Stevenson’s finest hour, however, was yet to come. On Thursday, October 25, armed again with a Schlesinger speech, the ambassador returned to the chamber of the Security Council for his famous confrontation with his Soviet counterpart, Valerian Zorin (who was also in the chair). “All right, sir,” he demanded at the height of their exchange, “let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba. Yes or No? Do not wait for the translation. Yes or no?” When Zorin told Stevenson he was not in a courtroom, Stevenson fired back, using a phrase that he had discussed with Schlesinger and Galbraith a year earlier, “You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and can answer yes or no.” Zorin hedged again, saying Stevenson would get an answer in due course. To which Stevenson replied, somewhat illogically but brilliantly, “I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over, if that is your decision. I am also prepared to present evidence in this room,” which he promptly did—displaying huge presentation boards of the U-2 reconnaissance photographs showing the presence of nuclear sites in Cuba.
“Stevenson had his confrontation with Zorin in the Security Council,” Schlesinger wrote afterwards in his diary. “Zorin, who seemed to be laboring without instructions, was not effective, and Stevenson even won a favorable notice from the Daily News.” Perhaps more pertinently, Stevenson got another favorable notice from the president. “Terrific,” he announced, watching the speech on TV in the Oval Office, before adding more waspishly, “I never knew Adlai had it in him. Too bad he didn’t show some of this steam in the 1956 campaign.”26
Stevenson was not the only one of his old clients that Schlesinger helped rehabilitate that week in New York. In between Stevenson’s two speeches, Averell Harriman contacted Schlesinger to express his concern about how the crisis was developing. Although Harriman was an assistant secretary at the State Department, he was conspicuously outside the policymaking loop. But Harriman was not going to let that stop him from involving himself in the current crisis, when, he believed rightly, he had as much experience in reading Soviet intentions as anyone in Washington. Khrushchev was desperate to find a way off the hook, he now told Schlesinger. “We must give him an out,” Harriman urged. “If we do this shrewdly, we can downgrade the tough group in the Soviet Union which persuaded him to do this. But if we deny him an out, then we will escalate this business into a nuclear war.” Have you told anyone this? Schlesinger asked him. “I haven’t talked to Rusk,” Harriman admitted. So Schlesinger promised to pass along his view directly to Kennedy.
“Accordingly I reported his view in a memorandum which I sent that night to the President,” he recalled, “who apparently read it because he called Harriman the next day and asked him questions about it.” In that conversation, Harriman, as Stevenson had, would raise the prospect of withdrawing US missiles from Turkey—a crucial part of the deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev that would emerge over the coming weekend. Bobby Kennedy, who noticed how useful Harriman’s Soviet credentials had been during the crisis, recommended that Harriman soon afterwards become assistant secretary of state for political affairs, putting him once again back on the inside track.27
Going in to see the president on Monday, October 29, once the crisis had passed, Schlesinger found JFK “relaxed and chipper but far from complacent.” The problem, Kennedy told him, was that “too many people will think now that all we have to do in dealing with the Russians is to kick them in the balls.” Kennedy asked him to put some thoughts on paper about how they might present the lessons from these traumatic thirteen days. That paper, written the same afternoon, would point to the crisis as marking “an end and a beginning—an end to violent adventures designed to overturn the equilibrium of world power; and a beginning of fresh initiatives for peace,” particularly on nuclear testing. “[We] should interpret the nature of the victory in such a way as to accustom the nation to the future use of limited force for limited purposes,” he told Kennedy, “while at the same time pointing out that our success in Cuba does not prove that force can solve everything.” After all, a relieved Schlesinger reflected in the privacy of his own diary, it had all been “a near thing.”28
At the end of the meeting, the two men conversed about the judgments of history. A survey of seventy-five historians, published that year by Arthur’s father in the New York Times Magazine, fascinated Kennedy. The poll had appeared under a photograph not of a past president but of the current one, with the question underneath, “How will he be rated by historians?” Kennedy had expressed astonishment at the high rankings for Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in the survey over, say, Polk or Truman. “What is interesting,” Schlesinger reported to his father, “is that his criterion is obviously that of concrete achievement rather than political education.” Talking later to Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, Schlesinger put it another way: the shift from the New Deal to the New Frontier was one from “evangelists who want to do something because it is just and right, to technocrats who want to do something because it is rational and necessary.”
Writing to his mother to thank her for the gift of cigars for his birthday (“I have been smoking them regularly throughout the crisis and could hardly have survived without them”), Schlesinger now offered his own first draft of the judgment of history on the president. “Everyone here says that the President was superb,” he told her, “cool, judicious, clear, and wholly impervious to the pressures, at times quite extreme, to get him to commit himself to one or another rash policy.” Life in Washington, DC, had returned to normal, Arthur reassured her. “Last night among the trick or treaters, there appeared a little girl dressed in a mask with a collection of friends,” he reported. “Behind them a masked mother directed their activities. It turned out to be Jackie and Caroline.”29
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE WATCHMAN WAKETH BUT IN VAIN
The missile crisis boosted the president’s national approval ratings, with one Gallup poll saying he was the most admired man in the world. That in turn bolstered Kennedy’s confidence about reelection in 1964. The midterm elections had delivered the second-best result for a party in a century. The favorite to win the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, was someone Kennedy believed would frighten moderate conservatives into his camp. All told, his political prospects looked better than at any time since before the Bay of Pigs disaster shortly after he took office in 1961.1
Schlesinger had clear ideas about how the president should spend that political capital in 1963. The missile crisis, we saw him tell Kennedy days after the crisis passed, represented “an end and a beginning.” For Schlesinger that meant both a reengaging on the whole question of nuclear testing that had complicated superpower relations since the summer of 1961, and the minting of a new evangelizing language addressing the broader question of peace. Yet Arthur himself remained frustratingly at arm’s length in this process.
Over the course of the next year, with the memory still fresh of how close the two sides had come to a nuclear exchange, the United States and the Soviet Union worked steadily toward a nuclear test agreement. In July 1963 Averell Harriman went to Moscow, where an agreement was reached on the terms of a limited test ban treaty. The US Senate ratified the treaty on September 24 by a majority of 80–19.2
Kennedy described the test ban treaty as “a shaft of light cut into the darkness.” That language reflected for Kennedy in 1963 a rhetorical shift in the way he discussed the Cold War. On June 10, wanting to give the test ban talks a boost, Kennedy gave the commencement address at American University in Washington, DC. There he broke with the Wilsonian tradition of making “the world safe for democracy” by declaring that he wanted peace for all mankind, “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” It was time to reexamine relations with the Soviet Union, he said. The huge losses that the Soviets had endured in defeating Hitler must be acknowledged and hon
ored. Pluralism of political systems need not be a barrier to good relations. And the two countries had to work together to ensure that the world avoided another war—this one nuclear. “For in the final analysis,” Kennedy declared in one of his most eloquent pieces of rhetoric, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet; we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children’s future; and we are all mortal.” Twelve days later, Kennedy embarked on a ten-day European tour, where he was greeted, the presidential historian Herbert Parmet would later write, “as though he was a new prince of peace and freedom.”3
In all these developments, Schlesinger remained at best distant, at worst completely out of the loop. The American University speech showed how successful Sorensen had been in repelling Schlesinger’s advances in the battle of the speechwriters. During the previous year, Kennedy had often set the two men up against each other, telling them to sort out their differences for important speeches such as the Yale commencement address. Or, as in the 1962 State of the Union address, he told Sorensen to include specific paragraphs from Schlesinger’s drafts. By 1963 Sorensen was clearly in command and Schlesinger on the bench. “Feel free to recommend deletions and improvements in grammar and style as well as substance,” Sorensen had written offhandedly to him about the 1963 State of the Union message, adding the curt instruction, “It is imperative, however, that specific changes in wording are suggested, not general comments.” Provocatively, Schlesinger rewrote the entire speech, telling Sorensen, “It seemed to me simplest to run it through the typewriter.” For the American University speech, Sorensen sent copies to Schlesinger, Mac Bundy, and Walt Rostow, who then met to discuss it. “We all thought the speech was fine and suggested only minor changes,” Schlesinger noted in his diary. Then Sorensen joined Kennedy on a trip to Hawaii, where the two men worked alone on the speech aboard the new “Air Force One” presidential plane. When they returned to Washington, DC, on the morning of June 10, an unkempt Sorensen, text in hand, went straight to American University rather than accompanying the president back to the White House. It was yet another example of the lengths to which he would go to keep others away from his handiwork.
For all the personal irritation in his relationship with Sorensen, Schlesinger could not help but admire the results and the way in which the American University speech circumvented the bureaucratic constraints that so often blunted the key messages. “I suppose from that, from the viewpoint of orderly administration, this was a bad way to prepare a major statement on foreign policy,” he mused, “but the State Department could never in a thousand years have produced this speech. The President is fortunately ready to assert control over the policy of his administration, however deeply it may offend the bureaucracy.” Or his other speechwriters, he might have added.4
Sorensen’s highly defensive attitude about being the sole voice for the president could explain Schlesinger’s minimal involvement with the American University address. Other areas of exclusion were more puzzling. Two years earlier, when the test ban issue once again became a point of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kennedy had asked Schlesinger to draft a white paper. Schlesinger had then been closely involved in advising the president throughout the summer, even if he eventually ended up on the losing side about whether or not the United States should resume atmospheric testing. By 1963, however, even though the debate had moved in his direction, Schlesinger played almost no role in the White House discussion of the issue. What makes this exclusion even more surprising is that Averell Harriman, the politician to whom, along with Adlai Stevenson, Schlesinger was closest, became deputy undersecretary of state in April and then led the discussions in Moscow that brought agreement.5
Schlesinger’s exile was similarly evident in European affairs. Again in 1961, pushing a theme he had developed in The Vital Center about the importance of the non-Communist Left, Schlesinger had argued hard that the United States should take advantage of an “opening to the left” in Italy. That intervention loosed an avalanche of opprobrium on Schlesinger’s head. State Department officials dismissed him as an amateur and Secretary of State Dean Rusk could scarcely hide his contempt. But by 1963, just as Kennedy prepared to leave for Europe, the “opening to the left” had come off, with the Socialists about to join a government for the first time since 1947. It was a moment of great personal and political satisfaction for Schlesinger, and an area, moreover, in which he could justifiably claim to have greater expertise than others in the president’s team. Not only that, but Kennedy was also visiting Berlin and London, both places where Schlesinger had connections and expertise. Hence he might reasonably have expected a seat on the presidential plane. Yet while the likes of Sorensen, Bundy, Dave Powers, and Kenny O’Donnell all accompanied the president to Europe, Schlesinger remained behind. He could not quite bring himself to beg for a seat, but he did quietly try to maneuver himself onto the plane. When the draft speeches from the State Department came in for use in Europe, Schlesinger told the president they were pretty much rubbish. “My general impression is of their predominant banality and vapidity,” he wrote. “These speeches could have been given just as easily by President Eisenhower—or by President Nixon. They fail to convey any sense of a fresh American voice or distinctive Kennedy approach.” Perhaps, Schlesinger suggested, picking up on a casual remark the president made in the Oval Office, it might be worth “sending Ted Sorensen and myself over a few days in advance to get the feel of things,” before adding hastily, “I am not bucking for a trip for myself.” In the end it did not happen. “Ted does not consider this necessary,” Schlesinger wrote forlornly.6
Sorensen had cut Schlesinger out of the loop; other personality clashes also took a toll. On European affairs, Schlesinger found himself blocked off by Rusk. The secretary believed “Schlesinger was a fifth wheel in decision making.” He purposely “stonewalled” to keep him away from policymaking and foreign trips. How keenly Schlesinger felt that personal animosity is evident in A Thousand Days, where he delivered the only real insider hatchet job in the book. In six pages on “The Enigma of Rusk,” he headed and gutted the man who was still secretary of state as a character of “imperturbable blandness” who constantly “perplexed and disappointed” Kennedy. “Inscrutability was splendid as a negotiating stance,” Schlesinger hissed, “but inadequate as a principle of life.”7
Schlesinger recognized as well that the Kennedy team ultimately viewed him as a Stevenson man. Some of that distrust went back at least to the 1960 Democratic convention, when Schlesinger, uneasy at the ruthlessness of the Kennedy campaign, appeared to flirt with the idea that Stevenson should get a third tilt at the presidency. He served the White House in part as a liaison with the liberal faction faithful to Stevenson. That function had paid great dividends for the administration during the missile crisis, when Kennedy sent Schlesinger to work with Stevenson on his UN speeches, but in its aftermath, the special assistant again seemed to show where his loyalties lay. A few weeks after the crisis, the Saturday Evening Post proclaimed, “Adlai Wants a Munich. He Wanted to Trade U.S. Bases for Cuban Bases.” The authors, Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, were both friends of the president, who had seen the article in draft and who was the “non-admiring official” referred to in the story. Kennedy, whose undergraduate thesis and a subsequent book condemned appeasement, even seems himself to have penciled in “Munich.” Schlesinger urged the president to refute the story. Afterwards, he sent a memo in which he took the story apart line by line. “The Alsop-Bartlett story on Stevenson seems to be wrong in almost every particular” he charged. At the time, Schlesinger was not among the handful who knew that Kennedy had done a deal to remove US missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of those in Cuba. Kennedy had fed the Stevenson story to Alsop and Bartlett, partly because it enabled him to look strong in comparison to the ambassador. Schlesinger, outraged by the attack on his old boss, called on his new one to come to the ambassador’s aid. “The suggestion in t
he Alsop-Bartlett story that Stevenson favored a Caribbean Munich is grossly unfair,” he told Kennedy, “and shows the number of people who still have their knives out for him.” Clearly he did not realize that Kennedy was one of them. Reluctantly, Kennedy agreed to write to Stevenson emphasizing the importance of the ambassador’s role at the UN during the crisis and that the letter could be leaked to journalists.8
In defending Stevenson, Schlesinger embarrassed the president by calling him out in front of his own Georgetown set. That contributed to his drift to the margins. But so too did the sense, often self-inflicted, that Schlesinger was not un homme sérieux. The president “liked Arthur Schlesinger,” his brother, Robert Kennedy, would say, “but he thought he was a little bit of a nut sometimes.”
By 1963, that nuttiness was beginning to irk. Schlesinger embroiled himself in embarrassing public spats with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and editor of the conservative magazine National Review. Buckley liked nothing better than tweaking Schlesinger as a high priest of the liberal establishment. Recall that during the 1960 election he had sent a donkey to Schlesinger’s house in Cambridge. In a similar vein of devilment, in February 1963, Buckley advertised his new book with a quotation from Schlesinger: “He has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.” Rather than playing along with the joke, or at least rising above it, Schlesinger wrote immediately to demand that the publisher furnish him with “the source of this statement or else discontinue its use.” On and on the correspondence went, with a delighted Buckley never failing to up the stakes. “Would you be so kind as to ask Mr. Schlesinger to okay the translation of his quotation into French,” Buckley asked in April, including the text. Then he put out a press release saying Schlesinger was suing him and trying to censor the book. Furious, Schlesinger wrote a public letter to Publishers Weekly protesting that “both claims are false.” Inevitably Buckley responded, happy to keep the row going. He would stop using the quotation, he wrote, if Schlesinger sent him a letter “requesting me to do him the personal favor of removing it.” Otherwise, “so long as he tries to get me to drop it under the pressures of Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst [attorneys], I’ll go to the electric chair first, and instruct my heirs to put on my tombstone, Wm. F. ‘Envy His Rhetoric’ Buckley Jr.”
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