Kennedy: The Classic Biography (3 page)

His concern for history continued once he entered the White House. He gave considerable attention to the library which would preserve his papers. He was accessible to the press and other writers, candid and articulate in public and private, and determined to elucidate, educate and explain. At the urging of the eminent historian on his staff, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., he agreed that procedures should be established to record the firsthand recollections of participants in crucial events while our memories were still fresh.

But he never found time to do it. He arranged for the comprehensive transcription of major deliberations, and at times he dictated memoranda of conversations for the flies. But he communicated many of his key decisions by voice instead of in writing, by telephone instead of letter and to one instead of many. Of the record he did leave in writing—his speeches, messages, cables, letters and memoranda—comparatively few were based on first drafts he had dictated or written out himself.

He was, moreover, in some ways deliberately elusive in his approach. While those on the inside knew far more than those on the outside, no one—no single aide, friend or member of his family—knew all his thoughts or actions on any single subject. My particular responsibilities in his Senate and White House office enabled me to know a little bit about a lot of things, but by no means everything about anything. His motives were often unknown or unclear to others, for he resisted the obvious and the easy; and he was usually too busy with the next decision to take time to explain the last.

At times he talked as if he wanted us to be preserving important conversations through memoranda in our files. His rule against future “backstairs” memoirs (which stemmed from a friendly warning offered by Margaret Truman) applied to the household staff, not his professional aides. Yet at other times he made it clear that he would not feel comfortable in confidential talks if he thought one or more participants would be rushing to record their interpretations of his views.

He was the kind of President who would want a great book written about his administration—but he was also the kind who would want to write it himself. He assumed Schlesinger would be writing a solid book—but he otherwise expressed disdain for the reliability of most government memoirs and diaries. He thought that Emmet Hughes, a part-time speech-writer for Eisenhower, had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private conversations against them. “I hope,” said Kennedy, “that no one around here is writing that kind of book.”

This is not that kind of book. It is not even a neutral account. An impassioned participant cannot be an objective observer. Having formed a strong attachment for John Kennedy, I cannot now pretend an attitude of complete detachment. Having devoted nearly eleven years to advancing his interests and explaining his views, I cannot now cloak my partisanship as disinterested scholarship. This book, let it be clear at the outset, praises John Kennedy and what he has done, not merely out of loyalty and affection, but out of deep pride and conviction.

Nevertheless he both deserves and would have desired something better than a portrait that painted him as more herculean than human. In life he did not want his counsel to be a courtier, and in death he would not want his biography confined to eulogies. Making no claims of omniscience or infallibility, he freely admitted imperfections and ignorance in many areas. He credited luck with many of his achievements, and he would have willingly applied to himself what he said of Winston Churchill: “Accustomed to the hardships of battle, he [had] no distaste for pleasure.”

While legend recalls our martyred heroes as beloved by all and defeated by none, John Kennedy had enemies as well as friends, and disappointments as well as achievements. He recognized these facts more openly and more clearly than either his admirers or his detractors. His delight in poking fun at the pompous and the preposterous included a refusal to take himself too seriously. It included an ability to laugh at exaggerated claims that were made on his behalf—including some he made himself.

“You are obliged to tell our story in a truthful way,” he said to his Voice of America employees, “to tell it, as Oliver Cromwell said about his portrait, with all our blemishes and warts, all those things about us that may not be so immediately attractive.” He said the same to a group of foreign students. I believe he would have said the same to me. Proud of his work, he would be pleased to have this book or any book admire it, but he would want it to be admired with the same candor and objectivity with which he admired it himself.

This book does not purport to be a full-scale biography of John Kennedy or a comprehensive history of his era. Yet it is more than a personal memoir. I have attempted to put into context and perspective my observations and association with an extraordinary man during an extraordinary period, relying primarily on what I know rather than on what others have written. I have not interviewed those whose memories may have been shaded by subsequent events, but have depended principally on my files and recollections—for which there can be no footnotes.

As a result, in addition to certain facts omitted for reasons of security or propriety, those episodes in John Kennedy’s life in which I did not participate—including all that took place before 1953 and many thereafter—are not reported here in intimate detail. I do not claim that those included were necessarily the most important, only that none has been deliberately excluded and that the real John Kennedy can be more clearly sketched through firsthand recollections.

Many lesser issues, events and personalities have also been omitted for reasons of space. In time, a painstaking scholarly study must systematically analyze each document and day of the Kennedy administration, but I am able to write here only of the peaks, and not of the tortuous paths which led up to them. This is a book, moreover, about one man—not his family, his friends or his foes, not Washington or the world he inhabited, and those in search or need of further facts on those subjects will find them here only as they pertain to John Kennedy.

If some passages seem politically partisan, it is because he was a Democrat and proud of it. My purpose is neither to condemn nor condone the actions of others, nor to substitute my judgment for my subject’s. My only obligation is to the truth about Kennedy.

Historical truths, to be sure, are rarely the object of unanimity. Recollections differ, opinions differ, even the same facts appear different to different people. John Kennedy’s own role will be recalled in wholly different fashion, I am certain, by those in different relationships with him. To the politicians, he was first and last a politician. To the intellectuals, his qualities of mind were most memorable. Differing traits and trade-marks are recalled by his friends and by his family.

Most regrettable, in my view, are those memorials and tributes which speak more of his style than of his substance. The Kennedy style
was
special—the grace, the wit, the elegance, the youthful looks will rightly long be remembered. But what mattered most to him, and what in my opinion will matter most to history, was the substance—the strength of his ideas and ideals, his courage and judgment. These were the pith and purpose of his Presidency, of which style was but an overtone. I would be the last to diminish the value of his speeches. But their significance lay not in the splendor of their rhetoric but in the principles and policies they conveyed.

During his days at the White House he became weary of hearing the cynics say that his personality was more popular than his program. In his view the two were mutually reinforcing and inseparable. Now the same people—unwilling or unable to perceive the changes he wrought—are writing that his legacy was more one of manner than of meaning.

For still others the tragedy of his death has obscured the reality of his achievements. In emphasizing the youthful promise left unfulfilled, they overlook the promises he kept. His death, to be sure—symbolic though senseless—should never be forgotten. But I think it more important that John Kennedy be remembered not for how he died but for how he lived.

PART ONE
The Emerging Kennedy

CHAPTER I
THE MAN

T
HE TRULY EXTRAORDINARY MAN
,” it has been written, “is truly the ordinary man.” The first time I met John Kennedy I was immediately impressed by his “ordinary” demeanor—a quality that in itself is extraordinary among politicians. He spoke easily but almost shyly, without the customary verbosity and pomposity. The tailor-made suit that clothed a tall, lean frame was quietly stylish. A thatch of chestnut hair was not as bushy as cartoonists had portrayed it. He did not try to impress me, as office-holders so often do on first meetings, with the strength of his handshake, or with the importance of his office, or with the sound of his voice.

We talked briefly on that morning in early January, 1953, about my application for a job in his new Senate office. I had come to that meeting with more hope than expectation. A month earlier, when I had reviewed with a knowledgeable Washington attorney the list of new Senators for whom I might work, he had snorted at the name of Kennedy. “Jack Kennedy,” he said, “wouldn’t hire anyone Joe Kennedy wouldn’t tell him to hire—and, with the exception of Jim Landis, Joe Kennedy hasn’t hired a non-Catholic in fifty years!”

Both of these suppositions turned out to be false. But it was true that Congressman Kennedy’s election to the Senate from Massachusetts, after three elections to the House, had not inspired any predictions of greatness in the national press or in Democratic Party circles. The intellectual journals of opinion had doubts about his credentials as a liberal, about his religion and, above all, about his father. The more popular press emphasized the financial cost of his campaign, the participation of his family, his new tea-party technique of electioneering and the sympathy evoked in female hearts by his tousled hair and boyish looks.

No one stopped to think that more than tea and sympathy must have been required for Kennedy, in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of Massachusetts, to oust Eisenhower’s campaign manager, the well-known Henry Cabot Lodge, who had first been elected to the Senate when Kennedy was a freshman in college. Kennedy was, in fact, only the third Democrat elected to the Senate in the history of Massachusetts, but the solid significance of his narrow victory (51.5 percent of the vote) had largely been obscured by the glamour and glitter of his publicity.

Except for the Palm Beach tan on a handsome, youthful face, I saw few signs of glamour and glitter in the Senator-elect that winter morning. His Senate offices were not yet available—a new Congressman was moving into his old House suite—and it was in the latter’s outer office, sitting almost in the doorway amidst the clutter and confusion of two staffs, that we talked very briefly—about the salary, my experience and his needs in the office. He spoke with a clear and natural voice, listened attentively and promised an early decision. The occasional tapping of his fingers on his teeth and knee, I later learned, was a habitual sign of his restless energy, not impatient irritation.

A few days later we talked briefly again. This time I raised a few questions of my own to satisfy myself about his Convictions (he was not pro-McCarthy, he said, but he did doubt Owen Lattimore) and my role (I would report directly to him and could supplement my salary assisting him with published articles). Then, on the basis of these two hurried conversations of some five minutes each, he offered me the position of No. 2 Legislative Assistant in his Senate office, for a “trial” period of one year.

I accepted. The Temporary Committee of the Congress on Railroad Retirement Legislation, for which I had been working some eight months, had completed its report; and the Executive Branch, for which I had previously worked briefly as a lowly attorney, had imposed a job “freeze” in advance of the Eisenhower inauguration. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, the committee chairman, aided by his Legislative Assistant Bob Wallace, had kindly recommended me to a host of Democratic Senators and Senators-elect; and among the latter was Jack Kennedy, who had worked with and admired Douglas. (Kennedy had, in fact, expressed an interest a year earlier in Senator Douglas for the Presidency.)

Another Senator-elect—with a more liberal image and a more sympathetic press—had also considered employing me, emphasizing his desire to secure an assistant to help get his name in the news. Kennedy, I felt, had offered a more challenging assignment. The textile mill towns and other depressed areas of Massachusetts had neither responded to the growing competition of other regions and fibers nor made the most of postwar industrial development. Kennedy’s campaign slogan in 1952 had been “He can do more for Massachusetts,”
¹
and he wanted a man to help him translate the slogan, the problems and the repeated studies made of those problems into a legislative program—a man who could meet that very month, he said, with Professor Seymour Harris of Harvard, John Harriman of the Boston
Globe
, Alfred Neal of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and other experts on boosting the New England economy. Having never been to New England or studied much economics, but sharing his concern for the unemployed, I started to work.