The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  There was far too little questioning of the moral right to launch the attack: after all, the Communists did things like this all the time, that was the way it was, the way power was used. A vast number of people felt it had failed because too little force had been used (this indeed appeared to be the problem for the President; the right was noisier in those days). The President himself probably, in some of the far reaches of his mind, began to learn important lessons about institutional wisdom, but among his advisers there seemed to be little learned. Nothing very important, nothing very serious. “A brick through the window,” McGeorge Bundy would tell friends. Part of the fault, the Administration believed, was that the advice had come from relics of the Eisenhower years, Allen Dulles at CIA and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the departure of both would be precipitated, the idea being that people more loyal to the President should head those institutions and thus make them more Kennedy-like. Bundy seemed preoccupied with the tactical aspects of the failure; when he met with his staff the day after the debacle, he seemed very much in control. The Bay of Pigs, he told his staff, showed that Che had learned more from Guatemala than the United States had (apparently a reference to the importance of air power). As for the members of the Brigade (many of them still strung out on the beaches), he said that these counterrevolutionaries were very much like assistant professors at Harvard, who were always being reminded about the possibility of not getting tenure but who never really believed your warnings until tenure failed to arrive.

  Rusk’s weak stand left the Kennedy people in retrospect more frustrated by his performance than anything else, and left both Kennedy and Rusk wishing that he had spoken up more clearly. But as soon became apparent, it was consistent with both his character and his view of the job; Rusk had, after all, not been chosen because Kennedy wanted a strong man, but because he would be a low-profile Secretary of State. Thus a voice which might predictably have been strongly opposed to this kind of military adventure was muted. On the other hand, the overt opposition of Bowles and Fulbright did not do them much good. Although in Fulbright’s case it strengthened his reputation in Washington as the chief Hill intellectual, it did not bring him any closer to the Kennedy circle, in part because of his own growing doubts about the men now in the executive branch.

  For Bowles it would be a good deal worse. Somehow the word got out that he had been against the invasion. Soon there was a story going around Washington that Bobby Kennedy had come out of a meeting, jammed his fingers into Bowles’s stomach and told him that he, Bowles, was for the invasion, remember that, he was for it, they were all for it (the story did not originate with the Bowles people, either). The Bay of Pigs debacle seemed to symbolize the futility of Bowles and to seal his end; he was talky, a do-gooder, had probably been against the venture for the wrong reasons. He was too ideological, while they, of course, were all pragmatists. In the early days of the Administration that particular word had been used so frequently that David Brinkley, writing the introduction of an early book of portraits of the Kennedy people, would dwell on that single word, and note that at an early Washington cocktail party a woman had gone around the room asking each of the hundred people there if he was a pragmatist.

  In May, a month after the Bay of Pigs, when a variety of lessons might have been sinking in, Bowles, who was considered so good at spotting long-range problems and so bad at handling immediate ones, wrote one of the most prophetic analyses of the new Administration in his private diary:

  The question which concerns me most about this new Administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong. I realize in posing the question I am raising an extremely serious point. Nevertheless I feel it must be faced.

  Anyone in public life who has strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of public morality, both domestic and international, has a very great advantage in times of strain, since his instincts on what to do are clear and immediate. Lacking such a framework of moral conviction or sense of what is right and what is wrong, he is forced to lean almost entirely upon his mental processes; he adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion. Under normal conditions, when he is not tired or frustrated, this pragmatic approach should successfully bring him out on the right side of the question.

  What worries me are the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry, frustrated, or emotionally affected. The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.

  The problem for Bowles would soon become somewhat personal. He had entered the Administration with powerful enemies, some on the Hill, some in the entrenched wing of the foreign service, and some in the Democratic party­Acheson hard-line group. His enemies had not decreased in the early months of the Kennedy Administration. He had added Bobby Kennedy to them, a most formidable person indeed in those days, the ramrod of the Administration. At the end of May an incident occurred which certainly contributed to Bowles’s downfall. While both the President and Rusk were in Europe with De Gaulle, there was a crisis in the Dominican Republic following General Rafael Trujillo’s assassination. A group headed by Bobby Kennedy, but including McNamara and a few others (with Rusk, Kennedy and Bundy out of town, they represented the highest officials in the government), wanted to effect an immediate, though somewhat limited American intervention. They had some CIA contacts who promised that the right kind of Dominicans would rally and thus save the republic. Bowles, acting as Secretary, held the line against intervention because he doubted the legality of what they wanted to do. The others argued that speed was of the essence. Bowles suggested they find out a little more about which way events were moving. At that point Bobby Kennedy, still in his hard-nosed incarnation, the tough guy of the Administration, unleashed a cascade of insults about Bowles’s being a gutless bastard, which made some of the others in the room wince. Later in the day Bowles went on the phone to the President in Paris, explaining what the activists wanted to do and why he objected. Kennedy concurred in the objections.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Bowles, “and in that case, would you clarify who’s in charge here?”

  “You are,” the President said.

  “Good,” said Bowles. “Would you mind explaining it to your brother?”

  In addition to everything else, the functioning of the State Department just wasn’t working out well. At a dinner party in the spring of 1961 after the Bay of Pigs, Bundy would tell friends, “Something has to be changed at State and you can’t fire the Secretary of State. Particularly,” he added, “if you hired him after only one meeting,” a reference to the fact that if you have made a snap judgment you dare not admit that it is wrong. By early July 1961 a somewhat embarrassed Rusk was offering Bowles a job as roving ambassador, preferably to rove out of town, and admitting that it was Kennedy’s idea. A few days later Charles Bartlett, a close friend of Kennedy’s, wrote in his syndicated column that Bowles was on his way out. Bowles called up Kennedy and asked for a meeting. A curious conversation ensued. Kennedy began by saying that perhaps it had been a mistake not to make Bowles Secretary of State and that if so, things might have been different. But Rusk was Secretary of State, and the Department had not come up with new policies, and changes had to be made. Would Bowles like Chile? No, Bowles would not like Chile. As far as new ideas were concerned, he told Kennedy he had spent a great deal of time coming up with them, but they did not seem to go beyond Rusk’s desk. They decided to meet together in a few days, on July 17.

  In the meantime Washington seethed with rumors that Bowles was on his way out. He had become the perfect target for the conservatives, while the liberals, uneasy about the direction of the Kennedy Administration, began to rally round Bowles. For the first time the split personality of the Kennedy Administration seemed to show itself. Stevenson, Walter Reuther, Soapy Williams all rallied and told Bowl
es not to leave without a fight. He had become, in spite of himself, a litmus paper of the Administration. At the July 17 meeting he showed up armed with his memos on Cuba, China and related issues, memos which incorporated far more new ideas than the Kennedy Administration was prepared to handle. He told Kennedy he did not intend to take Chile. Later that day Press Secretary Pierre Salinger held a briefing and said no, Bowles’s resignation was not currently expected, but he added that off the record, for background, he was not expected to be around very long.

  There were others in the Kennedy circle uneasy with the direction of the Administration and particularly with the decision-making processes used in the Bay of Pigs. Shortly afterward Arthur Goldberg, the new Secretary of Labor (a labor negotiator who had been a particular favorite of the Kennedy people, having worked for them when much of labor’s hierarchy was anti-Kennedy because of the rackets committee investigation), asked the President why he hadn’t consulted more widely, why he had taken such a narrow spectrum of advice, much of it so predictable. Kennedy said that he meant no offense, but although Goldberg was a good man, a friend, he was in labor, not in foreign policy.

  “You’re wrong,” Goldberg replied, “you’re making the mistake of compartmentalizing your Cabinet. There are two people in the Cabinet you should have consulted on this one, men who know some things, and who are loyal to you and your interests.”

  “Who?” Kennedy asked.

  “Orville Freeman and me.”

  “Why Orville?”

  “Because he’s been a Marine, because he’s made amphibious landings and because he knows how tough they can be even under the very best circumstances. He could have helped you.”

  “And why you?”

  “Because I was in OSS during the war and I ran guerrilla operations and I know something about guerrillas. That they’re terrific at certain things. Sabotage and intelligence, nothing like them at that. But they’re no good at all in confronting regular units. Whenever we used them like that, we’d always lose all our people. They can do small things very well, but it’s a very delicate, limited thing. But you didn’t think of that—and you put me in the category of just a Secretary of Labor.”

  “A brick through the window.” Windows are easy to replace, and the Bay of Pigs did not change the basic direction of the Kennedy Administration in foreign affairs. It was still activist, anxious to show its muscles, perhaps more anxious than before. At Defense, McNamara was an activist, pledged to end a missile gap which did not exist, and whose own immediate instincts, once he was in government, were if anything to add to the arms race; he was, at first, very much the hardware man. In early 1961 some of the White House people like Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner and Carl Kaysen of the National Security Council were trying to slow down the arms race, or at least were in favor of a good deal more talking with the Soviets before speeding ahead. At that point the United States had 450 missiles; McNamara was asking for 950, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asking for 3,000. The White House people had quietly checked around and found that in effectiveness, in sheer military terms, the 450 were the same as McNamara’s 950. Thus a rare moment existed, a chance to make a new start, if not turn around the arms race, at least to give it a temporary freeze.

  “What about it, Bob?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, they’re right,” McNamara answered.

  “Well, then, why the nine hundred and fifty, Bob?” Kennedy asked.

  “Because that’s the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered,” he answered.

  Perhaps, thought one of the White House aides, by holding back we might have slowed the cycle rather than accelerated it. But in 1961 the advocates of disarmament encountered an Administration which considered the issue a little peripheral, not something that could be taken up immediately, something that would have to wait. Of the high officials, the President himself seemed the most receptive to the idea, though he was in no rush to lead the parade. McNamara appeared to be surprisingly educable, and if not an ally, at least open-minded, a man who could be brought around. Bundy was of little help; in the early days this was something he simply stayed out of. And Rusk, whose job at State it really was to create a disarmament lobby, seemed the least interested in the subject.

  If anything, the Bay of Pigs had made the Kennedy Administration acutely aware of its vulnerability and determined to show that it was worthy, that this was not a weak young President unable to cope with the Soviets, but that he was just as tough as they were, just as fast on the draw. In the Administration, those who were the tough-minded realists were strengthened; those less inclined to use force were weakened. Kennedy would soon have a chance to show whether he was worthy of his mandate, at the upcoming conference with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in early June, a meeting scheduled so soon after the Bay of Pigs that the very holding of it was dubious. But he went through with it, and the outcome, rather than lowering tensions, increased them. The President left Khrushchev in Vienna feeling that he had been bullied, more determined than ever to show Khrushchev that despite his youth, despite the Bay of Pigs, he was someone to conjure with. He would call up the reserves, and flex American muscle in many ways.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, it need not have been that way. Averell Harriman had long felt that a meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy was inevitable, and he had carefully prepared himself for it. He was then sixty-nine years old, and a supreme party warhorse. Although something of a failure in domestic politics (in 1958 he was beaten badly by Nelson Rockefeller in the New York gubernatorial race; and he had wanted his party’s presidential nomination but never came close to it), he was one of the most forceful players at governmental politics of a generation, relentless, restless and ruthless, expert in the care and feeding of Presidents of the United States. In 1960, after his defeat in New York, the low point in his career, close friends like Michael Forrestal and Pat Moynihan would meet and discuss what they could possibly do to ease Harriman’s pain and the prolonged humiliation which now seemed to be his fate for the rest of his life. He had fallen from grace and activity as only a defeated American politician can. Gay Talese, then a young New York Times reporter, later recalled being assigned to cover a Harriman press conference in 1960. The ex-governor, having just returned from a trip abroad, had deigned to announce that he would reveal his version of it; since in those days the Times covered everything, Talese was dispatched to the Harrimans’ magnificent East Side town house, with its great bust of Roosevelt by Jo Davidson and the accompanying Matisse, Cézanne and Rousseau paintings. Among these great objects he waited; he waited for a very long time alone, because he was the only reporter to show up, and after about forty minutes the press conference was mercifully called off.

  Even at this low point, Harriman had been thinking ahead, projecting a future role for himself. Sensing that there was a good chance of a Democratic President’s being elected in the fall, and wanting to specialize in Soviet affairs, exploiting the most personal kind of expertise that went back to his boyhood, he had written to Khrushchev suggesting that the Premier invite him to Moscow (which would be a marvelous piece of wampum to barter with a new President). Khrushchev, who understood the game, of course, and who knew what Americans did not know, that a Harriman was just as much a Harriman out of office as in office, indeed that the office was marginal, more of a lark than anything else, immediately responded, and invited him. They spent two days together, twelve good long hours, and at the beginning Khrushchev, as was his wont, bullied Harriman, threatened, stomped, the voice rising: if the Americans did not move out of Berlin the rockets would fly, the tanks would roll, and he, Citizen N. Khrushchev, could not be responsible for all the terrible things which would happen. Harriman listened and then quietly rejoined that rocketry was a two-way avenue, that there were now few shelters left on either side, that the Soviet industrial might was just as vulnerable as American might and had been built up at just as high a national price. That done with, they had subsided into long
and profitable talks about other subjects, the possibility of coexistence, the aims of the Chinese, a very pleasant exchange which had lasted the two days.

  Harriman came back from that trip believing that there was a possibility of a deal with the Soviets, that history had finally converged to a point where both nations were ready, that the Soviet fear of the Chinese radically changed their national security problems. He felt in this winter of a long career that this was the special contribution he could make, particularly to a young President. He told friends that every man wants to contribute what he knows best, and since Soviet-American relations were his specialty, he had a special belief that he could give a new President the legacy of this special knowledge of the Soviets. Harriman had come over to the Kennedy side rather belatedly, the reason of course being doubts about Joe Kennedy, that man. He had not been a great aid during the campaign, and to the Kennedys he was someone who had once been Democratic governor of New York, someone they ought to do something for. He had a serious hearing problem, which would not have been a problem except that he also had a serious vanity problem, which precluded a hearing aid. At the first meeting with Kennedy after November 1960, he had been at his worst; asked what he thought about a complicated question of Soviet intentions, he had answered “Yes.” Later Kennedy had taken Michael Forrestal, Harriman’s protégé, aside and asked if there was someplace they might talk privately. Forrestal suggested the bathroom, and they went in there, locking the door, Forrestal delighted, sure that his own big job was coming, at State. Or perhaps, like his father, at Defense. At least an Assistant Secretaryship. “Do you think,” asked Kennedy, “that you can get Averell to wear a hearing aid?”