Kennedy’s acquaintance had, indeed, certain limitations. He knew most national and many local politicians, Republican as well as Democratic; he knew a number of government officials; he knew Washington newspapermen; he knew labor leaders; and he knew a smattering of college professors, mostly from the Northeast. He had his chums from Harvard, the Navy, Massachusetts politics and Palm Beach. He knew, in addition, a miscellany of writers, theatrical figures and society people. On the other hand, he knew relatively few bankers, industrialists, leaders of the bar, university presidents, deans, foundation officials, generals, farmers, social workers, scientists or engineers. In particular, he was little acquainted in the New York financial and legal community—that arsenal of talent which had so long furnished a steady supply of always orthodox and often able people to Democratic as well as Republican administrations. This community was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations; its organs, the New York Times and Foreign Affairs.* Its politics were predominantly Republican; but it possessed what its admirers saw as a commitment to public service and its critics as an appetite for power which impelled its members to serve Presidents of whatever political faith. Roosevelt and Truman had drawn freely upon them, partly to avail themselves of Establishment competence, partly to win protective coloration for policies which, with liberals in front, would have provoked conservative opposition. It was never clear who was using whom; but, since it was never clear, each side continued to find advantages in the arrangement.
The New York Establishment had looked on Kennedy with some suspicion. This was mostly because of his father, whom it had long since blackballed as a maverick in finance and an isolationist in foreign policy. It was perhaps also because the younger Kennedy’s main associations were with Democratic politicians and academic intellectuals, two groups the New York Establishment regarded with mistrust; and partly too because it had not recovered from a 1957 speech attacking French policy in Algeria which had shocked it to the core and even created the myth that Kennedy was anti-NATO, a cardinal Establishment sin. Now that he was President, however, they were prepared to rally round; and, now that he was President, he was prepared to receive them. This too was part of the strategy of reassurance. It also might help solve the problem of people.
The chief agent in the negotiation was Lovett, a man of great subtlety, experience and charm. Lovett punctiliously informed Kennedy that he had voted for Nixon, apparently out of fear of J. K. Galbraith; but Kennedy, with the election out of the way, was losing much of his interest in how people voted (an indifference which distressed the academic intellectuals as much as the Mafia). He told Clifford, “Now on those key jobs, I don’t care whether a man is a Democrat or an Igorot. I want the best fellow I can get for the particular job.” After a couple of conversations, Kennedy found himself captivated by Lovett. No doubt Lovett’s urbane realism was a relief from the liberal idealists, like myself, who were assailing the President-elect with virtuous opinions and nominations. Certainly Lovett opened a new sector of talent for him and exerted a quiet influence on his tastes in the next weeks.
Kennedy was prepared to offer Lovett his choice of the three top cabinet portfolios—State, Defense and the Treasury—and he sent Clark Clifford to New York to make a particularly strong try on the last. Over a three-hour luncheon, Lovett, while protesting how much he would like to serve, explained that he had recently had two bouts with bleeding ulcers and doubted whether his doctor would let him do it. When Clifford reported this to Kennedy, the President-elect wondered whether Lovett could be induced to take Defense for a year with Robert Kennedy as Under Secretary; if not, he might want to retain Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Thomas W. Gates, for a year, also with Bobby as his second man. In either case, he would expect to move Bobby up at the end of the year. But his advisers argued strongly against keeping Gates, pointing out that Kennedy, after having made a campaign issue about the inadequacy of our defenses, could hardly anoint the man who bore so heavy a part of the responsibility.
The President-elect talked a good deal about cabinet problems when I saw him in Washington on December 1. “State, Treasury and Defense,” he told me, “are giving me the most trouble. I’d like to have some new faces here, but all I get is the same old names. It’s discouraging. But I suppose that it will take a little while to develop new talent.” He seemed in general much more on the defensive than at Hyannis Port—more oppressed by the narrowness of his victory, by the gravity of the balance-of-payments situation and the flight of American gold overseas, by the urgency of appointing people who would get along with what he was now convinced would be a “rough” and conservative Congress.
He had reached firm decisions on two Cabinet appointments—Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina for Commerce and Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut for Health, Education and Welfare. Both appointments fitted into the pattern of reassurance. Hodges was an older man, nearly twenty years the President’s senior, a southerner of geniality and presence; his designation would appeal to Congress and to the business community. Ribicoff, too, had been an attractive and prudent governor as well as a man to whom Kennedy was indebted for support in the pre-convention period. To give Health, Education and Welfare to Ribicoff he had to reject the claims of Sargent Shriver and of Mennen Williams. Shriver was, of course, a brother-in-law; and, if he were to risk appointing a member of his family to the Cabinet, it seemed that Robert Kennedy should have the priority. As for Williams, who had long been under attack for supposed prodigality as governor of Michigan, “there were just too many difficulties . . . I just don’t think he is the man to go before this Congress and request big spending bills for education and medical care. Abe will be able to do this much more effectively.” He had announced Williams’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa that morning. I asked whether Williams had been unhappy about this. Kennedy said, “He was at first, but I think he is feeling better now. After all, you could hardly ask for a more challenging job.”
Kennedy had also by this time substantially decided on two more appointments—Stewart Udall of Arizona as Secretary of the Interior, unless Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico wanted it, and Arthur Goldberg of Illinois as Secretary of Labor, if opposition within the labor movement, especially from the building trades, could be overridden. Both appointments were almost inevitable. Udall, young, brisk, literate and a Mormon, not only had a distinguished record in Congress as a defender of the nation’s resources but had snatched the Arizona delegation away from Lyndon Johnson and turned it over to Kennedy before Los Angeles. Goldberg was a man of unquestioned ability and drive whom Kennedy had got to know well in the Senate fights over labor legislation in 1958 and 1959. It turned out that Anderson did not want Interior too much and that the building unions could be ignored, so Kennedy was free to go ahead. When Udall was announced, Kennedy heard from Robert Frost: GREAT DAYS FOR BOSTON, DEMOCRACY, THE PURITANS AND THE IRISH. YOUR APPOINTMENT OF STEWART UDALL OF AN OLD VERMONT RELIGION RECONCILES ME ONCE FOR ALL TO THE PARTY I WAS BORN INTO.
Our talk had begun at noon in his Senate office. We then drove out to Georgetown for a drink before luncheon. In due course Lovett arrived for lunch, and I took my leave. Actually, after this meeting with Lovett, Kennedy was well on his way to the solution of the Defense problem. During his talk with Clifford in New York, Lovett had mentioned Robert S. McNamara, a Michigan business executive, just a year older than Kennedy, who had been elected president of the Ford Motor Company the day after Kennedy had been elected President of the United States. During the Second World War, Lovett, then Assistant Secretary of War for Air, had brought to the Pentagon a team of management specialists from the Harvard Business School. McNamara, he told Clifford, was the prize of the lot, and the Kennedy people ought to consider him for either the Tre
asury or Defense. Though the nation’s previous experience with presidents of motor companies as government officials, and particularly as Secretary of Defense, had not been inspiring, Kennedy, impressed by Lovett’s recommendation, asked Sargent Shriver to take a look.
The look revealed that McNamara was, indeed, an exceptional figure. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California in 1937, he had gone on to the Harvard Business School, where he did so well that on graduation he was appointed an assistant professor of business administration. He was already beginning to display quiet symptoms of heterodoxy. During the 1940 election, a poll of the Business School faculty produced a vote of 98 to 3 in favor of Willkie against Roosevelt. McNamara was one of the heretics; the other was a young colleague named Eugene Zuckert. Ending the war as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, McNamara then joined Ford, rising steadily to the top. In Michigan, he continued to show wayward tendencies. He declined, for example, to live with other Ford executives in the suburb known derisively on the New Frontier as Fat Point, preferring the academic environment of Ann Arbor. He exhibited sympathy for such dubious organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had been tremendously impressed by Profiles in Courage, and, though nominally a Republican, had voted for Kennedy and contributed money to his campaign.
Kennedy knew none of these last facts, however, but Shriver reported that one of his associates in the talent search, Adam Yarmolinsky, had met McNamara and had the highest opinion of him. J. K. Galbraith, who had sought McNamara’s assistance in the fifties for a book on economic organization, also recommended him. One day late in November McNamara received a call from Robert Kennedy requesting that he see Sargent Shriver. When McNamara asked what about, Kennedy said that he would rather let his brother-in-law say when they met. McNamara responded that he could see Shriver the next week. Kennedy remarked that Shriver was prepared to go out to Detroit that afternoon.
Shriver, arriving later that day, said that the President-elect had authorized him to offer McNamara an appointment either as Secretary of Defense or as Secretary of the Treasury. Nothing could have surprised McNamara more. He quickly declined the Treasury on the ground that he had had no experience in banking or fiscal affairs. As for Defense, such experience as he had had was fifteen years out of date and pre-nuclear. Moreover, he had only just begun his new job as president of Ford. Shriver asked whether McNamara would meet personally with the President-elect before reaching a final decision. McNamara agreed, purely as a matter of courtesy, to come to Washington the next day.
When McNamara repeated his arguments to the President-elect, Kennedy replied drily that he was not aware of any school for either cabinet members or Presidents, and that he considered lack of experience no excuse. Shifting his ground, McNamara named several other people as better qualified. Kennedy rejected them all for reasons which McNamara felt bound to accept. Then McNamara took the offensive, asking Kennedy whether he had really written Profiles in Courage. Kennedy assured him that he had. But McNamara, though pleased by the ease and candor of their talk, continued to insist that his own appointment would be a mistake. Kennedy asked him to think about it some more and see him again in a few days. McNamara left under Kennedy’s spell, thought about the matter some more, and, at their second meeting, ascertained that he would have a free hand in making appointments and accepted the post.
4. CHOOSING THE CABINET: II
The problem of the Treasury was still unresolved, though the successive approaches to Lovett and McNamara showed how Kennedy’s mind was running. Throughout the autumn he had heard a great deal about the balance of payments and the flight of gold from the country, and since the election he had heard very little else. A task force on national security headed by Paul Nitze reported to him that “all those whom we consulted in the New York business community” had put the gold drain at the top of their list of issues, and that friends in State and Treasury had told the task force that the problem was worse than publicly admitted. “The early appointment of a Secretary of the Treasury who enjoys high respect and confidence in the international financial world,” the Nitze report declared, “would do more than anything else that your Committee can think of to consolidate confidence in the international payments position of the United States.”
Even Richard Neustadt conceded that there was much to be said “for bowing to tradition and drawing your secretary out of the financial community. . . . His daily duties cannot help but make him sensitive to the concerns of bankers and investors, their colleagues overseas, and their friends on the Hill. He will end as a ‘spokesman’ for them. He might as well begin as an effective spokesman to them.” Neustadt suggested someone of the type of Lovett, McCloy or Douglas Dillon, Under Secretary of State in the outgoing administration and the son of Clarence Dillon of Dillon, Read and Company. “Since Treasury is a major foreign policy post,” Neustadt continued, “you would be advantaged further if your man had had a previous experience in State.” If Kennedy followed these specifications, Neustadt conceded, he would probably end up with a Republican; but even this had an advantage—“the symbolisms of ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ rolled into one.” But Kennedy, Neustadt warned, could pay too great a price; he had better be sure that the man would wear well as a colleague before taking him into the bosom of the family. “Among Republicans, Stimsons and Lovetts are not met with every day; and superficial resemblances can be deceiving. It would be better to forego the symbolism, and to settle for a Democratic known quantity, than to risk a Martin Durkin case.”*
This last sentence expressed a widespread feeling among Kennedy’s supporters. Even some who accepted the Wall Street-acceptability thesis were dismayed at the prospect of installing a Republican in the economic high command of a Democratic administration. About this time a countermovement started for Eugene Black of the World Bank, a man acceptable to Wall Street but at least a Democrat. Still others, seeing the Treasury as crucial for an expansionist economic policy, challenged the whole criterion of Wall Street acceptability. Admitting that the gold drain was a problem, they feared that a conservative Secretary would apply the conventional remedy—i.e., reduce public spending and increase the interest rate, even at the risk of deflation and unemployment. It seemed essential to have a Secretary committed to the use of fiscal and monetary policy to stimulate economic growth. Thus Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee contended to Kennedy on November 22 that the Treasury was the key to the success of his Presidency. “The present difficulties with balance of payments . . . are symptoms, really, of the failure of the present administration to keep the United States on the ‘move.’ . . . Why, then, should you consider for a fleeting moment for appointment to the key post of Treasury one whose chief claim to fame is that he has been a member of a team that failed its most important test? This applies not only to Mr. Dillon, who is an affable easy-goer, but to other conservative Republicans who have been mentioned.” Such an appointment “would be a signal that you had given up the goals of a truly Democratic Administration.”
We had similar apprehensions in Cambridge, and Kenneth Galbraith, Seymour Harris, Paul Samuelson and I met one day in an effort to come up with a candidate. We thought of Averell Harriman, Senator Gore, Congressman Henry Reuss, Congressman Richard Bolling, all of whom were well qualified for the job but lacked, except possibly for Harriman, the mystic relationship with the lower end of Manhattan Island; even Harriman, we conceded, would probably be rejected there as a renegade. A few days later, Galbraith and I went to Washington to go over the Cambridge slate with Sargent Shriver. Dining that evening with Philip Graham, we were distressed by his impassioned insistence that Douglas Dillon should—and would—be made Secretary of the Treasury. Without knowing Dillon, we mistrusted him on principle as a presumed exponent of Republican economic policies. In addition, as an historian and therefore a conservative, I could recall no precedent for giving a vital cabinet post to a sub-c
abinet official of a defeated administration, especially to an official who had contributed to Nixon’s campaign and might well have been Nixon’s nominee for the same job.
When I mentioned this to the President-elect in Washington on December 1, he remarked of Dillon, “Oh, I don’t care about those things. All I want to know is: is he able? and will he go along with the program?” They had first met in Cambridge in 1956 when Kennedy received a Harvard honorary degree and Dillon was the Chief Marshal of the Twenty-fifth Reunion class. After the exercises, they met again as fellow members in the rooms of the Spee Club. In 1958, when Dillon received an honorary degree himself, Kennedy took note of his Alumni Day speech calling for an increase in the national growth rate. In the next years, they came to know each other better, and Joseph Alsop as well as Philip Graham had been eloquently urging Dillon’s appointment on the President-elect. But Dillon was still surprised to get a phone call from Salinger in late November saying that Kennedy wanted to come over to his house that evening. Pressing Dillon on the question of economic growth, Kennedy satisfied himself that he had found a man whom bankers would trust but who also would support expansionist policies. He therefore resolved to ignore the liberal protests and go ahead.
One obstacle remained: Robert Kennedy, who kept asking what would happen if Dillon resigned in a few months with a blast against the administration’s financial policies. He warned his brother that they were putting themselves in the hands of a Republican who had no reason for loyalty to them and might well betray them. Finally the President-elect consented to Bobby’s plea that prior assurances of good behavior be obtained. As Dillon was waiting with the President-elect in the Georgetown house before going downstairs to meet the press, Bobby by prearrangement broke in on them and asked bluntly what Dillon would do if he found himself in disagreement with the policy. Dillon, a little surprised but always the Harvard man, said that, if he felt he had to resign, he would of course go quietly.
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