Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  “All you bright fellows have gotten the President into this,” Bobby Kennedy, a vocal advocate of the operation, raged during a meeting in the Cabinet Room, “and if you don’t do something now, my brother will be regarded as a paper tiger by the Russians.”32

  Certainly Jack Kennedy himself had a strong sense his clever advisors had let him down. “There is only one person in the clear,” he fumed in a breakfast meeting with staff on April 21, “that’s Bill Fulbright.” MacGeorge Bundy piped up that, in fairness, Schlesinger had opposed the operation too. Only a week before, Kennedy had been laughing at a remark made by Bundy in a meeting that the president was “surrounded by five ex-professors.” Now Kennedy rounded on them. “Oh sure,” he jabbed, “Arthur wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” The president even had a title for Schlesinger’s book: Kennedy: The Only Year.

  The meeting was a dispiriting end to the first hundred days of the new administration. Schlesinger’s only hope was that they had all learned a lesson. The president should have overruled his senior advisors and called the operation off. “Next time,” he wrote hopefully, “I am sure he will.” By sticking around, Schlesinger gave himself the chance to find out.33

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PLAYING CASSANDRA

  Friday, April 21, 1961. Settling into his seat on the Rome-bound flight from New York, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had every reason to be nervous. Not only was he flying into a storm of opprobrium in Europe, but there was the worry of leaving the White House as everyone cast about for a Bay of Pigs scapegoat. Schlesinger had been one of the few who had opposed the operation, yet, as any student of politics knows, no prince wants to be reminded of his own failure. It is easier to banish the offending courtier and start again with someone new. Kennedy would sideline Chester Bowles, the assistant secretary of state who was telling anyone who would listen that he had opposed the operation in Cuba, within the year. This trip to a conference in Bologna had been long planned. Before leaving, a nervous Schlesinger had suggested postponing, but with Kennedy himself due to leave for Europe in a month, the president had been keen to have someone to conduct reconnaissance and effect damage control. “Maybe you can explain to them over there what we have been doing,” Kennedy told him. “Do your best.”1

  In the last few weeks, Schlesinger had been constantly on the move and almost always awake, working late into the night as the crisis escalated. Now in the radio silence of the flight, he was able to consider what really had gone wrong. “How does one add all this up?” he asked plaintively in his journal. Over the next few months, he would draw some broader conclusions about the machinery of foreign policymaking and how it could better serve the president.2

  His more immediate task, however, was to weather the storm of European reaction to recent events in Cuba. Arriving in Bologna to address an international conference on American foreign policy, he found a baffled audience given to embarrassment. European participants talked of “everything but” Cuba. “One felt as if there had been a frightful scandal in one’s family,” Schlesinger wrote, “which friends refrained from mentioning for reasons of delicacy.” The press were less tactful. “In one day,” blared the Corriere della Sera, “American prestige collapses lower than in eight years of Eisenhower timidity and lack of determination.” Then too he had to face Dean Acheson at the conference. The doyen of American diplomacy had been “present at the creation” of the postwar world under Roosevelt and Truman. Acheson listened to Schlesinger’s account with amused disdain, before quoting an aphorism of Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of Germany: “In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.”3

  Schlesinger left Bologna concluding that the Bay of Pigs had done “immense damage” to the Kennedy administration’s reputation. “We not only look like imperialists,” he wrote, “we look like ineffectual imperialists, which is worse; and we look like stupid, ineffectual imperialists, which is worst of all.” Traveling on to London and Paris, Schlesinger found more bemusement and dismay. “I’ve staked my whole political career on the ability of Americans to act sensibly,” Denis Healey, the Labour foreign affairs spokesman, complained, recalling Britain’s own imperial bungling five years earlier at Suez. Healey’s colleague Richard Crossman warned, “Faith still remains in Kennedy . . . but one more mistake like this, and you really will be through.”4

  Schlesinger returned to Washington humiliated. On the plane home, he began drafting a memo for Kennedy outlining his experience and its implications for American policy. It was a document that spared no one’s feelings, including those of the commander in chief. “The new American President in three months had reestablished confidence in the maturity of American judgment and the clarity of American purposes,” Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy. “Now, in a single stroke, all this seemed wiped away. After Cuba, the American Government seemed as self-righteous, trigger-happy and incompetent as it had ever been. . . . ‘Kennedy has lost his magic,’ one person said to me.”5

  As “baffled and incredulous” as European opinion was about how “incompetent, irresponsible and stupid” the administration had been, the “unfortunate and unnecessary” fact that embassy staff had not been briefed about the operation exacerbated matters. “The State Department appears to have sent out no instructions to American Embassies how to explain what happened in Cuba,” Schlesinger wrote. “As a consequence, our Ambassadors remain in the dark, . . . forced to mouth official generalities or to confess ignorance or to rely on [columnist James “Scotty”] Reston or Time.”6

  Having prepared his memorandum, Schlesinger went to see Kennedy in the Oval Office. The recently agitated figure of the Cuban crisis had reverted to a leader who “seemed, as usual, cool and composed.” The two men talked about Cuba, with Kennedy again incredulous about the quality of the advice he was still getting from the CIA and the military, saying they wanted him to “intervene in Laos now.” Schlesinger’s downbeat report from Europe he brushed off with a joke. Showing his special assistant new Gallup polling that put him at an unprecedented 82 percent approval rating with US voters, he laughed, “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.”7

  Schlesinger had always admired Kennedy’s coolness and composure, believing, as in the summer of 1960, that it was the quality that better equipped him to be president than, for example, Adlai Stevenson. Yet for all the bonhomie and self-deprecating wit, Schlesinger over the next weeks noticed a palpable dent in the president’s self-assurance. “I surmise a rather profound shock to the President’s own self-confidence,” he recorded in his diary at the beginning of June. “Beneath his total self-control, he saw from the moment things began to go wrong the whole proportions of the catastrophe. . . . He has not spared himself when it comes to postmortems.” Certainly the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, recognized that potential insecurity and tried to pulverize the president when the two leaders met in Vienna for their first summit on June 4. Khrushchev threatened to take West Berlin and talked airily of nuclear war. “Pretty rough?” the journalist Reston asked afterwards. “The roughest thing in my life,” Kennedy replied, “he just beat the hell out of me.” The face-to-face meeting combined with the incompetence of the Bay of Pigs convinced Khrushchev he could take advantage of a young and inexperienced leader by ratcheting up tensions in the Cold War. Washington and the allied community lost a measure of confidence in the president. “Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead,” spat Vice President Johnson with his Texan’s contempt for any sign of weakness. British prime minister Harold Macmillan saw Kennedy as “completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity” of the Soviet leader. “It reminded me in a way,” he wrote ominously, “of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler.”8

  Schlesinger did not travel to Europe with Kennedy. Thu
s he had an opportunity to think more about the broader issues of governance that had bothered him since the Cuban failure. Incompetence and poor advice defined the operation; its aftermath generated a blend of torpor and risk aversion. “Because this bold initiative flopped,” he complained, “there is now a general predisposition against boldness in all fields.” Reinvigoration required not simply the president getting his “magic” back, but also a systemic overhaul.9

  Schlesinger the historian was deeply interested in the ways in which a president imposed his will on his own administration; now as a political operative he wanted to apply some of those lessons. In The Coming of the New Deal, he had dedicated the last part of the book to the evolution of the presidency, with an entire chapter on the “dynamics of decision.” In particular, Schlesinger had emphasized Roosevelt’s habit of breaking down formal lines of demarcation, often to the irritation of advisors and cabinet officials. Harold Ickes complained in his diary about “what he [FDR] does frequently, namely, calling in members of my staff for consultation on [Interior] Department matters, without consulting me or advising with me.” Sometimes those visitors would find themselves asked for advice completely outside their area of expertise. “He had a great habit,” Schlesinger quotes FDR’s commerce secretary, Jesse H. Jones, saying, “of talking to one caller about the subject matter of his immediately preceding interview.” So officials brought in to discuss economic policy might suddenly find themselves talking about foreign policy. “All this,” Schlesinger concluded of Roosevelt’s leadership philosophy, “irritating as it was to tidy minds, enlarged the variety of reactions available to [FDR] in areas where no one was infallible and any intelligent person might make a contribution.”10

  After the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger made it one of his principal activities to try to break down fences within the federal government, open the Oval Office to a wider range of advice, and thereby find ways to push presidential ideas more firmly through the system. He captured the frustrations of that challenge in the chapter in A Thousand Days entitled “In The White House,” which mirrors the chapter on decision-making in The Coming of the New Deal. On taking office “aglow with ideas,” the Kennedy administration, Schlesinger writes angrily, “promptly collided with the feudal barons of the permanent government, entrenched in their domains and fortified by their sense of proprietorship; in turn, the permanent government, confronting this invasion, began almost to function . . . as a resistance movement.” He then stressed, “This was especially true in foreign affairs.”11

  In the summer of 1961, Schlesinger’s specific fear was that nothing had been learned from the experience of Cuba. He was appalled to learn that the CIA had drawn up another Cuban covert plan. “Stop this paper in its present form and demand that it be recast to make political sense,” Schlesinger wrote urgently to Dick Goodwin. “It is a fallacy to suppose that clandestine activity can be carried out in a political vacuum,” Schlesinger despaired.12

  These individual cases were dangerous examples of what Schlesinger believed was a systemic problem, so he sought constantly to act as a disruptive force within that system. It began with the CIA. Writing to Kennedy days after the Bay of Pigs, he urged “reconsideration and reorganization” of the agency, reminding the president that “I served in OSS during the war, and I have been a CIA consultant for a good deal of the period since; so that, while I am far from a professional in this field, I am a relatively experienced amateur.”13 Kennedy told him to think further on the issue. The result was a fifteen-page report at the end of June. It contained some philosophical reflections on the nature of an intelligence agency, with “the conclusion that secret activities are permissible so long as they do not corrupt the principles and practices of our society, and that they cease to be permissible when their effect is to corrupt those principles and practices.” But its most radical contribution was the recommendation for a major overhaul of intelligence gathering and analysis, with the CIA stripped of its independence. The Agency’s failure at the Bay of Pigs operation, at root, had come about because the intelligence branch (DDI) of the agency had been subservient to the operations branch. Even low-level agents hanging around the Cuban bars of Miami had known more about the Bay of Pigs operation than top officials of the intelligence branch.

  Schlesinger’s plan for reorganization required creating greater separation of activities. The State Department would be granted general clearance over all “clandestine activity,” and a new assistant secretary of state for intelligence would take responsibility for convening a Joint Intelligence Board to coordinate “all elements in the intelligence community.” The CIA itself would be split into an operating agency and a separate research agency (the latter charged with collation and interpretation). It was, Schlesinger admitted, “a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” But as he warned the president, “The important thing to recognize today, in my judgment, is that the CIA, as at present named and constituted, has about used up its quota [of visible errors]. Its margin for future errors is practically non-existent.”14

  In some ways Schlesinger was pushing at an open door. Kennedy privately cursed the “CIA bastards” who had led him into trouble, and expressed a wish to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” That summer, after affording Allen Dulles a period of grace, Kennedy summoned the CIA director and fired him, along with his deputy Richard Bissell. “Under a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office,” Kennedy consoled Dulles, “but under our system it is you who must go.” For one tantalizing moment Kennedy, perhaps thinking out loud, seemed to consider bringing in Schlesinger as a new reforming director of the CIA, even though, as Schlesinger recognized, “it would cause consternation on the Hill.” In the end, however, Kennedy followed the model of his earlier appointments by putting a well-regarded Republican into a controversial appointment as a way of blunting criticism of his policies from the right. In this case he preferred Truman veteran Clark Clifford but instead chose businessman John McCone, chair of the Atomic Energy Agency under President Eisenhower. Schlesinger took the news of his own non-appointment phlegmatically. “I imagine that the President was joking,” he said of the idea that he might have gone to the CIA.15

  That summer Schlesinger also found his name under consideration for the position of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. Schlesinger fought a rearguard action against having to move from the White House, telling his parents of “my effort to disengage” from matters Latin. Dick Goodwin, who later in 1961 would get the State Department job himself, brilliantly captures how such a departure felt to an insider. Kennedy told him, “You know, Dick, maybe we’d be better off if you were in the State Department, closer to the action.” Politics, Goodwin realized, was not love, even though he felt jilted. “I was not in the White House because John Kennedy liked me (although he may have) but for my contribution to his ambitions and objectives,” he wrote afterwards. “In return I received a title, a significant office, and the opportunity to help shape the course of public power. If my presence caused difficulties, if my value declined, then I must go. It was a simple matter of transaction; not ruthless at all, but rational, the inevitable deduction from the syllogism of power.”16

  Schlesinger was aware that he himself had been an irritant in the lead-up to Cuba without being effective. He “saw little” of Kennedy in the early summer, and when he did, Schlesinger found him colder than before, as “the customary wit and relaxation were missing.” In part, Kennedy’s “back was causing him definite trouble,” but there was also a marked sense of despondency in the West Wing after the twin setbacks of Cuba and the Vienna summit, with another crisis brewing in Berlin.17

  Looking elsewhere to focus his attention, Schlesinger settled on Italy, whose prime minister, Amintore Fanfani, was due to visit the White House that summer. Just as Schlesinger had been drawn to thinking about decision-making and the bureaucracy in a Rooseveltian context, so too
did his policy interest in Italy stem from earlier writings. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Schlesinger had written often and controversially about the importance of the non-Communist Left, most famously in his best-selling book, The Vital Center (1949). Arguably the most powerful postwar Communist force in the West was the Italian Communist Party. But in the late 1950s, the Socialists led by Pietro Nenni moved away from the Communists, eventually breaking with them by 1960. This split provided an apertura a sinistra (opening to the left) for a government that excluded Communists. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger had written that “the health of the democratic left requires the unconditional rejection of totalitarianism,” and that in this and most other regards, the Italian socialist party was “broken and helpless.” Now in 1961 he believed that Nenni’s move presented a real opportunity for the non-Communist Left in Italy and for the United States to nudge things along.

  Briefing Kennedy the weekend before Fanfani arrived, he laid out the context for the president. “The issue here is whether the Christian Democrats [Fanfani’s party] should be encouraged to undercut the Italian Communist Party, which is the largest and most formidable Communist party in the free world . . . by adopting the policy of the so-called ‘opening to the left.’ ” Answering the question, Schlesinger advised Kennedy that “what you might wish to do is . . . solicit Fanfani’s views on the opening to the left [and] make it clear that, if there is a real prospect through closer relations with the Nenni Socialists of rescuing a large segment of the Italian working class without corrupting the Italian position in NATO, the U.S. would welcome such a development.”18