Kennedy (52 page)

State’s relations with the Congress, the press and the White House were in some disarray. Holdovers in the department talked longingly of Acheson—or Nixon. The Foreign Service, many of its brightest lights having been darkened or dimmed during the McCarthy-McCleod days and by Dulles’ one-man diplomacy, still suffered from low morale and from a tradition of grumbling about interference by aggressive amateurs and by other agencies, and from a system of looking so long at every side of every decision that often only indecision emerged. (A veteran diplomat told the President, however, that the Foreign Service had become much like a badly trained horse whom punishment could only make worse.)

The President had no desire to change the Secretary of State. But Rusk left administration to his Under Secretary, Chester Bowles, who preferred exploring long-range ideas to expediting short-gap expedients, and to the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration, Roger Jones, a former Civil Service commissioner. As one observer summed it up to the President, “Rusk finds it hard to use a deputy and Bowles finds it even harder to be a No. 2.” The President liked Bowles, liked most of his ideas and liked most of his personnel recommendations. But the State Department team needed a manager.

Many names were considered. Bundy had already rejected the job in January. Sargent Shriver and David Bell were needed where they were. Bob Kennedy would not have fitted there. Arthur Dean and John McCloy, both highly regarded for their work on disarmament and the UN, preferred not to accept permanent full-time responsibilities. Harvard’s Robert Bowie had been more of a thinker than an administrator. Finally the solution was clear, as perhaps it should have been earlier: promoting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs George Ball, No. 3 man in the department, into the No. 2 position.

But premature word of Bowles’s impending reassignment in the summer of 1961 brought glee to his enemies, who mistakenly assumed that the President had ‘leaked’ it to his columnist friends, and this postponed Bowles’s fate. The Foreign Service cliques, the CIA professionals, the Pentagon generals and the right-wing editorials were all opposed to Bowles for the wrong reasons. Kennedy was not motivated by any criticisms that Bowles was too “soft,” or too naive, or had attempted to clear himself of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure. At the same
time, some of Bowles’s supporters in the press, party and government (nicknamed by some “the Chet Set”) began to pressure the President to retain Bowles for equally irrelevant reasons. Bowles himself ignored all hints and opportunities to request reassignment as a matter of service and loyalty to the President.

Kennedy let the controversy die down, but he began relying more on Ball than on Bowles. While Ball also had little time or inclination to take on the management of the department, he was able to give the President more expeditious service on major projects. In a press conference, while praising Bowles, Kennedy made clear his intention to “make more effective the structure and the personnel of the State Department…. If I come to the conclusion that Mr. Bowles could be more effective in another responsible position, I would not hesitate to ask him.”

By late November he was ready to move with a whole series of closely held, swiftly executed changes “better matching men and jobs.” Dick Goodwin’s ambitious efforts on Latin America and Walt Rostow’s generalized planning on foreign policy belonged in State, which was weak in these areas, rather than in the White House. Fred Dutton, whose abilities had not found a firm foothold in the White House, would take over State’s sorry Congressional relations (where he did a good job despite the continuing practice of the more timid bureaucracy to appease those legislators who controlled the purse strings). Averell Harriman, whom the President noted had already held more important posts than anyone since John Quincy Adams, and whose performance as Ambassador at Large (once he swallowed pride and wore a hearing aid) had far surpassed Kennedy’s expectations, agreed to serve as Assistant Secretary for the Far East, where the problems of Laos, Vietnam, Red China and Formosa had not been adequately handled. Rostow was to take the place of Rusk man George McGhee, McGhee was to take Ball’s place (where he was later succeeded by Harriman), Ball was to take Bowles’s place, and Bowles was to be offered a specific or roving ambassadorship.

Obviously the whole chain of moves depended on Bowles. Fearful that Bowles might resign in an uproar, the President asked me to “hold his hand a little, as one ‘liberal’ to another, after Rusk breaks the news to him.” I liked Chet Bowles and his ideas about the Foreign Service and the kind of men it needed. I had stayed in contact with him since 1959. It was the Sunday afternoon after Thanksgiving when the news was broken to each of the men moved, and Rusk, concerned by Bowles’s reaction, called me at home where I had been standing by and urged me to see the Under Secretary immediately.

In the all-but-empty new State Department Building I found Bowles sitting disconsolate and alone in his office. He was hurt and angry at
Kennedy, at Rusk and at the world. He had no intention of taking any post. He had his pride and his convictions, he said. He had been loyal and received no loyalty in return. He would resign and speak his mind.

We talked. On behalf of the President, I sympathized with Chet’s feelings. I rejected his threats. I shared his grief. I admired his efforts. It grew darker and darker, but neither of us moved to turn on the lights. Salinger’s prescheduled Hyannis Port press conference, at which the changes had to be announced before they “leaked,” was about to begin. We talked on and on.

Finally a solution began to emerge. Bowles would be a part of the prestigious White House team, the President’s “Special Representative and Adviser for Asian, African and Latin-American Affairs” with the rank of ambassador. He would have a raise in pay, reflecting a raise in responsibility. He would have his own office and staff, use of the White House cars, and access to the White House dining room. He would report directly to the President.

It was not a real post, as became clear to all later. Bowles was far more suited to return to India as Ambassador, which he did promptly on Galbraith’s retirement in mid-1963, and where he served with loyalty and distinction. But it was a post which saved faces and prevented fights in November, 1961. Bowles accepted it. The President, who would nail it down the following day in a personal conversation, liked it. Salinger announced it. All those who a few months earlier had denounced the prospect of Bowles’s removal could not effectively object to it. And the President, who looked with some amusement on my assignments as a missionary to liberals, commented, “Good job, Ted—that was your best work since the Michigan delegation.”

J
OHN KENNEDY ONCE RECALLED
with humor the day at Cape Cod when he sat handicapped by his bad back in the eye of a New England hurricane. The only two other people in the house had been a servant who was drunk and a chauffeur enraged at the servant. While they chased each other threatening murder, the then Senator sat alone with his crutches in the deadly still air, watching nature’s fury swirl about him and wondering whether he would survive.

In 1961 he found himself once again in the eye of a hurricane. Sitting alone in the unnatural quiet that becalms the summit of power, beset by economic and military handicaps and quarrels within the free world, he saw the international horizon explode about him in one storm after another. “Every President,” wrote John Fischer in
Harper’s Magazine
, “needs about twelve months to get his executive team organized, to feel his way into the vast and dangerous machinery of the bureaucracy…. While [Kennedy] was still trying to move in the furniture, in effect, he found the roof falling in and the doors blowing off.”

Kennedy had been forewarned. The CIA briefings he received from Allen Dulles and his deputy in Palm Beach were far more revealing than those he had received as a candidate, and the still fuller familiarity with world trends that came with his assumption of power “staggered” him, as he willingly confessed. But he had never entertained any illusions about avoiding or postponing these crises. “That’s stupid,” he had said to me in Palm Beach upon hearing that sources within his administration
were supposedly reporting that he had asked Soviet Chairman Khrushchev for a six-month moratorium on world tensions to give the new administration time to look for new answers. The national interests of the Soviet Union, he said, like those of the United States, could not be waived or suspended for any person or period, and where those two sets of interests conflicted, there was trouble ahead.

During his first week in office we worked intermittently on his first State of the Union address. As each successive draft was reviewed, he sought to make more somber his warning to the country of the perils that lay ahead. His original foreign affairs passage struck me as already rather ominous, preoccupied as I was with his legislative program:

But on Saturday, January 28, two days before the message was to be delivered, he decided, in reviewing a near-final draft completed in an all-night session, that these words of warning were still insufficient. He inserted another paragraph:

And then on Sunday, going over the finished draft in the Mansion after church, he added one final prediction:
“There will be further setbacks before the tide is turned.”

On Monday the message was delivered, and immediately much of the press called these passages unnecessarily grim and gloomy. No one could have foreseen that the rate of world crises in the following eight months would so rapidly outpace that message that a unique second State of the Union address would be required in the spring and that even grimmer dangers would appear in the summer.

Two weeks after his speech, on February 13, the Soviets threatened new intervention in the Congo following the assassination of former Premier Lumumba.

On March 9 Communist-led forces were so close to taking over all of Laos that detailed plans for the introduction of American forces were presented to the President.

On March 18 NATO ally Portugal was required to rush troops to Angola to repress a nationalist uprising supported by America’s African friends.

On March 21 the Soviet delegation at the Geneva test-ban talks announced its new demand for a Troika veto over all inspection, making doubtful any nuclear disarmament.

On April 12 the Soviets dramatically demonstrated their superior rocket boosters by orbiting the first man in space.

On April 19 Fidel Castro completely crushed an invasion at the Bay of Pigs by a band of U.S.-supported Cuban exiles hoping to free their homeland.

On May 1 the Communist-sponsored National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Communist Party newspaper in North Vietnam announced that the rate of progress in the guerrilla war would enable them to take over the country by the end of the year.

On May 15 an internal military coup overthrew the government of U.S.-defended South Korea.

On May 30 the assassination of dictator Trujillo introduced an atmosphere of revolt and unrest into the Dominican Republic that is still continuing as of this writing.

On June 4 Khrushchev at Vienna warned Kennedy that a peace treaty with East Germany, ending Western access rights in West Berlin, would be signed before the end of the year.