Kennedy: The Classic Biography (49 page)

Indispensable to the President was the ever-smiling presence of his old friend Dave Powers, who kept everyone else smiling with his unending supply of Charlestown, Massachusetts color, baseball lore and statistics, and unprecedented greetings of the great and near-great (examples: “He’s our type Shah” and “Is this the real Mikoyan?”).

Housed in the Executive Office Building across a small avenue from the White House West Wing were the President’s economic and science advisers. Walter Heller, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was learned without being doctrinaire and liberal without being rigid. Once he learned to adjust to Kennedy’s methods, views and emphasis on the possible, Heller and his associates became the most highly influential and frequently consulted Council of Economic Advisers in history. In fact, both Heller and Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner, by learning to adapt their pedagogy to the President’s preference for brevity and to accept philosophically his decisions contrary to their advice, greatly raised the stature of their offices.

The economic, science, Budget and other advisers in the Executive Office Building worked closely with the President’s office and those adjoining it in the West Wing of the White House. More distant in many ways were the offices in the East Wing, containing military aides, social secretaries, administrative officers, correspondence clerks, Mrs. Kennedy’s staff and assorted others. With certain notable exceptions such as Schlesinger, the occupants of those sedate and serene offices were regarded almost as inhabitants of another world. “Sometimes,” sighed the President one day on the telephone to an aide of Mrs. Kennedy, “I don’t think you people in the East Wing have any understanding of our problems over here in the West Wing.”

THE DEPARTMENT HEADS

Ranking the Cabinet has long been a favorite game among the Washington columnists and cocktail circuit-riders. Who is “in,” “out,” “up,” “down”? Who is slated to go and who will replace him? The game is based more on fun than fact, for there are very few facts available to the public which are relevant to such rankings. A Cabinet member who sees the President often may be considered by the latter to be an intimate or a bore. One who sees the President rarely may have been given broad discretion or the “deep freeze.” It is much easier for a Secretary of Labor to be judged a “success” by the press than it is for a Secretary of Agriculture. The value of a Postmaster General cannot be compared with that of an Attorney General; nor will a President preoccupied with world crises turn to his Secretary of Commerce as often as to his Secretary of State.

The nature of their responsibilities and the competence with which they did their jobs brought six senior national executives particularly close to the President: Vice President Johnson, Attorney General Kennedy, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Dillon, Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Labor Goldberg. The other Cabinet officers—Secretary of Agriculture Freeman, Secretary of Labor (II) Wirtz, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Ribicoff, Secretary of the Interior Udall, Secretary of Commerce Hodges, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (II) Celebrezze and Postmasters General Day and Gronouski—all enjoyed, for the most part, the President’s fullest confidence and respect, though he necessarily spent less time with them.

The President and Vice President, to the astonishment of many and somewhat to the surprise of them both, got along famously. Their initial wariness gave way to genuine warmth. Johnson’s vast energies were enlisted in a wide range of undertakings: Chairman of the antidiscrimination in employment committee, Chairman of the coordinating Space Council, Chairman of the Peace Corps Advisory Board, member of the Cabinet and National Security Council, participant in the legislative and pre-press conference breakfasts, emissary and fact-finder on foreign missions of major importance, Democratic campaigner and fund-raiser, and a channel to both houses of Congress, particularly Texans and Southerners who were not otherwise easily reached. His advice was particularly sought by the President on legislative and political problems. Presiding over the Senate and substituting at ceremonies were the least of his duties.

The President did not delegate decisions to the Vice President, and Johnson did not expect to make them. In foreign affairs he sometimes advocated within the White House a slightly more militant policy but strongly supported whatever course the President adopted. In domestic affairs he often made suggestions accepted by the President—including a less sweeping reform of oil and other depletion allowances in the tax bill, and the inclusion of both a large scale job-training and illiteracy elimination effort and a voluntary conciliation service in the civil rights program. He was not voluble at meetings and did not volunteer advice on matters on which he felt insufficiently informed. On a few of these occasions Kennedy felt Johnson could have been more forthright or forthcoming, and on occasion Johnson felt Kennedy could have kept him better informed. But expressions of irritation on both sides were, to the best of my knowledge, comparatively few. The President never doubted his Vice President’s loyalty, as so many Presidents have, took pains to have him present at all the major meetings earlier mentioned, and publicly praised him as “invaluable.”

He was angered by false reports that he was having Johnson spied upon or that he was considering dropping him from the ticket (this last rumor he traced to rival Texas politicians). He made clear at two separate news conferences his intentions to have the same ticket in 1964. “The merger of Boston and Austin was one of the last that the Attorney General allowed,” he told a political banquet, “but it has been one of the most successful.” The former Majority Leader in turn never complained about his new position’s comparative lack of publicity and power and never crossed or upstaged his leader. “Frankly,” he was quoted by one reporter as saying, “I believe he [the President] is more considerate of me than I would be if the roles were reversed.”

The possibility of succession through death was ever-present but rarely seriously mentioned. The President often joked about it in casual banter with both the Vice President and his own staff. “If that plane goes down,” he said to me with a laugh one day in his bedroom, dressing with the help of valet George Thomas for a storm-threatened flight to Ohio, “Lyndon will have this place cleared out from stem to stern in twenty-four hours—and you and George will be the first to go.” But the President knew that in fact his staff and Cabinet, with occasional exceptions, had excellent relations with the Vice President, and that Johnson was sufficiently informed to take over smoothly, if necessary.

Kennedy asked Congress in 1961 for legislation to provide Secret Service protection for Vice Presidents without their request and for those next in line when the Vice President assumed the Presidency. Also in 1961 he and Johnson agreed without difficulty on the procedures by which the Vice President would serve as Acting President if so required by Presidential disability. These procedures were identical to those adopted by their predecessors, with one addition. “Appropriate consultation” by the Vice President, in case the President was unable to communicate his disability, was spelled out in the Kennedy-Johnson agreement to include the support of the Cabinet and a legal justification from the Attorney General. The fact that the latter was a member of the Kennedy family gave additional assurance to both President and Vice President.

The Attorney General remained his brother’s closest confidant. As an invited member of the National Security Council and its various offshoots, as a bearer of the President’s flag, name and purpose in foreign lands, and as a participant in every major crisis meeting, he gave advice and assistance in foreign affairs to an extent unprecedented for his position. By chance several of the major crises in domestic affairs, including civil rights and steel prices, fell normally within the purview of his department. With the exception of juvenile delinquency and poverty, he was not consulted on or directly concerned with most other domestic measures or on day-to-day foreign operations, although he often lent a hand in legislative relations and high-level personnel selection.

With the help of an unusually talented group of associates, he achieved without detracting from these other duties a remarkable record at the Justice Department: not only in advancing civil rights but in attacking juvenile delinquency, organized crime, monopolistic mergers and price-fixing; intervening in the landmark reapportionment cases; securing counsel for impoverished defendants; broadening the use of pardons; humanizing the Immigration Service; improving (with some exceptions) the quality of the Federal Judiciary; turning the FBI to more effective work against organized criminal syndicates and civil rights violators; and ending abuses of bail and excessive or improper punishment. For twenty-five years the Federal Prisons Director had tried unsuccessfully to overcome opposition to the closing of archaic Alcatraz; the Kennedys closed it. The department also obtained more legislation from Congress than it had in thirty years. The large number of Democrats indicted for Federal offenses, and the small number of Republicans appointed to the Federal bench, caused some grumbling among the respective officials of both parties, but the Attorney General, on these as on all other matters, willingly took the heat for decisions the President had approved.

There were disadvantages to having a brother in the Cabinet. Bob’s errors on the side of candor could not so easily be repudiated. His enemies could attack “the Kennedys” instead of merely attacking the Cabinet. His intervention in the problems of other departments was more intimidating to colleagues, who might have more stoutly resisted anyone other than a Kennedy. But these liabilities were more than offset by his assets: a mature judgment that belied his youth, and unusual drive, dedication and loyalty. His various errors and enemies thus occasioned light banter between the two brothers more often than expressions of regret.

Bob Kennedy in 1961 had far more warmth and depth than when I had first met him in 1953, and this was not merely because he and I were by then getting along well. His work in the Cabinet added to his human as well as his professional stature. Working with the victims of racial prejudice and with the causes of juvenile delinquency made him more compassionate. Working with the problems of peace and war made him less militant. Working with his brother made him more patient and willing to listen, less demanding and certain of his solutions.

Between them was built a bond of confidence and affection that is rare even among brothers. They communicated instantly, almost telepathically. Even the President observed that their communication was “rather cryptic.” Both joked about Bob’s reputation as second only to the President in the government. When a phone call from the Attorney General interrupted one conference in the oval office, the President said with a smile, “Will you excuse me a moment, this is the second most powerful man calling.”

Like all Cabinet members and the President, they did not always agree. The President authorized a start on the Volta River Dam project in Ghana, even though, as he told the National Security Council, “I can feel the hot breath of the Attorney General breathing down my neck” from his customary seat in the back row. The President did not like it when a press interview with his brother revived the Bay of Pigs controversy. Bob did not like it when the President joked at a post-inaugural dinner that he saw no harm in naming his brother Attorney General to give “him a little experience before he goes out to practice law.” Actually, Bob (who preferred not being called Bobby, but could never persuade the President to change) had been sensitive to the nepotism charge, and had long resisted his brother’s desire to name him Attorney General, despite his rackets-busting background. But the alternatives of his serving as a private Presidential adviser without responsibility, or as a White House adviser without command, or as a subordinate to the Secretaries of State or Defense, presented obvious practical difficulties.

The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was clearly the star and the strong man among the newcomers to the Kennedy team. His own staff and subordinates ranked with Bob Kennedy’s and Douglas Dillon’s as the best in Washington and possibly in history; and it was largely through the President’s confidence in McNamara’s competence that the Department of Defense began to play a far greater role in areas in which other agencies were concerned: civil defense, space, intelligence, paramilitary operations, foreign aid and foreign policy in general. Unlike some Secretaries of Defense, McNamara even delved deeply into military matters. In addition, his business experience was drawn upon in the steel price dispute, while his previous status as the independent Republican President of the Ford Motor Company was a useful deterrent to Republican attacks.

McNamara, whose name had been produced by the Shriver talent scouts and recommended by several sages, had at first refused to leave this business background. Shriver, in Detroit, refused to take “no” for an answer. McNamara then repeated to the President-elect in Washington his doubts about his own qualifications. “I wasn’t aware,” Kennedy replied, “that there was a school for Cabinet officers.” McNamara reconsidered, obtained the President-elect’s assurance that he would not be bound by either the Symington task force on Pentagon reorganization or by any political commitments on the choice of his subordinates, and decided that one could not say “no” to a President.

Neither ever regretted that decision. The two men forged a close personal as well as official relationship. They reinforced each other in reasserting civilian control of the military. Both put in long, hard hours. Both preferred precise decisions to prolonged attempts to please everyone. In eleven years with Kennedy I never saw him develop admiration and personal regard for another man as quickly as he did with Robert McNamara, enabling the McNamaras to be excepted from the general Kennedy rule of keeping official and social friendships separate.