Kennedy’s belief in the “great man” theory of history helped shape his approach. JFK had studied the European and American past, including the writings of Winston Churchill and what Teddy White characterized as an “astonishing” list of American historians. As the author of Profiles in Courage, JFK considered himself an amateur historian as well. According to Jackie, Kennedy “read and reread” books on American statesmen: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, John Randolph, and John Quincy Adams. (The first book JFK gave to Jackie was The Raven, Marquis James’s biography of Sam Houston.) Kennedy “was dubious about the theory of great historical tides that no person can change—economic, political or otherwise,” said Ted Sorensen. As Schlesinger put it, “Kennedy felt individuals could make a difference for history, and within limits could make a great difference. He thought Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were examples. He thought he would like to be like that.”
Most of Kennedy’s men clustered in the surprisingly modest West Wing, a warren of rooms with low ceilings and narrow corridors, although Bundy and Johnson worked out of spacious and airy quarters in the Executive Office Building next door. Arthur Schlesinger was dispatched to an office on the other side of the Executive Mansion amid Jackie’s staff in the East Wing—a setting that reminded Galbraith of “the reception room in a Radcliffe dorm.”
At lunchtime, the New Frontiersmen gathered in the White House Mess, a small dining room seating thirty-five in a corner of the basement. On white linen tablecloths set with silver cutlery and china rimmed in gold, they ate simple fare (Salisbury steak, omelettes, fish chowder—served by the quart) prepared by navy chefs. Each presidential adviser also had his own monogrammed silver napkin ring. The atmosphere was distinctly masculine, with nautical prints on the walls, lamps with eagle bases, and spare flower arrangements of daisies and fern in slender vases. Only two women had full privileges: Tish Baldrige, who occasionally appeared to “snow” a visitor, and Kennedy’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln, who was too busy to walk downstairs. She always ate at her desk, from a tray sent up by the navy men.
During the early days, Kennedy wandered through the West Wing maze to see where everyone was situated—at one point getting lost in a “complex little area when [he] kept going around in circles and . . . ending up in the same place.” After an Oval Office meeting, he offered to take Galbraith to the mansion for a tour—and promptly marched “headlong into a closet.”
For display in the Oval Office, Bill Walton found a model of the frigate Constitution and two paintings of the ship in battle. Kennedy spent time “hanging pictures of things he loved,” recalled Jackie, and “setting out his collection of whale’s teeth”—antique scrimshaw pieces, many of them chosen by Lem Billings. At Jackie’s direction, JFK’s office was transformed from “austere formality” to the ambiance of a “New England sitting room” with the arrangement of two sofas and a mahogany coffee table in front of the fireplace.
Even after he had been on the job for more than a month, Kennedy was “still restless,” Salinger reported to Teddy White. “He paces all over the White House, up and down. He visits everywhere.” Staff members were stunned to discover JFK one morning in the mail room “opening letters himself and writing instructions across them.” Kennedy would stroll into the Rose Garden or drop by the press office, picking up books from desks along the way. When the President addressed press aide Barbara Gamarekian by name, she returned to her post “sort of floating on a little pink cloud.”
Kennedy fostered an almost feudal loyalty among his top aides, all of whom remained with him to his death. John Steinbeck once asked Walt Rostow to explain “how Kennedy generated love.” Rostow described a “repressed but powerful affection” among his aides that was “unspoken,” “went both ways,” and was “amusing, dry and understated” rather than backslapping and demonstrative. The Kennedys prided themselves on sticking with their friends and demanded 100 percent loyalty in return. In the White House the most stalwart loyalists were two men who had served with Kennedy the longest, David Francis Powers and Kenneth Philip O’Donnell.
Walking into the West Wing with the President for the first time “was like being Alice in Wonderland,” recalled Powers. “He looked ten feet tall to me, and he seemed to grow every day.” That unabashed admiration had taken root during Kennedy’s first campaign for Congress in 1946. Stamped by his privileged background, Kennedy needed a well-connected “townie” to help him engage the man on the street, and Powers, the son of a coal miner turned dockworker, was perfect for the role.
Powers’s parents had been born in County Cork; his father died when he was only two. To help support his mother and seven siblings, Powers went to work at age ten hawking newspapers at the Boston Navy Yard, putting in shifts before and after school. Following high school, Powers did census surveys for a publishing company, and during World War II he mapped bombing targets in China for the Flying Tigers commanded by Colonel Claire Chennault, for whom Joe Alsop served as an aide-de-camp.
Powers, who was described by Newsweek as an “irrepressible leprechaun,” perched at a desk in the West Lobby, where visitors routinely arrived. The bald and ruddy aide put guests at their ease and escorted them to their appointments. Five years older than the President, he was part entertainer, part nanny, part valet. He knew nearly every detail of JFK’s daily routine—what he ate, what he read, when he bathed.
By enlisting Powers, JFK was emulating his father, who “always had someone like a court jester around him,” observed Rose Kennedy, “someone witty, light hearted; but faithful, loyal, and with sense enough to keep his mouth closed under all circumstances.” While the Kennedy family may have recognized Powers’s value, they underestimated his savvy. Behind his cheery facade, he was shrewd and resourceful, with a gift for sizing up character. In their first encounter, Powers astutely recognized that JFK was “aggressively shy,” meaning that “he always got what he wanted,” persistently but diffidently, through a series of questions.
It was no secret that Powers was on the White House staff only to make the President happy, and to be available for that purpose anytime. With his gentle voice—a lilting tenor with broad Bostonian inflections drawing out the last words of sentences for emphasis—Powers was a born raconteur. Whether soaking in his bath for “tub talk” or relaxing in his rocking chair, Kennedy loved to hear Powers’s quips—the patrician Massachusetts Republican senator Leverett Saltonstall was “Irish on his chauffeur’s side”—along with tales of Chinese peasants during World War II, the delights of the “Morning Glory” baseball league of Powers’s working-class youth, an endless supply of sports statistics, and instant replays of elections and vote tallies.
Like Lem Billings, Powers had a dispensation from Kennedy to make outrageous comments that nobody else would attempt—announcing the Shah of Iran as “my kind of Shah.” (Lem quite resented Powers, dismissing him as “a nice employee” that JFK “enjoyed,” but he “wasn’t as I was.”) Powers called everyone “pal,” and some White House aides were annoyed by the habitual humming that would signal Powers’s arrival around the curve of the main West Wing corridor. “He was a perennial jokester,” said Barbara Gamarekian. “It was almost demeaning to the President to find solace with someone like that.” Even Jackie “thought he was crude,” said Tish Baldrige, “although she couldn’t be uncivil to him because he was popular.” Jackie understood, as Tish explained it, that both Powers and Billings were “friends from the past who made Jack comfortable in the present.”
Kenny O’Donnell was the flip side of Powers: a dour and intimidating presence who could often be found leaning against a wall, arms folded across his chest. O’Donnell had a hard face, his black eyes compressed into slits, his thin lips set impassively, his manner inscrutable. Few knew that he carried a concealed gun. He spoke sparingly, smiled fleetingly, and developed what William Manchester called “quiet almost fanatical devotion” to Kennedy. Joe Dolan, an aide to JFK, recalled encountering O’Donnell during the
floor demonstration for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 convention. “A lot of noise, huh?” Dolan remarked. Without bothering to shift his gaze from the crowd, O’Donnell said nothing, then finally growled, “Last gasp.”
O’Donnell had come to JFK’s 1952 Senate campaign by way of Bobby Kennedy, a football teammate at Harvard. Wiry and small like Bobby, Kenny was the superior athlete. He was the varsity quarterback and captain while Bobby was a scrappy benchwarmer. O’Donnell had grown up in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of the football coach at Holy Cross College. He went to war at age nineteen after high school, serving in Britain as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, flying thirty missions.
When O’Donnell matriculated at Harvard in 1945, he was an authentic war hero. He and Bobby shared as much enthusiasm for debating as for football. O’Donnell was a mediocre student; only a photographic memory enabled him to slide through by cramming at the last minute. After Harvard, he halfheartedly studied law at Boston College, until the Kennedys lured him into politics.
“Kenny’s genius was simply that his mind worked like a computer,” said John Seigenthaler, an aide to Bobby Kennedy. “He never took notes, ever. It was all in his head.” O’Donnell traveled everywhere with Jack, and helped organize campaign logistics with Bobby, who had become his closest friend.
It was a given that O’Donnell would assume a comparable role in the White House. Not only did the thirty-six-year-old assistant oversee Kennedy’s daily schedule, he supervised the West Wing staff (which included access to the FBI’s investigative files), coordinated all travel and security matters for the President, and functioned as an all-round political adviser.
O’Donnell took up a sentry position, “hovering, grim-faced,” said Charley Bartlett, at his desk in an office just beyond the West Lobby, accessible to visitors through the West Gate on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was decisive and crisp, with little patience for small talk or courtesies. He spoke in grunts, “with his gut,” said Nancy Dutton, a White House aide.
His door to the Oval Office was the main route to the President, but plenty of friends and aides subverted his tight grip by going through Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln, located on the other side of the Oval Office—accessible by entering the White House through the East Gate. With her helmet of black hair, harlequin glasses, and prim shirtwaist dresses, Lincoln wore a deceptive mask of Nebraskan naÏveté. But in her disarming fashion, she was also sharp-eyed and efficient, with a strong instinct for self-preservation. Years earlier Kennedy had tried to dismiss her (a task he always hated), but he had been so oblique in his message that she had simply appeared the next day anyway. “I thought I fired her, but she’s still here,” Kennedy told Sorensen. Lincoln burrowed in and made herself indispensable: she was one of the few who could read Kennedy’s scrawl. O’Donnell considered Lincoln’s access route an affront to his authority, but its flexibility suited Kennedy, so O’Donnell kept his resentment to himself.
Jack Kennedy held just one meeting of his White House staff “to talk about leaks to the press,” recalled Sorensen. In Kennedy’s view, staff meetings only stirred up trouble by allowing aides to air their differences. Following Neustadt’s advice, Kennedy also did away with regular sessions of the National Security Council and disbanded the council’s staff support groups—a move that eliminated a rich source of analysis from agencies and departments. Weekly cabinet meetings, which Kennedy considered “a waste of time . . . like bull sessions,” also disappeared.
When Kennedy did call his cabinet together, he went through the motions, declining even to banter, much less ask advice. Four cabinet officials—McNamara, Rusk, Dillon, and Bobby Kennedy—saw JFK constantly. The remaining six formed an outer circle—Stewart Alsop called them “curious dim figures”—that had infrequent contact and felt frozen out. “We didn’t even have clearance to see secret documents,” recalled Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior. Udall called himself “the Gardener” and made the most of his opportunity “to work without adult supervision,” developing initiatives that would stimulate the environmental movement of subsequent decades.
The White House atmosphere was what Sorensen called “hard driving but easy mannered.” With the exception of the notably formal Dean Rusk, who was “Mr. Secretary,” and presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln, who was “Miz Lincoln,” Kennedy called everybody by their first names. Secretaries who had worked in the White House for years suddenly found themselves on a first-name basis with their bosses as well. Yet Kennedy had “enough of a remoteness about him,” said Barbara Gamarekian, “that you didn’t infringe on the fact that he was informal.”
A handful of key aides—O’Donnell, Sorensen, Bundy, and Salinger—saw Kennedy several times a day, with no particular pattern to their contacts. Kennedy liked his advisers to be “quick, tough, laconic, decided people” who gave him fresh information and insights. He disapproved of anyone dull, prolix (“more than thirty seconds,” said Marcus Raskin, an aide to Bundy, with only mild exaggeration), ideological, earnest, or emotional. His preferred time frame for meetings was fifteen minutes, and few lasted more than an hour, according to Sorensen. Although Kennedy promoted an informal ambiance, the White House “was terribly taut,” said Isaiah Berlin. “Everyone was walking some kind of tightrope, and was very excited to do so. People were always terrified of slipping in some sort of way.”
The British journalist Barbara Ward described Kennedy as “a stimulant. He wasn’t a communicator. He was making up his own mind but he wanted to use everybody to the full . . . not to exploit them but just to get everything that was in their minds, get it absolutely clear to himself.” Instead of a conversation, Kennedy would probe with questions at trip-hammer speed, often jumping to the next query before his interlocutor had finished the answer. “He often cut short others,” said Sorensen, “no matter how important or friendly.”
As a listener, Kennedy was simultaneously seductive and intimidating. He would “lean forward, his eyes protruding slightly,” taking in every word. Having caught the drift quickly, he would betray his impatience by drumming his fingers or fidgeting with his tie. He sometimes asked “exactly what the words mean.” He had little tolerance for grand pronouncements, persiflage, or loose talk. “Never even in conversation did he speak for the pleasure of hearing his own words and phrases,” said Galbraith, and he was “impatient with wordy men,” a “rare case,” the economist added, of a politician applying rules “with equal rigor against himself.”
Kennedy was careful to keep his own counsel, on the assumption that if he expressed his opinion he would inhibit the advice from his aides. He was open to “contrary arguments, sometimes very unpleasant ones,” said David Ormsby Gore. As Kennedy confided to Gore, “One of the rather sad things about life is you discovered the other side really had a very good case.” Kennedy listened until he was confident of his own views. “It was his habit,” said Joe Alsop, “a very good habit for a political leader, not to make very grave decisions until they had to be made. He always left questions open until they were required to be closed.”
Henry Luce once said Kennedy had a “beautiful mind”—and even Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko described the President as “acute” and “penetrating.” He had what Alsop called an “aptitude for facts” and an “interest in how things worked.” Kennedy’s curiosity was wide ranging, but he was not known for originality. As Gromyko put it, Kennedy was “a good catalyst and consumer of other ideas and thoughts.” For that reason, he relied heavily on picking the brains of his advisers. One of his most memorable quips, that Washington was “a city of southern efficiency and northern charm,” came from Amherst political science professor Earl Latham, an early member of JFK’s “Academic Advisory Committee.” Latham made the crack to Sorensen, who passed it to then-Senator Kennedy, who popularized it. “Kennedy’s genius,” said Sorensen, “was in recognizing that a line from an obscure source was accurate as well as deft and funny.”
Kennedy had a remarkable memory, tossin
g out quotes and recalling tiny details. He kept a commonplace book—a small black leather volume filled with quotations that he began collecting before World War II. His apparent effortlessness resulted from calculated and determined application. “I’ll read [an article],” Kennedy once revealed, “then I’ll force myself to lie down for about a half hour and go through the total article in my mind, bringing to memory as much as I possibly can, analyzing the article, and then attacking it and tearing it down.” He read voraciously (although not profoundly, as Joe Alsop would patronizingly point out), propping up a book on his bureau as he dressed or sometimes taking a volume to read as he walked.
But even his reading was purposeful, less for diversion, as Schlesinger explained, than for “information, comparison, insight, and the joy of felicitous statements.” He habitually reached for biography and history—including such obscure texts as an exploration of economic dissent in Burma—although Henry Luce was once surprised to see him with one of Benjamin Disraeli’s “two or three once-famous novels” that “probably a half dozen” people had read in the previous decade. Two of Kennedy’s favorite works were by British writers: John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way, “a journal of certain experiences,” and Melbourne, David Cecil’s portrait of Whig England.
Richard Neustadt recalled that Kennedy “did not go out of his way to put people off balance,” and exhibited “no sadism” as Franklin Roosevelt frequently did when pitting his men against each other. But Kennedy did promote creative tension among his staff. When he hired Dillon, for example, Kennedy explained that he also had to appoint Walter Heller, a liberal economist from the University of Minnesota, as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers “to protect myself politically.” Kennedy said he wanted to “give Heller more public exposure,” while reassuring Dillon, “You are my chief financial adviser.” At the same time, Kennedy was telling Heller that he was a necessary “counterweight” to Dillon’s “conservative leanings.” Kennedy was more candid with Dillon than with Heller. Dillon understood that “Heller was supposed to represent the left wing and make it appear that Kennedy was more interested than he was.” Heller, however, never quite understood his role because he believed Kennedy when “he made Walter think he was going to be very important,” said Dillon.
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