A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts—a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women—an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand.

  It was an extraordinary occasion. The people in the East Room came suddenly alive as the young President spoke his words of idealism and purpose. There was strong applause. Goodwin and I circulated among the group as it dispersed. One found still a measure of doubt and cynicism, but most people were deeply moved. The Venezuelan Ambassador took my arm and said urgently, “We have not heard such words since Franklin Roosevelt.” The future of the hemisphere did seem bright with hope.

  IX

  The Hour of Euphoria

  THE FUTURE EVERYWHERE, INDEED, seemed bright with hope. By the time I came back from Latin America in early March, the New Frontier was in full swing. The capital city, somnolent in the Eisenhower years, had come suddenly alive. The air had been stale and oppressive; now fresh winds were blowing. There was the excitement which comes from an injection of new men and new ideas, the release of energy which occurs when men with ideas have a chance to put them into practice. Not since the New Deal more than a quarter of a century before had there been such an invasion of bright young men. Not since Franklin Roosevelt had there been a President who so plainly delighted in innovation and leadership.

  Before I went to South America, there had been a White House reception for presidential appointees. We had all wandered around the East Room in an intoxication of pleasure and incredulity. One’s life seemed almost to pass in review as one encountered Harvard classmates, wartime associates, faces seen after the war in ADA conventions, workers in Stevenson campaigns, academic colleagues, all united in a surge of hope and possibility. The President himself appeared to share the mood, though in his case it was a response to possibilities rather than to facts. He already had his gallery of anxieties—the sliding situation in Southeast Asia, the gold drain, the stagnation of the economy, the Cuban exiles in Guatemala. Yet anxiety did not disturb his easy composure, and he watched the exhilaration around him with pleasure, even if a skeptical smile played on his lips as he considered its more naïve manifestations.

  Now, when I returned to Washington a month later, the New Frontier was hard at work. The pace was frenetic. Everyone came early and stayed late. I soon found myself arriving in the East Wing by eight or eight-thirty in the morning and remaining until seven-thirty or eight at night. Telephones rang incessantly. Meetings were continuous. The evenings too were lively and full. The glow of the White House was lighting up the whole city. Washington seemed engaged in a collective effort to make itself brighter, gayer, more intellectual, more resolute. It was a golden interlude.

  1. THE WHITE HOUSE STAFF

  Within the White House itself, things were beginning to settle into a pattern. Evelyn Lincoln and Ken O’Donnell guarded the two entrances into the presidential office. Pierre Salinger entertained the press with jocular daily briefings. Larry O’Brien, having won the critical fight to enlarge the House Rules Committee, was now deploying his people all over the Hill in support of the presidential program. Myer Feldman and Lee White were working on legislation and messages. Ralph Dungan was conducting the last stages of the talent hunt and supervising questions of government reorganization. Dick Goodwin was handling Latin America and a dozen other problems. Fred Dutton was Secretary of the Cabinet and dealt with many questions of politics and program.

  It was already apparent that the key men around the President, so far as policy was concerned, were Theodore Sorensen and McGeorge Bundy. There had been predictions of conflict between the two. Sorensen, it was supposed, having had a monopoly of Kennedy for so long, would not easily relinquish him to other hands. I myself had been warned that, in entering the White House, I would be plunging into a ruthless scramble for access and power. But this did not seem to be taking place—and, indeed, the Kennedy White House remained to the end remarkably free of the rancor which has so often welled up in presidential households. One reason for this was that staff members had more than enough to do and therefore not much time for resentment or feuding. Another was that the President handled the situation with effortless skill, avoiding collective confrontations, such as staff meetings where everyone might find out what everyone else was up to. He tactfully kept the relations with his aides on a bilateral basis.

  Sorensen and Bundy themselves were aware of the dangers and behaved with poise and amiability. I had known Ted for some years but never well; it was hard to know him well. Self-sufficient, taut and purposeful, he was a man of brilliant intellectual gifts, jealously devoted to the President and rather indifferent to personal relations beyond his own family. He had grown up in Nebraska. His father, a progressive Republican, was very close to George W. Norris (Evelyn Lincoln’s father, Congressman John N. Norton of Nebraska, had been another Norris associate). The Sorensen family resembled the Kennedy family in certain respects. They were a collection of talented brothers and sisters, spirited and competitive, enraptured by politics and athletics, tough and ambitious. Ted’s older brother Tom, a man of marked ability and greater personal warmth, was a career officer in USIA who had recently been named one of Ed Murrow’s deputies. But in other respects the Sorensens—midwestern, Unitarian, middle-class, liberal, anti-Establishment, puritanical, pacifist—occupied a world different from the Kennedys’. Of Sorensen and Kennedy themselves, two men could hardly have been more intimate and, at the same time, more separate. They shared so much—the same quick tempo, detached intelligence, deflationary wit, realistic judgment, candor in speech, coolness in crisis—that, when it came to policy and speeches, they operated nearly as one. But there were other ranges of Kennedy’s life, and of these Sorensen partook very little.

  Contrary to the predictions, Sorensen accepted the new situation in the White House with imperturbable grace. The legislative program, domestic policy and speeches became his unchallenged domain; and speeches, of course, assured him an entry into foreign policy at the critical points. No one at the White House worked harder or more carefully; Kennedy relied on no one more; and Sorensen’s suspicions of the newcomers, whatever they may have been, were under rigid control. Underneath the appearance of bluntness, taciturnity and, at times, sheer weariness, he was capable of great charm and a frolicsome satiric humor. His flow of comic verse always enlivened festive occasions at the White House.

  For his part, McGeorge Bundy treated Sorensen and his relationship with Kennedy with invariable consideration. Bundy possessed dazzling clarity and speed of mind—Kennedy told friends that, next to David Ormsby Gore, Bundy was the brightest man he had ever known—as well as great distinction of manner and unlimited self-confidence. I had seen him learn how to dominate the faculty of Harvard University, a throng of intelligent and temperamental men; after that training, one could hardly doubt his capacity to deal with Washington bureaucrats. Though professionally a Republican, he had supported Kennedy in 1960. On issues, his mind was trenchant and uninhibited. On personalities, an instinctive commitment to the Establishment, of which he was so superb a product, was tempered by a respect for intelligence wherever he could find it. He had tremendous zest and verve. He never appeared tired; he was always ready to assume responsibility; and his subordinates could detect strain only when rare flashes of impatience and sharpness of tone disturbed his usually invincible urbanity. One felt that he was forever sustained by those two qualities so indispensable for success in government—a deep commitment to the public service and a large instinct for power.

  Mac was presently engaged in dismantling the elaborate national security apparatus built up by the Eisenhower administration. The National Security Council had been established in 1947 to give permanent form to the wartime State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee and provide the President with an authoritative advisory body for foreign and defense policy. Truman, concerned as always with defending the presidential prerogative, took c
are to keep the NSC in what he regarded as its place, attending its sessions only sporadically, except during the Korean War, and never letting it forget that the buck did not stop there. Eisenhower, however, with his interest in institutionalizing the Presidency, sought to give the NSC a more central role. In time, he made it the climax of a ponderous system of boards, staffs and interdepartmental committees through which national security policy was supposed to rise to the top. But the result, instead of strengthening the NSC, was to convert it essentially into a forum for intramural negotiation. The process of what Dean Acheson called “agreement by exhaustion” papered over policy discord. The broad and very often empty NSC formulas obscured rather than clarified issues and alternatives.

  In 1959 Senator Jackson’s Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery began a long inquiry into the national security system. Its recommendations, which began to come out during the interregnum, substantially coincided with Kennedy’s own feeling about the future of the NSC. Jackson thought it should be not an elaborate bureaucratic mechanism perched at the top of “policy hill” but “an intimate forum” in which the President and his chief advisers could squarely confront the real policy choices. When he appointed Bundy, the President-elect praised the Jackson study and said that he hoped to use the NSC and its machinery “more flexibly than in the past.” Richard Neustadt had taken great pleasure during the interregnum in introducing Bundy to the Eisenhower White House as the equivalent of five officers on the Eisenhower staff. After the inauguration, Bundy promptly slaughtered committees right and left and collapsed what was left of the inherited apparatus into a compact and flexible National Security Council staff. With Walt Rostow as his deputy and Bromley Smith, a remarkable civil servant, as the NSC’s secretary, he was shaping a supple instrument to meet the new President’s distinctive needs.

  2. THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW FRONTIER

  The excitement in the White House infected the whole executive branch. A new breed had come to town, and the New Frontiersmen carried a thrust of action and purpose wherever they went. It is hard to generalize about so varied and exuberant a group; but it can be said that many shared a number of characteristics.

  For one thing, like the New Dealers a quarter century earlier, they brought with them the ideas of national reconstruction and reform which had been germinating under the surface of a decade of inaction. They had stood by too long while a complaisant government had ignored the needs and potentialities of the nation—a nation whose economy was slowing down and whose population was overrunning its public facilities and services; a nation where the victims of racism and poverty lived on in sullen misery and the ideals held out by the leaders to the people were parochial and mediocre. Now the New Frontiersmen swarmed in from state governments, the universities, the foundations, the newspapers, determined to complete the unfinished business of American society. Like Rexford G. Tugwell in another age, they proposed to roll up their sleeves and make America over.

  For another, they aspired, like their President, to the world of ideas as well as to the world of power. They had mostly gone to college during the intellectual ferment of the thirties. Not all by any means (despite the newspapers and the jokes) had gone to Harvard, but a good many had, though Sir Denis Brogan, after a tour of inspection, remarked that the New Frontier seemed to him to bear even more the imprint of Oxford. Certainly there were Rhodes Scholars on every side—Rostow and Kermit Gordon in the Executive Office, Rusk, Harlan Cleveland, George McGhee, Richard Gardner, Philip Kaiser and Lane Timmons in State, Byron White and Nicholas Katzenbach in justice, Elvis Stahr and Charles Hitch in Defense, as well as such congressional leaders as William Fulbright and Carl Albert. Many of the New Frontiersmen had been college professors. (Seymour Harris has pointed out that of Kennedy’s first 200 top appointments, nearly half came from backgrounds in government, whether politics or public service, 18 per cent from universities and foundations and 6 per cent from the business world; the figures for Eisenhower were 42 per cent from business and 6 per cent from universities and foundations.*) A surprisingly large number had written books. Even the Postmaster General had published a novel. They had no fear of ideas nor, though they liked to be sprightly in manner, of serious talk. One day in March Robert Triffin, the economist, and I paid a call on Jean Monnet. We asked him what he thought of the New Frontier. He said, “The thing I note most is that the conversation is recommencing. You cannot have serious government without collective discussion. I have missed that in Washington in recent years.”

  Another thing that defined the New Frontiersmen was the fact that many had fought in the war. Kennedy and McGovern were not the only heroes in the new Washington. Lieutenant Orville Freeman had had half his jaw shot off by the Japanese in the swamps of Bougainville in 1943. Lieutenant Kenneth O’Donnell had flown thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier for the 8th Air Force; his plane had been shot up, and twice he had made emergency landings. Lieutenants McGeorge Bundy and Mortimer Caplin had been on the Normandy beaches on D-day plus 1, while a few miles away William Walton was parachuted in as a correspondent, accompanying Colonel James Gavin in the fighting for Ste. Mère-Eglise. Lieutenant Nicholas Katzenbach, a B-25 navigator, had been shot down in the Mediterranean and spent two years in Italian and German prison camps; he twice escaped and was twice recaptured. Lieutenant Commander Douglas Dillon had been under Kamikaze attack in Lingayen Gulf and had flown a dozen combat patrol missions. Captain Roger Hilsman had led a band of native guerrillas behind Japanese lines in Burma. Lieutenant Edward Day had served on a submarine chaser in the Solomons and a destroyer escort in the Atlantic. Lieutenant Byron White had fought in the Solomons. Ensign Pierre Salinger had been decorated for a dangerous rescue in the midst of a typhoon from his subchaser off Okinawa. Major Dean Rusk had been a staff officer in the China-Burma-India theater. Major Arthur Goldberg had organized labor espionage for the OSS in Europe. Lieutenant Stewart Udall had served in the Air Force. Lieutenants Paul Fay and James Reed were veterans of the PT-boat war in the Pacific.

  The war experience helped give the New Frontier generation its casual and laconic tone, its grim, puncturing humor and its mistrust of evangelism. It accounted in particular, I think, for the differences in style between the New Frontiersmen and the New Dealers. The New Dealers were incorrigible philosophizers—“chain talkers,” someone had sourly called them thirty years before—and the New Deal had a distinctive and rather moralistic rhetoric. The men of the thirties used to invoke ‘the people,’ their ultimate wisdom and the importance of doing things for them in a way quite alien to the New Frontier. The mood of the new Washington was more to do things because they were rational and necessary than because they were just and right, though this should not be exaggerated. In the thirties idealism was sometimes declared, even when it did not exist; in the sixties, it was sometimes deprecated, even when it was the dominant motive.

  The New Frontiersmen had another common characteristic: versatility. They would try anything. Most had some profession or skill to which they could always return; but ordinarily they used it as a springboard for general meddling. Kenneth Galbraith was an economist who, as ambassador to India, reviewed novels for The New Yorker and wrote a series of pseudonymous satiric skits for Esquire. Bill Walton was a newspaperman turned abstract painter. This was especially true in the White House itself. Where Eisenhower had wanted a staff with clearly defined functions, Kennedy resisted pressures toward specialization; he wanted a group of all-purpose men to whom he could toss anything. It seemed to me that in many ways Dick Goodwin, though younger than the average, was the archetypal New Frontiersman. His two years in the Army had been too late for the war, even too late for Korea. But he was the supreme generalist who could turn from Latin America to saving the Nile monuments at Abu Simbel, from civil rights to planning the White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners, from composing a parody of Norman Mailer to drafting a piece of legislation, from lunching with a Supreme Court Justice to dining with Jean Seberg—a
nd at the same time retain an unquenchable spirit of sardonic liberalism and an unceasing drive to get things done.

  Not everyone liked the new people. Washington never had. “A plague of young lawyers settled on Washington,” one observer had said of the New Dealers. “. . . They floated airily into offices, took desks, asked for papers and found no end of things to be busy about. I never found out why they came, what they did or why they left.” Even Learned Hand complained in 1934 that they were “so conceited, so insensitive, so arrogant.” Old-timers felt the same resentments in March 1961. One could not deny a sense of New Frontier autointoxication; one felt it oneself. The pleasures of power, so long untasted, were now being happily devoured—the chauffeur-driven limousines, the special telephones, the top secret documents, the personal aides, the meetings in the Cabinet Room, the calls from the President. Merriman Smith, who had seen many administrations come and go, wrote about what he called the New People; “hot-eyed, curious but unconcerned with protocol, and yeasty with shocking ideas . . . they also have their moments of shortsightedness, bias, prejudice and needlessly argumentative verbosity.” The verbosity, I have suggested, was marked only in comparison with the muteness of the Eisenhower days; but the rest was true enough, especially in these first heady weeks.