by Nancy Gibbs
Ike had assembled credentialed strangers to run the government; Kennedy wanted a band of brothers to blow up the whole contraption. In its place he envisioned the spokes of a wheel, and he would be the hub. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, Clifford informed reporters that Kennedy’s executive team would be much smaller than Eisenhower’s, without the military system answering to a powerful chief of staff. There would be no such figure in Kennedy’s White House, Clifford said, since the president did not want anyone “between him and his staff.”
It all sounded just wonderful, but it was a theory that had never been tested in practice. Kennedy had no executive experience, unless you count commanding his PT boat during the war. As a House and then Senate backbencher, it was fine to function as a political freelancer, accountable to no one but the voters. He would later confess that “it was a tremendous change to go from being a Senator to being President. In the first months it is very difficult.”
Ike’s people tried to warn them: when Bryce Harlow, who managed Ike’s congressional affairs, heard that Kennedy planned to handle relations with the Hill himself, he called special assistant Larry O’Brien in and “scared the hell out of him.” I like a good political fight as much as anyone, he said, but we shouldn’t be fighting over mechanics. Even in the waning days of Ike’s presidency, he was fielding 125 calls a day from the Hill, not counting visits; the appointments secretary next door handled four hundred calls. From 12:01 on January 20, he said, “you won’t be able to hang it up without it ringing, no matter how many lines you put on it. Now, if you think you can handle all that stuff by yourself. . . . I’m just telling you, you’re going to destroy yourself and destroy your president. The President told us to be good to you guys in transition. I’m just telling you that’s absolutely mad, stark raving mad.”
O’Brien took the advice.
Only years later did historians dislodge from the popular imagination—and their own—the image of a detached Eisenhower delegating to his commanders in the field. Eisenhower had run the Army; he knew all the ways decision making can go off the rails, and insisted on collective debate precisely to prevent senior officials from freelancing, or putting their departmental interests first. For all the formal machinery, Eisenhower was very literally the commander in chief, making the key decisions himself and monitoring closely how they were carried out. Even years after D-Day, when critics needled him for not being on the front lines with the invading forces, he retorted, “I planned it and took responsibility for it. Did you want me to unload a truck?”
“He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words,” Nixon would observe. “Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three or four lines of reasoning to a single problem. . . . His thoughts far outraced his speech and this gave rise to his frequent ‘scrambled syntax.’”
In time, Kennedy would come to see that maybe he had something to learn from the old general. But not for a while yet.
The December Meeting
Kennedy got to test a few of his own theories about Ike when the two men met on December 6, the first date in what would be a careful courtship. Eisenhower had instructed his people to cooperate in every way possible; both he and Kennedy were intent on avoiding a repeat of the Truman-Eisenhower bar fight of 1952. Thanking Eisenhower for his invitation, Kennedy wired that “the whole country is hopeful that your long experience in the service of your country can be drawn upon further in the years to come.”
A few nights before the meeting, Kennedy was still in Palm Beach, having dinner in the big kitchen with friends. Someone asked if he was nervous about the approaching meeting.
Kennedy laughed. “Good morning, Mr. Ke-e-nnedy,” he said, mimicking Eisenhower, who was known to mispronounce Kennedy’s name. Then with a bow, he swept off his hat: “Good morning, Mr. Eeee-senhower.”
At the White House meanwhile, a dozen painters were putting a fresh coat on the mansion. Eisenhower hosted a farewell luncheon; he glimpsed the inaugural reviewing stands going up across Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I feel,” he told friends, “like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built.”
Kennedy was famous for running an hour or two late during the campaign. But on that Monday morning he left his Georgetown home so promptly he had to be driven a roundabout route to avoid arriving at the White House too soon. The cream-colored Lincoln pulled up to the North Portico at 8:58, as the Marine Band struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever” and an all-service honor guard stood at attention. Such are the trappings of the office you are about to inhabit, Ike seemed to be saying, and Kennedy jumped out before the car had stopped, his hat in his hand as he stepped lightly up the stairs where Eisenhower stood.
“Good morning Mr. President.”
“Senator.”
“It’s good to be here,” Kennedy said, in a historic understatement. And Ike ushered him into the White House.
They seemed, the New York Times suggested hopefully, “genuinely pleased to see each other.”
The two men talked for more than an hour in the Oval Office. Kennedy admired the president’s immaculate desk; his own was typically buried under a drift of books and papers. They discussed the major problems Kennedy would face—disarmament, NATO burden sharing, Laos, Berlin, Cuba. Kennedy had already been briefed by CIA chief Allen Dulles; but there was much more to learn about the parts of the world most likely to torment him in office.
Kennedy pressed Eisenhower for details about how he managed the National Security apparatus. Ike stressed that the NSC “had become the most important weekly meeting of the government”; it had met 366 times during his presidency, and he had presided at 329 of them. But Eisenhower had a growing sense of Kennedy’s determination to tear the whole thing apart. They discussed Pentagon reform: a month before the election, Kennedy had received a report from a study group chaired by Senator Stuart Symington. It proposed drastically centralizing power under the secretary of defense, consolidating combat forces under four unified commands, and eliminating the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Eisenhower knew something of the proposal—“and while I consider it so useless as to be ridiculous,” he wrote in his memo of the meeting, “I was careful to say nothing about the report as such.”
Where to begin to teach this restless young man what lay ahead? The president ran through the various roles of the White House staff, the relations of the president and the cabinet, all the areas Kennedy was clearly intent on changing in order to speed up and stir up and centralize decision making. “No easy matters will ever come to you as President,” Eisenhower warned him. “If they are easy, they will be settled at a lower level.” So he urged Kennedy to avoid any reorganization until he had learned for himself the nature of the job. “I pray that he understands it,” he wrote that night. “Certainly his attitude was that of a serious, earnest seeker for information.”
Conscious of how thoroughly Roosevelt had exiled Hoover, and how Ike had banished Truman from any further service, Kennedy conspicuously propped the back door open. He asked whether Eisenhower would be prepared to serve again in some capacity. “Of course,” Eisenhower replied, though given his age and experience, he preferred that it be consultation on something he knew about rather than “errands which might necessitate frequent and lengthy travel.”
Eventually they moved into the Cabinet Room to meet with the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury. Eisenhower opened the meeting noting that “it was evident we couldn’t turn over the government in the matter of two or three hours, and that he had invited Senator Kennedy to come back and see him and any of his people at any time.” According to notes by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Wilton Persons, the principals discussed Berlin (“This is acute and dangerous,” Ike warned), Laos (“the strategic gateway to Southeastern Asia”), Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, India, nuclear proliferation, and Pentagon reform.
In case Kennedy wasn’t getting the message, Persons recorded, “t
he President further pointed out that the great problem is keeping a big war from starting.”
Eisenhower was pleased by the invitation to remain involved, as Kennedy had plainly intended. And he was, against all expectations, impressed. Persons later told Clifford that Ike had been “overwhelmed” by Kennedy. “What impressed the President most,” Persons said, “was your man’s understanding of world problems, the depth of his questions, his grasp of the issues and the keenness of his mind.” Ike called him one of the “ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across,” and confessed to perhaps having misjudged him.
But he also glimpsed the blind spots. “I think he was pretty quick, but my impression was this,” Eisenhower told an interviewer years later, reflecting on that first encounter. “At that time, he looked on the presidency as not only a personal thing, but as an institution that one man could handle with an assistant here and another there. He had no idea of the complexity of the job at that time.”
For the moment, Kennedy was glad to hear the charm offensive had worked. But “he still felt that Eisenhower was a ‘non-President,’” Clifford recorded, “with only limited understanding of the powers available to him.” When he recruited the Ford Motor Company’s boy genius Robert McNamara to run the Pentagon after reading a profile of him, McNamara demurred, saying he didn’t know anything about government. “We can learn our jobs together,” Kennedy told him. After McNamara discussed the job with outgoing defense secretary Thomas Gates, he told Kennedy he was convinced he could handle the job. Kennedy smiled: “I talked over the presidency with Eisenhower,” he said, “and after hearing what it’s all about, I’m convinced I can handle it.”
Eisenhower did have one favor he wanted from the incoming president: that Kennedy expedite Eisenhower’s petition to be restored to his five-star rank. Kennedy asked Colonel Ted Clifton, acting as intermediary, about the “eccentric request.” Clifton explained that as “Mr. President,” Eisenhower would be in the company of Hoover, Truman, and Kennedy; five-star generals were an even rarer breed. Besides, he had worked his whole life to become a general, quite unlike his glide path to the presidency. “And if he is a five star general,” Clifton told Kennedy, “he needs no favors from you or the White House.”
Turning Over the Keys
Kennedy’s final meeting with Eisenhower came on the day before he’d take office at last: January 19, 1961. Kennedy wanted to get together “because it would serve a specific purpose in reassuring the public as to the harmony of the transition. Therefore strengthening our hands.” They spent forty-five minutes together privately in the Oval Office: Kennedy thought Eisenhower looked “very fit, pink cheeked and un-harassed.”
Then it was time for the general to show the lieutenant what it really meant to be president.
This session was about life and death and power. It was almost taken for granted that a nuclear attack would come sooner or later. Eisenhower talked about the “immediate, split-second decisions” that fell only to the commander in chief. He introduced the nondescript man with the black briefcase containing the nuclear codes who would shadow the president every day he was in office. As president, Kennedy would carry a laminated card at all times, which would allow him to pick from thirty pages of lethal options, activate missile silos, surface the submarines. Ike explained it all with a cool confidence that Kennedy found almost chilling.
And then, one final show. Eisenhower picked up the phone and smiled. “Watch this.”
“Opal Drill Three,” he said crisply into the phone. Within about three minutes, a Marine helicopter had swooped in and was hovering outside on the White House lawn. Kennedy loved it.
Together they went over to the Cabinet Room, where the incoming and outgoing cabinet secretaries were gathered. “I’ve shown my friend here how to get out in a hurry,” Eisenhower told them with a laugh.
Eisenhower presided; each cabinet officer ran through the problems and responsibilities that would soon fall to the new team. The bulk of the meeting was focused on Laos, and the prospect of dominoes toppling under Sino-Soviet pressure: “It is like playing poker with tough stakes,” Ike said. “There is no easy solution.”
And then there was Cuba. Kennedy already knew that the CIA was training Cuban exiles in Guatemala in preparation for an invasion. Had he not been briefed by the CIA, he could have read about it in the New York Times: “US Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Base,” declared the headline nine days before—thereby ensuring that the “secret” part, at least, was no longer operative. Eisenhower explained that no specific invasion plan had been set, and stressed the importance of finding a legitimate Cuban leader to set up a government in exile and provide an alternative to Castro. “In the long run,” Eisenhower said, “the United States cannot allow the Castro government to continue to exist in Cuba.”
“The tone of the old soldier—on his last day of public service, half a century after entering the United States Military Academy—had a powerful effect on Kennedy,” Clifford wrote in his memoirs. Kennedy’s men didn’t know enough about the situation in Southeast Asia to challenge Ike’s assessment. “In retrospect, I believe that President Eisenhower, while sincere, did a disservice to the incoming administration,” Clifford said. Having himself resisted getting drawn into a land war in Asia, Eisenhower now took a much harder line—“sensing in the men of the New Frontier,” Ewald suggested, “inexperience . . . and a tendency to tilt soft.” It “cast a shadow over the early decisions of the next administration,” Clifford argued. “Its consequences, moreover, affected Vietnam and even Cuba.” Given the colossal failures in presidential decision making in the months ahead, Kennedy loyalists would never miss a chance to lay the blame at least in part at Eisenhower’s feet.
When it was over, Kennedy thanked Eisenhower for giving them everything they asked for and offering ideas they hadn’t thought to ask about.
“You are welcome—more than welcome,” Eisenhower replied. “This is a question of the Government of the United States. It is not a partisan question.”
As the meeting broke up, Eisenhower took Kennedy aside, to make one last point. Whatever you may have said in the campaign about a supposed “missile gap” between the United States and the USSR, Eisenhower said, the Soviets were nowhere near as powerful as they pretended. “You have an invulnerable asset in Polaris,” he said, referring to America’s submarine-launched missiles. “It is invulnerable.”
Kennedy came away from this last meeting grateful, and sober, and determined never to cross his popular predecessor if he could possibly help it.
The Torch Has Been Passed . . .
Finally, it was time to celebrate. The entire city had primped and prepped for the big day ahead. The National Park Service sprayed the grass around the Lincoln Memorial with fresh green dye, simulating spring. Trees along the inaugural route were coated in Roost-No-More to repel the starlings. Secret Service agents sealed the manhole covers to foil bombers; there were snipers on the rooftops, five thousand men on security detail. But even they could not protect against the weather.
That afternoon after his White House meeting, Kennedy attended a governors reception, then visited with Truman; the traffic snarled into knots as the first snowflakes fell. By that night at least ten thousand cars were stalled and abandoned. Planes couldn’t land; President Hoover, flying up from Florida, had to turn back and never made it to the inauguration. It took Pat Nixon more than two hours to get to her husband’s farewell party at the Senate. At the White House, dozens of members of Eisenhower’s staff were snowbound for the night, as three thousand men and seven hundred plows worked around the clock clearing the streets.
It was still cold in the morning, but clear. And the atmosphere at the White House was altogether warmer than eight years before. Jack and Jackie had coffee with the Eisenhowers, the Johnsons, and the Nixons, in one of those rare club initiation ceremonies that included future presidents as well as present and outgoing ones. There would be no homburgs th
is time; Eisenhower and Kennedy emerged in their top hats and rode together in the black, bubble-topped limousine to the Capitol, where they waited for their call to the platform.
It was somehow fitting that their final conversation before the handover of power was about a book Kennedy was reading in which Eisenhower was a character: The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan’s book about D-Day. “He was fascinated that Eisenhower had never read the book,” Bobby Kennedy recalled.
As Richard Cardinal Cushing rose to give the invocation, little wisps of smoke began to rise from the podium from a short circuit. “If that smoke indicates a bomb and if the bomb explodes while I’m praying,” Cushing recalled thinking, “I’m going to land over on the Washington Monument.” At that point Eisenhower leaned over and whispered to Kennedy: “You must have a hot speech.”
Kennedy was struck again by the sheer force Eisenhower radiated. “The vitality of the man!” Kennedy marveled that night. “It stood out so strongly there at the Inauguration. There was [Secretary of State] Chris Herter, looking old and ashen. There was Allen Dulles, gray and tired. There was Bob Anderson, with his collar seeming two sizes too large on a shrunken neck. And there was the oldest of them all, Ike—as healthy and ruddy and as vital as ever.”