The Best and the Brightest (7 page)

It was, however, this very quality which would tend to hurt him with his new allies, the Kennedy team. What the liberals liked about Bowles was his predictability, which was precisely what the Kennedys came to dislike. The liberals liked him because he kept saying the old enduring things that had bound them together in the thirties; the Kennedy people did not like the old slogans and ideas and wanted to get on with the more modern world. So in their eyes he would become a curiously heavy figure, and knowing that he was not as facile as they were, he became even more awkward. While they were so obviously intellectual, he was more visceral in his instincts; while they were all men of great and towering accomplishments and proud of them, he was curiously ashamed of his own successes, of having made it as an advertising man, of being a millionaire. He spoke in terms which were not flashy and which plain people could understand, but which seemed out of place in their new style. Even though he sensed the differences between himself and the Kennedy team, he signed on—serious, ponderous Chester Bowles, given to long answers to short questions, reeking of good intentions and good thoughts, sermons really, among lean, swift young men who thought it quite acceptable to have idealistic thoughts and dreams just so long as you never admitted them.

The relationship never really worked, not from the start. Even in the best of days, at the beginning, the suspicions which had separated them in the past still remained. The differences in style were really differences in substance, and there was no way of getting around it. Bowles had retained his misgivings about Kennedy, more than he realized. This became clear in April of 1960 in Wisconsin, and it was Wisconsin which began the decline of Chester Bowles. This, the second primary, was a crucial test for Kennedy on his way to the nomination. Kennedy’s liberal credentials were still anything but assured; his only victory as the Wisconsin campaign began was in friendly Catholic New Hampshire. Now he was running in the Midwestern state which was a Humphrey stronghold, more Protestant than Catholic, more tuned to Humphrey’s genial Midwestern liberalism. Here Kennedy needed all the liberal support he could muster, and he needed every liberal face to appear on his behalf. In his hour of need he turned to his chief foreign policy adviser. Who balked. Bowles said that when he joined forces, he had specifically ruled out campaigning against his old friend Hubert Humphrey, so he could not go into Wisconsin against Hubert. Robert and Jack Kennedy were appalled by this refusal, and the pressure began to build. They prevailed upon Ted Sorensen, then considered a link to the liberals, to be the persuader. It was terribly important, Sorensen argued, Bowles must come to their aid; if he went in now and fought, many good things would come his way. At first the warnings were gentlemanly, but as time passed, as the heat of the campaign mounted—after all, one primary defeat and it might all be over—the tone became harsher and more demanding. If he did not comply, Sorensen said, there would be dire consequences. Not only would the good things not happen, but bad things might. If he was for them, he was for them, and that was the only thing they understood. And as they became irritated, so too did Bowles; he felt he was having his arm twisted. In a sense the Kennedys were right: he could, after all, campaign for Jack without necessarily being anti-Humphrey. But Bowles felt that although Kennedy might be the best way of beating Nixon, there were old loyalties to Humphrey, and old suspicions: touches of liberal anti-Catholicism remaining in him as well; any liberal governor of Connecticut had had to struggle against the conservative political power of the Church in the past. So Bowles refused to go in, and Harris Wofford, his aide, replaced him in Wisconsin. The Kennedys would later decide, when they cut up their spoils, that they were not that beholden to Bowles or to the liberals who had not been there when they were needed. From then on the balance changed, and as primary victory followed primary victory, Bowles’s role and value diminished except as an occasional useful bit of window dressing. He was made chairman of the party platform committee, on which he worked relentlessly, though becoming increasingly aware as the campaign progressed that he had less and less contact and influence with the candidate. In July, at convention time, when he worked very hard for a Kennedy-style platform, he discovered that among the people least interested in the platform was his candidate. Indeed, even as Kennedy was accepting the convention’s nomination, an act which should have gladdened Bowles after this long, arduous uphill struggle, Bowles had a feeling that he was far from the action and the decisions, that the link between him and his candidate was weak and growing weaker.

He could not have been more right, for at that very moment Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was having dinner in New York at the apartment of Henry Luce, the publisher of magazines which had long specialized in the tormenting of just such people as Chester Bowles and promoting such archenemies as John Foster Dulles, leaving some people with the suspicion that Dulles was
Time
magazine sprung to life (inspiring the liberal poet Marya Mannes to write the short verse: “Foster Dulles/Henry Luce/GOP Hypotenuse”). At the dinner Joe Kennedy gave his word to Luce that his son, while a Democratic presidential nominee, was nonetheless reliable. Joe Kennedy and Henry Luce were old friends in the best sense of many hands scratching many backs, Luce having written an introduction to the first book by Kennedy’s son Jack, a book entitled
Why England Slept,
while Joe Kennedy, not to be outdone, had arranged to get Luce’s son Hank his first job after college, as special assistant to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission—the chairman, of course, being Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

What Luce and Kennedy were discussing was in effect what it would take to neutralize
Time
and
Life
during the forthcoming campaign. It turned into something of a heated discussion because Luce tried to divide the issues between foreign and domestic affairs and implied that he would not be upset by Jack Kennedy’s liberalism on domestic issues, and Joe Kennedy took this personally. No son of mine is going to be a goddamn liberal, Kennedy interjected. Now, now Joe, Luce answered, of course he’s got to run as a liberal. A Democrat has to run left of center to get the vote in the big northern cities, so don’t hold it against him if he’s left of center, because we won’t. We know his problems and what he has to do. So we won’t fight him there. But on foreign affairs, Luce continued, if he shows any sign of weakness toward the anti-Communist cause—or, as Luce decided to put it more positively—if he shows any weakness in defending the cause of the free world, we’ll turn on him. There’s no chance of that, Joe Kennedy had guaranteed; no son of mine is going to be soft on Communism. Well, if he is, Luce answered, we’ll have to tear him apart.

Then they went back to watching the acceptance speech, and Kennedy, the sire of a great political family, his own driving ambitions now close to realization, thanked Luce for all he had done for the Kennedys in the past, a gesture Luce accepted cordially at the time. Later, however, as the campaign progressed, he would wonder if
Time
and
Life
were doing too much for young Jack Kennedy—had they been too favorable, too straight in their reporting? It was, he realized, a hard line to draw, and made more difficult not so much by personal obligations to the Kennedy family, but by the difficulty in finding real differences between the Nixon and the Kennedy foreign policies. In fact, during the fall, when
Life
was geared up to run a major editorial praising Nixon’s foreign policy, the editors, at Luce’s suggestion, held off a week because Nixon had not made his stand any noticeably more anti-Communist than Kennedy. Later, when the election was over and the narrowness of Kennedy’s margin became clear, Luce’s good Republican conscience would bother him: perhaps, if he had been truer to his party, Nixon would be in the White House. But it did not bother him so much that he turned down a chance to attend the Kennedy inaugural ball, and sit, just by chance, in the box with the Joseph P. Kennedys.

Which was far from where Chester Bowles sat that night. He sat with some of his boys, that special group of talented young men which he regularly seemed to discover and propel into public life, some of whom (like Jim Thomson, Abe Chayes, Tom Hughes and Harris Wofford) would do particularly well in the new Administration. That night he was with Wofford, who was to be a White House Special Assistant for Civil Rights, and Tom Hughes, who would become Director of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Hughes was one of the few genuine intellectuals of the era, a funny, skeptical, almost cynical man who had worked earlier for Bowles, then for Humphrey (who in 1959 was a hotter political figure), and finding Humphrey a less interesting man, had returned to Bowles. Wofford had been Bowles’s main link to the Kennedys, the man who had worked hard to bring him into the Kennedy campaign. Replacing Bowles during the Wisconsin primary, Wofford had said in Madison, a hotbed of liberalism, “There is a Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles view of the world, and Jack Kennedy is the most likely man to carry it out.” Later, when Kennedy was elected and his first two announcements were the reappointment of the heads of both the FBI and the CIA, Hughes sent Wofford a postcard saying: “I want you to know that I finally voted for your StevensonHumphreyBowlesKennedyHooverAllen Dulles view of the world . . .”

For ever since he gained the nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy had changed: he did not need the liberals that much; they had nowhere else to go. It was no longer Kennedy versus Humphrey or Stevenson; it was Kennedy versus Nixon. He turned to face different doubts and different suspicions. On the way to the nomination the question had been whether or not he was sufficiently liberal; then it became a question of whether he was sufficiently mature, tough and anti-Communist. He was facing a candidate who had been catapulted into American life on the issue of anti-Communism, and who had been the hatchet man against the Democrats in previous campaigns on the issue of softness on Communism, to such a degree that his superior, Dwight Eisenhower, was sometimes made uneasy (not so uneasy as to make him stop; Eisenhower was not uneasy when that rhetoric benefited Dwight Eisenhower, simply dubious whether a man who depended upon it was worthy of succeeding him in that lofty office). No doubt he would use that same issue once more against the Democrats, should they show any small sign of weakness. So Kennedy moved toward the right to reassure America that he was just as tough as Nixon, that he wanted a firm foreign policy, that he cared as much for Quemoy and Matsu as Nixon did, and in fact charging that the Eisenhower Administration was, yes, soft on Cuba. Since Cuba was a Democratic issue in 1960, Lyndon Johnson, working the South for Kennedy, said he knew what to do. First he’d take that Castro fellow and wash him. (Cheers.) And then shave him. (Cheers.) And then spank him. (Wild cheers.) And as Kennedy worked this issue he moved away from the positions of his principal foreign policy adviser and the Stevenson wing of the party, and the Stevenson imprimatur became increasingly suspect inside the Kennedy camp after Los Angeles. After the campaign was over, the Stevenson people were assigned to work up a series of foreign policy papers. George W. Ball, a Chicago lawyer who was originally a Stevenson man, had prepared them, and they were really Ball papers, not Stevenson papers; nevertheless, Ball was so uneasy about the Stevenson taint that he let a deputy take the papers to Palm Beach for Kennedy’s perusal.

Bowles’s influence had diminished steadily during the campaign. Early during the race the question had arisen of whether he should seek re-election to his Connecticut congressional seat, and something of an Alphonse-Gaston charade took place. Kennedy asked Bowles to run. Bowles deferred, saying that if he was not going to serve out his full term it would not be fair to the good voters of Connecticut’s Second Congressional District, nor to his protégé William St. Onge, who wanted the seat. Then Kennedy argued that if Bowles dropped out of the race, the Stevenson supporters would think a deal had been made that Bowles was to be Secretary of State; hence they would not work as hard for the cause. Bowles then insisted that the Stevenson people were made of sterner stuff, and pushed very hard for Kennedy’s permission not to run. Implicit in all this, of course, was the idea that if Bowles did not run, the Administration was committed to giving him something very high, perhaps even State. Kennedy did not like to be crowded and he was uneasy with Bowles’s request, and he did not give his approval to the Bowles withdrawal. Bowles, who did not like the House of Representatives, dropped out of the race anyway. This irritated Kennedy, who felt Bowles had gone around him, and whatever chance Bowles had to be Secretary of State, which had never been great, diminished appreciably.

The real problem of course was that the mix between the two was not very good, either personally or professionally. Bowles spoke in long, quasi-theological terms and the Kennedy people spoke in shorthand, almost a code, the fewer words the better, for tartness and brevity showed that you understood the code, were on the inside. Bowles spoke in terms of idealism, of world opinion, of political morality, wearing his high hopes for mankind right there on his sleeve, and the Kennedy people, if they thought that way—and some did and some did not—thought the worst thing you could do was confess openly to high idealism. Bowles, though wealthy, lacked the aristocratic style one might find at the dinner party of an Alsop or a Harriman, and at the Bowleses’ one was likely to find Indians, Africans, American Negroes and others; in an Administration which placed great emphasis on style and, ironically, would be remembered more for its style than its achievements, there was a feeling that Bowles had the wrong style; his wife, after all, was given to wearing Indian saris. All this was a problem, and so too was the fact that his basic view of the world, which had remained unchanged despite the pressures of the McCarthy years and the Cold War, had given him an image of being fuzzy and woolly-headed, and had made a convenient target for hard-liners in the press and in Congress. Part of this was Bowles’s own fault; he was marvelous at long-range thinking, at seeing the dangers inherent in policies, but he was a weak infighter. He lacked an ability to dissemble, he had no instinct for the jugular, he did not maneuver well at close hand. Thus, while Averell Harriman might stand for the same policy as Bowles, Harriman was not a good target; he was a vicious, almost joyous, brutal infighter, and anyone who tangled with him would do so in the full knowledge that Harriman would remember and strike back, and for a hard-line columnist like Joe Alsop, who had more than a little of a bully in him, Bowles made a much better target. His career in government thus was limited by the knowledge of potential adversaries that they could strike at him and he would not strike back.