An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
The meeting began with an outward display of cordiality by both men at the north portico of the White House, where the president greeted his successor before press photographers and the marine band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Kennedy, eager to use his youth and vigor to rekindle public hope, stepped from his car before it had come to a full stop and rushed forward alone to shake hands before the president could remove his hat or extend his hand. It perfectly symbolized the changing of the guard.
During the meeting, which lasted over an hour, longer than anticipated, Eisenhower did most of the talking. It was by far the most time Kennedy had ever spent with Eisenhower. Jack found much of Ike’s discourse unenlightening, later describing the president to Bobby as ponderous and poorly informed about subjects he should have mastered. He did not appreciate Ike’s advice that he “avoid any reorganization before he himself could become well acquainted with the problem.” But he also came away from the meeting with a heightened appreciation of Ike’s appeal and a more intimate realization that Eisenhower’s political success rested on the force and effectiveness of his personality.
Eisenhower was more impressed with Kennedy. He saw greater substance to the man than he had formerly. Kennedy convinced him that he was “a serious, earnest seeker for information and the implication was that he will give full consideration to the facts and suggestions we presented.” (Jack had obviously done an effective job of masking his limited regard for the president’s presentation of issues.) Eisenhower had some reservations: He believed that Kennedy was a bit naive in thinking that he could master issues by simply putting the right men in place around him. Despite this concern, Ike sent word to Washington attorney Clark Clifford, the head of Kennedy’s transition team, that he had been “misinformed and mistaken about this young man. He’s one of the ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across.”
Ten weeks after his election, Kennedy had a clearer idea of priorities, and he requested another meeting with Eisenhower. His principal worries, he said, in order of importance, were Laos, the Congo, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Berlin, nuclear test talks and disarmament, Algeria, “an appraisal of limited war requirements vs. limited war capabilities,” and “basic economic, fiscal, and monetary policies.” Eisenhower declared himself ready to discuss any of these topics in a “larger meeting,” but he wanted to talk with Kennedy alone about presidential actions in a defense emergency, particularly authorization of the use of atomic weapons, and covert or “special operations, including intelligence activities.”
In their private meeting, which lasted forty-five minutes, Ike, who looked “very fit, pink cheeked,” and seemed “unharassed,” reviewed the emergency procedures for response to “an immediate attack.” It was one expression of current fears about a Soviet nuclear assault, even if, as Eisenhower knew, Moscow lacked the wherewithal to strike successfully against the United States. The prevailing wisdom, after the horrors of World War II and Soviet repression in the USSR and Eastern Europe, was that fanatical communists were capable of terrifying acts, especially against Western Europe, which Western political leaders would be irresponsible to ignore.
Kennedy marveled at Eisenhower’s sangfroid in discussing nuclear conflict. Ike assured Kennedy that the United States enjoyed an invulnerable advantage over Moscow in nuclear submarines armed with Polaris missiles, which could reach the Soviet Union from undetectable positions in various oceans. He seemed to take special pleasure in showing Kennedy how quickly a helicopter could whisk him to safety from the White House in case of a nuclear attack. With evident glee at a president’s military mastery, Ike said, “Watch this,” and instructed a military aide on the telephone: “Opal Drill Three.” The marine helicopter that landed almost at once on the White House lawn brought a smile of approval to JFK’s face as well.
But Kennedy’s main focus remained on Laos. A three-sided civil war between Pathet Lao communists, pro-Western royalists, and neutralists presented the possibility of communist control in Laos and, by extension, the loss of all Southeast Asia. As Kennedy noted in a later memo, “I was anxious to get some commitment from the outgoing administration as to how they would deal with Laos, which they were handing to us. I thought particularly it would be helpful to have some idea as to how prepared they were for military intervention.”
Speaking for the president, Eisenhower’s secretaries of state and defense urged a commitment to block communist control of Laos. They saw the Soviet bloc testing the unity and strength of Western intentions. They believed that the communists would avoid a major war in the region but that they would “continue to make trouble right up to that point.” They described Laos as “the cork in the bottle. If Laos fell, then Thailand, the Philippines,” and even Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime on Formosa would go. Eisenhower himself favored unilateral intervention if America’s allies would not follow its lead, predicting that Cambodia and South Vietnam would also be victims unless the United States countered communist aggression in Southeast Asia. He also advised against a coalition government in Laos: “Any time you permit Communists to have a part in the government of such a nation, they end up in control.” Kennedy was not happy at the prospect of having to send American forces into Laos as the first major action of his term. “Whatever’s going to happen in Laos,” he had said to Sorensen before the January meeting, “an American invasion, a Communist victory or whatever, I wish it would happen before we take over and get blamed for it.” Despite his bold talk, Eisenhower was reluctant to intervene, and there was no chance he would act in the closing days of his term.
By contrast with Laos, Cuba barely registered as an immediate worry. Eisenhower advised Kennedy that he was helping anti-Castro guerrilla forces to the utmost and that the United States was currently training such a group in Guatemala. “In the long run the United States cannot allow the Castro Government to continue to exist in Cuba,” Eisenhower said. None of this, however, was news to Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy had received a memo as early as August 1960, which Jack’s friend Florida senator George Smathers warmly endorsed, recommending that the U.S. government encourage formation of “a respectable government-in-exile” to replace Castro. Moreover, by October, Bobby knew that Cuban exiles in Miami were describing “an invasion fever in Guatemala” but that they felt themselves “being rushed into it and that they are not yet equipped for it.” Bobby was also advised that “this invasion story is in the open.” The fact, however, that no action seemed imminent put the Castro problem lower on Kennedy’s list of worries than Laos, and in his memo of the conversation with the president, Jack made no mention of Cuba.
In preparing for power, Kennedy wanted to ensure that he not be the captive of any group or individual. As the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, he anticipated dealing with more experienced Washington hands who would see his youth as a reason to assert their authority over him. He did not view potential appointees and advisers as intent on maliciously weakening his control but as forceful men accustomed to leading and eager to help an untested Chief Executive burdened with unprecedented responsibilities. His concern to ensure his authority registered clearly on Schlesinger, to whom he spoke repeatedly about Franklin Roosevelt’s “capacity to dominate a sprawling government filled with strong men eager to go into business on their own.”
Kennedy’s determination to maintain control of organizational, procedural, and substantive matters was evident even before he was elected. In August, he had asked Clark Clifford to prepare transition briefs. “If I am elected,” he said, “I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and have to ask myself, ‘What in the world do I do now?’”
Clifford was the consummate Washington insider. Tall, handsome, silver haired, he looked more like a matinee idol than a savvy attorney who had learned the inner workings of the White House as an aide to Truman. Clifford had made political control into a fine art: He greeted visitors to his office with a minute of silence and seeming indifference to their presence while
At the same time Kennedy invited Clifford to set an agenda for the transition, he asked Richard Neustadt, a Columbia political scientist who had recently published a widely praised book on presidential power, to take on the same assignment. On September 15, when Neustadt presented Kennedy with his memo on “Organizing the Transition,” Jack took an instant liking to the tone and substance of Neustadt’s advice: He counseled Kennedy against trying to repeat FDR’s Hundred Days, which had little parallel with the circumstances of 1961, and to settle instead on a presidential style that suited his particular needs. Kennedy disliked Clifford’s recommendation that he “see Congressmen all day long. ‘I can’t stand that,’” he told Neustadt. “Do I have to do that? What a waste of time.” Neustadt replied: “‘Now, look, you cannot start off with the feeling that the job must run you; that you have to do it this way because this is the way Truman did it. We’ll just have to think of devices to spare you as much of this as you don’t like. . . . We’ll have to use our ingenuity.’ He seemed relieved to be told what I am sure he hoped to hear,” Neustadt recalled. Kennedy asked him to elaborate in additional memos on a list of problems Neustadt expected to arise during the transition. Kennedy instructed him “‘to get the material directly back to me. I don’t want you to send it to anybody else.’ ‘How do you want me to relate to Clark Clifford?’” Neustadt asked. “I don’t want you to relate to Clark Clifford,” Kennedy answered. “I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers. If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”
BECAUSE KENNEDY THOUGHT in terms of people rather than structure or organization, his highest priority during the transition was to find the right men—no women were considered for top positions—to join his administration. Selecting a White House staff was little problem. Since he intended to be his own chief of staff who issued marching orders to subordinates, this eliminated the issue of elevating one close aide over others and making some of them unhappy. It was obvious to Kennedy that the men who had worked with him so long and so hard to build his Senate career and make him president—Sorensen, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Powers, and Salinger—were to become the White House insiders. Their occupancy of West Wing offices near the president’s Oval Office and their access to Kennedy without formal appointments signaled their importance in the administration. “The President was remarkably accessible,” Sorensen recalls. “O’Donnell and Salinger—and usually [McGeorge] Bundy [special assistant to the president for national security affairs], O’Brien and myself were in and out of the Oval Office several times a day.” Each member of the Kennedy team had particular responsibilities—O’Brien as legislative liaison, O’Donnell as appointments secretary, Powers as a political man Friday, Salinger as press secretary, and Sorensen as special assistant for programs and policies—but none operated within narrow bounds, working instead on anything and everything.
Choosing other officials was much more difficult. “Jack has asked me to organize [a] talent search for the top jobs,” Sargent Shriver told Harris Wofford two days after the election. “The Cabinet, regulatory agencies, ambassadors, everything. We’re going to comb the universities and professions, the civil rights movement, business, labor, foundations and everywhere, to find the brightest and best people possible.” Kennedy relished the idea of “appointing outstanding men to top posts in the government.” But it was not easy to identify and convince the seventy-five or so individuals needed for the cabinet and subcabinet to serve. As Jack told O’Donnell and Powers, “For the last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected President that I didn’t have any time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good President.” In addition, some talented people were not keen to interrupt successful careers to take on burdens that might injure their reputations. And Kennedy saw some of those eager for jobs as too self-serving or too ambitious to accept a role as a team player devoted to an administration’s larger goals. Kennedy also believed that his narrow electoral victory required him to make other nonpartisan appointments like those of Dulles and Hoover.
During the course of discussions with potential cabinet appointees who modestly explained that they had no experience in the office the president-elect wanted them to fill, Kennedy invariably replied that he had no experience being president either. They would, he explained with some levity, all learn on the job. His response was partly meant to reassure future officials that he had enough confidence in their native talents and past performance to believe that they would serve his administration with distinction. But he was also signaling his intention to keep policy commitments to a minimum until he could assess immediate realities. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled that after Bobby had asked if he would like to be an ambassador and Schlesinger replied that he would prefer to be at the White House, Jack said to him: “‘So, Arthur, I hear you are coming to the White House.’ ‘I am,’” Schlesinger replied. “‘What will I be doing there?’ ‘I don’t know,’” Kennedy answered. “But you can bet we will both be busy more than eight hours a day.” And Schlesinger would be. He operated from the East Wing, which, except for Schlesinger, was filled with peripheral administration officials who, in Sorensen’s words, “were regarded almost as inhabitants of another world.” Schlesinger, who would usually see the president two or three times a week, would be the administration’s spokesman to liberals at home and abroad as well as “a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches on all topics.”
Kennedy, remembering the wartime service of Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox in FDR’s cabinet, made clear to O’Donnell that he would do something similar. “If I string along exclusively with Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris and those other Harvard liberals, they’ll fill Washington with wild-eyed ADA people,” he said. “And if I listen to you and Powers and [John] Bailey and [Dick] Maguire [at the DNC], we’ll have so many Irish Catholics that we’ll have to organize a White House Knights of Columbus Council. I can use a few smart Republicans. Anyway, we need a Secretary of the Treasury who can call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names.”
For Kennedy, the two most important cabinet appointments were Treasury and Defense. Since he intended to keep tight control over foreign policy, finding a secretary of state was a lower priority. Help in managing the domestic economy and national security came first. He wanted moderate Republicans for both posts who could give him some political cover for the hard decisions a minority president would need to make to expand the economy and bolster the national defense.
Although Kennedy felt more comfortable addressing defense and foreign policy issues, he knew that reinvigorating a sluggish economy was essential to a successful administration. The country’s substantial economic growth between 1946 and 1957 had ground to a halt with a nine-month recession in 1957-58, when unemployment had increased to 7.5 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression. Another economic downturn in 1960 had followed a relatively weak recovery in 1958-59. As one economist explained the problem, the backlogged demands of the war years had been largely sated and the nation now faced a period of excess capacity and higher unemployment. On top of these difficulties, an international balance-of-payment deficit causing a “gold drain” had raised questions about the soundness of the d
As a Democrat who could count on traditional backing from labor and consumers, Kennedy felt compelled to pay special attention to skeptical bankers and business chiefs. But how was he to quiet predictable liberal antagonism to a prominent representative of Wall Street, who seemed likely to favor tax and monetary policies serving big business rather than working-class citizens, in the Treasury Department? Giving a Republican so much influence over economic policy seemed certain to touch off an internal battle and produce even greater damage to the administration’s standing in the business community than the initial choice of a Democrat.
Kennedy hoped to solve this problem by making Republican Robert Lovett secretary of the treasury. A pillar of the New York banking establishment, Lovett had intermittently served as a high government official since World War II. His worldliness and track record of putting country above partisanship moved Kennedy to offer him State, Defense, or Treasury. But failing health, caused by a bleeding ulcer, decided Lovett against accepting any office, and Kennedy turned instead to C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was an even more imposing establishment figure: His father had founded the Wall Street banking firm of Dillon, Read & Company. A privileged child, Dillon had graduated from Groton, FDR’s alma mater, and Harvard, and, with family apartments and homes in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Maine, Florida, and France, he enjoyed connections with America’s wealthiest, most influential people. During World War II, he had served in the southwest Pacific, where he had won medals as a navy aviator. After the war, he had become chairman of Dillon, Read and of the New Jersey State Republican committee. His early support of Eisenhower had led to his appointment as ambassador to France, where his effective service had persuaded Ike to make him undersecretary of state for economic affairs and then the undersecretary, the second-highest State Department official. Dillon impressed populists like Tennessee senator Albert Gore as an enemy of the people, but in fact he was an open-minded moderate, a liberal Republican whom Kennedy believed he could trust.