Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (14 page)

None of this is to suggest that Kennedy wouldn’t have been receptive to initiatives from the State Department that offered fresh ideas about the country’s many foreign problems. But he was not very hopeful, once Fulbright was out of the picture, that Rusk and Bowles had the wherewithal to capture his attention with the kinds of imaginative proposals he expected to see from his national security team.

Kennedy’s appointment of George Ball as undersecretary for economic affairs deepened rather than eased his doubts about the department’s likely contribution to foreign policy. Trained as a lawyer, the fifty-one-year-old Ball had been an associate general counsel in the Lend-Lease Administration and a counsel to the European Economic Community. As someone who had written reports for Kennedy during the campaign on foreign economic policy, Ball certainly had a claim on that post. But Ball was another strong Stevenson supporter who had come late to Kennedy’s side in the campaign. Moreover, he had no personal tie to Kennedy and shared Stevenson’s indignation at Kennedy’s roughhouse political tactics in the run-up to the nomination.

Stevenson told Ball that after winning the Oregon primary in June 1960, Kennedy came to see him in his Libertyville, Illinois, home. When Stevenson resisted Kennedy’s plea for his support at the convention, which Kennedy believed would allow him to clinch the nomination, he “behaved just like his old man,” Stevenson said. “Look,” Kennedy said, “I have the votes for the nomination and if you don’t give me your support, I’ll have to shit all over you.” Stevenson was outraged by Kennedy’s “Irish gutter talk,” but he didn’t tell him off.

Because he was so closely identified with Stevenson, Ball doubted that Kennedy would ask him to join the State Department. And in fact, Kennedy initially intended to bypass Ball and use the undersecretary’s post to satisfy the same political pressures that had moved him to give Republicans a central voice in his foreign affairs appointments: He offered the job to William C. Foster, a liberal Republican. But Stevenson lobbied Fulbright to press Kennedy to choose Ball instead. Fulbright persuaded Kennedy to give Ball the job, warning him that “too many top posts in the three principal departments—State, Defense, and Treasury”—were going to Republicans. It was creating “the impression that the Democratic Party lacked men of stature.” But Kennedy brought Foster into the administration anyway as the head of the new Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

With his national security and State Department teams in place, Kennedy turned his attention to the Inaugural Address—the opportunity to describe his administration’s goals in foreign affairs over the next four years to audiences at home and abroad and to the men (there were no female appointees) who would be charged with giving shape to the broad aims of his government. He had been thinking constantly about the speech since his election, but felt compelled first to satisfy public expectations that he name the cabinet officers who would help him meet the national security challenges ahead. Eisenhower thought that Kennedy’s concern with choosing advisers made him look weak or like an inexperienced leader who would be too dependent on subordinates. In fact, Kennedy was determined to be his own boss and chart out an inspirational grand design in his inaugural speech.

He hoped that the speech would be a call to unity and action that could help overcome divisions in the country evident in the narrowness of his victory. Galbraith urged him to think hard about how he would achieve liftoff for his administration. “It is evident,” Galbraith wrote to Kennedy after he gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, “that in straightforward exposition and argument you are superb. . . . When it comes to oratorical flights and Stevenson-type rhetoric, [however,] you give a reasonable imitation of a bird with a broken wing. You do get off the ground but it’s wearing on the audience to keep wondering if you are going to stay up.”

Kennedy’s address, which he crafted in close collaboration with Sorensen, foretold his almost exclusive emphasis on foreign affairs and his determination to advance international peace and prosperity. “Let every nation know,” he declared, “that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty. . . . To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves. . . . If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” In Latin America, he promised to convert his words into an Alliance for Progress.

As for the “uncertain balance of terror” that could lead to “mankind’s final war,” Kennedy urged a new era of negotiation: “Let us never negotiate out of fear,” he counseled. “But let us never fear to negotiate. . . . And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.” He closed with “a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself,” ending with the most memorable words of the speech: “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He concluded, “Let us begin.”

Anyone listening to Kennedy’s Inaugural Address heard a president entirely focused on foreign affairs. And given national anxieties about America’s apparently weakened international position against a Soviet Union with a seeming advantage in intercontinental ballistic missiles and a Cuban client state threatening to spread communism across Latin America, few were inclined to quarrel with Kennedy’s priorities. Indeed, Gallup polls had demonstrated the extent and intensity of public attention to external communist threats and a conviction abroad that America’s international standing and power were on the decline. Even Galbraith, who believed that America’s strength abroad depended on robust prosperity at home, advised Kennedy to make foreign dangers his first priority: “As to the issues, I would think there are four,” Galbraith wrote in August 1959. “The first is to find some durable alternative to the present strategy of deterrence with which we can live in greater safety. The second, is to find some way of assisting the poor lands which takes account not only of their need for capital but also the urgent pressures for political and social advancement. Thirdly, we must find some way of reconciling price stability with full employment and economic growth. Fourth, and finally, we must correct the notable disparity between our comparative private opulence and the poverty of our public services.”

Yet, however much foreign affairs was at the center of national concerns, and however little inclined he was to divert attention from dangers abroad, Kennedy could not totally ignore domestic economic and social issues that affected a majority of Americans and made them eager for presidential leadership promoting prosperity and civic peace. Kennedy’s election had partly rested on public discontent with Eisenhower’s handling of the economy and race relations, and more generally, on a sense of national drift or lost national purpose. Commentators complained of a “bland, vapid, self-satisfied, banal” society that lacked a shared commitment to some grand design. Adlai Stevenson decried an America in which “the bland were leading the bland.” He saw a country without “an irresistible vision of . . . exalted purpose and inspiring way of life.” Our choice, Kennedy had said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, was “between national greatness and national decline. . . . All mankind waits upon our decision.”

Three recessions had roiled Eisenhower’s eight-year term, with the last of these downturns still evident in January 1961: Unemployment stood at 7 percent and rising prices added to the woes of some 40–60 million people, between a quarter and a third of the country’s population living without adequate nutrition, housing, or medical care. The problem of poverty, chronicled by Michael Harrington, first in
Commentary
magazine in 1958 and then in a 1962 book,
The Other America: Poverty in the United States
, was a national embarrassment for a country urging Third World nations to see capitalism or free enterprise as superior to communist societies, which could not match American living standards.

Kennedy understood that the communist challenge would be only one test of his presidency; he would also need to advance the country’s economic well-being, reduce the gap between rich and poor, expand educational opportunities, insulate seniors from the medical and hospital costs afflicting their lives, and defend African Americans against the institutionalized racism that denied them a chance at the American dream. Persuading Congress to free entrepreneurs from confiscatory income taxes of 91 percent, raising educational standards through federal grants to localities, improving the lot of seniors by establishing a federal system of affordable medical insurance, and easing racial tensions with a civil rights act outlawing segregation in all places of public accommodation were challenges demanding the political skills of a leader who could inspire and persuade on a par with a Washington, a Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts. But it would also take an investment of presidential prestige and political capital that Kennedy saw in short supply after his narrow victory. Foreign policy priorities would also leave limited freedom to press the case for domestic reforms.

While he doubted that enacting tax reform, federal aid to education, and Medicare would happen quickly, if at all, during his first term, he saw surmounting the racial divide as a challenge few in 1961 believed any president could achieve in the immediate future. The Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education
had pressured school districts across the segregated South to integrate public schools with mixed results. Resistance by Arkansas’s Governor Orval Faubus to federal court orders ending racial segregation in Little Rock’s Central High School, for example, had forced Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and compel integration by armed troops, which had led to a rise in white schoolchildren attending private schools. Resistance to the nonviolent protests of the Reverend Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference had erupted in sporadic violence. Having left no doubt during the campaign that he would side with advocates of racial justice by praising peaceful sit-ins at segregated public facilities, as well as promising to integrate public housing “with one stroke of the pen” and to use executive powers “on a bold and large scale” in behalf of civil rights, Kennedy needed to choose a White House staff and appoint cabinet and subcabinet officials who could try to overcome the long odds against his domestic agenda, especially on volatile race relations.

Choosing a White House staff was relatively easy. Kennedy intended to be his own chief of staff. It had the advantage of not antagonizing any of the loyal subordinates who had been with him since his first House campaign in 1946, by elevating one over the others. Five men had been at the center of his political advance to the presidency: Dave Powers, Kenneth O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien, and more recently, Ted Sorensen and Pierre Salinger. Powers, O’Donnell, and O’Brien were described as the “Irish Mafia”: core members of a group that was uncritically loyal to Kennedy and had made his rise possible.

Powers was the first among equals. He had known Kennedy since 1946, when Jack, hearing that Powers had an understanding of the people and issues vital to a candidate’s bid for Boston’s sprawling Eleventh Congressional District, called on the thirty-four-year-old Air Force veteran of World War II at his three-story walk-up residence to ask his help in the campaign. Powers wondered how “a millionaire’s son from Harvard trying to come into an area that is longshoremen, waitresses, truck drivers, and so forth” could possibly win a majority or even a plurality of votes against opponents who could speak the language of the district’s Irish and Italian working class. Nonetheless, Powers, a walking encyclopedia of information about the district, saw Kennedy as potentially someone in the right place at the right time: Jack’s standing as a war hero and a young man on the make spoke to the aspirations of the district’s upwardly mobile blue-collar voters—men and women who took special satisfaction in knowing that one of their own, the Irish Kennedys, had made it so big in America.

Powers’s quick wit and easy regard for rogue politicians amused and endeared him to Kennedy. He was at Kennedy’s side at every step toward the White House and provided Kennedy with a kind of refuge from the burdens of running for and serving in office. He was a facilitator of Kennedy’s considerable affinity for extramarital relations, discreetly arranging the time and places for trysts with a variety of women. Kennedy enjoyed Powers’s mischievous sense of humor: During the Shah of Iran’s visit to the White House, Powers, bringing the leader into the Oval Office, put his hand on his shoulder and declared, “You’re my kind of Shah.” To the humorless Soviet first deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan, he said: “Are you the real Mikoyan?”

Initially, Kennedy had to sell himself to Powers, who agreed to attend a talk in January 1946, two days after Kennedy had asked for his help in the campaign. In a speech to Gold Star Mothers who had lost sons in the war, Kennedy not only won over the women with a heartfelt expression of regard for their sacrifice, one his own mother suffered with Joe, Jr.’s death, but also convinced Powers of his viability as a coming political star. “I don’t know what this guy’s got,” Powers recalled. “He’s no great orator and he doesn’t say much, but they [the mothers] certainly go crazy over him.”

Kennedy made Powers a special assistant to the president, in which role he acted as a man Friday watching over the president’s personal needs, always with him on trips around the country and abroad. He usually was the first to see Kennedy in the morning and the last to see him at night. He was less a political adviser than a friend with whom Kennedy could relax. They would swim together in the White House pool, where Powers would use a breaststroke in order to keep up a steady chatter of amusing conversation that Kennedy enjoyed.