Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  The conference in Punta del Este found Schlesinger, as usual, despairing about Dean Rusk’s performance and, again as usual, he seized the occasion to undermine him with the president. The gathering of foreign ministers of the Organization of American States took place amid growing division and acrimony over what to do about Cuba. The Americans had proposed a hard line, effectively expelling Cuba from the club and imposing punitive sanctions. “The present Government of Cuba, which has officially identified itself as a Marxist–Leninist government,” declared the draft resolution, “is incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.” In order to pass that resolution, a two-thirds majority (fourteen states) was required. After some last-minute negotiations, including, in a nod to future policy in the region, a deal with the authoritarian regime of François Duvalier in Haiti, the United States got its fourteen votes. But for Schlesinger it was an opportunity missed. Argentina had proposed a compromise motion (expulsion but more moderate sanctions) that all twenty states might easily have supported. “In these terms, the decision taken at Punta del Este to prefer a hard resolution and a divided hemisphere to milder resolution and a united hemisphere may have been an error,” Schlesinger wrote to the president. He praised Rusk for his “great patience and tact in dealing with the Latinos,” but twisted the knife by suggesting that “at the end he may have been overborne by the pressure of the North American legislators and the Central American diplomats.” The importance of achieving unanimity among the OAS nations would come to the fore later in 1962 during the missile crisis when the question was whether to impose a quarantine on Cuba. Now it was just one more misstep in American diplomacy on Cuba that overall, Schlesinger complained, was causing “general bafflement” among allies.18

  From the drama of Punta del Este, Schlesinger traveled on to the educational and cultural meeting in Japan. “I guess this conference was a good idea,” he complained, “[but] the meetings were about the most tedious I have ever attended anywhere.” Things looked up once George McGovern arrived in Japan to travel on to India—the Food for Peace program’s number one client state. Schlesinger liked McGovern, found him “intelligent, persuasive, tactful, and a splendid embodiment of American liberalism and of tough-minded humanitarianism.” His program was committed to sending India $1.4 billion worth of wheat and other agricultural produce—the equivalent of a shipment of wheat every day for the next four years. As they toured India together, McGovern and Schlesinger witnessed the effect of this aid at first hand, not least in the popular school lunch program that reached one in every five Indian children and would help double school attendance by 1964. Schlesinger would later describe the Food for Peace program as “the greatest unseen weapon of Kennedy’s third world policy.” Its broader political impact in 1962, he reported back to the president, was such that he “could find little evidence of a serious Communist threat in the country”—an important development in a nonaligned nation during the Cold War.19

  Schlesinger’s tour across India with McGovern was thrilling but exhausting. “I evidently overscheduled Arthur a bit,” ambassador J. K. Galbraith noted laconically. The two men nevertheless enjoyed the time they spent together in New Delhi, not least the opportunity to bitch about Rusk. “Arthur agrees that Rusk is a dull foundation type,” Galbraith recorded, “necessarily dependent on the military and a passionate and indiscriminate exponent of all the Establishment clichés.” All that seemed to matter to Rusk, they concluded, was that “he is in, which is the basic position of all Establishmentarians.”20

  Such lofty professorial disdain came easily around the dinner table at the ambassador’s residence, but these Harvard men were Establishmentarians of their own kind too, having to endure a drubbing that in all other circumstances they would have disdained. Flying from New Delhi, still gossiping, this time about Kenneth O’Donnell and the “Irish mafia” in the White House, the two arrived at Dum Dum Airport in time to greet Bobby Kennedy, with whom Schlesinger would be traveling on to Rome and Berlin. “Bobby looked very tired,” Galbraith noted, and when Schlesinger showed him the keynote address he was due to give in Berlin, Kennedy, in front of Galbraith, ripped it to shreds for its “conventional praise of the bravery of Berliners, [and] strictly conventional damnation of Communists.” Galbraith had actually looked it over and “thought it all right.” Now, however, “On second thoughts, I was forced to conclude, as did Arthur, that the criticism was sound.” Rusk, it turned out, was not the only one who was beholden. As Thomas Parrot, a White House notetaker, would later say of the dynamic between Bobby and any official, “[He’d] sit there, chewing gum, his tie loose, feet up on his desk, daring anyone to contradict him. He was a little bastard, but he was the president’s brother, the anointed guy, and you had to listen to him. Everybody felt that he would tell Big Brother if you didn’t go along with what he was proposing.”21

  Loyalty to the Kennedys, a prerequisite of service, was particularly difficult to sustain during these next weeks, as their behavior on tour became more and more difficult to explain away. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife, and Teddy Kennedy, Jack and Bobby’s younger brother, had always been exuberant up to, and often beyond, the point of embarrassment. The previous summer, Schlesinger had recorded in his journal a party for Bobby and Ethel’s wedding anniversary that had seen “wild dancing,” Ethel and Teddy singing, and the latter “plunging fully dressed into the swimming pool.” Schlesinger liked to explain this as “great fun—a perfect expression of the rowdier aspects of the New Frontier.” To Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post and no shrinking violet himself, the scene was “just like a horror movie.” At the following year’s party, Arthur found himself dumped fully clothed into the swimming pool with Ethel, causing him to offer his resignation to the president. “Don’t worry about it,” an amused JFK told him. Interior secretary Stewart Udall’s wife, Lee, later confessed, saying “he was standing there holding forth and looking so Arthurish, and something came over me.”22

  Excessiveness at private parties might be considered one thing, but when the younger Kennedys were abroad representing their country, their public antics were more difficult to dismiss. In Rome, at the famous Alfredo’s restaurant, a champagne-fueled lunch that went on for five hours reportedly ended with Ethel riding a Vespa between the tables, causing chaos and embarrassment. An appalled Marian Schlesinger said the “mayhem” represented “the Kennedy party at its adolescent worst.”23

  Even worse was to come in Berlin when Teddy Kennedy joined the party. At a dinner given by Willy Brandt, the mayor of Berlin and future chancellor, before Bobby’s lecture at the Free University, events once again got out of hand. During the toasts, Brandt drank to “the President, government and people of the United States.” The attorney general, responding lamely, said, “That’s the three of us—the President, that’s my brother [Jack]; the government, that’s me; and [pointing at Teddy] you’re the people.” This remark, Brandt wrote afterwards, made him view the whole Kennedy project with “disquiet.” Leaden humor then gave way to farce. Bobby rose again at the end of the dinner and made the unwelcome announcement that Teddy, who turned thirty that day, was “going to sing some songs from South Boston.” To the astonishment of the West German worthies gathered at the banquet, the birthday boy now proceeded to give excruciating renditions of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Danny Boy.” “Teddy was obviously high and the tension was almost unbearable,” Marian wrote. “The Kennedys often did this sort of thing, turning so many occasions into little private parties of their own, full of private jokes and silly by-play,” she continued witheringly. “They were so self-centered that if something happened to them, then it had to be of overwhelming importance to everyone concerned whether it be the burghers of Berlin or the shopkeepers of Rome.” Arthur, writing to the president afterwards, reported, “Bobby handled himself with immense poise and skill and did not make a false step.” For Marian, on the other hand, the trip to Berlin was “one of the most embarrass
ing occasions I ever witnessed.”24

  The darker side of Camelot was in marked contrast to the sobering experience of the Berlin Wall. “It was more barbaric and sinister than one could have imagined,” Arthur remembered, “the crude, gray concrete blocks, the bricked-in windows of the apartment houses along the sector line, the vicious tank traps, the tall picket fences erected to prevent East Berliners from even waving to relatives or friends in West Berlin, the plain white crosses marking places where people had jumped to their death.” Surveying the depressing sight before him gave Schlesinger pause. Should the allies, he wondered, “have done something to halt the wall or to tear it down?” As his thoughts now turned homeward, it was a grim reminder, if he needed it, that policymaking in Washington affected real lives on the front line of the Cold War. He could hardly have known that within months, Washington, DC, itself would stand on that same front line.25

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WE’RE COUNTING ON YOU

  White House cinema, Saturday, March 7, 1962. Since childhood, Arthur Schlesinger had always been a film buff. At school he had kept a notebook in which he recorded his thoughts on every movie he saw. Always the academic, he even graded them. As special assistant to the president, he continued to write movie reviews for Show: The Magazine of the Performing Arts (“Do they pay you well?” Kennedy wanted to know). So now, having returned a few days earlier from a forty-two-day trip encompassing three continents and thousands of miles of travel, Schlesinger found himself in the screening room in the White House. The selection that night, the dreamlike Last Year in Marienbad directed by Alain Resnais, was unusual in an era dominated by Westerns. Schlesinger thought it “one of the most enthralling” films he had ever seen. But when the president left the White House screening room halfway through the movie, Schlesinger was caught in a diplomatic movie conundrum. Should he leave Marian Schlesinger and the First Lady to watch the movie alone? Take advantage of his boss leaving to grab him for a private word? What was a special advisor to do? In the end, discretion was the better part of valor, and he stayed behind, transfixed not just by the film but also by how Jackie watched “with fascination.”1

  Afterwards, when Kennedy returned to the room and the two couples chatted over late night drinks, the subject of families and how to raise children came up. How was it, Schlesinger sycophantically asked JFK, that the Kennedys had turned out so well when the Churchills and the Roosevelts had done so badly? Kennedy’s reply was remarkable for the consummate skill of his acting:

  Well no one can say that it was due to my mother. It was due to my father. He wasn’t around as much as some fathers; but, when he was around, he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him. He seemed terribly interested in everything we were doing. He held up standards for us, and he was very tough when we failed to meet his standards. This toughness was important. If it hadn’t been for that, Teddy might be just a playboy today. But my father cracked down on him at a crucial time in his life, and this brought out in Teddy the discipline and seriousness which have made him a possible political figure.

  Marian in particular must have found it hard not to choke on her drink, but the question makes Arthur look like a fool or a stooge. The fact that he asked it and Kennedy replied in that fashion tells us something about the relationship between the two men. Given what we now know about the “dark side of Camelot,” it is impossible really to understand the extent to which Schlesinger was naïve about or complicit in the vagaries of the president’s personal life. Certainly the way in which Arthur, in comparison to Marian, later glossed over the events in Rome and Berlin in his biography of Robert Kennedy, suggests that he was capable of turning a blind eye to the excesses of this family. He dismissed those who did otherwise as members of “the National Enquirer school of biographers.” On the other hand, the question also displays a guileless quality. Certainly it was not a question that Kennedy would have had been asked by the likes of Dave Powers, for whom close friendship often entailed pimping for the president. Kennedy’s answer shows how adept he was at maintaining the public facade. But it also illustrates the limits of the relationship man-to-man with Schlesinger, who surely otherwise would have steered well clear of the subject in front of Jackie.2

  Whatever the nature of their personal friendship, Schlesinger’s presence that weekend in the White House, where he dined two out of three consecutive nights, exemplifies the easy access that he enjoyed with Kennedy. A few weeks afterwards, John Kenneth Galbraith, following dinner with Schlesinger and the president, wondered whether he himself was “far less effective as an adviser than a year ago,” because Kennedy now “knows so much more, has much greater confidence” than when he came into office. But Galbraith and Schlesinger were also learning to play the game a little better themselves, as events would soon demonstrate.3

  In those weeks liberals in the administration—Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Chester Bowles (now special representative and advisor on African, Asian, and Latin American Affairs)—began a concerted push back on increasing American involvement in Vietnam. Both Schlesinger and Bowles visited India in consecutive weeks in February. On March 2, in a letter purportedly about the First Lady’s visit to India, Galbraith told Kennedy that the United States looked doomed to repeat the mistakes of the French in Vietnam. Further US involvement was “political poison” and “could kill us.” It was vital that the president keep the door open to a political settlement involving “even the Russians,” Galbraith urged, reminding him shortly afterwards “that the Soviets are not particularly desirous of trouble in this part of the world.”4

  Three days later, Schlesinger opened his report on his global travels with a long disquisition on the state of Communism, reporting how “the Russo-Chinese tension has become a dominating issue throughout the world.” There was, he wrote, “no question that this tension has already had a serious effect on Communist operations outside the bloc,” adding that “the Russo-Chinese divergence has seriously impaired the broad appeal of Communism.” The key for the United States was to encourage pluralism, but not do anything that might “stimulate Russia and China to try to get together again.” Schlesinger did not mention Vietnam by name, but his strategic meaning could not have been clearer.5

  Kennedy got the message and invited Schlesinger and Galbraith down to Glen Ora, his Virginia family retreat. (In a further indication of how dependent advisors were on the patronage of the president, Kennedy never bothered to see Chester Bowles, who also wrote him a fifty-four-page memorandum on Vietnam; the man who had backstabbed JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco was “out.”) Schlesinger and Galbraith arrived in Virginia in the late afternoon on April 1, with both surprised at the lack of security (“a gate with a single guard”) and the “relatively modest” surroundings. Before dinner, everyone sat down to watch an NBC documentary about Jackie’s visit to India. “Well, while you and Ken watch yourselves on television,” Kennedy quipped, “Arthur can read his books and I will listen to some of my old speeches.” After dinner, the talk turned to more serious matters—“South Vietnam as usual,” said Galbraith.6

  At the end of the evening, Kennedy asked for a formal memo on the subject. It arrived three days later on April 4, under Galbraith’s signature, although the repeated use of “we” suggests that Schlesinger had a hand in its composition. The memo warned in stark terms that a “growing military commitment” in Vietnam “could expand step by step into a major, long-drawn-out, indecisive military involvement.” The United States was “backing a weak and, on the record, ineffectual government.” There was a “consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.” But what to do? “In the light of the foregoing we urge the following,” the memo continued, recommending “that it be our policy to keep open the door for political solutions . . . seize any good opportunity to involve other countries and world opinion in settlement and its guarantee . . . [and] measurably reduce our commitment to the part
icular leadership of the government of South Vietnam.” The United States should “approach the Russians to express our concern about the increasingly dangerous situation that the Vietcong is forcing in Southeast Asia.” In the meantime, Kennedy should “resist all steps which commit American troops to combat action and impress upon all concerned the importance of keeping American forces out of actual combat zones.” A personal note from Galbraith that accompanied the memo thanked JFK for “the other evening at Glen Ora, our survey of the problems of the nation and the world, and the chance to reflect on the unique capacity of your advisers to solve them.”7

  When the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, and the chiefs of staff got hold of the Vietnam memo, they pressured the president to reject both its premise and recommendations. “The Department of Defense cannot concur in the policy advanced by Ambassador Galbraith,” the joint chiefs told Kennedy, “but believe strongly that present policy toward South Vietnam should be pursued vigorously to a successful conclusion.” In truth, Kennedy himself was skeptical about negotiating with Hanoi, but he also remained fearful that the United States was being dragged into a colonial war that could only end badly, so he sent word to Galbraith that he wanted him to explore the option of using India as a go-between with the North Vietnamese to find a way out. Galbraith’s official biographer, Richard Parker, claims that Averell Harriman, now assistant secretary of state, disobeyed a direct instruction from the president and did not pass along that message to Galbraith. Yet Galbraith made the approach to the Indians anyway and sent a blistering telegram condemning Harriman.