Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Problems involving all Cabinet members, and thus appropriate to Cabinet discussion, were few and far between: Civil Service and patronage, the Budget outlook, legislative relations and somewhat superficial briefings, not consultations, on administration policy and current events. Occasionally more important matters appeared on the agenda—the responsibility of Cabinet officers for advancing civil rights or accelerating Federal projects during the recession, for example—but more typical by far was this Cabinet agenda for December 10, 1962, set forth here in its entirety:

  Review of Foreign Situation—The Secretary of State

  Review of Economic Situation and Outlook—Honorable Walter Heller

  Status Report on 1963 Legislative Program—Honorable T. C. Sorensen

  While Heller and I were often asked to make presentations of this kind—as were O’Brien, the Budget Director and the Civil Service Chairman—only the ten department heads (and Ambassador Stevenson, when in town) sat at the long Cabinet table. None of them brought any staff or subordinates with them and most of them said comparatively little. The Cabinet Assistant, the Budget Director, the Science Adviser, the Economic Adviser and I sat behind the President, who kept the meetings as brief as decorum permitted. Often he would cut discussion short. Occasionally he would ask the Vice President to “chair” the meeting during his temporary absence—and then disappear permanently into his office.

  Much the same was true of the large formal meetings of the National Security Council, which dealt exclusively with foreign affairs. It had a more significant agenda prepared by McGeorge Bundy, papers were circulated in advance and the meetings were more interesting to the President. He ran them in every sense of the word, first asking the CIA Director for the intelligence summaries on the situation under study, then asking the Secretary of State to give his recommendations, and then throwing it open to Defense and others. (Usually the senior official was addressed by the President as “Mr. Secretary” or “Mr. Dulles,” but his own aides by their first names.)

  At times he made minor decisions in full NSC meetings or pretended to make major ones actually settled earlier. Attendance was generally kept well below the level of previous administrations, but still well above the statutory requirements. He strongly preferred to make all major decisions with far fewer people present, often only the officer to whom he was communicating the decision. “We have averaged three or four meetings a week with the Secretaries of Defense and State, McGeorge Bundy, the head of the CIA and the Vice President,” he said in 1961. “But formal meetings of the Security Council which include a much wider group are not as effective. It is more difficult to decide matters involving high national security if there is a wider group present.”

  For brief periods of time, during or after a crisis, the President would hold NSC meetings somewhat more regularly, partly as a means of getting on record the views of every responsible officer (who might otherwise complain that he wasn’t consulted and wouldn’t have approved), but mostly to silence outside critics who equated machinery with efficiency. “The National Security Council,” he said, when asked about various positions reportedly taken by its members in the Cuban missile crisis, “is an advisory body to the President. In the final analysis, the President of the United States must make the decision. And it is his decision. It’s not the decision of the National Security Council or any collective decision.” This he meant quite literally, for he often overruled the principal NSC members and on at least one occasion overruled all of them.

  There were some complaints about the Kennedy approach to organizational machinery. Secretary Hodges grumbled publicly that there should be more Cabinet meetings. State Department aides grumbled privately that their prestige suffered if they were not present for key decisions. Secretary Rusk complained that he did not like to offer his views in meetings at which “people like Sorensen and Kaysen with no responsibility were making academic comments.” He preferred to save his arguments for the President’s ear only. But in general the department heads concurred with Willard Wirtz’s conclusion that, without many formal meetings, there had been an “extraordinary degree” of close communication, both ways, “between the President and his Cabinet…and among the Cabinet members.”

  SPEECH AND STATEMENT CLEARANCES

  The President’s standing rule requiring White House clearance for all major speeches and Congressional testimony was rarely enforced except in critical periods. Salinger and his staff and Ted Reardon checked routine speech drafts, and my staff and Bundy’s checked major statements on domestic and foreign policy respectively. The President reviewed some speeches on his own. Occasionally he would ask us to coordinate in advance and monitor in progress all Congressional testimony by administration witnesses with differing points of view on a sensitive issue under hearing—the Cuban missile crisis or the 1962 economic and tax outlook, for example.

  Some important gains resulted. Several Defense Department speeches were rendered less “missile-rattling.” A State Department aide was informed that he could not assert his own visionary proposals for civil rights. But it was an imperfect system. Several controversial high-level statements were given without clearance, and there was no way to clear answers to press or Congressional questions.

  The speeches most difficult to check—and most dangerous to leave unchecked—were those by high-ranking military officers, whose remarks had not always reflected the President’s point of view about peace. When it became known in Kennedy’s first week that a strong anti-Soviet speech by Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke had been toned down in the White House lest it disrupt the release of the RB-47 fliers, a great hue and cry arose about “muzzling” the military. Actually, Admiral Burke had voluntarily submitted the speech and the procedure was not unusual. But it was clearer than ever that military officers on active duty were not to undermine the final decisions of their Commander in Chief in their speeches or legislative testimony, not to confuse the world about the nature of America’s foreign policy, and not to undertake as an official responsibility the political indoctrination of either their troops or public opinion.

  The most flagrant example of the last was Major General Edwin Walker’s use of right-wing extremist material with his troops in Germany. The President read about Walker’s wild charges in the newspaper and asked McNamara to investigate. In November, 1961, having been admonished and ordered to the Pacific, the General resigned from the Army.

  There was nothing radical or even new, said Kennedy, about protecting the military from direct political involvement, requiring their educational talks to be nonpartisan and accurate, and requesting that their official speeches reflect official policies. Nor was any new curb placed on the military’s freedom of speech and opinion, or on their frank answers to Congressional questions. But

  if a well-known, high-ranking military figure makes a speech which affects foreign policy or possibly military policy, I think that the people—and the countries abroad—have a right to expect that that speech represents the opinion of the national government…. The purpose of the review…is to make sure that…the government speaks with one voice.

  And he pointed out that his own speeches were reviewed in State and Defense with this objective.

  In time, however, a Senate investigation, sparked by Strom Thurmond, sought to link this “censorship” with “softness” toward Communism. The situation was complicated by former President Eisenhower’s statement, “after thoughtful reconsideration,” that his own administration’s policy of requiring speech clearances should be dropped. But several high-ranking officers testified to the wisdom of the practice, and General Walker’s ranting testimony served to confirm it. The most prominent military supporters of his policy on clearances were all distinguished officers, said the President with some pleasure,

  who understand the importance of the proper relationship between the military and the civilian…which has existed for so many years, which provides for civilian control and responsibility…. In f
act, the military seems to understand the problem better than some civilians.

  Not all the military understood. Not all agreed to speak with one voice, that of their civilian Commander in Chief. Some still grumbled to the press and Congress about decisions on which they felt inadequately consulted or unwisely overruled. But, on the whole, official Washington spoke publicly with one strong voice more clearly than ever before.

  PERSONNEL CHANGES

  Very few important officials inherited or appointed by Kennedy were overtly dismissed from the Federal service. One Kennedy critic in a major holdover post was the object of such intentions, but upon reading Bundy’s memorandum explaining that by statute the only hope for removing this gentleman would be to “get him on bad behavior,” the President scrawled at the bottom: “No—he might do the same to us. JK.”

  Nevertheless those who could not keep up, those whose contributions did not match their reputations and those who did not share his energy and idealism were reassigned, if not asked to retire. The most prominent case of reshuffling—known in some quarters as “the Thanksgiving Massacre of 1961”—occurred in the Department of State.

  The President was discouraged with the State Department almost as soon as he took office. He felt that it too often seemed to have a built-in inertia which deadened initiative and that its tendency toward excessive delay obscured determination. It spoke with too many voices and too little vigor. It was never clear to the President (and this continued to be true, even after the personnel changes) who was in charge, who was clearly delegated to do what, and why his own policy line seemed consistently to be altered or evaded. The top State Department team—including Secretary Rusk, Under Secretaries Bowles and Ball, UN Ambassador Stevenson, Roving Ambassador Harriman, Assistant Secretary Williams, Latin America coordinator Berle, all men of Cabinet stature, and many others—reflected an abundance of talent ironically unmatched by production. Kennedy felt the men recommended by Bowles had done better than Rusk’s; Rusk felt confined by subordinates appointed personally by Kennedy, some of them even before Rusk had been named, and by all the White House aides and other outsiders brought in on foreign policy; Bowles felt unable to get Rusk’s backing on the administrative rebuilding which the Secretary was too busy to perform; and Stevenson, enveloped in the United Nations-New York atmosphere where world opinion weighed heavier than domestic, felt out of touch with decisions in Washington. In addition, reorganization of the foreign AID program was hampered not only by ineffective direction but by the refusal of Congress, the No. 1 critic of AID overstaffing and inefficiency, to authorize the elimination of “deadwood” personnel, many of them placed there through Congressional influence.

  State’s relations with the Congress, the press and the White House were in some disarray. Holdovers in the department talked longingly of Acheson—or Nixon. The Foreign Service, many of its brightest lights having been darkened or dimmed during the McCarthy-McCleod days and by Dulles’ one-man diplomacy, still suffered from low morale and from a tradition of grumbling about interference by aggressive amateurs and by other agencies, and from a system of looking so long at every side of every decision that often only indecision emerged. (A veteran diplomat told the President, however, that the Foreign Service had become much like a badly trained horse whom punishment could only make worse.)

  The President had no desire to change the Secretary of State. But Rusk left administration to his Under Secretary, Chester Bowles, who preferred exploring long-range ideas to expediting short-gap expedients, and to the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration, Roger Jones, a former Civil Service commissioner. As one observer summed it up to the President, “Rusk finds it hard to use a deputy and Bowles finds it even harder to be a No. 2.” The President liked Bowles, liked most of his ideas and liked most of his personnel recommendations. But the State Department team needed a manager.

  Many names were considered. Bundy had already rejected the job in January. Sargent Shriver and David Bell were needed where they were. Bob Kennedy would not have fitted there. Arthur Dean and John McCloy, both highly regarded for their work on disarmament and the UN, preferred not to accept permanent full-time responsibilities. Harvard’s Robert Bowie had been more of a thinker than an administrator. Finally the solution was clear, as perhaps it should have been earlier: promoting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs George Ball, No. 3 man in the department, into the No. 2 position.

  But premature word of Bowles’s impending reassignment in the summer of 1961 brought glee to his enemies, who mistakenly assumed that the President had ‘leaked’ it to his columnist friends, and this postponed Bowles’s fate. The Foreign Service cliques, the CIA professionals, the Pentagon generals and the right-wing editorials were all opposed to Bowles for the wrong reasons. Kennedy was not motivated by any criticisms that Bowles was too “soft,” or too naive, or had attempted to clear himself of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure. At the same time, some of Bowles’s supporters in the press, party and government (nicknamed by some “the Chet Set”) began to pressure the President to retain Bowles for equally irrelevant reasons. Bowles himself ignored all hints and opportunities to request reassignment as a matter of service and loyalty to the President.

  Kennedy let the controversy die down, but he began relying more on Ball than on Bowles. While Ball also had little time or inclination to take on the management of the department, he was able to give the President more expeditious service on major projects. In a press conference, while praising Bowles, Kennedy made clear his intention to “make more effective the structure and the personnel of the State Department…. If I come to the conclusion that Mr. Bowles could be more effective in another responsible position, I would not hesitate to ask him.”

  By late November he was ready to move with a whole series of closely held, swiftly executed changes “better matching men and jobs.” Dick Goodwin’s ambitious efforts on Latin America and Walt Rostow’s generalized planning on foreign policy belonged in State, which was weak in these areas, rather than in the White House. Fred Dutton, whose abilities had not found a firm foothold in the White House, would take over State’s sorry Congressional relations (where he did a good job despite the continuing practice of the more timid bureaucracy to appease those legislators who controlled the purse strings). Averell Harriman, whom the President noted had already held more important posts than anyone since John Quincy Adams, and whose performance as Ambassador at Large (once he swallowed pride and wore a hearing aid) had far surpassed Kennedy’s expectations, agreed to serve as Assistant Secretary for the Far East, where the problems of Laos, Vietnam, Red China and Formosa had not been adequately handled. Rostow was to take the place of Rusk man George McGhee, McGhee was to take Ball’s place (where he was later succeeded by Harriman), Ball was to take Bowles’s place, and Bowles was to be offered a specific or roving ambassadorship.

  Obviously the whole chain of moves depended on Bowles. Fearful that Bowles might resign in an uproar, the President asked me to “hold his hand a little, as one ‘liberal’ to another, after Rusk breaks the news to him.” I liked Chet Bowles and his ideas about the Foreign Service and the kind of men it needed. I had stayed in contact with him since 1959. It was the Sunday afternoon after Thanksgiving when the news was broken to each of the men moved, and Rusk, concerned by Bowles’s reaction, called me at home where I had been standing by and urged me to see the Under Secretary immediately.

  In the all-but-empty new State Department Building I found Bowles sitting disconsolate and alone in his office. He was hurt and angry at Kennedy, at Rusk and at the world. He had no intention of taking any post. He had his pride and his convictions, he said. He had been loyal and received no loyalty in return. He would resign and speak his mind.

  We talked. On behalf of the President, I sympathized with Chet’s feelings. I rejected his threats. I shared his grief. I admired his efforts. It grew darker and darker, but neither of us moved to turn on the lights. Salinger’s prescheduled Hyannis Port press conf
erence, at which the changes had to be announced before they “leaked,” was about to begin. We talked on and on.

  Finally a solution began to emerge. Bowles would be a part of the prestigious White House team, the President’s “Special Representative and Adviser for Asian, African and Latin-American Affairs” with the rank of ambassador. He would have a raise in pay, reflecting a raise in responsibility. He would have his own office and staff, use of the White House cars, and access to the White House dining room. He would report directly to the President.

  It was not a real post, as became clear to all later. Bowles was far more suited to return to India as Ambassador, which he did promptly on Galbraith’s retirement in mid-1963, and where he served with loyalty and distinction. But it was a post which saved faces and prevented fights in November, 1961. Bowles accepted it. The President, who would nail it down the following day in a personal conversation, liked it. Salinger announced it. All those who a few months earlier had denounced the prospect of Bowles’s removal could not effectively object to it. And the President, who looked with some amusement on my assignments as a missionary to liberals, commented, “Good job, Ted—that was your best work since the Michigan delegation.”

  1 One unsubtle gesture was made in this direction, however, by arranging with Negro Congressman William Dawson the announcement that he had “declined” Kennedy’s offer of the postmaster-generalship.

  2 He heard from his sister-in-law how the wife of one man highly recommended to be Secretary of State had wept bitter tears over Kennedy’s nomination at Los Angeles, but there is no truth to the allegation that his father was responsible for the selection of Rusk and McNamara and the formal draft of brother Bob.