Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Schlesinger may well have been the one to pass along the president’s message, although George Ball, another assistant secretary at the State Department who opposed escalation in Vietnam, would also have been a candidate. Either way, it showed that the liberals were learning to work together effectively as political players. They had by no means won the argument on Vietnam, but they had at least successfully provided the president with an alternative strategy and point of view—a vital lesson learned from the Bay of Pigs disaster.8

  The spring of 1962 also saw Schlesinger playing more of a role in crafting Kennedy’s speeches, which in turn meant a subtly more liberal tone for the president. After all, Kennedy gave more progressive speeches once Schlesinger was brought in to help the more conservative Ted Sorensen. This arrangement also brought management challenges. Everyone, including the president, knew that working with the brilliant but possessive Sorensen was often a nightmare. Take, for example, the experience of Richard Goodwin, who had been in the speechwriting office with Sorensen from the beginning despite having told Kennedy after the 1960 campaign that “I don’t think I can work with Ted.” Kennedy persuaded him otherwise but was forced to move him on after less than a year when the relationship with Sorensen proved too fraught. Goodwin, born in 1931, was only three years younger than Sorensen, but the (slightly) older man treated him like some kind of ungrateful apprentice.

  Schlesinger, on the other hand, as an older Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Harvard professor who had been the chief speechwriter to Adlai Stevenson, was harder to ignore or dismiss. In January 1962, Kennedy asked Schlesinger to pep up Sorensen’s draft of the state of the union address. Sorensen then stayed up the night before the speech, writing another competing version. Kennedy passed them both to Bundy and said, “Weave them together.” According to Schlesinger’s son Robert, even moments before the speech, Sorensen was trying to have Schlesinger’s sections removed. “Ted certainly doesn’t go for additions to his speeches!” Kennedy joked. But he kept the insertions, one of which—“To make society the servant of the individual and the individual the source of progress, and thus to realize for all the full promise of American life”—was highlighted as the “Quotation of the Day” in the next morning’s New York Times. “Ted will die when he sees that,” JFK told Schlesinger.9

  In March, Kennedy asked Schlesinger to write a speech for Charter Day at the University of California, Berkeley. Kennedy was tired of headlines that talked only of a world in crisis; he wanted something that spoke of a democratic vision. He had read the long memorandum “Around the world in 42 days,” in which Schlesinger had argued that the most basic difference between Communism and the democratic world was pluralism (an idea that he had picked up from his Oxford friend Isaiah Berlin). “Pluralism is incompatible with the Communist system,” the memo stated, “but it is wholly compatible with—indeed, should be the basis of—our system. What we must do is both to emphasize that our objective is a pluralist world and to rethink our international relationships in these terms.” Now in a further memo, Schlesinger urged that the Berkeley speech might show how “we have already made great progress in putting flesh and bones on the concept of the pluralistic world.”10

  Kennedy told Schlesinger to go ahead, but again Sorensen wrote a competing draft, this time on the “age of hate or the age of knowledge.” On March 22, the day before the speech, Kennedy called both men up to his private office in the Family Quarters, passing a scowling FBI director, Edgar Hoover, on the threshold. (“I didn’t introduce you,” Kennedy explained, “because I did not want to upset Mr. Hoover.”) Looking over the two drafts, Kennedy explained that he liked the “age of knowledge” but not the “age of hate” from Sorensen and “pluralism” from Schlesinger. “Weave them together,” Kennedy again instructed, this time passing both drafts to Schlesinger. Each man “protested” that they were two different speeches, with Sorensen no doubt further irritated that Schlesinger got the assignment. Kennedy waved these concerns aside, telling them to have it done by 5 p.m.

  “This reminds me of my father,” Kennedy told them. “When someone gave him an idea or a memorandum, he would say, “ ‘This is lousy. It’s no good.’ Then they would ask what he wanted, and he would say, ‘That’s up to you,’ and walk out of the room. That’s what I am doing now.” And he did precisely that, leaving for his swim and a nap. “By five,” Arthur recorded, “I dutifully returned with a new draft.” Just as the president had wanted, it combined both themes.

  “The pursuit of knowledge itself implies a world where men are free to follow out the logic of their own ideas,” Kennedy would say at Berkeley the next day. “It implies a world where nations are free to solve their own problems and to realize their own ideals. . . . We must reject oversimplified theories of international life—the theory that American power is unlimited, or that the American mission is to remake the world in the American image. We must seize the vision of a free and diverse world—and shape our policies to speed progress toward a more flexible world order.” Afterwards, Schlesinger proudly recorded that Walter Lippmann described the speech as Kennedy’s best since the inaugural address.11

  The Berkeley speech established a pattern for Schlesinger and Sorensen. “My first draft seemed to him [JFK] too mild,” Schlesinger wrote of the commencement address for Yale in 1962, “and he asked me to ‘sharpen’ it up, which with Galbraith’s help I did. The result was too sharp.” So of course “Sorensen now produced a new draft,” Schlesinger explained, but “this was not right either.” Eventually, to Sorensen’s evident irritation, Schlesinger and Bundy (Yale ’40) knocked out the final copy.

  The theme, government-business relations, came at a time of economic sluggishness and industrial disputes. Interestingly, given the strident tone that Schlesinger had adopted toward business interests in his books, notably The Crisis of the Old Order, the main point of the speech was a call for common sense and pragmatism, not renewed ideological warfare.

  “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy,” Kennedy said at Yale on June 11. “What we need is not labels and cliches but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.”

  It was, Schlesinger wrote afterwards, an expression of Kennedy’s “economic thought, with its pragmatic and managerial instincts.” Years afterward, to Harvard’s Daniel Bell, he noted, “the general problem of ‘myth’ and reality’ was much on Kennedy’s mind in that period,” so that while he had written “the basic draft . . . the theme was Kennedy’s own, expounded to me at some length when he asked me to prepare a draft.” It was an example of how as a speechwriter Schlesinger had the capacity to be the servant not the master of the message. He did, however, follow it up with a long memorandum on “Business and Government: An Historian’s View,” which forcefully asserted that “an American president, to win world confidence, must convince the world that he is independent of the American business community.”12

  As a side note, it is worth pointing out that the Yale speech also demonstrated Schlesinger’s natural ear for humor, on this occasion making good use of JFK’s (as well as his own) background as a Harvard man. “It might be said now,” Kennedy began, having received his honorary doctorate, “that I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and Yale degree.” To great laughter he continued, “I am particularly glad to become a Yale man, because as I think about my troubles, I find that a lot of them have come from other Yale men.”13

  Important speeches such as those at Berkeley and Yale were part of Schlesinger’s role as Kennedy’s liaison with intellectuals and the universities. As he had written to Kennedy in 1961, “It might also be of use to have someone in the White House in whom labor and liberals would find what you once called ‘visual reassurance’ and whom they could trust as a channel of communication.” Since the
summer of 1961, that had involved being Kennedy’s point of contact for UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson. And it was in that role that Schlesinger would write perhaps the most important speech of his political career.14

  THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1962, memos from the CIA began reporting that the Soviets were supplying Cuba with “large quantities of transportation, electronic and construction equipment” that included “possible limited quantity weapons.” Several prominent Republicans, including Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, accused the administration of ignoring the buildup, including the prospect of missiles in Cuba. Schlesinger wrote to McGeorge Bundy on August 22, “The evidence suggests a striking change in Soviet policy toward Cuba.” He explained how Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, had visited Moscow a few weeks earlier and that “it now appears that Raul succeeded and that the USSR may have decided to make a major investment in Cuba.” But as to what that investment might be, Schlesinger urged caution. “Any military construction will probably be defensive in function,” he wrote, because “a launching pad directed against the U.S. would be too blatant a provocation. Probably they want to listen in on Canaveral [space center]—or to shoot down a U-2.” Then he added, “Mr. McCone is going to take this up with the President this afternoon.”15

  That apparently innocuous last line to Bundy was in fact a warning that CIA director John McCone took a much less benign view of Soviet activity. The Soviets were creating a major air defense system as part of what the CIA believed was “the most extensive campaign to bolster a non-bloc country ever undertaken by the U.S.S.R.” Surely, McCone advised the president, the Soviets were not putting such an elaborate system in place unless there was something in Cuba they did not want the Americans to see. He believed that the something had to be preparations for nuclear weapons. Kennedy was skeptical about the claim, looking at it in the context of McCone’s rabid anti-Communism. “The major danger is the Soviet Union with missiles and warheads,” the president cautioned, “not Cuba.”16

  Schlesinger was relieved at Kennedy’s circumspection, but two weeks later he returned to the subject of Cuba in a memo to the president. “I know very little about the present state of our Cuban policy,” he began. “However, as an old Cuba hand, it seems to me that there are increasingly dangerous potentialities in the existing situation.” Schlesinger then went on to say that he had heard about “a planned uprising in Cuba in the next few weeks,” which he feared would be a disastrous repeat of the Bay of Pigs. “Our world prestige would suffer a terrific blow,” he warned. “I would therefore hope that CIA be given the clear cut and definite responsibility to make sure that no such premature insurrection takes place.”

  Kennedy’s reply was guarded. “I read your memorandum of September 5th on Cuba,” it said. “I know of no planned ‘uprisings inside Cuba within the next few weeks.’ Would you send me the intelligence reports to which you refer. In any case, I will discuss the matter with the CIA.” In fact, as Schlesinger had seemingly picked up around the White House, the president at the end of August had already approved a top-secret directive to begin phase B of Operation Mongoose—the plan, coordinated by Bobby Kennedy, to murder Castro and overthrow his Marxist regime. Schlesinger later claimed circumstantial evidence pointed neither to Bobby nor to the president knowing about the specific plans to assassinate Castro. But either way, he would write, Operation Mongoose remained “Robert Kennedy’s most conspicuous folly.”17

  Schlesinger’s forceful posture on Cuba helps explain why JFK kept him out of the loop in the coming weeks as the Missile Crisis unfolded. Unlike Sorensen and Bundy, Schlesinger would not sit in on EXCOMM meetings from October 16 onwards. Thus he had no voice in shaping America’s response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. In fact, not only was Schlesinger absent from the meetings, such was their secrecy that he did not even know they were taking place. Given the need for absolute discretion, Schlesinger’s loose lips may also have been part of the reason for his exclusion. (“I am filled with contrition over my loose talking yesterday,” he had recently apologized in familiar fashion to the president. “I will stay away from the press for a while.”) Either way, it meant that he was out of the room when decisions were made during one of the most important moments of the Cold War.18

  That exclusion, however, did not mean he had no significant role to play as the events unfolded. In many ways, the crisis was the high point of his political career. On the afternoon of Friday, October 19, Adlai Stevenson phoned Schlesinger to say that he was in Washington and could they meet up early the next day. Stevenson was staying across the street from Schlesinger in Georgetown, and when the younger man walked the few short steps for the meeting, he found the ambassador’s official car already waiting with the engine running. But Stevenson beckoned Schlesinger inside the house, telling him that he didn’t want to risk being overheard by the driver.

  “Do you know what the secret discussions this week have been about?” Stevenson asked him. Schlesinger had not even heard of any secret discussions. “Berlin?” he replied weakly. “No, Cuba,” Stevenson said, and then went on to reveal what was going on. “The secret was superbly kept,” Schlesinger wrote somewhat ruefully in his diary afterwards. Stevenson now came quickly to the point. He had to make a speech to the UN Security Council justifying any American action: would Schlesinger write it for him?19

  That same Saturday, Stevenson was involved in the most intense EXCOMM meeting of the entire crisis, as the president’s advisors debated whether to bomb or blockade Cuba. Stevenson supported the latter course, but also proposed a series of other measures, including a guarantee of the territorial integrity of Cuba, UN inspection teams, and a summit meeting with Khrushchev. He also suggested handing back Naval Station Guantanamo Bay and withdrawing US missiles in Turkey in exchange for withdrawal of missile capacity in Cuba. At one stage, an incandescent Bobby Kennedy called a halt and pulled Stevenson aside into a separate room to continue the discussion in private, making clear, he later wrote, that he “disagreed strongly with his recommendations.” Many of Stevenson’s suggestions, including the offer to withdraw missiles from Turkey, would in fact become a decisive and highly secret part of the resolution of the crisis, but at the time they were sharply rejected.20

  Stevenson’s performance that Saturday afternoon led to accusations not only that he was a Cold War dove, but also that he was too soft or even a 1930s style appeaser.21 John F. Kennedy, however, was at least impressed by Stevenson’s fortitude in defending his line in the face of direct attacks. “You have to admire him for sticking to it,” the president told Sorensen, later adding to deputy national security advisor Carl Kaysen that Stevenson had shown “a lot of guts to come in here and say what he thought was right.” Kennedy might have admired Stevenson’s mettle, but it also left him with a problem. Robert Lovett, Truman’s secretary of defense, warned about the ambassador’s state of mind and advised Kennedy to send someone up to New York to look after him when he presented America’s case at the UN. Adopting a strategy of “good cop/bad cop,” for the latter Kennedy summoned John McCloy back from Europe to sit next to Stevenson during the UN debate. The pretext was bipartisan support; the subtext was that as a Cold War hardliner McCloy would stiffen the ambassador’s sinews. “I am confident,” Schlesinger would write in a note drafted for the president to send Stevenson, “that no one can interpret this in any way as a departure from your continuing authority and leadership in New York.” Understandably Stevenson did not agree, protesting to Kennedy that the Republican’s presence was an outrage. Schlesinger knew it too, which may be why he deleted the phrase in the final draft.22

  If McCloy was the bad cop, then Kennedy’s pick as good cop was an obvious choice. “On Monday the President told me to go to New York and work with Stevenson on the UN side of things,” Schlesinger wrote. He already had a completed draft of Stevenson’s speech, which he now discussed with JFK, Dean Rusk, and Robert Kennedy. “It was generally applauded,” he reported. But Bobby pulled hi
m aside afterwards to make clear that his role was about more than writing the speech. “We’re counting on you to watch things in New York,” he warned him. “That fellow [Stevenson] is ready to give everything away.”23

  “The next three days,” Schlesinger recalled, “were a kind of continued pandemonium.” He arrived in New York just in time to watch with Stevenson as the president outlined to the nation in a TV address the quarantine of offensive military equipment and his warning that any missile launched from Cuba would be regarded as an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union. As they discussed the president’s speech, Schlesinger thought Stevenson seemed in “good shape” and reconciled to the strategy. Even McCloy’s arrival did not seem to rattle the ambassador.

  Some familiar frustrations remained, however, as Schlesinger found the experience of working with Stevenson as maddening as ever. “The actual speech process was dismally reminiscent of the 1952 and 1956 campaigns,” he complained. “Adlai Stevenson worked hard on the draft, but at the last moment, so that both the main speech, delivered on Tuesday, and the rebuttal, delivered on Thursday, were still in the works when he had to go over to the Security Council to begin speaking.”24

  Nevertheless, amid the “sense of continuous and unrelenting crisis” at the UN that week, Schlesinger thought Stevenson proved “unperturbed and effective.” On Tuesday, October 23, the ambassador, using the speech and notes Schlesinger drafted, outlined the “grave threat to the Western Hemisphere and to the peace of the world.” In a bone-chilling conclusion, he declared, “We hope that Chairman Khrushchev has not made a miscalculation, that he has not mistaken forbearance for weakness. We cannot believe that he has deluded himself into supposing that, though we have power, we lack nerve; that, though we have weapons, we are without the will to use them.” Immediately afterwards, a delighted Kennedy cabled him a message. “I watched your speech this afternoon with great satisfaction,” it read. “It has given our cause a great start. . . . The United States is fortunate to have your advocacy. You have my warm and personal thanks.”25