“Humour,” said Hazlitt, “is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.” Franklin Roosevelt was a man of humor, Kennedy a man of wit. Irony was his most distinctive mode (“Washington is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm”). Explaining the origins of Six Crises, Nixon wrote about his visit to Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs: “When I told him that I was considering the possibility of joining the ‘literary’ ranks, of which he is himself so distinguished a member, he expressed the thought that every public man should write a book at some time in his life, both for the mental discipline and because it tends to elevate him in popular esteem to the respected status of an ‘intellectual.’” Only the solemnity with which Kennedy’s remark was received could possibly have exceeded the ambiguity with which it was uttered.
His irony could be gentle or sharp, according to mood, and it was directed at himself as often as at others. It helped him to lighten crises and to hold people and problems in balance; it was an unending source of refreshment and perspective, and an essential part of his own apparatus of self-criticism. Detachment was one of his deepest reflexes. When the first volume of Eisenhower’s presidential reminiscences came out, he said drily to me, “Apparently Ike never did anything wrong. . . . When we come to writing the memoirs of this administration, we’ll do it differently.” And selfcriticism was a vital strength in his luminous and rational intelligence, so consecutive and objective, so lucidly in possession of his impulses and emotions.
He came to the Presidency almost without break of stride. Yet the Presidency, as he once put it, is a “mysterious institution.” “There is no experience you can get,” he said at the end of 1962, “that can possibly prepare you adequately for the Presidency.” He himself came to feel the mystique of the Presidency strongly enough to doubt whether the quality of the presidential experience could be understood by those who had not shared it. My father, who had asked a panel of historians and political scientists in 1948 to rate the Presidents in categories from “great” to “failure,” repeated the poll in early 1962 and sent a ballot to the historian who had written Profiles in Courage and A Nation of Immigrants. Kennedy started to fill in the ballot but, as he thought about it, came to the conclusion that the exercise was unprofitable. “A year ago,” he wrote my father, “I would have responded with confidence . . . but now I am not so sure. After being in the office for a year I feel that a good deal more study is required to make my judgment sufficiently informed. There is a tendency to mark the obvious names. I would like to subject those not so well known to a long scrutiny after I have left this office.” He said to me later, “How the hell can you tell? Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are. If you don’t know that, how can you judge performance?” Some of his greatest predecessors, he would sometimes say, were given credit for doing things when they could do nothing else; only the most detailed study could disclose what difference a President had made by his own individual effort. War, he pointed out, made it easier for a President to achieve greatness. But would Lincoln have been judged so great a President if he had lived long enough to face the almost insoluble problem of Reconstruction?
For all his skepticism, he read the results of the poll with avidity in the New York Times Magazine in the summer. He was greatly pleased that Truman made the “near great” class. He was also interested that Eisenhower rated only twenty-eighth, near the bottom of the “average” category. He said, “At first I thought it was too bad that Ike was in Europe and would miss the article, but then I decided that some conscientious friend would send him a copy.” Later Kennedy, jokingly or half-jokingly, blamed Eisenhower’s vigorous entry into the 1962 congressional campaign on the historians’ ratings. “It is all your father’s poll,” he said. “Eisenhower has been going along for years, basking in the glow of applause he has always had. Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. Now he’s mad to save his reputation.”
What surprised him particularly in the poll was the high rating given to Wilson—fourth in the list and in the “great” category. Why, he asked, should Wilson have placed ahead of Jackson—number six and only “near great”? He reverted to this question a few days later when I brought in Frank Freidel, the biographer of Franklin Roosevelt. After all, the President said, Wilson had made a botch of the Mexican intervention; while he was right to bring us into the war, he had done so initially for narrow and legalistic reasons; he had messed up the League fight and, though a great speaker and writer, had failed in a number of his objectives. Why did the professors admire him so much? (We suggested that he was, after all, the only professor to achieve the Presidency.) He also wondered about Theodore Roosevelt (number seven and “near great”); he had really got very little important legislation through Congress. Why should either Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt rate ahead of Polk (number eight) or Truman (number nine)? It seemed evident that his measure of presidential success was concrete achievement; thus people who educated the nation without necessarily accomplishing their particular purposes rated, in his judgment, below those, like Polk and Truman, who accomplished their purposes without necessarily bringing the nation along with them. The best, of course, were those who did both, and he agreed with the panel’s choice of the top three—Lincoln, Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.
Now he sat in the presidential office himself and knew he was facing the appraisal of future historians. He had come in without illusions about the job; and experience soon reinforced what history had indicated. “Every President,” he wrote in his foreword to Ted Sorensen’s perceptive essay Decision-Making in the White House, “must endure the gap beween what he would like and what is possible.” He quoted Franklin Roosevelt’s remark on Lincoln—“a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.” Yet this insight never threw him. He was a natural President, as other men were natural writers or outfielders or steeplechase riders.
Our last natural President had been Franklin Roosevelt. Kennedy freely acknowledged their affinities. He was endlessly curious about Roosevelt and often demanded Roosevelt quotations for his speeches. Like Roosevelt, he was a naval President and filled his office with maritime pictures and ship models. Reading in the New York Times in the summer of 1961 an item about F.D.R.’s remarkable collection of naval prints, he immediately proposed that the National Archives put a selection on exhibition. He directed William Walton and me to follow up for him and displayed an active interest every step along the way. When the show “The Old Navy: 1776–1860” was ready a year later, the President opened it himself and later wrote a piece for Life about it.
The coolness with Eleanor Roosevelt had long since vanished. She was proud of Kennedy as President and proud of Jacqueline, with whom she had an affectionate correspondence, as the President’s lady. When she died in November 1962, the Kennedys flew to Hyde Park for the funeral. The Harrimans, my wife and I accompanied them on the plane. The day was overcast and somber. We sat in the small stone church and watched them walk in: President Kennedy, sad and silent; President Truman, looking very old, an expression of anguish on his face; President Eisenhower, grave and dignified; Frances Perkins and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Henry Wallace and James A. Farley, Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen, Herbert Lehman and Adlai Stevenson. “This is the last assembly,” Corcoran whispered to me. “There will never again be an occasion on which all these people will gather together.” By the time we reached the grave site a gentle rain had begun to fall. Later we went over to John Roosevelt’s. All the Roosevelt children were there. Thinking of the young Roosevelts, lost suddenly in middle age, and of the young Kennedys, so sure and purposeful, one perceived an historic contrast, a dynastic change, like the Plantagenets giving way to the Yorks.
Roosevelt and Kennedy had so
much in common: both were patrician, urbane, playful, cultivated, inquisitive, gallant; both were detached from the business ethos, both skeptical of the received wisdom, both devoted to politics but never enslaved by it, both serene in the exercise of power, both committed to the use of power for the ends of human welfare and freedom; both too had more than their share of physical suffering. Yet, as an historian who had written about Roosevelt, I could not but notice the differences as well as the resemblances.
Roosevelt was born thirty-five years earlier in a different century and a different world. He had grown up in those days of glowing hope which were shattered but not wholly extinguished by the First World War. He remained buoyant, expansive, spontaneous, audacious, theatrical, overflowing with a careless confidence about the future; if life was filled with trouble, action and passion could overcome it. Like Churchill, Roosevelt rallied the certitudes of the nineteenth century to fight the duplicities of the twentieth.
Kennedy, the child of a darker age, was more disciplined, more precise, more candid, more cautious, more sardonic, more pessimistic.* His purpose was hardened and qualified by the world of ambiguities and perils. Underneath the casualness, wit and idealism, lie was taut, concentrated, vibrating with inner tension under iron control, possessed by a fatalism which drove him on against the odds to meet his destiny. One could only speculate about the roots of this fatalism—the days of danger, the months of sickness, the feeling that life was short, the cool but tormented sense of the importunities and frustrations of the age in which he lived.
Someone once asked him what he regretted most; he replied, “I wish I had had more good times.” The shadow was never far from him: that rendezvous at midnight in some flaming town. One never knows to what extent retrospect confers significance on chance remarks; but he said so many things attesting to a laconic sense of the transience of the Presidency, if not to a haunted conviction of human mortality. So when he saw Nixon after the Bay of Pigs he said, “If I do the right kind of a job, I don’t know whether I am going to be here four years from now.” Nor could anyone interest him much in details of personal protection. “If someone is going to kill me,” he would say, “they are going to kill me.” Before he left on his trip to Mexico in June 1962, John McCone brought in a CIA report about assassination rumors. It had been a hard few days on the Hill; and Kennedy responded, without a second’s hesitation, “If I am to die, this is the week for it.” When we were preparing an exchange of letters with Harvard about the transfer of university land to the Kennedy Library whenever “The President” requested, he asked that this be rephrased; after all, “Who can tell who will be President a year from now?”* When Jim Bishop, the author of The Day Lincoln Was Shot, visited the White House in late October 1965, Kennedy chatted about his book. “He seemed fascinated, in a melancholy way,” Bishop wrote, “with the accidental succession of events of that day which led to the assassination.” President Kennedy never appeared ruffled or hurried. But time was his enemy, and he fought it to the end.
3. IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
As a natural President, he ran his presidential office with notable ease and informality. He did this by instinct, not by theory. He was fond of Richard Neustadt but a little annoyed by the notion that he was modeling his Presidency on the doctrines of Presidential Power. He once remarked that Neustadt “makes everything a President does seem too premeditated.”
He always shrank from portentous discussions of himself and the Presidency (or anything else). Pressed, he turned questioners aside: “I have a nice home, the office is close by and the pay is good.” In the autumn of 1961 Kennedy was sitting on the lawn of his mother-in-law’s house in Newport, smoking a fragrant pre-Castro cigar, while in the background the sun was setting and a great battle cruiser was entering the bay. It was the time of Berlin and the Soviet resumption of testing; in California Nixon was having his troubles with former Governor Goodwin Knight in internal Republican politics. As the warship steamed along, the American flag flying high, a friend felt a patriotic glow and was moved to ask Kennedy: “What do you feel at a moment like this? What is it like to be President?” The President smiled, flicked the ash from his cigar and said, “Well, it’s a lot better than mucking around with Goody Knight in California.” Once James Reston asked him what he hoped to achieve by the time he rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with his successor. “He looked at me,” Reston later wrote, “as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: Did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-to-day decisions and priorities? Again a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the question to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics.” Reston concluded that Kennedy had no large designs; but I suspect that the President was simply stupefied by what he regarded as the impracticality of the question. He was possessed not by a blueprint but by a process.
In order to get the country moving again, he had to get the government moving. He came to the White House at a time when the ability of the President to do this had suffered steady constriction. The clichés about the ‘most powerful office on earth’ had concealed the extent to which the mid-century Presidents had much less freedom of action than, say, Jackson or Lincoln or even Franklin Roosevelt. No doubt the mid-century Presidents could blow up the world, but at the same time they were increasingly hemmed in by the growing power of the executive bureaucracy and of Congress—and at a time when crisis at home and abroad made clear decision and swift action more imperative than ever before. The President understood this. “Before my term has ended,” he said in his first State of the Union address, “we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain.”
Kennedy was fully sensitive—perhaps oversensitive—to the limitations imposed by Congress on the presidential freedom of maneuver. But, though he was well aware of the problem within the executive domain, I do not think he had entirely appreciated its magnitude. The textbooks had talked of three coordinate branches of government: the executive, the legislative, the judiciary. But with an activist President it became apparent that there was a fourth branch: the Presidency itself. And, in pursuing his purposes, the President was likely to encounter almost as much resistance from the executive branch as from the others. By 1961 the tension between the permanent government and the presidential government was deep in our system.
This problem had assumed its contemporary dimensions after Franklin Roosevelt and the enlargement of government under the New Deal. Roosevelt had quickly seen that he could not fight the depression through the Departments of Agriculture, Labor, Commerce and the Treasury (or, later, fight the war through State, War and Navy). He had therefore bypassed the traditional structure, resorting instead to the device of the emergency agency, set up outside the civil service and staffed from top to bottom by men who believed in New Deal policies. This worked well in the thirties. But Roosevelt left his successors a much bigger government, and in due course the iron law of organization began to transform what had served as brilliant expedients for him into dead weights for them.
In the thirties conservatives had bemoaned the expansion of the federal government as a threat to freedom. Instead they should have hailed the bureaucracy as a bulwark against change. The permanent government soon developed its own stubborn vested interests in policy and procedure, its own cozy alliances with committees of Congress, its own ties to the press, its own national constituencies. It began to exude the feeling that Presidents could come and Presidents go but it went on forever. The permanent government was, as such, politically neutral; its essential commitment was to doing things as they had been done before. This frustrated the enthusiasts who came to Washington with Eisenhower in 1953 zealous to dismantle the New Deal, and it frustrated the enthusiasts who came to Washington with Kennedy in 1961 zealous to get the country moving again.
The Eisenhower administration in the end met the problem of the permanent government by accepting
the trend toward routinization and extending it to the Presidency itself. This was congenial both to President Eisenhower, accustomed all his life to the military staff system, and to the needs of a regime more concerned with consolidation than with innovation. The result was an effort to institutionalize the Presidency, making it as nearly automatic in its operations and as little dependent on particular individuals as possible. It was a perfectly serious experiment; but in the end it was defeated, both by the inextinguishably personal character of the Presidency, which broke out from time to time even in the case of one so well disciplined to the staff system as Eisenhower, and also by the fact that even the Eisenhower administration was occasionally forced to do new things in order to meet new challenges.
Kennedy, who had been critical of the Eisenhower effort to institutionalize the Presidency, was determined to restore the personal character of the office and recover presidential control over the sprawling feudalism of government. This became a central theme of his administration and, in some respects, a central frustration. The presidential government, coming to Washington aglow with new ideas and a euphoric sense that it could not go wrong, promptly collided with the feudal barons of the permanent government, entrenched in their domains and fortified by their sense of proprietorship; and the permanent government, confronted by this invasion, began almost to function (with, of course, many notable individual exceptions) as a resistance movement, scattering to the maquis in order to pick off the intruders. This was especially true in foreign affairs.
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