The Last Patrician (13 page)

At the same time, the term “Protestant establishment” exaggerated the religious tendencies of the people it purported to describe, as if religion were their most remarkable characteristic (and not simply one they happened to share with others), as if the Protestants themselves retained, in the twentieth century, the evangelical fervor or ascetic piety that had characterized their ancestors in the past. Nor can one escape the semantic difficulties of the term. In order to constitute an “establishment,” as that word is defined by the Oxford philologists, the entity in question must either be maintained at the expense of the sovereign or in some way enjoy the patronage of the state (the military establishment, an established church).
15
Although this was not true of the Protestant establishment, it was eminently true of the Stimsonians. They were at home in the corridors of the federal government; they insinuated themselves into its affairs and made themselves indispensable to its rulers by developing expertise in programs and policies they themselves helped craft. Once in power, they tended to perpetuate themselves, to “establish” themselves, through a skillful practice of the arts of nepotism and favoritism (the “old boy network”).

The “Stimsonian establishment,” then, is not simply another name for the old Protestant elites, for those classes that Joseph Alsop labeled the “Who was shes?” (since the leading families in these classes were related to one another by marriage, it was particularly important to know a matron's maiden name. Hence the critical question “Now, let me see, who was she?”).
16
But the Stimsonian establishment was to some extent descended from these declining elites; its members were largely recruited out of their ranks. The Stimsonians belonged to the same clubs (Century, Union, Links, Knickerbocker, Racquet, Somerset, the Brook, etc.) and took pride in the same hereditary organizations (Society of the Cincinnati, Mayflower Descendants, Daughters of the American Revolution) as their brothers and friends who made peace with the marketplace and devoted themselves more exclusively to the law, business, finance, or (more rarely as the century wore on) the Church (almost always the Episcopal one, although it was fashionable to have at least one member of the family enamored of the doctrines of Anglo-Catholicism or even of Rome itself). During the thirties tensions emerged between those patricians who worshipped capital and those who worshipped the state: while scions of some of the old-old and newly old families hated Roosevelt, others went to work for him. And yet even at the height of the New Deal FDR's patrician admirers were not as estranged from their brothers in finance and industry as might be supposed, and a surprising number of Stimsonians were able to lead double lives. In private life men like Harriman and Stimson were capitalists or the servants of capital; in public life they offered their services to a state increasingly eager to regulate and control capital. (Harriman, for example, served as an administrator of FDR's National Recovery Administration.
17
) The “Who was she?” classes were by no means united in their hatred of FDR, and indeed it was a rare patrician who would not have been happy to see his son benefit from the great man's patronage.

Not all Stimsonians, of course, were products of the “Who was she?” classes; as the century wore on, the Stimsonian club became an almost meritocratic one. A man who was considered “able”—a favorite Stimsonian term of praise—could expect preferment regardless of his background, provided, of course, that he was willing to embrace the fundamental tenets of the Stimsonian code. One of the more important achievements of the Stimsonians was to put an end to the gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) anti-Semitism that prevailed in the highest reaches of American public life in the first half of the century. Stimson himself recruited Felix Frankfurter for his staff in the United States Attorney's office; Dean Acheson considered Frankfurter his best friend.
18

If religion was gradually ceasing to be a barrier to entry in the club, geography had never really been one. John W. Davis came from West Virginia, Bob Lovett from Texas, Clark Clifford from Missouri, George Kennan from Wisconsin, Adlai Stevenson from Illinois, Robert McNamara from California, Dean Rusk from Georgia, and William O. Douglas from Minnesota and Washington State. The very fact that they came from the South or the West made many of these men all the more ardent in their profession of the Stimsonian faith. Their first encounter with Eastern standards and institutions was often a decisive—sometimes a traumatic—chapter in their lives. George Kennan, who had suffered from an acute feeling of inferiority at Princeton in the twenties, wept over the pages in
Gatsby
in which Nick Carraway describes the cultural bewilderment experienced by those who come to the East from beyond the Alleghenies.
19
In time, however, even the most self-consciously Southern or Western of the Stimsonian statesmen established ties to the East and its aristocratic institutions. They spent summers in places like Fishers Island, Dark Harbor, the Vineyard, and Newport; packed their children off to schools like Groton, St. Paul's, and the Phillips academies; and sent updated information concerning new wives, children, houses, and yachts to the Social Register Association at New York.

Their anomalous position as an elite in a democracy helps to explain the curious isolation of the Stimsonians, their lack of engagement in the life of the great mass of the people, their lack of sensitivity to changes in public opinion. One is not surprised to discover that they were often out of touch with the deeper currents of popular feeling. When he was not in Washington administering an agency, or establishing a commission, or planning a clandestine operation, the Stimsonian could be found not actively engaged in the politics of his community, but in his law firm or investment house, at his country seat or on the Vineyard. Although the Stimsonians could plausibly claim to represent popular sentiment where the Cold War was concerned, even here they seem not to have chosen the most popular (or economical) way of fighting that war.
20
By the time Jack Kennedy became President, America had, Neil Sheehan wrote, “built the largest empire in history,” and the most expensive one. The United States

had 850,000 military men and civilian officials serving overseas in 106 countries. From the combined-services headquarters of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific on the mountain above Pearl Harbor, to the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, to the shellproof bunkers along the truce line in Korea, there were 410,000 men arrayed in the armies, the fleets, and the air forces of the Pacific. In Europe and the Middle East, from the nuclear bomber bases in the quiet of the English countryside, to the tank manoeuvre grounds at Grafenwöhr on the invasion route from Czechoslovakia, to the aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet waiting in the Mediterranean, to the electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier in Turkey and Iran, there were another 410,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen deployed. When the diplomats from the State Department, the agents from the CIA, and the officials of the sundry other civilian agencies were counted, the United States had approximately 1.4 million of its servants and their families representing it abroad in 1962.
21

Some historians have found it convenient, by way of apology, to blame the excesses of the national security state on the pressures to which Joseph McCarthy and middlebrow Republicans subjected the Acheson regime in the early fifties. A tempting thesis, but not, finally, a convincing one. For after all, the first shot in the “Who lost China?” war was fired by Alsop himself, not McCarthy, in a series of articles that appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
early in 1950. Three years before, in March 1947, Truman had ordered loyalty tests. The first State Department casualty of China, John Stewart Service, was a victim not of McCarthy's capricious whims, but of Acheson and Truman's blunt administrative fiat.
22
And this was at a time when Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” was
skeptical
of the need for an American empire, a Cold War waged on a dozen fronts. Taft, who voted against NATO legislation, worried that America, in the vainglorious pursuit of imperial power, would sacrifice her republican and democratic character on the altar of Empire, just as Athens and Rome had sacrificed theirs before her.
23
(Joseph Kennedy would call Taft's death in 1953 “the greatest tragedy to befall the American people in the loss of a statesman since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
24
) In the late fifties Ike believed that the national security state was secure enough, was perhaps
too
secure; in his farewell address he famously warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” It was Acheson, Alsop, and Jack Kennedy who continued to insist on the precariousness of the nation's defenses; in 1960 Kennedy campaigned on a pledge to end a missile “gap” that didn't exist.
25
However much support Cold War policies may have had in the nation at large, the method of their execution bears the unmistakable impress of the Stimsonians.

If the Cold War policies of the Stimsonians had a solid basis of popular support, the same cannot be said of their domestic agenda. The Stimsonians' enthusiasm for the welfare and administrative state, an enthusiasm that lacked a foundation in what Bobby would later call “the shaping traditions of American life and politics,” was increasingly at odds with the mood of the American people in the postwar period. A perceptive observer even in 1960 might have detected those undercurrents of dissatisfaction with bureaucratic bloat, regulatory overkill, and selective federal largesse that would later manifest themselves so signally in Ronald Reagan's rebellion against the welfare and administrative state. The Stimsonians, if they were adept at identifying the nation's problems, never sought to solve them in a way that was consistent with the nation's history and traditions. The crises were real enough, but the methods chosen to solve them, and the philosophy brought to bear upon them, tending, as they did, to exalt the grandeur of the state at the expense of the individual, were repugnant to the character and genius of the American people. It is not enough, Burke long ago observed, for a statesman to solve problems; he must make the additional effort of solving them in a way that furthers rather than undermines the first principles of his country.

Toward Camelot

J
ACK AND
B
OBBY
might have chosen to question the prerogatives, the privileges, and the priorities of the Stimsonian establishment, but they did not. It was not in Jack's—or, at the time, in Bobby's—nature to be a heretic. Jack did not propose a radical overhaul of the Stimsonian system; he merely promised to get things “moving” again, whatever that meant. As a pledge of his good faith, he filled the executive establishment with Stimsonians of the highest caliber, men who had spent time in the best schools, the best colleges, and the best law firms in America. For his chief minister Jack wanted nothing less than a bona fide protégé of Stimson himself: among those he considered for Secretary of State were Bob Lovett, Jack McCloy, and McGeorge Bundy, each of whom had at one time worked for Stimson (as had Bundy's father). In the end Jack chose, in part on the basis of Lovett's recommendation, Dean Rusk.
26
Harriman, Bowles, and Stevenson were given diplomatic posts in the administration, Stevenson as Ambassador to the United Nations. Douglas Dillon went to the Treasury, David Bruce to London. Allen Dulles was kept on at the CIA, where Richard Bissell was a rising star and James Jesus Angleton performed with ponderous solemnity the role of high priest of the national security state. Kennedy made Robert McNamara, a Stimsonian by conviction and temperament rather than by blood, Secretary of Defense. McNamara's Defense Department could by itself have furnished an enviable Wall Street law practice; filling positions in the defense establishment were Roswell Gilpatric from Cravath, Cyrus Vance from Simpson, Thacher, Stan Resor from Debevoise & Plimpton, and Peter Solbert from Davis Polk. (Bill Bundy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was an alumnus of Dean Acheson's law firm, Covington, Burling & Rublee; Bundy was also Acheson's son-in-law.) At the Department of Justice Bobby brought in a younger but no less respectable staff. The influence of Yale Law School was particularly strong, with Byron R. “Whizzer” White becoming Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach heading the Office of Legal Counsel, Louis Oberdorfer the tax division, and John Douglas the civil division.
27
The Solicitor General's office went to Harvard's Archibald Cox.

Bobby's administration of the Justice Department remains a lasting example of Stimsonianism at its best; the department's work in securing the equal protection of the laws for blacks stands as one of the great achievements of the Stimsonian establishment. For once, the methods and tools the Stimsonians employed were equal to the crisis they confronted; for once, their lawyerly approach to human problems, their practice of hiring Ivy League lawyers and setting them to work to find legal and administrative answers to complex social and economic questions, resulted in accomplishments that withstood the test of time. Bobby himself became deeply involved in his department's civil rights work. He brought first-rate lawyers to the Civil Rights Division and put the admirable Burke Marshall in charge of them. He traveled to Georgia to announce in person the administration's commitment to school desegregation. He battled segregationists in Mississippi when they refused to allow James Meredith to enroll at the State University at Oxford. He flew to Alabama, at a time when even brave men might have stayed away, to try to persuade Governor Wallace to permit the registration of black students at the University of Alabama. He helped to prepare the landmark civil rights legislation his brother sent to Congress in June 1963, and he served as the administration's lead witness before the Senate committees that initially reviewed the bill. He even found time to master the cases and issues involved in an important apportionment case,
Gray v. Sanders,
which established a “one man, one vote” standard in voting controversies. Bobby personally argued the
Gray
case at the bar of the Supreme Court; his wife, his mother, two sisters, his younger brother, a sister-in-law or two, and four of his children were present to hear him deliver his argument before the justices.
28
And yet if Bobby's civil rights work represented one of the great successes of his Stimsonian Justice Department, it at the same time revealed—to him no less than to his critics—the limits of the Stimsonian technique. Legal and administrative remedies might make it possible for oppressed minorities to enjoy the full complement of civil rights, but those remedies could do little to give them the self-confidence they needed to take advantage of their new opportunities.