A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  They felt, in short, that they were outsiders again. Many may even have resumed this role with a certain relief. During the Eisenhower years they were somehow implicated in the actions of government and therefore debarred from denouncing Washington whenever anything happened they did not like. Kennedy’s election had liberated them. Now they were exempt from responsibility. They had a Democratic administration to blame again and ‘that man in the White House’ to hate again. It was back to the old rituals and devils, and they spoke out with liturgical fervor. The Republican congressional leadership called the steel fight “a display of naked political power never seen before in this nation. . . . We have passed within the shadow of police-state methods.” Barry Goldwater said that Kennedy was trying to “socialize the business of the country.” John W. Bricker, resurrecting his prose of a generation before, cried, “The recent display of dictatorial power by President Kennedy has made us realize that freedom in its largest sense is at stake. The Republican party is the last and only remaining bulwark.” Kennedy’s citation of his father reinforced the comforting sense of continuity. (A cartoon of the day showed two businessmen in their club, one saying to the other, “My father always told me that all Presidents are sons-of-bitches.” Kennedy was delighted, and the original hung on a wall in Evelyn Lincoln’s office.)

  As for the President, the steel fight showed once again his cool understanding of the uses of power. He had, in fact, no direct authority available against the steel companies. Instead, he mobilized every fragment of quasi-authority he could find and, by a bravura public performance, converted weakness into strength. And his victory was a durable one. When the administration a year later countenanced selective price increases by Wheeling Steel, some commentators rushed to conclude that Kennedy had thrown away his triumph of 1962. Actually these 1963 increases made no difference. As the Council of Economic Advisers reported in 1965, “On the average, steel prices are essentially unchanged from 1959.”

  In winning this victory, Kennedy answered the question with which the business community had confronted every activist Chief Executive since Jackson: “Who is President anyway?’’ He delivered his answer at a cost, but the cost of not answering would have been greater. And, if the domestic cost was significant, in foreign policy his triumph over steel was an unmixed gain. Newspapers applauded his action around the globe. Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman had won world confidence in part because their domestic policies had established them as the critics, and not the instruments, of American business. Now Kennedy had left the world no doubt that he was equally independent of the American business community—and in a world indoctrinated with fears of aggressive American capitalism this won new trust for his leadership in foreign affairs.

  His conclusion about organized business was impersonal and penetrating. “The problem is,” he said one day in July on the plane back from the Cape, “that the business community no longer has any confidence in itself. Whenever I say anything that upsets them, businessmen just die. I have to spend my time and energy trying to prop them up.”

  6. STOCK MARKETS AND SWIMMING POOLS

  He began the labor of propping up immediately after Blough’s capitulation. Moreover, the strength of pro-business sentiment in Congress and the need for active business collaboration in economic growth and foreign policy made it expedient to heal the wounds as speedily as possible. And in domestic, as in foreign, affairs, Kennedy never believed in humiliating an opponent or cutting off his retreat. He told his staff that it was “important that we not take any action that could be interpreted as vindictive.” When Blough received a citation from the Yale Law School, the President sent him a congratulatory telegram. At the end of April he made a conciliatory speech before the Chamber of Commerce.

  But business was not notably responsive to the flag of truce. The president of the Chamber of Commerce, after Kennedy’s speech, took the platform himself and made the dark observation: “We should remember dictators in other lands usually come to power under accepted constitutional procedures.” (Appearing a few days later before the United Auto Workers, Kennedy said, “Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce and the presidents of the American Medical Association, I began to wonder how I got elected. And now I remember.”) And a tension remained between his own public attitudes and private emotions. He exposed some of them one day when Hugh Sidey asked if it was to be war with business in the old F.D.R. style. Kennedy said at first, “No, no, we’re not going to do that. They’re our partners—unwilling partners. But we’re in this together. . . . I’m not against business—I want to help them if I can.” Then he added, “But look at the record. I spent a whole year trying to encourage business. And look what I get for it. . . . I think maybe I ought to get a little tougher with business. I think that may be the way to treat them. They understand it. When I’m nice to them, they just kick me. I think I’ll just treat them rougher. Maybe it will do some good.”

  Publicly he continued to be nice, however. Then on Monday, May 28, the stock market suddenly collapsed—the largest one-day drop in prices since the crash of 1929. Actually speculation on the possibility of inflation had pushed prices up too fast in the winter of 1960–61, and the market had been visibly adjusting, at least since the last week in March, to price stability and the diminished prospect for capital, gain. But the sudden descent created deep anxieties. Within the government Seymour Harris’s panel of Treasury consultants forecast trouble ahead. One conservative writer, Merryle Stanley Rukeyser, produced a book entitled The Kennedy Recession,* and business comment freely blamed the stock market troubles on the ‘lack of confidence’ engendered by the President’s disrespect for United States Steel. Marquis Childs, after talks with businessmen, wrote that their attitude to Kennedy was: Now we have you where we want you. When asked about this at a pressconference, the President convulsed the newspapermen by replying, with a nod to his office: “I can’t believe I’m where business—big business, wants me.” Privately he was increasingly disturbed and baffled by the problem of getting business to face the serious issues of the economy.

  One afternoon early in June, he held forth to Sorensen, O’Donnell and me. ‘‘I understand better every day,” he said, “why Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business. It is hard as hell to be friendly with people who keep trying to cut your legs off. . . . There are about ten thousand people in the country involved in this—bankers, industrialists, lawyers, publishers, politicians—a small group, but doing everything they can to say we are going into a depression because business has no confidence in the administration. They are starting ta call me the Democratic Hoover. Well, we’re not going to take that.”

  O’Donnell said, “The worst thing we can do now is to put ourselves in a foot-kissing posture.” The President wheeled around and said, “Yes, we tried that after the steel case, and we didn’t get anywhere. . . . They are trying to make government responsible for everything on the ground that what we did to steel destroyed business confidence. We have to turn it around. We have to put out the picture of a small group of men turning against the government and the economy because the government would not surrender to them. That is the real issue.”

  The market decline continued, if at a more stately pace, until the end of June 1962, and the business campaign against the administration intensified. Because Kennedy had great personal popularity through the country, the attacks began, in the classical manner, by concentrating on the more vulnerable of his advisers. Past sins made me an obvious target. A contribution in 1947 to a Partisan Review symposium on “The Future of Socialism” was now exhumed as evidence, as Barry Goldwater put it, that “for many years [Schlesinger] has been writing about socialism in America and laying out a blueprint on how to accomplish it. He announces himself as a socialist.” Goldwater had obviously never read the Partisan Review piece, for the article, following a discussion of capitalism and socialism, said: “After all which system has more successfully dehum
anized the worker, fettered the working class and extinguished personal and political liberty? . . . The socialist state is thus worse than the capitalist state because it is more inclusive in its coverage and more unlimited in its power.” But the suggestion that I was writing about socialism as an analyst and not as an advocate made little dent on the gathering clamor (though Goldwater, to do him justice, stopped calling me a socialist when the facts were pointed out to him). I also attracted the attention of a columnist named Henry J. Taylor, well known for his belief in the existence of flying saucers.* Early in May he cited the Partisan Review piece in a column for the Scripps-Howard papers entitled crisply “Schlesinger Should Go.” A little later I foolishly accepted a telephone call from him. He was inquiring about a piece I had written for the Saturday Evening Post and what I intended to do with the payment (answer: turn it over to charity); but I seized the occasion to point out that his column on the Partisan Review piece had falsified my views. In short order the conversation began to deteriorate. When he made some particularly outrageous accusation, I said, “If you believe that, you’re an idiot.” Taylor soon wrote a column saying indignantly that my “first words” when he called were, “You are an idiot.” Walter Winchell added his contribution: “Schlesinger is haunted by intellectual snobbery, dominated by arrogance . . . as power-mad as he is venomous . . . a threat to fundamental American concepts.” A group of patriots in California founded the Organization to Remove Schlesinger from Public Life.

  At this point Robert and Ethel Kennedy gave a party to celebrate their twelfth wedding anniversary. It was a gentle summer night at Hickory Hill. The tables were set around the swimming pool, and Ethel was sitting at a table for four on a bridge thrown rather precariously across the pool. Dancing took place between the courses. My partner and I ventured out on the catwalk; it shook under our tread; and to our horror we saw Ethel’s chair slide on the wet boards to the edge and then into the water. After a moment, I plunged in after her. We changed our clothes, and the party went pleasantly on. A few days later garbled versions of the swimmingpool episode began to find their way into print.

  One afternoon I received a call from Tom Corcoran, who had endured similar attention in another age. He said, “I scent a man hunt. Whenever the market goes down, those fellows demand a human sacrifice, and they have nominated you. The play they gave the swimming-pool story was the tip-off.” By this time, I began to suffer from the sense of having brought unnecessary trouble on the administration and increased the President’s burdens at a time when he had quite enough on his mind. Accordingly, in a lapse of humor, I solemnly told him that I was ready to leave. He said with great kindness, “Don’t worry about it. Everybody knows what Henry Taylor is like. No one pays any attention to him. All they are doing is shooting at me through you. Their whole line is to pin everything on the professors—you, Heller, Rostow. When the market fell, Time put Heller on the cover, not Dillon. Don’t worry about it. This is the sort of thing you have to expect.”

  XXIV

  The National Agenda

  UNDERNEATH THE CLAMOR the President had been thinking intensively about the problems of communication on economic problems. One Sunday in May 1968 he took André Malraux out to Glen Ora for luncheon, and, as Kennedy later described it, they fell into a discussion of the persistence of mythology in the contemporary world. “In the nineteenth century,” Malraux said, “the ostensible issue within the European states was the monarchy vs. the republic. But the real issue was capitalism vs. the proletariat. In the twentieth century the ostensible issue is capitalism vs. the proletariat. But the world has moved on. What is the real issue now?” The real issue today, Kennedy replied, was the management of industrial society—a problem, he said, not of ideology but of administration.

  This conversation remained in his mind. A few days later, when he spoke to the White House conference on national economic issues, the “difference between myth and reality” provided the theme for his remarks. The old debates of F.D.R. and Wilson and Bryan, the President observed, were increasingly irrelevant to the complex technical decisions of modern society. Only medical care for the aged still roused “powerful feelings among the general public.” For the rest—

  the fact of the matter is that most of the problems, or at least many of them, that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of ‘passionate movements’ which have stirred this country so often in the past. . . .

  How can we look at things as they are, not through party labels, or through position labels, but as they are—and figure out how we can maintain this economy so that it moves ahead?

  1. REASON AT YALE

  In another few days he decided to make this the theme of a major address at the Yale Commencement. One morning early in June he called me in and outlined very specifically the speech he wanted. My first draft seemed to him too mild; and he asked me to “sharpen” it up, which, with Galbraith’s help, I did. The result was too sharp, and Sorensen now produced a new draft. This was not right either; and finally McGeorge Bundy and I turned out still another. The President went over it on Sunday morning, June 10, and suggested still more changes. After these were made, he worked over the text himself on the plane north, adding several more paragraphs.

  The central issues of our time, Kennedy said in New Haven, “relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals.” As every past generation had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truism and stereotype, “so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.”

  For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

  In particular, the dialogue between government and business was “clogged by illusion and platitude.” It failed “to reflect the true realities of contemporary American society.”

  He then dealt with several prevalent myths. As against the myth that government was growing relatively bigger, he pointed out that, excepting defense and space expenditures, the federal government had expanded less than any other major sector of the economy since the Second World War. As against the myth that federal deficits created and surpluses prevented inflation, he cited the historical record of the postwar years. As against the myth that the national debt was growing at a dangerously rapid rate, he pointed out that it had declined sharply since the war, both per person and as a proportion of gross national product. As against the myth that ‘confidence’ in the national administration was the condition for economic prosperity, he pointed out that such confidence had not prevented recessions in 1929, 1954, 1958 and 1960, and that corporate plans were “not based on a political confidence in party leaders but on an economic confidence in the nation’s ability to invest and produce and consume.”

  What is at stake [he concluded] is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical issues involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead. . . .

  The debate of the thirties had its great significance and produced great results, but it took place in a different world with different needs and different tasks. It is our responsibility today to live in our own world and to identify the needs and discharge the tasks of the 1960s.

  In the course of the speech, Kennedy remarked that the governments of Western Europe were prepared “to face technical problems without ideological preconceptions” and therefore could “coordinate the elements of a national economy and bring about growth and prosperity.”
Our own nation, he said, should begin “a serious dialogue of the kind which has led in Europe to such fruitful collaboration among all the elements of economic society and to a decade of unrivaled economic progress.” This observation reflected his marked interest in the performance of the West European economies. Early in his administration he had charged Heller on his transatlantic trips to report on European planning methods, and he used to cross-examine European visitors to learn the secret of their success. He soon discovered that Western Europe was happily free of the American budgetary obsession. As E. Van Lennep, the Treasurer-General of the Netherlands and a leading figure in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), said to him a fortnight before the Yale speech, “In Europe one does not understand why in the United States there is still a strong tendency to have a balanced budget as a target [even] for the average of a business cycle.” The President learned too about European planning of the indirect or ‘indicative’ sort—not centralized physical direction of the economy but the technique of laying down projections for major industries and then persuading everybody to do what was necessary to make the projections come true.

  Lacking doctrinaire belief in the sanctity of balanced budgets or of unregulated markets, Kennedy found all this a perfectly rational way to run a modern economy. The continuing economic sluggishness in the United States, the persistence of unemployment even as business activity increased, the absence in the Keynesian system of a reliable defense against inflation under conditions of full employment: all these factors predisposed him intellectually toward the idea of combining decentralized decision with national economic targets. McNamara, whose interest in management extended to economic matters, strengthened this concern. The Secretary of Defense was sure that systems analysis could help rationalize the economy within the margin of free choice and used to say to Heller, “Your fellows and mine should get together and see what we can do.”