The time passed lightly and quickly. The Kennedys were leaving in the afternoon for Palm Beach. After luncheon his father and mother came in while the President-elect and his wife went upstairs to change for the trip. The Ambassador talked beguilingly about present and past. In a few moments, the younger Kennedys reappeared, and we all waved them off to the airfield.
1. PLANNING FOR POWER
Kennedy had a clear view of the kind of President he meant to be. Early in 1960 in a speech at the National Press Club he had sharply rejected a “restricted concept of the Presidency.” The Chief Executive, Kennedy said, must be ‘‘the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.” The nature of the office demanded that “the President place himself in the very thick of the fight, that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads, that he be willing to serve them at the risk of incurring their momentary displeasure . . . [that he] be prepared to exercise the fullest powers of his office—all that are specified and some that are not.”
He was determined to be a strong President—and this meant for him, I believe, a President in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt. Kennedy was by no means an F.D.R. idolator. I think that he considered Roosevelt’s policies, especially in foreign affairs, sometimes slapdash and sentimental. But he admired Roosevelt’s ability to articulate the latent idealism of America, and he greatly envied Roosevelt’s capacity to dominate a sprawling government filled with strong men eager to go into business on their own. He had mentioned to me a number of times the account of Roosevelt’s fluid administrative methods in the last section of The Coming of the New Deal. The interregnum was now to provide a first test of Kennedy’s own executive instincts and, in particular, of his skill in defending his personal authority against people striving, always for the best of motives, to contract his scope for choice.
The Twentieth Amendment left him only ten weeks to take command of the machinery of government. George W. Norris had designed this amendment to end the constitutional anomaly which could permit a President and Congress to wield power for a period of four months after the electorate had repudiated them in the November election. By shifting the inauguration from March 4 to January 20, the amendment eliminated the lame-duck Congress and nearly halved the tenure of a lame-duck President. But it also nearly halved the time afforded the incoming President to recover from the campaign, reassure his vanquished opponents, select the top officers of his administration and work out his legislative program.
This effect of the amendment had been obscured by the fact that, between its ratification in 1933 and the election of 1960, only one interregnum had involved the transfer of power from one party to the other. But early in 1960, the Brookings Institution, concerned by the casualness of interregnal procedures and remembering the troubles of 1952, set up a committee to study presidential transitions. James Rowe, who was a member of the Brookings group, wrote Kennedy a fortnight after Los Angeles urging him to anticipate his post-election tasks. “You should—now—‘cut’ some person ‘out of the herd’ in whom you have real confidence,” Rowe suggested, “who should devote himself to lining up these most difficult budget and staffing problems.” Rowe proposed Don K. Price and David Bell of the Harvard School of Public Administration as possibilities. Later, when he went to Hyannis Port with Lyndon Johnson, Rowe discussed the matter with Kennedy, who liked the idea but wanted to assign the responsibility to someone he knew personally. He mentioned James M. Landis. Rowe observed that Landis’s experience had been with regulatory agencies rather than with the executive branch. Kennedy then suggested Clark Clifford.
In Washington a few days later, Kennedy asked Clifford out to Georgetown for breakfast. Clifford, who had become an enormously successful Washington lawyer after his years with Truman, was a man of unusual ability and discretion, concealing a sharp and quick mind under a big-man-on-campus exterior. Kennedy had known him for a decade as a friend and also as a lawyer. When Drew Pearson said on television that Kennedy had not written Profiles in Courage, Kennedy turned over his collection of notes and drafts to Clifford; and Clifford obtained the retraction. Clifford’s support of Symington before Los Angeles had not interrupted his friendship with Kennedy, nor even his services as Kennedy’s counsel.
Kennedy began by asking Clifford to describe the campaign of 1948. He had heard enough, he said, about 1952 and 1956; now he wanted to hear about an election which the Democrats won. Clifford obliged, and for two hours they discussed how Truman had passed his miracle a dozen years earlier. Then Kennedy said he had one other thing on his mind: “If I am elected, I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and have to ask myself, ‘What in the world do I do now?’” His own experience and that of his staff, he pointed out, had been on the legislative side. He needed someone to analyze the problems of taking over the executive branch, and he thought that Clifford, with his White House background, would be ideal. Clifford, impressed by Kennedy’s foresight, promptly accepted the assignment. Kennedy did not mention the matter to him again before the election.
Clifford began to attend the meetings of the Brookings group. He also discussed transition problems with an associate from Truman days, Richard Neustadt, a political scientist who had worked in the Bureau of the Budget and later as a Special Assistant in the White House before becoming a professor at Columbia. Neustadt shared Clifford’s concern about the interregnum. Both remembered all too well the lost weeks after the triumph of 1948 when Truman went off to Key West and, in his absence, congressional leaders made bargains with interest groups which deprived him of control over his own legislative program. To his practical experience in government Neustadt added an acute and original approach to the theory of government organization. His interest in the facts rather than the forms of power had already done much to emancipate the study of public administration from its faith in organization charts as descriptions of operating reality. He had summed up his viewpoint in a searching essay on the politics of leadership called Presidential Power, published the previous April.
By the time Clifford spoke to him, however, Neustadt had already been tapped by Senator Henry Jackson, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, for a post-election assignment. Jackson, who was also chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations, was alarmed by testimony indicating that Eisenhower, as his bequest to the nation, might propose changes in the organization of the Presidency, especially the institution of a team of grand viziers to be called the First Secretary and the Executive Assistant to the President. In order to combat such proposals, Jackson had asked Neustadt to prepare a memorandum on the problems of change-over for the new President.
Neustadt completed “Organizing the Transition” by September 15. Three days later Jackson took him out to Georgetown to meet Kennedy. Kennedy, sitting in his garden, flipped through the twenty pages of the memorandum in his usual manner. He liked it at once, and it is easy to see why. The presentation was crisp and methodical, with a numbered list of specific problems and actions. It began by questioning campaign talk about “another Hundred Days”—a warning which must have inspired Kennedy, embarrassed by rhetorical excess, with confidence in the sobriety of the memorandum’s author. It constantly stressed the importance of flexibility. The President’s requirements for his personal staff, for example, “cannot be fully understood, or met, until they have been experienced.” Kennedy, moreover, was probably pleased to have a professor get into the act. At any rate, he told Neustadt to elaborate his argument in further memoranda. “When you finish,” he said, “I want you to get the material back directly to me. I don’t want you to send it to anybody else.” Neustadt asked, “How do you want me to relate to Clark Clifford?” Kennedy replied quickly, “I don’t want you to relate to Clark Clifford. I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers. If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.” Once Kennedy said that, the author of Presidential Power was thereafter on his leading strings.
Neu
stadt went back to Columbia and set to work. Toward the end of October he received a phone call from Fred Holborn of Kennedy’s office asking how he was doing. Kennedy often used Holborn, a Harvard political scientist and the son of a distinguished Yale historian, for contacts he wanted to keep out of the hands of his main staff. A few days later Holborn called again, asking Neustadt to join the Kennedy party at Norfolk, Virginia, on November 4. Neustadt duly appeared and went along on one of those frantic campaign days which began in Virginia, paused in Ohio, and concluded with a great rally at the Chicago Auditorium. In Toledo he was told to come onto the Caroline, Kennedy’s plane. After a time, Archibald Cox, who was aboard, said that the Senator was ready to see him but cautioned against conversation; “he’s saving his voice for Chicago.” Neustadt, going back to Kennedy, handed him a bundle of memoranda and said, “You don’t have to say anything—here are the memoranda—don’t bother with them till after the election.” One memorandum listed priority actions from election to Thanksgiving. Another dealt with cabinet posts. Another was called “Staffing the President-Elect”; sensing Kennedy’s affinities, Neustadt added to this appendixes discussing Roosevelt’s approach to White House staffing and to the Bureau of the Budget. Half an hour later Kennedy bounded out of his compartment in search of Neustadt. Finding him, he said, “That Roosevelt stuff is fascinating.” Neustadt said, “You’re not supposed to read it now.” Kennedy repeated, “It’s fascinating.”
The day after election, Clifford’s memorandum was delivered to Hyannis Port. It was shorter and less detailed than the Neustadt series. Where Neustadt viewed the problem in its administrative and organizational context, Clifford viewed it more in its policy context. But in the main the two advisers reinforced each other all along the line. There was only one transient issue between them. Neustadt in his September memorandum had proposed that Kennedy designate a “Number-One Boy, serving as a sort of first assistant on general operations, day by day,” to be called Executive Assistant to the President-Elect. This suggestion was contrary to the precepts of Presidential Power as well as to the practice of Kennedy, and by November Neustadt had broken up his Number-One Boy into three or four boys, deciding rightly that, as he put it to Kennedy, “You would be your own ‘chief of staff.’” Clifford, confronting the problem directly, had advised Kennedy: “A vigorous President in the Democratic tradition of the Presidency will probably find it best to act as his own chief of staff, and to have no highly visible major domo standing between him and his staff.”
These were the memoranda which Kennedy flourished at luncheon in Hyannis Port. He ignored a good many of their recommendations; but the Clifford-Neustadt emphasis on molding the executive machinery to meet the needs of the President was exactly what Kennedy wanted. When Eisenhower proposed the day after the election that Kennedy designate a representative to serve as liaison with the outgoing administration, Kennedy immediately named Clifford.
2. NAVIGATING THE TRANSITION
Kennedy now had seventy-three days to go until inauguration. With all his resilience, the daily barnstorming in the general election added to the months of primary fights, had left him physically exhausted. In earlier times, a President-elect had four months to recover—and less to recover from. Palm Beach now promised him a badly needed respite.
He also had to begin his work of reassuring the losers—a task all the more essential because of the slimness of the victory. He started this even before he left Hyannis Port. On Wednesday night after the election he relaxed at dinner with several friends. The group fell into an animated discussion of what the President-elect should do first. One guest suggested that he fire J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, another that he fire Allen W. Dulles of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kennedy, listening with apparent interest, egged his friends on. When they opened their papers the next morning, they were therefore a little irritated to read a Kennedy announcement that Hoover and Dulles were staying in their jobs.
This was part of the strategy of reassurance. Hoover and Dulles were still national ikons in 1960. Since the political cost of discharging them would have been considerable, reappointment enabled Kennedy to get full credit with their admirers for something he had no real choice but to do anyway. The same motive led him, soon after he arrived in Florida, to make a well-publicized call on Nixon, who was conducting his own recuperation not far away in Key Biscayne. Someone asked him why in the world he was doing this; Eisenhower would never have dreamed of calling on Stevenson in 1952 or 1956. Kennedy replied realistically, “There are some things Democrats must do which Republicans don’t have to do.”
In the meantime, Clifford in Washington was beginning his talks with the Eisenhower administration. His opposite number was General Wilton B. Persons of the White House staff. At their first meeting on November 14, the two men began by recalling the disastrous transitions of 1932 and 1952, “both marked by bad will and almost complete lack of communication,” and resolved to make 1960 a standard for the future. In short order, they set up a system by which Kennedy appointees would receive quick FBI clearance, Persons would put them in touch with their Eisenhower counterparts and office space could be arranged in their new departments. Thereafter Clifford and Persons remained in almost daily contact.
On November 21 Clifford and Neustadt reported their progress to the President-elect and his staff at Palm Beach. After dinner, Kennedy briskly divided up the group, taking Clifford and Sorensen into one room, asking Neustadt to wait in another room, Shriver in still another. When Neustadt’s turn arrived, Kennedy raised questions about some of the things his advisers had told him he must do as President—receiving Congressmen, for example, whenever they requested an appointment. Neustadt said that there were few imperatives in the Presidency; he should feel free to work it out in his own way. He then handed Kennedy a copy of Presidential Power, recommending that he read chapters three and seven (“The Power to Persuade” and “Men in Office”). Kennedy, almost as if surprised at the limited assignment, said, “I will read the whole book.” When he did, he found an abundance of evidence and analysis to support his predilections toward a fluid Presidency.
Early in December, Kennedy and Eisenhower had their first formal meeting. The President-elect prepared himself with great care, and the two men talked by themselves for seventy-five minutes before walking arm-in-arm into the Cabinet Room where Clifford and Persons were waiting. Persons phoned Clifford later and reported that Eisenhower, who had previously called Kennedy a “young whippersnapper,” was “overwhelmed by Senator Kennedy, his understanding of the world problems, the depth of his questions, his grasp of the issues and the keenness of his mind.” The subsequent rapport between the two principals assisted the transition process.
But Kennedy was concerned throughout not to assume responsibility until he assumed power. He remembered perhaps Hoover’s effort in 1932 to trap Roosevelt into decisions which, as Hoover privately confessed at the time, would have forced the incoming President to abandon “90 percent of the so-called new deal” and ratify “the whole major program of the Republican Administration.” In the main, the Eisenhower administration did not try to inveigle Kennedy into underwriting its policies. There were exceptions, however—most notably when Robert Anderson, the outgoing Secretary of the Treasury, wanted a Kennedy man to go with him to Bonn and discuss the gold problem with the Germans. Kennedy instead asked Paul Nitze to receive Anderson’s report on his return. Similarly the State Department sought Kennedy’s advance approval of a proposal for a multilateral nuclear force to be submitted to the December meeting of the North Atlantic Council; Kennedy again declined, instead asking Nitze and David Bruce to talk quietly with the NATO Director General, Paul-Henri Spaak. When the Eisenhower administration terminated diplomatic relations with the Castro regime early in January, Kennedy was informed but took no part in the decision.
3. CHOOSING THE CABINET: I
The question of “people” became more urgent every day. The Senate Co
mmittee on Post Office and Civil Service had thoughtfully produced a heavy green volume listing all the posts which the new President had the power to fill—the cabinet and agency heads, of course, plus about 1200 so-called Schedule C jobs, to which presidential appointees could name persons of their own choosing. For the next weeks the Green Book was the favorite reading on the New Frontier. It was known as the shopping list.
The White House staff was easy enough. Kennedy promptly announced Ted Sorensen as his Special Counsel and Pierre Salinger as his press man and made it clear that Ken O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Brien, Richard Goodwin, Myer Feldman and Ralph Dungan would all be Special Assistants. But beyond the White House lay the cabinet, and beyond the cabinet the long, hazy rank-on-rank of Green Book vacancies. Neustadt recalls Kennedy exclaiming at Palm Beach on November 21, as he mixed a batch of daiquiris before dinner, “People, people, people! I don’t know any people. I only know voters. How am I going to fill these 1200 jobs? . . . All I hear is the name Jim Perkins. Who in hell is Perkins?” (Perkins, who was then vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation and is now president of Cornell, was a name which automatically bobbed up during the interregnum whatever the post; a year or so later the all-purpose name would be Clark Kerr of the University of California.)
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