The Bay of Pigs was a crucial episode in the struggle. This disaster was a clear consequence of the surrender of the presidential government to the permanent government. The inherited executive bureaucracy rallied in support of an undertaking which the new administration would never conceivably have designed for itself. The CIA had a heavy investment in this project; other barons, having heavy investments in their own pre-Kennedy projects, doubtless wished to show that the newcomers could not lightly reject whatever was bubbling up in the pipeline, however repugnant it might be to the prefconceptions of the New Frontier. But the result, except for leading the President to an invaluable overhaul of his own operating methods, was ironically not to discredit the permanent government; instead, it became in certain ways more powerful than ever. The reason for this was that, one risk having failed, all risks were regarded with suspicion; and, since the permanent government almost never wished to take risks (except for the CIA, where risks were the entrenched routine), this strengthened those who wanted to keep things as they were as against those who wanted to change things. The fiasco was also a shock to the President’s hitherto supreme confidence in his own luck; and it had a sobering effect throughout the presidential government. No doubt this was in many ways to the good; but it also meant that we never quite recaptured again the youthful, adventurous spirit of the first days. “Because this bold initiative flopped,” I noted in June 1961, “there is now a general predisposition against boldness in all fields.” With one stroke the permanent government had dealt a savage blow to the élan of the newcomers—and it had the satisfaction of having done so by persuading the newcomers to depart from their own principles and accept the permanent government’s plan.
The permanent government included men and women of marked devotion, quality and imagination. Kennedy knew this, seized many occasions to say so publicly and gave John Macy, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, every support in improving the morale of the career services. Yet, though a valuable reservoir of intelligence and experience as well as a valuable guarantee against presidential government’s going off the tracks, the permanent government remained in bulk a force against innovation with an inexhaustible capacity to dilute, delay and obstruct presidential purpose. Only so many fights were possible with the permanent government. The fighters—one saw this happen to Richard Goodwin when he went over to the State Department—were gradually weakened, cut off, surrounded and shot down, as if from ambush, by the bureaucracy and its anti-New Frontier allies in Congress and the press. At the start we had all felt free to ‘meddle’ when we thought that we had a good idea or someone else a poor one. But, as the ice began to form again over the government, freewheeling became increasingly difficult and dangerous. At Wellfleet in the summer of 1962, I wrote that our real trouble was that we had “capitulated too much to the existing momentum of government as embodied and urged by the executive bureaucracy. Wherever we have gone wrong—from Cuba to fiscal policy—has been because we have not had sufficient confidence in the New Frontier approach to impose it on the government. Every important mistake has been the consequence of excessive deference to the permanent government. In too many areas we have behaved as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved.” The problem of moving forward seemed in great part the problem of making the permanent government responsive to the policies of the presidential government.
Kennedy could not solve this problem as Roosevelt had by bypassing the bureaucracy. An emergency agency, after all, required an emergency. Kennedy had no depression or war; and in the days since the New Deal the traditional structure had moved to absorb into itself as much as it could of the new functions. It was no accident that the organization which best expressed the distinctive spirit of the New Frontier—the Peace Corps—was almost the only one established as an emergency agency and carefully preserved from the embrace of the bureaucracy.
In the long run, the problem of the permanent government could no doubt be solved by permeation and attrition. “Getting the bureaucracy to accept new ideas,” as Chester Bowles once said, “is like carrying a double mattress up a very narrow and winding stairway. It is a terrible job, and you exhaust yourself when you try it. But once you get the mattress up it is awfully hard for anyone else to get it down.” But it also required day-to-day direction and control. This was Kennedy’s preferred method: hence his unceasing flow of suggestions, inquiries, phone calls directly to the operating desks and so on. This approach enabled him to imbue government with a sense of his own desires and purposes. A Foreign Service officer once remarked on the feeling that “we were all reading the cables together”—the man at the desk, the Secretary of State and the White House. Nothing was more invigorating and inspiring, especially for the imaginative official, than personal contact with the President.
Kennedy tried in a number of ways to encourage innovation in the permanent government. His call for “dissent and daring” in the first State of the Union message concluded: “Let the public service be a proud and lively career.” He took particular pleasure in the rehabilitation of government servants who had been punished for independence of thought in the past. Early on, for example, Reed Harris, whom Senator McCarthy had driven from USIA a decade before, came back to work under Edward R. Murrow, who himself had been one of McCarthy’s bravest critics. The President looked for an appropriate occasion to invite Robert Oppenheimer to the White House and soon found one. He was vigilant in his opposition to any revival of McCarthyism. One of his few moments of anger in press conferences came when a woman reporter asked him why “two well-known security risks” had been given assignments in the State Department. Kennedy remarked icily that she “should be prepared to substantiate” her charges and unconditionally defended the character and record of the officials involved.
But Kennedy’s habit of reaching into the permanent government was disruptive as well as exciting for the bureaucracy. For the permanent government had its own set of requirements and expectations—continuity of policy, stability of procedure, everything within channels and according to the book. These were essential; without them government would collapse. Yet an active President, with his own requirements and expectations, was likely to chafe under the bureaucratic minuet.
Early in 1963 a group of communists hijacked a Venezuelan freighter. The President was vastly, if somewhat amusedly, annoyed by the incapacity of his government to help Caracas cope with the situation. One day he beckoned me into his office while he was phoning the Secretary of the Navy to find out why the Navy had been so slow to send out planes to locate the ship. The Secretary apparently was saying that this was not his responsibility; it was a matter for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; nothing had come down through channels. A few days later President Betancourt arrived for a visit. Preparations had been made for a splendid military reception. Then a terrific rainstorm came, and the show was canceled. An hour later Kennedy looked out of his window and saw a forlorn group of soldiers still in formation in the rain. He immediately called General Clifton, his military aide, and asked why, since the ceremony was off, the soldiers were still there. Clifton replied that they had not yet received their orders through channels. Kennedy instructed him to go out right away and tell them to go home. Then he said acidly, “You can see why the Navy has been unable to locate that Venezuelan freighter.”
He considered results more important than routine. “My experience in government,” he once said, “is that when things are noncontroversial, beautifully coordinated, and all the rest, it must be that not much is going on.” He was not, like Roosevelt, a deliberate inciter of bureaucratic disorder; he found no pleasure in playing off one subordinate against another. But his total self-reliance, his confidence in his own priorities and his own memory, freed him from dependence on orderly administrative arrangements. In any case, the Constitution made it clear where the buck stopped. “The President,” he once said, “bears the burden of the responsibility. . . . The advisers may move on to new advice.” The White Hous
e, of course, could not do everything, but it could do something. “The President can’t administer a department,” he said drily on one occasion, “but at least he can be a stimulant.” This Kennedy certainly was, but on occasion he almost administered departments too.
His determination was to pull issues out of the bureaucratic ruck in time to defend his own right to decision and his own freedom of innovation. One devoted student of his methods, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, later spoke of the importance of getting in on emerging questions “by holding meetings of all relevant ministers at an early stage before the problem gets out of hand. That’s one of the techniques the world owes to Kennedy.” In this and other respects he carried his intervention in the depths of government even further than Roosevelt.
At luncheon one day Ben Cohen and Tom Corcoran drew an interesting comparison. “One of F.D.R.’s great strengths,” Cohen said, “was a certain detachment from the details of his administration. He did not try to run everything himself, but gave his people their head. Sometimes he was criticized for letting them go off too much on their own and squabble among themselves. But this was his way of trying people out.” Corcoran interjected, “Also it reduced his responsibility for their mistakes. Since he wasn’t directly involved, he could wash his hands of bad policies more easily.” Ben went on: “Then, when it mattered, he was always ready to weigh in and settle things. We often wished at the time that he would get involved earlier; but in retrospect I think he was right. I am afraid that your man in contrast tries to run too many things himself. He has too tight a grip on his administration. He is too often involved in the process of shaping things which should be shaped by others before they are presented to a President. I doubt very much whether the Bay of Pigs decision would have been made if the President had not taken part in the preliminary discussions—if he had been confronted in an uncommitted way with the final recommendation. . . . Kennedy is really a President on the model not of Roosevelt but of Wilson. Wilson also tried to run too much himself.”
Cohen had a point, though I think he underestimated the extent to which the hardening of the permanent government since Roosevelt’s day required presidential intervention at an earlier stage, as well as the extent to which the irreversibility of decisions in the nuclear age compelled a President to make sure that small actions at a low level would not lead ineluctably to catastrophic consequences. In any case, every President must rule in his own fashion. The President, Richard Neustadt had said, is “a decision-machine.” Kennedy’s purpose in his time of almost constant crisis was to control and stimulate a vast and unwieldy government in order to produce wise decision and efficient execution. He designed his methods to suit his purpose.
4. THE WHITE HOUSE STAFF
His first instrument was the White House staff. This was a diverse group, and Kennedy wanted it that way. Bundy liked to compare the staff to prisms through which the President could look at public problems; and he knew precisely the angle of each refraction. One of his talents was the capacity to attract natural oppositionists—Galbraith, Kaysen, Murrow and others—and put them to work for government. He had some of these on his staff, along with some who were natural public servants; together they provided the mix which met his needs.
He was infinitely accessible to the Special Assistants. One could nearly always get him by phone; and, while Ken O’Donnell guarded one entrance to the presidential office with a wise concern for the President’s time and energy, Evelyn Lincoln presided over the other with welcoming patience and warmth. For the half hour or so before luncheon and then again in the last hour of the afternoon, the door between Mrs. Lincoln’s office and the President’s room was generally ajar—a signal to the staff that he was open for business. One put one’s head in the door, was beckoned in; then the report was made or document cleared briskly across his desk. Everything was transacted in a kind of shorthand. Kennedy’s mind raced ahead of his words; and, by the time he was midway in a thought, he was likely to assume that the drift was evident and, without bothering to complete one sentence, he would begin the next. In the early evening, however, after the Huntley-Brinkley news program, the pressure would be off. Then he would frequently be in a mood to lean back in his chair and expand on the events of the day.
He liked to regard his staff as generalists rather than specialists and had a distressing tendency to take up whatever happened to be on his desk and hand it to whoever happened to be in the room. But a measure of specialization was inevitable, and the staff on the whole contrived its own clandestine structure, taking care to pass on a presidential directive to the person in whose area it lay. He never forgot anything, however, and he was perfectly capable weeks or months later of demanding to know what one had done about such-and-such.
He expected his staff to cover every significant sector of federal activity—to know everything that was going on, to provide speedy and exact answers to his questions and, most of all, to alert him to potential troubles. When a crisis was sprung without notice, there would be ejaculations of incredulity or despair; “For God’s sake, do I have to do everything around here myself?” These passed swiftly; he wasted little time in recrimination and always buckled down promptly to the problem of what to do next. For those who failed him, remorse was a far sharper spur than reprimands would have been.
He wanted the staff to get into substance. He constantly called for new ideas and programs. If a staff member told him about a situation, he would say, “Yes, but what can I do about it?” and was disappointed if no answer was forthcoming. The Special Assistants were not to get between the President and the operating chiefs of the departments and agencies; but they were to make sure that the departmental and agency recommendations took full account of the presidential and national interests. When the operating chiefs had business which was important enough for the White House to be informed but not important enough to justify a direct call to the President, they had a place to register their recommendation or make their point. Above all, the responsibility of the staff, Kennedy said, was to make certain that “important matters are brought here in a way which permits a clear decision after alternatives have been presented.” He added, “Occasionally, in the past, I think the staff has been used to get a pre-arranged agreement which is only confirmed at the President’s desk, and that I don’t agree with.”
When a decision was in the offing, the next step was to call a meeting. Kennedy disliked meetings, especially large ones, and insisted that they be honed to the edge of action. He convened the cabinet far less even than Roosevelt. “Cabinet meetings,” he once told John Sharon, “are simply useless. Why should the Postmaster General sit there and listen to a discussion of the problems of Laos? . . . I don’t know how Presidents functioned with them or relied on them in the past.” (Very few good ones had.) Instead, he asked for weekly reports from cabinet members outlining their activities and proposals. In consequence, he did not use the cabinet as effectively as he might have either to mobilize the government or to advance public understanding of administration policies. Perhaps the best cabinet meeting was in the midst of the Bay of Pigs when there were genuine exchange and assurances of reciprocal support.
If he had to have a meeting, he preferred a small one with candid discussion among the technicians and professionals who could give him the facts on which decision was to be based. Policy people were less essential because he could supply policy himself. Kennedy would listen quietly to the presentation, then ask pertinent questions and expect precise replies. He had a disconcerting capacity, derived in part from his larger perspective and in part from his more original intelligence, to raise points which the experts, however diligently they had prepared themselves, were hard put to answer. Rambling made him impatient, but his courtesy was unshakable; there were only those drumming fingers. At the end, he would succinctly sum up the conclusions.
Meetings, however, did not by themselves guarantee action, any more than White House staff recommendations did. In the main, actio
n followed deadlines, some set by the calendar, some forced by crisis. And, of the scheduled deadlines, the most important, next to the budget, were the ones created by the need to prepare presidential statements.
5. KENNEDY AND SPEECHES
Dean Acheson once said of presidential addresses, “This is often where policy is made, regardless of where it is supposed to be made.” The presidential speech was automatically a declaration of national intent, addressed not only to Congress, the country and the world but also (sometimes equally important) to the executive branch of the government.
Kennedy’s speeches covered a whole range of occasions from greeting delegations of foreign students to warning the world of the perils of nuclear war. Though he was a perfectly competent writer, he rarely had time to compose his own speeches any longer (except when he spoke extemporaneously, as he very often did). Ted Sorensen was, of course, his main reliance. They had worked closely together for a decade, and on these matters their minds, rolled in unison. I do not know which of them originated the device of staccato phrases (“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”) or the use of balanced sentences (“Never have the nations of the world had so much, to lose or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet or together we shall perish in its flames”); but by the time of the Presidency their styles had fused into one.
A Thousand Days Page 82