Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (4 page)

The same week, Kennedy arranged a meeting with Nixon as a show of national unity. He privately acknowledged that he had nothing to say to his recent rival, but he thought it was important to give the impression that he would construct a bipartisan administration, though he would not offer him a job. After the meeting, in which Nixon did most of the talking, Kennedy privately remarked, “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it.”

Two meetings with Eisenhower were more consequential. Kennedy wished to avoid any demonstration of antagonism, which had marked the transition from Truman to Eisenhower in 1952–53. Although Kennedy did not think well of Ike, seeing him as an “old fuddy-duddy” and calling him an “old asshole” who had lost control of his administration and become a “non-president,” he understood that Eisenhower still enjoyed high public standing.

The first meeting at the White House in December 1960 focused on foreign policy problems. Eisenhower dominated the conversation; afterward he praised Kennedy as “a serious earnest seeker for information.” He believed that Kennedy “will give full consideration to the facts and suggestions we presented,” implying that despite party and campaign differences, Eisenhower foresaw continuity between their administrations. Kennedy kept his counsel largely because he didn’t wish to reveal the limits of what he knew about the topics Ike had put before him or what he intended to do as president: “NATO nuclear sharing, Laos, the Congo, Algeria, Disarmament [and] Nuclear test suspension negotiations, Cuba and Latin America, U.S. balance of payments and the gold outflow.”

In January, as Kennedy approached his inauguration, he asked for a second meeting. He was particularly worried about a civil war in Laos and the possibility that his first crisis would compel a decision on using military force to prevent a communist victory, which Eisenhower’s advisers believed would pose a threat to all of Southeast Asia. Kennedy told an aide, “Whatever’s going to happen in Laos, an American invasion, a Communist victory or whatever, I wish it would happen before we take over and get blamed for it.” He feared a military action that went badly, diverted attention from other issues, and produced unfavorable contrasts with Ike. Comparison between him, a junior naval officer, and Eisenhower, the storied five-star World War II general, would clearly be disadvantageous at the start of Kennedy’s term.

When he sat down with Eisenhower, Kennedy wanted to discuss administrative questions. In particular, he was keen to talk about “the present national security set up, organization within the White House . . . [and the] Pentagon.” But Eisenhower put him off with the recommendation that he delay “any reorganization before he himself could become well acquainted with the problem.” Ike’s advice did not sit well with Kennedy, who believed that Eisenhower’s affinity for a military command system had produced an overly cautious administration reluctant to act boldly and move in new directions. Kennedy gave Eisenhower the impression that he intended to set up a government that relied on having the right man in the right place. Eisenhower, who believed that successful administration depended more on smooth-running bureaucracies than on ambitious men pressing their personal agendas, considered Kennedy naïve in thinking that he could find miracle workers who would help him solve national and international problems.

Kennedy, however, had no precise plan for how he would organize his administration. He believed that it required considerable forethought and preparation. Consequently, after winning the nomination, he had invited Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s White House counsel and architect of his 1948 election victory, to discuss campaign politics. At the end of a breakfast meeting, Kennedy made “a request that had no precedent in American politics, one that was to set a pattern for future transfers of presidential power,” Clifford recalled. Kennedy said, “Clark, I’ve been thinking about one matter where you could be of special help to me. If I win, I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and say to myself, ‘What do I do now?’ I want to have a plan. I want someone to be planning for this between now and November 8.” He asked Clifford to prepare a memorandum “outlining the main tasks of the new Administration.” A week later, Kennedy told Clifford that a Brookings Institution group was studying past transitions and discussing ways to improve on them. He persuaded Clifford to be his representative on the committee.

At the same time, Kennedy invited Columbia University political scientist Richard Neustadt, who had just published a widely discussed book,
Presidential Power
, to write a transition plan for him as well. Neustadt, who knew that Kennedy had also directed Clifford to develop a strategy for taking control of the government, asked how he should coordinate his efforts with Clifford. Kennedy instructed him to ignore Clifford. “I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers,” Kennedy told him. “If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”

Kennedy knew that the most effective presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts—had consulted various advisers but at the end of the day had relied on their own counsel to make the most important decisions of their terms. As Harry Truman had said, “the buck stops here.” It was the president who had the responsibility for choosing between the options available to him. Besides, for someone as young and inexperienced as he would be on entering office, Kennedy needed to insure against impressions of him as a cipher, a novice simply following the lead of subordinates who thought they knew better than their chief.

Neither Clifford nor Neustadt expressed an interest in becoming a part of the new administration, which pleased Kennedy. Tall, handsome, with the looks of a matinee idol and a reputation as a political miracle worker who had engineered Truman’s 1948 upset victory, Clifford would be a competitor for center stage with any president who brought him into the White House. Moreover, Kennedy saw Clifford as someone whose ambition for control would provoke clashes with other advisers and create unwanted tensions in a new administration trying to develop policy initiatives. Kennedy joked that Clifford wanted nothing for his services “except the right to advertise the Clifford law firm on the back of the one-dollar bill.” Kennedy had no interest in surrounding himself with yes-men, but he was determined not to be intimidated by veterans of earlier administrations, who found their way into the White House and believed themselves better prepared to lead the country than he was.

As for Neustadt, Kennedy had no plan to appoint him to some White House job that carried greater importance than the one he had held during the Truman presidency in the Bureau of the Budget. A personal encounter with Neustadt in December 1960 leads me to think that Kennedy’s decision disappointed him. Neustadt spoke to a lunch meeting of Columbia College faculty, including myself, a new instructor in the history department. I have vivid memories of Neustadt speaking to us at the university’s Faculty Club from notes written on the back of an envelope about a recent meeting with the president-elect on plans for the transition. Listening to the professor, who seemed like a consummate Washington insider, I could not imagine Neustadt not wanting to become part of Kennedy’s White House and a contributor to the young president’s development of exciting New Frontier programs.

Kennedy saw Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice president–elect, as a prime example of someone convinced he had greater understanding than Kennedy of how to set the direction of the new administration. Vice presidents had traditionally been men of limited influence in the government. John Adams, the first vice president, described the position as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Woodrow Wilson asserted, “In explaining how little there is to be said about it, one has evidently said all there is to say.” During the 1960 campaign, when Eisenhower was asked to name a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that he had adopted as president, he replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” Eisenhower’s comment spoke more about his reluctance to back Nixon’s reach for the White House than Nixon’s performance as vice president.

As the former Senate majority leader and a domineering personality who hated being anything less than top dog, Johnson arrived in the vice presidency determined to transform the office into something more important than it had been, though he was mindful of how Nixon had used the office to make himself into a credible presidential candidate. Johnson’s twenty-seven years in Washington, first as a secretary to a Texas congressman, then as a congressman for eleven years and a senator for twelve, had been a case study in mastering the Capitol’s congressional politics and making himself a prominent national figure. Many astute Washington insiders wondered why he would trade his powerful Senate post for the less consequential VP job. But Johnson believed that his days as a dominant majority leader were coming to an end: If Nixon became president, he would be less cooperative with a Democratic-controlled Senate than Eisenhower had been; if Kennedy won the White House, Johnson assumed that he would be a secondary player with a Democrat as president. Better to be second fiddle to Kennedy as vice president than to be just one of several senators eclipsed by his party’s new leader.

But presiding over the Senate and casting rare tie-breaking votes—a vice president’s only constitutional duties—was not Johnson’s idea of how he would serve in Kennedy’s White House. Within days of becoming vice president, he asked Kennedy to sign an executive order giving him “general supervision” over a number of government agencies and directing cabinet secretaries to copy the vice president on all major documents sent to the president. Seeing Johnson’s request as the opening wedge in a campaign to make himself a co-president, Kennedy simply dropped the memo in a drawer, where it was left to languish along with Johnson’s ambitions for a larger role in the administration. In a 1964 interview with Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie Kennedy recalled Jack and Lyndon together vying or “fencing” with each other about “political things. And I always thought Lyndon was arguing with him or being rude, but Jack was sort of parrying with such amusement, and he always sort of bested him. Lyndon would give a big elephant-like grunt,” grudgingly conceding that he was the subordinate in the relationship.

Kennedy’s determination not to be the captive of any individual or set of advisers partly rested on a reading of Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume
The Age of Roosevelt
, a reconstruction of the first years of FDR’s presidency. Schlesinger’s history provided Kennedy with a useful model of how to manage advisers. Roosevelt had encouraged competition for influence among his closest associates. It was his way of compelling them to turn to him for final decisions on all the big issues of his presidency. Kennedy intended to do the same.

Moreover, he was determined to be an activist president, a chief executive who placed “himself in the very thick of the fight,” a president unlike Harding and Coolidge in the twenties and now Eisenhower. Ike’s contemporary reputation for passivity was overdrawn, but it was the conventional wisdom of 1960, and it was the sort of leadership that Kennedy believed current sentiment wished him to shun. The moment demanded a president more like the two Roosevelts and Truman—someone who would risk “incurring” the “momentary displeasure of the public” by exercising “the fullest powers of the office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was the picture of a president less interested in domestic affairs and day-to-day battles with congressmen and senators to pass legislation than in formulating and executing foreign policies to protect the nation from external threats and find ways to assure immediate and long-term peace.

But whatever Kennedy could take away from the experience of the Roosevelts and Truman to make himself a successful president, it was clear to him that there were no hard and fast formulas for presidential effectiveness, and that circumstances and his own temperament would determine his fate. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian who had designed Truman’s containment policy, believed that Kennedy’s personal attributes set him apart from other political leaders and gave him the wherewithal to be a great president. Kennan, who agreed to become ambassador to Yugoslavia after discussing the job with Kennedy, described him as “the best listener I’ve ever seen in high position anywhere.” He was not a poseur or classic political glad-hander who loved to hear the sound of his own voice and craved the adulation that was expected in response. “He asked questions modestly, sensibly,” Kennan recalled, “and listened very patiently to what you had to say and did not try, then, to tell jokes, to be laughed at, or to utter sententious statements himself to be admired.” He did not “monopolize” a conversation but tried to learn from it—“a rare thing among men who have arisen to very exalted positions.”

At the start of his term, Kennedy believed that most of those who would serve with him could make a significant difference in shaping his administration. He was determined to seek out the best and the brightest for the top White House jobs and then talk them into taking on the sometimes thankless work that carried risks to their reputations and peace of mind—not to mention the diminished public pay compared with what they could earn in the private sector. But to Kennedy and the people he brought into his administration, public service was a calling that gave them satisfaction and served the national well-being—at least that was the ideal that drew others to work for a president they believed was about to make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of Americans and people everywhere.

Yet the strengths that Kennedy personally and the men advising him brought to the presidency provided no guarantee of a successful administration. Like all his White House predecessors, Kennedy faced uncertain events that could bedevil his time in office. But like the most successful of these men, Kennedy understood that presidential effectiveness required a capacity for imaginative thinking or flexibility that could help him master unforeseen challenges. He also appreciated that whether he could rise to that standard in every circumstance was an open question.