Kennedy (51 page)

A reporter compared the Eisenhower-Kennedy methods of obtaining teamwork with the differences between football and basketball. The Eisenhower football method relied on regular huddles and rigid assignments. In the Kennedy administration all team members were constantly on the move.

Kennedy called huddles, but only when necessary and only with those necessary, those whose official views he required or whose unofficial judgment he desired, regardless of protocol or precedent. Attendance varied with each subject, but it was not haphazard. McGeorge Bundy made certain that no responsible officer or point of view was omitted from meetings on foreign policy, and I tried to do the same on domestic. For example, if Walter Heller and George Ball wanted to meet with the President on the balance of payments, I made certain Dillon was also invited. The President’s own accessibility, and his insistence on dealing with subordinates as well as chiefs, made certain that he was not denied any relevant counsel or criticism, and both he and his staff improved our ability to use channels and coordinate decisions during those first crucial months. But he never altered his view that any meeting larger than necessary was less flexible, less secret and less hard-hitting.

As a result, with few exceptions, he held Cabinet meetings only because “I suppose we should—it’s been several weeks since the last one,” and with few exceptions these meetings bored him. He rarely made any attempt at such sessions, as President Roosevelt had, to engage Cabinet members in light banter, to seek their political advice, to suggest that they volunteer problems or to call on them one by one for discussion.

No decisions of importance were made at Kennedy’s Cabinet meetings and few subjects of importance, particularly in foreign affairs, were ever seriously discussed. The Cabinet as a body was convened largely as a symbol, to be informed, not consulted, to help keep the channels of communication open, to help maintain the
esprit de corps
of the members and to prevent the charge that Kennedy had abolished the Cabinet. There were no high-level debates, or elaborate presentations, or materials circulated in advance.
⁸

Kennedy relied considerably on his Cabinet officers, but not on the Cabinet as a body. On the contrary, he thought

He also felt, but could not add, that he usually had little interest in the views of Cabinet members on matters outside their jurisdiction. He summoned former Under Secretary of State Dillon to most major meetings on foreign policy and former Ford President McNamara to advise on the steel price dispute. But he did not want McNamara’s advice on debt management or Dillon’s advice on Nike-Zeus. In his opinion, that only wasted his time and theirs.

Problems involving all Cabinet members, and thus appropriate to Cabinet discussion, were few and far between: Civil Service and patronage, the Budget outlook, legislative relations and somewhat superficial briefings, not consultations, on administration policy and current events. Occasionally more important matters appeared on the agenda—the
responsibility of Cabinet officers for advancing civil rights or accelerating Federal projects during the recession, for example—but more typical by far was this Cabinet agenda for December 10, 1962, set forth here in its entirety:

While Heller and I were often asked to make presentations of this kind—as were O’Brien, the Budget Director and the Civil Service Chairman—only the ten department heads (and Ambassador Stevenson, when in town) sat at the long Cabinet table. None of them brought any staff or subordinates with them and most of them said comparatively little. The Cabinet Assistant, the Budget Director, the Science Adviser, the Economic Adviser and I sat behind the President, who kept the meetings as brief as decorum permitted. Often he would cut discussion short. Occasionally he would ask the Vice President to “chair” the meeting during his temporary absence—and then disappear permanently into his office.

Much the same was true of the large formal meetings of the National Security Council, which dealt exclusively with foreign affairs. It had a more significant agenda prepared by McGeorge Bundy, papers were circulated in advance and the meetings were more interesting to the President. He ran them in every sense of the word, first asking the CIA Director for the intelligence summaries on the situation under study, then asking the Secretary of State to give his recommendations, and then throwing it open to Defense and others. (Usually the senior official was addressed by the President as “Mr. Secretary” or “Mr. Dulles,” but his own aides by their first names.)

At times he made minor decisions in full NSC meetings or
pretended
to make major ones actually settled earlier. Attendance was generally kept well below the level of previous administrations, but still well above the statutory requirements. He strongly preferred to make all major decisions with far fewer people present, often only the officer to whom he was communicating the decision. “We have averaged three or four meetings a week with the Secretaries of Defense and State, McGeorge Bundy, the head of the CIA and the Vice President,” he said in 1961. “But formal meetings of the Security Council which include a much wider group are not as effective. It is more difficult to decide matters involving high national security if there is a wider group present.”

For brief periods of time, during or after a crisis, the President would
hold NSC meetings somewhat more regularly, partly as a means of getting on record the views of every responsible officer (who might otherwise complain that he wasn’t consulted and wouldn’t have approved), but mostly to silence outside critics who equated machinery with efficiency. “The National Security Council,” he said, when asked about various positions reportedly taken by its members in the Cuban missile crisis, “is an advisory body to the President. In the final analysis, the President of the United States must make the decision. And it is his decision. It’s not the decision of the National Security Council or any collective decision.” This he meant quite literally, for he often overruled the principal NSC members and on at least one occasion overruled all of them.

There were some complaints about the Kennedy approach to organizational machinery. Secretary Hodges grumbled publicly that there should be more Cabinet meetings. State Department aides grumbled privately that their prestige suffered if they were not present for key decisions. Secretary Rusk complained that he did not like to offer his views in meetings at which “people like Sorensen and Kaysen with no responsibility were making academic comments.” He preferred to save his arguments for the President’s ear only. But in general the department heads concurred with Willard Wirtz’s conclusion that, without many formal meetings, there had been an “extraordinary degree” of close communication, both ways, “between the President and his Cabinet…and among the Cabinet members.”

The President’s standing rule requiring White House clearance for all major speeches and Congressional testimony was rarely enforced except in critical periods. Salinger and his staff and Ted Reardon checked routine speech drafts, and my staff and Bundy’s checked major statements on domestic and foreign policy respectively. The President reviewed some speeches on his own. Occasionally he would ask us to coordinate in advance and monitor in progress all Congressional testimony by administration witnesses with differing points of view on a sensitive issue under hearing—the Cuban missile crisis or the 1962 economic and tax outlook, for example.

Some important gains resulted. Several Defense Department speeches were rendered less “missile-rattling.” A State Department aide was informed that he could not assert his own visionary proposals for civil rights. But it was an imperfect system. Several controversial high-level statements were given without clearance, and there was no way to clear answers to press or Congressional questions.

The speeches most difficult to check—and most dangerous to leave
unchecked—were those by high-ranking military officers, whose remarks had not always reflected the President’s point of view about peace. When it became known in Kennedy’s first week that a strong anti-Soviet speech by Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke had been toned down in the White House lest it disrupt the release of the RB-47 fliers, a great hue and cry arose about “muzzling” the military. Actually, Admiral Burke had voluntarily submitted the speech and the procedure was not unusual. But it was clearer than ever that military officers on active duty were not to undermine the final decisions of their Commander in Chief in their speeches or legislative testimony, not to confuse the world about the nature of America’s foreign policy, and not to undertake as an official responsibility the political indoctrination of either their troops or public opinion.

The most flagrant example of the last was Major General Edwin Walker’s use of right-wing extremist material with his troops in Germany. The President read about Walker’s wild charges in the newspaper and asked McNamara to investigate. In November, 1961, having been admonished and ordered to the Pacific, the General resigned from the Army.

There was nothing radical or even new, said Kennedy, about protecting the military from direct political involvement, requiring their educational talks to be nonpartisan and accurate, and requesting that their official speeches reflect official policies. Nor was any new curb placed on the military’s freedom of speech and opinion, or on their frank answers to Congressional questions. But

And he pointed out that his own speeches were reviewed in State and Defense with this objective.

In time, however, a Senate investigation, sparked by Strom Thurmond, sought to link this “censorship” with “softness” toward Communism. The situation was complicated by former President Eisenhower’s statement, “after thoughtful reconsideration,” that his own administration’s policy of requiring speech clearances should be dropped. But several high-ranking officers testified to the wisdom of the practice, and General Walker’s ranting testimony served to confirm it. The most prominent military supporters of his policy on clearances were all distinguished officers, said the President with some pleasure,

Not all the military understood. Not all agreed to speak with one voice, that of their civilian Commander in Chief. Some still grumbled to the press and Congress about decisions on which they felt inadequately consulted or unwisely overruled. But, on the whole, official Washington spoke publicly with one strong voice more clearly than ever before.

Very few important officials inherited or appointed by Kennedy were overtly dismissed from the Federal service. One Kennedy critic in a major holdover post was the object of such intentions, but upon reading Bundy’s memorandum explaining that by statute the only hope for removing this gentleman would be to “get him on bad behavior,” the President scrawled at the bottom: “No—he might do the same to us. JK.”

Nevertheless those who could not keep up, those whose contributions did not match their reputations and those who did not share his energy and idealism were reassigned, if not asked to retire. The most prominent case of reshuffling—known in some quarters as “the Thanksgiving Massacre of 1961”—occurred in the Department of State.

The President was discouraged with the State Department almost as soon as he took office. He felt that it too often seemed to have a built-in inertia which deadened initiative and that its tendency toward excessive delay obscured determination. It spoke with too many voices and too little vigor. It was never clear to the President (and this continued to be true, even after the personnel changes) who was in charge, who was clearly delegated to do what, and why his own policy line seemed consistently to be altered or evaded. The top State Department team—including Secretary Rusk, Under Secretaries Bowles and Ball, UN Ambassador Stevenson, Roving Ambassador Harriman, Assistant Secretary Williams, Latin America coordinator Berle, all men of Cabinet stature, and many others—reflected an abundance of talent ironically unmatched by production. Kennedy felt the men recommended by Bowles had done better than Rusk’s; Rusk felt confined by subordinates appointed personally by Kennedy, some of them even before Rusk had been named, and by all the White House aides and other outsiders brought in on foreign policy; Bowles felt unable to get Rusk’s backing on the administrative rebuilding which the Secretary was too busy to perform; and Stevenson, enveloped in the United Nations-New York atmosphere where
world opinion weighed heavier than domestic, felt out of touch with decisions in Washington. In addition, reorganization of the foreign AID program was hampered not only by ineffective direction but by the refusal of Congress, the No. 1 critic of AID overstaffing and inefficiency, to authorize the elimination of “deadwood” personnel, many of them placed there through Congressional influence.