A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Only the Post Office was left. There had been a flurry of newspaper speculation over Congressman William Dawson, a Negro political leader from Chicago. Though Kennedy had not offered Dawson the post and had no intention of doing so, the story caught on quickly and began a comedy of complication. Senator Olin D. Johnston, the chairman of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, denounced the idea as a conspiracy by political opponents in South Carolina designed to force him to have his picture taken with a Negro Postmaster General and thereby weaken him for his next primary contest. On the other side, Mayor Daley of Chicago was concerned lest an outright repudiation of the story seem a rebuff to Dawson and himself. The President-elect finally hit on a diplomatic solution by proposing an exchange of messages in which he would offer the post to Dawson and Dawson would decline it. This having been done, the search continued. Because the Pacific coast was conspicuously unrepresented in the cabinet, word went out to dig up a California businessman. Someone suggested J. Edward Day of Prudential Insurance. Day, a man of rollicking humor, had been Adlai Stevenson’s Insurance Commissioner in Illinois before moving to the West. His credentials appeared good, and his rather hasty appointment on December 17 completed the Kennedy cabinet.

  VI

  Prelude to the New Frontier

  THE CABINET WAS only the beginning. There remained those vital levers of power in the policy-making jobs just below the cabinet, and these the new President had to control if he meant to command the executive branch. This was the domain of the Green Book and of Schedule C; here, presumably, 1200 places waited to be filled.

  He had given Sargent Shriver the job of spying out the land and carrying through the occupation. Though people were sometimes deceived by Shriver’s unruffled courtesy and easy amiability into dismissing him as something of a Boy Scout, the President-elect had confidence in his energy and imagination—a confidence Shriver had justified in the campaign and justified again now. He assembled a small group—Harris Wofford, the law school professor who had been with him during the campaign, Adam Yarmolinsky, a lawyer and foundation executive, Louis Martin, a Negro newspaperman who worked for the Democratic National Committee, Herbert Klotz, a New York businessman, and Thomas Farmer, a Washington lawyer. The Shriver staff immediately got on the telephone, and the great talent hunt began.

  1. MANNING THE SHIP

  Kennedy, as usual, did not propose to give anyone exclusive authority. He therefore charged Shriver to work with Lawrence O’Brien, Ralph Dungan and Richard Donahue, who represented the political interest in appointments. In a sense, the Shriver group Began with the positions and looked for people qualified to fill them, and the O’Brien group began with the people and looked for positions they were qualified to fill; one concentrated on recruitment and the other on placement. But the Shriver group understood the importance of finding people who would be loyal to the administration, and the O’Brien group understood the importance of finding people who would do a good job, so there was not too much friction between them. When disagreements arose, Yarmolinsky and Dungan were generally able to resolve them.

  The proportions of the search turned out to be not so great as it had first looked. Of the 1200 Schedule C jobs, nearly four-fifths were presently filled from the career service, and about half the incumbents had competitive Civil Service status. Almost 500 of the Schedule C jobs, indeed, were not “policy-determining” at all but rather personal aides to policy makers—secretaries, chauffeurs, and the like. In the end, the Kennedy administration kept most of the career people, including even some on the sub-cabinet level. Nevertheless, a considerable number of vacancies remained. To fill these, the Shriver group began to compile what they hopefully described as an index of excellence.

  They started from scratch and learned as they went. Shriver hoped for a moment that they might benefit from business methods and obtained the loan of a top personnel man from IBM. But, after suggesting as tests of excellence such standards as the rate at which a man’s income had increased or the number of people he supervised—both of which the Shriver group found exceedingly unhelpful—the business expert departed, conceding that he had little to offer. The Shriver people ended by devising their own criteria—judgment, integrity, ability to work with others, industry, devotion to the principles of the President-elect and toughness. (The last provoked considerable jocularity in the press as well as a number of phone calls from office-seekers proclaiming, “I am tough”; what was meant was the ability, as Yarmolinsky later put it, “to make use of the vast resources of government without becoming, as some political appointees have become in the past, merely instruments of the permanent staff.”)

  They had to learn too about the government. At the start, assuming that Schedule C was sacred and unalterable, they spent valuable time trying to figure out why a job in the Interior Department, for example, was defined in a particular way and classified at a particular level, not realizing that some hard-pressed Assistant Secretary had probably dreamed it up to take care of the protégé of a powerful Senator. Only later did they discover that the inherited table of organization could be juggled and changed around. They received complete cooperation from Roger Jones of the Civil Service Commission and Robert Hampton, who headed Eisenhower’s patronage office, but for a long time did not know enough to take full advantage of their help.

  They worked night after night through November and December in offices provided by the Democratic National Committee, striving to make sure that all groups and regions were represented in their recommendations. They cast their net especially for women, for Negroes, for westerners. After a time, to be a Harvard graduate, a member of the Cambridge academic complex or an Irish Catholic was almost a handicap, surmountable only by offsetting evidence of spectacular excellence. (When McNamara’s name first came up, there was concern until it was ascertained that he was a Protestant.) Politics mattered here a little more than in Palm Beach; but, if it was helpful to be a Democrat, it did not prove essential to have been a Kennedy Democrat. For a moment Ted Sorensen suggested a point system—so many points for having been with Kennedy before Wisconsin, so many for having been with Kennedy at Los Angeles, and so on—but the idea soon seemed irrelevant. As each cabinet member was appointed, a representative of the Shriver group provided him with a list of names carefully culled for his consideration. By mid-December, the first stage of the roundup was complete. Shriver now left for a holiday in the West Indies. Ralph Dungan took over the talent hunt, later continuing it from the White House.

  Each department presented special circumstances. By the time Rusk was offered the State Department, for example, several crucial appointments in the foreign field—Stevenson, Bowles, Williams—had already been made. The next important place was the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs; and here the leading candidate was William C. Foster, a liberal-minded Republican businessman who had held important jobs in the Truman administration. But the prospect of a Republican appointment in addition to Dillon and McNamara seemed excessive, especially when a well-qualified Democrat was available. The well-qualified Democrat was George W. Ball, the Washington lawyer and long-time friend of Adlai Stevenson’s who had been closely associated with Jean Monnet and the European Common Market. John Sharon carried word of Foster’s impending designation to Stevenson, who called Senator Fulbright, then vacationing in Florida, and asked him to take the matter up with Kennedy. Fulbright went over to Palm Beach and suggested to the President-elect that giving Republicans so many top posts in State, Treasury and Defense was manifestly unfair to Democrats who had worked hard for his election. He added that this policy would create the impression that the Democratic party lacked men of sufficient stature. The argument proved effective. Kennedy withdrew the offer to Foster and appointed Ball; he later made Foster director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

  The Ball argument also applied to the case of Averell Harriman. Kennedy had not known Harriman well, but he appreciated his staunch support before the convention and re
cognized that Harriman’s record and experience in foreign affairs were unmatched in the nation. Still, both the President-elect and his brother remembered Harriman most as a political leader in New York, where he had not always been at his best, and they feared that, at sixty-nine and slightly deaf, he was too old for active service. When I once urged Harriman on Bobby, he said sympathetically, “Are you sure that giving Averell a job wouldn’t be just an act of sentiment?” I said that I thought Harriman had one or two missions left under his belt. For some weeks after the election, Harriman heard nothing from Kennedy. In the meantime, the names of his less distinguished but more conservative contemporaries Lovett and McCloy were constantly in the newspapers as Kennedy advisers or possible Cabinet members. Harriman might well have wondered at this point whether he would not have done better to have stayed a Republican thirty-five years earlier instead of breaking with the New York Establishment and going over to Al Smith. But, if he felt this way, he gave no sign of it.

  When I lunched with him in New York on December 11, he was temperate and wise. He understood the need for caution in view of the closeness of the election but added that he hoped Kennedy would not appoint too many businessmen; “people have to be given big jobs when they are young, or else their minds become permanently closed. The men who work their way step by step to the top in business are no good for anything big in government. They have acquired too many bad habits along the way.” I remarked that the President-elect seemed especially concerned about his relations with Congress. Harriman said, “Everyone worries about the things he knows best. Jack knows the Senate better than anything else, so he worries about that. For just the same reason, I worry most about the Russians.” During the campaign, he had sent word to Khrushchev to be equally harsh about both candidates lest any leniency toward Kennedy help Nixon. He was pleased by a message he had now received from Khrushchev pointing out that Moscow had taken care to be as critical of the Democrats as of the Republicans. Khrushchev went on to imply that the election had wiped the slate clean and that discussions might now resume with the United States. Harriman thought there might be an opportunity for fresh initiatives in the cold war; but he also feared that the Russians might try something risky somewhere in order to test Kennedy’s will and response.

  Harriman had many admirers on the New Frontier. In time Kennedy, though still a little skeptical, yielded to their enthusiasm and decided to appoint him as the State Department’s roving ambassador. First, however, he asked Bill Walton to make Harriman promise to equip himself with a hearing aid. When Walton accomplished this delicate mission, the appointment went through.

  Staffing the rest of the State Department involved complicated negotiations among Kennedy, Rusk, Bowles and the Shriver office. Kennedy wanted McGeorge Bundy somewhere on the top level of the State Department; for a moment in early December he had even wondered whether he might be a possible Secretary. He also thought that Walt W. Rostow, with his force and fertility of thought, should be counselor and chairman of the Policy Planning Council. But Rusk for various reasons resisted both Bundy and Rostow. From the institutional interests of the Department, this was a grievous error. Kennedy promptly decided to take them into the White House, Bundy as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and Rostow as his deputy. The result was to give the White House an infusion of energy on foreign affairs with which the State Department would never in the next three years (even after Rostow finally got the policy planning job) quite catch up.

  One reason for Rusk’s opposition to Rostow was his desire to keep the post of counselor for his old colleague from Truman days George C. McGhee, who had served a decade before as Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs. The new Secretary had a temperamental preference for professionals both in Washington and in the field; and he was also rightly determined to rebuild the morale of the Foreign Service after the shocks of the Dulles-McCarthy era.

  For its part, the Foreign Service was moving to take care of its own in the appointment of ambassadors and even of Assistant Secretaries. In late November, Loy Henderson, the dean of the career service and the retiring Deputy Under Secretary for Administration, suggested that the Department dear the appointment of seven senior Foreign Service officers as ambassadors to newly independent African states. Thomas Farmer of the Shriver staff intercepted the proposal and called it to the attention of Robert Kennedy. Africa, Farmer argued, was not a place for tired old men awaiting their pensions but for young officers with a career to make and even for people from outside the Foreign Service; it required an infusion of New Frontier spirit. Kennedy vigorously agreed, and, with the aid of Chester Bowles, the Henderson plan was killed. As for Assistant Secretaryships, the Shriver office did not accept the principle that they should necessarily go to professionals, noting that generals and admirals never dreamed of demanding to be made Assistant Secretaries in the Pentagon; and it darkly suspected that State was holding its Assistant Secretaryships down to the civil service salary level of GS-18 precisely in order to ward off outside appointments.

  Rusk did not, however, have a consuming interest in personnel; and a letter just before Christmas from Ted Sorensen, listing twenty-three issues of policy, all of complexity and moment, on which the President wanted his immediate advice, gave him other things to do. Accordingly he relinquished to Bowles, as Under Secretary, the responsibility for filling the top posts. Bowles had considerable respect for the professionals and a particular desire to seek out able men in the lower ranks of the Foreign Service. “If we provide the necessary leadership, sense of direction and sensitivity to individual attitudes and problems,” he told Rusk, “I am confident that we can count on a high degree of loyalty, intelligence and competent service from the Foreign Service generally.” At the same time, he also wanted to bring people from outside “unhampered by past loyalties” and committed to the New Frontier into the conduct of foreign relations. He canvassed the universities, the foundations, the press and politics and was more responsible than anyone else for the high quality of Kennedy’s first wave of appointments in foreign affairs. As a result, Abram Chayes became Legal Adviser, Roger Hilsman Director of Intelligence and Research, Lucius Battle Chief of the Secretariat, Harlan Cleveland Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, Philip Coombs Assistant Secretary for Cultural Affairs, Wayne Fredericks Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Arturo Morales Carrion Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, Phillips Talbott Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs. As a result, too, J. Kenneth Galbraith became ambassador to India, Edwin Reischauer to Japan, George Kennan to Yugoslavia, Teodoro Moscoso to Venezuela, William Attwood to Guinea, William McCormick Blair, Jr., to Denmark, Kenneth Young to Thailand, Philip Kaiser to Senegal and, in due course, Lincoln Gordon to Brazil, James Loeb to Peru and John Bartlow Martin to the Dominican Republic. Bowles was also the strong advocate of the appointment of Edward R. Murrow as head of the United States Information Agency.

  In the case of Defense, McNamara organized the personnel effort himself. He came to Washington early in December, set up an office in the Ford suite at the Shoreham Hotel and began to pursue a staff by round-the-clock telephoning all over the country. The President-elect and the Shriver office had suggested that he consider for Deputy Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, a New York lawyer and Democrat who had been Under Secretary of the Air Force under Thomas Finletter a decade before. After intensive inquiry, McNamara decided that Gilpatric, whom he had not yet met, was the man he wanted. He then began to track his quarry down, finally calling Gilpatric’s country house on the eastern shore of Maryland, waking his wife at six-fifteen in the morning and arranging to meet her husband later that day at the Baltimore airport. The two men sat in McNamara’s automobile in a snowstorm discussing the terms of the appointment. Gilpatric was easy, resourceful and intelligent, and the partnership was immediately sealed.

  For Comptroller—a position which McNamara saw as critical to the control of his amorphous inheritance—he
rejected the conventional choice of someone with a background in business or accounting. Instead, he chose Charles Hitch, a Rhodes Scholar and economist whose work in operational analysis at the Rand Corporation had shown an ability to break down complex problems to their essentials with a speed and exactness which matched McNamara’s own rapidity of mind. Hitch brought along as his Deputy Assistant Secretary for Systems Analysis another economist and Rhodes Scholar, Alain C. Enthoven. Hitch and Enthoven could invoke all the contemporary resources of mathematics and cybernetics to perfect the managerial magic with which, in its more rudimentary form, McNamara himself had so impressed Lovett during the Second World War. For Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, presiding over the intersection of defense and foreign policy, McNamara selected Paul Nitze, a man of trenchant mind and wide experience. For Secretary of the Air Force, he picked his fellow Roosevelt enthusiast from the Harvard Business School, Eugene Zuckert, and for Secretary of the Army, Elvis Stahr, still another Rhodes Scholar and president of Purdue University.

  The Navy Department presented a particular problem. Kennedy hoped that McNamara would accept Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., who not only was a close personal friend but had helped so much in the West Virginia primary. The Roosevelt record of association with the Navy was, moreover, long and formidable. Both Theodore Roosevelts, Sr. and Jr., had been Assistant Secretaries of the Navy; so too had been Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sr.; and there would be a pleasant historical symmetry in completing the quadrangle. Young Franklin himself had served with distinction in the Navy during the Second World War. But McNamara did not want him; and Kennedy, though regretful, accepted the decision without further question. (Feeling perhaps a little abashed, McNamara did accept Kennedy’s old comrade from PT-boat days Paul Fay as Under Secretary of the Navy.) In the meantime, McNamara’s personal talent search had unearthed the name of John Connally of Texas as a possibility for the Secretaryship. Late in December he called Kennedy at Palm Beach to clear an invitation to Connally. In view of Connally’s Texas connections, he added, perhaps the appointment should be checked with the Vice President-elect. Kennedy said that Senator Johnson was sitting beside him and put him on the phone. Since Connally was one of Johnson’s oldest political associates, Johnson was, of course, delighted. But this was all a happy coincidence, and, contrary to the speculation at the time, Johnson was not the source of the Connally appointment.