20. On Arthur Krock’s efforts to transform Jack Kennedy’s Harvard thesis into the book Why England Slept, see Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, pp. 130–31.
21. Hamilton, Reckless Youth, pp. 168–69.
22. See William W. Walton, quoted in American Journey, pp. 190–91.
23. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 81.
24. On Yeats’s dreaminess, see Ellmann, Yeats, pp. 83–84.
25. Forster, “Notes on English Character,” in Abinger Harvest, p. 5.
26. Newfield, A Memoir, p. 29.
CHAPTER 4
1. U.S. Constitution, Article I, Sections 9 and 10.
2. Syme, The Roman Revolution, p. 7.
3. “Just our type”: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 50.
4. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 150–51; vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 179.
5. De Toledano, R.F.K., p. 16.
6. Life magazine, special issue, “The Kennedys: The Third Generation,” p. 40 (1997).
7. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 83; see also Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, pp. 15, 24, 29, 73–74, 83, 150.
8. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 595.
9. Cecil, Melbourne, pp. 15, 17.
10. American Journey, p. 165.
11. Ibid., p. 163.
12. Visitors at Hickory Hill: ibid., pp. 162–63; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 607.
13. American Journey, p. 163.
14. Ibid., pp. 160–65.
15. Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman, On His Own, p. 16.
16. Birmingham, The Right Places, pp. 118, 125; David and David, Making of a Folk Hero, p. 263.
17. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 19.
18. Crowley, Nixon off the Record, p. 32.
19. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 153.
20. Ibid.
21. Geoffrey C. Ward, “A Charmed Life—Almost” (review of Reich, Worlds to Conquer), in The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1996, p. 10.
22. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 130–31.
23. David and David, Making of a Folk Hero, p. 264.
24. “bedint”: Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, pp. 210, 224.
25. Bobby wanted good relations with Hoover: see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 254.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 257.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Bobby put his feet up on his desk: see Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 297.
32. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 364.
33. La Donna Harris, quoted in American Journey, p. 160.
34. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 312; cf. Vidal, United States, pp. 823–24.
CHAPTER 5
1. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 105.
2. Vidal, United States, p. 1269.
3. Lincoln, speech at Cincinnati, Ohio, September 17, 1859, in Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vol. II, p. 84.
4. Though it was tempting, Hofstadter said, to view the New Deal as a continuation of that which had gone before, he himself rejected this approach. See Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 302–4.
5. In his early study of FDR, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Patrician as Opportunist,” Hofstadter spoke of the New Deal almost as a failure, an experiment that didn’t work, a chapter in the nation’s life that FDR himself, ever the “realist,” was eager to close. See Hofstadter, APT, pp. 445–46. By the time he wrote The Age of Reform, Hofstadter had revised his view of the New Deal; though he still maintained that it was the result of “a chaos of experimentation” rather than conscious design, he was now prepared to assert that the New Deal radically altered the conditions of American life. See Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 307–8.
6. The National Industrial Recovery Act was intended, among other things, to “provide for the general welfare by promoting the organization of industry for the purpose of cooperative action among trade groups” and to “induce and maintain united action of labor and management under adequate governmental sanctions and supervision.” Statutes of the United States, vol. 48, p. 195. Frederick H. Wood, counsel to the defendant in the Schechter case, called the act a “bold and unparalleled piece of legislation of the most sweeping and drastic character,” which, if upheld, would mean that “dictatorship is surely here.” See A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. et al. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 501 (1935). Title I of the Act, as applied in the Schechter case, was held by the Supreme Court to be an unconstitutional delegation of power to the President and to exceed “the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.” Schechter Poultry, 490 U.S. at 529 et seq. and 542 et seq.
7. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 308.
8. Ibid., pp. 308–9. FDR and Keynes: Hofstadter APT, p. 444; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 309.
9. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 464.
10. See Alsop’s contrast of the reaction of Washington insiders to Roosevelt’s death with the reaction of insiders to Kennedy’s, ibid.
11. Quoted in Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 164.
12. Vidal, United States, p. 821.
13. Bradlee, Conversations, pp. 41, 233; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 6, 332–33.
14. Berlin, Personal Impressions, pp. 12–13.
15. Cf. Vidal, United States, p. 780.
16. Cf. Hofstadter, APT, p. 415.
17. Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 30.
18. May even have left scars: ibid., p. 35.
19. Morgan, FDR, p. 12.
20. Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 36.
21. “Well-born, polite, not gifted”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, p. 30.
22. Gunther, Learned Hand, p. 456.
23. Ibid.
24. Berlin, Personal Impressions, p. 25.
25. Vidal, United States, p. 746.
26. Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 740.
27. Kessler, The Sins of the Father, p. 147.
28. Steel, Walter Lippmann, p. 316.
29. Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 740.
30. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 24.
31. Sophomoric jokes: Morgan, F.D.R., p. 507.
32. An example of flippant complacency: “The facts are,” FDR said in 1920, “that I wrote Haiti’s constitution myself, and, if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good constitution.” Hofstadter, APT, p. 419.
33. Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 136.
34. Vidal, United States, p. 747.
35. Morgan, FDR, p. 453.
36. Vidal, United States, p. 746.
37. Address, Fordham University, New York, June 10, 1967, quoted in Hall, Apostle of Change, p. 12.
38. The passage quoted is from chapter 6 of The Prince.
39. See Morgan, FDR, p. 542.
40. Bradlee, Conversations, pp. 107–8.
41. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 371.
42. See Spencer Abraham, “A Pro-Growth Tax Plan,” The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1996, p. A-18.
43. There is a great deal of scholarly debate as to whether the West really was the “cradle of individualism” that historians like Frederick Jackson Turner made it out to be. See Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 87–94. Individualism may have represented the aspiration rather than the reality.
44. See Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 193.
45. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 81.
CHAPTER 6
1. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pp. 53–54.
2. Ibid., pp. 47–57.
3. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 18.
4. Ibid.
5. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 78.
6. “Our Harvard … Senator”: ibid., p. 15; “perfe
ct manners”: ibid., p. 600 (quoting Pierre Salinger); “Brahmin taste”: ibid., p. 100; “a young Lord Salisbury”: Schlesinger, ibid, p. 78.
7. On JFK’s love of the poetry of Byron, see Collier and Horowitz, An American Drama, pp. 213–14.
8. De Toledano, R.F.K., p. 18.
9. “Happy, jolly things”: ibid.
10. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 78.
11. Bradlee, Conversations, p. 230.
12. Jack Kennedy’s love of the novels of Scott: Hamilton, Reckless Youth, p. 87. His love of Churchill’s prose: Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 84. His love of Burke’s prose: Manchester, Death of a President, p. 372. His love of English aristocratic gossip: Bradlee, Conversations, p. 230.
13. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 523.
14. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 96.
15. Ibid., p. 68.
16. Ibid., pp. 66, 68.
17. Ibid.
18. “Brooks Brothers beatnik”: Bradlee, Conversations, p. 227; “confuse him with Dean Acheson”: de Toledano, R.F.K., p. 12.
19. De Toledano, R.F.K., p. 33.
20. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 124.
21. Ibid., p. 96.
22. Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 137.
23. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 24.
24. Ibid., p. 27.
25. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 84–85.
26. Ibid., p. 70.
27. Ibid., pp. 69, 418.
28. Ibid., p. 59.
29. Jack Kennedy on America’s role as “chief defender of Western civilization”: Let the Word Go Forth, p. 38. JFK’s commitment to the welfare state is discussed in chapter 8.
30. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 14.
31. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, pp. 10, 11, 20, 35, 505, 515, 518, 521.
32. Ibid., p. 43.
33. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 82–83, 109.
34. Ibid., p. 109.
35. Lasky, The Myth and the Man, p. 306.
36. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 203–4.
37. See Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 729.
38. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 35.
39. Yoder, Joe Alsop’s Cold War, p. 91.
40. Ibid., pp. 9, 30.
41. Alsop said that Jack Kennedy and Phil Graham were his two “closest younger friends”: Alsop, I’ve Seen the Best of It, p. 375.
42. The Sunday-night supper club: Thomas, The Very Best Men, pp. 27, 99, 103–105.
43. The Sunday-night supper club: ibid.
44. Harriman and Nixon: ibid., p. 27.
45. Alsop’s parties: ibid., pp. 104–5; Yoder, Joe Alsop’s Cold War, pp. 27–28.
46. Alsop and the KGB: Yoder, Joe Alsop’s Cold War, pp. 153–58; Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 106.
47. Stimson’s attitude toward the New Deal is not easily categorized. Certainly he was committed to the strain of progressive thought out of which the New Deal and the welfare state arose. He was brought into public life by Theodore Roosevelt, he praised Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” and he supported the paternalist state that the “New Nationalism” envisioned. See Bundy and Stimson, On Active Service, p. 22: “Stimson wrote congratulating his friend and leader on the famous Osawatomie speech, the most terrifying of the lot” of “New Nationalism” speeches that TR delivered in 1910. (The Osawatomie speech was the embodiment of the “intensifying paternalistic nationalism” that TR had come to embrace. Hofstadter, APT, p. 301. In his blanket denunciation of industrial combinations, Roosevelt made no exception even for those combinations that create efficiency and thereby benefit consumers; he argued that “the way out” lay not in using the antitrust laws to prevent undesirable combinations, but rather in government “completely controlling” all industrial combinations “in the interest of the public welfare.” In a subsequent statement Roosevelt elaborated his position and declared that Americans ought to “abandon definitely the laissez-faire theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental control … the only way to meet a billion-dollar corporation is by invoking the protection of a hundred-billion dollar government,” one that was no doubt to be staffed by Enlightened experts possessed of a wisdom vastly superior to that of the marketplace.) In their book Stimson and McGeorge Bundy made it clear that Stimson sympathized not with the populist solutions of Progressive politics (the direct election of Senators, the direct primary contest), but with the paternalist solutions. “The true remedy for American misgovernment,” Stimson believed, “would lie, then, in exactly the opposite direction from that indicated by the advocates of direct democracy. The elected officials must have more power, not less.” Bundy and Stimson, On Active Service, p. 58. Stimson believed that Congress should establish “an administrative bureau for the permanent, continuous, and watchful oversight of corporate business engaged in interstate commerce.” Bundy and Stimson, On Active Service, p. 47. In his perceptive biography of Stimson, Elting Morison observed that Stimson and his peers, in their quest for a solution to the nation’s problems, “turned instinctively to the state.… [T]hey discussed the possibility of enlarging the sphere of government ownership, considered the wisdom of fixing prices by government action and even … examined tentatively the methods of what they called ‘collectivization.’ Before the War, none of these procedures was introduced in any systematic way though the power of the central government to regulate the economy was steadily increased.” Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, pp. 122, 125.
Although he remained a Republican, Stimson had little sympathy for Ogden Mills’s harshly antagonistic attitude toward FDR. See Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, p. 458. And if Stimson was critical of the heavy-handed approach to regulation embodied in legislation like the Securities Act of 1933, in time he reconciled himself to most of the New Deal policies, reconciled himself even to the TVA, the state-sponsored monopoly that six decades after its creation continues to thwart and bully competitors who seek to bring cheaper power to the South. See John J. Fialka, “New Deal Undone: Using Savvy Tactics, Bristol, Va., Unplugs from a Federal Utility: Town Cuts Its Electric Bill By Standing Up to TVA as Others Watch in Envy,” The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1997, p. A1. Although Stimson initially opposed the TVA, by 1947 he was “prepared to admit—perhaps even to claim—that which he had denied in 1935, that the principle of TVA, as an adventure in the effective use of national resources, was a direct outgrowth of the position he and other conservationists had taken back in 1912.” Bundy and Stimson, On Active Service, pp. 43–44.
Stimson’s contribution to the national security state and the American empire is less ambiguous than his relation to the New Deal. Although he himself retired from public life prior to the advent of the Cold War, the former governor general of the Philippines groomed many of the leading statesmen of the generation that built and administered the postwar American empire. He was their model, and many of them said that, throughout their public careers, they tried to approach problems the way Colonel Stimson would have approached them. McCloy, Lovett, Forrestal, and McGeorge Bundy were all directly influenced by Stimson’s ideas; countless other statesmen were indirectly influenced by them.
48. Bissell preferred Kennedy: Thomas, The Very Best Men, pp. 238–40. On the “Groton clique” at the CIA, see Thomas, The Very Best Men, passim, but especially pp. 90–91, 108.
CHAPTER 7
1. Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 431. The martinis were passed around like water: Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 103.
2. See Stein, Edie.
3. Baker, The Stevensons, pp. 154, 156–57.
4. Ibid., pp. 253–54, 261, 264, 271–75.
5. Ibid., p. 6.
6. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 133.
7. Thomas, The Very Best Men, p. 287.
8. Schaffer, Chester Bowles, pp. 7, 9
–11, 15–17.
9. Bowles incurs Taft’s wrath: ibid., p. 17. Bowles refuses to campaign in Wisconsin: ibid., pp. 171–72; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 17.
10. Ibid.
11. White, The Making of the President 1960, p. 140.
12. Ibid., pp. 140–41. See also: Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, p. 78; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 15–16.
13. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 8.
14. On the “power elite,” see Mills, The Power Elite. On the “real” versus “paper” power structure, see Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 195.
15. See The Oxford English Dictionary.
16. Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 29.
17. Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 116.
18. On Acheson’s relationship to Brandeis and Frankfurter, see ibid., pp. 125–26, 464–65.
19. Ibid., The Wise Men, p. 78.
20. See McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 169: “At home, the Cold War demanded peacetime conscription, high taxes, federal intervention in science, education, business, and labor (Truman broke strikes in the name of national security), not to mention domestic surveillance and loyalty oaths.”
21. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 43.
22. On Truman’s loyalty tests, see Wills, Lead Time, p. 53. On the dismissal of Service, see Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 114.
23. See Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 57.
24. Damore, Cape Cod Years, p. 137.
25. Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 704, 729.
26. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 9; Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, pp. 594–96.
27. See Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 237.
28. On Bobby’s civil rights work, see ibid., chapters 14–18.
29. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 99. Cf. Judge Posner’s assessment: “We tend to forget that the early 1960s was a period in which the political establishment was optimistic about the ability of elites, whether secretive foreign policy and military officials or secretive judges, to shape events.” Richard A. Posner, “In Memoriam: William J. Brennan, Jr.,” Harvard Law Review, November 1997, vol. III, p. 13.
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