The Best and the Brightest (11 page)

And when the Democrats returned, his old friends mentioned him as a man who should be used. He could serve a function but little understood in liberal administrations. These administrations need liberals for domestic tasks—not even a moderate conservative can be Secretary of Labor or of Health, Education and Welfare. But for foreign policy it is essential to have men who inspire confidence. This liberals do not do. Unless immediately on taking office they allay suspicion by taking an exceptionally strong stand in the Cold War, they will be suspected of a tendency, however subjective, towards appeasement of the Communists. The smallest gesture of conciliation will confirm this mistrust. Accordingly liberal administrations must place conservatives in charge of foreign policy or best of all, nonpolitical experts. Thus their need for men like Worth Campbell . . .

Chapter Four

It was a glittering time. They literally swept into office, ready, moving, generating their style, their confidence—they were going to get America moving again. There was a sense that these were brilliant men, men of force, not cruel, not harsh, but men who acted rather than waited. There was no time to wait, history did not permit that luxury; if we waited it would all be past us. Everyone was going to Washington, and the word went out quickly around the Eastern seacoast, at the universities and in the political clubs, that the best men were going to Washington. Things were going to be done and it was going to be great fun; the challenge awaited and these men did not doubt their capacity to answer that challenge. Even the campaign quote of Jack Kennedy seemed to keynote it. He had used it again and again, moving swiftly through small towns in the New Hampshire winter, closing each speech with the quote from Robert Frost: “. . . But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” History summoned them, it summoned us: there was little time to lose.

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good. Robert Frost, who had occasionally dropped by the Eisenhower White House to complain about the lack of leadership, sensed it. At the inaugural he said that a great new Augustan age was upon us, though he also challenged the new President to be more Irish than Harvard (not realizing that Harvard would produce a fine new breed of aggressive policy makers). It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

The Eisenhower stock could not have been lower; the country, which had taken reassurance from him at the beginning and relaxed in his easy presence, and which after the Korean War tensions had been ready for a father figure, was now restless. In Eisenhower’s last year in office, James Reston wrote a column in the
Times
which reflected the disappointment with Ike. Interviewing his friend Uniquack, Reston asked, “Who’s going to win the election?” Uniquack answered that Kennedy would win because “every President in this century has a double letter in his name. William McKinley—two
l
’s in William, Theodore Roosevelt—two
o
’s. Then there were Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and of course, Harry.”

“What about Eisenhower? Wasn’t he President?”

Uniquack: “We must await the judgment of history on that.”

Golf had long symbolized the Eisenhower years—played by soft, boring men with ample waistlines who went around rich men’s country-club courses in the company of wealthy businessmen and were tended by white-haired, dutiful Negroes. (Although almost everything John Kennedy did, thought, read, believed, liked was described and examined in minute detail by the public, one thing which was little known and deliberately obscured about the new President was that he was an excellent golfer, a far better player than the outgoing General.)

In contrast, the new men were tough—“hard-nosed realists” was a phrase often used to define them, a description they themselves had selected. They had good war records; they were fond of pointing out that they were the generation which had fought the war, that they had been the company commanders, had borne the brunt of the war and lost their comrades. This gave them special preparation for the job ahead, it was the company commanders replacing the generals, and even here was seen virtue. Actually, most of it was a myth. It was Walt W. Rostow, Bundy’s deputy, who had made this point, and typically, he had not been a company commander—he had picked bombing targets in Europe. While there were men in the Kennedy Administration who had been company commanders, they had little power in foreign policy. Rusk had been in the service but had been a staff colonel; Robert McNamara had been a semi-civilian doing statistics in the War Department; McGeorge Bundy had been an aide to a family friend who was an admiral; John McCone, head of the CIA, had made millions in shipbuilding (of the top people in national security, only the President had a distinguished war record). But their image was of virility; they played squash and handball to stay in shape, wrote books and won prizes (even the President had won a Pulitzer prize), climbed mountains to clear their minds. Many of them read poetry and some were said to be able to quote it.

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one). There was a sense of involvement even for those who were not a part of the excitement; the social columns of the major newspapers were closely read to find out who went to which cocktail and dinner party. We soon found out, however, that they did not go to many cocktail parties. They didn’t have time for that, for the idle chitchat. There were too many outsiders; they preferred, instead, dinner parties among their own, drinking a limited amount of good wine instead of too much hard liquor. The bright, quick repartee was reported, who had said what to whom.

The President himself was of course the object of the greatest fascination, and we craved details on what he read, what he ate, where he and Jackie went; all of that was news, and started, or ended, trends. It caused James MacGregor Burns to write with some irritation:

He is not only the handsomest, the best dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; his eye seizes instantly on the crucial point of a long memorandum; he confounds experts with superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipresent; no sleepy staff member can be sure that he will not telephone—or pop in; every hostess at a party can hope that he will. He is omnipotent; he personally bosses and spurs the whole shop; he has no need of Ike’s staff apparatus; he is more than a lion, more than a fox. He’s Superman!

McNamara, Bundy (who had been too powerful for Pusey at Harvard), Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, Sargent Shriver. Did they need a Texan? Everyone who met Bill Moyers came away impressed—a Kennedy-style Texan, with perhaps too much of the Bible in him, but that would change. A general? They had Maxwell Taylor, a
good
general, soldier-statesman, an intellectual who read books avidly and had even written one. They said he had resigned in the Eisenhower years in protest against the archaic defense policies, but they were wrong—he had not resigned, he had retired after serving the full four years, and then he had written his book. But the book was so critical that it seemed as if he had resigned—a small but very important difference which went unnoticed at the time. Still, he was their general; if Harvard produced generals it would have produced Max Taylor.

It was an extraordinary confluence of time and men, and many people in the know quoted Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to them at the first Cabinet meeting. He, the outsider, like us, looked at them with a certain awe, which was no wonder, since they had forgotten to invite him to the meeting, and only at the last minute, when the others were arriving, did someone remember the Vice-President and a desperate telephone search went on to find him. They were all so glamorous and bright that it was hard to tell who was the most brilliant, but the one who impressed him the most was “the fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair.” The fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair! A terrific line, because it once again delineated Johnson, who, Vice-President or no, seemed more a part of the Eisenhower era than this one. What was not so widely quoted in Washington (which was a shame because it was a far more prophetic comment) was the reaction of Lyndon’s great friend Sam Rayburn to Johnson’s enthusiasm about the new men. Stunned by their glamour and intellect, he had rushed back to tell Rayburn, his great and crafty mentor, about them, about how brilliant each was, that fellow Bundy from Harvard, Rusk from Rockefeller, McNamara from Ford. On he went, naming them all. “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” said Rayburn, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

So they carried with them an exciting sense of American elitism, a sense that the best men had been summoned forth from the country to harness this dream to a new American nationalism, bringing a new, strong, dynamic spirit to our historic role in world affairs, not necessarily to bring the American dream to reality here at home, but to bring it to reality elsewhere in the world. It was heady stuff, defining the American dream and giving it a new sense of purpose, taking American life, which had grown too materialistic and complacent, and giving it a new and grander mission. (That special hubris about the American age remained with some of the Kennedy people long after it had all gone sour and indeed come apart. In 1968, when the horror of the war and Gene McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire had finally driven Robert Kennedy from his role of Hamlet to announcing that he would become a candidate, Theodore Sorensen wrote for his announcement speech: “At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.” The sentence absolutely appalled all the younger Robert Kennedy advisers, who felt it smacked of just the kind of attitude which had gotten us into Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite their protests, it stayed in the speech.) The United States playing a new role, mighty and yet good. Not everyone, of course, was stirred by it. If there was a lack of modesty in the Kennedy beginnings, there were intellectuals who felt a more modest, limited sense about their own nation and its possibilities. In 1957, at a special symposium of American scholars, Walt Rostow, who would come to symbolize during both the Kennedy and the Johnson years the aggressive, combative liberal nationalism of the era, had made his case for an American national interest earlier in the symposium. Then David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, quietly warned against the dangers implicit in much of what Rostow had suggested (the Rostow idea that the American perspective of the world had not kept pace with American power in it and over it), which struck Riesman as jingoism. The Civil War, Riesman said, was “deadly serious as an omen of bellicosity and bigotry,” and he thought a humbler and more modest view of American society and its potential role in a diverse world was called for, as well as recognition of the failure of American culture here at home, the failure of the quality of American life, an understanding that not all indices of American life could be found in the booming statistics of the GNP. He felt that something was desperately missing. Commenting on “a kind of blandness that I somehow see as inhuman,” he noted that “when I see a French or Italian movie, the faces seem more alive and expressive than American faces in equivalent films. The very rich are perhaps unhappy in all countries. Their faces are often sour, fearful and suspicious. In America, millions are among the very rich in international terms, while the white-collar workers and many of the factory workers seem to me to be unhappy also—ill at ease in Zion.”

It would not be the last time Riesman was prophetic: in 1961, when the Kennedy team was already on board and there was great enthusiasm over the new theories of counterinsurgency (Rostow, his antagonist in the 1957 symposium, became one of the great propagators of antiguerrilla warfare) and Vietnam had been chosen as a testing ground, Riesman remained uneasy. In mid-1961 he had lunch with two of the more distinguished social scientists in the Kennedy government. On the subject of Vietnam the others talked about limited war with the combativeness which marked that particular era, about the possibilities of it, about the American right to practice it, about the very excitement of participating in it. All of this smacked strongly of the arrogance and hubris of the era, and Riesman became more and more upset with the tone and the direction of the conversation, until finally he stopped them and asked if they had ever been to Utah.
Utah!
No, they said, not Utah, but why Utah, had Riesman ever been there? No, Riesman answered, but he had read a great deal about the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and it occurred to him that his friends did not know much about America, about how deep the evangelical streak was. “You all think you can manage limited wars and that you’re dealing with an elite society which is just waiting for your leadership. It’s not that way at all,” he said. “It’s not an Eastern elite society run for Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.”