A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Gradually there evolved a sense of his own identity as a political man, compounded of his growing mastery of the political arts and, even more, of his growing understanding that, for better or worse, his public self had to be faithful to his private self. This second point may sound like something less than a blinding revelation. But it takes many politicians a long time to acquire it. Some never do, always hoping to persuade the voters that they are different from what they are. “No man, for any considerable period,” Hawthorne once wrote, “can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Kennedy was prepared to settle for his own face—and no doubt was encouraged to do so by his own cool evaluation of the alternatives. One day his father asked him why he wanted to take on the appalling burden of the Presidency. “These things have always been done by men,” Kennedy said, “and they can be done by men now.” As he looked around him, the others who yearned to assume the burden did not seem to him conspicuously better qualified than himself.

  The process of internal definition went on in other ways, and Jacqueline Kennedy made her own contribution to it. She must at first have been overwhelmed by the life into which marriage plunged her. Politics had been for her corny old men shouting on the Fourth of July, at least until the advent of Stevenson; his was the first political voice to whom she listened. And, once in this new world, she found it hard to get used to the ground rules. Her husband sometimes came home irritated by the action of a fellow politician. Jacqueline, concluding that this man was an enemy, would glare across the room when she met him. Then Jack would speak agreeably about him, and she would exclaim, “Are you saying nice things about X? I’ve been hating him for three weeks.” Her husband would reply, “No, no, that was three weeks ago. Now he has done Y.” He would tell her that in politics you rarely had friends or foes, only colleagues, and that you should never get in so deep a quarrel as to lose all chance of conciliation; you might need to work with the other fellow later.

  The teeming world of the Kennedys was another problem. Jacqueline had to fight to preserve her own identity in this family of active parents-in-law, athletic, teasing brothers-in-law, energetic, competent sisters-in-law. There often seemed no point in trying to compete in politics, any more than in touch football; and she sometimes carried her self-defense to inordinate extremes, as when she would pretend a total ignorance about politics or impose a social ban on politicians. Like all marriages, this one may have had its early strains. Their life together was almost nomadic, shuttling back and forth from Washington to Boston, from Newport to Palm Beach, living often with parents-in-law. They did not really have a house of their own until they had been married four years and their first child was born. Jacqueline often feared that she was a political liability and that everyone considered her a snob from Newport who had bouffant hair and French clothes and hated politics. Some of Kennedy’s supporters did feel this way in 1960, but he never mentioned it to her and never asked her to change. He was never worried; he loved her as she was. More and more she embodied something of increasing value for him—a surcease from daily business, a standard of excellence, a symbol of privacy, a style of life.

  This was partly because she proved able to extend his knowledge and sensibility. Before they were married, he had her translate and summarize ten or a dozen French books about Indochina; she was then living in the Auchincloss house in Virginia and labored late into hot summer nights to finish the assignment. When she read aloud passages from de Gaulle’s Memoires, especially the introductory evocation of his image of France, he seized the idea for his own speeches about America. Whatever concerned her interested him, and often he would soon know more about it than she did. But perhaps her greatest influence was to confirm his feelings about the importance of living his life according to the values he honored most. He was determined not to let his public role stunt or stifle his inner existence. At Hyannis Port in August 1960, after the succession of party leaders had paid their respects to their new candidate for President, Kennedy drew one day at lunch a distinction between the totally absorbed professional, for whom politics was the whole of life, and those who enjoyed the game and art of politics but preserved a measure of detachment from it. Jacqueline remarked of some of their visitors that their private faces were completely suppressed by the public face. She had asked one political wife, “What have you been doing since the convention?” expecting her to say, “Oh dear, I’ve just been resting up since that madhouse” or something of the sort. Instead the reply came: “I’ve been writing letters to all those good people who were so helpful to my husband.” “It was,” Jackie said, “as if they were on television all the time.”

  Kennedy’s determination to defend his privacy was crucial; for it permitted the inner self, so voracious for experience and for knowledge, so intent on reason and result, so admiring of grace and elegance, to ripen into free and confident maturity—and to renew and replenish the public self. By holding part of himself back from politics, he opened himself to fresh ideas and purpose. I do not mean to imply that he ever condescended to politics. His highest hope was to inspire the young with a lofty sense of the political mission. But politics was not the be-all and end-all; and because, with his wife’s complicity, he declined to yield himself entirely to it, he was able to charge it with creativity.

  7. THE KENNEDY MIND: I

  Kennedy was called an intellectual very seldom before 1960 and very often thereafter—a phenomenon which deserves explanation.

  One cannot be sure what an intellectual is; but let us define it as a person whose primary habitat is the realm of ideas. In this sense, exceedingly few political leaders are authentic intellectuals, because the primary habitat of the political leader is the world of power. Yet the world of power itself has its intellectual and anti-intellectual sides. Some political leaders find exhilaration in ideas and in the company of those whose trade it is to deal with them. Others are rendered uneasy by ideas and uncomfortable by intellectuals.

  Kennedy belonged supremely to the first class. He was a man of action who could pass easily over to the realm of ideas and confront intellectuals with perfect confidence in his capacity to hold his own. His mind was not prophetic, impassioned, mystical, ontological, utopian or ideological. It was less exuberant than Theodore Roosevelt’s, less scholarly than Wilson’s, less adventurous than Franklin Roosevelt’s. But it had its own salient qualities—it was objective, practical, ironic, skeptical, unfettered and insatiable.

  It was marked first of all, as he had noted to Jacqueline, by inexhaustible curiosity. Kennedy always wanted to know how things worked. Vague answers never contented him. This curiosity was fed by conversation but even more by reading. His childhood consolation had become an adult compulsion. He was now a fanatical reader, 1200 words a minute, not only at the normal times and places but at meals, in the bathtub, sometimes even when walking. Dressing in the morning, he would prop open a book on his bureau and read while he put on his shirt and tied his necktie. He read mostly history and biography, American and English. The first book he ever gave Jacqueline was the life of a Texan, Marquis James’s biography of Sam Houston, The Raven. In addition to Pilgrim’s Way, Marlborough and Melbourne, he particularly liked Herbert Agar’s The Price of Union, Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams, Allan Nevins’s The Emergence of Lincoln, Margaret Coit’s Calhoun and Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand. He read poetry only occasionally—Shakespeare and Byron are quoted in the looseleaf notebook he kept in 1945–46—and by this time fiction hardly at all. His wife does not remember him reading novels except for two or three Ian Fleming thrillers, though Kennedy himself listed The Red and the Black among his favorite books and, at some point in his life, had read most of Hemingway and a smattering of contemporary fiction—at least The Deer Park, The Fires of Spring and The Ninth Wave. His supposed addiction to James Bond was partly a publicity gag, like Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed affection for “Home on the Range.” Kennedy
seldom read for distraction. He did not want to waste a single second.

  He read partly for information, partly for comparison, partly for insight, partly for the sheer joy of felicitous statement. He delighted particularly in quotations which distilled the essence of an argument. He is, so far as I know, the only politician who ever quoted Madame de Stael on Meet the Press. Some quotations he carried verbatim in his mind. Others he noted down. The loose-leaf notebook of 1945–46 contained propositions from Aeschylus (“In war, truth is the first casualty”), Isocrates (“Where there are a number of laws drawn up with great exactitude, it is a proof that the city is badly administered; for the inhabitants are compelled to frame laws in great numbers as a barrier against offenses”), Dante (“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”), Falkland (“When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change”), Burke (“Our patience will achieve more than our force”), Jefferson (“Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy”), de Maistre (“In all political systems there are relationships which it is wiser to leave undefined”), Jackson (“Individuals must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest”), Webster (“A general equality of condition is the true basis, most certainly, of democracy”), Mill (“One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interest”), Lincoln (“Public opinion is everything. With it nothing can fail, without it nothing can succeed”), Huck Finn on Pilgrim’s Progress (“The statements are interesting—but steep”), Chesterton (“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up”), Brandeis (“Unless our financial leaders are capable of progress, the institutions which they are trying to conserve will lose their foundation”), Colonel House (“The best politics is to do the right thing”), Churchill (“The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are often no longer strong. . . . Let us have this blessed union of power and justice”), Lippmann (“The political art deals with matters peculiar to politics, with a complex of material circumstances, of historic deposit, of human passion, for which the problems of business or engineering do not provide an analogy”), Hindu proverbs (“I had no shoes—and I murmured until I met a man who had no feet”), Joseph P. Kennedy (“More men die of jealousy than cancer”) and even John F. Kennedy:

  To be a positive force for the public good in politics one must have three things; a solid moral code governing his public actions, a broad knowledge of our institutions and traditions and a specific background in the technical problems of government, and lastly he must have political appeal—the gift of winning public confidence and support.

  There emerges from such quotations the impression of a moderate and dispassionate mind, committed to the arts of government, persuaded of the inevitability of change but distrustful of comprehensive plans and grandiose abstractions, skeptical of excess but admiring of purpose, determined above all to be effective.

  His intelligence was fundamentally secular, or so it seemed to me. Of course, this was not entirely true. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, “If you are born and brought up a Catholic, you have absorbed a great deal of world history and the history of ideas before you are twelve, and it is like learning a language early; the effect is indelible.” Though Kennedy spent only one year of his life in a Catholic school, he assimilated a good deal of the structure of the faith, encouraged probably by his mother and sisters. He often adopted the Catholic side in historical controversy, as in the case of Mary Queen of Scots; and he showed a certain weakness for Catholic words of art, like ‘prudence,’ and a certain aversion toward bad words for Catholics, like ‘liberal.’ Nor could one doubt his devotion to his Church or the occasional solace he found in mass.

  Yet he remains, as John Cogley has suggested, the first President who was a Roman Catholic rather than the first Roman Catholic President. Intellectual Catholicism in American politics has ordinarily taken two divergent forms, of which Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota were contemporary representatives. Kennedy was different from either. Unlike Dodd, he lived far away from the world of the Holy Name Societies, Knights of Columbus and communion breakfasts. He discussed the princes of the American Church with the same irreverent candor with which he discussed the bosses of the Democratic party. When a dispatch from Rome during the 1960 campaign suggested Vatican doubts about his views of the proper relationship between church and state, Kennedy said, “Now I understand why Henry VIII set up his own church.” His attitude toward life showed no traces of the black-and-white moralism, the pietistic rhetoric, the clericalism, the anti-intellectualism, the prudery, the fear of Protestant society, which had historically characterized parts of the Irish Catholic community in America. On the other hand, he did not, like Eugene McCarthy, seek to rescue Catholic doctrine from fundamentalism and demonstrate its relevance to the modern world. Catholic intellectuals recognized his indifference to the scholastic tradition, and some disdained him for it.

  Kennedy’s religion was humane rather than doctrinal. He was a Catholic as Franklin Roosevelt was an Episcopalian—because he was born into the faith, lived in it and expected to die in it. One evening at the White House he argued with considerable particularity that nine of the ten commandments were derived from nature and almost seemed to imply that all religion was so derived. He had little knowledge of or interest in the Catholic dogmatic tradition. He once wrote Cogley, “It is hard for a Harvard man to answer questions in theology. I imagine my answers will cause heartburn at Fordham and B. C. [Boston College].” One can find little organic intellectual connection between his faith and his politics. His social thought hardly resulted from a determination to apply the principles of Rerum Novarum to American life. He felt an immense sense of fellowship with Pope John XXIII, but this was based more on the Pope’s practical character and policies than on theological considerations. Some of his Protestant advisers probably knew the encyclicals better than he did. Once during the 1960 campaign I handed him a speech draft with the comment that it was perhaps too Catholic. He said with a smile, “You Unitarians”—meaning Sorensen and myself—“keep writing Catholic speeches. I guess I am the only Protestant around here.”

  Still, his basic attitude was wholly compatible with the sophisticated theology of Jesuits like Father John Courtney Murray, whom he greatly admired. In the notebook he kept during his sickness, he wrote down some lines from Barbara Ward: “What disturbs the Communist rulers is not the phraseology of religion, the lip-service that may be paid to it, or the speeches and declarations made in its favor. . . . Religion which is a mere adjunct of individual purpose is a religion that even the Soviets can tolerate. What they fear is a religion that transcends frontiers and can challenge the purpose and performance of the nation-state.” This was not in the mid-fifties the typical attitude of American Catholics; but, if Kennedy was not a typical American Catholic, his example helped create the progressive and questing American Catholicism of the sixties. Above all, he showed that there need be no conflict between Catholicism and modernity, no bar to full Catholic participation in American society.

  His detachment from traditional American Catholicism was part of the set of detachments—detachment from middle-class parochialism, detachment from the business ethos, detachment from ritualistic liberalism—which gave his perceptions their peculiar coolness, freshness and freedom, and which also led those expecting commitments of a more familiar sort to condemn him as uncommitted. In fact, he was intensely committed to a vision of America and the world, and committed with equal intensity to the use of reason and power to achieve that vision. This became apparent after he was President; and this accounts in part for the sudden realization that, far from being just a young man in a hurry, a hustler for personal authority, a Processed Politician, he was, as politicians go, a
n intellectual and one so peculiarly modern that it took orthodox intellectuals a little time before they began to understand him.

  Another reason for the change in the intellectuals’ theory of Kennedy was their gradual recognition of his desire to bring the world of power and the world of ideas together in alliance—or rather, as he himself saw it, to restore the collaboration between the two worlds which had marked the early republic. He was fascinated by the Founding Fathers and liked to harass historians by demanding that they explain how a small and underdeveloped nation could have produced men of such genius. He was particularly fascinated by the way the generation of the Founders united the instinct for ideas and the instinct for responsibility. “Our nation’s first great politicians,” he wrote, “—those who presided at its birth in 1776 and at its christening in 1787—included among their ranks most of the nation’s first great writers and scholars.” But today

  the gap between the intellectual and politician seems to be growing. . . . today this link is all but gone. Where are the scholar-statesmen? The American politician of today is fearful, if not scornful, of entering the literary world with the courage of a Beveridge. And the American author and scholar of today is reluctant, if not disdainful, about entering the political world with the enthusiasm of a Woodrow Wilson.

  His summons to the scholar-statesman went largely unnoticed by the intellectual community in the fifties, perhaps because he chose such improbable forums as Vogue and a Harvard Commencement. Only when he began as President to put his proposition into practice did the intellectual community take a fresh look at him.