Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (9 page)

Bobby played his part as well, telling a friend that he was going to see Jack and tell him that he wouldn’t take the job. “This will kill my father,” Bobby said. Jack and Bobby met over breakfast and Bobby brought a friend, the reporter John Seigenthaler, along. Seigenthaler witnessed the little drama Bobby and Jack had prepared. Jack insisted that Bobby accept the appointment, explaining that he needed someone around who would tell him “the unvarnished truth, no matter what.” It echoed what Jack had already told former secretary of state Dean Acheson, that his cabinet members would be strangers to him and he needed “someone whom he knew very well and trusted completely with whom he could just sort of put his feet up and talk things over.” Finally, to demonstrate how reluctant he and Jack were, Bobby recounted how Jack joked that Bobby shouldn’t “smile too much” when they announced his selection or else the press would “think we are happy about the appointment.” Jack then told his friend Ben Bradlee, the editor of
Newsweek
, that he thought about announcing his decision by opening the front door of his house at two in the morning, when no one would be outside, and whispering to the empty street, “It’s Bobby.”

Was any of this to be believed? Or, to put it another way, were Jack and Bobby capable of so elaborate a cover-up? Unquestionably. They had effectively muted public knowledge of Jack’s health problems, which had required a more elaborate deception than disguising their determination to make Bobby attorney general. With the exception of Joe, Rose, and Bobby, no one knew all of Jack’s medical history—not even his various doctors, who were consulted about individual problems yet never the whole array of difficulties.

The reality of how Jack and Bobby were massaging the truth is evident in a note Bobby sent to the columnist Drew Pearson on December 15, one day before the breakfast meeting at which Jack supposedly persuaded Bobby to head the Justice Department. The letter, which is in Bobby’s attorney general papers at the John F. Kennedy Library, was meant to disarm Pearson’s doubts about him taking the job. Pearson had warned Bobby that he would be forced to deal with “so many controversial questions with such vigor that your brother in the White House would be in hot water all the time.” Bobby’s letter states: “I made up my mind today and Jack and I take the plunge tomorrow. For many reasons I believe it was the only thing I could do—I shall do my best and hope that it turns out well.” What Seigenthaler witnessed the next day was a charade meant to have him reveal the anguish Jack and Bobby supposedly suffered in installing Bobby at Justice. Even without the letter to Pearson, one can hardly believe that Jack and Bobby would have included a journalist in their deliberations if they were actually settling so vital a question as Bobby’s future role in the administration.

Bobby’s appointment put him at the center of the new administration, where he would become the president’s leading adviser on every major question. “Who would you say . . . the President depended and relied upon most?” Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon was asked. “Obviously the person he depended upon the most was the Attorney General,” Dillon replied. “The Attorney General was in and out of the White House a great deal. He talked with the President all the time, and the President relied heavily on him in all sorts of matters, from high policy to personal matters.”

C
HAPTER
3

“A Ministry of Talent”

T
he day after the November election, the exhilaration Kennedy, Bobby, and those closest to them felt at having won the country’s greatest political prize gave way to the hard work of building an administration. Kennedy saw himself as a bit at sea. He knew he wanted Bobby at his side in some capacity, but everything beyond that was pretty much a blank slate. During a post-election vacation in Palm Beach, Florida, he complained to his father, “Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this. Goddamn it, you can’t satisfy any of these people. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Joe was not very sympathetic: “Jack,” he said, “if you don’t want the job, you don’t have to take it. They’re still counting votes up in Cook County.”

Kennedy’s highest priority was choosing a national security team. The Cold War with the Soviet Union and fears that the United States had fallen behind in the arms race with Moscow, especially in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a state the Kennedy campaign described as the “missile gap,” had made initiatives that might reduce chances of armed conflict with Moscow Kennedy’s greatest concern. A conflict between pro-communist and pro-Western forces in Laos, Soviet talk of expelling the West from Berlin, and a Soviet foothold in Cuba threatening expanded communist control in the hemisphere heightened Kennedy’s fear of a crisis that could provoke a war. His worst nightmare as president was a nuclear conflict that would kill millions of people and scar parts of the earth for as far into the future as anyone could see.

Compounding Kennedy’s worries about communist challenges that could lead to armed conflict was his limited confidence in America’s military chiefs and uncertainty about finding wise national security advisers. His memories of the military in the southwest Pacific during World War II and pressure to appoint militant anticommunists to Defense and State, who might be more inclined to use nuclear weapons than he would, troubled him. For example, he remembered General Douglas MacArthur’s reputation as a brilliant Pacific commander as overblown. He thought that MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign had cost too many lives and had prolonged the Pacific fighting. He shared the average GI’s contempt for MacArthur as “Dug-out-Doug,” the general who refused to emerge from his “dug-out in Australia.” The professional Army and Navy officers—West Point and Annapolis graduates—gave him great pause. He recalled “ferrying quite a lot of generals around,” who thought they could advance further through the ranks by being seen in a PT boat—a symbol of courageous determination after a squadron of the crafts had carried MacArthur to safety from the Philippines. He saw these armchair warriors as the architects of what he called “this heaving puffing war machine of ours.” He had also been critical of the average fighting man. He became “cynical” about them during his time on the front line, describing them as prone to excessive “bellyaching and laying off.”

The Soviets might have taken satisfaction, or might have been understandably frightened, to know that Kennedy distrusted America’s military establishment as being too enamored of nuclear weapons and readiness to use them. As worrisome, General Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reciprocated the president-elect’s doubts: Could so young a man with such limited military experience serve as commander in chief?

Lemnitzer was a West Point graduate who had made his way up the ranks as a member of Eisenhower’s World War II staff, helping plan the successful invasions of North Africa and Sicily. He commanded an infantry division in Korea, became Army chief of staff in 1957, and was Eisenhower’s choice for head of the Joint Chiefs in 1960. The sixty-one-year-old general was little known outside of military circles, but his fellow soldiers remembered him as standing six foot two and two hundred pounds, with a large “bear-like” frame, “booming voice,” and “a deep infectious laugh.” His passion for golf, notable for smashing “a golf ball 250 yards down a fairway,” had partly made him an Eisenhower favorite. More important, he mimicked Ike’s talent for maneuvering through Army and Washington politics. Like Eisenhower he was not bookish or particularly drawn to grand strategy or big-picture thinking. He was the nuts-and-bolts sort of general who made his mark managing day-to-day problems.

Kennedy knew Lemnitzer only from congressional hearings, but since Lemnitzer was a career officer and the leading military official left over from the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy saw him as the representative not only of conventional Army thinking but also the embodiment of Ike’s affinity for reliance on massive retaliation with nuclear weapons, which Kennedy believed could engage the United States in a suicidal conflict known as MAD, mutually assured destruction. Schlesinger, who was close enough to Kennedy to know what he thought of Lemnitzer, privately described the Joint Chiefs chairman as “that sweet but dopey man.” Eisenhower had every confidence that he could count on Lemnitzer’s deference, but Kennedy doubted that Lemnitzer would be as respectful toward him.

Kennedy was right to be suspicious of Lemnitzer and all of Ike’s chiefs. After Kennedy’s victory, Lemnitzer’s briefing on military affairs deepened the mutual skepticism about their respective capabilities and good judgment. Lemnitzer questioned the new president’s qualifications to manage the country’s national defense. Privately, he lamented the fact that Eisenhower’s departure meant there would no longer be “a Pres with mil exp available to guide JCS.” He later said of Kennedy, “Here was a president with no military experience at all, sort of a patrol boat skipper in World War II.” Lemnitzer took pains to fill the vacuum with a detailed briefing about national emergency procedures or how the president should respond to a foreign threat. Kennedy’s preoccupation in that meeting with worries about having to make “a snap decision” on launching a nuclear response to a Soviet first strike added to Lemnitzer’s belief that Kennedy didn’t sufficiently understand the challenges before him.

The real issue between them was not Kennedy’s inexperience and limited understanding of how to ensure the country’s safety but Kennedy’s doubts about the wisdom of using nuclear arms and the military’s excessive reliance on them as a deterrent against communist aggression. The affinity for nuclear weapons rested on recent experience in World War II and Korea. Victory over Germany and Japan had been the product of total war—an all-out use of America’s industrial and military might against enemies whose defeat could only come with unconditional surrender. By contrast, the limited war in Korea had produced a stalemate that had left the military and the larger American public frustrated. Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation rested on the view that success in combat required the utilization of all the country’s power or at least the need to deter adversaries from acts of aggression, by encouraging the belief that risking war with the United States would bring the sort of destruction that had befallen the Axis powers. Kennedy’s reluctance to risk the carnage a nuclear war would bring by threatening all-out conflict put him at odds with the Chiefs he had inherited.

As Lemnitzer would soon find out, he was now part of an administration that had diminished regard for the military’s judgment on defense questions. It was not long before newspaper stories began describing how the White House bypassed and ignored the Chiefs in reaching decisions on national security matters formerly under their principal control. One critic of Kennedy’s greater concentration of military issues in civilian hands than had been the case with Eisenhower called this a “yo-yo form of government.” But Kennedy was less interested in how critics described his management of the Chiefs than in holding them in check.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, the fifty-nine-year-old chief of naval operations, a Naval Academy graduate with thirty-seven years of service, was a combat veteran of World War II and Korea. He was an early problem for Kennedy. As an anti-Soviet hawk, he believed that U.S. military officials needed to intimidate Moscow with threatening rhetoric. Burke “pushed his black-and-white views of international affairs with bluff naval persistence,” Schlesinger said. Kennedy had barely settled into the Oval Office in January when Burke proposed publicly, in the words of Arthur Sylvester, Kennedy’s new Defense Department press officer, to attack “the Soviet Union from hell to breakfast.” When Sylvester brought the speech to Kennedy’s attention, he ordered Burke to back off. Although Burke promised to write a new speech, he called Sylvester an “old son-of-a-bitch” and leaked the story to the
New York Times
, which provoked Senate hawks on the Armed Services Committee to criticize the White House for muzzling an admiral who was trying to warn Moscow against reckless acts of aggression.

Burke didn’t stop there. He went to see Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “Mr. Secretary, I’m quite a bit older than you are,” he began. “I’ve been in this jungle of Washington for a good many years. I would like to explain some things that you aren’t going to like. But I’d like to have you listen, and as a matter of fact, you must listen. I’ve got to get this off my chest.” Burke warned him against destroying what others had spent lifetimes building. He urged him not to focus on day-to-day actions but to think about the long term and to plan for what U.S. military power would look like in a decade. “Was he receptive to this?” an interviewer asked him. “Yes, yes,” Burke answered. “And thereafter I went down to see him two or three times a week in the early morning, or he came up to see me, until I left.” New to his job and eager not to antagonize the Chiefs, McNamara was being polite. But he wasn’t very receptive to Burke’s advice. And Kennedy wanted no part of any suggestion that the military would have free rein to say and act as they thought best in either the short or the long run. Soon after he heard about Burke’s speech, Kennedy ordered all active-duty officers to clear speeches with the White House, and told Sylvester, “The greatest thing that’s happened in the first three months of my administration was your stopping the Burke speech.”

Kennedy’s biggest worry about the military was the freedom of field commanders to launch nuclear weapons without explicit White House permission; it risked the devastation of Western Europe and cities in the United States. At the end of January, ten days after becoming president, Kennedy learned that “a subordinate commander faced with a substantial Russian military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative.” A top Kennedy aide recalled that “we became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the President really had over the use of this great arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Kennedy pushed the military to replace Eisenhower’s strategy of “massive retaliation” with what he called “flexible response”—a strategy of calibrated force other than strict reliance on nuclear weapons; the strategy had been described by General Maxwell Taylor in a 1960 book,
The Uncertain Trumpet
. But the stalemate in the Korean War frustrated military chiefs. They preferred the use of atomic bombs, as General Douglas MacArthur had proposed, to win a decisive victory. They were reluctant to have Kennedy, a president with so limited military experience, assume exclusive control over deciding when a first nuclear strike would be appropriate.

The NATO commander, General Lauris Norstad, and two Air Force generals, Thomas Power and Curtis LeMay, offered stubborn opposition to White House directives reducing their choice of when to go nuclear. The fifty-four-year-old Norstad had a reputation for being fiercely independent. During a visit to NATO headquarters by the secretaries of state and defense, they asked him to whom he had a primary obligation—the United States or the European alliance members. He saw the question as “challenging my loyalty. My first instinct was to hit him,” McNamara, Norstad recalled. Instead he “just stood there and . . . tried to smile and cool off a bit. . . . And I said, ‘Well gentlemen, I think that ends this meeting.’ Whereupon I walked out and slammed the door.” Norstad made his reluctance to concede Kennedy’s ultimate authority so clear that the president’s national security adviser urged Kennedy to tell Norstad that the president “is boss.”

Power confided to a journalist his worries over civilian control of his freedom to use America’s ultimate weapons. The fifty-five-year-old Power had joined the Army Air Corps after high school in 1928 and worked his way up through the ranks. During World War II, he had served in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific, where he led the first firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945. In 1957 he became head of the Strategic Air Command. He had unqualified faith in the use of airpower and was contemptuous of anyone urging restraint in a war with Russia. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?” he asked the authors of a RAND Corporation study counseling against attacks on Soviet cities at the start of a conflict. “The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.” LeMay, his superior, described Power as a “sadist” and “not stable.”

The fifty-four-year-old LeMay, who had the nickname “Old Iron Pants,” was not much different. He shared Power’s faith in the untrammeled use of airpower to defend the national security. The child of a working-class Ohio family, whose father was a harsh taskmaster, LeMay imbibed his father’s insistence on strict discipline and the value of dealing harshly with opponents. After earning a degree in civil engineering at Ohio State University, LeMay joined the Air Corps in 1928 and, like Power, became a pioneer in developing an Army air wing that mounted all-out assaults on Germany and Japan during World War II. The burly, cigar-chomping LeMay believed that the United States had no choice but to bomb its foes into submission. He had no qualms about striking at enemy cities, where civilian populations would pay the price for their governments’ misjudgments in fighting the United States. He was the principal architect of the incendiary attacks on Tokyo by B-29 heavy bombers that destroyed most of the city and killed more than two hundred thousand Japanese. He was convinced that the air raids shortened the war.