The Last Patrician (6 page)

The Traitor to His Class

I
N SELLING OUT
to the aristocrats, Joseph Kennedy, the self-made man, the brilliant entrepreneur, was a much more genuine “traitor to his class” than Franklin Roosevelt ever was. It is sometimes said that Roosevelt betrayed his class when he exacted his pound of flesh from the “economic royalists” during the New Deal. But in doing this, Roosevelt was not betraying his class, he was
avenging
it, avenging it against a class of new men, a class composed of the Wall Street speculators and big businessmen and great industrialists who had overthrown the old nobility. A few patricians, like Dick Whitney, the New York Stock Exchange president from whose gold watch chain dangled a little Porcellian pig, might have consented to join this aspiring class, and others, like the Morgans, might have helped to sustain it by raising capital for its ventures.
32
Many more patricians were compelled by financial necessity to act as lawyers for it.
33
But it was never Franklin Roosevelt's class; Roosevelt belonged to a family whose mercantile success had long before permitted its scions to set themselves up as country gentry.
34
The Roosevelts had once occupied the highest places in society, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the family came to be overshadowed by the magnificoes of the new plutocracy.
35
Roosevelt himself practiced law in a Wall Street firm after studying the profession at Columbia, but he quit in disgust after a few years. It was not a Roosevelt's job to do a Rockefeller's bidding.
36
Franklin Roosevelt did not belong to the aspiring class of plutocrats and would-be plutocrats that came into being after the Civil War. But Joseph Kennedy
did
belong to that class, and in rallying to Roosevelt's standard he betrayed it.

It is not difficult to see why Joseph Kennedy should have succumbed to the charms of the rejuvenated aristocracy. The risorgimento of the patricians represented one of the more astonishing comebacks in the history of American political power. Thrown out by Jefferson at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the patricians returned to power at the beginning of the twentieth, and the second time they did not make the mistake of alienating the common man. On the contrary, the patricians assiduously courted the people and, following the example of Caesar, promised no end of federally sponsored bread and shows. In the first half of the twentieth century the seemingly moribund aristocracy to which the Roosevelts belonged produced a succession of brilliant statesmen, administrators, and jurists; men like Elihu Root, Gifford Pinchot, Henry Stimson, Learned Hand, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Sumner Welles, Francis Biddle, James V. Forrestal, Robert Lovett, Jack McCloy, Adlai Stevenson, Desmond FitzGerald, Richard Bissell, and the Alsop and the Bundy brothers represented a formidable collection of talent, of energy, of social and intellectual distinction. These statesmen were educated at the same schools; they belonged to the same clubs; they worked in the same law firms; they summered beside the same New England harbors. Their careers were advanced by the same Roosevelt patronage. In my own mind I call them Stimsonian statesmen, for Colonel Stimson, although he was not the most distinguished, was perhaps the most representative of the breed.
37
He was given his first government job by Theodore Roosevelt (as United States Attorney in New York) and his last by Franklin Roosevelt (as Secretary of War), and his public career coincided with the golden age of patrician governance. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Stimson (Andover '84, Yale '88, Harvard Law '90) practiced law on Wall Street, and though he was a much greater success at the bar than FDR ever was, he never liked being a corporate lawyer; it was a living, he said, and nothing more. It was not until he became a federal prosecutor that he felt himself “out of the dark places” where he had been “wandering all his life” and in a place where he “could see the stars.”
38

The men who followed in Stimson's footsteps to a large extent shaped the great public debates of the first half of the twentieth century. If this has been the “American century,” it is because they made it so. Other groups besides their own, and other leaders besides themselves, were committed to many of the same ends, but none was as successful in articulating the new theory of government, and none was as effective in translating theory into practice. Their belief that a government composed of dedicated and Enlightened public servants could remake the world did more than give new purpose to a disaffected social class; it gave the nation a new sense of direction and aspiration, a new conception of its destiny.

The Stimsonians came to define twentieth-century American liberalism—a very different kind of liberalism from the nineteenth-century free-market liberalism they questioned. Their belief in the beneficent power of a government directed by brilliant Stimsonian illuminati received its most enduring expression, in domestic affairs, in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, with its insistence that government, not private enterprise, could best improve the conditions that had left a third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. It received its most enduring expression, in foreign affairs, in the Pax Americana advocated by Dean Acheson, General Marshall, and Joseph Alsop after the war, a policy whereby the American government, like the Roman one in a previous age, took upon its shoulders the burden of governing the world, of resisting, with the assistance of a vast military and intelligence establishment, the great heresies, and of improving, through lavish grants of money and matériel, the conditions of life in those countries that had been admitted to the American imperium.
39

The twin orthodoxies of the New Deal and the Pax Americana were the foundations upon which both the twentieth-century welfare state and the twentieth-century national security state were constructed.
40
The molders of these orthodoxies were themselves members of one of the most extraordinary clubs the world has known, a national aristocracy which, with its belief that there were few problems an aggressive, conscientious cadre of public servants could not solve, and through its control of a complex web of bureaucratic and administrative machinery, influenced the life of the nation and the world to a degree unprecedented in the history of the United States. It was into this tradition of aristocracy and Enlightened liberalism that Bobby Kennedy and his brothers were eventually inducted; they would become, indeed, the last American statesmen to campaign, openly and unapologetically, as heirs to the Stimsonian conception of progressive aristocracy.

They were the last of the old, but they were also the first of the new. The last of the great aristocratic families in twentieth-century American politics, the Kennedys produced the first mainstream critic of the orthodoxies on which the old Stimsonian arrangements rested. Bobby Kennedy, who in the first phase of his career was almost a parody of a young Stimsonian statesman eager to make his mark in the world, would emerge, in the last years of his life, as a great though reluctant critic of the world the Stimsonians wrought.

3

The desire to possess a paramount purpose in life, more pronounced in some men than in others, is probably innate, but the form which that purpose assumes, in the life of a particular man, must depend upon the man's education. Of the nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Bobby had perhaps the greatest need of a grand and overarching purpose in life; men who are indifferent to this need do not consider becoming priests. Left to its own devices, Bobby's hunger for purpose might have found expression in a life in the Church, in a life of piety and contemplation. But his father had determined that he would have a secular career, and as a matter of course Bobby adopted as his own those secular purposes that were held up to him at St. Paul's, at Milton, and at Harvard as being the most noble and fulfilling a man could have.

The ease with which he was converted to the creed of Stimson and the two Roosevelts is striking evidence of how skillful the New England academies had become, since Henry Adams's time, in producing pious ephebes eager to devote themselves to the cause of grand government. In his first months at Milton, Bobby attempted to lead “an underground movement” to convert his Protestant form-mates to the Roman Church, but his religious zeal quickly subsided, and his Roman Catholic faith became, in time, a merely secondary one, a Sunday faith. The achievement of secular power replaced the hope of eternal salvation as the principal object of his daily devotions, and he was soon writing home that the Protestant ministers who visited Milton, schooled in the ethic of public service propounded by Dr. Peabody and Dr. Drury, were more intellectually impressive than the Catholic priests who spoke of St. Augustine and St. Paul.
1

The exercise of political power is, of course, as gratifying a form of egotism as any, but in the New England academies in which he passed his youth, Bobby learned to think of it as a selfless and even a noble activity, an obligation that, under the more pleasing appellation of “public service,” the graduates of the New England schools had a sacred duty to discharge. Ever since Endicott Peabody had modeled Groton (founded in 1884) along the lines of Dr. Arnold's Rugby, the New England academies had attempted to imitate the English public schools in their mission of transforming well-born and not infrequently rich young gentlemen into conscientious wielders of political and administrative power. It was at these schools that patrician youths were initiated into the grand tradition of politics that men like Stimson and Theodore Roosevelt had recently revived. (Roosevelt sent his sons to be educated by Peabody at Groton; their Hyde Park cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, was also a Grotonian.
2
) It was in these schools that young men learned to look upon engagement in private business as a selfish and spiritually unrewarding activity; it was here that they learned to look upon government service as superior to those careers that existed only because a market had need of them.
3
(Bobby's own aversion to business, Schlesinger says, was confirmed during a summer he spent working in a Boston bank: it was “as close to business as he ever got”.
4
) A collection of authorities, beginning with Aristotle, was cited as evidence of the proposition that a public career was the noblest of all, and a strict regimen of athletic competition was instituted in order to prepare the budding young statesman for the rigors of political life.

The Exorcism of the Playing Field

I
T WAS NOT
enough simply to instill in young men a taste for the delights of power; for after all, even Henry Adams, who, his brother Brooks said, would not have “touched” public office in any form under any circumstances, was fully aware of how charming power can be.
5
The New England academies had the additional duty of preventing young men from developing those intellectual interests that would have been fatal to any attempt at a career in democratic politics. Central to Peabody's educational theories was a belief that too much brilliance, too much wit, too high a standard of scholarship, too fastidious a sense of taste, would inevitably corrupt and enervate the classes that were meant to rule. “I am not sure I like boys to think too much,” Peabody once said. “A lot of people think a lot of things we could do without.”
6
Walter Hinchman, a Groton master, observed that Peabody “wasn't really interested in education of the mind.”
7
“Intellectual curiosity,” Hinchman said, “simply did not interest him, and a boy … who had such curiosity in abundance, was almost suspect.”
8

Henry Adams records in the
Education
that in his day scholars were taught practically nothing at Harvard College. It is difficult to conceive of a more effective method of stimulating the development of an original and undogmatic mind, or a poorer one of producing a mind capable of acquiescing in the platitudes and prevarications of modern democratic politics. In the same way that Gibbon despised the languid learning of Oxford a century earlier, Adams resented—or affected to resent—the nonchalance of Harvard in the fifties.
9
A more objective observer, however, is likely to be struck not by the failures of antebellum Harvard, but by its successes. The university then encouraged, what perhaps the English universities still do, an intellectual curiosity, a free play of mind, which, no doubt because it occurred in a place where old libraries were well stocked with classic books, produced a happier result than any number of more up-to-date methods. By Bobby's time, however, the New England academies had eliminated much of the element of free intellectual play from their curricula, and had implemented the program of conscious philistinism that men like Peabody had devised in the hope of producing patricians capable of succeeding in modern politics. (The philistinism came naturally enough to a man who believed, as Peabody did, that Theodore Roosevelt was “America's greatest statesman and
In Memoriam
England's finest poem.”
10
) The New England academies taught a good deal more in Bobby's day than they had taught in Adams's, and taught it in such a way as to make it as dull and uninteresting as possible. Any genuine love of learning a boy might possess was almost certain to be extinguished in the drudgery of the classroom; nor was there, outside of the classroom, sufficient time for the kind of desultory reading that is indispensable to the creation of a vital and imaginative intellect.
11
In Peabody's scheme of education, a boy's leisure hours were to be given over to games, especially to football. Whatever romantic vapors, whatever traces of imaginative passion, still floated in a boy's mind, in defiance of the regime of the lecture hall, were certain to be eliminated in the great exorcism of the playing field. “Don't worry, Corinne, we'll soon knock all that out of him,” Peabody told Joseph Alsop's mother when she boasted of her son's love of reading.
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