Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (15 page)

Kenneth O’Donnell was Kennedy’s principal political adviser or, more to the point, the guardian of the president’s political interests. Like Powers, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Democratic Party’s power brokers, and as the president’s special assistant and appointments secretary, he served as the gatekeeper to the Oval Office, welcoming those who could advance Kennedy’s standing and barring those whose demands O’Donnell saw as serving no useful purpose. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, recalled that “[e]xcept for members of the official family and state visitors, no one could see the President without first clearing with O’Donnell—and he could say no to a corporation president trying to promote an ambassadorship as readily as he could to a ward politician trying to influence the award of a contract. . . . I found him to be one of the most candid and direct men I had ever met. He would never use five words if one would do, and that word was very often a flat ‘no.’” On all political questions affecting Kennedy, O’Donnell’s word was final.

O’Donnell’s political influence had initially come from his friendship with Bobby; they were roommates at Harvard and teammates on Harvard’s football team, where O’Donnell was the starting quarterback and Bobby a favorite pass receiver. The offspring of an Irish family—his father was football coach and athletic director at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, an Irish Catholic bastion—the twenty-eight-year-old O’Donnell joined Kennedy’s Senate campaign in 1952 after service in the Air Force during World War II and a stint as a businessman in a paper company. Between 1957 and 1959, he was an administrative assistant to Bobby Kennedy, who had become a counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee investigating union corruption. In 1960, he became Jack’s campaign scheduler, working tirelessly to help him win the White House. His mastery of the men and issues shaping national politics elevated him to the front rank of Kennedy’s inner circle.

It wasn’t only O’Donnell’s friendship with Bobby and political talents that recommended him to the Kennedys; they admired his toughness—his unsentimental determination to win in the political arena as he had on the football field. His wiry physique, sharp facial features, blunt conversation, and “grim, cryptic wit,” which gave him a reputation as someone with “the instinct for the jugular,” made him more admirable than likable among his White House colleagues. He was usually at the center of “strong and angry disagreements” that erupted among staffers competing for control of policy and the president’s approval. Kennedy didn’t mind the conflict: “The last thing I want around here is a mutual admiration society,” Kennedy told Salinger. “When you people stop arguing, I’ll start worrying.”

Kennedy’s objective was to ensure that every important decision came across his desk. He was determined to hold the reins of authority in his hands; he wanted no hint of a belief that he was too uncertain of himself to exercise the powers of the presidency. He had Franklin Roosevelt’s model of divide and rule or encouraging debates among his staff in order to force competing subordinates to come to him for a final decision. But Kennedy, Schlesinger said, “found no pleasure in playing off one subordinate against another.” Instead, he valued arguments for what substance they might ultimately give to decisions. His administrative management, however, mainly consisted of staying one step ahead of cabinet and subcabinet officials charged with considering major policy questions. As Schlesinger put it, Kennedy’s “determination was to pull issues out of the bureaucratic ruck in time to defend his own right to decision and his own freedom of innovation.”

Larry O’Brien, the third member of the Massachusetts Irish Mafia, had an irresistible claim on a White House job as well. O’Brien, like Kennedy, was born in 1917 and served in the military during World War II. He was a politician’s politician: less interested in holding elective or appointed offices than in managing campaigns and the give-and-take common to dealings with congressional leaders jealous of their influence. Born and raised in Springfield, in the western part of the state, O’Brien had breathed politics since his earliest years. He was the son of an Irish-born father who had combined success as a tavern keeper and real estate investor with activism in Democratic Party politics. The son’s effectiveness as a local organizer had taken him to national conventions and provided an outlet for his resentment toward the state’s “WASPs,” the Boston Brahmins contemptuous of what they saw as a small-town Irish pol challenging their authority. After law studies at Northeastern University, O’Brien became a political organizer for Foster Furcolo, an Italian American congressional candidate he helped win House terms in 1948 and 1950. Two years as Furcolo’s office manager temporarily cured O’Brien of Potomac fever; he returned to Springfield, where Kennedy, aware of his reputation as a keen political organizer, talked him into helping with his successful 1952 Senate campaign. Six years later O’Brien took a leading role in Kennedy’s 1958 reelection bid, in which Kennedy won the largest victory margin in Massachusetts’s history. Kennedy readily turned to O’Brien when he mapped out plans for his 1960 presidential run: He was an architect of Kennedy’s victories in Wisconsin and West Virginia, worked with Bobby to secure a majority of delegates at the convention, and raced around the country during the fall campaign encouraging state and local Democrats to work hard at putting Kennedy in the White House.

Having earned a choice job in the new administration, O’Brien asked to become Kennedy’s point man with Congress, managing the legislative initiatives he expected Kennedy to put forward in 1961. Jack and Bobby, however, were not convinced that O’Brien, for all his skills as a campaign organizer, was the right man for this job. He had no experience leading bills through Congress. Moreover, his affinity for negative thinking, such as an impulse to emphasize impediments to dealings with Congress, made them feel that O’Brien was ill-suited to sell congressmen and senators on bold domestic programs. And even if they were pessimistic about congressional action on major proposals, they did not want it said that they had given up without a fight or had assigned the job of pressuring Congress to someone who had shown little hope of success.

Bobby initially suggested that O’Brien become deputy postmaster general, where he could play the part of party patronage master. But O’Brien wanted no part of what he considered a minor post, and voiced his disappointment by saying he intended to return to Springfield. Since O’Brien’s exclusion from a top administrative job would have antagonized many party operatives, who were already complaining about Kennedy’s preference for Republican appointees over deserving Democrats, they convinced Kennedy to grant O’Brien’s request to manage congressional relations.

Two other considerations influenced Kennedy’s decision. The natural alternative to having O’Brien or any other Kennedy political operative deal with Congress was to rely on Vice President Lyndon Johnson. As a twenty-three-year veteran of Capitol Hill with a reputation as the most effective Senate majority leader in history, Johnson seemed like a natural choice to help enact the president’s legislative agenda. But giving Johnson such authority would have undermined Kennedy’s presidential standing by implying that the younger, less experienced Kennedy needed his more seasoned vice president to manage Congress. It would have diminished Kennedy’s status both at home and abroad and launched his administration on the wrong note.

Second, Kennedy had little hope of persuading southern conservatives, who chaired the principal congressional committees, to enact major domestic reforms that threatened to undermine their region’s racial segregation. There was enough to do in foreign affairs without focusing attention in the press on domestic controversies that Johnson seemed certain to provoke with southern congressmen and senators. On January 3, when Johnson had tried to expand his vice presidential control of the Senate by forcing a vote on his leadership of the sixty-three-member Democratic Senate caucus, he had run into a wall of hostility. “This caucus is not open to former senators,” one opponent of the proposal declared. The opposition angered and embarrassed Johnson, who told reporters, “I now know the difference between a cactus and a caucus. In a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.” Kennedy believed it better to let the less experienced O’Brien quietly manage progressive proposals that would have to wait for a second Kennedy term, if he were fortunate enough to get it.

Pierre Salinger’s selection as press secretary was predictable and uncontroversial. The thirty-five-year-old Salinger had come into Kennedy’s orbit through a career in investigative journalism that had led him to an appointment as an investigator for Bobby and Jack’s Senate subcommittee probing labor union corruption. Eagerly signing on to run Kennedy’s press operations during the 1960 campaign, Salinger dealt with every facet of Kennedy’s public relations from January through the election in November. The day after his election, Kennedy told Salinger that he wanted him to stay on as press secretary. It was in fact the assignment Salinger had been thinking about and hoping for since he had started working with Kennedy in 1957.

As spokesman for the president, Salinger could largely stand above the kind of political infighting that emerges in every administration. True, presidential press secretaries carry the burden of measuring every spoken word, which are seen as expressing a president’s latest thoughts. But a press spokesman can remain a noncontroversial messenger who does no more than report a president’s views. By contrast, White House advisers, faced with choices about what often prove to be insurmountable problems, battle for control of policy. As soon as Salinger wandered onto political grounds, counseling the boss how to manage his public image, he became an advocate with enemies or at least opponents.

Salinger was convinced that Kennedy’s instinctual ability to speak spontaneously and effectively about current controversies, as demonstrated in his successful debates with Nixon, could make him the first president to hold live televised press conferences. Salinger believed that the debates turned the election in Kennedy’s favor, showing him as “a mature, knowledgeable, attractive man.” By contrast, Nixon seemed like “an actor reading a toothpaste commercial.” The novelty of live press conferences would expand Kennedy’s audience and allow him to get his message directly to an attentive public.

Salinger’s proposal provoked a “swift and violent” reaction among “JFK’s closest advisers,” State Department officials, and White House correspondents. Advisers feared a misstatement that could trigger an international crisis, shaking markets and stimulating talk of war. White House correspondents, who had traditionally enjoyed the prerogative of informing the world about a president’s views, were chagrined at losing the privilege of first dibs on a big story. Despite loud complaints about their lost status, Salinger told them they could “take it or leave it.” And since it was the president’s press conference and not theirs, they had no choice but to take it.

Moreover, the reporters would soon make the adjustment, and Kennedy, who enjoyed the prospect of commanding center stage to a greater extent than any of his predecessors, proved to be masterful at bantering with the press, while also informing the public at home and abroad of where he stood on major issues. It was a chance to not only educate people about his views, but also school subordinate officials in his administration, who had little opportunity for direct contact with the president. His press conferences gave them a better understanding of administration priorities.

Given the importance the new procedure placed on the president’s press appearances, he preceded his conferences with intense preparation and breakfast meetings of principal advisers, especially his national security officials, where he would rehearse responses to predicted questions. Some of these answers would convulse his associates with laughter but were usually too undiplomatic to see the light of day. The aftermath, however, was consistently “a superb show, always gay, often exciting, relished by the reporters and by the television audience.”

Kennedy’s limited focus on domestic problems did not exempt him from choosing appointees who would be stewards of the economy. Although his appointment of C. Douglas Dillon as the secretary of the Treasury further inflamed liberals, Kennedy believed he was a good choice in every way for the job. With the economy in recession and trade imbalances causing a gold drain, there was a premium on finding a Treasury secretary who could generate confidence on Wall Street and in the business community more generally. Kennedy had seen Robert Lovett and Robert McNamara as filling that role, but neither would consider serving at Treasury. Phil Graham, the publisher of the
Washington Post
, and influential columnist Joseph Alsop began promoting Dillon, a prominent Republican, for the job. A former head of his father’s Wall Street banking firm, Dillon, Read & Company, Dillon had served as Eisenhower’s ambassador to France, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, and then undersecretary, the second-highest job at State.

Although Dillon would meet Kennedy’s need for an establishment financier who would quiet Wall Street worries about a spendthrift administration committed to expanding the economy with deficit spending, some of those closest to Kennedy cautioned him against the appointment. Joe Kennedy didn’t think Dillon, for all his Wall Street connections, knew enough about finance to merit the job. Schlesinger warned the president-elect against choosing someone who had been a member of the administration responsible for the country’s current financial and economic problems, had been a down-the-line Nixon supporter, and seemed likely to favor policies of austerity over deficits promoting economic expansion. Bobby Kennedy warned that after a few months of conflict over administration policy, Dillon might quit with an attack on the White House, which would embarrass them and shake public confidence in their ability to improve the economy.

When Dillon assured Kennedy of his commitment to actions much closer to innovative Democratic solutions than conventional conservative ones, emphasizing his eagerness to promote economic expansion, and promised to go quietly should they come to a policy impasse, Kennedy decided to appoint him.