Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  He preferred to avoid any names that would not receive Senate confirmation or a security clearance. But he had no hesitation about naming all the favorite targets of the extreme right, many of whom violently disagreed with each other: Bowles, Stevenson, Acheson, Galbraith, Mrs. Roosevelt, Schlesinger, Kennan, Bohlen, Nitze, the Bundys, Robert Weaver, Murrow and Mennen Williams. He was neither impressed by great fortune nor afraid of great intellects. When his brilliant economic adviser James Tobin at first demurred on the grounds that he was something of an “ivory tower economist,” the President-elect replied, “That’s all right—I’m something of an ivory tower President.” He did, in fact, appoint to important posts a higher proportion of academicians, including fifteen Rhodes scholars, than any other President in history including Roosevelt—more even than those European governments in which intellectuals abound only in the lesser civil service positions. His appointees, it was observed, had among them written more books than the President could read in a four-year term, even at twelve hundred words per minute.

  But most of Kennedy’s academicians had previous government experience, just as many of his politicians and businessmen had previously been writers or teachers. He wanted men who could both think and act, “men of ability who can do things…people with good judgment.” The qualities he sought largely mirrored his own: an outlook more practical than theoretical and more logical than ideological; an ability to be precise and concise; a willingness to learn, to do, to dare, to change; and an ability to work hard and long, creatively, imaginatively, successfully.

  His search succeeded. The men he picked were for the most part men who thought his thoughts, spoke his language and put their country and Kennedy ahead of any other concern. They were scrupulously honest; not even a suspicion of scandal ever tainted the Kennedy Cabinet. They were, like him, dedicated but unemotional, young but experienced, articulate but soft-spoken. There were no crusaders, fanatics or extremists from any camp; all were nearer the center than either left or right. All spoke with the same low-keyed restraint that marked their chief, yet all shared his deep conviction that they could change America’s drift. They liked government, they liked politics, they liked Kennedy and they believed implicitly in him. Their own feelings of pride—our feelings, for I was proud to be one of them—could be summed up in a favorite Kennedy passage from Shakespeare’s King Henry V in his speech on the St. Crispin’s Day battle:

  … we…shall be remembered—

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…

  And gentlemen…now abed

  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

  Those finally appointed were not always his first tentative selections. A farm leader—whom he had practically chosen to be his Secretary of Agriculture on the basis of a review of all the names—-talked, when summoned to his first meeting with the President-elect in Georgetown, only in terms of generalities and stereotypes. “It was so boring,” the President-elect told us afterward, “and the living room was so warm, that I actually fell asleep.” Orville Freeman, who had resisted the job, but was far more in the Kennedy image, was induced the next day to accept it.

  Although he named far fewer businessmen than his predecessor, Kennedy scoured the business community seeking able administrators, particularly for the foreign aid program. And while he insisted on men loyal to his philosophy, he retained a far larger proportion of the previous administration’s officials and appointed far more opposition party members to sensitive posts than his immediate predecessor had done eight years earlier. I doubt, in fact, whether any new President bringing a change of party displayed so much bipartisanship in his initial appointments.

  He worried longest over his selection of a Secretary of State, admitting to me that those aspirants whom he did not know had an advantage over those whose deficiencies as well as abilities he knew well. He worried the least over the postmaster-generalship, deciding almost as an afterthought that it would be well to have a Westerner. He privately predicted that the nomination of his brother as Attorney General (“Let’s announce it at midnight,” he said) would prove to be his most controversial choice then and one of his wisest choices later, and he was right on both counts.

  There were other controversies. A New Deal economist said Kennedy had surrounded himself with too many “businessmen and bankers,” and a top businessman said the team contained too many academic “theorists.” Republicans stressed that four of the ten Cabinet members were Harvard graduates (overlooking the fact that Eisenhower’s Cabinet also had four and Theodore Roosevelt’s five, although not all at the same time). Actually his appointees came from every background. But John Kennedy, in selecting his associates, did not pretend or attempt to achieve an average cross-section of the country—he wanted the best.

  The entire list of several hundred appointees would not prove to be wholly free of mistakes, from the Cabinet level on down. Some exceeded the President’s expectations and some failed to fulfill them. Noted men rarely equal their reputations—some are better, some are worse. In some instances the right kind of man was given the wrong kind of job. But as a group the remarkably high quality of Kennedy’s appointees reflected his own remarkable search for a true “ministry of talent.” My participation as a member of the Kennedy White House staff is still too recent to permit me to give an objective account of its personnel and their part in the government, but that part was too important to omit from any account of the Kennedy Presidency.

  Our roles should not be exaggerated. We wielded no secret influence. We did not replace the role of Cabinet officers, compete with them for power or publicity, or block their access to the President. We could not impose our own views, nor assert the President’s views, nor speak in the President’s voice, without his prior or subsequent approval. “I will continue to have some residual functions,” the President said drily when told of the tremendous powers being ascribed to one aide.

  President Kennedy tremendously increased and improved his own impact on the Executive Branch by the use of his personal staff. He knew that it was humanly impossible for him to know all that he would like to know, see everyone who deserved to be seen, read all that he ought to read, write every message that carried his name and take part in all meetings affecting his plans. He also knew that, in his administration, Cabinet members could make recommendations on major matters, but only the President could make decisions; and that he could not afford to accept, without seeking an independent judgment, the products and proposals of departmental advisers whose responsibilities did not require them to look, as he and his staff looked, at the government and its programs as a whole. He required a personal staff, therefore—one that represented his personal ways, means and purposes—to summarize and analyze those products and proposals for him, to refine the conflicting views of various agencies, to define the issues which he had to decide, to help place his personal imprint upon them, to make certain that practical political facts were never overlooked, and to enable him to make his decisions on the full range of his considerations and constituencies, which no Cabinet member shared.

  Contrary to reports that President Kennedy, in Rooseveltian fashion, encouraged conflict and competition among and between his staff and Cabinet, our role was one of building governmental unity rather than splintering responsibility. Two dozen or more Kennedy assistants gave him two dozen or more sets of hands, eyes and ears, two dozen or more minds attuned to his own. They could talk with legislators, bureaucrats, newsmen, experts, Cabinet members and politicians—serve on interdepartmental task forces—review papers and draft speeches, letters and other documents—spot problems before they were crises and possibilities before they were proposals—screen requests for legislation, Executive Orders, jobs, appointments with the President, patronage and Presidential speeches—and bear his messages, look out for his interests, carry out his orders and make certain his decisions were executed.

  In those areas where his interest and knowledge were limited, the s
cope of our discretion was often large. But even in those instances we did not make major decisions for him. Our role was to enable him to have more time, facts and judgments with which to make them himself—to increase his influence, not ours; to preserve his options, not his ego; to make certain that questions were not foreclosed or answers required before he had an opportunity to place his imprint upon them. In the words of Neustadt’s postelection memorandum, our task was to get “information in his mind and key decisions in his hands reliably enough and soon enough to give him room for maneuver.” That imposed upon him heavy burdens of overseeing everything we were doing, but he much preferred those burdens to the handicaps of being merely a clerk in his own office, caught up in the routines and recommendations of others.

  We advised him when he sought our advice; more often we enabled him to assess the advice of others. At the risk of displeasing Congressmen and Cabinet members—and the President—our task was to be skeptical and critical, not sycophantic. There was no value in our being merely another level of clearances and concurrences, or being too deferential to the experts—as the Bay of Pigs acutely showed.

  No doubt at times our roles were resented. Secretary Hodges, apparently disgruntled by his inability to see the President more often, arranged to have placed on the Cabinet agenda for June 15, 1961, an item entitled “A candid discussion with the President on relationships with the White House staff.” Upon discovering this in the meeting, I passed the President a note asking “Shall I leave?”—but the President ignored both the note and the agenda.

  Some overlapping was inevitable. The President frequently assigned the same problem to more than one aide, or kept one in the dark about another’s role or involved whoever happened to be standing nearby at a critical moment.

  He often expressed impatience with lengthy memoranda from certain aides which boiled down to recommendations that he “firm up our posture” or “make a new effort” on some particular problem. Such generalities, he observed, were sufficient for a candidate’s speeches but not for Presidential action. When he returned one assistant’s six-page, single-spaced memorandum with the request that the author set down its action consequences, he received back another long memorandum recommending: two Presidential speeches, a policy paper and a “systematic review of the situation”—and shortly thereafter that aide was moved to one of the departments.

  Those of us in the White House staff with policy responsibilities often differed from each other and from the President in the deliberations preceding a decision. But none of us ever questioned his decision once it was final.

  The selection of the White House staff—which began, as noted, on the day after his election was confirmed—was a personal Presidential process. He chose men to meet his personal needs and mode of operation. No Senate confirmation was required and no particular public impression was desired. One powerful politician brought heavy pressure to have his long-time personal aide made a member of our staff, but the President-elect did not respect that aide and would not be bound by anyone else’s preferences.

  No staff member was appointed in order to please, or to plead for, the advocates of disarmament or defense, Negroes or Jews, the State Department or the Commerce Department, farmers or labor, or any other goal, group or government agency. Nor was any staff member appointed with an eye to any particular pattern—balancing liberals and conservatives, regions or religions. We were appointed for our ability to fulfill the President’s needs and talk the President’s language. We represented no one but John Kennedy. And no one but John Kennedy could have drawn and held together the diverse and disparate talents of such strong-minded individuals, with all their differences in manner and milieu.

  His staff, to be sure, was neither as efficient as we pretended nor as harmonious as he thought. Failure of communication appeared more than once. A degree of envy and occasionally resentment cropped up now and then. A group of able and aggressive individualists, all dependent on one man, could not be wholly free from competitive feelings or from scornful references to each other’s political or intellectual backgrounds. Below the level of senior adviser, a few personnel changes did occur in due course. But Kennedy’s personal interest in his aides, refusal to prefer one over another, and mixture of pressure and praise achieved a total command of our loyalties. We worked for him ten to twelve hours every day, and loved every minute of it.

  The President showed his appreciation to us not by constant expressions of gratitude—which were in fact rather rare—but by returning in full the loyalty of his staff and other appointees.3 “Congressmen are always advising Presidents to get rid of Presidential advisers,” he told a news conference. “That is one of the most constant threads that runs through American history.” The statement was occasioned by the suggestion of conservative Democratic Congressman Baring that Kennedy get rid of Bowles, Ball, Bell, Bunche and Sylvester. “He has a fondness for alliteration in B’s,” observed the President smilingly, “but I would not add Congressman Baring to that list, as I have a high regard for him and for the gentlemen that he named…. Presidents ordinarily do not pay attention [to Congressmen urging dismissal of their advisers], nor do they in this case.”

  When Arthur Schlesinger was under fire for calling a columnist an “idiot”—when Dick Goodwin was accused of meddling in diplomacy—when Pierre Salinger’s trip to the Soviet Union was under attack—when the hard-working Bundy, Rostow and Galbraith were maligned as “the dancing professors”—and when Walter Heller, Stuart Udall, Willard Wirtz, Arthur Sylvester and many others were assailed for some supposed mistake or misstatement—the President took pains to reassure each of us in private and, if asked, to defend us in public. Jerome Wiesner, after the newspapers had distorted a sailing accident which temporarily laid him low, told how the President cheered him up with an offer “to give me lessons in sailing and press relations.” When another aide apologized for a personal incident which had appeared in the press, the President replied, “That’s all right, I’ve been looking over the FBI files and there isn’t one of us here that hasn’t done something.”

  Outside observers often attempted to divide the staff into two camps: the intellectuals or “eggheads” and the politicians or “Irish Mafia” (a newspaper designation bitterly resented by its designees when first published). No such division, in fact, existed. Those with primarily political roles were men of high intelligence. Those who came from primarily academic backgrounds often had political experience. Many could not be simply classified as either “intellectuals” or “politicians” (and I insisted I had a foot in each camp). All the President’s principal staff members shared his high hopes for a better world and his practical acceptance of the present one. All recognized that Presidential policies and politics were inseparable, respected each other’s individual talents and functions, and accepted the possibility of error in their own conclusions as well as those of their colleagues.

  While few of us had a “passion for anonymity,” most of us had a preference in that direction. In December, 1960, I reviewed with the President-elect a series of speaking invitations I had received, as well as requests for magazine profiles. “Turn them all down,” he said, and I did. “Not only will you not have time. Every man that’s ever held a job like yours—Sherman Adams, Harry Hopkins, House, all the rest—has ended up in the————. Congress was down on them or the President was hurt by them or somebody was mad at them. The best way to stay out of trouble is to stay out of sight.”4

  The wisdom of his words was brought home several months later when I represented the President at his request at a George Norris Centennial Dinner in my home state. My speech deplored the number of young people leaving Nebraska to seek better schools for their children, and it was bitterly attacked out of context. The Republican National Committeewoman, for example, said if I came back to Nebraska to die “it would be too soon.” Word of the uproar reached the Washington newspapers, and the President greeted me with the comment: “That’s what happe
ns when you permit a speech-writer to write his own speech!” When I apologized, not for what I had said but for any embarrassment I had caused him, he laughed. “I don’t mind,” he said. “They can criticize you all they like!”

  Kennedy wanted his staff to be small, in order to keep it more personal than institutional. Although in time a number of “special assistants” accumulated for special reasons, he kept the number of senior generalists to a minimum. Both my office, which dealt mostly with domestic policy, and that of McGeorge Bundy, which dealt exclusively with foreign policy, combined in relatively small staffs the functions of several times as many Eisenhower aides. Instead of adding specialists in my own office, I relied on the excellent staff work of the Bureau of the Budget and Council of Economic Advisers.

  The President wanted a fluid staff. Our jurisdictions were distinguishable but not exclusive, and each man could and did assist every other. Our assignments and relations evolved with time, as did the President’s use of us. There was no chief of staff in the Sherman Adams—Wilton Persons role supervising and screening the work of all others. Instead, Kennedy was his own chief of staff, and his principal White House advisers had equal stature, equal salaries and equal access to his office. He compared it to “a wheel and a series of spokes.”

  There were no distinctions in rank connoted by staff tides and very few differences in title. Nearly everyone was officially a “Special Assistant.” A few were “Administrative Assistants.” No one was “The Assistant to the President.” The President, in fact, remarked in January of 1961 that he wished everyone had been called Special Assistant. As the heir to a very honorable title, I could hardly share his sentiments, but only one title was ever used within the walls of the White House, and that was “Mr. President.”