An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (52 page)

Choosing other officials was much more difficult. “Jack has asked me to organize [a] talent search for the top jobs,” Sargent Shriver told Harris Wofford two days after the election. “The Cabinet, regulatory agencies, ambassadors, everything. We’re going to comb the universities and professions, the civil rights movement, business, labor, foundations and everywhere, to find the brightest and best people possible.” Kennedy relished the idea of “appointing outstanding men to top posts in the government.” But it was not easy to identify and convince the seventy-five or so individuals needed for the cabinet and subcabinet to serve. As Jack told O’Donnell and Powers, “For the last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected President that I didn’t have any time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good President.” In addition, some talented people were not keen to interrupt successful careers to take on burdens that might injure their reputations. And Kennedy saw some of those eager for jobs as too self-serving or too ambitious to accept a role as a team player devoted to an administration’s larger goals. Kennedy also believed that his narrow electoral victory required him to make other nonpartisan appointments like those of Dulles and Hoover.

During the course of discussions with potential cabinet appointees who modestly explained that they had no experience in the office the president-elect wanted them to fill, Kennedy invariably replied that he had no experience being president either. They would, he explained with some levity, all learn on the job. His response was partly meant to reassure future officials that he had enough confidence in their native talents and past performance to believe that they would serve his administration with distinction. But he was also signaling his intention to keep policy commitments to a minimum until he could assess immediate realities. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled that after Bobby had asked if he would like to be an ambassador and Schlesinger replied that he would prefer to be at the White House, Jack said to him: “‘So, Arthur, I hear you are coming to the White House.’ ‘I am,’” Schlesinger replied. “‘What will I be doing there?’ ‘I don’t know,’” Kennedy answered. “But you can bet we will both be busy more than eight hours a day.” And Schlesinger would be. He operated from the East Wing, which, except for Schlesinger, was filled with peripheral administration officials who, in Sorensen’s words, “were regarded almost as inhabitants of another world.” Schlesinger, who would usually see the president two or three times a week, would be the administration’s spokesman to liberals at home and abroad as well as “a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches on all topics.”

Kennedy, remembering the wartime service of Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox in FDR’s cabinet, made clear to O’Donnell that he would do something similar. “If I string along exclusively with Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris and those other Harvard liberals, they’ll fill Washington with wild-eyed ADA people,” he said. “And if I listen to you and Powers and [John] Bailey and [Dick] Maguire [at the DNC], we’ll have so many Irish Catholics that we’ll have to organize a White House Knights of Columbus Council. I can use a few smart Republicans. Anyway, we need a Secretary of the Treasury who can call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names.”

For Kennedy, the two most important cabinet appointments were Treasury and Defense. Since he intended to keep tight control over foreign policy, finding a secretary of state was a lower priority. Help in managing the domestic economy and national security came first. He wanted moderate Republicans for both posts who could give him some political cover for the hard decisions a minority president would need to make to expand the economy and bolster the national defense.

Although Kennedy felt more comfortable addressing defense and foreign policy issues, he knew that reinvigorating a sluggish economy was essential to a successful administration. The country’s substantial economic growth between 1946 and 1957 had ground to a halt with a nine-month recession in 1957-58, when unemployment had increased to 7.5 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression. Another economic downturn in 1960 had followed a relatively weak recovery in 1958-59. As one economist explained the problem, the backlogged demands of the war years had been largely sated and the nation now faced a period of excess capacity and higher unemployment. On top of these difficulties, an international balance-of-payment deficit causing a “gold drain” had raised questions about the soundness of the dollar. In these circumstances, winning the confidence of businessmen, especially in the financial community; labor unions; and middle-class consumers would be something of a high-wire act that no one was sure the new, untested president could perform.

As a Democrat who could count on traditional backing from labor and consumers, Kennedy felt compelled to pay special attention to skeptical bankers and business chiefs. But how was he to quiet predictable liberal antagonism to a prominent representative of Wall Street, who seemed likely to favor tax and monetary policies serving big business rather than working-class citizens, in the Treasury Department? Giving a Republican so much influence over economic policy seemed certain to touch off an internal battle and produce even greater damage to the administration’s standing in the business community than the initial choice of a Democrat.

Kennedy hoped to solve this problem by making Republican Robert Lovett secretary of the treasury. A pillar of the New York banking establishment, Lovett had intermittently served as a high government official since World War II. His worldliness and track record of putting country above partisanship moved Kennedy to offer him State, Defense, or Treasury. But failing health, caused by a bleeding ulcer, decided Lovett against accepting any office, and Kennedy turned instead to C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was an even more imposing establishment figure: His father had founded the Wall Street banking firm of Dillon, Read & Company. A privileged child, Dillon had graduated from Groton, FDR’s alma mater, and Harvard, and, with family apartments and homes in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Maine, Florida, and France, he enjoyed connections with America’s wealthiest, most influential people. During World War II, he had served in the southwest Pacific, where he had won medals as a navy aviator. After the war, he had become chairman of Dillon, Read and of the New Jersey State Republican committee. His early support of Eisenhower had led to his appointment as ambassador to France, where his effective service had persuaded Ike to make him undersecretary of state for economic affairs and then the undersecretary, the second-highest State Department official. Dillon impressed populists like Tennessee senator Albert Gore as an enemy of the people, but in fact he was an open-minded moderate, a liberal Republican whom Kennedy believed he could trust.

Dillon had to be persuaded to accept. Eisenhower warned him against taking the job, urging a written commitment to a free hand lest Kennedy give him no more than symbolic authority. But although Kennedy promised to do nothing affecting the economy without Dillon’s recommendation, he refused to give him any written pledge, saying, “A President can’t enter into treaties with cabinet members.” Kennedy extracted a commitment from Dillon, however, that if he resigned, it would be “in a peaceful, happy fashion and wouldn’t indicate directly or indirectly that he was disturbed about what President Kennedy and the administration were doing.”

For both economic and political considerations, Kennedy felt he had to balance Dillon’s appointment with a Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) made up of innovative liberal Keynesians who would favor bold proposals for stimulating the economy and would convince Democrats that he was not partial to Eisenhower’s cautious policies. Although he told Dillon that he was appointing the Keynesians for strictly political reasons, Kennedy truly wanted them as a prod to more advanced thinking and a way to educate the public and himself. As he freely admitted, he was unschooled in economics, telling everyone that he had received a C in freshman economics at Harvard (in fact, it was a B) and could not remember much, if anything, from the course.

Walter Heller was a University of Minnesota economics professor whom Kennedy had met during the campaign through Hubert Humphrey. At his first session with Heller, Kennedy asked him four questions: Could government action achieve a 5 percent growth rate? Was accelerated depreciation likely to increase investment? Why had high interest rates not inhibited German economic expansion? And could a tax cut be an important economic stimulus? Heller’s replies were so succinct and literate that Kennedy decided to make him chairman of the CEA. During a December meeting, Kennedy told Heller, “I need you as a counterweight to Dillon. He will have conservative leanings, and I know that you are a liberal.” Heller wanted to know if Kennedy would ask for a tax cut and whether he would have carte blanche to choose his CEA colleagues. Not now, Kennedy said of the tax reduction, explaining he could not ask the country for sacrifice at the same time he proposed lower taxes. The answer to the second question was yes. Heller also had the advantage of not being from the Ivy League or the Northeast, as James Tobin and Kermit Gordon, the other economists Heller asked to have as council colleagues, were. Kennedy was not well schooled in economics and found much of the theory mystifying, but he had a keen feel for who had the essential combination of economic knowledge and political common sense vital to successful management of the economy.

Finding a defense secretary who could ease the political and national security concerns of Democrats and Republicans was a bit easier than assembling an economic team. Liberals were not as worried about the impact of a defense chief as they were about a treasury secretary. Besides, with the deepening of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed to pose so grave a threat to the nation’s future, partisanship had become less of a problem. Still, Kennedy remembered the political pummeling the Democrats had taken in the late forties and fifties over Yalta, China, and Korea, and he knew that any misstep on defense could quickly become a political liability. After all, he had made effective use of the missile gap in his campaign and understood that if the opportunity presented itself in the next four years, the Republicans would not hesitate to use a defense failure against his reelection. He briefly considered reappointing the incumbent Thomas Gates, but concluded that it would open him to charges of political cynicism for having been so critical of the administration’s defense policies during the campaign.

A number of names came before him, but none as repeatedly as that of Ford Motor Company president Robert S. McNamara, a nominal Republican with impeccable credentials as a businessman and service as an air force officer during World War II, when he had increased the effectiveness of air power by applying a system of statistical control. McNamara seemed to be on everybody’s list of candidates for the job. Michigan Democrats, including United Auto Workers officials, and principal members of the New York and Washington establishments described him as an exceptionally intelligent man with the independence, tough-mindedness, and, above all, managerial skills to make the unwieldy Defense Department more effective in serving the national security. “The talent scouts,” McNamara biographer Deborah Shapley writes, “were delighted to find a Republican businessman who had risen meteorically at Ford and who was, at forty-four, only a year older than the president-elect. . . . That a young Republican businessman could also be well thought of by labor, be Harvard-trained, support the ACLU, and read Teilhard de Chardin were all bonuses.”

Without ever having met McNamara, Kennedy authorized Sargent Shriver to offer him an appointment as secretary of the treasury or secretary of defense. (Dillon had not yet been offered the Treasury job.) When McNamara got a message that Shriver had called, he asked his secretary who he was. (McNamara or his secretary, having never heard of Shriver, wrote him on the calendar as “Mr. Shriber.”) The offer of the Treasury job stunned McNamara, who turned it down as something he wasn’t qualified to handle. He said the same about the Defense post but had enough interest to agree to come to Washington to meet with Kennedy on the following day. McNamara and Kennedy made positive impressions on each other. Nevertheless, McNamara continued to declare himself unqualified to head the Defense Department. Kennedy countered with the assertion that there was no school for defense secretaries or presidents.

McNamara refused to commit himself at the first meeting but promised to come back for a second conversation in a few days. When he did, he gave Kennedy a letter asking assurances that he could run his own department; could choose his subordinates, meaning he would not have to agree to political appointees; and would not have to participate in the capital’s social life. Bobby, who sat in on the second meeting, said McNamara’s letter made it clear that he “was going to run the Defense Department, that he was going to be in charge; and although he’d clear things with the President, that political interests or favors couldn’t play a role.” He recalled that his brother “was so impressed with the fact that [McNamara] was so tough about it—and strong and stalwart. He impressed him.” McNamara’s letter, Bobby felt, flabbergasted his brother, but because Kennedy saw McNamara as so suited for the job, he accepted his conditions. To pressure McNamara into officially accepting, Kennedy leaked his selection to the
Washington Post,
which ran a front-page story. (“The Ship of State is the only ship that often leaks at the top,” a Kennedy aide later said.) After McNamara had accepted the appointment, he told Kennedy that after talking over the job with Tom Gates, he believed he could handle it. Kennedy teasingly responded in echo, “I talked over the presidency with Eisenhower, and after hearing what it’s all about, I’m convinced I can handle it.”