Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Patronage, the President said candidly, “does give us some influence…[but] there are not many jobs.” There are, he might have added, more headaches. Patronage squabbles in several states gave him more enemies than friends. Three-quarters of a century earlier, seven thousand out of every eight thousand Federal jobs were non-merit-system appointments. By 1961 the ratio was more nearly twenty out of eight thousand, and only four of those twenty were Presidential appointments. A large proportion of the twenty, moreover, required trained experts at low pay. But occasionally, with Republicans as well as Democrats, a specific personnel opening at the time of a crucial vote enabled both the President and a key legislator to please each other.

  Kennedy was generally unsuccessful, however, in his efforts to woo Republican votes, particularly on domestic policy. After 1961 only his gains with Southern Democrats enabled him to continue winning four out of five roll calls on the House and Senate floors. But on foreign policy, civil rights and a few other issues, his good relations with conservative GOP leaders Dirksen and Halleck were rewarding. He liked both men, respected them as fellow professionals and enjoyed bantering with them over their successes and defeats. In fact, by 1962 his relations were so good with Dirksen—whom he had always found entertaining and at times movable by invocations of patriotism (or patronage)—that both men had to reassure their respective party members that each had not embraced the other too much. The President went campaigning in Illinois for Dirksen’s opponent and the Senate Minority Leader protested good-naturedly that he had not “gone soft on Kennedyism.”

  No fight better illustrated both the necessity and the difficulty of winning Republican votes than the annual battle over foreign aid. Kennedy’s hope in 1961 was to obtain long-term borrowing authority for his reorganized AID program, thus permitting a new nation’s development to be planned on a more orderly basis than one year at a time. It also would have facilitated a more precise determination of how much other nations should contribute and how much self-help was expected from the recipient country. But Congress not only denied the long-term financing, relenting only to the extent of permitting long-range commitments without money to back them up; it also forced the President to fight a major battle each year to prevent heavy slashes in the program.

  Seeking Republican help, Kennedy included legislative leaders from both parties on foreign policy briefings, relied heavily on his Republican appointees in top posts, obtained statements on the AID bills from Eisenhower and other G.O.P. leaders, and publicly recalled the support he and his party had given Ike in earlier years.

  Seeking Democratic support, he talked to key members by telephone or in his office, rounding up votes in much the same manner as he once rounded up delegates: “I know your district, Sam, and this won’t hurt you there…. This is a tough one for you, Mike, I realize, but we’ll go all the way with you this fall…. Vote with us on recommittal, where it’s close, Al, and then you can vote ‘no’ on final passage.” He agreed to help with their pet projects or to speak in their districts. On one California trip he pointedly excluded the local Democratic Congressman from the platform for consistently deserting him on the foreign aid bill in committee, and another recalcitrant found the new Federal Office Building scheduled for his district suddenly missing from the Budget. More than one visiting prime minister from a new nation, the President remarked to me one evening, had confessed his inability to understand why a Democratic President could not tell what a Democratic Congress would do on foreign aid.

  Seeking public support, he repeatedly promoted the program in his televised speeches and press conferences and in his talks around the country. The opponents of foreign aid, he said,

  should recognize that they are severely limiting my ability to protect the interests of this country. They are not saving money…. Our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3.5 million Allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program.

  In proportion to our effort in the early days of the Marshall Plan, he added, his program was one-fourth as burdensome, yet the need was greater. “I don’t understand why we are suddenly so fatigued,” he told his last news conference. “The Congress has its responsibility, but…I cannot fulfill my responsibility in the field of foreign policy without this program.”

  But Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Otto Passman of Louisiana felt his annual responsibility was to cut back foreign aid as sharply as possible. Immune to the President’s personal pleas, and aided by members of both parties, North and South, liberal as well as conservative, Passman had no difficulty in finding examples of waste and error in a program rendered incapable of consistently maintaining efficiency and attracting quality by constant Congressional carping, constant executive reorganization, constant appropriation delays and constant shifts in emphasis among its most fervent advocates. No powerful constituencies or interest groups backed foreign aid. The Marshall Plan at least had appealed to Americans who traced their roots to the Western European nations aided. But there were few voters who identified with India, Colombia or Tanganyika.

  Each year Kennedy lost more ground to Passman, and each year the President blasted a little more sharply “those who make speeches against the spread of Communism…and then vote down the funds needed…to stave off chaos and Communism in the most vital areas of the world.” With what he privately acknowledged to be a “calculated risk,” he named a panel of conservative private enterprise skeptics to review his 1963 AID request. That panel, under General Lucius Clay, recommended cuts while strongly defending the program. Passman and Company ignored the defense, accepted the cuts and made still more cuts—and Kennedy’s gamble backfired.

  Kennedy was not embittered by his legislative defeats. He had no difficulty working with Kerr or Mills or Dirksen the day after they had successfully worked against him, just as his administration had room for those who had opposed his nomination. He often reminded his wife and brothers not to be bitter against those who fought or failed him, voicing two political maxims: “In politics you have no friends, only allies” and “Forgive but never forget.” 3

  His margin, however, was too narrow to grant him the luxury of attacking all Republicans or all Southerners. “I have to have the Congress behind me,” he told one interviewer, pointing to the list of mounting world crises. “I can’t afford to alienate them.” Legislative defeats, and the drop in his Gallup Poll rating which usually accompanied them, were accepted as part of the job. “There is a rhythm to a personal—and national and international—life,” he said, “and it flows and ebbs…. If I were still 79 percent fin the Gallup Poll] after a very intense Congressional session, I would feel that I had not met my responsibilities.” When I congratulated him on an October, 1961, Gallup Poll showing he would defeat Nixon 62-38, he replied that the margin would rise and fall many times before his re-election. He knew it was no coincidence that both his personal morale and his Gallup Poll ratings rose each time Congress adjourned for the winter. But the sheer volume of bitterly contested administration bills required each session to be longer than the one before. “It is much easier in many ways for me,” said the President frankly to a news conference, “when Congress is not in town. But… we cannot all leave town.”

  His legislative leaders warned him that he was sending to the Congress more than it could digest—a record of 1,054 requests in three years—but he wanted to lead, to set forth the agenda, to begin. “They are only going to pass part of what I send up anyway,” he said to me as we readied his 1963 program in Palm Beach. “If I had sent up half as many major bills in ’61-’62, they would have passed only half as many as they did.” Unless it was “completely emasculated…a shadow of success and not the substance,” he preferred a compromise to no bill at all—“compromises of our political positions but n
ot ourselves…of issues, not of principles.”

  Example: He deeply disliked dropping laundry workers—whose plight he had often cited in the campaign—from the extended coverage provisions of the minimum wage bill. But the alternative was no bill at all and thus no protection for millions of others.

  Example: By personally persuading Senator Eastland to report out a drug reform bill broader in its consumer protection provisions than the Kefauver drug bill, he gave both Kefauver and consumers a notable victory. Kefauver had been consulted all the way, but the Tennessean’s aides denounced the administration for not including their patent proposals, which would clearly have blocked the whole bill.

  1962 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

  No compromise or setback, moreover, was regarded as permanent. Each one, Kennedy promised, would be an item for a future, more favorable Congress and an issue in a future campaign. In the 1962 Congressional campaign, however, his task was to keep the Congress at least as favorable as it was.

  Within his own party he attempted no purge of those voting against his program but made clear his intention to campaign only for its supporters. Inasmuch as most of the Democrats who opposed him neither wanted nor needed his help in their one-party districts, this was hardly, as some claimed, a “purge” in reverse. He also gave indirect help in primary fights to those who had helped him, even when it meant helping an “old guard” Democratic incumbent against a “reform” challenger. Reformers moaned, for example, when a testimonial dinner-for Bronx Boss Charles Buckley received a laudatory wire signed “Joe, Jack, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy.” Although he had earlier snubbed New York’s “old guard” leaders, he generally paid little attention to such labels. The “old guard” bosses who once ordered his defeat now gladly took orders from him, he noted, and the reformers tended to become the old guard once they were in.

  His real problem in 1962 was with the Republicans, in stemming the historical trend of mid-term elections, which, with the exception of 1934, had invariably cost the party in the White House some three dozen seats in the House and a comparable number in the Senate. His own margin had been so thin in 1960 that few observers gave him much chance of keeping GOP gains down even to the fifteen to twenty additional House seats he publicly conceded. Aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued in a thoughtful memorandum that Roosevelt had made no campaign at all for the Congress in 1934, the one exception to the mid-term rule, and that Roosevelt had lost Democratic seats in both houses when he did campaign in 1938 and 1942. Kennedy’s intervention in the campaign, it was argued, would only invite blame for a historical trend beyond his control, and to avoid this loss of prestige he should remain above the battle.

  A prominent Republican also suggested that a President should limit himself to nonpartisan appearances representing all the people. No, said Kennedy,

  … it is a responsibility of the President of the United States…to have a program and to fight for it….I do not believe that in this most critical and dangerous period that Presidents…should confine themselves to ceremonial occasions, ornamenting an office at a time when this country and this world need all of the energy and the action and the commitment to progress that [we] can possibly have.

  In 1962 the opinion polls showed less than 30 percent of the Democrats, compared with 43 percent of the Republicans, planning to turn out to vote. To offset this apathy, the President planned a mid-term campaign more vigorous than that of any President in history. “I have never overstated what a President could do in these matters,” he told his news conference, and he was not campaigning, as most people assumed, simply because he enjoyed it. “I don’t enjoy it very much,” he told a surprised interviewer.

  One of the great myths in American life is that those who are in politics love to campaign. Well, maybe some do; but it’s hard work making a lot of speeches, and I have a good many other things to do. But…[this] is going to decide what kind of Congress we’re going to have for the next two years. So…there’s no place that I ought to be in these weekends that is more important.

  A Western “conservation tour” in the summer, a Southern space missile tour in September, and then quick trips to a dozen states by mid-October were indeed hard work. Then the Cuban missile crisis intervened to cancel the rest of his schedule. But the hard work paid off, aided to an undeterminable extent by his handling of the crisis. It was the largest turnout, except for 1938, of eligible voters in any mid-term election recorded, and it was the best showing, except for 1934, by any party in power in modern political history. The Republicans gained only two seats in the House and lost four seats in the Senate. “We are about where we were the last two years,” said the President; but he knew it was better than he had hoped.

  LEGISLATIVE LEADERS AND LIAISON

  One of those Senate races had given him extra joy—and extra anxiety. His youngest brother Ted, long touted as the most natural campaigner in the family, defeated Henry Cabot Lodge’s son George to keep the President’s old Senate seat in the Democratic column. Because the loss of his own state would have been a heavy blow, because the polls showed that only Teddy could carry the state for the Democrats, and because he would not stand in his younger brother’s way, the President was willing to endure far more complaints than he had foreseen about “nepotism” and “dynasty.” But the greatest strain growing out of Teddy’s candidacy was that placed on the President’s relations with the new Speaker of the House, John McCormack, whose nephew Eddie sought the same Senate seat.

  In Washington all the old stories about bad blood between the two families were revived. In Massachusetts the lines were tightly drawn for a bruising battle. But neither the President nor the Speaker took any public part or, at our weekly legislative breakfasts, any private notice. Both felt strongly about the outcome, but neither blamed the other for the contest and both were determined not to let it interfere with their collaboration, despite statements to the contrary by their Boston backers. Comparing the primary by implication to Vietnam, where American troops were officially present only as advisers and trainers, the President quipped to the Gridiron Club off the record:

  I have announced that no Presidential aide or appointee would be permitted to take part in that political war in Massachusetts. Of course, we may send up a few training missions…. All I can say is: I’d rather be Ted than Ed.

  I made a few “training missions,” as did others, and both the President and Attorney General helped coach their younger brother—who in fact was less nervous when performing out of their presence. The President was nervous, too, over his own reputation rising or falling with each controversial question Teddy might be asked—on aid to parochial schools or civil rights, for example—and for this reason turned off one TV panel interviewing his brother.

  But without requiring any overt help or improper pressure from either brother, Ted Kennedy won the nomination in September, 1962. The Speaker, while deeply disappointed, merely chewed his cigar more vigorously at the next legislative breakfast.

  These weekly Tuesday morning breakfasts, like meetings of the Cabinet, usually served little more than as a means of maintaining rapport, esprit de corps and open channels of communication. The President, leading the discussion on the basis of memos prepared by O’Brien and me, valued the meetings as a regular check for him on all pending bills, but the information he received and delivered was usually available without a full meeting.

  O’Brien, O’Donnell, Salinger and I attended from the staff. Majority leader Mike Mansfield, Majority Whip Humphrey and Democratic Conference Secretary Smathers attended from the Senate. In 1961 Sam Rayburn was Speaker of the House, John McCormack was Majority Leader and Carl Albert Assistant Leader or Whip. Rayburn died at the close of that session, McCormack and Albert each moved up and Hale Boggs succeeded Albert as Whip.

  Each of these men became devoted to Kennedy, including Rayburn who had bitterly opposed his nomination, Humphrey who had fought him in the primaries, Smathers who voted frequently against him and McCormack wit
h whom he had differed over Bay State politics. After Rayburn’s death, each of them was as new to his post as Kennedy and Johnson were to theirs, and together they made mistakes as they learned.

  Sam Rayburn had been increasingly grumpy and uncommunicative in his last months, but no man, including Henry Clay, ever served as Speaker for more years or with more distinction. He knew how, when and from whom to wheedle votes, dispense favors, intimidate newcomers and appease old-timers. In his absence, more power inevitably seeped to the conservative committee and subcommittee chairmen, and John McCormack, accustomed to the more aggressively partisan role of Majority Leader, found himself unfairly assailed from both wings of his party for failing to fill “Mr. Sam’s” shoes.

  Kennedy had, in fact, been strenuously urged to oppose McCormack’s elevation to Majority Leader. But the President noted that those so urging had no clearly electable candidate of their own, and no candidate with any better claim than McCormack to either the President’s help or the post itself. Unable to risk gaining many more enemies in high places, he stayed out of a fight he felt certain he would lose. Party organization in the House, moreover, had been steadily improving ever since that day early in 1961 when the minimum wage bill had been defeated by one vote with sixty-four Democrats absent.