Kennedy (47 page)

His staff, to be sure, was neither as efficient as we pretended nor as harmonious as he thought. Failure of communication appeared more than once. A degree of envy and occasionally resentment cropped up now and then. A group of able and aggressive individualists, all dependent on one man, could not be wholly free from competitive feelings or from scornful references to each other’s political or intellectual backgrounds. Below the level of senior adviser, a few personnel changes did occur in due course. But Kennedy’s personal interest in his aides, refusal to prefer one over another, and mixture of pressure and praise achieved a total command of our loyalties. We worked for him ten to twelve hours every day, and loved every minute of it.

The President showed his appreciation to us not by constant expressions of gratitude—which were in fact rather rare—but by returning in full the loyalty of his staff and other appointees.
³
“Congressmen are always advising Presidents to get rid of Presidential advisers,” he told a news conference. “That is one of the most constant threads that runs through American history.” The statement was occasioned by the suggestion of conservative Democratic Congressman Baring that Kennedy get rid of Bowles, Ball, Bell, Bunche and Sylvester. “He has a fondness
for alliteration in B’s,” observed the President smilingly, “but I would not add Congressman Baring to that list, as I have a high regard for him
and
for the gentlemen that he named…. Presidents ordinarily do not pay attention [to Congressmen urging dismissal of their advisers], nor do they in this case.”

When Arthur Schlesinger was under fire for calling a columnist an “idiot”—when Dick Goodwin was accused of meddling in diplomacy—when Pierre Salinger’s trip to the Soviet Union was under attack—when the hard-working Bundy, Rostow and Galbraith were maligned as “the dancing professors”—and when Walter Heller, Stuart Udall, Willard Wirtz, Arthur Sylvester and many others were assailed for some supposed mistake or misstatement—the President took pains to reassure each of us in private and, if asked, to defend us in public. Jerome Wiesner, after the newspapers had distorted a sailing accident which temporarily laid him low, told how the President cheered him up with an offer “to give me lessons in sailing and press relations.” When another aide apologized for a personal incident which had appeared in the press, the President replied, “That’s all right, I’ve been looking over the FBI files and there isn’t one of us here that hasn’t done something.”

Outside observers often attempted to divide the staff into two camps: the intellectuals or “eggheads” and the politicians or “Irish Mafia” (a newspaper designation bitterly resented by its designees when first published). No such division, in fact, existed. Those with primarily political roles were men of high intelligence. Those who came from primarily academic backgrounds often had political experience. Many could not be simply classified as either “intellectuals” or “politicians” (and I insisted I had a foot in each camp). All the President’s principal staff members shared his high hopes for a better world and his practical acceptance of the present one. All recognized that Presidential policies and politics were inseparable, respected each other’s individual talents and functions, and accepted the possibility of error in their own conclusions as well as those of their colleagues.

While few of us had a “passion for anonymity,” most of us had a preference in that direction. In December, 1960, I reviewed with the President-elect a series of speaking invitations I had received, as well as requests for magazine profiles. “Turn them all down,” he said, and I did. “Not only will you not have time. Every man that’s ever held a job like yours—Sherman Adams, Harry Hopkins, House, all the rest—has ended up in the————. Congress was down on them or the President was hurt by them or somebody was mad at them. The best way to stay out of trouble is to stay out of sight.”
⁴

The wisdom of his words was brought home several months later when I represented the President at his request at a George Norris Centennial Dinner in my home state. My speech deplored the number of young people leaving Nebraska to seek better schools for their children, and it was bitterly attacked out of context. The Republican National Committeewoman, for example, said if I came back to Nebraska to die “it would be too soon.” Word of the uproar reached the Washington newspapers, and the President greeted me with the comment: “That’s what happens when you permit a speech-writer to write his own speech!” When I apologized, not for what I had said but for any embarrassment I had caused him, he laughed. “I don’t mind,” he said. “They can criticize
you
all they like!”

Kennedy wanted his staff to be small, in order to keep it more personal than institutional. Although in time a number of “special assistants” accumulated for special reasons, he kept the number of senior generalists to a minimum. Both my office, which dealt mostly with domestic policy, and that of McGeorge Bundy, which dealt exclusively with foreign policy, combined in relatively small staffs the functions of several times as many Eisenhower aides. Instead of adding specialists in my own office, I relied on the excellent staff work of the Bureau of the Budget and Council of Economic Advisers.

The President wanted a fluid staff. Our jurisdictions were distinguishable but not exclusive, and each man could and did assist every other. Our assignments and relations evolved with time, as did the President’s use of us. There was no chief of staff in the Sherman Adams—Wilton Persons role supervising and screening the work of all others. Instead, Kennedy was his own chief of staff, and his principal White House advisers had equal stature, equal salaries and equal access to his office. He compared it to “a wheel and a series of spokes.”

There were no distinctions in rank connoted by staff tides and very few differences in title. Nearly everyone was officially a “Special Assistant.” A few were “Administrative Assistants.” No one was “The Assistant to the President.” The President, in fact, remarked in January of 1961 that he wished everyone had been called Special Assistant. As the heir to a very honorable title, I could hardly share his sentiments, but only one title was ever used within the walls of the White House, and that was “Mr. President.”

Not one staff meeting was ever held, with or without the President. Nor was one ever desirable. Each of us was busy with our separate responsibilities, and each of us met when necessary with whatever staff members had jurisdictions touching our own. For example, in my role of assisting the President on his program and policy, with particular emphasis on legislation, I might meet in one day but at separate times
with National Security Assistant Bundy on the foreign aid message, Budget Director Bell on its cost, Press Secretary Salinger on its publication, Legislative Liaison O’Brien on its reception by the Congress, and Appointments Secretary O’Donnell on the President’s final meeting on its contents, as well as the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury and the Foreign Aid Director. I also kept abreast of the President’s thinking by attending all the more formal Presidential meetings around which policy was built: the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the legislative leaders breakfasts, the pre-press conference breakfasts and the formulation of the Budget and legislative program. He and I continued to be close in a peculiarly impersonal way. Of course, no man is truly an “alter ego” to the President of the United States.

The President retained at all times the highest regard for each of his principal aides. McGeorge Bundy’s sagacious and systematic coordination of the President’s myriad foreign affairs headaches made him a logical candidate for Secretary of State in the event of a second-term opening. His brisk, sometimes brusque manner, which occasionally annoyed his intellectual inferiors (who were legion), suited Kennedy perfectly—as did the cry of outrage emanating from Foster Furcolo over the appointment of this Republican Harvard dean, surprisingly never used by Eisenhower, who had worked for Dewey in 1948, attacked Furcolo in 1958 and supported Kennedy in 1960.

“Dave Bell,” said Clark Clifford to the President-elect in November, 1960, “is your kind of man.” That was precisely correct, as the Budget Director proved to be a source of few words but unflagging work, un-frenzied advice and unfailing calm. Tough beneath a bland exterior, he loyally agreed later to take on the thankless task of the foreign aid directorship only after the President had overridden my protest that this was cutting off my right arm. Bell’s replacement as Budget Director, Kermit Gordon, fortunately proved equally able.
⁵

Ken O’Donnell, handling appointments, trip arrangements and White House administrative duties, customarily exhibited such a cool countenance, and such a grim resistance to those undeserving of the President’s time, that many were unaware of his shrewd sense of judgment and delightful sense of humor which helped the President through his day. The only chink in O’Donnell’s defense of the Presidential front door was the existence of a back door less strictly guarded by the President’s softhearted personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, still as unruffled and devoted as in her days in our Senate office.

Larry O’Brien, who shared political chores with O’Donnell when not
wrestling with the Congress, possessed the extraordinary patience, resilience and affable political instincts which enabled him not only to survive but to succeed in the struggle for Kennedy’s program.

Press Secretary Pierre Salinger’s work was more closely followed by the President on a daily basis than that of any other staff member, with the exception of O’Donnell and Mrs. Lincoln. While maintaining good relations with his counterparts in both the Soviet Union and Allied nations, Pierre did not intrude on Presidential policy-making. Transcripts of his twice-daily briefings of the press were quickly read by the President and staff for both illumination and entertainment—the latter covering such subjects as portly Pierre’s fitness for a Presidentially prescribed fifty-mile hike and his distinction as the only known golfer ever to hit the clubhouse at Hyannis Port.

Many others in the White House served Kennedy well and deserve to be mentioned: including Ralph Dungan, who continued the talent hunt in the White House and worked with Bundy as well; Ted Reardon, ever loyal to his old chief as Cabinet assistant; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served as a constant contact with liberals and intellectuals both in this country and abroad, as an adviser on Latin-American, United Nations and cultural affairs, as a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches on all topics, and incidentally as a lightning rod to attract Republican attacks away from the rest of us.

As Bundy was aided by the astute Carl Kaysen and others, as O’Brien and Salinger were backed by their able staffs, so I depended in the Special Counsel’s office on Mike Feldman and Lee White to handle many agency problems and pressure groups under the direct supervision of the President. Feldman, for example, served among other things as the channel for most business requests—on tariffs, airline routes and subsidies, to name but a few. “If Mike ever turned dishonest,” said the President one day, “we could all go to jail.”

Indispensable to the President was the ever-smiling presence of his old friend Dave Powers, who kept everyone else smiling with his unending supply of Charlestown, Massachusetts color, baseball lore and statistics, and unprecedented greetings of the great and near-great (examples: “He’s our type Shah” and “Is this the real Mikoyan?”).

Housed in the Executive Office Building across a small avenue from the White House West Wing were the President’s economic and science advisers. Walter Heller, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was learned without being doctrinaire and liberal without being rigid. Once he learned to adjust to Kennedy’s methods, views and emphasis on the possible, Heller and his associates became the most highly influential and frequently consulted Council of Economic Advisers in history. In fact, both Heller and Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner, by
learning to adapt their pedagogy to the President’s preference for brevity and to accept philosophically his decisions contrary to their advice, greatly raised the stature of their offices.

The economic, science, Budget and other advisers in the Executive Office Building worked closely with the President’s office and those adjoining it in the West Wing of the White House. More distant in many ways were the offices in the East Wing, containing military aides, social secretaries, administrative officers, correspondence clerks, Mrs. Kennedy’s staff and assorted others. With certain notable exceptions such as Schlesinger, the occupants of those sedate and serene offices were regarded almost as inhabitants of another world. “Sometimes,” sighed the President one day on the telephone to an aide of Mrs. Kennedy, “I don’t think you people in the East Wing have any understanding of our problems over here in the West Wing.”

Ranking the Cabinet has long been a favorite game among the Washington columnists and cocktail circuit-riders. Who is “in,” “out,” “up,” “down”? Who is slated to go and who will replace him? The game is based more on fun than fact, for there are very few facts available to the public which are relevant to such rankings. A Cabinet member who sees the President often may be considered by the latter to be an intimate or a bore. One who sees the President rarely may have been given broad discretion or the “deep freeze.” It is much easier for a Secretary of Labor to be judged a “success” by the press than it is for a Secretary of Agriculture. The value of a Postmaster General cannot be compared with that of an Attorney General; nor will a President preoccupied with world crises turn to his Secretary of Commerce as often as to his Secretary of State.

The nature of their responsibilities and the competence with which they did their jobs brought six senior national executives particularly close to the President: Vice President Johnson, Attorney General Kennedy, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Dillon, Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Labor Goldberg. The other Cabinet officers—Secretary of Agriculture Freeman, Secretary of Labor (II) Wirtz, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Ribicoff, Secretary of the Interior Udall, Secretary of Commerce Hodges, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (II) Celebrezze and Postmasters General Day and Gronouski—all enjoyed, for the most part, the President’s fullest confidence and respect, though he necessarily spent less time with them.