A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  In economics, as in politics, timing is of the essence. Because Dillon might agree that Heller was right about a tax cut in 1963 did not prove that Heller was right in wanting one in 1962. What the Secretary’s critics called his “dillontory” tactics and his penchant for “dillonbusters” may often have been in accord with political and economic actualities. Restraint was the Treasury’s job, as it was one of the Council’s jobs to venture out ahead of policy. The President would say to Heller, “I can’t say that yet, but you can.” The Council’s sallies in advance of the administration seemed to Kennedy a useful exercise both in political reconnaissance and in public education. Dillon appreciated this too, knowing that, on the things he cared about most, he could ordinarily get Kennedy’s support. The exchanges between the Treasury and the Council in these years taught the one economic ideas and the other political realities. What had begun between Dillon and Heller as an edgy competition became by 1963 a fruitful partnership. Above all, their agreement on the need for tax reduction in 1963 promised action, so long deferred, to get America moving again.

  4. THE NEW SOCIETY

  But economic growth was only the first step. The nation at midcentury, urban, industrial, mobile, technologically kinetic, spiritually hyperbolic, contained a swarm of hard and insistent problems. Kennedy used to speak almost with envy of the relatively predictable statecraft of the nineteenth century. Then, as he once said, “great Presidents and great Senators dealt with four, five or six issues which flowed in a gentle stream across the panorama of their lives. What they talked about when they came to Congress they talked about . . . at the end of their congressional terms.” Now the United States faced issues “which dwarf in complexity every week the kind of problems which those men dealt with in their lifetimes.” And these, he said, were “new problems, entirely different from those that have faced the Eisenhower administration, or that of Harry Truman, or Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson . . . new problems, requiring new people, new solutions, new ideas.”

  The problems, of course, were not all that different, nor were the answers he offered in 1960 all that new—the improvement of the educational system, the strengthening of public provisions for social security and medical care, attention to the decaying cities, a more rational farm program, the conservation and development of natural resources, recognition of the Negro revolution. This was, in effect, the unfinished business of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Yet Kennedy’s spirited presentation imbued it with his own intense contemporaneity. The program, taken as a whole, offered a systematic identification of the fundamental problems of modern America in terms of a deeply critical assessment of the moral, intellectual and institutional failures of American society. And, despite his support of economic growth and his concern over persisting privation, the thrust of his preoccupation was less with the economic machine and its quantitative results than with the quality of life in a society which, in the main, had achieved abundance.

  This, as he fully realized, was a subtle preoccupation, not easily convertible into the coin of politics. With 94 per cent of the labor force employed and national income steadily rising, it would be difficult to persuade a largely conservative Congress and a largely contented people of the need for federal action to improve the quality of society. It would require, as he saw it, a long and patient program of public education. This he promptly began in an extraordinary series of messages to the Congress on domestic affairs in the spring of 1961. In addition to his strictly economic documents, he sent the Hill messages on health and hospital care (February 9), education (February go), natural resources (February 23), highways (February 28), housing and community development (March 9), agriculture (March 16), regulatory agencies (April 13) and an omnibus message on urgent national needs (May 25). In subsequent years he sent further messages on many of these subjects-and added a variety of other issues: civil rights, transportation, public welfare, the protection of the consumer, mental illness and retardation, youth, the elderly.

  His intimate acquaintance, of course, was with urban and industrial issues. He approached the farm problem with suspicion, but he liked and trusted Orville Freeman and, in time, developed an authentic intellectual interest in farm matters. In 1960 national agricultural policy was in an evident cul-de-sac. The farmer was the victim of his own fantastic technological efficiency. Production per man-hour in American agriculture was increasing at a rate twice as fast as in industry; public storage of surplus agricultural commodities, especially wheat and feed grains, was overflowing every available bin and elevator. Yet at the same time people in the United States and abroad were going hungry; only one American farmer in nine was earning wages comparable to those of skilled factory workers; total farm income was declining; and unemployment and poverty were twice as bad on the countryside as in the cities. Moreover, the farmer himself, in spite of his immense contribution, was increasingly regarded as a cadger and parasite on the rest of the economy.

  Freeman tackled the problem with energy and intelligence. He brought back the agricultural economists to the Department, from which they had been expelled under the Eisenhower administration, spent long hours with the agricultural committees on the Hill and traveled around the country engaging in extensive colloquies with farmers and their representatives. Though his recommendations had a mixed reception in Congress, in time the elements of a new agricultural policy began to emerge. The surpluses were put to use through Food for Peace abroad and enlarged distribution of surplus foods to the needy at home, soon accompanied by a revival of the Food Stamp plan of the thirties. The Emergency Feed Grain Act of 1961, continued in later years, initiated an attack on the surpluses piling up for the future. When the wheat farmers rejected mandatory controls in May 1963, the administration began to shift from price to income support, allowing prices to find their own level while income was maintained by direct payments to farmers prepared to accept production controls. These policies both reduced surpluses to the level of a prudent national reserve and increased net farm income by the average of almost $1 billion a year during the Kennedy Presidency. In the meantime, Freeman’s rural areas development program began the work of improving and modernizing life on the countryside. The result was a series of changes which re-established the farmer in the national polity and offered for the first time in years the hope of a rational policy for agriculture.

  The President approached conservation with a good deal more initial warmth, though with similar abstractness. He had enjoyed pointing out during the presidential campaign that “the two Americans in this century who have done more to develop the resources of the west” were both easterners, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt (he could have added Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania and, by adoption, Bernard De Voto of Massachusetts); and he was determined to carry on this tradition. Early in March 1961; dedicating the National Wildlife Federation Building, he affirmed the responsibility “to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.” He was not complacent about the condition of the national estate. In his preface to Stewart Udall’s valuable book The Quiet Crisis he warned that “the race between education and erosion, between wisdom and waste, has not run its course. . . . Each generation must deal anew with the ‘raiders,’ with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, and with the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. The nation’s battle to preserve the common estate is far from won.” He concluded:

  The crisis may be quiet, but it is urgent. We must do in our own day what Theodore Roosevelt did sixty years ago and Franklin Roosevelt thirty years ago: we must expand the concept of conservation to meet the imperious problems of the new age. We must develop new instruments of foresight and protection and nurture in order to recover the relationship between man and nature and to make sure that the national estate we pass on to our multiplying descendants is green and flourishing.

  These were heartfelt words.
Kennedy cared deeply about the loveliness of lakes and woods and mountains and detested the clutter and blight which increasingly defaced the landscape. But, in the pressures of presidential life in the sixties, conservation had a rather low priority. “Intellectually he is fine,” Udall said to me one day. “He knows the issues and recognizes their importance. When the problems are brought to him, his response is excellent. But he doesn’t raise them himself.” He did, however, call the first White House Conference on Conservation in fifty-four years, and he gave Udall’s vigorous direction of the Department of the Interior strong support; the annual outlays for natural resources were 16 per cent higher than in Eisenhower years. As one who loved ocean beaches, gulls wheeling in the sky, dunes baking in the sun, gleaming surf and salt spray, he was particularly pleased to establish three national seashores, above all the one covering white beaches and serene inland ponds of his own Cape Cod.

  5. YOUTH AND THE FUTURE

  Yet, except on holiday, he remained unregenerately a city man, deeply anxious about the mess and tangle of urban America. This could be only in part a matter for the national government; and the Attorney General wrought a decisive change in the capacity of cities to provide for themselves by bringing apportionment cases to the Supreme Court and challenging the system of rural overrepresentation in state legislatures. Baker v. Carr in 1962 adjudged legislative apportionment as within the jurisdiction of the courts, and Reynolds v. Sims, which Robert Kennedy personally argued in 1964, established the one-man, one-vote principle as the standard for apportionment. In the meantime, the Housing Act of 1961, the most extensive piece of housing legislation for a dozen years, gave the federal government new weapons and resources in its attack on urban squalor. The President’s attempts to persuade Congress to authorize a Department of Urban Affairs failed in 1961 and 1962, in part because of the expectation that he would give the new cabinet post to his Housing Administrator, Dr. Robert C. Weaver, eminently qualified in every way save, in the view of some, by the color of his skin.

  But the President’s particular concern was how to turn the urban and suburban communities, so often chaotic and demoralized, into places where young people could grow up with a sense of purpose in their lives and a belief in the rationality of their society. When he would say that the key to the American future was its youth, this was not a passing piety. It was a central fact as vividly perceived as Orville Freeman’s wheatfields or Stewart Udall’s dams. He knew (and would rattle off the statistics) that each year 4 million boys and girls were born in the United States; that one out of three who completed the fifth grade would drop out before graduation from high school; that nearly 3 million in their teens would come every year into the labor market; that workers under the age of twenty-five, though less than one-fifth of the labor force, were one-third of the unemployed; that the social cost in aimless defection from society, like that of the beats, or insensate anger against it, like that of the delinquents, was growing; that arrests of the young had increased 86 per cent in a decade; that juvenile delinquency, as his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Abraham Ribicoff, told Congress in 1961, was not so much criminality as “a system of belief and values with a strong and stable tradition of its own”; and that, as the President summed it up, “youth unemployment poses one of the most expensive and explosive social and economic problems now facing this country.” The terror of being young and poor or young and cynical or young and hopeless was much on his mind. He understood the power of a glittering society to tantalize and thwart the deprived young, to give them the world on a television screen and slam the door in their faces, to take people already confused by broken homes, overcrowded schools, hostile communities and fill them with such desperate resentment that, to affirm their own impalpable identities, they could not stop short of violence and murder.

  In Robert Kennedy, eight and a half years his junior, who eared, if possible, even more intensely about youth trapped in a careless society, the President had both a passionate ambassador to the young and a determined instrument of action. It was the Attorney General who ran the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (with his old schoolmate from Milton, David Hackett, as director) and did so not as a cop but as a comrade; it was the Attorney General who headed the cabinet study group in 1962 which devised the National Service Corps, later known as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA); it was the Attorney General who led the national campaign against school dropouts, roamed the streets of Harlem, fought for schools and playgrounds in Washington and talked to the young at every opportunity. Because of the personal concern of the Kennedys, much of the youth program took place outside the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. But that sprawling and disheveled department played a growing role—its annual expenditures increased from $3.6 to $4.9 million in the Kennedy years—under the direction of two Secretaries, Ribicoff, who finally decided that it was unmanageable and resigned to run for the Senate from Connecticut, and Anthony J. Celebrezze, the quiet and sensible mayor of Cleveland; both were reinforced by the unfaltering sagacity of Assistant Secretary Wilbur J. Cohen, who had specialized in social security and health since New Deal days.

  If youth constituted the key to the future, “the most direct, rewarding and important investment in our children and youth,” as the President once put it, “is education.” Education was essential to employment in a high-technology society where among the unemployed 40 per cent had eight years of schooling or less (and where only 1.4 per cent had college training). More than that, education was essential to the fulfillment of talented individuals. As the war generation of babies now pressed upon the colleges, with their younger brothers and sisters beginning to crowd the schools, little seemed more important than the expansion and improvement of the nation’s educational facilities. By 1970 there would be a 25 per cent increase in school children and a 75 per cent increase in college students. Nor would building more schoolrooms help much by itself if teachers and curricula remained mechanical and boring. Little disappointed the Kennedys more in domestic policy than their failure to make significant legislative progress in federal aid to education.

  A comprehensive education bill passed the Senate in the spring of 1961 but was beaten in the House by a coalition of Republicans, who objected to federal aid, and Catholics, who objected to the first Catholic President’s exclusion of non-public schools from the benefits. In 1962 a bill for aid to higher education perished when the House and Senate were unable to reconcile their differing versions in conference. Abandoning the quest for a general bill in 1963, Kennedy asked for a number of separate measures, most of which were passed but which together fell short of the desired comprehensive program. Blocked in the legislative branch, Kennedy in late 1962 had persuaded Francis Keppel, the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to become Commissioner of Education. Keppel brought new authority to the job, played a vital role in the legislative successes of 1963 and laid the foundation for comprehensive school legislation in the years to come.

  Underneath all this lay the President’s acute sense of the rising issue of generations in American life. By 1966 half the population would be under the age of twenty-five. Having seized power themselves from a resentful older generation, the Kennedys understood the emotions of the young crowding into a capricious and incomprehensible society. Many of the legislative measures of the New Frontier may have been left over from the New Deal. But the generational perception was new and original. It reinforced the President in his determination to transform a wealthy society into a civilized community and gave his program its distinctive design and theme. American politics would never be the same again.

  XXV

  In the White House

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1962 Kennedy was well settled in the Presidency. He had changed somewhat physically in this year and a half. The face was more lined and furrowed; the features were heavier, less handsome but more powerful. The first eighteen months is always the period of presidential def
inition, and for Kennedy the succession of crises had tied an already disciplined personality ever more irrevocably to the responsibilities for which he held himself accountable to the future. The experience deepened him and gave emphasis to a certain somber side of his nature. At the same time, it liberated him. He could at last be himself; the private face, somewhat subdued and withheld during the congressional years, became fully the public face. The force of his intelligence, gaiety and wit, now displayed without inhibition, made people wonder how two years earlier they could possibly have confused him with Richard Nixon.

  Uniting head of government and head of state in a single office, the American Presidency has its symbolic as well as its executive aspects. The President’s seat is at the center of concentric circles of relationships, moving outward from his family, the White House staff, the cabinet, the civil service, the Congress, the press, to the American people and ultimately to the world beyond. The measure of achievement is in part a President’s success in suffusing the web of relationships with his own values and purposes. By this second summer the methods of the Kennedy Presidency were coming into focus.