Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Such a row between two literary figures might have been entertaining; Buckley, after all, regularly sparred with liberal writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. But Schlesinger was no longer simply a literary figure; he was a political one, and such exchanges often seemed beneath the dignity of a special assistant at the White House. When added to embarrassing headlines that he had fallen into the swimming pool with Ethel Kennedy at Hickory Hill, called a journalist an “idiot,” or accepted payment for articles in contravention of the government code of conduct, the impression emerged of a man who was more a liability than an asset. Schlesinger himself conceded the point after the swimming pool incident in 1962, writing to the president with “a heartfelt apology for the trouble I was causing him and a statement that I would resign at any time.” Yet his behavior over the next year did not noticeably change.9

  Irritation with Schlesinger’s working methods inside the White House compounded concern over his outside nuttiness. Kennedy often seemed to tire of Schlesinger’s barrage of ideas and proposals. “His suggestions would reach the President’s desk in a constant stream of memoranda,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “Although many of Schlesinger’s recommendations were put to use, JFK occasionally was impatient with their length and frequency, and felt that many of the memos should have gone to staff specialists.”10

  At times Schlesinger’s demands on the president’s time went beyond frivolous. In the spring of 1963, as Kennedy grappled with the implications of the Birmingham civil rights campaign, one of the most influential struggles of the civil rights movement, Schlesinger chose to ask him about the state of the White House tennis court. “The President listened skeptically,” Schlesinger recorded, but told him he saw “no particular need to resurface the court.” Yet Schlesinger persisted until Kennedy said somewhat testily that he would “take a look himself.” The next day he ended the debate. “I went down to take a look at the court,” he told his special assistant, “and it looks fine to me.” Schlesinger admitted defeat (“at least until the fall” he added in his diary). He seems not to have recognized that he might have irritated the president or wasted both men’s time in the face of what Schlesinger called “a Negro revolution.” “It has been a long time since I felt things to be so vividly in motion in our country,” he added with no reference to tennis.11

  These flaps in and out of the White House came together during the Birmingham campaign. Kennedy had been cautious on introducing civil rights legislation, but the aftermath of police attacks on black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, finally convinced him to ask Congress for a civil rights law. On June 11, 1963, George Wallace, the controversial governor of Alabama, in the face of the federalized Alabama National Guard, allowed two black students to register at the University of Alabama, thereby ending segregation of admissions in the school. Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, bore the brunt of this confrontation. He urged his brother to use the occasion to inform the nation on television that he was calling on Congress to act on civil rights. Given that Wallace left the campus at 5:40 p.m. Washington time, the White House had just over two hours to meet the 8 p.m. TV deadline for the address. Both Kennedys handed their notes to Sorensen. There was also a draft speech on civil rights from Richard Yates, Bobby’s new speechwriter and the acclaimed author of Revolutionary Road (although characteristically Sorensen later claimed never to have read the Yates draft). Within the hour, Sorensen had his own first draft, which he took to the waiting president and his brother. RFK, thinking of 1964, was appalled by its confrontational tone, which included phrases like “the cesspool of discrimination” and “a social revolution is at hand,” and he pronounced it “unsatisfactory.” The president agreed the draft was inadequate. Waving away Sorensen’s protests, he told Evelyn Lincoln to get hold of Arthur Schlesinger right away.12

  Four hundred miles away in Boston, Arthur was drinking whisky with his Harvard contemporaries, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis and journalist Teddy White. The three members of the class of ’38 were marking their twenty-fifth reunion. But Arthur and his friends were doing so privately, taking a rain check as the rest of the class gathered at Symphony Hall to hear Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The three men had agreed to enjoy some gossip and a few drinks before watching the president speak on TV at eight o’clock.

  As they drank, back in Symphony Hall an announcement came over the public address system paging Schlesinger. After a few minutes, the message came again, this time more urgent. “Attention Mr. Schlesinger! Attention Mr. Schlesinger! Urgent message from the White House. Call the President!” No doubt eyes rolled among those gathered in the hall. As one of the youngest members of the class, there had always been something immature about Little Arthur. Had he paid someone on the hall staff to make such a self-aggrandizing announcement? Over at Winthrop House, the undergraduate hall where Schlesinger was staying for the reunion, other urgent messages from Mrs. Lincoln also piled up, but Arthur could not be found.

  Back at the White House, with the minutes ticking down before JFK spoke to the nation, the atmosphere was becoming increasingly agitated. “It was,” Sorensen recalled, “the only time in my three years at the White House that JFK came to my office to ask about a speech.” Sorensen’s deputy, Lee White, remembers, “The President was extremely nervous. Normally he’s not nervous, but he was awfully damn nervous about this one. . . . He wasn’t sure exactly what was going to come out of the typewriter . . . he was scrounging around for more information and he remembered he’d read something in the New York Times two days before, could we find that? People were flying around trying to get it.” When National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy arrived at Joe Alsop’s house for dinner shortly before 8 o’clock, he told the assembled group, “There isn’t going to be a speech. I just left the White House 30 minutes ago and Sorensen didn’t have a draft yet.” (“That was true,” Sorensen admits.) And still Arthur Schlesinger was M.I.A. Finally, at 7:55 p.m., Schlesinger got a message and immediately called the White House. It was too late: Kennedy was on air in five minutes.13

  In the end Sorensen admitted defeat and simply gave the president what he had. “When the text did arrive, Kennedy had no more than two minutes to look it over,” writes Andrew Cohen in Two Days in June. “It was a jumble of fragments and different pieces of paper; he made changes in pen, striking words, adding others. . . . In some accounts of this opéra bouffe pages continued to arrive even after he began speaking.” Certainly Kennedy extemporized the last eight paragraphs. This last section, “to give a chance for every child,” Lee White later judged, “was probably the most moving part of the whole thing.”14

  Kennedy’s call for social justice was controversial, but everyone seemed to recognize the address itself as a tour de force. “It was one of the most eloquent, profound and unequiv[ocal] pleas for justice and freedom of all men ever made by any President,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to Kennedy immediately afterwards. Sorensen, judging his own efforts, was more modest. “It turned out fine,” he recalled. In some ways Sorensen had been hoisted by his own petard. He never lost an opportunity to make clear that others had made little or no contribution to important speeches. Even Kennedy’s extemporized conclusion to the civil rights speech was parsed (“there is a discernable point where the rhythm and style change slightly,” Sorensen wrote). Had he developed a team around him, perhaps he would not, in his own words, have left JFK with four minutes to go before 8 p.m. “scribbling while waiting for me, fearing I might produce nothing and he would have no text at all.”15

  Schlesinger regarded Kennedy’s TV address as “the best speech in his administration on civil rights.” But he felt intensely the personal embarrassment at not having been available to help amid the chaos. Not only had he missed an opportunity to upstage Sorensen, he was perhaps the only person in the White House who would have had both the skill set and the personal authority to bang out sections of the speech and then put them directly into the hands of the president. He was a fas
ter, more fluent and prolix writer than Sorensen, and his first drafts were usually better.

  As the night of June 11 went on, the full extent of White House efforts to contact him became apparent. “At first, I thought it was a joke,” he said on hearing about Symphony Hall, “but it became evident that something had happened.” When he returned to Winthrop House, he received Mrs. Lincoln’s messages urging him to call the president. “I suppose that, at the peak of uncertainty, he was collecting opinions as to what he should do,” he wrote, adding a somewhat forlorn, “Anyway, it came out right.”

  In his more private moments, however, Schlesinger understood that the events confirmed the unfavorable impression developing about him. Of course, he had informed the president in a note that he was “scheduled to be in Cambridge until Thursday night [June 13] at my 25th reunion [but] I can break away at a moment’s notice, however, if I can be helpful here.” Yet when the moment came, he had neither broken away nor been helpful. That made him look both hapless and lightweight. It was something about which he had been anxious throughout his time at the White House. “I feel that I lack some sort of specific gravity of the kind that is required for effectiveness in government,” he confessed. “I guess I convey an ineradicable impression of dilettantism—partly because I am spread so thin and partly because at bottom I must prefer it that way.” The events of June 11 did nothing to dispel that impression.16

  Throughout that summer, Schlesinger remained on the fringes. Kennedy was in Europe throughout much of June and July, leaving Arthur in Washington, DC, while Sorensen supplied another hit with the famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech (even if the German phrase implied that the president was a doughnut). Soon afterwards, Averell Harriman made the surprisingly fast breakthrough in Moscow that led to a limited test ban treaty with the Soviets.

  While others bestrode the world stage, Schlesinger was left in the White House managing a project for the First Lady, who wanted to provide the building with a proper library. “As you know, Mrs. Kennedy is deeply interested in realizing the full potentialities of the White House as an expression of American culture and the American experience,” he had explained to Fred Adams, the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. “Her redecoration program has included the Library on the ground floor, and it is her hope that this Library may contain the books which will best represent the history and culture of the United States.” Now having begun the process of housing the books, Schlesinger was trying to maneuver Jackie into putting the library to use. “I had supposed that members of the White House staff, who need to consult a book in a hurry, might feel free to go to the shelves of the White House Library,” he gently pleaded with her. “It is true that the Library of Congress is available; but it takes half a day to get books from the other side of town; and, as you know, there are occasions when something has to be written in half an hour.” The library matter was a far cry from what Schlesinger anticipated when he left his tenured professorship at Harvard to join the president’s staff.17

  This last thought seemed to nag at Schlesinger. The previous year he had cheerfully given up tenure at Harvard to remain as special assistant to the president. Now when the early modern historian W. K. Jordan wrote somewhat bashfully saying that the Widener Library had offered him Schlesinger’s old room, Arthur reacted with barely concealed alarm. “Have you any suggestions as to how I should answer this question,” he asked his father plaintively. Clearly there was “no substantial ground for continuing to reserve Widener.” And yet “on the other hand, it is an agreeable office, and I should be sorry to relinquish it.” Glumly he concluded, “I imagine that there is no alternative.” But more than at any point during his time in Washington, DC, the letter seemed to show not just that Schlesinger had doubts about his role in the White House, but that also, really for the first time, he was thinking about an eventual return to his old life in Cambridge.18

  If Schlesinger felt dejected that summer, Phil Graham’s suicide compounded his dismay. The publisher of the Washington Post was “in some ways the most brilliant member of my generation” (which, it should be remembered, included the president). Graham had been ill for some time, spending most of that year in Chestnut Lodge, a private sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland. A conversation he had with the president during a late-night call illustrated a deteriorating state of mind that bewildered his friends. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to,” Graham asked angrily at one point. “I know,” Kennedy replied gently, “I’m not talking to the Phil Graham I have so much admiration for.” For all the warning signs, his death was a profound shock. “Suicide always remained a possibility,” Arthur wrote disbelievingly, “but I had subconsciously supposed that his innate vitality would win out over the demons within.” Graham was “my closest friend in Washington.”19

  Adding to the air of melancholy around the White House was the sad death of the president’s infant son, Patrick, a few days later. Arthur expressed his condolences to the Kennedys and received a handwritten reply from Jackie saying, “some letters really do help.” But Patrick’s death also led to an excruciating conversation in the Oval Office with JFK, who, “almost shyly,” told him that Adlai Stevenson had not bothered to write to Jackie. “Everyone else who ought to write has written—she got a very nice letter from you—except Adlai,” he said. “I can’t believe that he didn’t write; but, if he hasn’t, I wish you would tell him to send her a letter.” It was just one more way in which Schlesinger’s association with Stevenson tarred in the Kennedys’ eyes.20

  Sometimes Arthur’s position as “White House liaison with United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson” seemed to be all that was left for him. At least that summer he managed to make the most of it by shooting for the moon. The rest of August and September he acted as the go-between with Stevenson as the president prepared to address the United Nations General Assembly. That did free him to make one eye-catching policy contribution. “The moon proposal is a vagrant thought of my own,” Schlesinger told Stevenson on September 16, “which has been discussed with no one.” When Kennedy gave his speech four days later, it included the proposal that the United States and the Soviet Union should cooperate on a joint expedition to the Moon—an idea that the president had gratefully seized upon as helping him to find a way out of—or at least share—the expensive pledge he had made in 1961 to land a man there by the end of the decade. The idea had occurred to Schlesinger more as a response to a dull speech draft from the State Department about the “Alliance of Man” than from any particular interest in space exploration. The space race, like the arms race, had been a point of conflict between the two superpowers; the suggestion of cooperation there provided a neat symbol for the better relationship that was emerging after the dangers of the missile crisis.

  Schlesinger tested the idea on Bundy and Sorensen, who both told him to show the president. “The bracketed proposal on the moon project has been cleared with no one,” he told the president, “I put it in to see how it sounded.” Once Kennedy said he liked it, Schlesinger then made a few hasty phone calls to the head of the space agency, and to State, Defense, and the Arms Control agency. “Established procedures nearly always prevent anything new from happening,” John Bartlow Martin, his old colleague and fellow Stevenson speechwriter, noted. “In the main only by such end-runs as Schlesinger’s can new things be accomplished.” It was Arthur at his best in his other role as the White House “gadfly.”21

  Throughout the rest of that fall important discussions continued inside the White House about the future of American involvement in Vietnam. The question arose of what the United States should do in the aftermath of the military coup against President Diem in November. Gadflies had no say in such weighty matters. Instead Schlesinger was left to drift back “against my inclination” to “doing more and more in the way of speechwriting.” He did at least do his best to make the most of the situation. He drafted a fine address for the president to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Nationa
l Academy of Sciences, setting out the challenge of how, “as we begin to master the destructive potentialities of modern science, we move toward a new era in which science can fulfill its creative promise.” And a few days later Kennedy handed him Sorensen’s draft for a speech at the groundbreaking for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College on October 27. Since the president dismissed it as “thin and stale,” Schlesinger completely rewrote it to reflect Frost’s legacy, which included his reading at Kennedy’s inauguration and his ideas about power and the arts.

  The night before the Amherst speech, Kennedy called Schlesinger to ask him to come along on the trip. “The President’s mood was gay,” Schlesinger recalled. On Air Force One the two men worked on the draft toning down the “fancier passages,” with Kennedy adding his own personal reflections on the responsibilities of those born into wealth. “The result, I think,” Schlesinger reflected proudly, “was most successful. Certainly no previous President has ever talked this way about the arts.”

  “At bottom,” Kennedy/Schlesinger had said in a beautiful passage, “he [Frost] held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it’s hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”22