Kennedy (70 page)

Any affront to his office—whether it came from Congress on the B-70, Khrushchev on Cuba, Big Steel on prices, or his own church on education—was resisted. What he could not accomplish through legislation—to fight recession, inflation, race discrimination and other problems—he sought to accomplish through Executive Orders, proclamations, contingency funds, inherent powers, unused statutes, transfers of appropriations, reorganization plans, patronage, procurement, pardons, Presidential memos, public speeches and private pressures.

Example:
In the summer of 1963, unable to obtain passage of his education bill and concerned about growing youth unemployment, he used his Presidential “emergency fund” to distribute $250,000 for guidance counselors in a drive against school dropouts.

Example:
His first Executive Order, improving surplus food distribution to the needy, had been previously held up by his predecessor for lack of clear statutory authority. Kennedy issued it immediately, drawing upon his constitutional powers and on revenues available from customs fees.

“The Constitution has served us extremely well,” he explained to a group of students in the White House flower garden, “but…all its clauses had to be interpreted by men and had to be made to work by men, and it has to be made to work today in an entirely different world from the day in which it was written.”

Within the Executive Branch he accepted responsibility for every major decision, delegating work but never responsibility to Cabinet, National Security Council, Joint Chiefs of Staff, White House aides or other advisers. He did not wait for unanimity among them or permit them to disregard his instructions. In reporting on executive actions to the Congress, he deliberately worded his messages to read “I have directed the Secretary…” rather than “I have requested…”

He had no intention of using his staff, he said, “to get a prearranged agreement which is only confirmed at the President’s desk. That I don’t agree with.” He wanted no one shielding him from anticipating problems and seeking to initiate solutions. Told in one conference by a sub-Cabinet member that the issue at hand involved the biggest decision he would ever have to make, he replied drily: “We get one of those every week.”

He was very clear about the distinct roles of advisers and Presidents. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, he said, “advise you the way a man advises another one about whether he should marry a girl. He doesn’t have to live with her.” And in the three-network television interview of December, 1962, which contained his remarkably candid views on the Presidency, he stated:

He deliberately had many advisers of varying points of view. Some outsiders mistook their clash of ideas for confusion, and assumed that a multiplicity could only produce uncertainty. Because they could not tell whether Dillon or Heller was in charge of tax planning, or whether Acheson or Rusk was in charge of Berlin planning, they assumed the President was either equally confused or compromising two views. Actually, he was in charge and liked hearing alternatives and assumptions challenged before he made up his mind.

His decisions were not fixed by any “grand design” for the future. He started his term with basic convictions and broad goals just as a scientist begins with faith in his hypothesis, but each new discovery and experience would broaden his perspective and recast his strategy. Because he had a shrewd judgment of the possible, he did not exhaust his energies or hopes on the impossible. Asked what kind of world he hoped to leave his successor in 1969, he replied in mid-1961, “I haven’t had time to think about that yet.”

Yet ever since his youth he had possessed an unusual ability to take the long view. “I sometimes think,” he said, “we are too much impressed by the clamor of daily events. Newspaper headlines and the television screens give us a short view…. Yet it is the…great movements of history, and not the passing excitements, that will shape our future.” Despite his fascination with the past, he oriented his policies to the future. His speeches were increasingly addressed to the next generation as well as his own, and he wanted to make sure there would be one. “Each President,” he wrote, “is the President not only of all who live, but, in a very real sense, of all those who have yet to live.” To help the next generation, he was always fashioning, not grand designs, but single steps—toward disarmament and space discoveries and salt water conversion and an end to illiteracy and disease. He talked of laying
the groundwork now for foreign policy beyond the cold war—of preparing now for coming water shortages, doctor shortages, classroom shortages, power and timber and park and playground shortages—of an Alliance for Progress a decade from now and an Atlantic Partnership a generation from now and wilderness preserves a century from now. Maintaining our forest lands is a “challenge to our foresight,” he said, because “trees planted today will not reach the minimum sizes needed for lumber until the year 2000.”

In fact, one of his favorite stories, which he repeated again on the fifteenth of November, 1963, related how French Marshal Lyautey’s gardener sought to put off the persistent Marshal by reminding him that the trees which he wanted planted would not flower for a hundred years. “In that case,” the Marshal had said, “plant it this afternoon.” John Kennedy believed in planting trees this afternoon.

As his months in office increased, however, he talked more and more about the limitations of power.

“Every President,” he wrote in the Foreword to my book on
Decision Making in the White House
, “must endure a gap between what he would like and what is possible.” And he quoted Roosevelt’s statement that “Lincoln was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.”

His strategy in the Presidency, as in politics, was to keep moving, looking for openings, hoping to make the breaks fall his way. He was wise enough to know that in a nation of consent, not command, Presidential words alone cannot always produce results.

Near the end of November, 1963, he wrote a letter to Professor Clinton Rossiter, whose work on
The American Presidency
he greatly admired. Rossiter had dedicated his book with a line from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth:
“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’” Kennedy, who could sleep with his perils but not always waken others to them, suggested in his letter as “more appropriate” the exchange between Glendower and Hotspur in
Part I
of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV:

D
URING THE FOUR YEARS
following John Kennedy’s inauguration the United States experienced the longest and strongest economic expansion in this nation’s modern history, as the output of goods and services increased more in four years than it had in the previous eight. The rate of national economic growth in 1960 was less than 3 percent, and a major talking point in his campaign. The three-year average during 1961-1963 was nearly double that level.

Nixon in 1960 had derided Kennedy’s complaints about the growth rate, and some of Kennedy’s own advisers were doubtful that these figures meant much to most voters. But to Kennedy they meant jobs. By the end of 1963 a record $100 billion, 16 percent growth in the nation’s total output had provided more than two and three-quarter million more jobs and a record rise in labor income. The amount of idle manufacturing capacity had been reduced by half, and for the first time the seventy-million-job barrier had been shattered. The postwar trend of recurring recessions had been broken; the recession which was “due” in 1963 had been skipped; and nearly every indicator of the state of the economy was at a record level.

The President was far from satisfied with these gains. Too many men were still without work. Too many families, in Appalachia and Harlem and other centers of poverty throughout the country, were still without hope. He had plans to do more in the years ahead. He had regrets that he had been unable to do more in the years that had passed. But those who throughout his tenure were demanding that he do more and do it all at once clearly misjudged both the man and the mood of the
Congress and country. Partly because he did move cautiously, deliberate carefully, talk conservatively and seek counsel from a Republican Secretary of the Treasury, he obtained from the Congress a host of far-reaching economic measures, all while under heavy Republican attack, and all while confronted with a delicate and dangerous imbalance of international payments, an “independent” Federal Reserve Board and a conservative coalition in Congress.

The President would not claim that Federal actions alone had been responsible for all the economy’s gains. Nor do I claim that he devised all his own economic policies. Kennedy had little formal background in economics. Nixon accused him in the campaign of being an “economic ignoramus…who doesn’t understand simple high school economics.” Young Jack Kennedy probably didn’t learn much economics in high school—few do—or, for that matter, anywhere else. At Harvard he had received a “C” in a beginning economics course from instructor Russ Nixon, whom Congressman Kennedy later enjoyed cross-examining when Nixon turned up as an official with a union kicked out of the CIO for its relations with Communist fronts. Republican fears to the contrary, illness had prevented him from obtaining much exposure to Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. His letters home from college indicated that he was operating on a “budget” and occasionally dabbling in stocks, and he sought as a Senator to keep at least his household operations within the confines of his Senate salary. But he had little interest in his father’s business or most of his own economic environment, had no taste for economic theory and, even as a legislator, defied classification on the economic spectrum. As President he was generally more cautious on spending than the Republicans thought but more liberal than his tight-fisted handling of the Budget indicated. He did not regard government planning as socialism, but neither did he believe the Budget should never be balanced. He recognized limits on “big government’s” attempts to do everything, but few limits in combating unemployment and poverty.

He never mastered the technical mysteries of debt management and money supply. He once confided in his pre-Presidential days that he could remember the difference between fiscal policy, dealing with budgets and taxes, and monetary policy, dealing with money and credit, only by reminding himself that the name of the man most in charge of monetary policy, Federal Reserve Board Chairman William McChesney Martin, Jr., began with an “M” as in “monetary.”

But as President he more than compensated for his limited background in economics by his superb ability to absorb information and to ask the right questions. He was surrounded with probably the most knowledgeable group of articulate economists in U.S. history. He recognized
the role of economics in all his decisions, and included Walter Heller in his pre-press conference breakfasts and pre-State of the Union meetings.

The members of the Council of Economic Advisers, led by Walter Heller and absolutely invaluable to the President (whom they kept buried in a tide of memoranda), emphasized more than the others the “gap” between our production and our potential. Treasury Secretary Dillon emphasized more than the others the international dangers of too large a Budget deficit. Part-time adviser Ken Galbraith—who helped work on our 1961 economic messages before taking up his duties as Ambassador to India (in what the President called Galbraith’s “period of penance”)—emphasized more than the others the benefits of more public spending. Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg emphasized more than the others the uses of massive public works and other pinpointed solutions. The President’s leading “outside” economic adviser, Professor Paul Samuelson, emphasized more than the others the value of a temporary tax cut. Banker Martin, Businessman Hodges, Trader Ball and other department and agency heads emphasized more than others the needs of their respective clienteles. Budget Directors Bell and Gordon usually sided with Heller. My role, untrained as I was in economics, was simply to analyze and synthesize, refining issues for the President’s consideration and relating them to the larger legislative and political outlook.

All these advisers, it should be stressed, whatever their differences in emphasis, agreed on the same basic principles: that unemployment was too high, that Budget deficits at such times were both unavoidable and useful, and that consumer purchasing power should be more strongly supported by Federal actions than had been true under the previous administration. The President paid most attention to Heller and Dillon, but he also mixed in his own readings, observations and sense of the national and Congressional mood. He was slow to grasp many of the theoretical economic doctrines presented to him, but on practicable proposals and problems he learned fast. An old friend and part-time adviser, Professor of Economics Seymour Harris, invited with his wife to watch the 1962 America’s Cup races at Newport with the Kennedys, spent most of the time discussing economics and later wrote: