The Last Patrician (11 page)

In the end politics brought these two very different men together.
21
Without “the common link of Jack's destiny,” David Halberstam wrote, the two brothers “might have gone quite different ways, with different friends, different wives, different tastes.”
22
Jack Kennedy, who for all his energy and purpose had certain of the habits of a dilettante, needed an enforcer. And Bobby, who for all his talk of running for various offices himself was at heart a manager, needed a candidate. As a Stimsonian Bobby wished, of course, to make a contribution in public life, but in the late fifties he came to realize that the best way he could do this was by getting his brother Jack elected President.

The Ascent

T
HE BROTHERS' ASCENT
to the top of the Stimsonian hierarchy was so rapid and so apparently smooth as to seem, in retrospect, inevitable. In reality it was neither inevitable nor smooth. Dean Acheson was dubious about the “unformed young man” he took Jack Kennedy to be.
23
Adlai Stevenson was equally skeptical. “That young man,” Stevenson said, “he never says please, he never says thank you, he never asks for things, he demands them.”
24
Truman, the Middle American face of a patrician administration, was openly disparaging of “the boy.” Bobby, by turns sullen and rude, was even less popular with the grandees. For all the skill with which they played their Stimsonian roles, Jack and Bobby could not escape their father's past. The Stimsonians looked upon the sons with the same wariness with which they regarded the father. The elder Kennedy blamed the Stimsonians for ruining his political career, and in retirement from public life he had become openly contemptuous of their most cherished dogmas. He was critical of the Truman Doctrine and the various policy decisions that flowed from it—the decisions to intervene in Greece, in Turkey, and in Korea.
25
America's postwar foreign policy, Joseph Kennedy declared, amounted to a “grandiose subsidization of the world,” an undertaking of commitments abroad that America could not possibly fulfill.
26
It was a formula, he said, “for minding other people's business on a global scale,” an “imperialism of mind,” an arrogant effort to “make every state into a copy of America.”
27
The Ambassador was no less caustic in his criticism of proposals to expand the welfare state. A greatly enlarged federal establishment, he believed, would become a tyrannical subverter of traditional American liberties, the “beginning of some form of socialism in this country,” with the government “mixing itself more and more into everybody's lives.”
28

Jack and Bobby were careful to demonstrate their independence of their father's heretical views. During his years in the House and Senate, Jack was an altogether orthodox supporter of the national security state and the welfare state.
29
And yet there was something not entirely convincing in his protestations of fidelity to the Stimsonian ethos; the right wing of the Stimsonian establishment, led by Acheson, and the left wing, led by Stevenson and Mrs. Roosevelt, continued to be skeptical. It was not so much Kennedy's 1957 speech calling for Algerian independence that troubled the Stimsonians, although that speech, the only controversial one Kennedy made during his eight years in the Senate, troubled both the Achesonian and the Stevensonian factions a great deal. Their skepticism seemed rather directed at the lightness of his manner, the irreverence of his wit, perhaps even the freedom with which he conducted his personal affairs; Jack Kennedy seemed to them too glib, too flippant, too in love with pleasure to be a really serious public servant. He had written a book about political courage, and yet in 1954 he had cravenly abstained from voting to censure Senator McCarthy, Bobby's old boss and the nemesis of the Acheson administration. When Arthur Schlesinger suggested to him that he “had paid a heavy price” for giving his book the title
Profiles in Courage,
Jack could only smile and reply, “Yes, but I didn't have a chapter in it on myself.”
30
Jack, if he never rebelled against the orthodoxies of the day, never gave the impression that he took those orthodoxies—or anything else—altogether seriously. Bobby could have admired a man like Henry Stimson, a stoic plodder for whom life consisted of work, duty, and occasional riding and shooting at Highhold, his Long Island estate, or on extended visits to Scotland. Jack would have found Stimson lacking in the brightness, the mandarin charm, the high and vivid powers of imagination that he found so compelling in the historical characters he admired, in Fox, in Melbourne, in Winston Churchill. Jack would have been bored by Stimson, just as he was later to be bored by Stimson's spiritual descendant, Dean Rusk. The Stimsonians sensed Jack's fascination with color and romance, his love of style, the ironic detachment with which he viewed matters of substance, and they wondered if these were not the qualities of a frivolous man.

Converting the Stimsonians

B
OBBY, WITH HIS
as yet pious and conventional nature, was in some ways a truer Stimsonian than his older brother, but in the end it was Jack who, with a seductive combination of charm and intellect, succeeded in converting important Stimsonian statesmen, intellectuals, and journalists to the Kennedy cause. Schlesinger, the unofficial historian of the liberal wing of the Stimsonian establishment, proved, after his conversion, to be a particularly valuable ally, one who could put urbane prose (which he was able to produce on demand) at the Kennedys' disposal. He was more worldly than the other intellectuals to whom Bobby and Jack looked for advice and counsel, more intellectually elegant than Sorensen or Landis; he spoke the Stimsonian language more fluently than they; he was at home, in a way the other Kennedy intellectuals were not, at Hickory Hill and Hyannis. Except for the time he spent at Phillips Exeter Academy, in England (at Cambridge), and with the OSS during the war, Schlesinger had passed his entire life at Harvard, where his father had been a professor before him. At the age of twenty-eight he had published
The Age of Jackson
(it won a Pulitzer Prize), the first in a series of books that together form a kind of history of the Stimsonian point of view. In Schlesinger's brilliant but ahistorical account of Jacksonian America, Jefferson's overthrow of the villainous Federalists proved to be in vain, for a no less pernicious “business community” rose up in place of the evil Hamiltonians.
31
This “business community,” predictably enough, abused its power and oppressed the laboring classes, whose humble members were forced to turn to a hero (General Jackson) to save them, much as their descendants would one day turn to the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. (Of Jackson Schlesinger wrote that the “people called him, and he came, like the great folk heroes, to lead them out of captivity and bondage.”
32
) In a sequel,
The Age of Roosevelt,
Schlesinger chronicled the Golden Age itself. His Decline and Fall came later, in the magisterial studies of the Kennedys.

Schlesinger's first encounter with Bobby Kennedy was not auspicious. In 1954 the young professor was provoked by a letter of Bobby's that appeared in
The New York Times
condemning Franklin Roosevelt's actions at Yalta. The disgrace of Yalta was a favorite theme of the hard-line anticommunist Bobby of the late forties and early fifties; in an essay he wrote while at the University of Virginia Law School Bobby condemned FDR's “amoral” concessions to the Soviets at the Crimean conference.
33
Schlesinger responded to Bobby's anti-Roosevelt invective with a letter of his own to the
Times:
Bobby's right-wing views, Schlesinger said, represented “an astonishing mixture of distortion and error.”
34
But Bobby, contrary to much that has been written about him, readily forgave his adversaries (he was less forgiving of his brother's opponents), and he soon enough perceived Schlesinger's value. Schlesinger knew everyone, from Mary McCarthy to Reinhold Niebuhr, but he was particularly valuable to the Kennedys because he knew—and was able to act as an emissary to—the liberal Stimsonians, the Stimsonians who worshipped Mrs. Roosevelt and thought Adlai Stevenson an oracle whose public utterances ranked with those of Plato. Schlesinger was never admitted, it is true, to the real penetralia of Jack's and Bobby's political councils, and he was always regarded by the Sorensens and O'Donnells of the world as an “impractical liberal.”
35
But the foggy platitudes of Stevensonian liberalism had not prevented him from perceiving, in the late fifties, that Adlai Stevenson was too indolent, too effete, too intellectually delicate, to be President of the United States. Schlesinger wrote in his journal:

I have come, I think, to the private conclusion that I would rather have [Kennedy] as President than [Stevenson]. [Stevenson] is a much richer, more thoughtful, more creative person; but he has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality.… I find it hard to define this feeling—a certain frivolity, distractedness, overinterest in words and phrases? I don't know; but in contrast [Kennedy] gives a sense of cool, measured, intelligent concern with action and power.
36

And so in 1960 Schlesinger abandoned Stevenson and went to work for Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

Joseph Alsop was an even greater prize. In the late fifties Alsop began spreading the word at Georgetown dinner parties that Jack Kennedy, unlike his father, was one of them, that he was safe, that he spoke their language, that he was “just their type.” Pronouncing Jack a “Stevenson with balls,” Alsop was as responsible as anyone for inducting the young Senator into the Stimsonian fold.
37
In return Jack spoke of him affectionately as “that old thing” and flattered him constantly. It was one of the odder spectacles in the annals of the Eastern aristocracy, the anointing of the handsome young prince by the ugly old columnist, and yet it was also somehow fitting, for Alsop himself was one of the odder Stimsonians. An influential newspaper columnist, an art collector, a Georgetown savant, and a (relatively) discreet homosexual, Alsop was also the self-appointed judge of the moral and intellectual fitness of the leaders of the postwar American empire. Jack was okay in Alsop's view: He had “balls.” Chester Bowles was not: Bowles was a “eunuch” because he didn't know when he'd been fired.
38
Adlai Stevenson, whom Alsop for a time admired extravagantly, disappointed him by turning out to be a wimp; Alsop noted that the Sage of Libertyville had a distressing tendency to invoke Abraham Lincoln's name in his miscellaneous table talk—a sure sign, Alsop said, that Stevenson was a case for the psychiatrist, a man who could not be depended upon to uphold those standards of unsentimental Cold War machismo that fat little Joe had himself helped to fashion.
39

Alsop's epicene tastes, his sinuous prose, his devotion to the rarest and most beautiful forms of art, would seem to have fitted him for nothing more than the life of a leisured aesthete, unsuited to an active role in the world. He lived out his long life amid rare plants and exotic Oriental art, amid lacquer and porcelain and jade; nothing but silk, he liked to say, was permitted to touch his body (his shirts, his underclothes, and his pajamas were made of imported Chinese silk).
40
But this aestheticism was deceptive, for Alsop had, at a tender age, been exposed to the charms of power, and he who has tasted those charms once will never again be content merely with books and pictures. At the age of twenty-five he had been made Washington correspondent to the New York
Herald Tribune,
and he had soon afterward found himself on close terms with Senators and Cabinet Secretaries. Alsop's conspicuous position and respectable connections made him a welcome guest in the grandest houses in the capital. He lunched regularly with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, to whom he was related through his mother's family, and he was frequently invited by his mother's first cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, to intimate little suppers at the White House itself. He knew
everybody
who mattered, from Duff and Diana Cooper to Phil and Kay Graham, and to record the many and various acquaintances he accumulated over the years, from Mme. Chiang to General Marshall, from Harry Hopkins to Colonel Lansdale, would be to write a portion of the history of the empire to which he devoted his career. He who was by nature an arbiter of taste became a connoisseur of power, and the author of
The Rare Art Traditions
was not ashamed to acknowledge that he had occasionally encountered, in the coarser realm of politics, instances of beauty quite as wonderful as any that he had discovered in the realm of art. In his pantheon of beautiful people the Kennedys were soon to occupy the most exalted places.
41

Alsop's power derived from his newspaper column, a column that owed much of its interest to its author's Stimsonian connections. During the Truman and Eisenhower years Alsop became an influential figure in a powerful preppy coterie known as the Sunday-night supper club, so called because of the potluck dinners its members attended on their maids' night off.
42
Georgetown had only recently been discovered by fashionable people, and it was to one or another charming eighteenth-century town house that Alsop repaired each week with friends like Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, Richard Bissell, George Kennan, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and their wives.
43
(It was at a Sunday-night supper that Averell Harriman famously switched off his hearing aid to avoid having to make conversation with Richard Nixon.)
44
Alsop himself became one of Georgetown's most conspicuously successful hosts; so packed with power and celebrity were the parties he gave with Susan Mary Alsop, with whom for a time he had a marriage of convenience, that they amounted almost to an unofficial policymaking arm of the United States government.
45
It is no wonder that the Soviets should have attempted (unsuccessfully) to blackmail Alsop with compromising photographs depicting him in the arms of a KGB agent during a visit to Moscow in the late fifties. In the years since George Kennan had sent his Long Telegram outlining the strategy of containment and Paul Nitze had drafted his blueprint for the national security state—the NSC-68—Alsop had become giddy with the responsibilities of empire. By the time the Soviets tried to snare him he had been among the nation's most influential Cold Warriors for at least a decade.
46