Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (10 page)

During the Cold War, LeMay was prepared to inflict greater damage on the Russians with nuclear bombs in a preemptive first strike. He dismissed civilian control of his decision-making, complaining that the White House had a phobia about nuclear weapons and privately asking, “Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?” LeMay was the inspiration for “General Jack D. Ripper” in the 1964 film farce
Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
, a harrowing satire of a paranoid U.S. commander who believes that the Russians have poisoned the U.S. water supply and orders a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. Ted Sorensen called LeMay “my least favorite human being.”

When Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, asked the staff director of the Joint Chiefs for a copy of the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP), the blueprint for nuclear war, the general at the other end of the line said, “We never release that.” An exasperated Bundy explained, “I don’t think you understand. I’m calling for the president and he wants to see the JSCP.” Small wonder that the Pentagon was reluctant to let even the president read a plan that threatened to strike Moscow with 170 atomic and hydrogen bombs. Every major Soviet, Chinese, and East European city was slated for destruction, including the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in the communist bloc. When Kennedy received a formal briefing on the war plan, he was sickened by what he heard. Turning to a high administration official, he said, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

At the time, Schlesinger reflected on how some people questioned Kennedy’s willingness to retain “Chiefs who occasionally seemed so much out of sympathy with his policy. The reason was that, in his view, their job was not policy but soldiering, and he admired them as soldiers.” Kennedy said that “it’s good to have men like Curt LeMay and Arleigh Burke commanding troops once you decide to go in. But these men aren’t the only ones you should listen to when you decide whether to go in or not,” he told
Time
columnist Hugh Sidey. Schlesinger also noted Kennedy’s sensitivity “to the soldier’s role—dangerous in war and thankless in peace.” Kennedy was fond of quoting a poem:

God and the soldier all men adore,

In Time of trouble and no more;

For when War is over and all things righted,

God is neglected—the old soldier slighted.

Yet it wasn’t simply regard for career military men dictating Kennedy’s willingness to keep quarrelsome chiefs like Burke and LeMay in place. As long as they confined their differences with him to the conference room and did not embarrass him with public protests, he was reluctant to stir up anything resembling the political criticism Harry Truman had caused with Douglas MacArthur’s dismissal in 1951. The closeness of Kennedy’s election victory influenced not only the choice of men he appointed to high administration positions but also the minimal freedom he believed he had to provoke controversies that could erode his limited political capital.

Lemnitzer was not entirely off the mark in wondering about Kennedy’s readiness to deal with national security questions. For someone who saw foreign affairs and threats to the peace as the central issues of his presidency, Kennedy had entered the transition period with astonishingly little certainty about his choices for secretaries of defense and state. His highest priority, however, was finding appointees who satisfied domestic political considerations. True, Kennedy wanted men he saw as impressively bright and tough-minded—“a ministry of talent,” he said—but the closeness of the election convinced him that he had to choose appointees who would be considered bipartisan or would not intensify national political divisions. These same political considerations had led him to reappoint Allen Dulles as head of the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI, signaling that continuity rather than radical innovation would be the initial hallmark of the administration. A reluctance to antagonize Hoover, who had files he could use against any officeholder who might try to unseat him, and, specifically, embarrassing material about Kennedy’s womanizing, may also have influenced the decision.

Feeling initially surrounded by the Eisenhower military and security officials he felt compelled to keep on—at least for a time—Kennedy moved quickly to ensure that in addition to Bobby he would have some familiar faces close to him. Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger topped the list.

No one on his staff had been closer to Kennedy during his ten Senate years than Sorensen. Reporters described him as “the president’s ‘intellectual alter ego,’ and ‘a lobe of Kennedy’s mind.’”

Sorensen was born in Nebraska in 1928, the son of the Danish American state’s attorney general, who was a progressive Theodore Roosevelt Republican, and a Russian Jewish mother, who was a pacifist advocate of women’s rights. Sorensen was a superb student at the University of Nebraska, where he graduated first in his class from the law school in 1951, at the age of twenty-three. As a high school, college, and law student, he had been an activist on behalf of equal rights for African Americans, urging a fair employment law upon the Nebraska legislature and testing local segregationist practices in places of public accommodation like restaurants, the municipal swimming pool, and the university’s dormitories. He was also an avowed pacifist who, when registering for the draft, requested classification for noncombat service. In the late 1940s, when the country was awash in anticommunist agitation, being a proponent of left-wing causes took some courage. It was a demonstration of Sorensen’s affinity for high-minded missions and self-righteousness, which throughout his years as a Senate and White House staffer would become a source of conflict with anyone who did not share his views.

After graduating from law school, Sorensen headed to Washington without a job, an “immense gamble,” as he saw it, but he hoped to find some kind of public service that could “make a difference,” which was shorthand for saying he was looking for a calling that would not only change the world but also make him famous or at least a public figure. He had been drawn to Washington by what had attracted so many others through the generations—a chance to do good things and become someone important.

It took several days of walking the city’s steaming July pavements before he found an opening at the Federal Security Agency, part of the Social Security system as well as a forerunner of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He stayed there only for a little over a year, however; a chance to write a report on the Railroad Retirement System ended his service at the FSA, where the likelihood of budget cuts seemed certain to eliminate his job. But writing reports that seemed likely to have little, if any, impact did not measure up to what had brought him to the capital.

Sorensen resumed the hunt for a government position that fulfilled his larger ambitions. With Eisenhower about to become president and executive branch openings in short supply, he looked for an appointment on Capitol Hill. He was not impressed with what he had seen of Congress from a seat in the Senate gallery or at one of its committee hearings: The public posturing and intellectual and moral strength of the men he observed “disillusioned” him. In time, however, he came to believe that congressmen and senators were a mixture of good and bad: “an ambitious young idealist can realize his highest ambitions and a greedy demagogue can exercise his worst traits,” he wrote later.

When opportunities for appointments with newly elected senators Henry Jackson from Washington and John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts developed, Sorensen chose Kennedy. He liked Kennedy: He was “a good guy” who didn’t try to impress him with his pedigree or status; moreover, he offered Sorensen “a more challenging, exciting, and promising” assignment, developing an economic plan of renewal for New England, than anything Jackson proposed. But Sorensen also saw Kennedy as a senator on the make. He sensed from the first that Joe Kennedy’s son had higher aspirations than being one of ninety-six legislators. For someone as devoted to liberal causes as Sorensen, joining Kennedy was more the result of ambition to tie himself to a rising star than to be a true believer in bold social reforms. If he had followed Kennedy’s Senate campaign, Sorensen knew that Kennedy was essentially a budding Cold Warrior rather than an advocate of progressive domestic advance.

Political considerations more than any assessment of Sorensen’s abilities had dictated the Jackson and Kennedy job offers. Jackson believed that a Sorensen on his staff would help his political standing with Scandinavian constituents. Kennedy didn’t mention his political conviction that Sorensen’s outspoken liberalism would help him with left-of-center Democrats suspicious of Kennedy’s commitment to their causes.

Nor did Sorensen mention in his 2008 memoir,
Counselor
, the political gain Kennedy saw from hiring him. Although Sorensen complained in his book about “the idolaters who have almost buried the memory of the real man under a Camelot myth too heroic to be human,” Sorensen’s recollections contribute to the romanticized portrait of a great president. He wrote: “Despite the exaggerated attention and speculation, some malicious, some merely mindless focused on allegations about his private life, and despite the revisionist detractors, these hindsight distortions of his life and record have not lessened his hold on America’s affectionate memory.”

Like Kennedy’s critics, who aimed to undermine Kennedy’s historical profile, Sorensen’s recollections suffer from distortions aimed at maintaining and improving it. For one, he was unwilling to acknowledge that Kennedy’s invitation to him was partly based on political considerations about JFK’s shaky relations with liberals. Moreover, my revelations about Kennedy’s medical history and his efforts to hide the true state of his health from the public prior to and during his thousand days in the White House provoked complaints from Sorensen that I was mistaken: “There was no cover-up,” he told me several times, which of course there was.

And in
Counselor
, Sorensen acknowledged that he and the “Kennedy team . . . to some extent” downplayed, especially in the 1960 campaign, “the true state of JFK’s health.” They “may have obscured the stark truth,” he adds, but he couldn’t bring himself to describe fully the lengths to which Kennedy and those closest to him hid his health problems. It may be that Sorensen did not know the full extent of Kennedy’s medical troubles until the records were opened. He was surprised by what they revealed and regretted having agreed to open them.

Arthur Schlesinger certainly didn’t know. In July 1959, when he asked Kennedy about rumors that he had Addison’s disease and was taking cortisone to control it, Kennedy replied that he had an associated problem from malaria that had been brought under control and that “[n]o one who has the real Addison’s disease should run for the Presidency, but I do not have it,” which, of course, was untrue. The Kennedys understood that being more forthcoming might have cost him the election. They were surely correct: Given the closeness of the final tally and the problems Kennedy had convincing voters that his Catholicism and youth or inexperience should not be a bar to his election, adding a discussion of his medical history would probably have put his victory out of reach.

During his lifetime, Kennedy had reciprocated Sorensen’s regard. From the first, Kennedy relied on him for a variety of jobs: “My work at the office varies 100% from week to week,” Sorensen wrote his father in the spring of 1956. “One week it may be a commencement address . . . another week it may be a legislative matter . . . and another week politics.” Sorensen considered it “the most wonderful job in the world . . . for a wonderful, responsible guy . . . with whom I get along excellently.” He took exceptional satisfaction from having helped Kennedy write his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Profiles in Courage
, though he always downplayed his contribution to the book. He lived by the traditional speechwriter’s and ghostwriter’s creed of never laying claim to the words that came from his boss’s lips or pen. Yet he was protective of his turf, jealously guarding against other speechwriters altering his handiwork. In 1962, when Schlesinger persuaded Kennedy to add a paragraph to his State of the Union message that Sorensen had written, Kennedy said, “Ted certainly doesn’t go for additions to his speeches.” When the
New York Times
used words from Schlesinger’s paragraph as its “Quotation of the Day,” Kennedy told Schlesinger, “Ted will die when he sees that.”

Sorensen’s importance to Kennedy grew as the latter reached for the presidency. And the 1960 campaign was something of “a turning point.” Sorensen recalled with great satisfaction that Kennedy referred to him as “indispensable . . . one of his very key men who got the work done.” As Kennedy traveled the country and made campaign decisions, Sorensen was someone he “trust[ed] implicitly.” Not surprisingly, Kennedy decided to make the thirty-two-year-old Sorensen his “principal adviser on domestic policy and programs—his source of ideas, his draftsman of speeches and messages, the formulator of presidential legislative and administrative programs turning campaign promises into feasible action.” Sorensen was “overjoyed” when Kennedy announced at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the afternoon after the election that he would be the president’s “policy-program” adviser, with the title of “special counsel to the president.”

As Sorensen would eventually find out, his White House post was a source of satisfaction and conflict. He came to see the truth of the adage that the White House is, as Thomas Jefferson said, “a splendid misery.” The chance to make a difference in shaping the country’s current and future affairs exists side by side with the tensions and divisions that eventually develop in every administration. The competition for a president’s attention and regard provokes rivalries among ambitious men and women with exaggerated views of their own wisdom and importance.

Sorensen’s difficulties were principally with O’Donnell and other members of the so-called Irish Mafia who were unconvinced that Sorensen’s ideas and judgments were always Kennedy’s best options. Sorensen never entirely understood what antagonized O’Donnell, who was decidedly hostile to him. Sorensen wondered whether it was his “reticent reserve or inability to schmooze” or what some saw as his abrasive personality that offended O’Donnell. Sorensen also speculated that it may have been his status as “an outsider among the Irish-Catholic politicians from Massachusetts who thought they had a proprietary stake” in Kennedy’s career and presidency. He never found out. But the division was a reality that played a part in shaping Kennedy’s White House.