The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Bowles’s standing with the party’s liberals was not diminished after his setback, since defeat was never a liberal dishonor; if anything, it was more of a decoration. Kennedy had gone after Bowles early in 1959, but first he romanced one of Bowles’s chief aides, Harris Wofford, then a law school professor at Notre Dame and a long-time protégé of Bowles’s. He was a young man deeply committed to racial progress both at home and overseas (it would be Wofford’s suggestion during the campaign that resulted in the Kennedy phone call to the family of the imprisoned Martin Luther King, Jr.). Kennedy approached Wofford both for his own availability and as a bridge to Bowles. There was a major staff position open for Wofford, Kennedy said, as a speech writer right next to Sorensen himself. Their meetings were impressive; Kennedy, Wofford later reflected, knew exactly which issues would touch Wofford. Much ideological sympathy was expressed, and eventually Wofford went to work for him. The Democratic party had to get away from the Cold War policies of the past, not just of Dulles, but of Acheson as well, Kennedy said. It needed new, fresher leadership. It desperately needed a new China policy. It needed to encourage anticolonial feeling. Of course, all these things echoed Wofford’s own sentiments, and he helped remove some of the doubts held by Bowles.

  Kennedy himself worked hard on Bowles and used all his charm in stressing the vast areas they agreed on, philosophically if not tactically (a difference which seemed small then, though perhaps not so small as time passed). Finally Bowles came around, with grave reservations. He was not really comfortable with Kennedy, with the brashness and self-assurance of this younger man. He had an old and abiding loyalty to Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had fought so many battles all those lonely years—for civil rights, for foreign aid, for disarmament—but as a professional politician he was able to look coolly at the field and decide that Kennedy might be able to go all the way and beat Nixon, while Humphrey might fall by the wayside. It was a crucial switch within the competing factions of the Democratic party, an institution severely damaged by the McCarthy years and by Republican charges of twenty years of treason. Here was Bowles, if not moving from the Stevenson­Humphrey­Eleanor Roosevelt­Bowles wing to the more centrist camp of John Kennedy, and if not actually leaving his old group, at least conferring an ideological acceptance on the Kennedy camp, easing liberal-intellectual doubts, for no less a liberal institution than the New Republic had listed Bowles as its own dark-horse candidate. Now it was done: Chester Bowles would become Jack Kennedy’s chief foreign policy adviser. Through countless liberal psyches would flash the idea, precisely as Kennedy intended it to: Bowles as Secretary of State. Or better still, Bowles as a holding action for a couple of months, and Adlai as Secretary of State.

  It was a very good liberal name to have, Chester Bowles. In the eyes of the liberals, he was one of the few who was without a stain. He was, in fact, the definitive liberal-humanist at a time when those particular values had been on the defensive and had been made to seem naÏve. Politicians who professed the old liberalism of the thirties in this harsher postwar era were considered too trusting and unrealistic, men who did not understand the dangers of the contemporary world, where Communists constantly lurked to exploit any and all do-good organizations and intentions. This Cold War realism had touched many of the liberal politicians, who had been put on the defensive about their past, but it had not necessarily touched the liberal voters, and in 1960 Bowles was unique among politicians in that he refused to adapt to contemporary pressures. To him, it was as if the Cold War had never taken place. He was markedly untouched by it; he believed that the problems America encountered were its own, what it did at home and in the world, not what the Soviet Union did. He was, it seemed at the moment, somewhat behind the times; a few long years later it would seem that he had been ahead of them.

  Chester Bowles’s origins were somewhat incongruous for such a good card-carrying liberal. He was the classic New England Yankee, whose people were almost all Republicans, and yet some of his friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy.

  Born in 1901, he was the grandson of a famed liberal editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, and the editorials that Samuel Bowles wrote at the time of the Civil War had made a deep impression on him. Even as a boy he was something of a maverick liberal in his family, and when he was in his twenties his heroes were Norman Thomas and Robert La Follette rather than the chosen Republican and Democratic presidential candidates of the period. Although he went to Yale, he did not go to the regular college, but to Yale’s engineering school at Sheffield, and this, thought friends, accounted for a certain inferiority complex as far as his own intellectual ability went. He was, in his own mind, virtually self-educated. He was unsure of himself intellectually, and in contrast to the crisp, sharp style of the Kennedy people, his manner would seem slow and ponderous. (Uneasy in their presence, his insecurity showing, he tended to become something of a caricature of himself, speaking too much and too long as a means of trying to cover up his deficiencies.)

  After college he worked briefly on the family newspaper, where he proved too liberal. He almost went to China as a foreign service officer, and at the last minute he turned to advertising. Eventually, with Bill Benton, he opened up the firm of Benton & Bowles. They started in July 1929 with very meager resources, but the Depression helped rather than hurt them. The big companies, Bowles noted, were ready for a change, any change, in the early days of the Depression, so the firm of Benton & Bowles prospered. While he was still in his early thirties, Bowles became a self-made millionaire, but an unusual one. He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

  Advertising was not the real love of either partner in Benton & Bowles, and both were anxious to get into other fields, preferably politics. Benton went first, and Bowles soon followed. From then on his career was well known, the classical, good liberal career. Liberal director of the Office of Price Administration during World War II, liberal and successful governor of Connecticut a few years later. Liberal ambassador to India in the fifties, eventually liberal congressman from Connecticut. His following among liberals had continued to grow during this time, and by the end of the decade he was something of a hero for two major reasons. First, because more than most liberal politicians, his internationalism seemed to be a reflection and an extension of his domestic political ideals. Second, and perhaps even more important, at a time when so many liberals seemed to be on the defensive about their past and had taken refuge in the new liberal anti-Communism, Bowles had been particularly u
nflinching; he had never changed from his original precepts or accommodated very much. That his ideas seemed to be a little unfashionable did not bother him. He simply did not take the Russian threat that seriously; he thought the real dangers in the world were those of poverty and hunger. To many liberals he was a comforting throwback to the Roosevelt era; he still stood for things that they believed in but which had recently come under considerable attack.

  It was, however, this very quality which would tend to hurt him with his new allies, the Kennedy team. What the liberals liked about Bowles was his predictability, which was precisely what the Kennedys came to dislike. The liberals liked him because he kept saying the old enduring things that had bound them together in the thirties; the Kennedy people did not like the old slogans and ideas and wanted to get on with the more modern world. So in their eyes he would become a curiously heavy figure, and knowing that he was not as facile as they were, he became even more awkward. While they were so obviously intellectual, he was more visceral in his instincts; while they were all men of great and towering accomplishments and proud of them, he was curiously ashamed of his own successes, of having made it as an advertising man, of being a millionaire. He spoke in terms which were not flashy and which plain people could understand, but which seemed out of place in their new style. Even though he sensed the differences between himself and the Kennedy team, he signed on—serious, ponderous Chester Bowles, given to long answers to short questions, reeking of good intentions and good thoughts, sermons really, among lean, swift young men who thought it quite acceptable to have idealistic thoughts and dreams just so long as you never admitted them.

  The relationship never really worked, not from the start. Even in the best of days, at the beginning, the suspicions which had separated them in the past still remained. The differences in style were really differences in substance, and there was no way of getting around it. Bowles had retained his misgivings about Kennedy, more than he realized. This became clear in April of 1960 in Wisconsin, and it was Wisconsin which began the decline of Chester Bowles. This, the second primary, was a crucial test for Kennedy on his way to the nomination. Kennedy’s liberal credentials were still anything but assured; his only victory as the Wisconsin campaign began was in friendly Catholic New Hampshire. Now he was running in the Midwestern state which was a Humphrey stronghold, more Protestant than Catholic, more tuned to Humphrey’s genial Midwestern liberalism. Here Kennedy needed all the liberal support he could muster, and he needed every liberal face to appear on his behalf. In his hour of need he turned to his chief foreign policy adviser. Who balked. Bowles said that when he joined forces, he had specifically ruled out campaigning against his old friend Hubert Humphrey, so he could not go into Wisconsin against Hubert. Robert and Jack Kennedy were appalled by this refusal, and the pressure began to build. They prevailed upon Ted Sorensen, then considered a link to the liberals, to be the persuader. It was terribly important, Sorensen argued, Bowles must come to their aid; if he went in now and fought, many good things would come his way. At first the warnings were gentlemanly, but as time passed, as the heat of the campaign mounted—after all, one primary defeat and it might all be over—the tone became harsher and more demanding. If he did not comply, Sorensen said, there would be dire consequences. Not only would the good things not happen, but bad things might. If he was for them, he was for them, and that was the only thing they understood. And as they became irritated, so too did Bowles; he felt he was having his arm twisted. In a sense the Kennedys were right: he could, after all, campaign for Jack without necessarily being anti-Humphrey. But Bowles felt that although Kennedy might be the best way of beating Nixon, there were old loyalties to Humphrey, and old suspicions: touches of liberal anti-Catholicism remaining in him as well; any liberal governor of Connecticut had had to struggle against the conservative political power of the Church in the past. So Bowles refused to go in, and Harris Wofford, his aide, replaced him in Wisconsin. The Kennedys would later decide, when they cut up their spoils, that they were not that beholden to Bowles or to the liberals who had not been there when they were needed. From then on the balance changed, and as primary victory followed primary victory, Bowles’s role and value diminished except as an occasional useful bit of window dressing. He was made chairman of the party platform committee, on which he worked relentlessly, though becoming increasingly aware as the campaign progressed that he had less and less contact and influence with the candidate. In July, at convention time, when he worked very hard for a Kennedy-style platform, he discovered that among the people least interested in the platform was his candidate. Indeed, even as Kennedy was accepting the convention’s nomination, an act which should have gladdened Bowles after this long, arduous uphill struggle, Bowles had a feeling that he was far from the action and the decisions, that the link between him and his candidate was weak and growing weaker.

  He could not have been more right, for at that very moment Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was having dinner in New York at the apartment of Henry Luce, the publisher of magazines which had long specialized in the tormenting of just such people as Chester Bowles and promoting such archenemies as John Foster Dulles, leaving some people with the suspicion that Dulles was Time magazine sprung to life (inspiring the liberal poet Marya Mannes to write the short verse: “Foster Dulles/Henry Luce/GOP Hypotenuse”). At the dinner Joe Kennedy gave his word to Luce that his son, while a Democratic presidential nominee, was nonetheless reliable. Joe Kennedy and Henry Luce were old friends in the best sense of many hands scratching many backs, Luce having written an introduction to the first book by Kennedy’s son Jack, a book entitled Why England Slept, while Joe Kennedy, not to be outdone, had arranged to get Luce’s son Hank his first job after college, as special assistant to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission—the chairman, of course, being Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

  What Luce and Kennedy were discussing was in effect what it would take to neutralize Time and Life during the forthcoming campaign. It turned into something of a heated discussion because Luce tried to divide the issues between foreign and domestic affairs and implied that he would not be upset by Jack Kennedy’s liberalism on domestic issues, and Joe Kennedy took this personally. No son of mine is going to be a goddamn liberal, Kennedy interjected. Now, now Joe, Luce answered, of course he’s got to run as a liberal. A Democrat has to run left of center to get the vote in the big northern cities, so don’t hold it against him if he’s left of center, because we won’t. We know his problems and what he has to do. So we won’t fight him there. But on foreign affairs, Luce continued, if he shows any sign of weakness toward the anti-Communist cause—or, as Luce decided to put it more positively—if he shows any weakness in defending the cause of the free world, we’ll turn on him. There’s no chance of that, Joe Kennedy had guaranteed; no son of mine is going to be soft on Communism. Well, if he is, Luce answered, we’ll have to tear him apart.

  Then they went back to watching the acceptance speech, and Kennedy, the sire of a great political family, his own driving ambitions now close to realization, thanked Luce for all he had done for the Kennedys in the past, a gesture Luce accepted cordially at the time. Later, however, as the campaign progressed, he would wonder if Time and Life were doing too much for young Jack Kennedy—had they been too favorable, too straight in their reporting? It was, he realized, a hard line to draw, and made more difficult not so much by personal obligations to the Kennedy family, but by the difficulty in finding real differences between the Nixon and the Kennedy foreign policies. In fact, during the fall, when Life was geared up to run a major editorial praising Nixon’s foreign policy, the editors, at Luce’s suggestion, held off a week because Nixon had not made his stand any noticeably more anti-Communist than Kennedy. Later, when the election was over and the narrowness of Kennedy’s margin became clear, Luce’s good Republican conscience would bother him: perhaps, if he had been truer to his party, Nixon would be in the White House. But it did not bother him so much that he turned
down a chance to attend the Kennedy inaugural ball, and sit, just by chance, in the box with the Joseph P. Kennedys.

  Which was far from where Chester Bowles sat that night. He sat with some of his boys, that special group of talented young men which he regularly seemed to discover and propel into public life, some of whom (like Jim Thomson, Abe Chayes, Tom Hughes and Harris Wofford) would do particularly well in the new Administration. That night he was with Wofford, who was to be a White House Special Assistant for Civil Rights, and Tom Hughes, who would become Director of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Hughes was one of the few genuine intellectuals of the era, a funny, skeptical, almost cynical man who had worked earlier for Bowles, then for Humphrey (who in 1959 was a hotter political figure), and finding Humphrey a less interesting man, had returned to Bowles. Wofford had been Bowles’s main link to the Kennedys, the man who had worked hard to bring him into the Kennedy campaign. Replacing Bowles during the Wisconsin primary, Wofford had said in Madison, a hotbed of liberalism, “There is a Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles view of the world, and Jack Kennedy is the most likely man to carry it out.” Later, when Kennedy was elected and his first two announcements were the reappointment of the heads of both the FBI and the CIA, Hughes sent Wofford a postcard saying: “I want you to know that I finally voted for your Stevenson­Humphrey­Bowles­Kennedy­Hoover­Allen Dulles view of the world . . .”