A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Averell Harriman, who worked for them both, remarked once that Kennedy was more his own Secretary of State than Franklin Roosevelt had been. He meant that Roosevelt picked out the problems he wanted to handle himself and left everything eke to Sumner Welles, who ran the Department, while Kennedy dealt personally with almost every aspect of policy around the globe. He knew more about certain areas than the senior officials at State and probably called as many issues to their attention as they did to his. He wanted particularly to stay ahead of problems; nothing exasperated him more than to be surprised by crisis. It was at his instance in early 1961, for example, that a task force worked out the first long-range program for Iran; and as early as August 1961 he sent out a directive saying that the United States should prepare for a more active role in Cyprus if trouble was to be averted in the eastern Mediterranean. More than anyone in the government, he was the source of ideas, initiative and imagination in foreign policy.

  This was partly a matter of temperament and curiosity but partly too of necessity. In the modern Presidency, every chief executive, sooner or later, no matter what his background or predilection, is drawn into a particular concern with foreign affairs. It is not just that foreign questions are often more interesting or offer Presidents more scope for personal maneuver and decision; it is above all that the issues are more fateful. And the nuclear age, as Richard Neustadt liked to point out, added a dimension of ‘irreversibility’ to policy—that is, certain choices, once made, could not be called back. Moreover, the irreversible choices might be, not the final, dramatic decisions, but rather the minor and technical steps taken at a low level a long time back but leading ineluctably to the catastrophic choice. The Bay of Pigs provided Kennedy the warning and confirmed his temperamental instinct to reach deep inside State, Defense and the CIA in order to catch hold of policies before these policies made his choices for him. “Domestic policy,” he used to say, “can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”

  5. THE STRUGGLE FOR COORDINATION

  While Kennedy had no doubt that the President’s exercise of his seniority in foreign affairs was his constitutional duty, he earnestly hoped that the State Department would really serve as his agent of coordination. He wanted to end the faceless system of indecision and inaction which diffused foreign policy among the three great bureaucracies of State, Defense and the CIA. But, to make coordination effective, it was necessary to strengthen the Department’s instrumentalities of control. This was especially important overseas, where the dispersion of power was most acute, visible and mischievous. Kennedy’s circular letter to the ambassadors consequently gave them the authority to “oversee and coordinate all the activities of the United States Government” in their countries, except for military forces in the field under a United States area military commander.

  This was not an entirely popular move. It was resisted by Defense, the CIA, the Peace Corps and other agencies which liked to act independently—and even by traditional Foreign Service officers who did not want to be responsible for nontraditional operations and preferred not to know, for example, what the CIA was up to. Within State, however, Chester Bowles ardently championed the new approach. He had provided the original draft of the President’s letter, and he soon followed it up with a memorandum reminding chiefs of mission of their obligation to see that all United States representatives “speak with a common voice and are not played off one against the other by a foreign government.”

  These instructions were aimed particularly at the CIA. Cuba and Laos had already provided the new administration with horrible examples of the readiness of CIA operatives in the field to go off on policies of their own. This was only the most spectacular expression of the steady growth of the CIA in the 1950s. The CIA’s budget now exceeded State’s by more than 50 per cent (though it was less than half that of the intelligence operations of the Defense Department). Its staff had doubled in a decade. In some areas the CIA had outstripped the State Department in the quality of its personnel, partly because it paid higher salaries and partly because Allen Dulles’s defiance of McCarthy enabled it to attract and hold abler men. It had almost as many people under official cover overseas as State; in a number of embassies CIA officers outnumbered those from State in the political sections. Often the CIA station chief had been in the country longer than the ambassador, had more money at his disposal and exerted more influence. The CIA had its own political desks and military staffs; it had in effect its own foreign service, its own air force, even, on occasion, its own combat forces. Moreover, the CIA declined to clear its clandestine intelligence operations either with the State Department in Washington or with the ambassador in the field; and, while covert political operations were cleared with State, this was sometimes done, not at the start, but after the operation had almost reached the point beyond which it could not easily be recalled. The coincidence that one Dulles brother was head of State and another the head of the CIA had resulted in practical independence for the Agency, because Allen Dulles could clear things with Foster without clearing them with Foster’s Department. The lucky success in Guatemala, moreover, stirred dangerous longings for adventure in CIA breasts.

  None of this is to suggest that the CIA constituted, in the title of a popular exposé, an “invisible government” or that its influence was always, or often, reactionary and sinister. In my experience its leadership was politically enlightened and sophisticated. Not seldom CIA representatives took a more liberal line in White House meetings than their counterparts from State. A great deal of CIA energy went to the support of the anti-Communist left around the world—political parties, trade unions and other undertakings. None the less, it had acquired a power which, however beneficial its exercise often might be, blocked State Department control over the conduct of foreign affairs.

  The President’s letter now gave every ambassador for the first time the authority to know everything the CIA people were doing in his country (even if not always the way they were doing it). Some ambassadors, like Galbraith, used this authority more stringently than others; but the directive constituted at least a first step toward bringing secret operations under policy control. In Washington, U. Alexis Johnson, the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and an uncommonly efficient administrator, presided over an interdepartmental committee on intelligence affairs. After the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy took a personal interest in the CIA and became an informal presidential watchdog over covert operations.

  The Bay of Pigs, of course, stimulated a wide variety of proposals for the reorganization of the CIA. The State Department, for example, could not wait to separate the CIA’s overt from its clandestine functions and even change the Agency’s name. The President, consulting closely with James Killian, Clark Clifford and the other members of his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, decided not to go that far. The Agency itself suffered from doubt and gloom after Cuba, and it was feared that drastic measures would cause total demoralization. Instead, Kennedy moved quietly to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a 20 per cent reduction by 1966. At the same time, anticipating the resignation of Allen Dulles, he began looking for a new director. Under Eisenhower the need had been for an authoritative interpreter of the flow of intelligence; here Allen Dulles, with his perceptive and flexible sense of the political ebb and flow, was ideal. But Kennedy, Bundy and the White House staff preferred to interpret intelligence themselves. They sought, not an intellectual oracle, but a sensible and subdued manager of the government’s intelligence business. In addition, the President thought it politically prudent to have a CIA chief conservative enough to give the Agency a margin of protection in Congress.

  After a long search, he came up in September 1961 with the name of John McCone, a California Republican who had served Truman as Under Secretary of the Air Force and Eisenhower as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He summoned McCone to the White House on the pretext of asking his views on nuclear testing, sized him up in a two-hour
conversation and, when McCone returned a fortnight later with his report, startled him by offering the CIA post. The President did this with notable secrecy, recognizing that the appointment would bring a moment of consternation to the New Frontier. McCone had the reputation of a rigid cold-warrior who viewed the world in moralistic stereotypes. Scientists who recalled his opposition to a test ban were particularly agitated. McCone did lack the expansive personality of his predecessor, but he turned out to be a cautious, realistic and self-effacing head of the CIA. He repaired morale within the Agency, instituted measures to subject venturesome proposals to critical scrutiny and did his best to keep the CIA and himself out of the newspapers. He restored its relations with the State Department and the Congress, if not altogether with the Department of Defense. And, declining to allow his own views to prejudice the intelligence estimates, he showed a fair-mindedness which shamed some of us who had objected to his appointment. Two able professionals, Richard Helms and Ray Cline, became his deputies for operations and intelligence. The result was to make the Agency a more consistently technical service.

  As further evidence of his desire to place responsibility in the diplomatic professionals, Kennedy gave the Foreign Service an unprecedentedly large share of ambassadorial appointments. In 1940 career officers held only 47 per cent of the embassy posts, in 1955 they were down to 40 per cent, but by the middle of 1962 they held 68 per cent. Nor did this consist only of ‘hardship posts’ in primitive countries. In 1938–39, there were fifteen non-career Chiefs of Mission in Europe (including Joseph P. Kennedy) as against twelve Foreign Service officers; in 1962, there were seventeen career men and only seven noncareer. And during the interregnum Kennedy persuaded John Rooney, chairman of the House subcommittee which controlled State Department appropriations, to increase representational allowances so that career officers could afford to take major embassies.

  6. THE UNEASY PARTNERSHIP

  Yet, in spite of the presidential effort to give the Department the central role in foreign affairs, Richard Neustadt was obliged to testify before the Jackson Subcommittee in 1963: “So far as I can judge, the State Department has not yet found means to take the proffered role and play it vigorously across the board.”

  Part of the trouble was inherent in the effort, as Neustadt defined it, to make the State Department “at once a department and then something more.” The Secretary already had, in the jargon, a ‘full plate.’ He had to manage and represent the Department and Foreign Service, attend to Congress and public opinion and take part in conferences and negotiations all over the planet. To do all this and serve in addition as the President’s agent of coordination would require almost superhuman talent and energy. It was not that the Department failed to produce statements of plans and objectives. If anything, it produced too many—a Basic National Security Program, State Department guidelines, country plans, internal defense plans, national policy papers and so on. But the process of codification tended toward generalization and ambiguity and rarely provided specific guidance on the hard choices.

  Part of the trouble too lay in the attitude of the White House toward the Foreign Service. Talk of the need for specialization was all very well; but, as Charles Bohlen used to urge with urbane persuasiveness, the art of diplomacy must also be recognized as a specialization and basic to the others. It was Bohlen who, among Foreign Service officers, saw most of Kennedy in the relaxed moments of his Presidency. The gaiety of Bohlen’s mind, the shrewdness of his insight, and the breadth of his experience made him a delightful companion. At the same time, though he was infinitely more independent and irreverent than the typical career officer, the Foreign Service had no more faithful or ingenious champion. Once Kennedy, exasperated over the difficulty of getting action out of State, said, “What’s wrong with that goddamned Department of yours, Chip?” Bohlen answered candidly, “You are.”

  By this Bohlen meant, as he explained to an interested Kennedy, that the President did not make sufficient allowance for the virtues of professionalism. He wanted quick and personal replies to significant questions, not taking into account the fact that any significant question had a bundle of implications which the Department must consider in an orderly way before it could make a responsible answer. He wanted ambassadors to know languages, master technical fields and fraternize with the people of the countries to which they were assigned, forgetting that the chief purpose of the diplomat was the transaction of business between governments and that everything else was supporting and subsidiary. Too much emphasis on diplomatic activism per se might lead people to forget the limits of diplomatic action. Bohlen even argued that the Assistant Secretaryships should be filled from the Service, though, when Kennedy mildly observed that it was not easy to find good Foreign Service officers, Bohlen conceded that this was so.

  The aggressiveness of the White House staff no doubt compounded the trouble. Probably most of the Foreign Service had welcomed Kennedy’s accession. Yet a year later many career men were wondering whether they had not exchanged King Log for King Stork. White House ‘meddling’ struck some of the pros as careless intrusion by impulsive and ignorant amateurs—“crusading activism touched with naïveté.” This was John Davies’s phrase, and he added: “Bold new ideas and quick decisions were asked of men who had learned from long, disillusioning experience that there were few or no new ideas, bold or otherwise, that would solidly produce the dramatic changes then sought, and whose experience for a decade had been that bold ideas and actions were personally dangerous and could lead to congressional investigations and public disgrace.” In his visits to Washington, Davies would talk acidly about the Foreign Service, “purged from the right under Dulles, now purged from the left under Kennedy,” and ask, “How can you expect these men to do a good job?”

  The question was a real one. The Foreign Service obviously had to carry out the policies of the administration; yet ‘thought correction,’ even in tavor of the New Frontier, presented its problems. The President, commenting on the public service in his first State of the Union message, had said, “Let it be clear that this Administration recognizes the value of dissent and daring—that we greet healthy controversy as the hallmark of healthy change.” But what if dissent meant opposition to the neutralization of Laos or to the Alliance for Progress or to the center-left experiment in Italy? This was a riddle which the White House, wishing free minds in the bureaucracy but at the same time demanding commitment to its policies—and the Foreign Service, proclaiming its loyalty to all administrations but at the same time reserving the right to defend old policies against new—never solved. Probably it was insoluble.

  These structural factors explained part of the State Department’s faltering response to its “proffered role.” The partnership seemed chronically out of balance. But Kennedy never ceased hoping that it would work. He tried one thing after another. “I have discovered finally that the best way to deal with State,” he said to me one day in August, 1961, “is to send over memos. They can forget phone conversations, but a memorandum is something which, by their system, has to be answered. So let’s put as many things as possible in memoranda from now on.” Though he licensed an exceptional degree of White House interest in foreign policy, he set up no new authorities which would prevent the Secretary of State from serving as the presidential ‘agent of coordination.’ Instead, he repressed his frustrations (at some times more successfully than at others) and kept supposing that by strengthening the direction of the Department he would enable it to sustain its side of the partnership.

  7. THE ENIGMA OF RUSK

  Kennedy had decided on Dean Rusk as Secretary of State after a single talk. It was an understandable choice. Rusk was a man of broad experience and marked ability. He rarely spoke about himself; but I remember one night, on a plane rushing south to Punta del Este, his talking with quiet charm about his boyhood in rural Georgia. He was delivered by an aged veterinarian whose medical training had been picked up in the Civil War. Rusk’s father was the o
nly one of twelve brothers and sisters who attended college. But three of his father’s five children went to college; all the grandchildren would go to college. In the same way the Georgia back-country, a land of kerosene lamps and goiter and pellagra when Rusk was growing up, had been transformed by public health and rural electrification. These memories left him a convinced if undemonstrative liberal on domestic issues. To his social and economic convictions he added an earnest concern for the rights of Negroes; in the Kennedy years his oldest son was active in the Urban League.

  From Davidson College in North Carolina, Rusk, with his Rhodes Scholarship, went to Oxford, and from Oxford to the political science department of Mills College. Here his moderation and competence inevitably made him dean of the faculty. War service in the China-Burma-India theater was followed by government service in the Pentagon and then in the State Department. He was Assistant Secretary for United Nations Affairs and then for the Far East before leaving Washington in 1952 to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation. This background gave him expert knowledge of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Defense and State, the United Nations and the ways that science and medicine could benefit mankind.