A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  On civil liberties questions, contrary to liberal fears, Robert Kennedy proved concerned and responsive. Like all Attorney Generals since 1940, he wanted wiretapping legislation; but, after imprudent endorsement of a broad bill in 1961, the Department restudied the problem and came up the next year with a far more careful and confined approach. For the rest, he presided over a quiet and thorough liquidation of the McCarthyite heritage. “I think that the Communist party as a political organization is of no danger to the United States,” he said. “It has no following and has been disregarded by the American people for many, many years.” Insofar as its relationship to the Soviet Union made it a danger, that was a matter for the FBI. Anti-communist vigilantes, he continued, “perform a disservice to the United States,” and he attacked “those who, in the name of fighting Communism, sow seeds of suspicion and distrust by making false or irresponsible charges, not only against their neighbors, but against courageous teachers and public officials.” Within the government he argued for the dismissal of unsupported security charges and recommended a pardon for the last Smith Act defendant in federal prison, the ex-Communist Junius Scales; he did this over the opposition not only of Hoover, who insisted that Scales should not be released until he cooperated by naming names, but of his successive Deputy Attorney Generals. “For the first time since the rise of McCarthyism,” said Joseph Rauh, Washington’s leading civil liberties lawyer, “an Attorney General has refused to treat a man’s unwillingness to inform on others as a ground for withholding favorable governmental action in his case.”

  He was also active on questions of visas and travel restrictions. The basic immigration law excluded politically suspect aliens from the country unless a waiver could be secured from the Department of Justice. The definition of political dubiety was broad and loose, and the result was often the denial of visas to eminent writers and scholars for having committed an offense against American ideas of political propriety at some point in the remote past. Robert Kennedy thought the system injurious to the national interest, granted waivers whenever the State Department asked for them and, if the Department hesitated, often spurred it on to make the application.

  The President himself, it must be added, was vigorously of the same mind. When he appointed Abba Schwartz administrator of the State Department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, he told Schwartz that he was tired of the impression of the United States as a sort of police state, obsessed with security and judging every applicant for admission by past political views; he wanted the world to see America as an open society ready to listen to anyone. It continued to enrage him to read in the newspapers that a distinguished foreigner invited to the United States had been turned down by a minor consular official. Schwartz would tip me off when possibly controversial cases were pending; and I would take them in to the President, who would say with exasperation, “Of course, get the waiver, give ’em the visa, the country will survive.”

  The Attorney General also strongly supported the move within the executive branch to remove restrictions on American travel to China, Albania and other forbidden lands. Within the State Department, Schwartz, Averell Harriman and George Ball had recommended that restrictions be lifted for all countries save Cuba; and the President several times gave instructions that this be done. But the Secretary of State always felt that it was the wrong time to do it, whether because a bill was pending in Congress or a negotiation pending in Moscow; and as a result nothing ever happened. The Attorney General went even further than the internal State Department proposal and favored lifting restrictions on travel to Cuba as well. It seemed to him preposterous to prosecute students who had a desire to see the Castro regime in action. “Why shouldn’t they go?” he once said. “If I were twenty-one years old, that’s what I would like to do this summer.”

  In the Washington judgment, he turned out to be the best Attorney General since Francis Biddle twenty years earlier. But this was a lesser part of his services to the President. When he first decided to appoint his brother to the cabinet, I do not know how much John Kennedy expected Robert to do besides run the Department of Justice and be available for private advice and commiseration. The Bay of Pigs, however, changed all that. Thereafter the President wanted Bobby at every crucial meeting. He did not necessarily agree with his younger brother; the Attorney General was one more prism which he read like the others. But the President trusted him more than anyone else to get to the bottom of an idea or project, to distinguish what was operational from what was literary, to anticipate consequences, to ride herd on execution, to protect the presidential interest and, above all, to be candid.

  Within the cabinet, Robert Kennedy became a constant and steady liberal force, no matter how much it irritated him to have this pointed out. Whatever the issue, one could expect a reaction on the merits, without regard to vested intellectual or administrative interests. One could expect a reaction on political feasibility also; but the two were kept carefully separate. Gradually the New Frontiersmen came to see him as their particular champion, knowing that he was often free to say and do things which the President, in the nature of things, could not say or do. Soon he had his allies scattered throughout the administration. An unfriendly observer wrote, “Kennedy, a student of guerrilla warfare, was applying its techniques to intergovernmental relations.” But he did not plant these men; he won them.

  He was also increasingly the voice of New Frontier idealism to young people at home and abroad. His programs for poor children through the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, with their concern for education and emphasis on what intellectuals would later call ‘participatory democracy,’ represented a genuine innovation in American social policy. When he resigned as Attorney General, the children of the Washington public schools organized a mass tribute, presenting him an itemized statement of their reasons for gratitude, concluding:

  FOR having hundreds of school children into his office to discuss subjects of interest to Washington students;

  FOR making hundreds of unpublicized calls and writing hundreds of unpublicized letters in connection with student problems and programs;

  AND, most of all, both by personal example and by the strength of his interest and affection,

  FOR giving the children of the District pride in themselves and hope in their future.

  Especially in foreign affairs, if a good idea was going down for the third time in the bureaucratic sea, one turned more and more to Bobby to rescue it. His distinctive contribution was to fight unremittingly for his brother’s understanding that foreign policy was not a technical exercise off in a vacuum but the expression of a nation’s internal policy and purpose. When I met him in India in February 1962 after his visit to Japan and Indonesia, he remarked that he had been most impressed by the fact that America could make contact with the youth and the intellectuals in Asia only as a progressive country. “I kept asking myself,” he said, “what a conservative could possibly say to these people. I can talk all the time about social welfare and trade unions and reform; but what could someone say who didn’t believe in these things? What in the world could Barry Goldwater say?” He freely attacked the policy of association “with tyrannical and unpopular regimes that had no following and no future.” To students coming to his office he would say, “Two thirds of the world today goes to bed hungry. The benefits of the world can’t be concentrated on the few. Such a solution would be intolerable. We in the United States have a responsibility to help others.” He left his mark in a dozen areas of foreign policy from cultural exchange to counterguerrilla warfare.

  The myth of ruthlessness persisted. But the man grew; his horizons enlarged; his identity evolved. “He is an active principle,” Norman Mailer wrote. “. . . Something compassionate, something witty, has come into the face. Something of sinew.” He was in these years his brother’s total partner and, more than anyone else, enabled the President to infuse the government with the energy and purpose of the New Frontier.

  3.
THE VICE-PRESIDENT

  However surprised John Kennedy had been in Los Angeles when Lyndon Johnson accepted his invitation to go on the ticket as candidate for Vice-President, he soon had reason to rejoice in the selection. In the autumn of 1960 Johnson proved a powerful and tireless campaigner, especially in the South. Indignantly rejecting suspicions of the presidential candidate as a Yankee and Catholic, he would say in the regional idiom, “Kennedy’s a man to go to the well with.”* Employing his whole oratorical range—first hunched over the rostrum, talking in a low, confiding, pleading voice, telling a repertory of stories unmatched since Alben Barkley, then suddenly standing erect, roaring, gesticulating, waving his arms—he carried the message of confidence with panache across the southern states. Without Johnson, Kennedy would have lost Texas and perhaps South Carolina and Louisiana:* without these three states, the electoral vote would have been evenly split and the result at the mercy of unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama. Kennedy fully appreciated all this arid was grateful.

  After the inauguration, both Kennedy and Johnson confronted the problem of the vice-presidential role in the new administration. Thirty-four previous Presidents had faced this problem with only indifferent success; the real difficulty lay in the Constitution itself. “My country has, in its wisdom,” wrote the first Vice-President, “contrived for me the most insignificant office . . . that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Yet, if the Vice-Presidency was an office without power (the duty of presiding over the Senate, whatever that was worth, derived technically from the constitutional provision assigning the Vice-President another and distinct post as President of the Senate), it remained one of absolute potentiality. “I am Vice-President,” John Adams continued. “In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.” Like the hooded man at the feast, the Vice-President had little to do but remind the emperor of his own mortality. And in the meantime, as Harry Truman once put it, “the President, by necessity, builds his own staff, and the Vice-President remains an outsider, no matter how friendly the two may be. . . . Neither can take the other completely into his confidence.” It was in a way a doomed relationship. Probably no President and Vice-President since Jackson and Van Buren had wholeheartedly liked and trusted each other.

  Nevertheless one did not have the impression that Kennedy worried unduly about his relations with Johnson. He recognized of course that the former majority leader might have difficulty in reconciling himself to the upward rush of the young back-bencher. “After all,” Kennedy remarked to me one day, “I spent years of my life when I could not get consideration for a bill until I went around and begged Lyndon Johnson to let it go ahead.” And he was well aware too that the Vice-President was temperamental, edgy and deeply sensitive. Writing a birthday telegram to Johnson, he once said, according to Tom Wicker, was like “drafting a state document.” On the other hand, ever since their confrontation on the Tuesday of convention week, Kennedy had no doubt, I think, that Johnson would accept his primacy. Moreover, he liked Johnson personally, valued his counsel on questions of legislation and public opinion and was determined that, as Vice-President, Johnson should experience the full respect and dignity of the office. He took every care to keep Johnson fully informed. He made sure he was at major meetings and ceremonies. Nor would he tolerate from his staff the slightest disparagement of the Vice-President.

  As for Johnson, he once said philosophically to Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., that no Vice-President could hope to compete with the President in public impact; all any Vice-President could do was stand aside. “Your daddy,” Johnson added, “never let his Vice-Presidents put their heads above water”; and I believe that in this respect he regarded Kennedy as a thoroughgoing Rooseveltian. A draft executive order emerging early on from the Vice-President’s office and contemplating the assignment to him of certain executive responsibilities produced a post-inaugural joke comparing his relationship with Kennedy to Seward’s with Lincoln at the start of their administration (when Seward had proposed that Lincoln turn over major presidential responsibilities to him). Johnson was wounded by this and complained to the President about it. I am sure that pulling a Seward was not in his mind. His sympathetic friend William S. White has written that Johnson set out “to be first of all a loyal Vice-President.”*

  This was clearly so, and Johnson clearly succeeded. White suggests that Johnson would have handled certain matters differently—Vietnam, Latin America, the steel crisis—but Johnson rigorously kept disagreement to himself. He cleared all important speeches with the White House, held few press conferences and rarely gave stories to newspapermen. At meetings of the cabinet or the National Security Council, he kept his peace until the President asked his view. Then he would faithfully back the President’s policies and reserve his own comment for questions of political or congressional management.

  The problem still remained of finding things for the Vice-President to do. As Senator, Johnson had helped shape the space program, and as Vice-President he was now able to carry it forward. Johnson also served as chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities, as Nixon had before him. Above all, as Kennedy had promised Sam Rayburn in Los Angeles, he sent the Vice-President on trips abroad. In the Kennedy years Johnson visited thirty-three countries and delivered more than 15a speeches. The equal employment and overseas assignments, as Johnson must have noticed, gave him an opportunity to build himself up in areas where he had been conspicuously weak when he had tried for the Presidency in 1960.

  Johnson’s vice-presidential performance was a triumph of selfdiscipline, and it exacted its psychic price. Underneath the selfimposed constraint, Johnson remained a proud and imperious man of towering energies and passions. Self-effacement was for him the most unnatural of roles; and the foreign visits became one great escape. He sought his missions abroad, adored them and whirled through his thirty-three countries, scattering ballpoint pens, cigarette lighters and general pandemonium in his wake and returning with, trunks of gifts for his friends. He was effective in his meetings with foreign leaders and had a bracing impact on the correct young men of the Foreign Service. Once an American diplomat met him at the Rome airport and on the way into the city methodically instructed him, as if he were some sort of uncouth backwoodsman, on how to behave when he met the local dignitaries. Johnson listened to this singular performance with unaccustomed patience. When they arrived at the hotel, the diplomat said, “Mr. Vice-President, is there anything else I can do for you?” The Vice-President, looking stonily up and down at his model of diplomatic propriety, replied, “Yes, just one thing. Button up your shirt.”

  But life in Washington was harder. In later years he would describe the Vice-Presidency as the most valuable time in his career—the time which enabled him to take over the Presidency with such skill and purpose—and doubtless this was so; but at the time one felt an increasing moroseness and unhappiness. One night at a party at The Elms, his large house in Spring Valley, he sent a Negro chauffeur to collect a guest’s car. Johnson said, “Do you see that man? He has driven for every majority leader since Joe Robinson. When I became Vice-President, I asked him whether he would keep on driving for me. He said no, he wouldn’t. He said, ‘I want to drive for the big man. I don’t want to drive for the Vice-Presideat. That’s nothing.’” Seizing his guest’s arm, Johnson said with great earnestness, “I sure wish I had had him with me in Los Angeles in 1960.”

  Probably Johnson’s greatest frustration lay in his role, or lack of it, in relationship to Congress. Beyond his deep emotional identification with the New Deal, somewhat tempered in the fifties by the conservatism of the country and the politics of Texas, Johnson had displayed no consuming interest in the substance of policies. But, once the substance was given, he was the great legislative prestidigitator of his time. Not since James F. Byrnes had Congress seen a man so skilled in modifying a measure to enlist the widest possible support, so adept at the arts of wheedling, trading and arm-twisting, s
o persistent and so persuasive. Yet these extraordinary talents went largely unemployed in the Kennedy years.

  This was partly his own fault. During the interregnum Johnson acted as if he expected to combine the best of both his old job and his new. He set up for business in the majority leader’s suite in the Capitol, picked Mike Mansfield as his successor and convened meetings between committee chairmen and members of the new cabinet. But he went too far when he permitted (or encouraged) Mansfield to propose that as Vice-President he continue to preside over the Democratic caucus. Though a majority of the caucus was willing to have Johnson, seventeen Senators, pronouncing his presence an intrusion from the executive branch, voted to reject the motion. This unexpected repudiation deeply wounded Johnson. Belatedly recalling the jealous rules of his old club, he did not press his victory and thereafter left the senatorial caucus alone. The incident reduced his usefulness on the Hill. Once the necromancer had left his senatorial seat, the old black magic evidently lost some of its power.