An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (53 page)

After JFK’s election, many assumed that Kennedy would have to choose Adlai Stevenson as his secretary of state. Stevenson remained the party’s senior statesman and had established himself as an expert on foreign policy. Although in January 1960, Kennedy had promised to make Stevenson secretary of state if he supported his candidacy, Stevenson’s failure to do so had nullified the proposal. After Kennedy got the nomination, however, he encouraged Stevenson’s ambition for the job by asking him to prepare a report on foreign policy problems. This had some practical reasoning behind it—Stevenson was, after all, experienced and knowledgeable about a great deal—but was also somewhat petty and personal. Jack had absolutely no intention of appointing Stevenson. “Fuck him,” Kennedy said to Abe Ribicoff after the election. “I’m not going to give him anything.” Kennedy remained angry at Stevenson for failing to support his nomination, believed he was too equivocal to help make tough foreign policy decisions, and worried that he “might forget who’s the President and who’s the Secretary of State.” Kennedy wanted no part of the arrangement that seemed to have made John Foster Dulles the most important foreign policy decision maker in Eisenhower’s administration.

Liberal pressure to give Stevenson something, however, pushed Kennedy to offer him a choice of three jobs: ambassador to Britain, attorney general, or ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson did not want to go to the U.K. or head the Justice Department, and he felt humiliated at the idea of accepting the U.N., a post with no real policy making authority, telling Bill Blair, “I will never be ambassador to the U.N.”

In deciding on a secretary of state, Kennedy wanted to ensure that the State Department would be under his control. He asked John Sharon, who had worked with Stevenson on the foreign policy report, for “‘a shit list’—that was his word,” Sharon said, “— of people in the state department who ought to be fired.” But before he could get rid of department bureaucrats who might obstruct his policies, he needed to decide on a cooperative secretary. Chester Bowles, Harvard University dean McGeorge Bundy, and diplomat David Bruce all received brief consideration, but Bowles was too idealistic, Bundy too young and inexperienced, and Bruce too old for the assignment.

William Fulbright, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, received more serious consideration. Kennedy knew Fulbright from their work together in the Senate and admired his handling of the Foreign Relations Committee. Kennedy “thought he had some brains and some sense and some judgment,” as Bobby put it. “He was really rather taken with him.” But Bobby and their father talked Jack out of choosing him. As a southern senator “who had been tied up in all the segregation votes” and had signed a southern manifesto opposing the Supreme Court’s school desegregation orders, Fulbright seemed certain to stir antagonism among Third World countries, especially in Africa, a sharply contested region of the world in the East-West struggle. Fulbright also had enemies in the Jewish community, where he had aroused hostility with pro-Arab pronouncements. Seeing the international opposition as too great for him to serve successfully and uncertain that he wanted to trade his Senate seat for the administration of an unwieldy bureaucracy, Fulbright asked Kennedy not to make the offer.

By process of elimination, and determined to run foreign policy from the White House, Kennedy came to Dean Rusk, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rusk was an acceptable last choice, with the right credentials and the right backers. A Rhodes scholar, a college professor, a World War II officer, an assistant secretary of state for the Far East under Truman, a liberal Georgian sympathetic to integration, and a consistent Stevenson supporter, Rusk offended no one. The foreign policy establishment—Acheson, Lovett, liberals Bowles and Stevenson, and the
New York Times
—all sang his praises. But most of all, it was clear to Kennedy from their one meeting in December 1960 that Rusk would be a sort of faceless, faithful bureaucrat who would serve rather than attempt to lead. “It is the President alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy,” Kennedy had publicly announced the previous January. He called the office “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government” and declared his belief that a president must “be prepared to exercise the fullest powers of his office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was an open secret that Jack intended to be his own secretary of state. Journalists, congressmen, and Kennedy intimates saw Rusk’s selection as confirmation of this assumption and as the principal reason behind the attempt to consign Stevenson to a second-line diplomatic post.

According to Rusk, an exploratory meeting with Kennedy at his Georgetown home did not go well. He told Bowles, “Kennedy and I could not communicate. If the idea of making me Secretary ever actually entered his mind, I am sure it is now dead.” But Rusk had misread Kennedy’s intentions. He was as close to what Kennedy wanted as he seemed likely to find. His diffidence was transparent. He set no conditions for taking the job; in making no demands about freedom to choose subordinates, he persuaded Kennedy that he would reflect the president’s opinions rather than try to determine them. The Kennedys made much of the idea that people who came into the administration needed to be tough. When Bobby told Ken O’Donnell to check on someone as a possible secretary of the army, he described him as a “hard-working tough guy.” And one of Jack’s initial inquiries about Rusk was whether he was “tough-fibered.” But with Jack and Bobby there to take a strong line on foreign affairs and a tough-minded Bob McNamara at Defense, they could afford to have a pliable secretary of state. It was clear to Kennedy that Rusk would be passive in future policy debates: After he had served as secretary for a while, Kennedy said that when they were alone, Rusk would whisper that there were still too many others present.

Now Kennedy came back to Stevenson, who badly wanted to serve in some major foreign policy capacity and announced he could work well with Rusk. Still, Stevenson equivocated, and Kennedy came close to withdrawing the U.N. offer. Finally, despite his earlier pronouncements, and the likelihood that he would have little influence on policy, Stevenson agreed.

If Bobby was genuinely torn about a postelection career choice, his indecision did not last long. His first priority had to have been helping his brother succeed as president. It was inconceivable that after all the hard work to put his brother in the White House, Bobby would now walk away from the tough fights Jack faced as president. As Ribicoff told the president-elect, “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years and I notice that every time you face a crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s an empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be President without using Bobby all the time.” Jack agreed. He told Acheson that “he did not know and would not know most of the people who would be around him in high cabinet positions—and he just felt that he had to have someone whom he knew very well and trusted completely with whom he could just sort of put his feet up and talk things over.”

The principal question for Jack about Bobby was where he would serve in the administration. At first, there were thoughts of making him an undersecretary of defense or an assistant secretary of state. But on reflection, this seemed like a poor idea. As Dean Acheson told him, it would “be a great mistake. . . . It would be wholly impossible for any cabinet officer to have the President’s brother as second in command. . . . This would not be fair to anybody—and, therefore, if he were to be brought in at all, he ought to be given complete responsibility for a department of government, or be brought to the White House and be close to the President himself.” Bobby, however, wanted no part of a White House appointment working directly under his brother. “That would be impossible,” Bobby told Schlesinger. “I had to do something on my own, or have my own area of responsibility. . . . I had to be apart from what he was doing so I wasn’t working directly for him and getting orders from him as to what I should do that day. That wouldn’t be possible. So I never considered working at the White House.” Even if he had, Jack’s promise during the campaign that he “would not appoint any relative to the White House staff” ruled out giving Bobby such an assignment.

Jack had actually asked Bobby about heading the Justice Department before he turned to Ribicoff and Stevenson, but Bobby had worried about charges of nepotism. Bobby also expected an attorney general to provoke so much antagonism over civil rights that it would undermine Jack’s political standing for him to take the position. “It would be the ‘Kennedy brothers’ by the time a year was up,” Bobby said, “and the President would be blamed for everything we had to do in civil rights; and it was an unnecessary burden to undertake.” Others reinforced Bobby’s concerns. Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, Drew Pearson, and Sam Rayburn all warned against the repercussions of having Bobby at the Justice Department. And the
New York Times,
to which Jack leaked the idea of his brother’s appointment, opposed it as politicizing an office that should be strictly nonpartisan and as a gift to someone lacking enough legal experience. But after Ribicoff and Stevenson had rejected offers to become attorney general, Kennedy decided that his brother should take the job, despite Bobby’s doubts.

Bobby was particularly sensitive to complaints that he had not practiced law or sat on the bench. When Jack joked with friends that he “just wanted to give him a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer,” Bobby upbraided his brother: “Jack, you shouldn’t have said that about me.” “Bobby, you don’t understand,” Jack replied. “You’ve got to make fun of it, you’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics.” Bobby answered, “You weren’t making fun of yourself. You were making fun of me.”

Once Jack had decided to appoint Bobby to the Justice Department, he tried to minimize the political damage. So Jack, Bobby, and their father encouraged the belief that Joe had forced Bobby and Jack into doing it. Jack told Clark Clifford that his father was insisting on Bobby’s appointment against their wishes. Clifford listened with “amazement” to Kennedy’s description of the family argument and thought it “truly a strange assignment” when Jack asked him to talk his father out of the idea. Clifford went to New York to make the case to Joe, but to no avail. Looking Clifford straight in the eye, Joe said, “
Bobby is going to be Attorney General.
All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded, I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.”

As Bobby later described events, he had decided in December not to take the job. He recalled how he called Jack up to say he didn’t want the job and then told a friend, “This will kill my father.” Jack had refused to talk about it on the phone, and insisted that they discuss it over breakfast the next morning. Bobby and John Seigenthaler, a reporter from the
Nashville Tennessean,
whom Bobby brought with him, described Jack as determined to appoint Bobby. They recounted Jack’s concern to have a cabinet member who would tell him “the unvarnished truth, no matter what,” when problems arose. “He thought it would be important to him and that he needed some people around that he could talk to so I decided to accept it,” Bobby said later. Remembering Jack’s advice to inject some humor into the account, Bobby also described how Jack then said, “So that’s it, General. Let’s grab our balls and go” talk to the press. But before they did, Jack told him to go upstairs and comb his hair. As they went outside, Jack counseled him, “Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment.” (Bobby remembered Jack telling Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
that he had actually wanted to announce the appointment some morning at about 2
A.M.
He would open the front door of his house, look up and down the street, and if no one was there, he would whisper, “It’s Bobby.”)

The story of Bobby’s reluctance, Joe’s insistence, and Jack’s need for an intimate in court was a useful means of muting criticism. But the written record shows it was mostly fiction. A letter Bobby wrote to Drew Pearson on December 15, the day before Jack supposedly talked him into taking the job and they announced Bobby’s appointment, makes clear that the story of Bobby’s reluctance was meant to disarm critics. “I made up my mind today and Jack and I take the plunge tomorrow,” Bobby told Pearson. “For many reasons I believe it was the only thing I could do—I shall do my best and hope that it turns out well.” Seigenthaler’s presence at the morning meeting during which Bobby and Jack pretended to be debating Bobby’s possible appointment guaranteed public knowledge of the invented account.

Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary, was given the same false view of Bobby’s appointment as Seigenthaler. In a diary entry on December 15, at the same time Bobby was telling Pearson of his decision to accept the appointment, Lincoln recorded that Bobby called Jack, who “tried to persuade him to take the Attorney Generalship, if not that Senator from Massachusetts, if not that then perhaps be Under Secretary of State for Latin Affairs. Bobby said he wasn’t interested in any of them—would rather write a book.” That Jack and Bobby were hiding their true intentions to quiet objections was without question. When Ethel Kennedy greeted her husband at the West Palm Beach airport after Jack and Bobby had disclosed the appointment, “she flashed a big smile and shouted, ‘We did it.’”

The Kennedys believed that Bobby’s expected effectiveness as attorney general and the success of the administration ultimately would make misgivings about the appointment disappear. But Bobby’s selection generated sharp criticism despite the Kennedys’ manufactured story. Journalists and legal experts complained that Bobby’s background gave him no claim on the office. Political insiders were no less skeptical. “Dick Russell,” Lyndon Johnson told Senate secretary Bobby Baker, “is absolutely shittin’ a squealin’ worm. He thinks it’s a disgrace for a kid who’s never practiced law to be appointed. . . . I agree with him.” But Johnson did not believe that Bobby’s influence as attorney general would be very great. He also told Baker, “I don’t think Jack Kennedy’s gonna let a little fart like Bobby lead him around by the nose.” Johnson made the same point to his former Senate colleagues, who needed to rationalize voting for Bobby’s appointment. Johnson also appealed to his friends on personal grounds, telling Baker, “I’m gonna put it on the line and tell ’em it’s a matter of my personal survival.” Reluctant to challenge the new administration on a matter of executive privilege—the freedom of a president to choose his cabinet—senators repressed their doubts and confirmed Bobby’s nomination.