A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  The President-elect’s judgment turned out to be correct. Indeed, no two people became closer friends in the next years than Dillon and Bobby. When one came later to know the Secretary of the Treasury, the anomaly seemed to be, not that he was willing to join the Kennedy administration, but that he ever could have endured the Eisenhower administration. He used to describe the cabinet meetings—the opening prayer, the visual aids, the rehearsed presentations. “We sat around looking at the plans for Dulles Airport. They had a model and everything, and we would say why don’t you put a door there, and they would explain why they didn’t. It was great fun if you didn’t have anything to do.” At the same time, though Dillon was considerably more liberal than the Cambridge group thought, he was still likely to be influenced by Wall Street and Republican associations as well as by the institutional conservatism of the Treasury. Following a balancing principle, Kennedy prepared to give the other key economic posts—the directorship of the Bureau of the Budget and the chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisers—to liberal Democrats.

  Clark Clifford had already proposed David Bell, another of Harry Truman’s young men in the White House, for the Budget. After serving as a Truman Special Assistant, Bell had worked in the Stevenson campaign in 1952, then spent some years in Pakistan running an economic mission for the Ford Foundation and had come to the Littauer School at Harvard in the late fifties. The audacity of Clifford’s suggestion can be measured by the fact that the Cambridge group, admiring Bell’s ability but wondering at his youth, had only dared suggest him as associate director. Kennedy sent Shriver on the usual tour of inspection, received a highly favorable report and then talked with Bell himself. He later told me, “He’s a quiet fellow, but I liked him and I think I’ll go through with him.” Bell was, indeed, a quiet fellow compared to some of the other Cambridge economists (and historians), but he had the calmness of temperament, the openness and precision of mind and the moderation of judgment which were bound to impress the President-elect.

  For the chairmanship of the Council, the Harvard group, and doubtless many others, proposed Professor Walter Heller of the University of Minnesota. Kennedy’s first thought was Paul Samuelson; but Samuelson could not be lured down from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in any case, Kennedy was beginning to fear that he might be overdoing appointments from Cambridge. Hubert Humphrey had introduced Heller to him in Minnesota during the campaign. Kennedy, who had instantly subjected him to a cross-examination on economic policy, remembered him favorably and decided to go ahead. One day in December, back in Palm Beach, Richard Neustadt handed Kennedy a memorandum on the Council. Kennedy observed that he had already chosen his chairman and, indeed, was at that moment waiting to hear from him. In a few minutes Heller called in from Minnesota. As Neustadt watched with fascination, Kennedy cradled the phone on his shoulder, and, while he carried on a detailed conversation with Heller, flicked through Neustadt’s memorandum on the Council, picked up the morning Herald Tribune, looked at the first page and the editorial page, let it slip to the floor, picked up the Times, looked at the first page and the editorial page, retrieved the memorandum, read parts of it aloud to Heller, dropped it on the floor again and simultaneously completed his business and the morning papers.

  For the second place in the Council, Heller suggested James Tobin who, though he had a Harvard degree, had fortunately moved on to Yale and was thus not subject to the Cambridge ban. Tobin was a brilliant economic theorist; and, when Kennedy called him, he tried to set forth what he considered his lack of qualifications for the job, concluding, “I am afraid that I am only an ivory-tower economist.” Kennedy replied, “That is the best kind. I am only an ivory-tower President.” The deal was promptly consummated. For the third member, Heller wanted Kermit Gordon of Williams. Kennedy, retaining a vague memory of Gordon’s reluctance to work for him in 1959, was unenthusiastic, and the decision was delayed until January. Finally Heller called on Kennedy at the Hotel Carlyle in New York, hoping to get the matter settled. While he waited, he discussed the problem with Ken O’Donnell. O’Donnell asked whether Gordon was really the best man for the job. Heller said emphatically that he was. O’Donnell then said that he should stick to his guns and tell the President-elect that he had to have Gordon. Heller did so when he saw Kennedy a few minutes later. Kennedy said, “Oh, all right,” picked up the phone and called Gordon in Williamstown. Both appointments proved great successes; and Gordon, who quickly won Kennedy’s esteem, eventually succeeded Bell at the Budget.

  Two conundrums remained—State and Justice—and two uncertainties—Agriculture and Post Office. Nothing was giving Kennedy more trouble than State. The Democrat with the strongest claim was Adlai Stevenson, and Stevenson fully expected to be offered the job. But when the President-elect returned from Palm Beach in late November he told Stevenson that he had taken too many public positions on prickly issues and would in consequence be too ‘controversial’ for Congress; given the margin of the election, Kennedy said that he needed most of all a Secretary of State who could get along on Capitol Hill. In addition, Kennedy privately questioned Stevenson’s capacity for decision and no doubt also did not want a Secretary of State with whom he feared he might not feel personally comfortable.

  In talking to Stevenson, Kennedy went on to say that Stevenson had more international prestige than any other Democrat and, in Kennedy’s view, could make his greatest contribution as Ambassador to the United Nations. Though this was a hard blow to Stevenson, he accepted it realistically, saying only that he could not take the UN assignment until he knew who the Secretary of State would be. Kennedy told Stevenson not to worry; as President, he would guarantee any stipulations Stevenson wanted to make about the UN job. But Stevenson insisted that the Secretary would have to be someone with whom he could have a relationship of mutual confidence. He had been told by Walter Lippmann that McGeorge Bundy might be the choice; and, since Bundy had voted against him in two elections, Stevenson doubted whether the required confidence would exist between them; therefore he could not immediately accept the post. Kennedy was nettled at this reaction and strengthened in his belief in Stevenson’s indecisiveness.

  On December 1, he asked me why Stevenson did not want to take the UN job. I started to explain that Stevenson had been at the UN before and that this time he wanted to help shape foreign policy rather than be at the other end of the telephone. Kennedy broke in, “The UN is different now. I think this job has great possibilities.” Then, to my astonishment, he said, “I have another thought. What about Adlai for Attorney General?” I was completely taken aback. Kennedy continued, “I’d like Stevenson for Attorney General and Paul Freund for Solicitor General.” That night he sounded out Bill Blair on the possibility of Stevenson for Justice, but word came back that Stevenson thought his greatest usefulness would lie in foreign affairs and preferred the UN.

  The political grounds which excluded Stevenson from the Secretaryship applied just as much, or more, in Kennedy’s mind to Chester Bowles. But his political indebtedness to Bowles, who had been the first nationally known liberal to support him for the nomination and had served as a nominal ‘foreign policy adviser’ during the campaign, was very much greater. He therefore decided to make Bowles Under Secretary. With Lovett out of the picture, the leading candidates for the top job were now David Bruce, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Dean Rusk of the Rockefeller Foundation.

  When I talked to Kennedy on December 1, it was clear that his thoughts were turning more and more to Fulbright. He liked Fulbright, the play of his civilized mind, the bite of his language and the direction of his thinking on foreign affairs. Moreover, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright had considerable influence on the Hill. But there were problems too. Fulbright had not had an executive job since he was president of the University of Arkansas, and some doubted his capacity to control a large organization. More seriously, he had taken the segregationist position on civil rights, even going
to the length of filing an amicus curiae brief against the government during the Little Rock crisis of 1957; this would hardly commend him to the new African states. And his opposition to an all-out anti-Nasser policy had aroused concern in the Jewish community.

  At this point, some of Bowles’s backers, acting without his knowledge, began stirring up Negro and Jewish organizations against Fulbright. And people close to the President-elect came to feel that Fulbright’s appointment would create unnecessary difficulties with the new nations. If as Secretary of State, for example, he had to take a position against the African states, it might be received, not on its merits, but as an expression of racial prejudice. Kennedy had almost decided on Fulbright; but finally, after rather heated arguments, the President-elect yielded and struck Fulbright’s name from the list.

  David Bruce now became the leading candidate. Philip Graham, Joseph Alsop and others recommended Bruce. He was one of the most experienced of all American diplomats. He had served with distinction in Paris and Bonn. He had been Under Secretary of State in the last years of the Truman administration. Moreover, he had the gift of attracting and using able young men. But he was sixty-two years old, his orientation was European, Lovett was unenthusiastic, and, though he was respected on the Hill, he had no conspicuous following there. Lovett instead began to argue vigorously for Dean Rusk.

  Rusk, who was fifty-one years old, had a plausible background. He had been a Rhodes Scholar and a professor of government before the war. He had served with the Army in the Far East; and, after the war, he had gone to the State Department, heading the Office of United Nations Affairs and ending up as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs. At the Rockefeller Foundation he had supervised programs of health, education and technical assistance in the underdeveloped countries. He was a Democrat (in fact, he had been chairman of the Stevenson-for-President Committee in Scarsdale in the spring of 1960). Lovett recommended him for the job as against Bruce or Fulbright. Acheson thought highly of him. Bowles, who was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, spoke of him with enthusiasm. Robert Kennedy believed him the best solution. The Kennedy staff read all his speeches and articles they could find and discovered nothing which would cause trouble on the Hill. Kennedy himself was especially taken with parts of a piece Rusk had written for Foreign Affairs in the spring of 1960 entitled “The President.” Here Rusk discussed the Presidency as the place from which leadership in foreign policy must flow and emphasized the President’s responsibility “to influence and shape the course of events.” (Actually, though the article showed a nice appreciation of the Presidency, it also contained another and somewhat contradictory argument that the President should not engage in foreign negotiations, above all at the summit, and should leave diplomacy to the diplomats.)

  On December 4 the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation was meeting at Williamsburg, Virginia. Lovett, McCloy, Bowles, Ralph Bunche and Rusk—all of whom had been mentioned by now as possible Secretaries—were sitting around the conference table when Rusk was called out of the room for a phone call; it was the President-elect inviting him to Washington. On the night of December 7 Rusk dined at Bowles’s house in Georgetown and asked him in detail about Kennedy. They met for the first time the next morning. Kennedy mentioned the Foreign Affairs piece but said nothing directly about the Secretaryship. Rusk left certain that he and Kennedy were on different wavelengths and that their meeting had come to nothing. But Kennedy was attracted by the clarity of Rusk’s views, the quiet competence of his manner and the apparent solidity of his judgment. Accordingly he offered Rusk the Secretaryship the next day. The appointment was announced on December 12 with Bowles as Under Secretary and Stevenson, who knew and liked Rusk, as Ambassador to the United Nations.

  The Department of Justice confronted Kennedy with a problem almost as difficult as State but for different reasons. Abraham Ribicoff, to whom the Attorney Generalship was first offered, turned it down; he thought that it would not help the cause if a Jewish Attorney General were putting Negro children into white schools in the South, and he preferred a less controversial post. Adlai Stevenson was not interested. The President-elect’s father meanwhile hoped that Robert Kennedy would become Attorney General. Bobby himself was reluctant. He felt that, after five years as counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, he had been “chasing people” too long and wanted a different kind of assignment now. Also, he recalled an incident in the campaign when Nixon, passing through South Carolina, had tried to conceal the presence of Attorney General William Rogers on his plane, knowing how unpopular Rogers’s civil rights activity had made him in the South. Bobby’s view was that, if the new Attorney General were named Kennedy, this inevitable unpopularity would quickly spread to the President himself. Instead, he contemplated the possibility of becoming Under Secretary of Defense or perhaps Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs in the State Department. His father argued forcibly, however, that Bobby obviously had to report directly to the President; if he were in a subordinate post, the position of the official who stood between himself and the President would be impossible. Since Bobby did not want to work in the White House, this left the cabinet. Nonetheless, after a time Bobby decided against Justice, thinking that he might return to Massachusetts and run for governor in 1962.

  The President-elect, however, wanted his brother in Washington and also wanted an Attorney General in whom he could repose absolute trust. Though nearly all the advice to both brothers was against the idea, he called Bobby over for breakfast one morning and told him that he would have to take the job. When Ben Bradlee later asked Kennedy how he proposed to announce his brother’s appointment, he said, “Well, I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’” When the moment finally came, and the brothers started out the door to face the press, he said, “Damn it, Bobby, comb your hair.” Then: “Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we are happy about the appointment.”

  I had luncheon with Bobby in Washington the day before his appointment was announced. He seemed both rueful and fatalistic about his prospective eminence. The problem of assuring his brother a sufficiently diversified White House staff was much on his mind. Obviously, he said, the President needed to enlarge his staff beyond the men who had worked for him in the Senate and the campaign, able and loyal as they were. Moreover, some neutral figures ought to be introduced in order to relieve what he feared might be a tension between the Sorensen and O’Donnell groups. Thus he had recruited Fred Dutton of California for the White House and had tried in vain to get Richard Neustadt. As we were chatting, he abruptly asked me what I intended to do for my country. I said that an ambassadorship and the Assistant Secretaryship of State in charge of cultural relations had been mentioned, but that neither prospect attracted me much. He then asked whether it would be agreeable if he suggested to his brother that I come down as a Special Assistant to the President and serve as a sort of roving reporter and trouble-shooter. I said I would be delighted.

  Bobby’s appointment left Agriculture and the Post Office untenanted. By this time, there was spreading unhappiness among the liberals over the failure of any of their particular favorites, except Arthur Goldberg, to make the cabinet. Stevenson was off in the United Nations; Bowles and Williams were in sub-cabinet posts; George McGovern was slated to head the Food for Peace program, Frank Coffin the Development Loan Fund. When I mentioned this discontent to the President-elect, he said, “Yes, I know, the liberals want visual reassurance just like everybody else. But they shouldn’t worry. What matters is the program. We are going down the linę on the program.” I suggested that what he had in mind was an administration of conservative men and liberal measures. He said, “We’ll have to go along with this for a year or so. Then I would like to bring in some new people.” He paused and added reflectively, “I suppose it may be hard to get rid of these people once they are in.”
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  Still, one policy position remained—Agriculture—and one strong liberal candidate—Orville Freeman. Actually Freeman did not much want Agriculture. He would have preferred to be Attorney General or even, for some reason, Secretary of the Army. A number of other middle-western Democratic governors—Herschel Loveless of Iowa, George Docking of Kansas—as well as George McGovern and farm leaders like Fred V. Heinkel of Missouri were active candidates for Agriculture. Kennedy regarded the appointment with some perplexity. His upbringing was ineradicably urban. He had taken positions on farm policy as a Senator which made trouble for him when he became a candidate for the nomination; and the more he had studied the agricultural problem, the more he regarded it with a mixture of distrust and incipient despair. He wanted someone intelligent and tough enough to take the problem off his shoulders and even, perhaps, to find solutions. He talked to Loveless, Docking, Heinkel and others, and his sense of hopelessness mounted. He would have liked to appoint McGovern, but there was strong feeling in the Senate that, as a young Congressman who had just lost a senatorial contest, he lacked sufficient seniority. As time passed, Kennedy decided that Freeman was the man. Freeman had a political base in the Middle West, even if he came from Minneapolis rather than from the farms; he was intelligent and brave; he had an ex-Marine’s indomitability before insoluble problems; Galbraith, who in the remote past had been an agricultural economist, recommended him; and his appointment would please the liberals. When the matter was put to him, Freeman cheerfully consented. (Asked how he happened to have received the invitation, Freeman said, “I’m not really sure, but I think it’s something to do with the fact that Harvard does not have a school of agriculture.”)