A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Next to Sorensen, Richard Goodwin was Kennedy’s best writer. After Goodwin’s departure to the State Department, I found myself increasingly involved in speech drafting. The President somewhat mistrusted my efforts, however, as “too Stevensonian,” by which he meant too complicated in syntax and fancy in language. He felt that his voice had too narrow a range to permit rhetorical flight and used to envy Stevenson his greater inflection of tone. Actually his own range steadily expanded during the Presidency, and he rapidly became an orator of unusual force and eloquence.

  He would begin work on a speech by calling in the writer and sketching out his ideas. When the occasion was serious, he would read the draft with intense care, scribble illegibly on the margin and then go over the result with the writer. Like most politicians, he had little sense of the structure of a speech. He also was an uncertain speller; nor was his grammar infallible. In his impromptu remarks, for example, he often bobbled his compound objects.* But he was an excellent editor, skilled at tuning up thoughts and eliminating verbal excess. Above all, he loved pungent expressions. Early one Sunday in December 1962 he woke me to read aloud two sentences from a Khrushchev speech in the morning newspapers. One began, “At the climax of events around Cuba, there began to be a smell of burning in the air.” The other went: “Those militarists who boast that they have submarines with Polaris rockets on board, and other surprises, as they put it, against the Soviet Union, would do well to remember that we are not living in mud huts either.” Kennedy remarked with admiration, “Khrushchev certainly has some good writers.” (I said that we could do as well for him if he would only give two-hour speeches.)

  If the occasion was political or festive, he would approach the speech with greater casualness, quite often using the prepared text only as a point of departure or, as he had done so often in the 1960 campaign, abandoning it entirely. He gave one of his most sparkling talks at a luncheon in October 1961 marking the publication of the first four volumes of the John Quincy Adams papers. I had prepared a draft. Then his rather detailed suggestions led to a new draft, at which he glanced half an hour before the lunch while conducting conversation with other staff people on unrelated topics. In a few moments we went over to the Statler-Hilton Hotel. During lunch he went calmly over the manuscript, crossing out paragraphs and writing inserts. When he rose to speak, the first half of his remarks was absolutely new (including the felicitous opening: “I want to say to Mr. Adams that it is a pleasure to live in your family’s old house”). The second half was a free (and improved) adaptation of the text he had brought with him.

  The speech process often brought his miscellany of curious knowledge into play. In September 1962 he asked me to prepare something for a talk he had to make at Newport at the dinner before the America’s Cup races. He suddenly said, “I understand that there is about the same amount of salt in the human blood as there is in sea water, and that is a proof of our origin in the sea.” This sounded like an old wives’ tale to me, but I said I would check into it. I called one of Jerome Wiesner’s specialists, who was skeptical too but agreed to look further. In an hour he called back, rather excited, and said, “It seems as if you have got on to something there.” Apparently blood does have a certain amount of salt, almost as much as sea water, and Claude Bernard and others had speculated that the need of cells for a salt solution might be related to man’s primal origin in the sea. When I later asked Kennedy where in the world he had heard this, he said he couldn’t remember. In Newport he converted it into poetry: “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.”

  XXVI

  Down Pennsylvania Avenue

  ALL THESE DEVICES—White House staff, meetings, speeches—were familiar presidential tools. But by themselves they were only the beginning of the system of presidential control. Every activist President devises further methods, often peculiar and personal, to reach out beyond the White House into the executive branch and beyond that to the Congress. Kennedy’s most efficacious means of management and stimulus had no precedent since the age of Jackson and Taney and did not fully exist then—that is, the use of the Attorney General as a prime presidential agent on policy across the board.

  In spite of the eight and a half years’ difference in their ages, John and Robert Kennedy had achieved by 1961 an extraordinary partnership. Their communication was virtually telepathic and their communion complete. One is not sure when this all started. Robert, the seventh of the nine Kennedy children, was also, among the brothers, the smallest, lightest and, perhaps in consequence, tensest. One had the impression that the family competition had been hardest on him, forcing him to scramble for everything and giving his character at an early point the style of bantam-cock determination. Possibly because of this, and even though the gap in ages could not have permitted much comradeship in the early years, his older brother was obviously fond of him. A letter from the South Pacific after PT-109 when Robert, then seventeen, joined the Navy from Milton Academy suggests the relationship. “The folks sent me a clipping of you taking the oath,” Jack Kennedy wrote. “The sight of you there, just as a boy, was really moving particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on. I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing out here while you go stroking around in my drape coat, but I suppose that [is] what we are out here for.” He added lightly: “In that picture you looked as if you were going to step outside the room, grab your gun, and knock off several of the houseboys before lunch. After reading Dad’s letter, I gathered that the cold vicious look in your eye was due to the thought of that big blocking back from Groton.”

  1. BOBBY

  That “cold vicious look” stayed in Robert Kennedy’s photographs for some time; his public role in the fifties was that of a prosecutor and investigator. After the Navy, he went on to Harvard and then to the University of Virginia Law School. After law school he briefly joined Truman’s Department of Justice. When the Republicans took over in 1953, he moved on to the staff of the Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Here he worked primarily on an investigation of trade by allied nations with Communist China. Though this investigation was considerably disputed, it was less disputed than McCarthy’s other investigations into the alleged disloyalty of government employees. Partly because he genuinely liked McCarthy, Robert Kennedy watched the committee steer this second course with mounting disapproval. After six months, he told McCarthy that he disagreed with the way the committee was being run, predicted that it was headed for disaster and resigned. Subsequently he returned as counsel for the Democrats on the committee—Jackson, Symington and McClellan—and wrote the minority report condemning McCarthy’s investigation of supposed Communist shenanigans at Fort Monmouth. In 1957 he became counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee in its long and angry investigations into “improper activities” on the part of labor and management. Here his bitter duel with Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters attracted national attention.

  Robert’s close working association with his older brother began in 1952, when he managed the Senate campaign, and flourished in the Rackets Committee, where John Kennedy was a leader among the senatorial members. In November 1959, Jack naturally turned to Robert to organize his drive for the presidential nomination. Bringing along such colleagues from the Rackets Committee staff as Kenneth O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger, Bobby took over. In the next year he mobilized the Kennedy forces, brought pressure on undecided party leaders, gave people orders, blew them up if the execution was slow or slipshod, became the candidate’s no-man and took on himself the onus for the hard judgment and the unpleasant decision. By the end of 1960 he had thus embellished the public impression of the remorseless prosecutor by stirring in that of the re
lentless politician.

  When, to the general indignation of the bar and the press, he was appointed Attorney General, he was widely regarded as a ruthless and power-hungry young man, devoid of principle or scruple, indifferent to personal freedom or public right, who saw life in rigidly personal and moralistic terms, divided people between the ‘white hats’ and the ‘black hats’ and found his greatest pleasure in harassing his fellow citizens. A cluster of legends arose to reinforce this theory: thus his father was supposed to have said with paternal pride, “Bobby hates the same way I do.” And Bobby’s public bearing—the ominous manner, the knock-the-chip-off-my-shoulder look, the stony blue eyes, clenched teeth, tart, monosyllabic tongue—did not especially dispel the picture of a rough young man suddenly given national authority.

  I do not know of any case in contemporary American politics where there has seemed to me a greater discrepancy between the myth and the man. The public theory of Robert Kennedy could only appear to those who knew him, as James Wechsler later described it, a case of mistaken identity. No doubt Robert’s first political heroes were Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur; no doubt he once considered Yalta a national betrayal; no doubt he regarded (and continued to regard) professional liberals with suspicion. But in my experience he did not hold grudges, cherish a black-and-white view of life, seem issues of personal freedom or believe that anyone who was not with him was against him. This was true neither of his personal relations nor (as was plainly shown by his leadership in changing the American line on neutral countries) of his policy judgments. He was emotionally more intense than his older brother, but he had all of John Kennedy’s laconic candor and increasing shares of his objectivity and his deadpan, throwaway wit.

  Indeed, as one came to know him better, what seemed most characteristic were his gentleness, consideration, sobriety, idealism and, if the word had not been hopelessly degraded by political oratory, compassion. At home in Hickory Hill, with his happy and spirited wife, surrounded by multiplying sons, daughters and pets (David Ormsby Gore once said that he had known Bobby and Ethel so long that he could remember when the dogs outnumbered the children), or in shirtsleeves in his office, children’s drawings thumbtacked on the wall, a litter of souvenirs from foreign travel strewn around the room, a large dog somnolent on the floor, he hardly seemed the demon of the liberal imagination. Most striking of all was what one of his first liberal friends, William O. Douglas, called his “unique capacity for growth.” Thus at some point Robert Kennedy grew aware of the world of mind and sensibility in which his brother had been so long at ease; and he determined to explore this world for himself. He began reading extensively, especially history and biography; he started listening to music and attending ballet; and he was responsible for organizing one of the pleasantest of the New Frontier exercises, the so-called Hickory Hill seminar.

  The purpose here was to remind public officials that a world existed beyond their in-boxes. The regulars, consisting of about twenty cabinet members, agency chiefs and lesser government people, plus the Ormsby Gores, met once a month or so to hear an authority speak on a subject of his own choosing so long as it did not involve the day-to-day business of government. Two of the sessions—with Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and David Donald of Johns Hopkins—were held at the White House, and Jacqueline occasionally came to others. The evenings were lively and generally disputatious. Ethel Kennedy and Eunice Shriver were particularly undaunted questioners. One evening A. J. Ayer, then of the University of London, came and delivered with his usual virtuosity an attack on abstract propositions. Midway, Eunice whispered to the person on her right, “I don’t think that Professor Ayer believes in God.” When Ayer finished, Ethel immediately rose and challenged him to explain his rejection of metaphysics. Ayer, resorting to the oldest of teaching tricks, said, “What do you mean by metaphysics?” Bobby called his wife a warning from the back of the room, but after a moment Ethel responded gamely, “I mean whether conceptions like truth and virtue and beauty have any meaning.” An evening with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, the psychiatrist, produced a heated debate over the best way to reach pre-school children from poor families and a subsequent thoughtful correspondence between Kubie and Walter Heller. The seminars summed up a good deal of the humane and questing spirit of the New Frontier.

  2. THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

  As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy was determined to make the Department of Justice professionally the best department in the government. The quality of appointments had not been so high since the New Deal—Byron White and then Nicholas Katzenbach as Deputy Attorney General, Archibald Cox as Solicitor General and, among the Assistant Attorney Generals, Burke Marshall for the Civil Rights Division, John Douglas for the Civil Division, Louis Oberdörfer for the Tax Division, Herbert Miller for the Criminal Division, William Orrick for Anti-Trust, Ramsey Clark for Lands and Norbert Schlei for the Office of Legal Counsel. In addition, two Pulitzer Prize newspapermen, John Seigenthaler and Edwin O. Guthman, were in charge of public information.

  It was an exceptionally able staff, and Robert Kennedy told it to make the Department an example of impartial law enforcement. The Attorney General’s readiness, for example, to bring cases against Democratic politicians—two Congressmen, three state judges, five mayors, assorted chiefs of police and sheriffs—confounded his critics of 1960. Along with civil rights and juvenile delinquency, he took a particular personal interest in the fight against organized crime. He recruited ardent young lawyers for the Organized Crime Section and for a special investigative staff headed by Walter Sheridan, another associate from the Rackets Committee, and gave them full support. He worked out with Mortimer Caplin of the Internal Revenue Service arrangements for a corps of antiracketeer tax investigators. He brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the broad war against the crime syndicates. There were occasional public relations excesses. Criminologists, for example, were skeptical of the sanction the Department gave to the notion of a centrally organized and all-pervasive Mafia; and J. Edgar Hoover resented the publicity given the testimony of convicted racketeers, especially in the Valachi case. Nonetheless, the anticrime effort had more élan and effect than it had had for years.

  The relationship with J. Edgar Hoover was always a problem for Attorney Generals. For a quarter of a century the FBI had operated as if it were an independent agency, choosing its own cases, nourishing its own relations with the Congress and the press and bypassing its Attorney Generals to report directly to the President. The exceptional proficiency of Hoover’s investigations and certainly of his public relations had made him an almost sacrosanct national figure. As Cyril Connolly once put it, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the G-men and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover form one of the most important elements of the American myth—symbols of perfection in detective methods, wholesome anti-Communism, ruthless pursuit of gangsters and spies, and of a dedicated, puritanical but unselfseeking chief above and outside politics; the nation’s watchdog and the President’s counsellor.” John F. Kennedy would have agreed with him—and would have said it in much the same tone. He regarded the FBI as an element in the panoply of national power requiring both propitiation and control. While he preserved friendly relations with Hoover and invited him from time to time to the White House, he also wholeheartedly supported his brother’s view that the Bureau be restored to the Department of Justice. For the first time in a generation, communications from the Bureau to the White House went through the office of the Attorney General. Moreover, Robert Kennedy directed the FBI to join the Department by moving not only into the drive against organized crime but also, considerably more alien to the Bureau’s folkways, into the enforcement of the civil rights laws.

  The question of the indigent defendant was another of Robert Kennedy’s personal concerns. In 1961 he appointed a committee to inquire into the quality of justice afforded the needy. That committee found, in effect, two systems of criminal justice in the country—one for the rich, another for the poor. Through legislation an
d the establishment of an Office of Criminal Justice, he now sought to make sure that poor men charged with crime would have free counsel, reasonable bail and a fair opportunity to prepare a defense; he wanted, as he liked to say, a Department of Justice, not a Department of Prosecution.

  Judgeships were a recurring negotiation between Justice and the White House. James Eastland of Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had his own views about judges, especially in the South. In an effort to placate Eastland, and in preparation for Eastland’s acquiescence in the appointment of Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the Second Circuit Court, the Attorney General recommended the appointment early in 1961 of Harold Cox and J. Robert Elliott to district court judgeships in Mississippi and Alabama. Both men had been recommended by the American Bar Association. Cox personally assured Robert Kennedy in a long conversation that he would do his constitutional duty in civil rights matters. Once on the bench, however, both Cox and Elliott turned out to be bitter segregationists; and two other of the eight appointees to southern district courts showed a marked reluctance to apply the civil rights decisions. The appointments were plainly mistakes and caused trouble in the future.

  The first Supreme Court vacancy came in March 1962 with the resignation of Charles Whittaker. Kennedy, on the Attorney General’s recommendation, appointed Byron White. The President later told me that it was one of the hardest decisions he had had to make and that he had hesitated a week over it. “I figure that I will have several more appointments before I am through, and I mean to appoint Paul Freund, Arthur Goldberg and Bill Hastie. But I didn’t want to start off with a Harvard man and a professor [Freund was a professor at the Harvard Law School]; we’ve taken so many Harvard men that it’s damn hard to appoint another. And we couldn’t do Hastie [a Negro judge serving with distinction on the Third Circuit] this time; it was just too early.” The President also disliked the thought of losing Goldberg from the cabinet; and when the next vacancy came with Felix Frankfurter’s resignation in the summer of 1962, he inclined at first toward Freund. The Attorney General meanwhile urged the case of Archibald Cox, who had taken the job of Solicitor General, which Freund had declined. Unhappy about choosing between these two men of high ability and comparable background, the President eventually went ahead with Goldberg. Again he said philosophically, “I think we’ll have appointments enough for everybody.”