Kennedy (42 page)

In both meetings Eisenhower was joined after an interval by his Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, and in both meetings the President-elect probed hard on the problems he was about to face. Eisenhower, who had regarded Kennedy with disdain in the campaign, and who had apparently delayed their first meeting until it was clear no recount could change the voters’ verdict, reportedly told a friend that the young Senator had “tremendously impressed” him. Kennedy in turn found Eisenhower “better than I had thought,” and he was grateful for his cooperative attitude, remarking after the second meeting, “I don’t think we have asked for anything that they haven’t done.”

He also met briefly and cordially on November 14 with Nixon, to whose gracious wire of concession he had responded with congratulations “on a fine race” and his conviction “that you and I can maintain our long-standing cordial relations in the years ahead.” For the unprecedented meeting he requested with Nixon, which both men described
as amicable, and for which ex-President Herbert Hoover served as intermediary, Kennedy flew from Palm Beach to Nixon’s vacation retreat in Key Biscayne, Florida.

Eisenhower and Nixon, merely by meeting with Kennedy, were patriotically recognizing the certainty of his election, and thus helping to put an end to the bitter charges of fraud, the demands for recounts and the threats of Southern independent electors. In few other nations could so narrow a result have been so smoothly accepted. A framework of good feeling was established; and in sharp contrast to the rancor, the cool relations, the absence of communication and the casual indifference which had marked almost all previous Presidential transitions, the Eisenhower-Kennedy transfer was characterized by an atmosphere of cordiality and continuity. It demonstrated to the nation and the world a spirit of unity which John Kennedy was anxious to preserve.

There were some disagreements, to be sure. As I reviewed with Eisenhower’s Budget officers the document with which he would take his leave of the Congress in January, it was clear that its precarious balance relied upon legislative actions, expenditure reductions and revenue expectations which they knew full well would never be realized. But it was equally clear that they had no intention of revising their estimates in the light of changed conditions, preferring to let Kennedy take the blame for the deficit. At the same time, the President-elect thought it inappropriate and unwise, until he had full responsibility and information, to participate in, commit himself to, or even comment or be consulted upon those actions taken by the outgoing administration between election and inauguration—including a mission to Western Europe to improve the payments balance and the ending of all diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Below the Presidential level, the results varied from department to department. One appointee told us that his predecessor had spent most of their conference on transition problems urging him to retain that departing official’s personal private secretary. From my interview with the genial General Wilton Persons, who had succeeded Sherman Adams as the Assistant to the President, I learned enough to confirm Kennedy’s wisdom in abolishing the duties of that post, which included: permitting no memorandum, letter or document to go before the President without Persons’ initialed approval; seeing Cabinet members, Congressmen and White House aides who would otherwise “overwhelm” the President; granting interviews to few, if any, reporters except when the Press Secretary said it was necessary; and similar functions more appropriate to the chief of staff in a military chain of command. Although I was disappointed at the time that a promised list of pending problems was never forthcoming from Persons, I now realize that the personal and
political nature of White House posts would have made such a list wholly speculative.

For the most part, the collaboration was smooth and useful. Kennedy men emulated their leader in showing respect for their predecessors and gratitude for their assistance. The whole process was further facilitated by the Eisenhower administration’s generous agreement to put two incoming personnel on the payroll of each department as of January 3, 1961, with ten in both State and Defense.

Despite this move, one of the unsolved problems of that transition period, on which Kennedy would later successfully urge Congressional action for the sake of future Presidents-elect, was its cost. His personal fortune, homes, plane, telephone and Senate office payroll could absorb much of it. Many new appointees and advisers took care of their own expenses, although not without considerable hardship on their part. Many were granted office space in their prospective departments. But more funds had to be found for the many people required to handle mail, screen appointments, meet the press and assist the President-elect, for their wages, hotel rooms, office space, supplies, telephones and travel. It was unfair to saddle either the Kennedy family or the National Committee with the total bill, which was estimated in excess of $350,000 from election to inauguration.

Except for brief visits to Nixon, Boston and the LBJ ranch in Texas, Kennedy divided his time between Palm Beach, Washington and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. His air travels totaled an insignificant (compared to the campaign) fifteen thousand miles. For the first two weeks, and from time to time thereafter, he basked in the sun at Palm Beach—where he quickly gained fifteen pounds—but felt it was too fancy and faraway for serious announcements. He enjoyed his own home in Washington, but found himself more subject there to interruptions and requests than in New York. Moreover, his Georgetown house was not large, and the ever-present crowd of newsmen, policemen, Secret Service agents and onlookers was forced to freeze outside while the Senator met inside with aides and possible appointees.

One prolonged stay in Washington commenced earlier than planned. He had flown from Palm Beach to Washington to share Thanksgiving dinner with his wife, whose pregnancy kept her at home. When he left that evening to return to Florida, all was well. But upon landing in Palm Beach, he was told that John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been suddenly and prematurely born, and he immediately flew back to Washington.

The trip to Boston served three purposes: (1) to attend a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers, whose obligations of membership he took
very seriously (when nearly mobbed by cheering students in the Harvard Yard, he responded, “I’m here to go over your grades with President Pusey, and I’ll protect your interests”); (2) to confer with prospective appointees from the Boston and New England area, in a brief session at the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. home; and (3) to bid farewell to Massachusetts in an address to the state legislature on historic Beacon Hill.

The last was approached with some concern. Kennedy the historian was not unmindful of Lincoln’s farewell to the people of Springfield. Kennedy the politician was not unmindful of the debt he owed the state of his birth for making possible his public career. And Kennedy the President-elect was not unmindful of his inability to be as proud of all the politicians in Massachusetts as Massachusetts was of him. Few state governments in the United States have a record free from corruption, but in January, 1961, few had a record that could surpass the repeated disclosures of official wrongdoing that had rocked his home state. The President-elect felt he could neither avoid that issue nor deliver a self-righteous lecture about it.

There had been little time to prepare the speech, and I had reluctantly dipped into our file of phrases collected for the Inaugural Address in order to meet his specifications. It was not a lengthy speech—less than three dozen sentences. But it was one of his best, and it proved to be a moving occasion. It was his first formal address since the election, and to all those watching on television he looked and sounded like a President as he spoke of government as “a city upon a hill.”

By the time he flew to Boston, the pace of the President-elect very nearly matched the furious rate of the fall campaign, though it was far less physically punishing. Two months earlier he had concluded his brief statement of victory at the Hyannis Port Armory by saying, “Now my
wife and I prepare for a new administration—and a new baby.” In the weeks that followed, he had welcomed the new baby and largely formed the new administration. He had slept long hours, fished, golfed regularly, visited the LBJ ranch, attended the theater in New York and enjoyed the company of his family. Shunning a host of applicants, he had recommended his old roommate, the former Mayor of Gloucester, Benjamin Smith, to fill his Senate seat. He had sold all his corporate stocks and bonds and converted them into Government Bonds. He had read both pertinent and pleasurable books by the score, reviewed dozens of reports and conferred repeatedly with his expanding number of associates. Building wider public acceptance, he had seen not only Eisenhower and Nixon but Herbert Hoover, Billy Graham, labor leaders, farm leaders, Negro leaders and many more. He had held nineteen press conferences of one kind or another. He had conferred with Lyndon Johnson and with the leading Democrats in both houses of Congress. He had received regular intelligence briefings, and conferred with the British Ambassador and German Vice Chancellor, and he would later confer before inauguration with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

His “office” was the living room or library of whichever home he inhabited at the time—Palm Beach, Georgetown or the Carlyle Hotel penthouse—and his “office” continually throbbed with activity. While the Senator interviewed one prospective appointee, another waited in the bedroom, sometimes along with a Kennedy aide waiting to brief the President-elect and a delegation invited to see him. Press and Secret Service clustered outside, telephones rang constantly inside.

My notes on the instructions which he gave me one afternoon (largely because I happened to be there on other business) indicate the range of his activities:

By chance this last call to Senator Morse, then with the UN delegation in New York, was returned when I was again in conference with the President-elect and he answered the phone: “Yes…He’s here,
operator, but I’ll take it…. This is Senator Kennedy and I’m answering Mr. Sorensen’s calls for him today.”

But far from this often frenzied atmosphere the formulation of a new Presidential program was quietly under way. It was a remarkable job. A Democratic President had not succeeded a Republican since 1933, and that occasion offered little by way of precedent. Another President might have awaited his inauguration and then appointed study groups, after the pattern in 1953, to give him time and ideas. But Kennedy had a different conception of his duty. When asked, prior to the convention, what his first effort would be as President, he had replied: “… to determine what the unfinished business was, what our agenda was, and set it before the American people in the early months of 1961.” To do that required unusual efforts in the late months of 1960.

The previous summer, following his nomination, the Senator had commissioned with appropriate publicity a series of advisory committee reports to be delivered in the transition period: a report on Defense Department reorganization under the chairmanship of Stuart Symington, a report on foreign policy problems under Adlai Stevenson, a “non-partisan, bipartisan” report on national security measures under Paul Nitze, and a report on natural resource needs under Congressman Frank Smith. In addition, Averell Harriman was to tour Africa, and Senator Joe Clark and Congressman Emanuel Celler were to prepare new civil rights recommendations. The political and public relations value of announcing each of these studies at the start of the campaign was obvious.

But after noon on November 9, it was no longer a matter of politics and public relations. Many more reports were needed as foundations for new programs and policies. Public reports were useful, also, as trial balloons to test the political atmosphere, and as public evidence of continuing Kennedy momentum.

Several of the topics generally touched upon in the Stevenson report—including foreign economic policy, food surpluses, Africa, USIA, overseas personnel and disarmament—were assigned to a series of new task forces directed by Stevenson associates George Ball and John Sharon. James Landis was asked to report on regulatory agencies and Richard Neustadt on government reorganization. My first two assignments as Special Counsel to the President-elect were (1) to recruit a task force on ways to combat the recession and (2) to work out with him other studies needed. The latter list rapidly expanded to include depressed areas and West Virginia, housing and cities, health and Social Security, education, taxation, minimum wages, outer space, Latin America, India, cultural exchanges, USIA and the Peace Corps.

The obvious overlapping in these lists caused confusion at times but
represented a deliberate Kennedy pattern. Rejecting one suggestion for coordination, he said, “I simply cannot afford to have just one set of advisers.” One major subject omitted was agriculture, and an effort to establish a task force on this subject failed. We found many men with open minds on agriculture, and we found many experts, but we could find no open-minded experts.