3. A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
The intellectual exhaustion of the Foreign Service expressed itself in the poverty of the official rhetoric. In meetings the men from State would talk in a bureaucratic patois borrowed in large part from the Department of Defense. We would be exhorted to ‘zero in’ on ‘the purpose of the drill’ (or of the ‘exercise’ or ‘operation’), to ‘crank in’ this and ‘phase out’ that and ‘gin up’ something else, to ‘pinpoint’ a ‘viable’ policy and, behind it, a ‘fall-back position,’ to ignore the ‘flak’ from competing government bureaus or from the communists, to refrain from ‘nit-picking’ and never to be ‘counterproductive.’ Once we were ‘seized of the problem,’ preferably in as ‘hard-nosed’ a manner as possible, we would review ‘options,’ discuss ‘over-all’ objectives, seek ‘breakthroughs,’ consider ‘crash programs,’ ‘staff out’ policies—doing all these things preferably ‘meaningfully’ and ‘in depth’ until we were ready to ‘finalize’ our deliberations, ‘sign on to’ or ‘sign off on’ a conclusion (I never could discover the distinction, if any, between these two locutions) and ‘implement’ a decision. This was not just shorthand; part of the conference-table vocabulary involved a studied multiplication of words. Thus one never talked about a ‘paper’ but always a ‘piece of paper,’ never said ‘at this point’ but always ‘at this point in time.’
Graceless as this patois was, it did have a certain, if sometimes spurious, air of briskness and efficiency. The result was far worse when the Department stopped talking and started writing. Whether drafting memoranda, cables or even letters or statements for the President, the Department fell into full, ripe, dreariness of utterance with hideous ease. The recipe was evidently to take a handful of clichés (saying something in a fresh way might create unforeseen troubles), repeat at five-minute intervals (lest the argument become clear or interesting), stir in the dough of the passive voice (the active voice assigns responsibility and was therefore hazardous) and garnish with self-serving rhetoric (Congress would be unhappy unless we constantly proclaimed the rectitude of American motives).
After the Bay of Pigs, the State Department sent over a document entitled “The Communist Totalitarian Government of Cuba as a Source of International Tension in the Americas,” which it had approved for distribution to NATO, CENTO, SEATO, the OAS and the free governments of Latin America and eventually for public release. In addition to the usual defects of Foggy Bottom prose, the paper was filled with bad spelling and grammar. Moreover, the narrative, which mysteriously stopped at the beginning of April 1961, contained a self-righteous condemnation of Castro’s interventionist activities in the Caribbean that an unfriendly critic, alas! could have applied, without changing a word, to more recent actions by the United States. I responded on behalf of the White House:
It is our feeling here that the paper should not be disseminated in its present form. . . .
Presumably the document is designed to impress, not an audience which is already passionately anti-Castro, but an audience which has not yet finally made up its mind on the gravity of the problem. Such an audience is going to be persuaded, not by rhetoric, but by evidence. Every effort to heighten the evidence by rhetoric only impairs the persuasive power of the document. Observe the title: ‘The Communist Totalitarian Government of Cuba . . .’ This title presupposes the conclusion which the paper seeks to establish. Why not call it ‘The Castro Regime in Cuba’ and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the evidence? And why call it both ‘Communist’ and ‘totalitarian’? All Communist governments are totalitarian. The paper, in our view, should be understated rather than overstated; it should eschew cold war jargon; the argument should be carried by facts, not exhortations. The writing is below the level we would hope for in papers for dissemination to other countries. The writing of lucid and forceful English is not too arcane an art.
The President himself, with his sensitive ear for style, led the fight for literacy in the Department; and he had the vigorous support of some State Department officials, notably George Ball, Harriman and William R. Tyler. But the effort to liberate the State Department from automatic writing had little success. As late as 1963, the Department could submit as a draft of a presidential message on the National Academy of Foreign Affairs a text which provoked this resigned White House comment:
This is only the latest and worst of a long number of drafts sent here for Presidential signature. Most of the time it does not matter, I suppose, if the prose is tired, the thought banal and the syntax bureaucratic; and, occasionally when it does matter, State’s drafts are very good. But sometimes, as in this case, they are not.
A message to Congress is a fairly important form of Presidential communication. The President does not send so many—nor of those he does send, does State draft so many—that each one cannot receive due care and attention. My own old-fashioned belief is that every Presidential message should be a model of grace, lucidity and taste in expression. At the very least, each message should be (a) in English, (b) clear and trenchant in its style, (c) logical in its structure and (d) devoid of gobbledygook. The State Department draft on the Academy failed each one of these tests (including, in my view, the first).
Would it not be possible for someone in the Department with at least minimal sensibility to take a look at pieces of paper designed for Presidential signature before they are sent to the White House?
It was a vain fight; the plague of gobbledygook was hard to shake off. I note words like “minimal” (at least not “optimal”) and “pieces of paper” in my own lament. I can only testify with what interest and relief the President and the White House read cables from ambassadors who could write—Galbraith from New Delhi with his suave irony, David Bruce from London with his sharp wit, Kennan from Belgrade with his historical perspective and somber eloquence, John Bartlow Martin from Santo Domingo and William Attwood from Guinea with their vivid journalistic touch.
Theodore H. White summed it all up in a letter he sent me from the Far East in the summer of 1961—a dispatch the President read with great interest. “The State Department and its competitive instruments,” White wrote, “have in the years since I worked with them become so tangled as to be almost unfit for any policy-making purpose or decision. . . . Somewhere there exists in the State Department a zone, or a climate, or inertia, which prevents it from thinking in terms of a new kind of politics, new departures in technique, an inertia which binds it rigidly to the fossil routine of conferences, negotiations, frozen positions. What must be changed must be changed first in Washington, at the center.”
4. THE WHITE HOUSE AND FOREIGN POLICY
The center, of course, lay not in Foggy Bottom but in the White House. The act of 1789 establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs provided that the Secretary should manage the business of the Department “in such manner as the President of the United States shall from time to time order or instruct.” Kennedy saw the White House and the Department as intimate partners in the enterprise of foreign policy.
The operating link in this partnership was McGeorge Bundy and the now streamlined National Security Council staff. The Council itself met far less regularly than in Eisenhower days—sixteen meetings in the first six months of the Kennedy administration—and the President convened it only when he was on the brink of decision. He saw no sense in placing unformulated problems before the miscellaneous body of men designated in the statute; he could not understand, for example, why serious matters of foreign policy should be discussed in the presence of his first director of the Office of Emergency Planning, a garrulous southerner who had a flow of irrelevant opinions on everything. Instead he preferred to set up task forces specifically qualified to deal with particular problems.
The task forces of 1961 were not study groups like those of the interregnum; and they differed from the interdepartmental committees of the Eisenhower administration in being ad hoc bodies, destined to disappear as soon as the crisis was over, as well as in vesting respo
nsibility, not in the committee as a whole, but in its chairman. By bringing together working representatives of every agency concerned with the matter and giving one man the job of producing recommendations, the task force could greatly improve the speed and coordination with which policy was made. It was symptomatic of the President’s doubts about State that the first two task forces in the spring of 1961 had chairmen from Defense—Gilpatric on Laos and Nitze on Cuba. In time the task force approach led to the formation of the so-called Executive Committee of the National Security Council—a group drawn from the NSC but not including all its statutory members and supplemented by people from outside the NSC as occasion demanded.
But, if the National Security Council played a diminishing role, the National Security Council staff was indispensable. Bundy saw his function as that of the clarification of alternatives set before the President and the recording and follow-up of presidential decisions. Neither he nor the President, as Bundy told the Jackson Subcommittee, wanted to interpose “a large separate organization between him and his Secretary of State.” Yet, Bundy added, “if his Cabinet officers are to be free to do their own work, the President’s work must be done—to the extent that he cannot do it himself—by staff officers under his direct oversight.”
The Bundy staff was a remarkable body of men—and it was a tribute to Bundy’s own clarity of intellect and force of character that they so cheerfully deferred to his leadership. Walt Rostow, an economic historian turned social philosopher, served as Mac’s deputy. A man of unusual inventiveness of mind and copiousness of expression, he was inexhaustible in his capacity to meet every crisis with a plan and unfailing in his decency and enthusiasm. He had written long and thoughtful books on England, America, Russia and China; and his Stages of Economic Growth, though no doubt overschematic in its presentation, offered a stimulating profile of the development process from traditional society through “take-off” into the phase of self-sustaining growth to the age of high mass consumption. His combination of the spacious historical view with a passion for counterguerrilla warfare caused much joking about his being “Chester Bowles with machine guns,” all of which he took with gentle tolerance. Carl Kaysen applied his brilliant intelligence to security as well as economic issues. Robert Komer, a government career man who had managed to survive the Eisenhower years with undiminished liveliness of wit and hope, covered the uncommitted world. In 1962, Michael Forrestal, the son of Truman’s Secretary of Defense, joined the staff and brought intelligent judgment to the baffling issues of southeast Asia. Bromley Smith, a great civil servant, presided calmly as NSC Secretary over the flow of documents and decisions. All of these men had easy access to the President and served him invaluably in alerting him to problems and executing his instructions.
Nor was the work of foreign policy at the White House confined to the Bundy staff. The President wanted Ted Sorensen at his right hand every time there was a major crisis or a major speech. Because of his special concern with Latin America, he directed Richard Goodwin and me and later Ralph Dungan to follow hemisphere developments for him. Dungan, in addition, watched the foreign aid program and advised on the selection of top government officials. Jerome Wiesner and his Science Adviser’s staff dealt with armament and disarmament. Myer Feldman kept a hand in on the Middle East and on tariff and trade issues. I acquired the United Nations and occasional European matters, especially Italy, as particular problems.
The Bay of Pigs made us all more aggressive in defending the interests of the President and therefore in invading on his behalf what the foreign affairs bureaucracy too often regarded as its private domain. Bundy insisted from the start that the White House get the flow of raw intelligence from State, Defense and the CIA; this generally gave us enough facts to be able to ask the departments the pregnant questions and not be put off by the sterile answers. We tried to become the President’s eyes and ears through the whole area of national security, reporting to him the things he had to know—and this would sometimes include things which the department involved did not wish him to know until it had decided for itself what it wanted him to do. At the same time we tried to uncover in the middle levels of government ideas which we believed deserved a hearing at the top before they had been diluted or choked off by interbureau or interagency rivalry. The White House staff, in addition to offering the President independent comment on proposals from the departments, served as a means of discovering whether his instructions were being carried out. On occasions too frequent to record, the staff would have to say that State or Defense were not doing the things in one area or another they had been directed to do; and Kennedy would patiently pick up the phone and renew the pressure. We were the President’s men, and the government knew it, in part welcoming it, in part resenting it.
Kennedy’s use of his staff provoked much press comment about White House ‘meddling’; the very word implied that the White House had no business interfering in the internal affairs of the government. One day in the midst of the Berlin crisis Bundy and I wondered whether we dared ask the Department to rework a draft white paper on Berlin. When we explained to Kennedy our reluctance to incense the now highly sensitive Department further, Kennedy, unmoved, said that they ought to read the Constitution over there and find out who was responsible for foreign affairs and whose government it was anyway. We did not ourselves regard meddling as warfare against the bureaucracy, for we were powerless without allies throughout the permanent government. Our purpose was to seek out the people in the great opaque mechanism who were capable of innovation, to bring them and their ideas forward and to strengthen their hands.
The staff was part of the formal panoply of the White House; but in October 1961 Kennedy acquired a highly informal source of wisdom and support in international matters when his old friend David Ormsby Gore came to Washington as British Ambassador.* Many ties had strengthened their relationship since they first met in London in 1938. Kathleen Kennedy had married Ormsby Gore’s cousin and was godmother of the oldest Ormsby Gore child. During the 1940s and 1950s the two young men had shared a lively interest in books, history and public affairs. As Kennedy rose in American politics, Ormsby Gore became a progressive Tory Member of Parliament and soon Minister of State for Foreign Affairs with special responsibility for disarmament. When Ormsby Gore was in New York for the meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1959, he discussed the test ban negotiations a good deal with Kennedy; and it was from Ormsby Gore that Kennedy first understood the feebleness and inconsequence of American disarmament planning, a point he urged with much force in the 1960 campaign. After the election, Kennedy told Ormsby Gore, back in New York for the UN meeting, that he must come to Washington as ambassador. This message was communicated to Harold Macmillan, to whom Ormsby Gore was related by marriage, and in due course he appeared.
The Kennedys (to the irritation of the rest of the diplomatic corps) enjoyed no couple more than they did the Ormsby Gores. The President found the Ambassador a companion for every mood, whether he wanted to sail in Nantucket Sound or brood over the prospects of nuclear annihilation. Like Kennedy and like Macmillan, Ormsby Gore believed in the realistic pursuit of a détente with the Soviet Union, and he steadily reinforced Kennedy’s skepticism about the clichés of the cold war. He possessed not only great personal charm but exceptional intelligence and integrity. Indeed, only two men of notable character could have so delicately mingled personal and official relations, for each remained at all times the firm and candid advocate of the policies of his own nation. Their long, relaxed, confidential talks together, whether at Hyannis Port or Palm Beach or on quiet evenings in the White House, gave Kennedy probably his best opportunity to clarify his own purposes in world affairs.
Beyond his staff, his task forces, his friends, there was the President himself, increasingly the day-to-day director of American foreign policy. Though he had faithfully served his domestic apprenticeship in Congress, foreign affairs had long since captured his primary imagination, even before he gaine
d his membership on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had had a considerably more varied and extensive international experience than most men elected President. In his twenties he had talked to Franklin Roosevelt, Chamberlain and Baldwin and in his thirties to Churchill, Nehru, Ben Gurion and Fanfani. He knew Europe well and had traveled in Russia, Latin America and the Far East.
It was not accidental that he chose the Under Secretary of State, the Ambassador to the United Nations and the Assistant Secretary for Africa before he named the Secretary of State; he felt this in some particular sense ‘his’ department. Nor was his early appearance as, in effect, desk officer for Laos uncharacteristic. He wanted to know everything that was going on and, when matters were critical, he often cleared (and redrafted) messages and instructions himself. In the relationship between the President and the ambassadors, there had been, it is true, a slippage since Roosevelt’s day. Roosevelt regarded them correctly as “my” ambassadors and encouraged them to supplement their reports to the Department by personal communications to him. A generation later the bureaucracy, here as elsewhere, had contracted the power of the Presidency. In a circular letter to the ambassadors in May 1961, Kennedy actually retained State Department language reminding them that “your own lines of communication as Chiefs of Mission run through the Department of State.” Only Kenneth Galbraith, I believe, systematically ignored this injunction (and Kennedy was delighted that he did). But, in spite of the Department’s effort to insert itself between the President and his ambassadors, Kennedy succeeded in displaying what Edmund Gullion once described as a “direct and sometimes disconcerting personal interest in the problems of particular missions.” Ambassadors as different as George Kennan in Yugoslavia and Joseph Farland in Panama later told me that they found the President far more understanding of their problems than the State Department.
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