Kennedy (45 page)

Between meetings and swearing-in ceremonies he acquainted himself with his office and its various buttons and buzzers. He strolled into other offices, talked with his staff, visited with stenographers, opened mail, used the phone and generated work for himself. The unaccustomed long uninterrupted hours of solid working time came as both a shock and a blessing. “It’s awfully quiet over there sometimes,” he remarked to me at lunch the first week on the second floor of the Mansion, thinking of his noisy quarters in the Senate, on the
Caroline
and during the interim.

It was not all quiet. The exhilaration of securing the prize he had sought so long had not yet worn off. The adjustment from the days of constant compaigning was not complete. Politicians and reporters were constantly in and out of his office. The new President’s first visitor had been former President Harry Truman, welcomed for the first time to his former home. Organizations, celebrities and award winners of every kind, from Baptists to beauty queens, were greeted daily in the oval office. Thirty thousand letters poured in every week. Twelve speeches were made in the first two months. Old friends were visited in their homes. Departmental meetings were visited in person. Press conferences and background briefings were held regularly. Legislative requests were contained in separate messages spaced for maximum publicity.

His activist, enthusiastic approach was contagious throughout the Executive Branch. The lights burned late in his office and in every department in Washington. It was an exciting and inspiring time in our lives, and nothing could dampen our delight in being in that place at that time. “Those were the days,” Bob Kennedy would recall somewhat wistfully some hundred days later, “when we thought we were succeeding because of all the stories on how hard everybody was working.”

The new President never got over the small boy’s sense of pride and excitement about living in the White House. On his second full day in office, returning from Mass with Paul Fay and his brother Teddy, he invited them in for an inspection; and sitting in the only chair in the still bare and nearly empty oval office, he spun around and asked with a pleased look, “Paul, do you think it’s adequate?” And Fay spoke for all of them in replying, “I feel any minute somebody’s going to walk in and say, ‘All right, you three guys, out of here.’” On at least two other occasions that week, he and Jacqueline took guests on a top-to-bottom tour of what he called “the property,” asking Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. the history of a particular room or furnishing, pointing out to Ken Galbraith the holes in the floor caused by his predecessor’s golf shoes. The whole tour, said Galbraith, “was sheer delight. He turned over furniture, looked at the labels, complained that there were too many reproductions, dismissed something here as ‘Grand Rapids,’ tried the
Lincoln bed, and kept up a running conversation about political problems.”

In New Ross, Ireland, nearly three years later, he told the story of the old-time Irish immigrant who had his family’s picture taken in front of the White House and proudly told his friends back in Ireland it was their summer home and his friends should pay a visit. “Well,” concluded the President proudly, “it is our home also in the winter, and I hope you will come and see us.”

N
OTHING GAVE THE NEW PRESIDENT
a greater sense of satisfaction and security on the day of his inauguration than the men he had selected to work with him.

Only seventy-two days before his inauguration, Kennedy had started with a wholly clean slate. American politics provides for no “shadow Cabinet” in the party out of power, and Kennedy’s staff and advisers were not an equivalent. He had secured the nomination without obligating himself to any leader of his party. After the convention he had mobilized a campaign team and raised a campaign fund without promising any posts in return. He had not even made any tentative designations in his own mind. During the campaign he had steadfastly resisted the efforts of reporters and Stevenson supporters to persuade him to reveal a preference for Secretary of State. To do so, he said, would be inappropriate, presumptuous and, recalling Dewey’s decision to the contrary in 1948, needlessly defiant of fate. The premature announcement of any names, he felt (and Nixon took a similar position), would only confuse the issue between the two candidates. His full time and attention were devoted instead to winning the election. The press could and did speculate on a possible Kennedy Cabinet but with no help or hints from the candidate.

Consequently, as the great talent hunt of 1960-1961 began on November 10, his choice was not limited by any definite political debts
or campaign commitments. The ten department heads comprising the official Kennedy Cabinet, selected in the five weeks that followed, reflected this lack of political restriction in at least five ways.

1. The Cabinet contained no figures with a nationwide following of their own. Wilson in 1913 had felt bound to take Bryan, and Roosevelt in 1933 took a former National Chairman and prominent Southern Congressman, Cordell Hull. But Kennedy felt free to by-pass Stevenson, Bowles and other nationally known names for the little-known Dean Rusk as Secretary of State. An even lesser known figure, Robert Mc-Namara, was named to the other top post, Secretary of Defense, instead of Presidential rival Stuart Symington or retiring National Committee Chairman Henry Jackson. Kennedy had met both Rusk and McNamara for the first time a full month after his election—coincidentally but separately on the same day, December 8. Other top posts were similarly filled, and Stevenson was named to a post for which he was ideally suited, United Nations Ambassador, and given Cabinet rank.

2. The Cabinet contained only one member who had contributed $1,000 or more to the 1960 campaign: Douglas Dillon, who, together with his wife, had contributed over $26,000. But the Dillons had contributed to Nixon and the Republicans, not to Kennedy.

3. The Cabinet contained no dissenting spokesman for some opposition group he needed to appease—such as labor leader Durkin in the Eisenhower Cabinet and all the factional leaders in Lincoln’s Cabinet—nor did it contain any free-wheeling individualists of the Henry Wallace-Harold Ickes variety. His Cabinet members had a variety of backgrounds and gave him independent judgments, but they were uniformly dedicated to him and to the broad public interest, and all, including the two Republicans among them, approached their assignments with a philosophy consistent with their chief’s. His Secretary of Agriculture was sponsored by no farm organization and had sponsored no farm legislation. His Secretary of Labor, despite long association with the labor movement as a lawyer, was not regarded as one of their own by organized labor’s leaders, and his name was not on the list of acceptable names they put forward.

While Kennedy recognized his vote losses among segregationists, anti-Catholics and farmers, he made no appointments from their ranks, just as he would not name a woman or a Negro to the Cabinet merely for the sake of show.
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An example of his unwillingness to appease occurred when he asked me what I knew of Henry Fowler’s background for Under Secretary of the Treasury, and I said I believed Fowler had fought
in Virginia against the powerful political machine of Finance Committee Chairman Harry Byrd. “That,” said the President-elect, “is a strong point for him, not against him.”

While he obviously would have been concerned had his entire Cabinet turned out to be Catholics, he paid no regard to religion in their selection. When I felt it necessary to bring to his attention the fact that all three of my proposed White House associates—Mike Feldman, Lee White and Dick Goodwin—were of Jewish ancestry, he replied matter-of-factly, “So what? They tell me this is the first Cabinet with two Jews, too. All I care about is whether they can handle it.”

4. The Cabinet contained only one official from the Roosevelt-Truman era, Dean Rusk, who had been a Deputy Under Secretary of State, and not one man who had held elective office as long as Kennedy had. At the Cabinet and particularly the sub-Cabinet level there was a wealth of experience in public affairs, but in place of the old, familiar faces were new men. It was the youngest Cabinet in the twentieth century. Luther Hodges was the only member born before 1900. Kennedy made no effort to balance youth with age. On the contrary, at an early stage when I mentioned that Paul Samuelson had suggested Robert Roosa as Secretary of the Treasury, with the warning that he was only forty-three years old, Kennedy’s reply was: “A forty-three-year-old Secretary of the Treasury…hmm—might be a good combination with Mac Bundy as a forty-one-year-old Secretary of State.”

5. The Cabinet was nonpolitical and bipartisan to an extent unusual for Democratic Presidents in particular. It contained only four men who had ever sought public office (Ribicoff, Udall, Freeman and Hodges), none of them national figures, and only four members of the FKBW (For Kennedy Before Wisconsin) Club (Bob Kennedy, Ribicoff, Udall and Goldberg). These four were joined in the campaign by Freeman and Hodges, but Kennedy had no political or even personal tie with either Rusk (who had supported Stevenson for the nomination) or Republican McNamara and knew Dillon had supported Nixon. An Eisenhower holdover in the Pentagon, Research Director Herbert York, pointed out to me the curious fact that he was the earliest Kennedy supporter in the top ranks of the new Defense Department, for he had favored JFK at a time when all the others were for Rockefeller, Symington, Johnson or Stevenson. The postmaster-generalship, in another break with tradition, was turned over, not to a patronage politician or National Committee Chairman, but to a skilled administrator, J. Edward Day, a Stevenson supporter whom JFK had met only in passing.

Contrary to a report that the appointment of Dillon, Eisenhower’s Under Secretary of State, contradicted a Kennedy pledge to “make a clean sweep” of all Ike men, “superior ability” had been practically the
only positive test enunciated in the campaign. The candidate had also touched briefly on what he did
not
want. He did not want his Cabinet drawn entirely from a single segment of society, such as business. He did not want men unwilling “to commit themselves to stay on the job long enough to learn what they must learn.”

The financial sacrifice required was considerable. Even by the standards of state and local government, Federal executives were paid shockingly low salaries. The Superintendent of Schools in La Due, Missouri, received a higher salary than the Secretary of Defense (and McNamara’s earnings at the Ford Motor Company had been $410,000 the previous year). The Chief Probate Judge of Cook County, Illinois, was paid more than the Secretary of State. The city of Los Angeles alone offered twenty-eight positions more highly paid than any Cabinet post.

Kennedy wanted a ministry of talent. Several limitations and pressures beset him in his hunt for the best. Most of his previous contacts and friendships were in two fields—politics and journalism. Most of them were in the East. Many of the best members of Congress preferred the security and seniority of their seats to the Executive Branch, and in many cases could help us more by staying where they were. Each private pressure group in a particular field, such as labor or agriculture, put forward names unacceptable to other groups in the same field. It was difficult, the President-elect found, to check quietly on a man’s ability and philosophy without arousing his expectations, his Democratic Senator’s irritation and some party faction’s opposition. Names of those supposedly under consideration—some of which he had never even heard or considered—continually leaked out to the press, which promptly concluded they were deliberate “trial balloons” on the part of Kennedy. Even personality problems cropped up. He was, for example, irritated by Stevenson’s delay in deciding on the UN Ambassadorship and publicly announced that it had been offered in order to make rejection all the more difficult.

There were also pressures of time. Clifford and Neustadt both urged him to appoint a Budget Director almost immediately. Eisenhower, the press emphasized, had announced his final Cabinet choice by December 1, which was the day Kennedy announced his first (Ribicoff). Even after he had completed his full Cabinet on December 17 (with Day), some sixty additional key policy posts and several hundred more key positions remained to be filled, and he was determined not to delegate to the Cabinet full discretion in the selection of the “sub-Cabinet.”

The process was arduous as well as long and deliberate. “This is the one part of the job I had hoped would be fun,” the President-elect had remarked somewhat sardonically as we wearily reviewed names one night in Palm Beach. “But these are the decisions that could make or break us all.” He lacked neither advice nor assistance. In the first large-scale
organized effort of its kind ever undertaken by a newly elected political party, Larry O’Brien and Sarge Shriver did a skillful job of meticulously screening the qualifications of tens of hundreds of applications and recommendations, for positions high and low. Aided by Dungan, Wofford, Donahue and Adam Yarmolinsky, they not only received names but searched for new ones. Their vast card file of candidate evaluations was both less systematic and more sensible than some news stories reported.