A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  At some point between interviews the President-elect turned to me, mentioned my conversation with Bobby in December and asked whether I was ready to work at the White House. I said, “I am not sure what I would be doing as Special Assistant, but, if you think I can help, I would like very much to come.” He said, “Well, I am not sure what I will be doing as President either, but I am sure there will be enough at the White House to keep us both busy.” I then asked whether this was firm enough in his mind for me to request leave from Harvard. He said, “Yes—but we won’t say anything about this until Chester Bowles is confirmed. I don’t want the Senate to think that I am bringing down the whole ADA.”

  He went south that evening and in the next few days began work on his inaugural address. Morning after morning, puffing a small cigar, a yellow, legal-sized pad of paper on his knees, he worked away, scribbling a few lines, crossing out others and then putting the sheets of paper on his already overflowing desk. Many people submitted suggestions, and Ted Sorensen gave his usual brilliant and loyal cooperation. Kennedy’s hope was to strike a series of distinctive notes—to express the spirit of the postwar generation in politics, to summon America to new exertions and new initiatives, to summon the world to a new mood beyond the clichés of the cold war. (Walter Lippmann contributed to the last by suggesting, when he was shown a draft of the speech, that the references to the Soviet Union as the “enemy” should be replaced by “adversary”—a word which expressed Kennedy’s intention more precisely and which he employed for the rest of his life.) As time passed, the speech took form. Then one day the President-elect stuffed the papers into his battered black briefcase and went north into the cold and snow.

  On January 19 Kennedy held a final meeting with Eisenhower. They talked alone and then met with their advisers in the Cabinet Room. The discussion concentrated on points of crisis, and especially on the mounting difficulties in Laos. Eisenhower said that he had hoped that the South-East Asia Treaty Organization would take charge of the “controversy” but that the British and French did not want SEATO to act. Christian A. Herter, the retiring Secretary of State, added that he did not think that “the Soviet bloc” intended a major war in Southeast Asia but that they would continue to make trouble up to the brink. The United States, Herter recommended, must convince the communists of our intention to defend Laos, at the same time trying to persuade our allies to move with us in concert. If a political settlement could not be arranged in Laos, then this country must intervene. Eisenhower added that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia. If the communists took Laos, they would bring “unbelievable pressure” on Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Laos, he said with solemnity, was so important that, if it reached the point where we could not persuade others to act with us, then he would be willing, “as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally.” He wondered for a moment why communist soldiers always seemed to have better morale than the soldiers “representing the democratic forces”; evidently there was something about “the communist philosophy” which gave their supporters “a certain inspiration and a certain dedication.” Then he said that it would be fatal to permit the communists any part in a new Laotian regime, citing the experience of China and the Marshall mission.

  Kennedy, listening quietly, finally asked how long it would take to put an American division into Laos. Secretary Gates replied: twelve to seventeen days from the United States, less if we used troops already in the Pacific. Gates went on to say that he was “‘exceedingly sanguine” about American capabilities for limited war; our forces were fully adequate to meet “any foreseeable test.” Then he added that, while the United States was in excellent shape to meet one “limited war situation,” it could not of course meet two limited war “situations” going on at the same time.

  Secretary of the Treasury Anderson spoke about the balance-of-payments crisis. The erosion of the gold position, he said, was continuing unabated; measures had to be found to reverse the present trend.

  The tour d’horizon reached Cuba. On November 18 Kennedy had learned for the first time from Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell of CIA that on March 17, 1960, the Eisenhower administration had decided to equip and drill Cuban exiles for possible action against the Castro regime. The outgoing President now said that it was “the policy of this government” to aid anti-Castro guerrilla forces “to the utmost.” At present, “we are helping train anti-Castro forces in Guatemala.” Eisenhower recommended that “this effort be continued and accelerated.”

  Twenty-four hours later, as he took the presidential oath in the freezing cold of Capitol Plaza, these became John F. Kennedy’s problems.

  VII

  Latin American Journey

  THE KENNEDY PRESIDENCY BEGAN with incomparable dash. The young President, the old poet, the splendid speech, the triumphant parade, the brilliant sky and the shining snow: it was one of the most glorious of inaugurals. And the new President himself obviously savored every moment of it. He watched the parade from beginning to end, saluting the marchers and applauding the floats. Noting that there were no Negroes in the Coast Guard contingent, he demanded an immediate explanation and was shocked to discover that the Coast Guard Academy had no Negro students, a condition he ordered changed forthwith. After the parade he dined with the new cabinet, later made the circuit of inaugural balls, and finally, after midnight, dropped by Joseph Alsop’s.

  He slept tranquilly in Lincoln’s bed and woke very early the next morning. The sun streamed through the windows while he dressed and contemplated the prospects of the day. Soon he was off with springy step to the presidential office in the West Wing. He sat on the presidential chair, tried out the buttons on his desk, summoning Evelyn Lincoln from one adjacent office and Ken O’Donnell from the other, asked Dave Powers where his mail was and explored the West Wing, seeking out the offices of his staff. He called Ted Reardon, who had been with him since his first days on the Hill, and, mentioning a problem, said, “Phone so-and-so, and tell him the Senator says that he wants it such-and-such a way.” Then, remembering that he was Senator no longer, they both laughed, and Kennedy said, “Do you think the country is ready for us yet?”

  President Truman stopped by to pay his respects; it was his first visit to the White House since he had left it himself eight years before. After a few moments, Kennedy took him back to the Mansion to make a call on Jacqueline. They had a gay talk, the old and the new Presidents and the young wife. Later Kennedy brought Robert Frost over for another talk. It was a happy day.

  He turned to his new responsibilities with zest. He issued his first executive order, doubling the rations of surplus food provided by the federal government to four million needy people across the nation; this was a response to his memories of West Virginia and the pitiful food rations doled out to the unemployed miners and their families. And he plunged into the great questions of foreign policy. The afternoon before he had received a message from Moscow, signed N. Khrushchev and L. Brezhnev, expressing the hope that “by our own joint efforts we shall succeed in achieving a fundamental improvement in relations between our countries and a normalization of the whole international situation.” Kennedy now replied that he was “ready and anxious to cooperate with all who are prepared to join in genuine dedication to the assurance of a peaceful and more fruitful life for all mankind.” This message, a piece of State Department boiler plate, expressed the quality neither of the President’s hope nor of his concern. For, at the very moment when Khrushchev and Brezhnev were sending their good wishes, the situation was growing worse in Laos. The central committee of the Chinese Communist Party was putting out a statement affirming its solidarity with the Soviet Union and naming the United States as the great enemy of the workers of the world. And the band of Cuban exiles were training on a plantation in Guatemala.

  1. FOOD FOR PEACE

  I was among those who froze in the Capitol Plaza on that cold Friday noon. I had arrived in Washington the Tuesday before in time for a party given by Jean and Step
hen Smith, the President-elect’s sister and brother-in-law. People sat around tables in a vast heated tent in the garden of their house in Georgetown; after dinner there was dancing. Kennedys were everywhere, and the members of the new cabinet, and a vast miscellany of appointees and friends. The atmosphere was spirited and stylish. Everyone felt a sense of anticipation. It was the first rally of the New Frontier.

  Among the guests was a quiet, agreeable man with rimless glasses looking like a college professor. As usual, I failed to catch his name; but he spoke a pleasant word or two about a pamphlet I had written in 1960 arguing for a larger allocation of our resources to the public sector. Later I asked Stephen Smith who he was; Steve said, “That’s Bob McNamara.” The President-elect was there, his face tanned from his weeks at Palm Beach, moving lightly from one group to another with greetings and banter. He asked my wife whether she had found a house in Washington. The remark gave me some relief because I had heard nothing about my supposed White House appointment since the talk in my house in Cambridge three weeks earlier.

  When I returned to Cambridge after the inauguration, silence resumed. At the time, it seemed to continue for weeks; but it was actually only a few days before the Senate voted to confirm Chester Bowles. The next morning I received a call from Andrew Hatcher of the White House press office. He said, “The President wants to announce you this afternoon,” and requested biographical information for the press release. I inquired when I should plan to come to Washington. Hatcher said that I should ask Ralph Dungan, who was the Special Assistant in charge of personnel.

  I called Dungan, whom I hardly knew, and told him that I gathered that my appointment was about to be announced. He said in an astonished voice, “Your appointment as what?” I said, “As I understand it, Special Assistant to the President.” After a pause, Dungan said, “That’s the first I have ever heard of it.” However, he rallied manfully and told me to come to Washington on the next Monday, January 30.

  Dungan received me courteously when I arrived. “Things are happening so fast around here,” he said, “that no one knows what is going on.” Then Dungan and Richard Neustadt stood up with me while I took the oath. I was assigned the office in the East Wing, where James F. Byrnes had held forth twenty years before as the director of the Office of War Mobilization. I was also given an extraordinarily able and reliable secretary, Gretchen Stewart, who had served in the White House since the days of Truman.*

  A few minutes later I went to Capitol Hill with a number of my new colleagues to hear the President deliver his first State of the Union message. Kennedy described his inheritance in grim terms—recession in the economy, deficit in the balance of payments, deficiencies in housing, education and medical care, imbalance in the posture of defense, trouble in Laos, the Congo and Latin America—and then, with heartening eloquence, called for action to stimulate economic recovery, to protect the dollar, to improve the national household, to diversify the means of defense and to establish an alliance for progress in the hemisphere, a Food for Peace program and a Peace Corps. “Life in 1961 will not be easy,” he concluded. “Wishing it, predicting it, even asking for it, will not make it so. There will be further setbacks before the tide is turned. But turn it we must. The hopes of all mankind rest upon us.” We stood along the back wall in the chamber of the House, welcoming the applause as our President set forth his proposals, and then went back to the White House, exhilarated by the sense of taking part in a great new national adventure.

  What precisely my own part would be was not, however, clear. The first days in the White House, as a Special Assistant without a special assignment, were uncertain and confusing. Then at the end of the week the President told me that George McGovern, now director of the Food for Peace program, was going to Latin America to discuss food problems with the governments of Argentina and Brazil. As this would be, he said, the first mission of his administration to Latin America, he wanted to demonstrate his personal concern with hemisphere problems by sending along someone from the White House. Knowing my interest in Latin America, he wondered whether I was not the person to go. Moreover, the Latin American intellectual community had the idea that the United States was a reactionary and materialistic nation; maybe my presence in the mission might persuade somebody that things had changed in Washington. He would be particularly interested, he emphasized, in anything that could be discreetly learned about attitudes toward Castro.

  The Food for Peace idea went back to the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, better known as Public Law 480. This measure had been passed to ease the problems created by mounting farm surpluses and storage charges after the Korean War; and the Eisenhower administration had carried it out basically as a program for the disposal of unwanted American surpluses abroad. Though a good deal of food and fiber went to the new nations in these years, the surplus-disposal philosophy had seriously limited the effectiveness of the program both as an aid to development and as an instrument of national policy. Some foreign countries mistrusted PL 480 as a disguised dumping operation; others acted as if they were doing the United States a favor by relieving the American economy of the embarrassment of surpluses.

  In the late fifties, liberal Democrats in Congress—especially McGovern in the House and Hubert Humphrey in the Senate—began to agitate for a reconstruction of the program. This was one aspect of farm policy to which Kennedy was immediately and wholeheartedly responsive. McGovern recalls introducing him for a learned speech about price supports and supply management before fifty thousand farmers at the National Plowing Contest in South Dakota during the campaign. “I felt that he was not at ease with the prepared manuscript,” McGovern later said, “and the crowd reacted indifferently.” But two hours later at Mitchell, South Dakota, speaking without a note, Kennedy thrilled a farm audience by a moving discussion of the surplus difficulty. “I don’t regard the . . . agricultural surplus as a problem,” he said. “I regard it as an opportunity. . . . I think the farmers can bring more credit, more lasting good will, more chance for peace, than almost any group of Americans in the next ten years, if we recognize that food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want.”*

  In October Kennedy had appointed a task force, with Murray Lincoln as chairman and including, among others, Humphrey, to study new ways of using American agricultural abundance overseas. The report condemned “the conception, the philosophy and the nomenclature of ‘surplus disposal.’” It called for a transformation of “what is now a surplus disposal act into a food-for-peace act designed to use American agricultural capacity to the fullest practicable extent to meet human needs the world over and to promote world economic development.” Instead of sending overseas whatever happened to be in surplus in the United States, it envisaged the use of American agricultural abundance to meet specific wants abroad both of nutrition and of development. This could mean shifts in domestic production from wheat and corn into oils and fats and protein foods; it could mean the use of food to generate local currency for productive investment and to check the inflation of food prices which might otherwise result from development projects; it could mean the use of food as capital through direct payment in kind to labor working on dams, roads, ports or similar projects.

  Kennedy in his second executive order put the program within the Executive Office of the President and named McGovern as director (after Robert Kennedy had objected to the title coordinator on the ground that it would mean nothing in South Dakota, McGovern’s home state). McGovern went swiftly to work. In the past, PL 480 had existed in a limbo between the Department of Agriculture, which supplied the food, and the Department of State, which supplied the policy. Though both Agriculture and State coveted the program, McGovern argued that it should have a public identity of its own and that it could be best run out of the Executive Office of the President. Kennedy agreed in principle, though he was not sure whether it might not be wise
to appease State by locating the office physically in the Department. But McGovern, taking advantage of the confusions of the first week, established himself in a vacant suite in the Executive Office Building before State or Agriculture knew what was happening. To further the cause of giving Food for Peace a separate identity, he sent the President a memorandum urging that Food for Peace missions be dispatched right away to Latin America, Asia and Africa—a proposal about which he heard nothing until the Latin American mission turned up as a recommendation in the State of the Union message. As McGovern prepared for his trip, he received one day a phone call from Kennedy saying that he wanted Arthur Schlesinger to go along “to look into some things for me.”

  2. THE LATIN AMERICAN DILEMMA

  My interest in Latin America was of long standing. It had begun twenty years earlier in the Office of Strategic Services. As editor of the weekly intelligence bulletin, I had the job of summarizing and reprinting reports submitted by the regional desks of the Research and Analysis Branch. These were mostly detached and scholarly documents; but the reports from the chief of our Latin American section, in my view, showed a clear communist slant. In order to document my suspicions, I began to follow Latin American affairs myself and soon was rejecting the party-line reports in favor of my own notes on Latin American developments.