The Last Patrician (9 page)

Jack and Bobby profited from FDR's example as best they could. During the 1960 campaign they shrewdly exploited Roosevelt's memory in places like West Virginia, and they made valiant attempts to overcome his widow's hostility to their cause. But although they studied Roosevelt's career, and copied his techniques whenever they found it useful to do so, they never idolized the man; indeed, they may never even have liked him. Roosevelt was adored by millions who never met him, who knew him only through his radio broadcasts; those who were more intimately acquainted with him—as the Kennedys were—had a different impression of his character. The men who were close to Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop observed, did not love him.
9
They did not weep when he died.
10

How, the Kennedys wondered, had Roosevelt done it? During the 1960 campaign Jack asked Richard Neustadt to prepare a series of memoranda on FDR's approach to the presidency. “That Roosevelt stuff is fascinating,” Kennedy exclaimed after reading it.
11
The brothers admired the great man's achievement, but the admiration was tinged with envy, and when they dealt with the Roosevelt children there was an unmistakable sense of scores to be settled.
12
“She hated my father,” Jack said of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960, “and she can't stand it that his children turned out so much better than hers.” The brothers resented the way Franklin Roosevelt had toyed with their father, resented the fact that he had given the Treasury to William Woodin and Henry Morgenthau but never to Dad. They were still more piqued by the fact that history would remember Roosevelt as the heroic founder of a state (albeit the welfare one); theirs would be the distinctly lesser glory of adding to another man's monument.

Did they ever understand the secret of Roosevelt's success? Did they ever glimpse the subtle bitterness that poisoned his mind and stimulated his genius? There is no bitterness like that of the fallen patrician; the resentment of the social climber is not nearly so great. Although Jack and Bobby could recall, with remarkable clarity, the insults their family had endured at the hands of the WASPs, neither of them was, at heart, a bitter man.
13
Roosevelt was. The popular conception of the happy warrior, the spontaneous, great-hearted, and generous leader, the infectiously optimistic statesman who, after contracting polio, resisted the temptation to indulge in self-pity, is not entirely wrong. There is truth enough in this picture, but it is not the whole truth.
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Beneath the ebullient patrician facade lay a more vulnerable man than was apparent on the surface, a man who possessed a full array of human weaknesses, a smaller and less attractive man than the larger-than-life figure the crowds adored, a man who was not free from bitterness.
15

The Kennedys, so lacking in bitterness themselves, could never comprehend the extent to which bitterness underlay Roosevelt's achievements. Their world was too different from his. The young Roosevelt grew up not in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of a household like the Kennedys', but in the splendid isolation of a Hudson River estate. The only child of a protective mother, little Franklin had grown up in a universe that revolved around him, and he could never afterward be comfortable in that larger, colder world which refused at first to pay homage to his ordinary and at the time rather trivial self. He was a Roosevelt, of course, but not an Oyster Bay Roosevelt, and as a young man he soon discovered that the world was no longer impressed by Hyde Park Roosevelts.
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(Joseph Alsop said that the Hyde Park Roosevelts' place in New York society “might well have been less than middling” at the end of the nineteenth century.”
17
) In youth Roosevelt was never as popular as he wanted to be—not at Groton, not at Harvard, not in his early career. His wife said that his Groton years may “even have left scars,” which is odd, because he was not
un
popular at Groton.
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But he was not the most popular boy in his form, either, and he found this circumstance painful. Thirty years later he was still smarting over his failure to have been elected a class marshal at Harvard and to have been invited to join Porcellian.
19
He was a handsome young man, but according to Joseph Alsop, whose mother had known the gossip of the day, he was handsome in a “rather awful” sort of way, and had been given the nickname “Feather Duster” by the girls.
20
His reputation for shallowness led many discerning men to look upon him with disdain, to dismiss him as a “well-born, polite, not particularly gifted young man, something of a prig.”
21
Henry Adams patronized him; Walter Lippmann thought him amiable and stupid; Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced his intellect second-rate; Learned Hand thought him “nearly devoid of critical faculty.”
22
The young Kennedys were similarly patronized, but they had
expected
to be patronized, had thought it inevitable that they would be patronized. Roosevelt had not expected it; he was not prepared for it.

Roosevelt's later successes never completely assuaged the humiliations of his early years, when first he had gone into a world that was indifferent to him. This residual bitterness manifested itself most signally in the quite unmistakable cruelty with which he treated others. It revealed itself in what Learned Hand called his vindictiveness, his “willingness to fan incendiary animosities” in ways Hand said he could “never forgive.”
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It revealed itself in the way he manipulated his subordinates, and in the way he dropped them after they ceased to be useful to him.
24
Marguerite “Missy” Le Hand, his secretary, devoted her life to him, but when she lay dying, Roosevelt did not bother to call her.
25
Cruelty showed itself, too, in the way he played his aides against one another, and in the heavy sarcasm, the petty humiliations, the demeaning nicknames, the relentless teasing to which he subjected them.
26
Sometimes this cruelty took the form of a playful, catlike malice, as when Roosevelt asked Joseph Kennedy to drop his trousers in the White House, to see whether it was true that Kennedy was bow-legged (it
was
true).
27
Sometimes it was more brutally blunt, as when once he said to his wife, who was attempting to give her opinion of a pending bill, “Oh, Eleanor, shut up. You never understand these things anyway.”
28
Dean Acheson resigned rather than submit to Roosevelt's daily calisthenics of cruelty. Roosevelt, Acheson said, not only “condescended” to his subordinates, he did so in a particularly “humiliating” way. It was not easy, Acheson wrote, for a person who had done his best to serve the President to receive in return “the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stableboy.”
29
Roosevelt was a charming man, the most charming man she had ever known, Rose Kennedy said.
30
Winston Churchill compared meeting him to opening his first bottle of champagne. But Roosevelt's was the charm of Dickens's Chester, a superficial smoothness that was not in the least incompatible with great personal cruelty.

The adolescent behavior, the love of sophomoric practical jokes, the delight with which he called Corcoran “Tommy the Cork” and Morgenthau “Henry the Morgue” revealed not merely a man who was capable of a cruelty that was all the more devastating because it was so casual, so careless, so thoughtless, but a curiously underdeveloped man, one who was strong enough to overcome his crippled legs but who never succeeded in overcoming the barriers that had prevented the full maturation of his mind, a man who seemed content with the rather stunted emotional existence to which he was confined.
31
There was—everyone who knew him noticed it—a certain dullness in the great man's conversation and character. There was an air of youthful self-satisfaction about him, the complacent attitude of a flippant schoolboy.
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The President's table talk, Alsop observed, was remarkably “stale.”
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His sense of fun, Gore Vidal said, was “heavy.”
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The beautiful Dorothy Schiff, to whom for a time the President turned regularly for female companionship, was surprised to find herself growing bored in his company. She listened “over and over again to the same stories—how once when he was going past the Vanderbilt mansion he saw on a clothesline some black chiffon underwear,” and so on and so forth.
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He was incapable, Missy Le Hand believed, of “personal friendship with anyone.”
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And yet Roosevelt was, in spite of his coldness and his cruelty, able to achieve things that the Kennedys, for all their superior warmth and greater personal loyalty, could not. The Kennedys lacked the deep bitterness, what Learned Hand called the “venom,” that gave Roosevelt's ambition its edge, that made it possible for him to lead an ideological revolution. The unagitated mind does not propose the overthrow of an established order; it may rebel, but it hesitates to destroy. Roosevelt's bitterness supplied him with the animus he needed to create a system of his own, one in which he would again be the center of the universe, the sun around which everything else revolved.

Bobby would later question the wisdom of Roosevelt's revolution, but he would do so only with reluctance, with an ambivalence he did not bother to conceal. He could never have brought himself to denounce the philosophy of the New Deal completely. Bobby may have been, as his enemies said, “ruthless,” but he lacked the capacity for quiet cunning that, far more than energy or intellect, accomplishes the reorganization of a nation, the reformation of a creed. A passage that Bobby quoted in one of his own speeches is revealing: “‘There is,' said an Italian philosopher, ‘nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.'”
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Bobby no doubt thought it prudent to refer to Machiavelli as “an Italian philosopher”; burdened as he was by a reputation for “ruthlessness,” he could hardly afford to be revealed as a careful student of
The Prince.
38
And yet the Machiavellian aperçu that attracted Bobby's eye was a cautionary, not a ruthless one, one that emphasized how difficult and how dangerous revolutions are. Real revolutionaries do not dwell on this fact; only ambivalent ones do. Bobby was not a Machiavellian prince; Franklin Roosevelt was in many ways much closer to being that. Roosevelt, less sensitive than Bobby, was more subtle. Roosevelt did not dwell on the dangers and perplexities of revolution; he would doubtless have denied that the New Deal was a revolutionary program at all. Certainly he never came clean as to the
nature
of the revolution he was leading; he was not about to alienate his fellow citizens by insisting openly, as the Federalists had done before him, on the virtues of aristocratic governance. Roosevelt instead appealed to the people and, in the temperate language of reform and Enlightened economic policy, denounced the new men, the plutocrats, the representatives of the vulgar “business interests,” the “economic royalists” who had supplanted the ancient gentry. According to Roosevelt, they, and not he, were the real revolutionaries, the real villains.
39
Bobby talked of revolution and even fantasized about it, but he was not a genuine revolutionary. Franklin Roosevelt was. Roosevelt was the Moses, the Solon, the Lycurgus of the welfare state, and for a time Bobby could but piously follow in his footsteps.

The Significance of the Frontier in Patrician History

B
OBBY'S AND
J
ACK'S
progressive and idealistic rhetoric, set off by toothy smiles and carefully maintained suntans, did more for the cause of Roosevelt's paternalistic federal establishment than anything since the great man himself. The brothers' decision to embrace the cause was not, however, the easy, obvious one it might seem, for by the time Jack and Bobby came of political age, the Stimsonian path had ceased to be a sure way to power. It is true that, in the quarter-century between 1940 and 1965, four brilliant aristocrats were at or near the head of affairs—FDR, Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, and Jack Kennedy himself. But after all, Acheson's administration could not have survived without the plebeian beard that Truman supplied; Stevenson lost (twice) to the decidedly less Stimsonian Ike, and Kennedy's own margin of victory over the “classless” Nixon was slim. The paternalistic mentality that had proved popular in the first half of the century, during the climax of immigration in the early years of the century and at the height of the Depression in the thirties, produced far less enthusiasm in the electorate in the postwar years, years in which a booming economy proved that the United States remained a land of opportunity for individuals. In the postwar period Americans regained confidence in their ability to improve their lives through their own individual efforts, without the assistance of the welfare and administrative state. The legacy of that renewed confidence is with us still, in the millions of baby boomers who were born in the prosperous decades that followed the war, a testament to a generation's faith in its future. That confidence portended ill for the Stimsonians, portended, indeed, their demise as a governing class. Looking from the lofty heights of the presidency on a Massachusetts state Democratic convention in the early sixties, Jack Kennedy was scornful of Irish machine politicians like Edward J. “Knocko” McCormack, Sr., Patrick J. “Sonny” McDonough, and Peter “Leather Lungs” Clougherty. “Their day is gone,” the President told Ben Bradlee, who was covering the convention for
Newsweek,
“and they don't know it.”
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Perhaps their day
was
gone, but so was the Stimsonians' own. Thirty years later characters like Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Adlai Stevenson seem hardly less exotic than the Carmine De Sapios and Knocko McCormacks of the period; it is difficult to conceive of a patrician statesman displaying a similarly splendid plumage on the national political stage today. Contemporary patricians in public office, such as former Governor Weld, are reduced to melancholy stunts like jumping into Boston Harbor fully clothed. Jack Kennedy accurately foretold the demise of the machine politicians, the politicians who carried on the tradition of his own grandfather Honey Fitz, the politicians whose style he himself so emphatically rejected, but he seems not to have foreseen the death of the Stimsonian tradition he had struggled to make his own.