Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (13 page)

When Schlesinger talked to Kennedy on December 1 about the State Department, “it was clear that his thoughts were turning more and more to Fulbright. He liked Fulbright, the play of his civilized mind, the bite of his language and the direction of his thinking on foreign affairs.” Bobby Kennedy had the same impression: “The President was quite taken with having Fulbright. . . . [He] had worked with Fulbright and thought he had some brains and some sense and some judgment. . . . He was the only person mentioned as Secretary of State whom he knew.”

But Bobby talked Jack out of appointing him, even if it was only after heated arguments. Having signed a southern manifesto opposing the Supreme Court’s 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision desegregating schools, backed a 1957 filibuster against the first major civil rights law since Reconstruction, and signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Governor Orval Faubus’s opposition to integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, Fulbright had openly identified himself as an unequivocal supporter of segregation. Bobby convinced Jack that Fulbright would be a liability in dealing with Africa and Third World nations generally. It was no small consideration: Winning the contest with the communists for the hearts and minds of Third World peoples was a Kennedy priority. His appointment of Rostow partly rested on Rostow’s identification as an economist aiming to draw developing countries into the Western camp. A secretary of state who rejected equality for people of color would give Moscow and Peking an advantage in emerging nations deciding between East and West. In addition, Fulbright’s opposition to “an all-out anti-Nasser policy,” implying a degree of sympathy for Egypt and other Arab nations, also made Jewish supporters of Israel distrustful of Fulbright and potential vocal opponents of his appointment as secretary of state.

With Fulbright eliminated from the competition, the job fell to Dean Rusk as a kind of consolation prize, though Rusk never saw it that way. Bobby Kennedy may have best captured the spirit in which Rusk won the appointment when he said later, “It finally had come down to where everybody had been eliminated—and Rusk was left. . . . Time was running out. We had to get somebody. . . . So the President—he had never met him—invited him down to Florida and asked him right away. So Rusk was selected, not for any great enthusiasm about him as such, although people spoke highly of him.”

It was not as if Rusk was without credentials. Born in rural Georgia in 1909, the fifty-one-year-old Rusk was a classic example of the self-made man. A graduate of Atlanta’s public schools, Rusk worked his way through Davidson College in North Carolina, where he played basketball, commanded his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps battalion, and graduated at the top of his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1931, he spent the next two years at Oxford before studying in Germany during the first year of Hitler’s regime. His exposure to Nazism deepened an affinity for Wilsonian pacifism and moved him to write an essay on British relations with the League of Nations, which won him the Cecil Peace Prize. From 1934 to 1940 he taught at Mills, a women’s college in Oakland, California, while also attending the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School. In 1940, foreseeing American involvement in World War II, Rusk joined the U.S. Army, where he won the rank of colonel as a staff officer to General Joseph W. Stilwell in the China-Burma-India Theater. Posted to the operations division of the general staff in Washington in 1945, Rusk helped identify the 38th parallel as the dividing line between U.S. and Soviet forces in Korea. At the close of his military service in 1946, Rusk became a State Department official focused on United Nations affairs. Proving himself a master of the department’s bureaucratic ins and outs, he rose to deputy undersecretary of state, becoming a favorite of Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson.

Rusk endeared himself to Acheson in 1950 when he accepted appointment as assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. The communist victory in China in 1949 had opened the department, especially its Asian specialists, to attacks from right-wing politicians, led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, for having “lost” China. Rusk spent the next twenty-one months echoing the Truman administration’s defense of its China policy published in the State Department’s
China White Paper
; rationalizing the White House decision to expand the fighting in Korea above the 38th parallel, which trapped the United States in a stalemated war; and helping negotiate the 1951 Japanese Peace Treaty. Resigning from the department in December 1951, Rusk became president of the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was serving when Kennedy invited him to become secretary of state.

When Kennedy offered Rusk the job in mid-December, it wasn’t simply that he was the last man standing, though Kennedy had pretty well exhausted the list of candidates. Rusk in fact satisfied Kennedy’s vision of what a secretary of state in his administration should be. After their initial meeting at Kennedy’s Georgetown house, where, according to Rusk, Kennedy never raised the prospect of his becoming secretary, Rusk told a friend, “We couldn’t communicate. If the idea of my being Secretary of State ever entered his mind, it’s dead now. We couldn’t talk to each other. It’s all over.” From Kennedy’s vantage point, however, Rusk’s passive or low-key style was desirable. Kennedy described Rusk after their meeting as “lucid, competent, and self-effacing,” hardly the sort of enthusiastic endorsement a new president usually provides for a high-level appointee.

When Kennedy called the next day to offer him the job, Rusk asked that they meet again before either of them made a final decision. Kennedy agreed and invited him to fly to West Palm Beach, where he had gone for a vacation. As Rusk sat in Kennedy’s living room, waiting to see the president-elect, he noticed a copy of the
Washington Post
sitting prominently on a coffee table—it announced Rusk as secretary of state. When Kennedy entered and saw the headline, he “blew his top,” asking Rusk if he was the source of the leak. Told no, Kennedy called
Post
publisher Philip Graham to chide him for printing the story. After Graham explained that Kennedy was the one who had told him, Kennedy said, “But that was off the record.” Hardly, since it was exactly what Kennedy wanted: Kennedy had no interest in giving Rusk a choice of accepting; he was compelling him to take the job, and by forcing the issue, was also making clear that Rusk was now under the president’s command.

As Kennedy already understood, Rusk was the sort of man who would take orders without complaint and do the president’s bidding. Indeed, it was Rusk’s diffidence that especially appealed to Kennedy. With Fulbright, Bundy, and Rostow eliminated from service in the department, Kennedy planned to concentrate control of foreign policy strictly in the White House, specifically with Bundy’s emerging team of high-powered national security advisers. Kennedy had read an article Rusk had published in the journal
Foreign Affairs
, titled “The President.” It argued for a return to presidential dominance of foreign policy making, a shift away from what had allegedly been the arrangement between Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Moreover, the journalist Walter Lippmann’s description to Kennedy of Rusk as a “profound conformist” who “would never deviate from what he considered the official view” was additional confirmation for Kennedy of what he now wanted in the State Department. As a friend of Schlesinger’s told him, Rusk was “the lowest common denominator,” meaning he would be the least controversial and most compliant of the several men Kennedy had considered.

Once in office, Rusk was promptly seen as the gray eminence in an administration of scintillating figures. Mindful of the image he had taken on at the Kennedy White House, Rusk would jokingly say that in this crowd of dazzling characters “he looked like the friendly neighborhood bartender.” When Warren Christopher, another understated personality, served as secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, critics would joke that Christopher was another Dean Rusk, without his charisma.

Rusk’s caution was the consequence not just of his persona but also of a conviction that a secretary of state is obliged to stand in a president’s shadow. As Rusk’s son, Richard Rusk, said, his father “believed that a secretary of state should never show any blue sky with his president, that policy differences between them must remain confidential, and that failure to do so weakens an administration.” Rusk was obsessed with maintaining confidentiality: He resisted making records of phone conversations with Kennedy or having secretaries prepare memos of conversations. He had regular sweeps of his home and office for “bugs,” lest any government agency be recording his conversations. “His passion for secrecy was so strong,” his son adds, “that after leaving office, he went back to the State Department, pulled out his copies of telephone memos of conversations with his two presidents, and threw them away.”

Rusk’s prudence made him the butt of some hostile Washington humor spread by McGeorge Bundy. During a White House meeting in the Oval Office between only Kennedy and Rusk, when the president asked his opinion, Rusk is supposed to have whispered: “There’s still too many people here, Mr. President.” While Rusk compulsively deferred to the president, he was less accommodating toward others in the administration, especially competitors for the president’s ear on foreign policy. He would have his share of differences with Bundy and others in the national security bureaucracy who saw Rusk’s restraint as amounting to a State Department foreign policy vacuum that they had no choice but to fill.

Yet Rusk was never as passive and self-effacing as he pretended to be. He had quietly lobbied for his appointment. The publication of his
Foreign Affairs
article in the spring of 1960 was no accident. It was meant to send a message to any Democrat who might get the nomination. Moreover, letters to Kennedy recommending Rusk for the post were part of an orchestrated campaign. His silence in the face of the not-so-quiet Washington gossip about his meekness angered him; he once told a colleague that “it isn’t worth being secretary of state” when a president gives so much preference to his White House national security team. But it wasn’t just White House competitors who ignored Rusk; some in the State Department, unhappy with his caution, soon saw fit to bypass him, graphically belittling his habit of protecting his private parts.

Once he made Rusk secretary of state, Kennedy did not believe the department would be the source of much fresh thinking about foreign affairs. He held Rusk at arm’s length, never addressing him as other than “Mr. Rusk.” Kennedy was content then to satisfy domestic political obligations by making Chester Bowles undersecretary, the department’s second in command, rather than appoint someone likely to stimulate innovative foreign policy discussions.

The fifty-nine-year-old Bowles was a devoted Stevenson supporter and a spokesman for liberal Democrats whom Kennedy had courted as essential in his reach for the White House. Notable as the architect of the Benton & Bowles advertising firm, which had made him wealthy; as governor of Connecticut from 1948 to 1950; as Truman’s ambassador to India from 1951 to 1953; as a one-term congressman at the end of the fifties; and as Kennedy’s foreign policy adviser during the campaign, Bowles had a record of public service that made him a reasonable choice for a top State Department post. Given Kennedy’s decision to deny the secretary’s post to Stevenson and give him a distinctly secondary appointment as U.N. ambassador; the selection of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, which survived furious objections from liberal labor leaders; his reappointment of conservatives J. Edgar Hoover and Allan Dulles, respectively, as FBI and CIA directors; and the choice of McNamara and Bundy, nominal Republicans, as leading national security officials, Kennedy was acting out of political considerations more than foreign policy ones when he chose Bowles.

Kennedy appointed him in spite of personal tensions between them. Bowles had offended Kennedy when he would not campaign for him against Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary. He also angered Kennedy when he rejected Kennedy’s advice to run again for the House seat he had won in 1958; it would have relieved Kennedy of having to give him a job in the administration. They were temperamentally incompatible. Bowles was an idealist who offended Kennedy’s affinity for practical, realistic solutions.

Yet their backgrounds and politics were close enough. As a graduate of Choate and Yale, with a sense that privileged Americans like himself should help the needy at home and abroad and that attention to Third World countries was vital in defeating communist ambitions for world control, Bowles shared with Kennedy concerns about domestic change and international challenges that promised to make him a credible member of Kennedy’s State Department.

Bowles’s call for aid to India and other emerging Asian nations as a way to counter Soviet appeals to follow their lead toward state socialism particularly resonated with Kennedy. They also shared a belief in the need for America’s identity with anticolonialism, or the right of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern peoples to self-determination. But their mutual concerns could not bridge a fundamental divide: For Bowles, democracy or independence for former colonies was a moral imperative, a matter of
principle
; for Kennedy, it was a means to a self-serving American end—a way to ensure that the resources of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, especially oil supplies, were available in the West, and that the strategic areas of these regions could serve as potential bases for the United States and its European allies to contain communism.

“Annoyed” is probably too kind a description of how Kennedy responded to his undersecretary. His view of Bowles was closer to contempt for someone who, holding high office, seems very detached from the hard realities a responsible official needs to confront. And Bowles, in Kennedy’s view, was the kind of soft-minded intellectual who thought that hunger and poverty were greater dangers to the United States than a Kremlin laying plans to control Cuba and throw the West out of Berlin. Kennedy had been mindful of former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s view of Bowles as a “garrulous windbag and an ineffectual do-gooder.” But politics dictated that he include him in the ranks of administration appointees. Besides, putting him in the State Department seemed like less of a problem once he had appointed Rusk and concluded that the department would be a sort of fifth wheel in the crucial decisions affecting foreign affairs.