The Best and the Brightest (6 page)

Chapter Two

If lower Manhattan Island and State Street, Boston, and the rest of the world of both Louis Auchincloss and John O’Hara read of the Kennedy-Lovett meeting with considerable reassurance, the first sign that the man in the White House, though young, Irish and a Democrat, knew his shortcomings and that they could deal with him, then there was at least one man who learned of it with a haunting sense of confirmation of what he had always feared. This was not someone who had run against Kennedy or opposed his nomination, but curiously enough someone who had worked very hard for Kennedy’s election and was technically his chief foreign policy adviser—Chester Bowles of Connecticut, liberal icon, whom Kennedy had so assiduously cultivated and pursued just one year earlier, and whose views on all matters of foreign policy Kennedy had seemed, at that moment, to share with such great devotion. Now Bowles watched from a distance what was happening as Kennedy prepared to take office; his phone did not ring often, and what he knew about the Kennedy-Lovett meeting was largely what he read in the
New York Times.
He sensed that the young President-elect was flashing his very considerable charms at Robert Lovett, just as he once had done with Bowles himself.

It had been very different in 1959. Then Jack Kennedy had readied himself to run in his party’s primaries, and he had done this as a good liberal Democrat. He was by no means the most obvious of liberals, being closer to the center of his party, with lines put to both the main wings. He knew from the start that if he was going to win the nomination, his problem would not be with the professional politicians, but with the liberal-intellectual wing of the party, influential far beyond its numbers because of its relations with, and impact upon, the media. It was a section of the party not only dubious of him but staunchly loyal to Adlai Stevenson after those two gallant and exhilarating defeats. That very exhilaration had left the Kennedys, particularly Robert Kennedy, with a vague suspicion that liberals would rather lose gallantly than win pragmatically, that they valued the irony and charm of Stevenson’s election-night concessions more than they valued the power and patronage of victory. That feeling of suspicion was by no means unreciprocated; the New Republic liberals were well aware who had fought their wars during the fifties and who had sat on the sidelines.

The true liberals, those derivative of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, were at least as uneasy about Kennedy as he was about them, sensing that he was too cool, too hard-line in his foreign policies, too devoid of commitment. To them, Kennedy seemed so much the new breed, so devoted to rationalism instead of belief that even his first biographer, James MacGregor Burns, had angered the Kennedy Senate staff, particularly Theodore Sorensen, by suggesting that Kennedy would never risk political defeat on behalf of a great moral issue. They felt he had made too many accommodations in deference to the Cold War climate and adjusted his beliefs; he in turn thought them more than a little naÏve and unrealistic about what was then considered a real Soviet threat. As a young congressman, then very much his father’s son, he had been capable of being pleased by Richard Nixon’s defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, a race marked by the shabbiest kind of Red-baiting. In Massachusetts, where McCarthyism was a particularly emotional issue, dividing the Catholic mass and the intellectual elite, he had carefully avoided taking a stand. He was in the hospital in December 1954 at the time of the Senate vote on McCarthy, but it was said that he had intended to vote for the censure; his evasion of the issue, however, combined with liberal suspicion of both his father’s wartime beliefs and his own Catholicism, did not endear him to traditional liberals. As he moved toward becoming a presidential candidate, he had decided first to ease liberal doubts. He wanted Stevenson’s support, but that would not come. Since he sensed that Stevenson, though playing Hamlet, rather badly wanted the nomination, Kennedy moved after the next-best thing, the support of Chester Bowles, a hero of the liberal left.

Bowles seemed so attractive a figure that even in 1958, when Kennedy talked with friends about his own future and candidly admitted that he planned to run for the Presidency, Chester Bowles’s name hung over the conversation. Kennedy thought he had a very good chance at the nomination, certainly better than Symington, Humphrey or Johnson, he said, citing the political liabilities of each. At the moment it looked very good, he confided, and the only real problem was that 1958 was likely to be a good Democratic year and might produce new candidates who could become instant national figures. Two men in particular might pose a real threat: Richardson Dilworth of Pennsylvania, an aristocratic liberal, and Bowles, then contending for a Connecticut Senate seat. Both, he said, could carry the New Republic crowd, the intellectuals and the liberals, and they had as good or better a claim on the constituency which he sought; but unlike him they were Protestants, and thus might serve the purpose of his enemies, many of whom were uneasy about his Catholicism. It was a revealing conversation, about the way he saw the road to the nomination, and the cold and tough-minded appraisal of the problems he faced.

The twin threat did not materialize. Bowles was unsuccessful in securing the nomination; he was not particularly good at dealing with professional politicians like John Bailey, head of the Connecticut party, who was deeply committed to Kennedy, and Dilworth made the mistake of declaring that Red China ought to be admitted to the United Nations, a statement which contributed mightily to his defeat in Pennsylvania. Dilworth’s brand of candor was somewhat different from the Kennedy candor, which was private rather than public, in that he would freely admit in private what he could not afford to admit publicly (such as telling Bowles and Stevenson after the election that he agreed completely with their positions, that our own policy on China was irrational, but that he could not talk about it then—perhaps in the second term).

Bowles’s standing with the party’s liberals was not diminished after his setback, since defeat was never a liberal dishonor; if anything, it was more of a decoration. Kennedy had gone after Bowles early in 1959, but first he romanced one of Bowles’s chief aides, Harris Wofford, then a law school professor at Notre Dame and a long-time protégé of Bowles’s. He was a young man deeply committed to racial progress both at home and overseas (it would be Wofford’s suggestion during the campaign that resulted in the Kennedy phone call to the family of the imprisoned Martin Luther King, Jr.). Kennedy approached Wofford both for his own availability and as a bridge to Bowles. There was a major staff position open for Wofford, Kennedy said, as a speech writer right next to Sorensen himself. Their meetings were impressive; Kennedy, Wofford later reflected, knew exactly which issues would touch Wofford. Much ideological sympathy was expressed, and eventually Wofford went to work for him. The Democratic party had to get away from the Cold War policies of the past, not just of Dulles, but of Acheson as well, Kennedy said. It needed new, fresher leadership. It desperately needed a new China policy. It needed to encourage anticolonial feeling. Of course, all these things echoed Wofford’s own sentiments, and he helped remove some of the doubts held by Bowles.

Kennedy himself worked hard on Bowles and used all his charm in stressing the vast areas they agreed on, philosophically if not tactically (a difference which seemed small then, though perhaps not so small as time passed). Finally Bowles came around, with grave reservations. He was not really comfortable with Kennedy, with the brashness and self-assurance of this younger man. He had an old and abiding loyalty to Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had fought so many battles all those lonely years—for civil rights, for foreign aid, for disarmament—but as a professional politician he was able to look coolly at the field and decide that Kennedy might be able to go all the way and beat Nixon, while Humphrey might fall by the wayside. It was a crucial switch within the competing factions of the Democratic party, an institution severely damaged by the McCarthy years and by Republican charges of twenty years of treason. Here was Bowles, if not moving from the StevensonHumphreyEleanor RooseveltBowles wing to the more centrist camp of John Kennedy, and if not actually leaving his old group, at least conferring an ideological acceptance on the Kennedy camp, easing liberal-intellectual doubts, for no less a liberal institution than the New Republic had listed Bowles as its own dark-horse candidate. Now it was done: Chester Bowles would become Jack Kennedy’s chief foreign policy adviser. Through countless liberal psyches would flash the idea, precisely as Kennedy intended it to: Bowles as Secretary of State. Or better still, Bowles as a holding action for a couple of months, and Adlai as Secretary of State.

It was a very good liberal name to have, Chester Bowles. In the eyes of the liberals, he was one of the few who was without a stain. He was, in fact, the definitive liberal-humanist at a time when those particular values had been on the defensive and had been made to seem naÏve. Politicians who professed the old liberalism of the thirties in this harsher postwar era were considered too trusting and unrealistic, men who did not understand the dangers of the contemporary world, where Communists constantly lurked to exploit any and all do-good organizations and intentions. This Cold War realism had touched many of the liberal politicians, who had been put on the defensive about their past, but it had not necessarily touched the liberal voters, and in 1960 Bowles was unique among politicians in that he refused to adapt to contemporary pressures. To him, it was as if the Cold War had never taken place. He was markedly untouched by it; he believed that the problems America encountered were its own, what it did at home and in the world, not what the Soviet Union did. He was, it seemed at the moment, somewhat behind the times; a few long years later it would seem that he had been ahead of them.

Chester Bowles’s origins were somewhat incongruous for such a good card-carrying liberal. He was the classic New England Yankee, whose people were almost all Republicans, and yet some of his friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy.

Born in 1901, he was the grandson of a famed liberal editor of the Springfield (Mass.)
Republican,
and the editorials that Samuel Bowles wrote at the time of the Civil War had made a deep impression on him. Even as a boy he was something of a maverick liberal in his family, and when he was in his twenties his heroes were Norman Thomas and Robert La Follette rather than the chosen Republican and Democratic presidential candidates of the period. Although he went to Yale, he did not go to the regular college, but to Yale’s engineering school at Sheffield, and this, thought friends, accounted for a certain inferiority complex as far as his own intellectual ability went. He was, in his own mind, virtually self-educated. He was unsure of himself intellectually, and in contrast to the crisp, sharp style of the Kennedy people, his manner would seem slow and ponderous. (Uneasy in their presence, his insecurity showing, he tended to become something of a caricature of himself, speaking too much and too long as a means of trying to cover up his deficiencies.)

After college he worked briefly on the family newspaper, where he proved too liberal. He almost went to China as a foreign service officer, and at the last minute he turned to advertising. Eventually, with Bill Benton, he opened up the firm of Benton & Bowles. They started in July 1929 with very meager resources, but the Depression helped rather than hurt them. The big companies, Bowles noted, were ready for a change, any change, in the early days of the Depression, so the firm of Benton & Bowles prospered. While he was still in his early thirties, Bowles became a self-made millionaire, but an unusual one. He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

Advertising was not the real love of either partner in Benton & Bowles, and both were anxious to get into other fields, preferably politics. Benton went first, and Bowles soon followed. From then on his career was well known, the classical, good liberal career. Liberal director of the Office of Price Administration during World War II, liberal and successful governor of Connecticut a few years later. Liberal ambassador to India in the fifties, eventually liberal congressman from Connecticut. His following among liberals had continued to grow during this time, and by the end of the decade he was something of a hero for two major reasons. First, because more than most liberal politicians, his internationalism seemed to be a reflection and an extension of his domestic political ideals. Second, and perhaps even more important, at a time when so many liberals seemed to be on the defensive about their past and had taken refuge in the new liberal anti-Communism, Bowles had been particularly unflinching; he had never changed from his original precepts or accommodated very much. That his ideas seemed to be a little unfashionable did not bother him. He simply did not take the Russian threat that seriously; he thought the real dangers in the world were those of poverty and hunger. To many liberals he was a comforting throwback to the Roosevelt era; he still stood for things that they believed in but which had recently come under considerable attack.