The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  IV

  CHARISMA

  What a strange Nemesis lurks in the felicities of men! In thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey, in thy belly it shall be bitter as gall! Some weakly organized individual, we will say at the age of five-and-twenty, whose main or whole talent rests on some prurient susceptivity, and nothing under it but shallowness and vacuum, is clutched hold of by the general imagination, is whirled aloft to the giddy height; and taught to believe the divine-seeming message that he is a great man: such individual seems the luckiest of men: and, alas, is he not the unluckiest?

  —THOMAS CARLYLE

  13

  Counterinsurgency at Home

  Eisenhower embodied half the needs of the nation, the needs of the timid, the petrified, the sanctimonious, and the sluggish. What was even worse, he did not divide the nation as a hero might (with a dramatic dialogue as the result); he merely excluded one part of the nation from the other. The result was an alienation of the best minds and the bravest impulses from the faltering history which was made. America’s need in those years was to take an existential turn, to walk into the nightmare, to face into that terrible logic of history which demanded that the country and its people must become more extraordinary and more adventurous, or else perish.

  —NORMAN MAILER, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”

  President Eisenhower’s crime, in Norman Mailer’s eyes, was a government by committee. Committees are not creative. They stifle originality, impose conformity. Eisenhower had let problems go untended in order to preserve the country’s (and his own) tranquillity. An “existential” leadership would dare to go “outside channels,” to confront the unexpected with a resourceful poise of improvisation.

  Schlesinger and Sorensen, official historians, portray their leader as just the “existential” hero Mailer pined for. His first job was to dismantle the protective procedures. Eisenhower had woven around the presidency. Kennedy wanted to be exposed, not shielded—out on the battlements, scanning all horizons, not seated in his chamber sifting documents. His ideal was the Franklin Roosevelt celebrated by Schlesinger and Burns and Neustadt. Richard Neustadt’s 1960 book, Presidential Power, became the “hot” item of the transition. In it, Roosevelt and Eisenhower were contrasted—Roosevelt as a man free from procedural entanglements, Eisenhower as the slave of them:

  Where Roosevelt let his channels and advisers become orderly he acted out of character. With Eisenhower, seemingly, the case is quite the opposite. Apparently he had a sense of power and a source of confidence as unlike Roosevelt’s as were the two men’s methods. For Eisenhower the promotion of disorder was distinctly out of character. When he could not work through a set procedure, or when channels failed him, or when his associates quarreled openly, he grew either disheartened or enraged.… Eisenhower has been a sort of Roosevelt in reverse.

  Which meant that Kennedy, to imitate Roosevelt, had to become a sort of Eisenhower in reverse.

  Neustadt, who had been appointed during the 1960 campaign to prepare for the transition, turned in his first report to the candidate on his airplane:

  After a time, Archibald Cox, who was aboard, said that the Senator was ready to see him but cautioned against conversation; “he’s saving his voice for Chicago.” Neustadt, going back to Kennedy, handed him a bundle of memoranda and said, “You don’t have to say anything—here are the memoranda—don’t bother with them till after the election.” One memorandum listed priority actions from election to Thanksgiving. Another dealt with cabinet posts. Another was called “Staffing the President-Elect”; sensing Kennedy’s affinities, Neustadt added to this appendixes discussing Roosevelt’s approach to White House staffing and to the Bureau of the Budget. Half an hour later Kennedy bounded out of his compartment in search of Neustadt. Finding him, he said, “That Roosevelt stuff is fascinating.” Neustadt said, “You’re not supposed to read it now.” Kennedy repeated, “It’s fascinating.”

  At his first session with Kennedy after the election, Neustadt gave him a copy of Presidential Power and recommended that he read chapters three and seven. Schlesinger continues: “Kennedy, almost as if surprised at the limited assignment, said, ‘I will read the whole book.’ When he did, he found an abundance of evidence and analysis to support his predilections toward a fluid presidency.”

  There would be no Sherman Adams in Kennedy’s White House. The President would direct his own operation. All bottlenecks to fluidity had to be broken up. The National Security Council, for one. Under Eisenhower, this was a coordinator of information coming to the President. Kennedy meant for it to be his own arm reaching out—through, over, or around the government—to get things done. Schlesinger applauded the birth of what became the Vietnam-planning organ of government:

  Mac [Bundy] was presently engaged in dismantling the elaborate national security apparatus built up by the Eisenhower administration.… Richard Neustadt had taken great pleasure during the interregnum in introducing Bundy to the Eisenhower White House as the equivalent of five officers on the Eisenhower staff. Bundy promptly slaughtered committees right and left and collapsed what was left of the inherited apparatus into a compact and flexible National Security Council staff. With Walt Rostow as his deputy and Bromley Smith, a remarkable civil servant, as the NSC’s secretary, he was shaping a supple instrument to meet the new President’s distinctive needs.

  A pattern was being set, by which the President’s special teams actively took on an adversary role toward the rest of the executive branch.

  Kennedy’s appointments reflected his sense of priorities. Dean Rusk, a southern gentleman acclimated to Eastern Establishment ways as head of the Rockefeller Foundation, would be custodian of the State Department’s traditional duties toward other countries. But McGeorge Bundy would supply the ideas on foreign policy, from his office in the White House. Schlesinger felt that Washington could pose no difficulty too great for a man who had been king of the hill in Cambridge: “Bundy possessed dazzling clarity and speed of mind—Kennedy told friends that, next to David Ormsby Gore, Bundy was the brightest man he had ever known—as well as great distinction of manner and unlimited self-confidence. I had seen him learn how to dominate the faculty of Harvard University, a throng of intelligent and temperamental men; after that training, one could hardly doubt his capacity to deal with Washington bureaucrats.” It is an interesting psychological point—and typical of the time—that Schlesinger considers the enemy to be dealt with, not as hostile foreign powers, but as the bureaucracy.

  Dean Rusk soon became the butt of jokes emanating from Bundy’s circle of bright men at the White House. David Halberstam describes Rusk’s patience during this ordeal: “He resisted the impulse to react to stories being told about him, but at times the anger and irritation would flash through. ‘It isn’t worth being Secretary of State,’ he once told Dick Goodwin, ‘if you have a Carl Kaysen at the White House.’ Substitute for the name Kaysen the name Bundy.” Rusk, it was said with condescension, actually liked to attend meetings. It was a point of pride at the White House not to hold meetings. Sorensen boasts: “Not one staff meeting was ever held, with or without the President.” The few meetings the President had to call were shams: “He never altered his view that any meeting larger than necessary was less flexible, less secret and less hard-hitting.… No decisions of importance were made at Kennedy’s Cabinet meetings and few subjects of importance, particularly in foreign affairs, were ever seriously discussed. The Cabinet as a body was convened largely as a symbol, to be informed, not consulted.”

  Kennedy’s men felt they had broken the logjam caused by Eisenhower’s committee approach to government. Sorensen describes his leader’s attitude this way:

  He ignored Eisenhower’s farewell recommendation to create a First Secretary of the Government to oversee all foreign affairs agencies. He abandoned the practice of the Cabinet’s and the National Security Council’s making group decisions like corporate boards of directors. He abolished the practice of White House staf
f meetings and weekly Cabinet meetings. He abolished the pyramid structure of the White House staff, the Assistant President-Sherman-Adams-type job, the Staff Secretary, the Cabinet Secretary, the NSC Planning Board and the Operations Coordinating Board, which imposed, in his view, needless paperwork and machinery between the President and his responsible officers. He abolished several dozen interdepartmental committees which specialized in group recommendations on outmoded problems. He paid little attention to organization charts and chains of command which diluted and distributed his authority. He was not interested in unanimous committee recommendations which stifled alternatives to find the lowest common denominator of compromise.

  The Kennedy teams lived on the move, calling signals to each other in the thick of the action—as Sorensen put it, like basketball players developing plays while the game moved on; not, like Eisenhower’s people, withdrawing into football huddles after every play. In his 1963 book on Kennedy, Hugh Sidey celebrated the escape from Eisenhower: “John Kennedy, it is clear, recaptured all the power and more which Dwight Eisenhower ladled out to his Cabinet officers. In fact, Kennedy in the first weeks nearly put the Cabinet on the shelf as far as being a force in policy matters, and he rarely bothered to dust it off. His government became a government by function, not by organizational chart.”

  If Kennedy thought the State Department was not his to be used, but an alien thing to be tamed, he was bound to feel the same way about the Defense Department. It, after all, bore much of the blame for letting a missile gap develop. Eisenhower had won election with a promise that he would go to Korea. Kennedy had promised, in effect, that he would go to the Pentagon—and he did so in the person of Robert McNamara. A product of the Harvard Business School, McNamara had been part of a team that planned the expansion of the Air Force during World War II, a team (known as the Whiz Kids) that went intact to the Ford Motor Company after the war. McNamara had just become the president of Ford (the first one not to bear the family name) when Kennedy called him to Washington. This intellectual-as-manager would assert civilian control over a Pentagon in love with the giant implements of massive retaliation. And, having done that, he would be called on for advice in every area of government. Sorensen describes the man’s extraordinary impact on the President:

  The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was clearly the star and the strong man among the newcomers in the Kennedy team. His own staff and subordinates ranked with Bob Kennedy’s and Douglas Dillon’s as the best in Washington and possibly in history.… In eleven years with Kennedy I never saw him develop admiration and personal regard for another man as quickly as he did with Robert McNamara, enabling the McNamaras to be excepted from the general Kennedy rule of keeping official and social friendships separate.

  Kennedy’s successor in the presidency would be equally impressed by McNamara’s brains and discipline. For years, intelligent men remained convinced that the Vietnam war could be won, because McNamara told them so, and McNamara always delivered.

  A President who treated his own executive branch as something to be raided, prodded, or ignored was bound to deal with Congress as an adversary. Kennedy’s own lackluster performance as a Representative and Senator derived in large part from his sense that real power lay with the executive branch (if only a non-Eisenhower would come along to energize it). Congress was, in his mind, the epitome of government by committee. Its principal power was to obstruct, to “deadlock” the system (as James MacGregor Burns argued in an influential book of the period). A strong President was needed to use all his power against the recalcitrant legislative branch.

  The President early decided to take on the committee system at its strongest node, that obstacle to all legislation, “Judge” Howard Smith’s House Rules Committee. Kennedy packed the committee, with Speaker Sam Rayburn’s help, but this was a pyrrhic victory. Schlesinger admits: “It was a close and bitter business, and the memory of the fight laid a restraining hand on the administration’s priorities for some time to come.” This assertion of power had drained power away—something that did not fit the Neustadt conception of power; but the lesson was lost on Kennedy.

  Instead, Kennedy concluded that, if outright confrontation failed, then circumvention of the process must be relied on—executive orders instead of legislation, extensions of authority for the team players, isolation of the less responsive parts of government. Let the uncooperative agencies atrophy, while a few vigorous men took on more and more general tasks. Sorensen describes the process: “It was largely through the President’s confidence in McNamara’s competence that the Department of Defense began to play a far greater role in areas in which other agencies were concerned: civil rights, defense, space, intelligence, paramilitary operations, foreign aid and foreign policy in general.” A small band of likeminded men, in conferences that were “flexible, secret, and hard-hitting,” might save the sluggish democracy despite itself. This “happy band of brothers” came straight from the pages of John Buchan. Kennedy’s fascination with counterinsurgency in other countries is well known. More important is the extent to which he viewed his own administration as a raid of mobile “outsiders” on the settled government of America. He had assembled a hit-and-run team to cut through enemy resistance, go outside channels, forgo meetings, subvert committees, dismantle structures. Democracies need such strong (and often secret) leadership by an enlightened few pitted against the many dullards of the bureaucracy.

  Kennedy had been encouraged by his father to despise professional diplomats. As Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy mocked the “striped-pants set,” and carved his way to a controversial independence in England—hoping to save his country from war, to shock those at home with the hard facts of England’s demise. The tough realism of that posture, the cutting through “crap,” came naturally to the man who was a loner in the business world, carrying out a series of raids, at odds with his fellow entrepreneurs’ corporate routines. Both father and son believed in inspired amateurs, in the gentlemen saviors of their country.

  As President, Kennedy conveyed his lack of respect for the State Department in many ways, once calling it “a bowl of jelly.” Schlesinger, by 1978, had come to see some flaws in this contemptuous attitude:

  The Kennedys had a romantic view of the possibilities of diplomacy. They wanted to replace protocol-minded, striped-pants officials by reform-minded missionaries of democracy who mixed with the people, spoke the native dialects, ate the food, and involved themselves in local struggles against ignorance and want. This view had its most genial expression in the Peace Corps, its most corrupt in the mystique of counterinsurgency. The gospel of activism became the New Frontier’s challenge to the cautious, painstaking, spectatorial methods of the old diplomacy.

  Abroad, counterinsurgency meant that a regime like Diem’s could not fight off insurgents alone; it was too mired in the past, too crippled by old compromises with the colonial power. But a team without such ties, a fresh force with clean hands, could purge and reform the administration while propping it up. It could fend off insurgents and alter the Vietnamese establishment. The assignment at home was not very different. In order to get the country “moving again,” make it clean and tough enough to confront the Russians, crisis teams would have to save the bureaucracy from itself, take over its duties, force it to join the successful operation of the outsiders. Henry Fairlie rightly called this a vision of “guerrilla government.”

  That ideal gives its real meaning to a term that became popular in and around the Kennedy presidency. James David Barber claims that charisma was “a much pawed-over concept Kennedy brought back to clarity.” But that was hardly the case. Kennedy’s admirers stretched and cheapened the sociological term adopted, half a century earlier, by Max Weber. Yet there was an unnoticed justice in the application of this word to the New Frontier. Weber distinguished three kinds of authority—traditional, relying on the inertia of sacred custom; legal, based on contractual ties; and charismatic, based on the special gifts of a single ruler. Cha
rismatic leadership is transitory—the “grace” is attached to one person, who must constantly revalidate it in action (“existentially,” according to the sixties jargon). It serves, amid the collapse of order or old ways, to bind together a new effort—the embodiment of a cause in George Washington or Mao Zedong. The founders of states, or of religious orders (a favorite Weber illustration), have to exert personal authority, since they have no preexisting majesty of office or sanction of law to draw upon.

  In Kennedy’s case, personalized leadership consciously distanced itself from the “traditional” father-king role of Eisenhower and the “legal” order of bureaucratic committees. Power came from Kennedy’s person, according to Schlesinger, which had to be displayed, deployed, brought to bear. His “cool” was his program, style and vigor his credentials. Kennedy’s term in office was later studied as just one more stage in the development of an Imperial Presidency. But his own followers saw it as a radical break with the institutional passivity of the post-Roosevelt presidency. They were returning to the last President who had been charismatic in Weber’s sense. Franklin Roosevelt, given special powers to deal with the crisis of the Depression, broke free of tradition, defied the two-term rule, took on himself the sacred mantle of war leader, and made policy by sheer personal fiat. Aspiring to a Rooseveltian presidency, Kennedy hoped, without benefit of depression or war, to assume emergency powers and assert a ruling charisma. Thus point after point in Reinhard Bendix’s analysis of Weber’s concept has its application to the New Frontier (a term which was itself intended to cut the new administration free of settled ways). In Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, Bendix articulates the different aspects of charismatic authority.