Both strains were much alive in the Kennedy years. The administration itself expressed the spirit of liberal pragmatism; and other liberal pragmatists in Congress and elsewhere urged only that it do so with greater audacity and force. Hence mild tensions sometimes existed between the administration and its logical allies. Kennedy and much of the White House staff retained a suspicion of the ritualistic liberal as someone more intent on virtuous display than on practical result; moreover, criticism was harder to take from friends than from enemies. As for the liberals on the Hill, they were sometimes hurt and resentful, as their predecessors had been toward Roosevelt a quarter-century earlier, when the President seemed to be compromising too much and sticking too close to the southern Democrats in the leadership. Hubert Humphrey was our most effective liberal in Congress; after one bitter debate he said wearily to me, “It’s hard for us down here to keep on defending the things we think the White House believes in when the White House seems to spend its time saying nice things about the other side.”
But the pragmatic liberals, if they often wished the administration to move faster, had no doubt that it was their administration. Humphrey worked closely with the White House, where he was liked and valued, and Paul Douglas’s attitude toward Kennedy reminded one of George Norris’s attitude toward Roosevelt—a large and serene faith in the President’s basic purpose and therefore an unwillingness to draw drastic conclusions from temporary tactics. As for Kennedy, despite occasional annoyance over the refusal of some liberals to understand the constraints on presidential action, he knew at bottom that over the long run pressure from the left increased his freedom of maneuver. In 1963, when I prepared a message for him to the annual convention of Americans for Democratic Action, describing the ADA as having contributed an indispensable ferment to the American politics, the President took out his pencil and scrawled an insert: “and looking back you can take satisfaction that on the whole time has confirmed the rightness of your judgments.”
The liberals who did not like power constituted a different problem. Their mood was that of the political philosopher of old Virginia, John Taylor of Caroline, who wrote James Monroe on the eve of his Presidency, “The moment you are elected, though by my casting vote, carried an hundred miles in a snow storm, my confidence in you would be most confoundedly deminished, and I would instantly join again the republican minority.” The nuclear age had given the recoil from power new intensity. Since Hiroshima many liberals and intellectuals had been reluctant to identify themselves with anything done by government.
Such people now viewed the Kennedy administration with deep suspicion. The President in their mind was the Tempter, using the allurements of power, charm, wealth and flattery to seduce their brethren into betraying their vocation and becoming the tools of what C. Wright Mills had called “the power elite.” Kennedy’s air of interest in ideas and the arts seemed only the latest and most diabolical Establishment ruse to defeat dissent by absorbing it. Those who succumbed to the temptation, the critics argued, would pay a heavy price both in weakening that principled opposition to power which was the duty of an intellectual community and in debasing themselves. Some critics, like Mills, were inordinate in their reaction; his companion in the last months before his death reports Mills as “ashamed to be an American, ashamed to have John F. Kennedy as his President.” Others, less rabid, felt, as Sidney Hyman wrote, that it was “a poor exchange to trade in first-class intellectuals for second-class politicians,” or, as Alfred Kazin concluded in a piece not without some highly perceptive passages, “Kennedy’s shrewd awareness of what intellectuals can do, even his undoubted inner respect for certain writers, scholars and thinkers, is irrelevant to the tragic issues and contributes nothing to their solution. To be an ‘intellectual’ is the latest style in American success, the mark of our manipulable society.”
Kazin had told me one July day at Wellfleet that he was planning this article, and I suggested that he might want to meet Kennedy first. When I mentioned it to the President, he proposed that I bring the eminent literary critic down for luncheon. I thought it a lively and agreeable occasion, the talk ranging from Cooper and Malraux to Khrushchev and Chiang Kai-shek. We chatted a bit about the role of the writer in American society. Kennedy said that in the United States the trouble was that success was construed in individual terms and thus was ultimately unsatisfying. On the other hand, in Castro’s Cuba, people had the higher satisfaction of working together in a group; but, since the writer was in the end a “single individual,” he would be even more thwarted in a collective society. Frustration, the President coneluded, was evidently the writer’s destiny. Finally, in a remark which Diana Trilling later reported was passed around New York literary circles, he said, “But what has all of this to do with the papers waiting for me on my desk?”
Kazin manfully resisted seduction. A few months later he came to dinner and announced that the New York intellectuals considered Kennedy slick, cool and empty, devoid of vision, an expert and calculating pragmatist. When I observed that the same people had thought the same things about Roosevelt, Alfred replied, with admirable consistency, that he thought they were right then too. (As for Kennedy, he was very funny about Kazin’s essay when it appeared in The American Scholar. “We wined him and dined him,” he said, “and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him, and I later told Jackie what a good time she missed, and then he went away and wrote that piece!”)
Kazin’s application of John Taylor’s principle expressed a wholly legitimate belief that one role for intellectuals was that of unremitting hostility to power. But was that the only role? It seemed to me that there was also a strong case for intellectuals so inclined to take part in government if only to provide a link between the political and the intellectual communities. The process of mediation might well give the intellectual community more impact on the political process than if it remained in solid and permanent opposition. It seemed hard to argue, moreover, that serious intellectuals were inexorably corrupted by public responsibility; this had hardly happened to Keynes or to MacLeish or to Berle in the thirties, to Murrow or Galbraith or Heller now. That was not to say that intellectuals made a great deal of difference to government, or that intellectuals in government always kept faith with their own ideals. Ted Sorensen, describing government meetings with mordant accuracy, once wrote, “The liberal may seek to impress his colleagues with his caution; idealists may try to sound tough-minded. I have attended more than one meeting where a military action was opposed by military minds and supported by those generally known as peace-lovers.” Nonetheless, if intellectuals decided to abandon government to non-intellectuals, they would have only themselves to blame for the result. If John Taylor of Caroline had a right to his position, Thomas Jefferson had an equal right to his.
3. KENNEDY AND THE LEFT: POLICIES
Where the utopian left felt more than a generalized mistrust of power, it objected to both the foreign and domestic policies of the administration. In foreign affairs, some regarded the cold war as the invention of the military-industrial complex and supposed that, if only Washington changed its course, Moscow and Peking would gladly collaborate in building a peaceful world. This had been somewhat the Indian view—or at least until the Chinese crossed the Himalayas and reality broke out. Others, while seeing communism as a problem and the cold war as a reality, felt that resistance involved too great a risk and were gloomily prepared to endure a communist world if that would avert a nuclear holocaust: better red than dead. Both groups condemned the policy of nuclear deterrence. Both identified themselves a bit self-righteously with ‘peace’ as if everyone who disagreed with them wanted to blow up the world. Both yearned for total solutions. And for both the proper United States policy was unilateral disarmament and neutralism.
Thus Professor Stuart Hughes, the Harvard historian, advised the United States in his book An Approach to Peace to seek “a new model for foreign policy in the experience of Sweden or of Switzerland, or even of Indi
a.” He added that he had “toyed” with the idea that the United States should unilaterally declare itself first among the neutrals; but “in reality we do not need to go that far. The events of the next generation will doubtless do it for us.” The mission of the American intellectual, as Hughes saw it, was to do what the Asians and Africans had thus far failed to do and define neutralism “as a faith and a way of life.” In the meantime, the United States should renounce nuclear weapons (by stages), close down most overseas military bases and rest national safety on “a territorial-militia or guerilla-resistance type of defense.”
In domestic affairs, the contribution of the utopian left was unimpressive, except in the civil rights effort, in which its members played a brave and valuable part. Some, like Hughes, called themselves socialists but refrained from specifying what they meant by socialism. Obviously if they meant the supersession of the mixed economy by state ownership of the means of production and distribution, they were committed to a gospel which was politically irrelevant and technically obsolete. If they only meant a change in the mix, they had stopped being socialists. Others, like Paul Goodman, were anarchists, who wrote vaguely of diversifying and decentralizing the economy. Goodman thus summarized his program:
An occasional fist fight, a better orgasm, friendly games, a job of useful work, initiating enterprises, deciding real issues in manageable meetings, and being moved by things that are beautiful, curious, or wonderful.
Norman Mailer’s “existential politics” was more drastic. Existential experience, he said, was
experience sufficiently unusual that you don’t know how it is going to turn out. You don’t know whether you’re going to be dead or alive at the end of it, wanted or rejected, cheered or derided. . . . The hoodlum is more likely to encounter existential experience than the university man. . . . When violence is larger than one’s ability to dominate, it is existential and one is living in an instantaneous world of revelations.
Apart from the whimsy of Goodman’s manifesto and the hysteria of Mailer’s, one could only say that, as serious programs for a high-technology society, they simply would not do. And on the more relevant issues the left made few original contributions. They acted as if they were crying out great ideas in the wilderness which the political leadeis studiously ignored. In fact, the political leaders themselves were begging for usable ideas—and not finding any. Even Michael Harrington’s book on poverty came along half a dozen years after Averell Harriman had begun a poverty program as governor of New York.
The utopian critique still had value perhaps in its sheer intransigence, though nothing more infuriated the Utopians than to be patted on the shoulder and told that society needed their nonconformity. The crime of ‘incorporating the critic into the consensus’ was quite naturally regarded as the dirtiest trick of all. Thus Goodman wrote bitterly, “I myself have been urged, by one who has access, to continue my ‘indispensable role of dissent.’ That is, we are the Jester.” The undertone was almost a longing for the good old days of McCarthy when heresy was at least taken seriously enough to warrant persecution. One could sympathize with Goodman’s chagrin but still wonder whether he was not offering a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition. If dissent was punished, terrible; if embraced, worse.
The Bay of Pigs had quite understandably thrust the utopian left into bitter opposition; and a curious episode later in 1961 turned its members even more bitterly against the administration. This was the furor which followed the President’s request, made originally in May and repeated with emphasis in his July speech on the Berlin crisis, for a fallout shelter program. The proposal was sensible enough. Any President, living in a world of possible nuclear war and knowing that things could be done to save the lives of twenty or thirty million people if war came, would have been plainly delinquent if he had declined to ask for them. Earlier both Truman and Eisenhower had urged civil defense measures, only to have the nation regard the problem with supreme boredom. Now in the Berlin context it acquired, or seemed to acquire, a frightening reality. Before anyone was aware what was happening, a condition of national panic seemed to be boiling up. Get-rich-quick shelter manufacturers arose on every side. Father L. C. McHugh, a Jesuit priest, suggested that shelter owners had the moral right to repel panicky neighbors by “whatever means will effectively deter their assault.” The civil defense coordinator of Riverside County, California, warned his constituents to arm themselves in order to turn back the thousands of refugees who might flee their way from Los Angeles. In Las Vegas a civil defense official similarly wanted the Nevada militia to repulse invaders from California. (“In suburban civil defense,” said an air-raid warden in a Feiffer cartoon, “our motto is: If you can’t get yourself a Russian, settle for an American.”) Many on the utopian left feared that the program, if it were not actual preparation for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, would at the very least give the American people a false sense of security and therefore encourage them in reckless foreign adventures. Within the United States itself they perceived it as an incitement to vigilantism if not a means by which the radical right could seize control of local communities. The program, in short, became in their minds a portent of preventive war and fascism.
Civil defense policy, in the meantime, was in a state of unjustifiable confusion. As the Defense Department had first conceived the problem, each family was to dig for itself. To advance the cause the Pentagon hired Madison Avenue specialists to prepare a shelter instruction booklet intended for distribution to every householder. This was a singular document. In the draft submitted to the White House, it did not make clear that American policy was to avoid a holocaust; and it offered a relatively sanguine picture both of life in the shelter and of the world into which people would emerge after the attack. Moreover, it seemed to be addressed exclusively to the upper middle class—to people owning houses with gardens or basements; there was nothing in it for those who lived in tenements. When the President asked Galbraith to take a look at it, he responded, “I am not at all attracted by a pamphlet which seeks to save the better elements of the population, but in the main writes off those who voted for you. I think it particularly injudicious, in fact it is absolutely incredible, to have a picture of a family with a cabin cruiser saving itself by going out to sea. Very few members of the UAW can go with them.” Moreover, the tract assigned the protection of the population to private enterprise. “The anticipation of a new market for home shelters,” it even said, “is helpful and in keeping with the free enterprise way of meeting changing conditions in our lives.”
Kennedy, while unshaken in his belief that defense against fallout was a necessary form of national insurance, was dismayed both by the booklet and the public reaction. He remarked ruefully that he wished he had never said the things which had stirred the matter up and wanted to diminish the excitement as expeditiously as possible. Carl Kaysen and I, who were following the problem for the White House, concluded that the do-it-yourself family shelter theory was a disaster and that the only fair and rational policy would be one of public community shelters. The Defense Department itself was reaching the same conclusion. The issue went before the President at the defense budget meeting at Hyannis Port the Friday after Thanksgiving 1961. It was a dark, sullen day, interrupted by pelting rain. When I discoursed on the demoralizing effect of the private shelter approach with its sauve qui peut philosophy, the Attorney General said grimly, “There’s no problem here—we can just station Father McHugh with a machine gun at every shelter.” The President speedily decided in favor of the public program. The Defense Department rewrote its pamphlet and, instead of putting it in every mailbox, left copies at post offices for concerned citizens. Thereafter the shelter panic subsided. Under the calm direction of Steuart Pittman in the Defense Department, and despite mounting congressional resistance to bills offering matching funds to non-profit institutions for including shelters in new construction, some progress was quietly made in marking existing buildings as shelter location
s and stocking them with food and equipment.
This episode, following too soon after the Bay of Pigs, seemed to many on the left a further horrible revelation of the inner essence of the administration. Stuart Hughes, announcing his candidacy for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1962, attacked “the deadening similarity of the two major parties” and declared it time for “a new kind of politics in America.” When I talked with him on the Cape that summer, he said he expected this would be the beginning of a nationwide third party dedicated to peace. The apparent response to his candidacy and to similar candidacies in other states gave the radical left a few moments of genuine hope.
Kennedy was well aware of this disaffection among the radical intellectuals. He used to say that Adlai Stevenson could still beat him in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, California—even perhaps in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet, most of the radicals, even at their most critical, felt a sense of reluctant kinship with the President. Kennedy was too bright, too attractive, too contemporary to be wholly disowned. He had fortified their own feelings of self-respect. He had made them feel in some way more at home in their own country. “For the first time in our literary life,” Mailer told an English interviewer, “it was possible to not only attack the President, you see, but to attack him as a younger brother, with the intensity of a family quarrel.”
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