The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  This was Kennedy’s choice, on September 27, 1961, of John McCone, an extremely conservative, almost reactionary California Republican millionaire to head the CIA. Ever since the Bay of Pigs earlier in the year Kennedy had wanted to change personnel in both the JCS and the CIA; he regarded Allen Dulles as a sympathetic man but an icon of the past, a man with too imposing a reputation for the younger men of the Administration to challenge. Now, in September, Kennedy made his move. He had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, who had impressed him during the changeover from the Eisenhower Administration. But Clifford was not interested; perhaps he sensed that there was not enough power at the Agency to lure him away from his own law practice. The next possibility was Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer cut classically from the Establishment mold; in fact the White House was close to announcing the Hamilton appointment when a problem developed at the Agency for International Development, and Hamilton was shifted there. Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone.

  The appointment caught the rest of the Administration by surprise, and the liberals in the Kennedy group were absolutely appalled by it. One reason the President had been so secretive even within his own Administration (he did not, for example, tell the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of his intention, nor solicit the views of its members) was that he knew the opposition to McCone within the government would be so strong as to virtually nullify the appointment. There was a variety of reasons for liberal distaste for McCone. During the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign in 1956, a group of scientists at the California Institute of Technology had come out in support of Stevenson’s proposals for a nuclear test ban; McCone, a trustee of Cal Tech, immediately retaliated. He claimed that the scientists had been “taken in” by Russian propaganda and were guilty of attempting to “create fear in the minds of the uninformed that radioactive fallout from H-bomb tests endangers life.” In addition to his words, which seemed quite harsh, the scientists had good reason to believe that McCone tried to have them fired (a charge which McCone not entirely convincingly denied). Nor did the liberals find very much else in McCone’s background which was reassuring (including, for instance, the statement of Strom Thurmond during the Senate hearings that he did not know McCone well, “but in looking over this biography to me it epitomizes what has made America great”).

  McCone came from a wealthy San Francisco family; he had been in steel before the war, but with the coming of World War II he had become the principal figure in a new company which was formed to go into shipbuilding. The business turned out to be an enormous financial success, and there were many contemporaries who felt McCone was nothing less than a war profiteer (in 1946 during a congressional investigation Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office, a watchdog of the Congress, testified that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000. “I daresay that at no time in the history of American business,” Casey remarked at the time, “whether in wartime or peacetime have so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of the taxpayers, not only of his generation but of future generations”). McCone served as a special deputy to James Forrestal, worked with Forrestal in creating the CIA, and later became an Undersecretary of the Air Force under Truman. A convert to Catholicism, he believed that Communism was evil and must be stopped—along with Claire Booth Luce, he represented Eisenhower at Pope Pius’ funeral in 1958. During the Eisenhower years he was known as the classic hard-liner, a believer in massive retaliation and nuclear deterrents.

  Thus the liberals within the Administration were appalled by the appointment, and if anything, they regarded it as a step back from Allen Dulles. But it was a very calculated appointment. McCone had been pushed by Robert Kennedy, then very much in his hard-line incarnation, who was also trying to get control of the apparatus of government. Bobby Kennedy wanted movers and doers and activists, men who could cut through the flabby bureaucracy, and McCone had precisely that kind of reputation (which McCone intended to keep—no sooner had he taken over than he called in the various heads of the other intelligence operations and told them to play ball with him, he intended to be the intelligence czar, that if they played his game, he would increase their power in the government). But in particular, McCone was chosen by Kennedy because he offered one more bit of protection for a young President already on the defensive; having McCone at the CIA would deflect right-wing pressure against his Administration. Which McCone did, though the price was not inconsiderable. Though McCone was reasonably straight in reporting what his subordinates were saying from the field, his own views, when volunteered, and he was not bashful about volunteering them, were always extremely hard-line (he would also from time to time use people in his Agency for causes that were not necessarily Administration causes, such as lending CIA people to the Stennis committee to help make the case against the Administration’s test ban treaty position). And it was also a gesture by Kennedy of turning over key parts of his government to people who were in no way part of his domestic political constituency. (In the last months of Kennedy’s life Kenneth O’Donnell, annoyed by the fact that the most important jobs in the government had gone to people who had not supported the Kennedy political candidacy, or if they had supported it, had been only marginally sympathetic in their commitment, was pushing for a new kind of appointment. He wanted to replace John McCone at CIA with Jack Conway, who had been Walter Reuther’s main political lobbyist, a man committed to Kennedy on domestic issues and fully capable of making judgments on foreign affairs as well. Had Kennedy lived and made the appointment it would have been almost unique in the entire history of national security appointments, a break in class and outlook of considerable proportion.)

  Chapter Nine

  So the appointment of McCone had shown the political center of the Kennedy Administration to be a good deal farther to the right than his original political supporters hoped; now as he moved on Vietnam they would again take minimal confidence. In October 1961 the President decided to send his own special representatives to Vietnam for an on-site fact-finding trip. He and he alone was responsible for the composition of the team, which would to a very real degree reflect the true outlook of the new Administration toward Vietnam and toward what were essentially political problems in that period. No senior official from State went, partly because Rusk did not want to get involved in Vietnam, partly because he did not believe it was particularly State’s responsibility. Another reason was that Kennedy himself did not push it, not having any particular respect for anyone at State other than for Averell Harriman, who was still in Geneva trying to neutralize Laos.

  The trip was first proposed as a Rostow mission—just Rostow—but Bowles, who had become extremely nervous about Rostow’s militancy (“Chester Bowles with machine guns,” Arthur Schlesinger said of him), pushed hard for a high representative from State to go along to give the nonmilitary view. It should be someone of genuine rank, perhaps Bowles himself, but if not, at least an Assistant Secretary, perhaps Harriman. But Rusk was resistant; he still saw it as a military, not a political problem. (In this he was fairly typical of a generation of public officials who had come out of World War II and who saw State serving as the lawyers for the Defense Department; if there was a military involvement of some sort, Defense had primacy.) Eventually, however, as something of a concession to the Bowles viewpoint, the President’s military adviser, Maxwell Taylor, was added to the mission. Bowles felt reassured; he remembered long talks in Korea in 1953, when Taylor had said with considerable emotion that American troops must never again fight a land war in Asia. Never again. And so Bowles and some of the others were pleased by the Taylor presence and considered it a sop, but a very important sop to them. The resulting Taylor-Rostow report would significantly deepen the American involvement in Vietnam from the low-level (and incompetent) advisory commitment of the Eisenhower years (geared up for a traditional border-crossing war that would never come) to the
nearly 20,000 support and advisory troops there at the time President Kennedy was killed. It was one of the crucial turning points in the American involvement, and Kennedy, by his very choice of the two men who had the greatest vested interest in fighting some kind of limited antiguerrilla war, had loaded the dice. In Saigon the American Ambassador to Vietnam first learned the news of the Taylor-Rostow mission over the radio.

  Rostow was born in New York in 1916, one of three sons of a Russian Jewish immigrant. Even their names expressed a radical newcomer’s almost naÏve love of America. Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Victor Rostow, Ralph Waldo Rostow (in 1966 James Thomson, now teaching at Harvard, wrote a satire on the White House in which a figure named Herman Melville Breslau was consistently militant). Walt had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something. The youngest to graduate from a school, to be appointed to something. An unusually young graduate of Yale, a young Rhodes scholar. A young man picking bombing targets in World War II. A young assistant to Gunnar Myrdal; indeed, because of his postwar association he was considered something of the State Department’s opening to the left in those days. Then a friend of C. D. Jackson’s at Life, and a thin connection with the Eisenhower Administration; then MIT, part of a department which seemed eager to harness the intellectual resources of this country into the global struggle against the Communists. Rostow came in contact with Kennedy during the mid-fifties, and Kennedy had been impressed.

  Rostow was always eager, hard-working, and in contrast to Bundy, extremely considerate of others. Even during the heights of the great struggles of 1968 in the attempt to turn around the war policy, when he was one of the last total defenders of the policy, many of his critics found it hard to dislike him personally. He seemed so ingenuously open and friendly, almost angelic, “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” Townsend Hoopes would write. The reason was simple: he was the true believer, so sure of himself, so sure of the rectitude of his ideas that he could afford to be generous to his enemies. What others mistook for magnanimity in defeat was actually, in his own mind, magnanimity in victory; he had triumphed, his policies had come out as he alone had prophesied.

  In the fifties he had been something of a star in Cambridge, a man who published and published regularly, whose books were reviewed in the New York Times, and who wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine, a man who had a reputation not only in Cambridge but in Washington and New York as well, which was not entirely surprising, for the Rostows were considered by some in Cambridge—a very traditional and somewhat stuffy town—as being quite ambitious socially, perhaps too ambitious. When they entertained, they always seemed to have the current political or literary lions among their guests. There was one party which a Cambridge lady remembered well because the Rostows gave it for Joyce Carey, the great English novelist. Everyone was impressed that the Rostows knew Carey so well, an impression which dimmed somewhat for the Cambridge lady when Carey very politely took her aside and said, “And now do tell me a little something about our charming host and hostess—I know so little about them.” Not that giving a party for a lion in order to enhance your own standing was particularly unusual or gauche in Cambridge, or, for that matter, New York or Georgetown, though getting caught at it was.

  Kennedy, on the make for an intellectual think tank of his own in the late fifties, particularly liked Rostow, liked his openness, his boundless energy, liked the fact that Rostow, unlike most academics, was realistic, seemed to understand something about how Washington really worked, liked the fact that Rostow mixed well, got on with professional politicians. (After Rostow moved to Washington it was something of a point of pride with him that he was a pluralist intellectual. He could get along with the military, play tennis with them, understand their viewpoint, did not have the knee-jerk antimilitary reaction of most Jewish intellectuals. In fact, on the night of the bombing of Pleiku years later, other aides would remember, Rostow wandered around the White House clapping Air Force officers on the back, asking about the weather, reminding them that he had once picked targets, and he knew that weather was important.) During Kennedy’s Senate days he was always helpful, a demon for work, always available when summoned by the senator, producing paper, memos, ideas, a great idea man (Open Skies for Ike, New Frontier and Let’s Get This Country Moving Again for Kennedy). He was responsive, too, which was a help; when Kennedy wanted a memo on some subject, Rostow did not, as too many academics did, refer him to some piece of paper they had already written, or some testimony before a committee they had given a year before. Instead, Kennedy would receive good, quick, tart, specific responses.

  So the early relationship between Kennedy and Rostow was good, and then Rostow went away for the academic year 1958­59 and by the time he came back, Kennedy was running hard and there was less communication between them. There were more people on Kennedy’s staff, and thus more filters between the candidate and the free-lance eggheads. There were those who felt that Kennedy was a little less comfortable with Rostow, a little pressed by him (“Walt,” Kennedy said in 1961, not entirely to flatter him, “can write faster than I can read”). Kennedy had less time, and now there seemed to be too many memos, too much energy on the part of Rostow. In addition, Kennedy himself had changed. He was no longer the young senator of the fifties who had been so dependent on the Cambridge eggheads for his special postgraduate education and briefings. Now he was beginning to move ahead of them; more and more of what they were telling him he already knew. During the 1960 campaign Rostow remained among the advisers, a willing one, though on the outer periphery, his name to be summoned forth in the pro-Kennedy literature as one more bit of proof that John Kennedy liked intellectuals and was at ease with them.

  Nevertheless, Rostow was ready to enter the new Administration with considerable money in the bank with the President-elect, a genuine certified Cambridge intellectual who had done his part for the greater glory. There were, however, some Kennedy people with reservations about him and they were not, curiously enough, the professional pols in the Kennedy group, but rather some of the Cambridge intellectuals themselves. It was not a particularly strong thing and they would, of course, never voice those feelings to outsiders or blow the whistle on Walt, just as the generals would never blow the whistle to an outsider on a fellow general about whom they had doubts. But there was a sense of unease about Walt, part of it personal, part of it professional, a feeling that for all Walt’s talent, wit, brilliance, something was missing. In the personal sense it was Rostow’s ability to adapt, to change: one of them remembered Rostow, when he had just come back from Oxford, playing the guitar at a Washington party and singing a very clever doggerel. It was enchanting, witty and very British, except that it was not Rostow, not at all. That feeling would deepen as Rostow went from virtual fellow traveler to militant anti-Communist ideologue, an uneasiness at the facility with which he adapted to fashion, without perhaps even knowing that he was doing it. This sense would heighten among some of his colleagues when they noticed, in the days of the Kennedy Administration, that Rostow sounded a little too much like the President, and grew even stronger when during the subsequent Administration he began to sound like Lyndon B. Johnson, employing the rough, tough language of the Ranch. It was, finally, a sense that behind all that bounciness and enthusiasm, perhaps Rostow did not know who he was, that in the eagerness of the poor Jewish immigrant’s son to make it, in the big leagues and with the Establishment, he had lost sight of what was Rostow and what was the Establishment, or perhaps knowing what was Rostow, he wanted to forget it. (And make it with the Establishment he did, joyously, a last holdout on Vietnam when even the Establishment had changed. Thus, in 1971, after the New York Times had published the Pentagon documents, which made many in those Administrations look very foolish, not the least of them Walt Rostow, who told a Times editor yes, he would write an article for the Op-Ed page, and then almost benignly added that he was concerned about one thing. It was not the printing of the Papers [he could understand that], but the split in the Es
tablishment. The Establishment was very small, which was necessary, and it was in charge of a country which was very young and which could not make the right decisions itself, and thus unity within the Establishment was very important. They must stick together, they must not be divided, America needed the Times in the Establishment, that was the important point, and now they must work to heal the breach, to bring the Times back.)