The Last Patrician (10 page)

It was not simply their inability to foresee the Stimsonians' demise that caused Jack and Bobby to adopt the Stimsonian pose, to imitate the old Rooseveltian gestures. Their upbringing had not really prepared them to play any other part. Bred up from birth to aspire to the curule chair, they naturally adopted, when they came of political age, the forms and manners of the patricians. So convincing was their performance that for a moment they revived the enthusiasm for grand government, the high rhetoric of the state, that had flourished during FDR's administration. Politics, they said, was an “honorable profession,” as though the other ones were less so. When Teddy, running for his first political office in 1962, asked his brother how he should explain why he wanted to be in the Senate, Bobby, tossing a football on the lawn in front of the Ambassador's house at Hyannis Port, replied: “If you get that question, tell them about public service. Tell them why you don't want to be sitting on your ass in some office in New York”—as though the work of men sitting in offices in New York was inherently less worthy than the work of Enlightened mandarins sitting in offices in Washington.
41
But the Kennedys' bold language and striking gestures concealed a cautious and pragmatic policy. As President, Jack Kennedy was reluctant to increase the size of the federal establishment to any great degree; in 1962 he actually proposed tax
cuts.
42
Lyndon Johnson, it is true, knew no such restraint: he shrewdly exploited the idealistic impulses his predecessor had aroused, and drew on them to build the great legislative mausoleum he conceived as a monument to his fame. But the national mood that made the Great Society possible proved ephemeral. Johnson's successors in the White House shunned the Stimsonian school of statesmanship; Presidents Reagan and Bush sought to demonstrate their closeness not to the Eastern establishment that had built up the paternalistic state, but to the West, the mythical land of rugged individualism and frontier democracy.
43
Richard Nixon, at the time of the Manson murders, went so far as to pay tribute to the virtues of a John Wayne movie,
Chisum,
and suggested that America would be a better place if it revived the harsher code of the lone Western hero whom Wayne played.
44
(It is one of the curious ironies of history that Johnson, although he was a far more genuine Westerner than the Illinois-born Reagan, the Massachusetts-born Bush, or even Nixon himself, the product of Southern California suburbia, should have been far less self-consciously Western in his politics than they. Like so many Westerners who come to the East, Johnson was fascinated by Eastern standards; his Great Society was the ultimate homage a Westerner could pay to the Stimsonian ideal of grand government.)

This preoccupation with Western individualism was nothing new; before the advent of the Stimsonians, American statesmen had, in more and less contrived ways, attempted to identify themselves with the West and the opportunities it represented for individuals in search of freedom and independence. The more memorable presidents before FDR had closely associated themselves with the frontier, had determined to prove themselves Hawk-eyes, not Major Heywards. Washington had been deeply involved in the settlement and colonization of the West and had traveled extensively in the Virginia and Ohio wilderness. Jefferson, in addition to being a backwoods land lawyer, had spoken eloquently of Western lands “with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” Jackson and Lincoln were both men of the frontier, and even Teddy Roosevelt, the cowboy of Harvard Yard, felt a need to grab a gun and roam about the Badlands in search of big game and dangerous men. Franklin Roosevelt broke with this tradition; he made no pretense to being a cowboy, to being anything other than a twentieth-century Major Heyward. Unashamed of his pinstripes, he possessed the easy manners of the faded gentry, and he felt no urge to don denim. Americans ceased, during the heyday of the Stimsonians, to demand in their politics the same Western motifs they enjoyed in their novels and their movies. But the Stimsonian interlude could not last forever; Bobby and Jack might well have been the last major American statesmen to get away with an overtly patrician style, a well-tailored manner, a Harvard accent. In the thirty-five years since President Kennedy's death, only one genuine patrician has occupied the White House, and George Bush, the second son of a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who for a time represented Greenwich in the Senate, was at pains throughout his career to prove that he
wasn't
a patrician, that he was really a Texan, a lover of country music and pork rinds. In his eagerness to repudiate his Stimsonian heritage, President Bush outdid St. Peter, and denied his faith, not three, but countless times.

For a time Bobby himself considered moving out West and running for office. Dissatisfied with his work as a young lawyer on Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Bobby decided to quit when McCarthy passed him over and named Roy Cohn to the position of chief counsel instead. Bobby told J. B. Matthews, an investigator with whom he worked on the committee, that “some hard work” and “a lot of hand-shaking” could get him the Democratic nomination for Senator in a state like Nevada.
45
The example of Teddy Roosevelt perhaps inspired him, and he no doubt genuinely loved the open spaces and severe freedom of the West. But as his brother's career gained momentum, it became obvious that the family needed him in the East, and the idea of a Western career was quietly dropped. Joseph Kennedy, though he himself had gone West, to Hollywood, to further his own career, would never have permitted Bobby to stray so far from the Stimsonian establishment over which he and his brother were (in the father's grand scheme) meant to preside. Bobby never became a Western Senator; if he had, he might have learned earlier those lessons he was fated to learn only at the end of his life.

6

The Stimsonians were successful in part because they combined two distinct sets of qualities and skills. First, they were intensely practical. “It is common sense,” Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1932, “to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try
something.
” Though he might have lacked intellectual depth or ideological conviction, the Stimsonian statesman excelled at doing things, at setting up commissions, building bureaus, devising programs, processing paper, all of which tended to create the illusion (if not the reality) of progress. McGeorge Bundy, for example, was believed by many of his Stimsonian peers to possess the most brilliant mind of his generation, and yet when Jack Kennedy made him his National Security Adviser in 1961 (Kennedy considered making him Secretary of State), Bundy had, David Halberstam observed, almost no scholarship, no serious intellectual work, to his name.
1
His reputation was based solely on the great practical ability he had demonstrated as a Harvard dean. Bundy proved his bureaucratic genius in Washington by setting up what amounted to a second State Department, an enlarged National Security Council that duplicated the work of the actual State Department.

It was not practical ability alone, however, that distinguished the Stimsonian statesman; he possessed other qualities as well, qualities that were less easy to define but no less readily apparent in his makeup, qualities vaguely allied to birth or class. Bundy himself possessed these qualities to an exceptional degree, as befitted one who was descended from the Lowells and the Putnams of Boston and who had been educated at Groton, where he won all the prizes, at Yale, where he was tapped for Skull and Bones, and at Harvard, where he was awarded a Junior Fellowship.
2
The holy trinity of Eastern universities—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—played an important role in creating and consolidating the Stimsonians' sense of themselves as an elite; it took no less than two of the three to create the kind of man that Mac Bundy became. The Stimsonians had the confidence of a caste, a confidence that enabled them to overcome the skepticism of many who would otherwise have been hostile to the kind of privilege they represented. So deeply had the Stimsonian mystique penetrated the American consciousness by the middle of the twentieth century that even a Middle Westerner like Theodore Sorensen could write that a “Harvard diploma is considered by most Massachusetts voters to be evidence of devotion to the public.”
3
Jack Kennedy, who was more familiar with the situation, corrected Sorensen's sentence to read: “A Harvard diploma is considered by many Massachusetts voters, although not all I hasten to add, to be evidence of some talent and ability.”
4
The ingenuousness with which Sorensen associated Harvard with an ideal of public service was perfectly understandable. Whether as the result of birth or education, or both, the Stimsonian gentlemen who passed through the halls of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in the first half of this century were in the eyes of many Americans eminently respectable characters, devoted to the common good and in love with civic virtue. The nature of their background, the polish of their diction, the very fact that they had been to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, all seemed a guarantee of probity and integrity: one might call it the Elliot Richardson syndrome. The Stimsonian statesman might have been a manipulative man (FDR was among the most manipulative of democratic leaders), but he didn't
seem
like a manipulative man; he seemed like a man you could trust.

The Division of Labor

I
F
B
OBBY AND
Jack were among the most adept Stimsonians of their generation, this was due in part to the artful division of labor upon which the two settled early in their careers. Jack was the reassuring Brahmin figure, quoting poetry and imitating English statesmen; Bobby was the Stimsonian fixer, ready to do battle in the wards, to prod the bureaucracies, to tell a man he had to work harder, to tell a man he was fired. The older brother's style, “reticent, patrician, bookish, urbane,” in Arthur Schlesinger's words, seduced a nation; the younger brother became one of the great raw
doers
in twentieth-century American politics.
5
Each had mastered a part of the Stimsonian equation; acting together they seemed unstoppable. Jack, if anything, played his chosen role
too
well. Schlesinger might have been thrilled by “our Harvard and Massachusetts Senator” (note the order) whose “perfect manners” and “Brahmin taste” reminded him of “a young Lord Salisbury,” but after the young lord became President, there was grumbling on Capitol Hill about too much Mozart and fox-trotting at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
6
Could Bobby have been any less baffled himself by his brother's fondness for aristocratic high culture, for the poetry of Byron and the music of Pablo Casals?
7
Ethel Kennedy frankly admitted that she and her husband did “not feel easy in the company of highbrows.”
8
They liked what she called “happy, jolly things,” not Sartre and Stravinsky.
9
With his hair perpetually askew, his necktie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his horn-rimmed glasses pushed high up on his head, Bobby was as natural and unself-conscious an aristocrat as his brother was a studied one. Bobby took for his models the men he saw around him; Jack took for his the men he read about in books. Jack adored the Englishmen—and Englishwomen—who formed his sister Kick's set in London; Bobby, after meeting a number of them in the late forties, confided to his sister Patricia that between “you & me except for a few individuals you can have the bunch.”
10
As President, Jack relished the diplomatic cables and dispatches that chronicled aristocratic high jinks like the Profumo affair; it is difficult to imagine Bobby taking a similar pleasure in such things.
11
Bobby did not revel in the novels of Scott or the prose of Burke and Churchill the way his brother did; he was as little capable of understanding his brother's fascination with the English aristocracy as Cato the Younger was of understanding his brother Caepio's addiction to jewelry and perfume.
12

To Bobby fell the more prosaic tasks of counting delegates, shaking up bureaucracies, administering committees, and humiliating enemies. Bobby's early career was devoted to learning the details of how the system worked. He learned how to use the tax code against criminals and enemies (during a stint at the Criminal Division of the Justice Department), how to conduct an investigation (the McCarthy apprenticeship, in which Bobby's efforts to expose profiteering by Western shipping interests eager to make deals with Red China represented one of the few constructive things McCarthy's subcommittee did), and how to manage a bureaucracy (the investigations of organized labor in the second half of the fifties, in which Bobby presided over a small army of lawyers, investigators, and accountants). He learned how to run a Senate campaign (his brother's in 1952) and how
not
to run a presidential campaign (Adlai Stevenson's in 1956). Bobby's increasing technical mastery of the system was not, to be sure, at odds with his deepest convictions; his commitments in the fifties generally reflected his conservative moral core, his belief that bad men (Communists, criminals) should be punished and that weak men could not be trusted (he voted for Eisenhower rather than Stevenson in 1956). If he was not the reactionary McCarthyite some have made him out to be, neither had he yet adopted the spacious liberalism he would embrace (reluctantly) in the middle sixties.

His bond with his brother, a bond that began to grow during Jack's 1952 campaign for the Senate, did not mature until later in the decade, when the two worked closely together to make Jack President. It was a bond grounded less in personal affinity than in personal need. “All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers,” their sister Eunice said, “has been exaggerated.” Jack was a statesman on the English model; politics was for him a grand game, to be played with ironic detachment.
13
He loved a first-rate political performance—Churchill's, for example, or Melbourne's—but loved it as much for its aesthetic excellence, its dramatic appeal, as for anything else. Bobby, with his earnestness, his passion, and his zeal, was a very different kind of man. The two brothers had, Eunice observed, “different tastes in men, different tastes in women.”
14
Bobby married a simple, pious, athletic girl; Jack married a woman of exquisite cultivation, a lover of literature and art, the essence of sophistication and poise. Eunice lamented the fact that Bobby should have chosen friends who were, well, so
different
from Jack's. Jack was drawn to self-confident preppies, to men who were “smooth and assured and adept with girls and parties.”
15
Bobby, however, was made uncomfortable by the George Plimptons and Ben Bradlees of the world; he did not begin to take pleasure in the company of such men until much later in his life. At Harvard he found excuses for staying away from the snobbish Spee Club; a classmate recalled that he “just wasn't particularly happy around those guys; he was rather uncomfortable.”
16
He made friends instead with oddballs and outcasts, with “big and bulky and very unsophisticated” types who “weren't in the usual social stream at all.”
17
Jack was a fashion plate, impeccably tailored and groomed; his hatless style and two-button suits set a new standard in men's fashion. Bobby dressed, in Ben Bradlee's apt description, like a “Brooks Brothers beatnik”; nobody, Ethel Kennedy said, would “confuse him with Dean Acheson.”
18
As Attorney General he still wore the Brooks Brothers button-down shirts that his older brother considered hopelessly passé. “Bobby doesn't know any better,” Jack Kennedy concluded.
19
Bradlee said that the closest Jack Kennedy liked to come to the great outdoors was a well-manicured lawn; white-water rafting, mountain climbing, and swimming in the Amazon River could never have appealed to him in the way they so obviously did to Bobby. Jack's idea of a fun vacation in the fifties was to rent a yacht with friends and sail around the Mediterranean. Bobby's was to trek through Soviet Central Asia with Justice Douglas, trying to persuade Communists of the error of their ways.
20