Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (12 page)

Kennedy was more focused on choosing his national security adviser, who would work at the White House and have more direct access to and interaction with the president. His choice was McGeorge Bundy, another Republican, and the youngest Harvard College dean in the university’s history. Bundy’s identity as a Republican also served Kennedy’s initial need for bipartisanship, but Kennedy saw him as likely to be a larger part of national security and foreign policy discussions than any of the cabinet officers. Kennedy considered cabinet meetings a formality that wasted valuable time. But he relished conversations with someone as smart, accomplished, and realistic about the world as Bundy seemed to be.

Kennedy knew Bundy’s history, or perhaps
pedigree
is a better word. He was a descendant of the Boston Lowells. Kennedy could not help but imagine his father’s satisfaction at knowing that a Brahmin would now work for an offspring of Boston’s Irish. The irony of that relationship, however, was of distinctly less consequence in bringing Bundy to the White House than Kennedy’s regard for him as one of the brightest men he had ever known. Bundy’s reputation for brilliance—notable as the applicant who had the highest score in history on Yale’s entrance exam, a Harvard Junior Fellow, someone too gifted to bother with a traditional Ph.D., and the Harvard dean who had mastered the university’s temperamental prima donnas—had found confirmation for Kennedy when he interacted with him as a Harvard trustee in the fifties. At five foot ten and 160 pounds, with clear plastic-frame glasses, a receding hairline, and round face with steely blue-gray eyes, Bundy was hardly a physically imposing figure. But no one who met him could dismiss him as some ordinary bookish academic too cerebral to make much of a mark on the world. His brilliance, sharp wit, precise thought, ability to think on his feet, and talent for cutting through rhetorical nonsense from politicians, journalists, and fellow academics made him a formidable adversary and an extraordinary colleague. All who knew him may have feared or loved him, but above all, they found him unforgettable.

At Harvard, Bundy had seen himself as one cut above his faculty, and in government, he would see himself as a kind of circus master, disdainful of congressmen and senators, the many know-nothings from the hinterlands who he thought were best ignored in the making of foreign policy, and the army of bureaucrats who could be troublesome and needed to be circumvented. Bundy quickly developed a reputation as someone who, in the familiar phrase, did not suffer fools gladly. When a Defense Department official provided a too long-winded, somewhat self-serving account of how he had uncovered a Joint Chiefs war plan hidden from the White House, Bundy snapped, “Is this a briefing or is it a confessional?” He snidely called a national security colleague he saw as too philosophical “the theologian.” He was no more patient with the press corps: “A communiqué should say nothing in such a way as to feed the press without deceiving them,” he advised Kennedy’s press secretary. Bundy’s arrogance would leave a trail of angry Washington colleagues and commentators who would later dish out verbal payback.

Kennedy’s eagerness to have so intelligent a man at his side had led him to consider asking Bundy to become secretary of state, but having so young a secretary—Bundy was only forty-one—seemed likely to trouble people at home and abroad; they were already on edge about a forty-three-year-old president, and so Kennedy dropped the idea. Kennedy then suggested that Bundy become undersecretary of state for political affairs, but he withdrew that proposal when his choice for secretary objected. Kennedy then asked Bundy to become undersecretary for administrative affairs, but Bundy thought it would be less interesting than running Harvard College. Serving as special assistant for national security affairs, however, was irresistible; it presented an opportunity to make a significant difference in an administration that would be primarily focused on foreign affairs. One Harvard colleague, however, doubted the wisdom of putting Bundy so much at the center of power. Sociologist David Riesman thought that the “arrogance and hubris” that had made Bundy so effective as Harvard’s “perfect dean . . . might be very dangerous” for the nation. Decisions about war and peace were best left to humbler men.

Because Kennedy intended to maintain the closest possible control over defense and foreign policy, Bundy was slated to carry a heavy load of responsibilities. To help him deal with the extensive daily challenges Kennedy envisioned for his office, he invented the job of Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, or Deputy National Security Adviser.

Kennedy chose Walt W. Rostow to fill the post. The forty-four-year-old Rostow was another one of the brilliant academics Kennedy had become acquainted with as senator from Massachusetts and a Harvard overseer. He was the offspring of a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His parents were socialists who named the second of their three sons Eugene V. Debs Rostow after the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World union. Also enamored of their adopted country, they named their other two sons Ralph Waldo Emerson Rostow and Walt Whitman Rostow. Rostow earned a Yale B.A. by the age of nineteen, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1935–36, and completed a Ph.D. in economics in 1940, when he was only twenty-three. He served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA, during World War II, and after the war became an economic adviser to the State Department, where he helped develop the significant reconstruction and relief impetus of the Marshall Plan to defend Western Europe against communist subversion. Between 1950 and 1961, Rostow was a professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speechwriter for President Eisenhower, and a counselor to Kennedy on international affairs. In 1960, he published
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
, which outlined a path to national prosperity for developing countries. It was an early statement of Rostow’s commitment to winning the international competition against communism. “I was glad I lived long enough to see the demise of communism,” he said in 1992.

During Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, Rostow, who was a prolific writer, provided JFK with memos on everything from foreign aid to arms control, space, policy toward Asia and Africa, and the United Nations. He helped Kennedy coin the phrase “Let’s get this country moving again” and ingratiated himself with Kennedy and his backers by warning, “If the Republicans win, this country will have gone round a corner from which there may be no return.” It was the sort of hyperbole that campaigns feed on, but overstated rhetoric could be a problem in responding to overseas threats, as Kennedy would see when Rostow later counseled him on Vietnam. Nonetheless, Kennedy was greatly impressed with Rostow’s capacity to write so extensively about so many different topics. Kennedy told him once, “Walt, you write books faster than I can read them.”

Kennedy had initially hoped to put Rostow in the State Department, to convert a stodgy bureaucracy into a more productive center of fresh foreign policy thinking. But Rostow was unwelcome in a department with so many cautious bureaucrats; he was too full of himself and grand theories they thought were probably unworkable and best avoided. Kennedy then decided to bring him to the White House, where Bundy, with Kennedy’s enthusiastic approval, set up a National Security Council, which was more like a college faculty than a government bureaucracy. Bundy was not eager to hear Rostow’s endless sermons on how to combat communism, but if Kennedy wanted him, Bundy thought it best not to resist. After all, Rostow did meet Kennedy’s standard of an independent thinker who had never been a bureaucratic yes-man uncritically endorsing what higher-ups wanted to hear.

Nonetheless, Bundy and Rostow were strikingly different personalities with little affinity for each other: Bundy, the Brahmin with a birthright to dominate and govern other men; Rostow, the ambitious ethnic with the talent to make his way in a competitive world. The self-confident Bundy expected deference but admired intellectual independence and relished the give-and-take of contested ideas. “Goddammit, Mac, I’ve been arguing with you about this all week long,” an exasperated Kennedy would explode at him during a tense period in the White House. But neither Kennedy nor Bundy would really mind. Nor did Rostow’s affinity for theorizing and exuberance for what Bundy sometimes saw as bad ideas greatly trouble the latter. At one level, he was still the dean arguing with the tenured professor whose ego eclipsed his better judgment.

Bundy recruited other smart academics, chiefly from Harvard, who aimed to reorient the country’s external dealings away from Eisenhower’s brinksmanship and massive retaliation to General Maxwell Taylor’s “flexible response.” The premium was on reducing Soviet-American tensions, inhibiting the arms race, and avoiding a blowup over Berlin and Germany and possible brushfire wars in Asia. Carl Kaysen led Bundy’s list of potential NSC colleagues. A professor of economics who had also been a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Kaysen was invited to focus on trade policy but was free to offer advice on arms control discussions and negotiations, as well.

When another colleague wrote Bundy about a successful conference in Geneva, Switzerland, he replied: “Your description of Geneva makes it sound like the opposite of Washington. There you have serious discussions in an atmosphere of unconcern.” That was the exception here, he complained. But “I think perhaps we are moving toward a period in which we shall be able to take serious decisions, some of them even based on thought.” As far as Kennedy was concerned, however, the State Department and Dean Rusk, the man he chose to head it, did little to advance the administration toward fresh, rational foreign policies.

Adlai Stevenson had wanted the job of secretary of state. There was some precedent for a twice-defeated presidential candidate to become the lead cabinet officer: In 1913, Woodrow Wilson had made William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party’s three-time losing White House nominee, his secretary of state. But Wilson owed Bryan: He had made the difference in helping Wilson become the Democratic nominee on the convention’s forty-sixth ballot. By contrast, Stevenson had stood in the way of Kennedy’s nomination by allowing supporters to unreservedly contest Kennedy’s candidacy. Neither Jack nor Bobby thought all that well of Stevenson. True, he had managed to excite liberal enthusiasm, but they saw him as rather prissy and ineffective. He never met their standard of tough-mindedness, on which they put a high premium for service in their administration. Also, they worried that he might forget who was president and who was secretary. But more important, they couldn’t forgive his refusal to support Jack for the nomination, even when they had sent word that they were willing to give him the secretary’s post in return for his early backing. “Fuck him,” Kennedy told an all-out Stevenson supporter after he won the presidency. “I’m not going to give him anything.”

Because Kennedy had asked him to write a foreign policy report during the campaign, Stevenson had some expectation that Kennedy would invite him to head the State Department. Stevenson’s hopes also rested on the conviction that Kennedy needed the backing of party liberals, who remained loyal to Stevenson and wanted to see him at the center of a new Democratic administration. In addition, Stevenson believed that his international standing as a prominent exponent of improved relations with Moscow might carry some weight with Kennedy.

In the end, although Jack and Bobby would have been just as happy to freeze Stevenson out of the administration, they felt compelled to offer him something; they could not ignore his continuing influence with party liberals. Kennedy offered him a choice of becoming ambassador to Britain, attorney general (this was before he turned to Bobby), or ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson was cool to all these proposals. He unequivocally rejected the London assignment and command of the Justice Department. Despite the prospect of limited impact on foreign affairs, the U.N. ambassadorship at least had the appeal of joining a list that included Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s first representative at the United Nations. Stevenson tested the limits of Kennedy’s patience by saying that he would need to see who was secretary of state before he accepted the U.N. appointment.

Bobby Kennedy remembered the process with Stevenson as “so unpleasant. . . . The President really disliked him. He was so concerned about what he was going to do and what his role was going to be and whether he’d take the position or not that the President almost withdrew it.”

Although Kennedy knew that he didn’t want Stevenson as secretary of state, finding a secretary proved to be more of a problem than Kennedy had anticipated. Part of the difficulty was Kennedy’s ambivalence about the department. He considered it something of a dinosaur, a sort of prehistoric beast that lumbered along with no discernible contribution to the national well-being. Kennedy’s consideration of nominees for the department’s leadership revealed how torn he was between trying to find either someone who could turn it into a useful engine of fresh thinking about overseas problems or else a caretaker who would simply keep it in line while the president and his national security advisers managed the serious work of policymaking.

Kennedy’s impulse to give the department new life registered in his arrangement during the campaign to have Stevenson write a foreign policy report in preparation for the day he would become responsible for the country’s external affairs. At the same time, he asked John Sharon, a Stevenson associate who helped him prepare the report, to give him a “shit list,” as Kennedy described it, “of people in the State Department who ought to be fired.” His inclination to place Bundy and Rostow in the department also suggested his leaning toward making it into a more productive source of constructive foreign policy proposals.

Kennedy’s thoughts of reforming the department found fullest expression in his consideration of Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright as secretary. Kennedy had developed a cordial relationship with Fulbright during their service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Fulbright chaired. Kennedy viewed Fulbright as a match for Bundy and Rostow. A star football player at the University of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and president of the University of Arkansas from 1939 to 1941, Fulbright was a combination of brains and athletic skill that Kennedy admired. He also shared Fulbright’s affinity for internationalism, which had made Fulbright an early supporter of U.S. commitment to the United Nations and a program of international student exchange that, beginning in 1946, enjoyed institutional standing in the United States as the Fulbright Fellowship Program.