ranks of business.” After reading Shriver’s files on the new Ford president in early December, Kennedy said, “Let’s do it.” The newspapers were already saying that Senators Stuart Symington and Henry Jackson were the most likely candidates for secretary of defense, but Kennedy told Shriver he could fly out secretly to Detroit to solicit McNamara’s interest in the position.
Shriver knew that getting McNamara to express serious interest was a long shot: He had just become the chief executive of one of the biggest companies in America. Not only would taking a cabinet positio
n mean taking a massive pay cut, but he was also one of the few people in the country for whom a senior cabinet position might be deemed a step down in status. Moreover, he would be a Republican in a Democratic administration, and he might fairly worry that this would constrain his influence.
But when Shriver arrived at the Detroit airport (incognito, because reporters had by now learned that following him around was a good way to figure out who likely cabinet appointments were) he was struck by a brainstorm. Why not expand McNamara’s options—and flatter his ego—by offering him the choice of two positions, both defense and treasury? (At this point, the treasury position had not yet been offered to Dillon.) Offering him this choice, Shriver reasoned, would signal to McNamara how strongly Kennedy wanted him and would indicate the latitude Kennedy was prepared to offer him should he join the administration. So Shriver called Kennedy from a pay phone and presented the scenario. Good idea, Jack told him. Go ahead and try it.
When Shriver met with McNamara in Dearborn later that day, the new Ford president dismissed the treasury offer out of hand but was impressed enough by the dual offer that he agreed to fly to Washington several days later to discuss defense. When McNamara and Kennedy met, each grilled the other intensely—and both came away favorably impressed. McNamara accepted the nomination to become secretary of defense.
Shriver’s intuition about McNamara’s compatibility with the incoming president proved accurate. Ted Sorensen said that in his eleven years with Kennedy, he had never seen him take to anyone so quickly as he did to McNamara. Shriver himself, however, jokingly regretted the appointment, at least at first, because McNamara made such extensive use of the Talent Hunt staff in recruiting his Defense Department personnel that they began falling behind in recruiting for any of the other departments. Finally Shriver had to tell him, “It’s your shop now, Mr. Secretary. Nobody else is doing the job you are in finding people. We’re needed in other places.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 25