Kennedy: The Classic Biography (48 page)

We advised him when he sought our advice; more often we enabled him to assess the advice of others. At the risk of displeasing Congressmen and Cabinet members—and the President—our task was to be skeptical and critical, not sycophantic. There was no value in our being merely another level of clearances and concurrences, or being too deferential to the experts—as the Bay of Pigs acutely showed.

No doubt at times our roles were resented. Secretary Hodges, apparently disgruntled by his inability to see the President more often, arranged to have placed on the Cabinet agenda for June 15, 1961, an item entitled “A candid discussion with the President on relationships with the White House staff.” Upon discovering this in the meeting, I passed the President a note asking “Shall I leave?”—but the President ignored both the note and the agenda.

Some overlapping was inevitable. The President frequently assigned the same problem to more than one aide, or kept one in the dark about another’s role or involved whoever happened to be standing nearby at a critical moment.

He often expressed impatience with lengthy memoranda from certain aides which boiled down to recommendations that he “firm up our posture” or “make a new effort” on some particular problem. Such generalities, he observed, were sufficient for a candidate’s speeches but not for Presidential action. When he returned one assistant’s six-page, single-spaced memorandum with the request that the author set down its action consequences, he received back another long memorandum recommending: two Presidential speeches, a policy paper and a “systematic review of the situation”—and shortly thereafter that aide was moved to one of the departments.

Those of us in the White House staff with policy responsibilities often differed from each other and from the President in the deliberations preceding a decision. But none of us ever questioned his decision once it was final.

The selection of the White House staff—which began, as noted, on the day after his election was confirmed—was a personal Presidential process. He chose men to meet his personal needs and mode of operation. No Senate confirmation was required and no particular public impression was desired. One powerful politician brought heavy pressure to have his long-time personal aide made a member of our staff, but the President-elect did not respect that aide and would not be bound by anyone else’s preferences.

No staff member was appointed in order to please, or to plead for, the advocates of disarmament or defense, Negroes or Jews, the State Department or the Commerce Department, farmers or labor, or any other goal, group or government agency. Nor was any staff member appointed with an eye to any particular pattern—balancing liberals and conservatives, regions or religions. We were appointed for our ability to fulfill the President’s needs and talk the President’s language. We represented no one but John Kennedy. And no one but John Kennedy could have drawn and held together the diverse and disparate talents of such strong-minded individuals, with all their differences in manner and milieu.

His staff, to be sure, was neither as efficient as we pretended nor as harmonious as he thought. Failure of communication appeared more than once. A degree of envy and occasionally resentment cropped up now and then. A group of able and aggressive individualists, all dependent on one man, could not be wholly free from competitive feelings or from scornful references to each other’s political or intellectual backgrounds. Below the level of senior adviser, a few personnel changes did occur in due course. But Kennedy’s personal interest in his aides, refusal to prefer one over another, and mixture of pressure and praise achieved a total command of our loyalties. We worked for him ten to twelve hours every day, and loved every minute of it.

The President showed his appreciation to us not by constant expressions of gratitude—which were in fact rather rare—but by returning in full the loyalty of his staff and other appointees.
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“Congressmen are always advising Presidents to get rid of Presidential advisers,” he told a news conference. “That is one of the most constant threads that runs through American history.” The statement was occasioned by the suggestion of conservative Democratic Congressman Baring that Kennedy get rid of Bowles, Ball, Bell, Bunche and Sylvester. “He has a fondness for alliteration in B’s,” observed the President smilingly, “but I would not add Congressman Baring to that list, as I have a high regard for him
and
for the gentlemen that he named…. Presidents ordinarily do not pay attention [to Congressmen urging dismissal of their advisers], nor do they in this case.”

When Arthur Schlesinger was under fire for calling a columnist an “idiot”—when Dick Goodwin was accused of meddling in diplomacy—when Pierre Salinger’s trip to the Soviet Union was under attack—when the hard-working Bundy, Rostow and Galbraith were maligned as “the dancing professors”—and when Walter Heller, Stuart Udall, Willard Wirtz, Arthur Sylvester and many others were assailed for some supposed mistake or misstatement—the President took pains to reassure each of us in private and, if asked, to defend us in public. Jerome Wiesner, after the newspapers had distorted a sailing accident which temporarily laid him low, told how the President cheered him up with an offer “to give me lessons in sailing and press relations.” When another aide apologized for a personal incident which had appeared in the press, the President replied, “That’s all right, I’ve been looking over the FBI files and there isn’t one of us here that hasn’t done something.”

Outside observers often attempted to divide the staff into two camps: the intellectuals or “eggheads” and the politicians or “Irish Mafia” (a newspaper designation bitterly resented by its designees when first published). No such division, in fact, existed. Those with primarily political roles were men of high intelligence. Those who came from primarily academic backgrounds often had political experience. Many could not be simply classified as either “intellectuals” or “politicians” (and I insisted I had a foot in each camp). All the President’s principal staff members shared his high hopes for a better world and his practical acceptance of the present one. All recognized that Presidential policies and politics were inseparable, respected each other’s individual talents and functions, and accepted the possibility of error in their own conclusions as well as those of their colleagues.

While few of us had a “passion for anonymity,” most of us had a preference in that direction. In December, 1960, I reviewed with the President-elect a series of speaking invitations I had received, as well as requests for magazine profiles. “Turn them all down,” he said, and I did. “Not only will you not have time. Every man that’s ever held a job like yours—Sherman Adams, Harry Hopkins, House, all the rest—has ended up in the————. Congress was down on them or the President was hurt by them or somebody was mad at them. The best way to stay out of trouble is to stay out of sight.”
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The wisdom of his words was brought home several months later when I represented the President at his request at a George Norris Centennial Dinner in my home state. My speech deplored the number of young people leaving Nebraska to seek better schools for their children, and it was bitterly attacked out of context. The Republican National Committeewoman, for example, said if I came back to Nebraska to die “it would be too soon.” Word of the uproar reached the Washington newspapers, and the President greeted me with the comment: “That’s what happens when you permit a speech-writer to write his own speech!” When I apologized, not for what I had said but for any embarrassment I had caused him, he laughed. “I don’t mind,” he said. “They can criticize
you
all they like!”

Kennedy wanted his staff to be small, in order to keep it more personal than institutional. Although in time a number of “special assistants” accumulated for special reasons, he kept the number of senior generalists to a minimum. Both my office, which dealt mostly with domestic policy, and that of McGeorge Bundy, which dealt exclusively with foreign policy, combined in relatively small staffs the functions of several times as many Eisenhower aides. Instead of adding specialists in my own office, I relied on the excellent staff work of the Bureau of the Budget and Council of Economic Advisers.

The President wanted a fluid staff. Our jurisdictions were distinguishable but not exclusive, and each man could and did assist every other. Our assignments and relations evolved with time, as did the President’s use of us. There was no chief of staff in the Sherman Adams—Wilton Persons role supervising and screening the work of all others. Instead, Kennedy was his own chief of staff, and his principal White House advisers had equal stature, equal salaries and equal access to his office. He compared it to “a wheel and a series of spokes.”

There were no distinctions in rank connoted by staff tides and very few differences in title. Nearly everyone was officially a “Special Assistant.” A few were “Administrative Assistants.” No one was “The Assistant to the President.” The President, in fact, remarked in January of 1961 that he wished everyone had been called Special Assistant. As the heir to a very honorable title, I could hardly share his sentiments, but only one title was ever used within the walls of the White House, and that was “Mr. President.”

Not one staff meeting was ever held, with or without the President. Nor was one ever desirable. Each of us was busy with our separate responsibilities, and each of us met when necessary with whatever staff members had jurisdictions touching our own. For example, in my role of assisting the President on his program and policy, with particular emphasis on legislation, I might meet in one day but at separate times with National Security Assistant Bundy on the foreign aid message, Budget Director Bell on its cost, Press Secretary Salinger on its publication, Legislative Liaison O’Brien on its reception by the Congress, and Appointments Secretary O’Donnell on the President’s final meeting on its contents, as well as the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury and the Foreign Aid Director. I also kept abreast of the President’s thinking by attending all the more formal Presidential meetings around which policy was built: the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the legislative leaders breakfasts, the pre-press conference breakfasts and the formulation of the Budget and legislative program. He and I continued to be close in a peculiarly impersonal way. Of course, no man is truly an “alter ego” to the President of the United States.

The President retained at all times the highest regard for each of his principal aides. McGeorge Bundy’s sagacious and systematic coordination of the President’s myriad foreign affairs headaches made him a logical candidate for Secretary of State in the event of a second-term opening. His brisk, sometimes brusque manner, which occasionally annoyed his intellectual inferiors (who were legion), suited Kennedy perfectly—as did the cry of outrage emanating from Foster Furcolo over the appointment of this Republican Harvard dean, surprisingly never used by Eisenhower, who had worked for Dewey in 1948, attacked Furcolo in 1958 and supported Kennedy in 1960.

“Dave Bell,” said Clark Clifford to the President-elect in November, 1960, “is your kind of man.” That was precisely correct, as the Budget Director proved to be a source of few words but unflagging work, un-frenzied advice and unfailing calm. Tough beneath a bland exterior, he loyally agreed later to take on the thankless task of the foreign aid directorship only after the President had overridden my protest that this was cutting off my right arm. Bell’s replacement as Budget Director, Kermit Gordon, fortunately proved equally able.
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Ken O’Donnell, handling appointments, trip arrangements and White House administrative duties, customarily exhibited such a cool countenance, and such a grim resistance to those undeserving of the President’s time, that many were unaware of his shrewd sense of judgment and delightful sense of humor which helped the President through his day. The only chink in O’Donnell’s defense of the Presidential front door was the existence of a back door less strictly guarded by the President’s softhearted personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, still as unruffled and devoted as in her days in our Senate office.

Larry O’Brien, who shared political chores with O’Donnell when not wrestling with the Congress, possessed the extraordinary patience, resilience and affable political instincts which enabled him not only to survive but to succeed in the struggle for Kennedy’s program.

Press Secretary Pierre Salinger’s work was more closely followed by the President on a daily basis than that of any other staff member, with the exception of O’Donnell and Mrs. Lincoln. While maintaining good relations with his counterparts in both the Soviet Union and Allied nations, Pierre did not intrude on Presidential policy-making. Transcripts of his twice-daily briefings of the press were quickly read by the President and staff for both illumination and entertainment—the latter covering such subjects as portly Pierre’s fitness for a Presidentially prescribed fifty-mile hike and his distinction as the only known golfer ever to hit the clubhouse at Hyannis Port.

Many others in the White House served Kennedy well and deserve to be mentioned: including Ralph Dungan, who continued the talent hunt in the White House and worked with Bundy as well; Ted Reardon, ever loyal to his old chief as Cabinet assistant; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served as a constant contact with liberals and intellectuals both in this country and abroad, as an adviser on Latin-American, United Nations and cultural affairs, as a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches on all topics, and incidentally as a lightning rod to attract Republican attacks away from the rest of us.

As Bundy was aided by the astute Carl Kaysen and others, as O’Brien and Salinger were backed by their able staffs, so I depended in the Special Counsel’s office on Mike Feldman and Lee White to handle many agency problems and pressure groups under the direct supervision of the President. Feldman, for example, served among other things as the channel for most business requests—on tariffs, airline routes and subsidies, to name but a few. “If Mike ever turned dishonest,” said the President one day, “we could all go to jail.”