A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  A man of exceptional intelligence, lucidity and control, he had a tidy and exact mastery of the technical detail of a bewildering range of foreign problems and a talent for concise and dispassionate exposition. He had great ability to summarize divergent views and put his finger on the heart of a question. His idealism, if subdued and prosaic, was authentic: “If a new foreign ambassador in Washington were to ask me, ‘What should I keep my eye on to learn how American policy would react to a given situation?’ I would point out to him the eighteenth-century phrase which has always served as to American policy; that is, the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Privately he was agreeable, modest and compassionate.

  As Secretary of State, he worked as long and as hard as anyone in Washington. In negotiations with foreign countries, he was vigilant, impassive, patient and skilled. He displayed the same qualities in his relations with Congress and proved the most effective Secretary of State on the Hill since Cordell Hull. Within the executive branch, he developed excellent relations with McNamara; indeed, Rusk, having spent more than half his government career with the military, disliked cracks about generals and was pleased to have their esteem. His performance on ceremonial occasions was invariably felicitous. As for the general public, he remained deliberately dim until dimness had its effect, repelling controversy and inspiring confidence. His speeches had the quiet authority of one who knew that he spoke for the foreign policy establishment; unlike Dulles, he did not pretend to speak for God too. Toward the Soviet Union he exhibited a matter-of-fact mistrust which at times seemed automatic inflexibility but still differed from Dulles’s conviction of irremediable Soviet evil.

  He was, more than anything else, a man bred in the large organizations of mid-century America. But, unlike McNamara, his organizational instinct was for service, not for mastery. Nurtured in the successive bosoms of the university, the Army, the government department, the foundation, he drew reassurance from the solidity of the structure, the regularity of the procedures, the familiarity of the vocabulary. His mind, for all its strength and clarity, was irrevocably conventional. He mistrusted what he called “the flashy or sensational” and rejoiced in the role of “tedium” in diplomacy. “A great deal of our work,” he would say without complaint, “is perhaps on the boring side. . . . We can be just as repetitive. We can play the long-playing records just as long as someone else. We don’t feel that we need to rush to an answer.”

  He seemed actually to prefer stale to fresh ways of saying things. One felt that he regarded novelty as an effort to shock or make mischief. Presidential speeches sent over to State for his comment would return with arresting phrases stricken out and weary State Department formulas proposed (but rarely accepted) in their place. He was totally unembarrassed by banality and dropped expressions like “this great struggle for freedom” or “the free world” in his familiar conversation. Concepts like “national sovereignty” and “self-determination” seemed to have the same reality for him that mountains would have for Stewart Udall or wheat fields for Orville Freeman. The stereotypes of diplomacy were his native tongue. At times one wondered whether the harshness of life—the seething planet of revolutionary violence, ferocity and hate, shadowed by nuclear holocaust—ever penetrated the screen of clichés, ever shook that imperturbable blandness. As he would talk on and on in his even, low voice, a Georgia drawl sounding distantly under the professional tones of a foundation executive, the world itself seemed to lose reality and dissolve into a montage of platitudes.

  He was a superb technician: this was his power and his problem. He had trained himself all his life to be the ideal chief of staff, the perfect number-two man. The inscrutability which made him a good aide and a gifted negotiator made him also a baffling leader. When Assistant Secretaries brought him problems, he listened courteously, thanked them and let them go; they would often depart little wiser than they came. Since his subordinates did not know what he thought, they could not do what he wanted. In consequence, he failed to imbue the Department with positive direction and purpose. He had authority but not command. One telephone conversation with the President was worth a score of meetings with the Secretary.

  He was equally baffling at the White House. Where McNamara and Dillon would forcefully and articulately assert the interests of their departments in impending foreign policy decisions, Rusk would sit quietly by, with his Buddha-like face and half-smile, often leaving it to Bundy or to the President himself to assert the diplomatic interest. If the problem were an old one, he was generally in favor of continuing what Herter or Dulles or Acheson had done before him. If the problem were new, it was generally impossible to know what he thought. Indeed, nearly every time Kennedy faced a major foreign policy decision the views of his Secretary of State remained a mystery. Or so at least was the impression of the White House staff. Doubtless this was unfair, and historians in due course may be able to ascertain what the Secretary wanted the government to do during the great crises of those years. One regretted only that he did not care to disclose his ideas at the time. Inscrutability was splendid as a negotiating stance but inadequate as a principle of life.

  The staff’s judgment of the Secretary failed, I am sure, to take account of his problems. He was a proud and sensitive man, surrounded in his own Department by figures of greater public note—Stevenson, Bowles, Harriman, Williams—and dominated by a President who wanted to be his own Secretary of State. He lived, no doubt, under threats of humiliation and fears of inadequacy. He sometimes allowed the ceremonial side of his job to take precedence over his harder responsibilities, almost as if he were seeking an escape from decision. And at times his colorlessness of mind appeared almost compulsive, the evenness of tone and temper purchased at inner cost. His feelings were stronger than he permitted them to seem. Some who talked to him late at night over highballs on planes bound for international conferences caught him pouring out not the nostalgia I encountered on the way to Punta del Este but bitter resentment over intolerable “interference” by the White House staff. These moments were rare. Most of the time one felt his decency, dignity, durability.

  His relationship with the President remained formal. Kennedy remarked to a friend in State that Rusk was the only cabinet member he did not call by his first name. When this was repeated to Rusk, he said he liked it better that way. Kennedy was always impressed by Rusk’s capacity to define but grew increasingly depressed by his reluctance to decide. Conceivably this was the kind of Secretary of State Rusk thought the President preferred. But, while the President was certainly determined to direct the foreign policy of the nation, he nonetheless wanted someone who could not only mass the State Department but be a constant source of definite recommendations and fresh ideas—someone who could serve him, for example, as Acheson had served Truman and Welles, Roosevelt. The Secretary, he would say, “never gives me anything to chew on. . . . You never know what he is thinking.” Yet, though often perplexed and disappointed by Rusk, Kennedy liked him personally and was protective of him. Nothing irritated the President more than the suspicion, at times justified, that carping newspaper stories about the Secretary came from the White House staff. When Philip Graham tried in 1962 to persuade Kennedy to send Rusk to the United Nations and Stevenson to London and make David Bruce Secretary of State, the President replied (so Graham said later), “I can’t do that to Rusk; he is such a nice man.” He was also an able and useful man; but most compelling perhaps was Kennedy’s feeling that dismissal of his Secretary of State would constitute too severe a comment on his own original judgment. All this meant that, if the President were going to get at the “bowl of jelly,” reorganization would have to start at a lower level.

  8. THE SACRIFICE OF BOWLES

  Chester Bowles, as Under Secretary, had the second place of responsibility in the State Department. Kennedy liked Bowles, appreciated his help in the months before Los Angeles and sympathized with his efforts to redress the balance of our foreign polic
y toward the underdeveloped world and toward political rather than military solutions. Moreover, Bowles had important assets for the administration. He had unusual gifts for public persuasion. His personal idealism inspired devotion on the part of many who worked for him. He was identified in the United States and through the world with the affirmative impulses of American foreign policy. He was more responsible than anyone else for the distinguished series of ambassadorial appointments. He had been right on Cuba. He retained a strong following in the liberal community.

  Bowles, however, had his vulnerabilities too. His ambassadorial choices, though they pleased everybody else, had outraged the old-line professionals. Foreign Service officers trying to stop the designation of Edwin Reischauer to Japan, for example, had gone to the length of extracting statements from the Japanese Embassy saying that it would be terrible to send to Tokyo an American ambassador with a Japanese wife. The new Under Secretary left behind a covey of unemployed and embittered diplomats who circulated rude stories about him over their second and third martinis at the Metropolitan Club.

  Once the appointments were completed, his role was ill-defined. Though he had shown marked executive ability when he headed the Office of Price Administration in the Second World War, he never received clear-cut authority to run the State Department. To Bowles’s supporters—and they were zealous and vocal as his enemies—it seemed that Rusk was unwilling either to manage the Department himself or to let Bowles do it. The relationship between the two men was less close than Bowles had expected. The Secretary appeared reluctant to discuss policy with him and preferred to deal directly with Alexis Johnson, the career Deputy Under Secretary. Rusk’s administrative philosophy was that “if a man demonstrates that he is willing to make judgments and decisions and live with the results, power gravitates to him because other people will get out of his way”; and, by this standard, Bowles did not succeed in imposing himself effectively on the Department (nor did Rusk).

  At the White House the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs had put Bowles in an exposed position. Nor had Bowles made any effort to exploit a personal relationship to the President. Recognizing that he had a public standing which Rusk lacked and fearing to make the Secretary feel more insecure, the Under Secretary was meticulous in not asking to see the President by himself and, indeed, had no private talks with Kennedy between the interregnum in December and the following July. More access would not necessarily have improved things, though, for there was a fatal difference in tempo between Bowles and the New Frontier. In conversation Bowles was accustomed to the slow wind-up. When asked a question, he tended to catch hold of it a long distance back, to discourse on its relations to the multiple revolutions of our time, to invoke pictures of natives struggling out of mud huts for bread and independence, and to move down to the present with all deliberate speed. Kennedy agreed with nearly everything Bowles would say, but he had generally thought of it before himself, and he grew impatient when people explained to him things he knew already. Bowles spoke the unabashed liberal language of the New Deal; again the junior officers of the Second World War disagreed, not with the sentiment, but with what they considered the sentimentality. The New Frontier put a premium on quick, tough, laconic, decided people; it was easily exasperated by more meditative types. And, when the answer came at the end, it would sometimes seem spacious and vague, lacking the operational specifics sought by the Kennedys. Bowles’s command of large issues was unfortunately not matched by a command of small issues. “Chet is a fine fellow,” the President said to me one day in early May, “but he’s just not doing the job. He was perfect as Ambassador to India. A job like that could use all his good qualities—his intelligence, his sympathy, his willingness to listen to difficult problems. But he is not precise or decisive enough to get things done. Because Chet isn’t doing his job. Rusk is spreading himself too thin and is not able to do his job either.” He added, “Now George Ball is fine. He gets things done. So does Alexis Johnson.”

  The situation dragged on unhappily for several weeks. One day early in June, after a meeting with the President on the Dominican Republic, Robert Kennedy asked me to stay behind to discuss the Department. The President observed that the present state of affairs really could not be permitted to continue, that Bowles was oriented toward discussion rather than action and therefore only reinforced the vacillating and dilatory habits of the Department. Someone, he said, would have to be put in Bowles’s place who could make the Department work; but “of course it will look as if we were throwing out the one man in the State Department who was right on Cuba.” He valued Bowles in two roles, the President said: in getting fresh thinking to the White House and in explaining our policies at home and abroad. What he wanted was to transfer Bowles to another assignment while protecting his title and his dignity. The Attorney General proposed that Bowles be made roving ambassador to the underdeveloped world. The President asked me, “Do you think he would take it?” I was doubtful.

  Rusk, it appeared, had his own candidate for Bowles’s job. This was Arthur Dean, who had come to the Department as a negotiator on test ban problems. Dean, an engaging man and an able lawyer-negotiator of the old-fashioned type, had no great interest in the political or economic aspects of foreign policy. Moreover, he not only was a former law partner of John Foster Dulles but had no relationship to the President and no commitment to the New Frontier. In mid-June, when I was talking with him on test ban matters, he suddenly said, with genuine or calculated naïveté, “I told Dean Rusk the other day that, if I could get my hands on this Department, I would turn the whole thing over.” Robert Lovett and other representatives of the foreign policy establishment were urging Dean’s appointment.

  The Bay of Pigs experience had provided convincing evidence that the President required people in the State Department whose basic loyalty would be to him, not to the Foreign Service or the Council on Foreign Relations. I discussed this with Abram Chayes, the Department’s Legal Adviser and an old friend of Bowles’s. We speculated about the possibility of a reallocation of functions within the Department: the chief of staff job to be given to George Ball, while Bowles would retain his relationship to personnel and to policy planning and take on new duties in the area of public persuasion, both in the United States and abroad. I submitted this solution to the President early in July, arguing that Bowles’s particular abilities could thus be put to full use and that Ball could be depended on as the President’s man in the Department. “He is loyal to you,” I said about Ball, “and believes in your policies. It would be a great error, both substantive and political, to replace Bowles by someone who is neutral or Republican in his political orientation. . . . It is indispensable to have as Under Secretary a man who sympathizes with your social and economic objectives in the world. We cannot afford a conservative New York lawyer, however competent, in this spot, unless we want to end up with an intelligent updating of Eisenhowerism. Ball is imaginative, practical and able.”

  Ball was, indeed, all these things. He had come to Washington from Illinois as a New Deal lawyer in 1933. After a few years, he went back to a law office in Chicago, where Adlai Stevenson was one of his colleagues. During the war he returned to Washington in the Board of Economic Warfare. I met him first in Germany in 1945 when he and Kenneth Galbraith ran the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany. After the war he practiced law in Washington and Paris, becoming Jean Monnet’s American representative in the fifties. A high-spirited, calm and resourceful man, he was never afraid to take chances. I remember a moment in the early fifties when Henry Wallace was called to testify on China policy before the Senate Internal Security Committee. This was the height of McCarthyism, and Wallace wanted a lawyer to go to the Hill with him. Joseph Alsop, who had also appeared in these hearings, and I spent several hours one afternoon trying to find counsel for the former Vice-President of the United States. We called one old New Dealer after another; each advanced some vaguely plausible reason why he could not accompany Wallace. Finally
it occurred to us to call Ball, who promptly assented. In 1952 and 1956, Ball took a leading part in the Stevenson campaigns, and in 1960 he was a Stevenson manager in Los Angeles.

  Bowles liked the idea of some reallocation of responsibility between himself and Ball; but the President shook his head. “It wouldn’t work,” he said. “It would just prolong the confusion and the agony. Chet would continue to be frustrated. Everyone would continue to blame Chet for everything. It would be best for everyone if Chet were to make a clean break from his present responsibilities.” He thought for a moment and said, “What about Brazil? It is the biggest job in the Americas. It is the India of the hemisphere, and the next few years will be crucial. Chet could do a great job there. That is where he should go. I would think he would much prefer it anyway—better to be first in the American Embassy in Rio than second in the Department of State.” He told me to telephone Bowles and ask him whether he would go to Rio.

  When I called him, Chet listened in silence, dismissed the idea of Brazil and finally said, “There’s no point in this. I guess the fat’s really in the fire now. I want the President to know I will do everything I can to make my exit as graceful as possible. He need not worry. I will not say anything to anybody. I will go off to Switzerland where no newspaperman can find me.” One felt deeply the personal injustice of administrative decision. I reported to the President: “It is ironic that Bowles is being removed for his failure to overcome the entrenched complacency of the Foreign Service pros—and that these very pros, who are the basic source of State Department inertia, will regard his removal as their victory. . . . The people in the Administration who will be most pleased by his removal are those who are most opposed to the Kennedy policies.”