by Ted Sorensen
For the most part, the collaboration was smooth and useful. Kennedy men emulated their leader in showing respect for their predecessors and gratitude for their assistance. The whole process was further facilitated by the Eisenhower administration’s generous agreement to put two incoming personnel on the payroll of each department as of January 3, 1961, with ten in both State and Defense.
Despite this move, one of the unsolved problems of that transition period, on which Kennedy would later successfully urge Congressional action for the sake of future Presidents-elect, was its cost. His personal fortune, homes, plane, telephone and Senate office payroll could absorb much of it. Many new appointees and advisers took care of their own expenses, although not without considerable hardship on their part. Many were granted office space in their prospective departments. But more funds had to be found for the many people required to handle mail, screen appointments, meet the press and assist the President-elect, for their wages, hotel rooms, office space, supplies, telephones and travel. It was unfair to saddle either the Kennedy family or the National Committee with the total bill, which was estimated in excess of $350,000 from election to inauguration.
Except for brief visits to Nixon, Boston and the LBJ ranch in Texas, Kennedy divided his time between Palm Beach, Washington and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. His air travels totaled an insignificant (compared to the campaign) fifteen thousand miles. For the first two weeks, and from time to time thereafter, he basked in the sun at Palm Beach—where he quickly gained fifteen pounds—but felt it was too fancy and faraway for serious announcements. He enjoyed his own home in Washington, but found himself more subject there to interruptions and requests than in New York. Moreover, his Georgetown house was not large, and the ever-present crowd of newsmen, policemen, Secret Service agents and onlookers was forced to freeze outside while the Senator met inside with aides and possible appointees.
One prolonged stay in Washington commenced earlier than planned. He had flown from Palm Beach to Washington to share Thanksgiving dinner with his wife, whose pregnancy kept her at home. When he left that evening to return to Florida, all was well. But upon landing in Palm Beach, he was told that John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been suddenly and prematurely born, and he immediately flew back to Washington.
FAREWELL TO MASSACHUSETTS
The trip to Boston served three purposes: (1) to attend a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers, whose obligations of membership he took very seriously (when nearly mobbed by cheering students in the Harvard Yard, he responded, “I’m here to go over your grades with President Pusey, and I’ll protect your interests”); (2) to confer with prospective appointees from the Boston and New England area, in a brief session at the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. home; and (3) to bid farewell to Massachusetts in an address to the state legislature on historic Beacon Hill.
The last was approached with some concern. Kennedy the historian was not unmindful of Lincoln’s farewell to the people of Springfield. Kennedy the politician was not unmindful of the debt he owed the state of his birth for making possible his public career. And Kennedy the President-elect was not unmindful of his inability to be as proud of all the politicians in Massachusetts as Massachusetts was of him. Few state governments in the United States have a record free from corruption, but in January, 1961, few had a record that could surpass the repeated disclosures of official wrongdoing that had rocked his home state. The President-elect felt he could neither avoid that issue nor deliver a self-righteous lecture about it.
There had been little time to prepare the speech, and I had reluctantly dipped into our file of phrases collected for the Inaugural Address in order to meet his specifications. It was not a lengthy speech—less than three dozen sentences. But it was one of his best, and it proved to be a moving occasion. It was his first formal address since the election, and to all those watching on television he looked and sounded like a President as he spoke of government as “a city upon a hill.”
For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us, recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities…our success…will be measured by the answers to four questions:
First, were we truly men of courage…?
Second, were we truly men of judgment…?
Third, were we truly men of integrity…?
Finally, were we truly men of dedication…?
These are the qualities which, with God’s help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government’s conduct.
FORMULATION OF A PROGRAM
By the time he flew to Boston, the pace of the President-elect very nearly matched the furious rate of the fall campaign, though it was far less physically punishing. Two months earlier he had concluded his brief statement of victory at the Hyannis Port Armory by saying, “Now my wife and I prepare for a new administration—and a new baby.” In the weeks that followed, he had welcomed the new baby and largely formed the new administration. He had slept long hours, fished, golfed regularly, visited the LBJ ranch, attended the theater in New York and enjoyed the company of his family. Shunning a host of applicants, he had recommended his old roommate, the former Mayor of Gloucester, Benjamin Smith, to fill his Senate seat. He had sold all his corporate stocks and bonds and converted them into Government Bonds. He had read both pertinent and pleasurable books by the score, reviewed dozens of reports and conferred repeatedly with his expanding number of associates. Building wider public acceptance, he had seen not only Eisenhower and Nixon but Herbert Hoover, Billy Graham, labor leaders, farm leaders, Negro leaders and many more. He had held nineteen press conferences of one kind or another. He had conferred with Lyndon Johnson and with the leading Democrats in both houses of Congress. He had received regular intelligence briefings, and conferred with the British Ambassador and German Vice Chancellor, and he would later confer before inauguration with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His “office” was the living room or library of whichever home he inhabited at the time—Palm Beach, Georgetown or the Carlyle Hotel penthouse—and his “office” continually throbbed with activity. While the Senator interviewed one prospective appointee, another waited in the bedroom, sometimes along with a Kennedy aide waiting to brief the President-elect and a delegation invited to see him. Press and Secret Service clustered outside, telephones rang constantly inside.
My notes on the instructions which he gave me one afternoon (largely because I happened to be there on other business) indicate the range of his activities:
Get Wiesner on the phone…. Ask Lovett if Fisk would take it and let us know before this afternoon’s meeting…. Find an office in Agriculture or somewhere for Ken Galbraith…. Ask Roosa when the Sproul group should report to the White House…. Ask Rusk about McCone staying on compared to McKinney…. Check with the Speaker on Hays…. F.D.R., Jr. for the Philippines?…Get Mills’s voting record…. Consult Marcy…. Which spot at Treasury for Surrey?…Magnuson wants educational TV and oceanography mentioned in Inaugural or State of the Union…. Ask Morse about minimum wage report.
By chance this last call to Senator Morse, then with the UN delegation in New York, was returned when I was again in conference with the President-elect and he answered the phone: “Yes…He’s here, operator, but I’ll take it…. This is Senator Kennedy and I’m answering Mr. Sorensen’s calls for him today.”
But far from this often frenzied atmosphere the formulation of a new Presidential program was quietly under way. It was a remarkable job. A Democratic President had not succeeded a Republican since 1933, and that occasion offered little by way of precedent. Another President might have awaited his inauguration and then appointed study groups, after the pattern in 1953, to give him time and ideas. But Kennedy had a different conception of his duty. When asked, prior to the convention, what his first effort would be as President, he had replied: “… to determine what the unfinished business was, what our ag
enda was, and set it before the American people in the early months of 1961.” To do that required unusual efforts in the late months of 1960.
The previous summer, following his nomination, the Senator had commissioned with appropriate publicity a series of advisory committee reports to be delivered in the transition period: a report on Defense Department reorganization under the chairmanship of Stuart Symington, a report on foreign policy problems under Adlai Stevenson, a “non-partisan, bipartisan” report on national security measures under Paul Nitze, and a report on natural resource needs under Congressman Frank Smith. In addition, Averell Harriman was to tour Africa, and Senator Joe Clark and Congressman Emanuel Celler were to prepare new civil rights recommendations. The political and public relations value of announcing each of these studies at the start of the campaign was obvious.
But after noon on November 9, it was no longer a matter of politics and public relations. Many more reports were needed as foundations for new programs and policies. Public reports were useful, also, as trial balloons to test the political atmosphere, and as public evidence of continuing Kennedy momentum.
Several of the topics generally touched upon in the Stevenson report—including foreign economic policy, food surpluses, Africa, USIA, overseas personnel and disarmament—were assigned to a series of new task forces directed by Stevenson associates George Ball and John Sharon. James Landis was asked to report on regulatory agencies and Richard Neustadt on government reorganization. My first two assignments as Special Counsel to the President-elect were (1) to recruit a task force on ways to combat the recession and (2) to work out with him other studies needed. The latter list rapidly expanded to include depressed areas and West Virginia, housing and cities, health and Social Security, education, taxation, minimum wages, outer space, Latin America, India, cultural exchanges, USIA and the Peace Corps.
The obvious overlapping in these lists caused confusion at times but represented a deliberate Kennedy pattern. Rejecting one suggestion for coordination, he said, “I simply cannot afford to have just one set of advisers.” One major subject omitted was agriculture, and an effort to establish a task force on this subject failed. We found many men with open minds on agriculture, and we found many experts, but we could find no open-minded experts.
Except for the depressed areas-West Virginia committee—which kept an old Kennedy commitment by immediately organizing for hearings in West Virginia under Senator Paul Douglas—the formation of these task forces was not announced. The close to one hundred men serving on them were drawn largely from the professions, foundations and university faculties, including two college presidents, in an unusually swift mobilization of the nation’s intellectual talent. The names of those of the thirteen for which I was responsible were drawn from the personal files, friendships and memories of various members of the Kennedy team and from recommendations by the chairman of each group.1
Partly because it was a time of intellectual hope and cooperation with the new administration, and partly because it was a time when talent was being recognized in prestigious appointments, no one, to my recollection, refused a request to serve on a task force. In some cases their acceptance did sound a little less eager than their initial response to the operator’s statement, that “Mr. Sorensen is calling from Palm Beach.”
The members of these task forces received no compensation and usually no expense money. In many cases only the chairman received public credit and a personal visit with the President-elect. Many of these specialists were sooner or later offered positions in the administration—men such as Jerome Wiesner, Walter Heller, Wilbur Cohen, Mortimer Caplin, Henry Fowler, James Tobin, Stanley Surrey, Adolf Berle, Joe McMurray, Tom Finletter, Robert Schaetzel, Donald Hornig, Frank Keppel, Lincoln Gordon, Jerry Spingarn, Champion Ward, Arturo Morales Carrion and many others, including those previously mentioned in our list of “academic advisers.” But some were not asked and some were unable to accept. Moreover, fiscal limitations, legislative opposition or other practical inhibitions often reduced the implementation of their work so sharply as to cause them disappointment if not dismay.
The President-elect’s private judgment on the task force reports, as they were delivered in early January, ranged from “helpful” to “terrific.”2Some, such as the Symington report calling for a wholesale reorganization of the military services along functional lines, were too controversial to be more than a stimulant to future planning. Others, such as the nine-billion-dollar program urged by Purdue’s President Frederick Hovde and his blue-ribbon task force on education, set a standard which could not immediately be reached. But all provided useful facts, arguments and ideas, and nearly all were directly reflected in legislation. Paul Samuelson’s antirecession task force, for example, had a major role in shaping the new administration’s early economic proposals (and also redoubled Kennedy’s futile efforts to induce Samuelson to leave the academic calm that he relished and join the “New Frontier”).
But composition of the new President’s program neither awaited nor depended upon completion of the task force reports. In November and December, with the help of the Budget Bureau staff and my associates, a master check list of all possible legislative, budgetary and administrative issues for Presidential action was prepared.3 This list was then refined and reduced to manageable proportions in a conference with our new Budget Director and his hold-over Deputy Director; and on December 21 a list of over 250 items, ranging from area redevelopment to Nike-Zeus, was reviewed in a rugged all-day and late-night session with the President-elect in Palm Beach. “Now I know,” he said, looking over the length and complexity of the list, “why Ike had Sherman Adams.”
He was well rested by then. His mind was far more keen and clear than it had seemed when I had last visited Palm Beach two weeks after the election. He had still seemed tired then and reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection. Now he was deeply tanned, and as he changed from his swimming trunks in his bedroom, he joked about how fat he looked. His comments were precise and decisive, and it was a tonic to me to see that he could hardly wait until the full responsibility was really his.
When we interrupted our session for lunch, he told us with a touch of humor about the assassination attempt uncovered the week before. A deranged New Hampshire resident had driven his car to Florida, filled it with dynamite and planned to crash it into Kennedy’s. When finally picked up on December 15 by the Secret Service tracing a tip from his home town, he said that he had foregone a perfect opportunity the previous Sunday only because Jacqueline and the children were also present. The President-elect seemed more intrigued than appalled by the man’s ingenuity in planning a motiveless murder, and then he dismissed it from his mind and returned to work.
On some items he asked questions of his new Budget experts who were present; on some he requested memoranda of additional detail or arguments from his Cabinet appointees who were not. Some matters he postponed as of lower priority or doubtful desirability. Some he referred to his task forces for recommendation. A few he preferred to delete altogether. He also added a few items on his own: a commission on campaign costs, a memo to all appointees to hold down Federal employment and another to divest themselves of all conflicts of interest.
It has since been widely reported that Kennedy, alarmed by the narrowness of his winning margin, had decided to retreat from his original plans for his first year. Certainly no alarm or retreat was sounded in this meeting. The President-elect was aware of the legislative realities. He exercised caution consistent with his new responsibilities. And he did not feel free, with the dollar appearing slightly shaky, to reverse in one month the fiscal philosophy that he felt had weakened the economy for years. But reviewing my notes on that December 21 check list, I see no signs of a slowdown. Not a single one of his major campaign pledges was ignored or interred.
On the basis of that December 21 conference, a detailed letter of questions and requests was sent to each prospective member of the Cabinet
, assignments were meted out for the drafting of detailed proposals and documents, new budget estimates were prepared, the task force reports were fitted in—and a Kennedy Presidential program took definite shape well before Kennedy became President. The amount of preparation was unprecedented. Clearly it made it possible for the new President to take the legislative initiative immediately. In almost every critical area of public policy—including recovery from the recession, economic growth, the budget, balance of payments, health care, housing, highways, education, taxation, conservation, agriculture, regulatory agencies, foreign aid, Latin America, defense and conflicts of interest—comprehensive Presidential messages and some 277 separate requests would be sent to the Congress in Kennedy’s first hundred days.
Kennedy was irritated, however, by widespread press speculation that he intended to emulate the first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt, who had taken office with a landslide vote, in the midst of a depression and with heavy Congressional majorities, and consequently rushed through far-reaching legislation almost immediately. Kennedy had emphasized the necessity of “setting forth the agenda” in the first hundred days, but had no illusions that the Congress and country of 1961 bore any resemblance to 1933.