The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (86 page)

During the campaign, Joe had bragged that while he would keep quiet until election day, afterward he would have his say. “I assure you that I will do it after that, and that it will be something worthwhile,” he boasted to
Newsweek.
“People may even see a flash of my old-time form.” Once the election was over, however, Joe seemed not to be concerned anymore with embroiling himself in all the minutiae of politics, and he never made the statement he had so vociferously promised. When the president-elect asked his father to suggest candidates for secretary of the Treasury, Joe replied: “I can t.

Joe cared primarily about his sons’ futures now, and he had just one request to make of his son: that he name Bobby as his attorney general. As much as Kennedy wanted to reward Bobby for his endless work in the campaign, he would no more have made his brother attorney general than name an intern as America’s surgeon general. It was unthinkable to make the nation’s premier attorney a man who had never practiced law. Kennedy’s critics would argue that thirty-five-year-old Bobby was too young, too brash, too ambitious, and too rude.

Kennedy did not dare confront his father with these truths; instead, at the swimming pool at the Palm Beach mansion, he deputized Smathers to suggest gently to Joe that Bobby would make a formidable assistant secretary of Defense. Joe would not even listen to such drivel. “Goddamn it, Jack, I want to tell you once and for all. Don’t be sending these emissaries to me. Bobby spilled his blood for you. He’s worked for you. And goddamn it, he wants to be attorney general, and I want him to be attorney general, and that’s it.”

As ambitious as he was, Bobby had his own doubts about the political wisdom of becoming his brother’s attorney general. Unlike the presidentelect, Bobby had not cordoned off his inner emotions from the world. One of those who had become privy to Bobby’s thinking and feeling was John Seigenthaler, a reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean.
Seigenthaler had first covered Bobby during the McClellan hearings. Like Charles Bartlett and Ben Bradlee and a few other reporters, Seigenthaler had incomparable access to the Kennedys and got stories many of his colleagues could never get. Yet as the months went by more and more of what he heard and saw never made its way into his journalism.

Seigenthaler was sitting with Bobby after he had spent a long, discouraging day running around Washington talking to various people about whether he should become attorney general. That was the Kennedy way. Seek out the most knowledgeable people, get their best judgments, and then make up
your own mind. In this instance, everyone from Supreme Court Justice Douglas to Senator McClellan had shaken his head in dismay at this harebrained idea. Only Hoover, who at the FBI would be working most intimately with Bobby, said that he should accept the appointment.

Bobby called his brother to tell him that he had decided against it. “We’ll go over in the morning,” Bobby said as he set down the telephone. “This will kill my father.”

Early the next day, Bobby and Seigenthaler drove over to the presidentelect’s home in Georgetown. Over breakfast, the three men discussed the appointment. Bobby detailed the reasons why he had to turn it down, and his brother told him that he had to say yes.

“You want some more coffee?” Kennedy asked.

“Look, there’re some more points I need to make with him,” Bobby told Seigenthaler as his brother walked into the kitchen.

“I think the points have all been made,” Seigenthaler said.

When Kennedy returned, Bobby set off again. The president-elect would not have put up with this endless palaver from most men. He had heard everything he needed to hear, and he had heard it tenfold. It was time to get on with things and walk outside into the cold morning and tell the waiting reporters what would become the most important appointment of his administration. “That’s it, general,” Kennedy said, cutting his brother off and calling him by his new title. “Let’s grab our balls and go.”

A
s Kennedy walked into the White House as president for the first time, he believed that he had surrounded himself with loyal strong men richly prepared to carry out his mandate. He had kept the obvious holdovers from the campaign, including Sorensen as special counsel in charge of domestic policy and speechwriting. Sorensen used words as the vehicle of policy. He not only wrote almost every important speech the president gave but often handed the address to the president only minutes before he spoke. Sorensen’s deputy, Mike Feldman, wrote most of the other speeches and dealt with Israel, regulatory policy, and whatever other matters came his way. Feldman may have been only half the writer that Sorensen was, but he was twice the attorney, and he became the de facto legal counsel.

Kenny O’Donnell, the appointments secretary, was the gatekeeper to the presidential person, along with Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s personal secretary. Larry O’Brien was in charge of congressional relations, yet another critical post. O’Donnell and O’Brien were the leaders of a small group in the White House that became known as the Irish Mafia; their ranks included Ted Reardon, Dick Donohue, and Dave Powers. These Irish-Americans
shared two faiths, Catholicism and politics. Sorensen may have provided the eloquent public voice of the administration, but these tough-minded men fed the belly, and there was a natural, understated tension between the two groups.

As his chief foreign policy adviser in the White House, Kennedy brought in McGeorge Bundy as special assistant for national security affairs. The Harvard dean had arrived by bicycle for his first meeting with the president-elect at Arthur Schlesinger’s Cambridge house, but there was nothing casual about either Bundy’s manner or his mind. Bundy had a crucial mandate. Kennedy believed that he could not make innovative foreign policy employing the rigid, militarylike structure that Eisenhower had created with the National Security Council. The president thought the only thing to do was to pull the structure largely down, and Bundy was his engine for doing so.

Kennedy could not run his own foreign policy if he had a powerful secretary of State such as Adlai Stevenson, who lobbied for the position and was shuttled to the United Nations ambassadorship. Instead, Kennedy chose Dean Rusk, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former assistant secretary of State, who willingly wore the shackles of subordination.

There was one man whom all the pundits thought would have inordinate power in the White House, and that was the president’s own father. “I want to help, but I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Joe confessed to Steve Smith, his son-in-law. “Can you tell me: do they want me or don’t they want me?”

Steve told Bobby what his father had said, and Bobby thanked his brother-in-law and said nothing. A few days later, seventy-two-year-old Joe sailed for Europe, and that entire year visited the White House only once.

K
ennedy’s closest White House aides had a fierce, loving loyalty to the president they served and comradely joy in what they were doing. “We had this confidence about ourselves that seems lost from the world of power now,” reflected Feldman. “We thought we could do anything. We wrote over a hundred messages to Congress in our first hundred days. Those days were filled with so much excitement and such a feeling of euphoria because we achieved our goal and now we were doing what we looked forward to and you have a superhuman ability when you feel that way.” The working atmosphere was one of nonchalance and wit. Sorensen occasionally sent serious memos to Feldman in rhymed couplets, and Feldman, not to be bested, replied in kind.

The humor often had a serrated edge, however, that left its mark. When Kennedy decided to find a place in the White House for his young Boston mistress who had graduated from Radcliffe, he placed her in the office of her
former dean. “Kennedy put the knife into Bundy by putting her on the staff,” recalled Marcus Raskin, who was only twenty-six years old when he entered the White House to serve as the resident liberal gadfly on Bundy’s staff. “And since I was the junior-most person on the staff, she was put to work for me, and Bundy said to me, ‘Well, I have a present for you.’ I knew something was going on because the president called my office a couple times not to speak to me but to speak to her. So even I figured it out at that point. And eventually she personally told me about it.”

The Kennedy humor featured put-downs in which the victim proved his mettle by quickly attacking with an even ruder counterblow. In such matters Kennedy and his friends had decorous limits that Bobby and his friends did not observe. What daring, taunting irreverence was it that allowed Claude Hooton to cable the new attorney general to remind him of the time during the campaign when he and Teddy had salted Bobby’s luggage with ladies’ underwear (
I AM SURE THAT THE ATTORNEY GENERAL HAS NO RETROACTIVE POWERS CONCERNING PERFUMED UNDERGARMENTS INSERTED IN SOMEONE ELSES BAGGAGE
). And what of Bobby, who did not fancy himself too powerful or too important to reply in kind: “There is some talk that I might turn the FBI loose on you and Teddy and that would be a full time task for all of their agents.”

Bobby was not about to be imprisoned in the dignity of office or to use his exalted new position to distance himself from friends he had known all his life. On the day after the inauguration, Bobby insisted on a football game, even though his old Harvard teammates had only their good clothes. After the football game came tobogganing. The men vied for the high honor of sharing a sled with Kim Novak, the movie star, who wrapped her long legs around her momentary companion. Ethel stood on the sidelines, not amused that her husband was competing for this honor. “I don’t understand, Ethel,” Bobby said, as he stood holding his daughter Kathleen’s hand. “Why can’t a father go sledding with his daughter?”

A
s Kennedy was staffing his New Frontier, he talked to an old family friend, Kay Halle. She was one of the few women who spoke to the president-elect on terms approaching equality. Halle suggested that he should choose more women. He abruptly changed the subject, for as Halle observed, he considered women largely “decorative butterflies and lovely to look at.” Kennedy was simply not comfortable being in a room with women who sought to be equal partners in the political process. Women tended to clutter up meetings, forcing a tedious decorum on the manly, often profane lingo of political
endeavors. The best way to deal with the problem was simply not to have women present at all.

The Kennedy staffers were mainly in their thirties and early forties. They were for the most part veterans of World War II who, like their leader, had served in combat. They had the stamina to work twelve-hour days, six days a week. Like soldiers in the front line, they worked all night when they had to, and through the next day. They shared a deeply rooted patriotism and a can-do attitude about endeavors large and small. Kennedy was fond of quoting the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
(“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother”). Kennedy paid each member of his band of brothers the same salary, $21,000, and would gladly have given them all the same title, special assistant. He wanted no staff meetings, no thicket of bureaucracy. He wanted his men to come to him.

Shortly after the election, Kennedy’s staff had sat with the president-elect trying to figure out how they could make sure that only important information got to the Oval Office. Kennedy was obsessed with the fear that he would be locked off from knowledge. “Listen, you sons of bitches, I want you to remember one thing,” he exclaimed as his neighbor and friend, Larry Newman, sat listening. “You know there’s a guy right behind each of you who’s working for me. And there’s a guy behind
him
who’s working for me. So there’s not a goddamn thing any one of you guys can do to keep things away from me. So if you try to pull any bullshit, the next thing you know you’ll be out.”

Kennedy set up a system so that there would be no crucial information that he did not hear. He was interested in the most arcane nuances of policy, in the details of initiatives, and in the most trivial gossip. Although he appeared to take no pleasure in reading the FBI reports on his aides, he told Feldman, “I never knew my staff led such interesting lives.”

Bundy’s deputy, Walt Rostow, observed that Kennedy “was capable because of his great energy and human capacity to maintain more reliable bilateral human relations than any man I have ever known.” He rarely praised. These were his men, and it was praise enough that they served him. They may have been his band of brothers on the field of political combat, but he would no more have socialized with them than Henry V would have sat down to dinner with his soldiers.

For the first time since the New Deal, sizable numbers of people wanted to come to Washington to work in this new administration. The presidentelect deputized Shriver to seek out the best whether or not they appeared ready to come to Washington. The word went out that the Kennedy administration
sought not only men who were intelligent and honest but also those who had a quality that had never been one of the necessary credentials for public service. They wanted men who were tough. “By ‘toughness’ I meant ‘tough mindedness,’” recalled Adam Yarmolinsky, one of Shriver’s aides interviewing candidates, “but when the list inevitably leaked to the press, candidates for appointment appeared in the talent search offices at the Democratic National Committee, flexing their muscles, and proclaiming, ‘I’m tough, I’m tough!’”

The man who probably exemplified the ideals of these Kennedy men better than anyone was Robert McNamara, the new president of Ford Motor Company. McNamara and his “whiz kids” had transformed the automobile industry with their acumen. The incoming administration had the audacious idea that McNamara could do the same with the Defense Department, though he professed ignorance about defense. “Well, you better give me a day to familiarize myself with this,” McNamara said. He began shortly after dawn in a room at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel reading memos, books, and briefing materials and talking to knowledgeable sources. He worked until late that night and began again the next morning. Within two days he could give the reasonable impression of a man deeply versed in the theory and practice of defense policies. By these efforts, McNamara had become a legend even before Kennedy took power.