I am an idealist without illusions.
—attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., c. 1953
JACK KENNEDY’S ELECTION to the presidency by the narrowest of margins frustrated and exhilarated him. He was “more perplexed than bothered by the narrowness of his victory,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled. Kennedy was clearly “jubilant” and “deeply touched” at becoming only the thirty-fourth American to become president. But after seeing him, journalist Henry Brandon thought that the result had actually somewhat “hurt his self-confidence and pride.” Kennedy himself asked Kenny O’Donnell, “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?”
But Kennedy had little time to savor or question his victory; the transition from candidate to president-elect confronted him with immediate new pressures. The problems he had complained of during the campaign—an uncertain public lacking inspired leadership in the Cold War, the missile gap, a nuclear arms race, Cuba, communism’s appeal to developing nations, a stagnant economy, and racial injustices—were now his responsibility.
In the seventy-two days before he took office, he had first to overcome campaign exhaustion. The day after the election, during the press conference at the Hyannis Port Armory, his hands, although out of camera range, trembled. One reporter, responding to Kennedy’s appearance the following day, asked whether rumors about his health problems were true. Two weeks after the election, when Ted Sorensen visited him at his father’s vacation retreat in Palm Beach, he had not fully recovered. His mind was neither “keen” nor “clear,” Sorensen recalls, and he “still seemed tired then and reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection.” As he and his father drove to a Palm Beach golf course, Jack complained, “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 about it all.” Joe responded, “Jack, if you don’t want the job, you don’t have to take it. They’re still counting votes up in Cook County.”
Kennedy knew he could not afford to show any signs of flagging in public. How could he get the country moving again or create the sense of hope, the belief in a better national future that had been so central to his campaign if he gave any indication of physical or psychological fatigue? Thus, in response to the reporter’s question about his health, he declared himself in “excellent” shape and dismissed rumors of Addison’s disease as false. “I have been through a long campaign and my health is very good today,” he said. An article based largely on information supplied by Bobby Kennedy echoed Jack’s assertions. Published in Today’s Health, an American Medical Association journal, and summarized in the New York Times, the article described Jack as in “superb physical condition.” Though it reported some adrenal insufficiency, which a daily oral medication neutralized, the journal assured readers that Jack would have no problem handling the demands of the presidency.
The reality was, of course, different. Kennedy’s health remained as uncertain as ever. Having gone from one medical problem to another throughout his life, he believed his ongoing conditions were no cause to think that he could not be president. But whether someone with adrenal, back, colon-stomach, and prostate difficulties could function with high effectiveness under the sort of pressures a president faced was a question that remained to be answered. True, FDR had functioned brilliantly despite his paralysis, but he was never on a combination of medicines like the one Kennedy relied on to get through the day. When he ran for and won the presidency, Kennedy was gambling that his health problems would not prevent him from handling the job. By hiding the extent of his ailments, he had denied voters the chance to decide whether they wanted to join him in this bet.
Kennedy’s hope was to return the center of decision to the Oval Office, rather than let it remain in the hands of the subordinates who were supposedly running Eisenhower’s government. But obviously he needed a cabinet, and selecting it was not simple. Appointing prominent older men could revive campaign charges that Kennedy was too young to take charge and needed experienced advisers to run his administration. At the same time, however, Kennedy did not want to create the impression that he would surround himself with pushovers and ciphers who would not threaten his authority. He wanted the most talented and accomplished people he could find, and he was confident that he could make them serve his purposes.
He also understood that his thin margin of victory gave him less a mandate for fresh actions than a need to demonstrate lines of continuity with Eisenhower’s presidency. The margin convinced him that it was essential to conciliate Republicans and indicate that as president he would put the national interest above partisan politics.
Indeed, Kennedy’s announcement of appointments two days after the election suggested not new departures but consistency with the past. At a dinner with liberal friends the day after the election, Kennedy’s mention of the CIA and the FBI had brought pleas for new directors and novel ways of thinking about Cold War dangers. To his friends’ surprise, the next morning he announced that Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover would continue to head the CIA and the FBI, respectively. Kennedy hoped this would put Democrats on notice that he would not be beholden to any party faction and would make up his own mind about what would best serve the country and his administration. (He may also have been guarding against damaging leaks from Hoover about his private life. As Lyndon Johnson would later put it, better to keep Hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.)
Four days later, Kennedy flew in a helicopter to Key Biscayne to meet Nixon. When O’Donnell asked him what he would say to Nixon, he replied, “I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe I’ll ask him how he won in Ohio.” The meeting had its intended symbolic value, showing Kennedy as a statesman above the country’s political wars. The New York Times reported Kennedy’s determination not to exclude the Republicans from constructive contributions to his administration, though Nixon himself would not be offered any formal role. Nevertheless, Kennedy could not ignore their political differences. O’Donnell recalled the conversation between Kennedy and Nixon as neither interesting nor amusing. Nixon did most of the talking. “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it,” Kennedy told O’Donnell on the return ride to Palm Beach. Nixon did not reveal his Ohio strategy, Kennedy said later.
In any case, the outgoing vice president was basically irrelevant; relations with Eisenhower, however, were crucial to the transition and coming assumption of power. Though election as the youngest president and service as the oldest separated Kennedy and Eisenhower, the two were among the most attractive personalities ever to occupy the White House. Ike’s famous grin and reassuring manner and JFK’s charm and wit made them almost universally likable. The “almost” certainly applied here: The two men did not have high regard for each other. Kennedy viewed Ike as something of an old fuddy-duddy, a sort of seventy-year-old fossil who was a “non-president” more interested in running the White House by organizational charts than by using executive powers. In private, he was not above making fun of Ike, mimicking him and calling him “that old asshole.” Eisenhower privately reciprocated the contempt, sometimes intentionally mispronouncing Kennedy’s name and referring to the forty-three-year-old as “Little Boy Blue” and “that young whippersnapper.” Ike saw the Kennedys as arrivistes and Jack as more celebrity than serious public servant, someone who had done little more than spend his father’s money to win political office, where, in the House and Senate, he had served without distinction.
Truman and Ike, whose differences in the 1952 campaign had carried over into the postelection transfer of power, had only one twenty-minute meeting at the White House, which was formal and unfriendly. Kennedy was eager to avoid a comparable exchange, so he seized upon an invitation to consult with Eisenhower at the White House in December. “I was anxious to see E[isenhower],” Kennedy recorded. “Because it would serve a specific purpose in reassuring the public as to the harmony of the transition. Therefore strengthening our hands.”
At an initial meeting on December 6, Kennedy wanted to discuss organizational matters, “the present national security setup, organization within the White House… [and] Pentagon organization.” Kennedy also listed as topics for discussion: “Berlin—Far East (Communist China, Formosa)—Cuba, [and] De Gaulle, Adenauer and MacMillan: President Eisenhower’s opinion and evaluation of these men.” Above all, Kennedy wanted “to avoid direct involvement in action taken by the outgoing Administration.” Yet despite his reluctance to enter into policy discussions, he prepared for the meeting by reading extensively on seven foreign policy issues Ike had suggested they review: “NATO Nuclear Sharing, Laos, The Congo, Algeria, Disarmament [and] Nuclear test suspension negotiations, Cuba and Latin America, U.S. balance of payments and the gold outflow.” Only one domestic topic made Eisenhower’s list: “The need for a balanced budget.”
The meeting began with an outward display of cordiality by both men at the north portico of the White House, where the president greeted his successor before press photographers and the marine band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Kennedy, eager to use his youth and vigor to rekindle public hope, stepped from his car before it had come to a full stop and rushed forward alone to shake hands before the president could remove his hat or extend his hand. It perfectly symbolized the changing of the guard.
During the meeting, which lasted over an hour, longer than anticipated, Eisenhower did most of the talking. It was by far the most time Kennedy had ever spent with Eisenhower. Jack found much of Ike’s discourse unenlightening, later describing the president to Bobby as ponderous and poorly informed about subjects he should have mastered. He did not appreciate Ike’s advice that he “avoid any reorganization before he himself could become well acquainted with the problem.” But he also came away from the meeting with a heightened appreciation of Ike’s appeal and a more intimate realization that Eisenhower’s political success rested on the force and effectiveness of his personality.
Eisenhower was more impressed with Kennedy. He saw greater substance to the man than he had formerly. Kennedy convinced him that he was “a serious, earnest seeker for information and the implication was that he will give full consideration to the facts and suggestions we presented.” (Jack had obviously done an effective job of masking his limited regard for the president’s presentation of issues.) Eisenhower had some reservations: He believed that Kennedy was a bit naive in thinking that he could master issues by simply putting the right men in place around him. Despite this concern, Ike sent word to Washington attorney Clark Clifford, the head of Kennedy’s transition team, that he had been “misinformed and mistaken about this young man. He’s one of the ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across.”
Ten weeks after his election, Kennedy had a clearer idea of priorities, and he requested another meeting with Eisenhower. His principal worries, he said, in order of importance, were Laos, the Congo, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Berlin, nuclear test talks and disarmament, Algeria, “an appraisal of limited war requirements vs. limited war capabilities,” and “basic economic, fiscal, and monetary policies.” Eisenhower declared himself ready to discuss any of these topics in a “larger meeting,” but he wanted to talk with Kennedy alone about presidential actions in a defense emergency, particularly authorization of the use of atomic weapons, and covert or “special operations, including intelligence activities.”
In their private meeting, which lasted forty-five minutes, Ike, who looked “very fit, pink cheeked,” and seemed “unharassed,” reviewed the emergency procedures for response to “an immediate attack.” It was one expression of current fears about a Soviet nuclear assault, even if, as Eisenhower knew, Moscow lacked the wherewithal to strike successfully against the United States. The prevailing wisdom, after the horrors of World War II and Soviet repression in the USSR and Eastern Europe, was that fanatical communists were capable of terrifying acts, especially against Western Europe, which Western political leaders would be irresponsible to ignore.
Kennedy marveled at Eisenhower’s sangfroid in discussing nuclear conflict. Ike assured Kennedy that the United States enjoyed an invulnerable advantage over Moscow in nuclear submarines armed with Polaris missiles, which could reach the Soviet Union from undetectable positions in various oceans. He seemed to take special pleasure in showing Kennedy how quickly a helicopter could whisk him to safety from the White House in case of a nuclear attack. With evident glee at a president’s military mastery, Ike said, “Watch this,” and instructed a military aide on the telephone: “Opal Drill Three.” The marine helicopter that landed almost at once on the White House lawn brought a smile of approval to JFK’s face as well.
But Kennedy’s main focus remained on Laos. A three-sided civil war between Pathet Lao communists, pro-Western royalists, and neutralists presented the possibility of communist control in Laos and, by extension, the loss of all Southeast Asia. As Kennedy noted in a later memo, “I was anxious to get some commitment from the outgoing administration as to how they would deal with Laos, which they were handing to us. I thought particularly it would be helpful to have some idea as to how prepared they were for military intervention.”
Speaking for the president, Eisenhower’s secretaries of state and defense urged a commitment to block communist control of Laos. They saw the Soviet bloc testing the unity and strength of Western intentions. They believed that the communists would avoid a major war in the region but that they would “continue to make trouble right up to that point.” They described Laos as “the cork in the bottle. If Laos fell, then Thailand, the Philippines,” and even Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime on Formosa would go. Eisenhower himself favored unilateral intervention if America’s allies would not follow its lead, predicting that Cambodia and South Vietnam would also be victims unless the United States countered communist aggression in Southeast Asia. He also advised against a coalition government in Laos: “Any time you permit Communists to have a part in the government of such a nation, they end up in control.” Kennedy was not happy at the prospect of having to send American forces into Laos as the first major action of his term. “Whatever’s going to happen in Laos,” he had said to Sorensen before the January meeting, “an American invasion, a Communist victory or whatever, I wish it would happen before we take over and get blamed for it.” Despite his bold talk, Eisenhower was reluctant to intervene, and there was no chance he would act in the closing days of his term.
By contrast with Laos, Cuba barely registered as an immediate worry. Eisenhower advised Kennedy that he was helping anti-Castro guerrilla forces to the utmost and that the United States was currently training such a group in Guatemala. “In the long run the United States cannot allow the Castro Government to continue to exist in Cuba,” Eisenhower said. None of this, however, was news to Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy had received a memo as early as August 1960, which Jack’s friend Florida senator George Smathers warmly endorsed, recommending that the U.S. government encourage formation of “a respectable government-in-exile” to replace Castro. Moreover, by October, Bobby knew that Cuban exiles in Miami were describing “an invasion fever in Guatemala” but that they felt themselves “being rushed into it and that they are not yet equipped for it.” Bobby was also advised that “this invasion story is in the open.” The fact, however, that no action seemed imminent put the Castro problem lower on Kennedy’s list of worries than Laos, and in his memo of the conversation with the president, Jack made no mention of Cuba.
In preparing for power, Kennedy wanted to ensure that he not be the captive of any group or individual. As the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, he anticipated dealing with more experienced Washington hands who would see his youth as a reason to assert their authority over him. He did not view potential appointees and advisers as intent on maliciously weakening his control but as forceful men accustomed to leading and eager to help an untested Chief Executive burdened with unprecedented responsibilities. His concern to ensure his authority registered clearly on Schlesinger, to whom he spoke repeatedly about Franklin Roosevelt’s “capacity to dominate a sprawling government filled with strong men eager to go into business on their own.”
Kennedy’s determination to maintain control of organizational, procedural, and substantive matters was evident even before he was elected. In August, he had asked Clark Clifford to prepare transition briefs. “If I am elected,” he said, “I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and have to ask myself, ‘What in the world do I do now?’ ”
Clifford was the consummate Washington insider. Tall, handsome, silver haired, he looked more like a matinee idol than a savvy attorney who had learned the inner workings of the White House as an aide to Truman. Clifford had made political control into a fine art: He greeted visitors to his office with a minute of silence and seeming indifference to their presence while he searched through papers on his desk. The visitor’s relief at being recognized gave Clifford the upper hand he considered useful in a world of power brokers intent on gaining any and every edge. For all his usefulness to Kennedy as someone who could instruct the president-elect about the executive bureaucracy and how to prepare for the takeover, Clifford also posed a threat as someone who might leak stories to the press about his dominant role in shaping the new administration. Jack joked that Clifford wanted nothing for his services “except the right to advertise the Clifford law firm on the back of the one-dollar bill.” Clifford did, however, blunt some of Kennedy’s concerns by declaring himself unavailable for any appointment in the administration.
At the same time Kennedy invited Clifford to set an agenda for the transition, he asked Richard Neustadt, a Columbia political scientist who had recently published a widely praised book on presidential power, to take on the same assignment. On September 15, when Neustadt presented Kennedy with his memo on “Organizing the Transition,” Jack took an instant liking to the tone and substance of Neustadt’s advice: He counseled Kennedy against trying to repeat FDR’s Hundred Days, which had little parallel with the circumstances of 1961, and to settle instead on a presidential style that suited his particular needs. Kennedy disliked Clifford’s recommendation that he “see Congressmen all day long. ‘I can’t stand that,’ ” he told Neustadt. “Do I have to do that? What a waste of time.” Neustadt replied: “ ‘Now, look, you cannot start off with the feeling that the job must run you; that you have to do it this way because this is the way Truman did it. We’ll just have to think of devices to spare you as much of this as you don’t like…. We’ll have to use our ingenuity.’ He seemed relieved to be told what I am sure he hoped to hear,” Neustadt recalled. Kennedy asked him to elaborate in additional memos on a list of problems Neustadt expected to arise during the transition. Kennedy instructed him “ ‘to get the material directly back to me. I don’t want you to send it to anybody else.’ ‘How do you want me to relate to Clark Clifford?’ ” Neustadt asked. “I don’t want you to relate to Clark Clifford,” Kennedy answered. “I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers. If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”
BECAUSE KENNEDY THOUGHT in terms of people rather than structure or organization, his highest priority during the transition was to find the right men—no women were considered for top positions—to join his administration. Selecting a White House staff was little problem. Since he intended to be his own chief of staff who issued marching orders to subordinates, this eliminated the issue of elevating one close aide over others and making some of them unhappy. It was obvious to Kennedy that the men who had worked with him so long and so hard to build his Senate career and make him president—Sorensen, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Powers, and Salinger—were to become the White House insiders. Their occupancy of West Wing offices near the president’s Oval Office and their access to Kennedy without formal appointments signaled their importance in the administration. “The President was remarkably accessible,” Sorensen recalls. “O’Donnell and Salinger—and usually [McGeorge] Bundy [special assistant to the president for national security affairs], O’Brien and myself were in and out of the Oval Office several times a day.” Each member of the Kennedy team had particular responsibilities—O’Brien as legislative liaison, O’Donnell as appointments secretary, Powers as a political man Friday, Salinger as press secretary, and Sorensen as special assistant for programs and policies—but none operated within narrow bounds, working instead on anything and everything.
Choosing other officials was much more difficult. “Jack has asked me to organize [a] talent search for the top jobs,” Sargent Shriver told Harris Wofford two days after the election. “The Cabinet, regulatory agencies, ambassadors, everything. We’re going to comb the universities and professions, the civil rights movement, business, labor, foundations and everywhere, to find the brightest and best people possible.” Kennedy relished the idea of “appointing outstanding men to top posts in the government.” But it was not easy to identify and convince the seventy-five or so individuals needed for the cabinet and subcabinet to serve. As Jack told O’Donnell and Powers, “For the last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected President that I didn’t have any time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good President.” In addition, some talented people were not keen to interrupt successful careers to take on burdens that might injure their reputations. And Kennedy saw some of those eager for jobs as too self-serving or too ambitious to accept a role as a team player devoted to an administration’s larger goals. Kennedy also believed that his narrow electoral victory required him to make other nonpartisan appointments like those of Dulles and Hoover.
During the course of discussions with potential cabinet appointees who modestly explained that they had no experience in the office the president-elect wanted them to fill, Kennedy invariably replied that he had no experience being president either. They would, he explained with some levity, all learn on the job. His response was partly meant to reassure future officials that he had enough confidence in their native talents and past performance to believe that they would serve his administration with distinction. But he was also signaling his intention to keep policy commitments to a minimum until he could assess immediate realities. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled that after Bobby had asked if he would like to be an ambassador and Schlesinger replied that he would prefer to be at the White House, Jack said to him: “ ‘So, Arthur, I hear you are coming to the White House.’ ‘I am,’ ” Schlesinger replied. “ ‘What will I be doing there?’ ‘I don’t know,’ ” Kennedy answered. “But you can bet we will both be busy more than eight hours a day.” And Schlesinger would be. He operated from the East Wing, which, except for Schlesinger, was filled with peripheral administration officials who, in Sorensen’s words, “were regarded almost as inhabitants of another world.” Schlesinger, who would usually see the president two or three times a week, would be the administration’s spokesman to liberals at home and abroad as well as “a source of innovation, ideas and occasional speeches on all topics.”
Kennedy, remembering the wartime service of Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox in FDR’s cabinet, made clear to O’Donnell that he would do something similar. “If I string along exclusively with Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris and those other Harvard liberals, they’ll fill Washington with wild-eyed ADA people,” he said. “And if I listen to you and Powers and [John] Bailey and [Dick] Maguire [at the DNC], we’ll have so many Irish Catholics that we’ll have to organize a White House Knights of Columbus Council. I can use a few smart Republicans. Anyway, we need a Secretary of the Treasury who can call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names.”
For Kennedy, the two most important cabinet appointments were Treasury and Defense. Since he intended to keep tight control over foreign policy, finding a secretary of state was a lower priority. Help in managing the domestic economy and national security came first. He wanted moderate Republicans for both posts who could give him some political cover for the hard decisions a minority president would need to make to expand the economy and bolster the national defense.
Although Kennedy felt more comfortable addressing defense and foreign policy issues, he knew that reinvigorating a sluggish economy was essential to a successful administration. The country’s substantial economic growth between 1946 and 1957 had ground to a halt with a nine-month recession in 1957–58, when unemployment had increased to 7.5 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression. Another economic downturn in 1960 had followed a relatively weak recovery in 1958–59. As one economist explained the problem, the backlogged demands of the war years had been largely sated and the nation now faced a period of excess capacity and higher unemployment. On top of these difficulties, an international balance-of-payment deficit causing a “gold drain” had raised questions about the soundness of the dollar. In these circumstances, winning the confidence of businessmen, especially in the financial community; labor unions; and middle-class consumers would be something of a high-wire act that no one was sure the new, untested president could perform.
As a Democrat who could count on traditional backing from labor and consumers, Kennedy felt compelled to pay special attention to skeptical bankers and business chiefs. But how was he to quiet predictable liberal antagonism to a prominent representative of Wall Street, who seemed likely to favor tax and monetary policies serving big business rather than working-class citizens, in the Treasury Department? Giving a Republican so much influence over economic policy seemed certain to touch off an internal battle and produce even greater damage to the administration’s standing in the business community than the initial choice of a Democrat.
Kennedy hoped to solve this problem by making Republican Robert Lovett secretary of the treasury. A pillar of the New York banking establishment, Lovett had intermittently served as a high government official since World War II. His worldliness and track record of putting country above partisanship moved Kennedy to offer him State, Defense, or Treasury. But failing health, caused by a bleeding ulcer, decided Lovett against accepting any office, and Kennedy turned instead to C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was an even more imposing establishment figure: His father had founded the Wall Street banking firm of Dillon, Read & Company. A privileged child, Dillon had graduated from Groton, FDR’s alma mater, and Harvard, and, with family apartments and homes in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Maine, Florida, and France, he enjoyed connections with America’s wealthiest, most influential people. During World War II, he had served in the southwest Pacific, where he had won medals as a navy aviator. After the war, he had become chairman of Dillon, Read and of the New Jersey State Republican committee. His early support of Eisenhower had led to his appointment as ambassador to France, where his effective service had persuaded Ike to make him undersecretary of state for economic affairs and then the undersecretary, the second-highest State Department official. Dillon impressed populists like Tennessee senator Albert Gore as an enemy of the people, but in fact he was an open-minded moderate, a liberal Republican whom Kennedy believed he could trust.
Dillon had to be persuaded to accept. Eisenhower warned him against taking the job, urging a written commitment to a free hand lest Kennedy give him no more than symbolic authority. But although Kennedy promised to do nothing affecting the economy without Dillon’s recommendation, he refused to give him any written pledge, saying, “A President can’t enter into treaties with cabinet members.” Kennedy extracted a commitment from Dillon, however, that if he resigned, it would be “in a peaceful, happy fashion and wouldn’t indicate directly or indirectly that he was disturbed about what President Kennedy and the administration were doing.”
For both economic and political considerations, Kennedy felt he had to balance Dillon’s appointment with a Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) made up of innovative liberal Keynesians who would favor bold proposals for stimulating the economy and would convince Democrats that he was not partial to Eisenhower’s cautious policies. Although he told Dillon that he was appointing the Keynesians for strictly political reasons, Kennedy truly wanted them as a prod to more advanced thinking and a way to educate the public and himself. As he freely admitted, he was unschooled in economics, telling everyone that he had received a C in freshman economics at Harvard (in fact, it was a B) and could not remember much, if anything, from the course.
Walter Heller was a University of Minnesota economics professor whom Kennedy had met during the campaign through Hubert Humphrey. At his first session with Heller, Kennedy asked him four questions: Could government action achieve a 5 percent growth rate? Was accelerated depreciation likely to increase investment? Why had high interest rates not inhibited German economic expansion? And could a tax cut be an important economic stimulus? Heller’s replies were so succinct and literate that Kennedy decided to make him chairman of the CEA. During a December meeting, Kennedy told Heller, “I need you as a counterweight to Dillon. He will have conservative leanings, and I know that you are a liberal.” Heller wanted to know if Kennedy would ask for a tax cut and whether he would have carte blanche to choose his CEA colleagues. Not now, Kennedy said of the tax reduction, explaining he could not ask the country for sacrifice at the same time he proposed lower taxes. The answer to the second question was yes. Heller also had the advantage of not being from the Ivy League or the Northeast, as James Tobin and Kermit Gordon, the other economists Heller asked to have as council colleagues, were. Kennedy was not well schooled in economics and found much of the theory mystifying, but he had a keen feel for who had the essential combination of economic knowledge and political common sense vital to successful management of the economy.
Finding a defense secretary who could ease the political and national security concerns of Democrats and Republicans was a bit easier than assembling an economic team. Liberals were not as worried about the impact of a defense chief as they were about a treasury secretary. Besides, with the deepening of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed to pose so grave a threat to the nation’s future, partisanship had become less of a problem. Still, Kennedy remembered the political pummeling the Democrats had taken in the late forties and fifties over Yalta, China, and Korea, and he knew that any misstep on defense could quickly become a political liability. After all, he had made effective use of the missile gap in his campaign and understood that if the opportunity presented itself in the next four years, the Republicans would not hesitate to use a defense failure against his reelection. He briefly considered reappointing the incumbent Thomas Gates, but concluded that it would open him to charges of political cynicism for having been so critical of the administration’s defense policies during the campaign.
A number of names came before him, but none as repeatedly as that of Ford Motor Company president Robert S. McNamara, a nominal Republican with impeccable credentials as a businessman and service as an air force officer during World War II, when he had increased the effectiveness of air power by applying a system of statistical control. McNamara seemed to be on everybody’s list of candidates for the job. Michigan Democrats, including United Auto Workers officials, and principal members of the New York and Washington establishments described him as an exceptionally intelligent man with the independence, tough-mindedness, and, above all, managerial skills to make the unwieldy Defense Department more effective in serving the national security. “The talent scouts,” McNamara biographer Deborah Shapley writes, “were delighted to find a Republican businessman who had risen meteorically at Ford and who was, at forty-four, only a year older than the president-elect…. That a young Republican businessman could also be well thought of by labor, be Harvard-trained, support the ACLU, and read Teilhard de Chardin were all bonuses.”
Without ever having met McNamara, Kennedy authorized Sargent Shriver to offer him an appointment as secretary of the treasury or secretary of defense. (Dillon had not yet been offered the Treasury job.) When McNamara got a message that Shriver had called, he asked his secretary who he was. (McNamara or his secretary, having never heard of Shriver, wrote him on the calendar as “Mr. Shriber.”) The offer of the Treasury job stunned McNamara, who turned it down as something he wasn’t qualified to handle. He said the same about the Defense post but had enough interest to agree to come to Washington to meet with Kennedy on the following day. McNamara and Kennedy made positive impressions on each other. Nevertheless, McNamara continued to declare himself unqualified to head the Defense Department. Kennedy countered with the assertion that there was no school for defense secretaries or presidents.
McNamara refused to commit himself at the first meeting but promised to come back for a second conversation in a few days. When he did, he gave Kennedy a letter asking assurances that he could run his own department; could choose his subordinates, meaning he would not have to agree to political appointees; and would not have to participate in the capital’s social life. Bobby, who sat in on the second meeting, said McNamara’s letter made it clear that he “was going to run the Defense Department, that he was going to be in charge; and although he’d clear things with the President, that political interests or favors couldn’t play a role.” He recalled that his brother “was so impressed with the fact that [McNamara] was so tough about it—and strong and stalwart. He impressed him.” McNamara’s letter, Bobby felt, flabbergasted his brother, but because Kennedy saw McNamara as so suited for the job, he accepted his conditions. To pressure McNamara into officially accepting, Kennedy leaked his selection to the Washington Post, which ran a front-page story. (“The Ship of State is the only ship that often leaks at the top,” a Kennedy aide later said.) After McNamara had accepted the appointment, he told Kennedy that after talking over the job with Tom Gates, he believed he could handle it. Kennedy teasingly responded in echo, “I talked over the presidency with Eisenhower, and after hearing what it’s all about, I’m convinced I can handle it.”
After JFK’s election, many assumed that Kennedy would have to choose Adlai Stevenson as his secretary of state. Stevenson remained the party’s senior statesman and had established himself as an expert on foreign policy. Although in January 1960, Kennedy had promised to make Stevenson secretary of state if he supported his candidacy, Stevenson’s failure to do so had nullified the proposal. After Kennedy got the nomination, however, he encouraged Stevenson’s ambition for the job by asking him to prepare a report on foreign policy problems. This had some practical reasoning behind it—Stevenson was, after all, experienced and knowledgeable about a great deal—but was also somewhat petty and personal. Jack had absolutely no intention of appointing Stevenson. “Fuck him,” Kennedy said to Abe Ribicoff after the election. “I’m not going to give him anything.” Kennedy remained angry at Stevenson for failing to support his nomination, believed he was too equivocal to help make tough foreign policy decisions, and worried that he “might forget who’s the President and who’s the Secretary of State.” Kennedy wanted no part of the arrangement that seemed to have made John Foster Dulles the most important foreign policy decision maker in Eisenhower’s administration.
Liberal pressure to give Stevenson something, however, pushed Kennedy to offer him a choice of three jobs: ambassador to Britain, attorney general, or ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson did not want to go to the U.K. or head the Justice Department, and he felt humiliated at the idea of accepting the U.N., a post with no real policy making authority, telling Bill Blair, “I will never be ambassador to the U.N.”
In deciding on a secretary of state, Kennedy wanted to ensure that the State Department would be under his control. He asked John Sharon, who had worked with Stevenson on the foreign policy report, for “ ‘a shit list’—that was his word,” Sharon said, “—of people in the state department who ought to be fired.” But before he could get rid of department bureaucrats who might obstruct his policies, he needed to decide on a cooperative secretary. Chester Bowles, Harvard University dean McGeorge Bundy, and diplomat David Bruce all received brief consideration, but Bowles was too idealistic, Bundy too young and inexperienced, and Bruce too old for the assignment.
William Fulbright, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, received more serious consideration. Kennedy knew Fulbright from their work together in the Senate and admired his handling of the Foreign Relations Committee. Kennedy “thought he had some brains and some sense and some judgment,” as Bobby put it. “He was really rather taken with him.” But Bobby and their father talked Jack out of choosing him. As a southern senator “who had been tied up in all the segregation votes” and had signed a southern manifesto opposing the Supreme Court’s school desegregation orders, Fulbright seemed certain to stir antagonism among Third World countries, especially in Africa, a sharply contested region of the world in the East-West struggle. Fulbright also had enemies in the Jewish community, where he had aroused hostility with pro-Arab pronouncements. Seeing the international opposition as too great for him to serve successfully and uncertain that he wanted to trade his Senate seat for the administration of an unwieldy bureaucracy, Fulbright asked Kennedy not to make the offer.
By process of elimination, and determined to run foreign policy from the White House, Kennedy came to Dean Rusk, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Rusk was an acceptable last choice, with the right credentials and the right backers. A Rhodes scholar, a college professor, a World War II officer, an assistant secretary of state for the Far East under Truman, a liberal Georgian sympathetic to integration, and a consistent Stevenson supporter, Rusk offended no one. The foreign policy establishment—Acheson, Lovett, liberals Bowles and Stevenson, and the New York Times—all sang his praises. But most of all, it was clear to Kennedy from their one meeting in December 1960 that Rusk would be a sort of faceless, faithful bureaucrat who would serve rather than attempt to lead. “It is the President alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy,” Kennedy had publicly announced the previous January. He called the office “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government” and declared his belief that a president must “be prepared to exercise the fullest powers of his office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was an open secret that Jack intended to be his own secretary of state. Journalists, congressmen, and Kennedy intimates saw Rusk’s selection as confirmation of this assumption and as the principal reason behind the attempt to consign Stevenson to a second-line diplomatic post.
According to Rusk, an exploratory meeting with Kennedy at his Georgetown home did not go well. He told Bowles, “Kennedy and I could not communicate. If the idea of making me Secretary ever actually entered his mind, I am sure it is now dead.” But Rusk had misread Kennedy’s intentions. He was as close to what Kennedy wanted as he seemed likely to find. His diffidence was transparent. He set no conditions for taking the job; in making no demands about freedom to choose subordinates, he persuaded Kennedy that he would reflect the president’s opinions rather than try to determine them. The Kennedys made much of the idea that people who came into the administration needed to be tough. When Bobby told Ken O’Donnell to check on someone as a possible secretary of the army, he described him as a “hard-working tough guy.” And one of Jack’s initial inquiries about Rusk was whether he was “tough-fibered.” But with Jack and Bobby there to take a strong line on foreign affairs and a tough-minded Bob McNamara at Defense, they could afford to have a pliable secretary of state. It was clear to Kennedy that Rusk would be passive in future policy debates: After he had served as secretary for a while, Kennedy said that when they were alone, Rusk would whisper that there were still too many others present.
Now Kennedy came back to Stevenson, who badly wanted to serve in some major foreign policy capacity and announced he could work well with Rusk. Still, Stevenson equivocated, and Kennedy came close to withdrawing the U.N. offer. Finally, despite his earlier pronouncements, and the likelihood that he would have little influence on policy, Stevenson agreed.
If Bobby was genuinely torn about a postelection career choice, his indecision did not last long. His first priority had to have been helping his brother succeed as president. It was inconceivable that after all the hard work to put his brother in the White House, Bobby would now walk away from the tough fights Jack faced as president. As Ribicoff told the president-elect, “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years and I notice that every time you face a crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s an empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be President without using Bobby all the time.” Jack agreed. He told Acheson that “he did not know and would not know most of the people who would be around him in high cabinet positions—and he just felt that he had to have someone whom he knew very well and trusted completely with whom he could just sort of put his feet up and talk things over.”
The principal question for Jack about Bobby was where he would serve in the administration. At first, there were thoughts of making him an undersecretary of defense or an assistant secretary of state. But on reflection, this seemed like a poor idea. As Dean Acheson told him, it would “be a great mistake…. It would be wholly impossible for any cabinet officer to have the President’s brother as second in command…. This would not be fair to anybody—and, therefore, if he were to be brought in at all, he ought to be given complete responsibility for a department of government, or be brought to the White House and be close to the President himself.” Bobby, however, wanted no part of a White House appointment working directly under his brother. “That would be impossible,” Bobby told Schlesinger. “I had to do something on my own, or have my own area of responsibility…. I had to be apart from what he was doing so I wasn’t working directly for him and getting orders from him as to what I should do that day. That wouldn’t be possible. So I never considered working at the White House.” Even if he had, Jack’s promise during the campaign that he “would not appoint any relative to the White House staff” ruled out giving Bobby such an assignment.
Jack had actually asked Bobby about heading the Justice Department before he turned to Ribicoff and Stevenson, but Bobby had worried about charges of nepotism. Bobby also expected an attorney general to provoke so much antagonism over civil rights that it would undermine Jack’s political standing for him to take the position. “It would be the ‘Kennedy brothers’ by the time a year was up,” Bobby said, “and the President would be blamed for everything we had to do in civil rights; and it was an unnecessary burden to undertake.”Others reinforced Bobby’s concerns. Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, Drew Pearson, and Sam Rayburn all warned against the repercussions of having Bobby at the Justice Department. And the New York Times, to which Jack leaked the idea of his brother’s appointment, opposed it as politicizing an office that should be strictly nonpartisan and as a gift to someone lacking enough legal experience. But after Ribicoff and Stevenson had rejected offers to become attorney general, Kennedy decided that his brother should take the job, despite Bobby’s doubts.
Bobby was particularly sensitive to complaints that he had not practiced law or sat on the bench. When Jack joked with friends that he “just wanted to give him a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer,” Bobby upbraided his brother: “Jack, you shouldn’t have said that about me.” “Bobby, you don’t understand,” Jack replied. “You’ve got to make fun of it, you’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics.” Bobby answered, “You weren’t making fun of yourself. You were making fun of me.”
Once Jack had decided to appoint Bobby to the Justice Department, he tried to minimize the political damage. So Jack, Bobby, and their father encouraged the belief that Joe had forced Bobby and Jack into doing it. Jack told Clark Clifford that his father was insisting on Bobby’s appointment against their wishes. Clifford listened with “amazement” to Kennedy’s description of the family argument and thought it “truly a strange assignment” when Jack asked him to talk his father out of the idea. Clifford went to New York to make the case to Joe, but to no avail. Looking Clifford straight in the eye, Joe said, “Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded, I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.”
As Bobby later described events, he had decided in December not to take the job. He recalled how he called Jack up to say he didn’t want the job and then told a friend, “This will kill my father.” Jack had refused to talk about it on the phone, and insisted that they discuss it over breakfast the next morning. Bobby and John Seigenthaler, a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean, whom Bobby brought with him, described Jack as determined to appoint Bobby. They recounted Jack’s concern to have a cabinet member who would tell him “the unvarnished truth, no matter what,” when problems arose. “He thought it would be important to him and that he needed some people around that he could talk to so I decided to accept it,” Bobby said later. Remembering Jack’s advice to inject some humor into the account, Bobby also described how Jack then said, “So that’s it, General. Let’s grab our balls and go” talk to the press. But before they did, Jack told him to go upstairs and comb his hair. As they went outside, Jack counseled him, “Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment.” (Bobby remembered Jack telling Ben Bradlee of Newsweek that he had actually wanted to announce the appointment some morning at about 2 A.M. He would open the front door of his house, look up and down the street, and if no one was there, he would whisper, “It’s Bobby.”)
The story of Bobby’s reluctance, Joe’s insistence, and Jack’s need for an intimate in court was a useful means of muting criticism. But the written record shows it was mostly fiction. A letter Bobby wrote to Drew Pearson on December 15, the day before Jack supposedly talked him into taking the job and they announced Bobby’s appointment, makes clear that the story of Bobby’s reluctance was meant to disarm critics. “I made up my mind today and Jack and I take the plunge tomorrow,” Bobby told Pearson. “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.” Seigenthaler’s presence at the morning meeting during which Bobby and Jack pretended to be debating Bobby’s possible appointment guaranteed public knowledge of the invented account.
Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary, was given the same false view of Bobby’s appointment as Seigenthaler. In a diary entry on December 15, at the same time Bobby was telling Pearson of his decision to accept the appointment, Lincoln recorded that Bobby called Jack, who “tried to persuade him to take the Attorney Generalship, if not that Senator from Massachusetts, if not that then perhaps be Under Secretary of State for Latin Affairs. Bobby said he wasn’t interested in any of them—would rather write a book.” That Jack and Bobby were hiding their true intentions to quiet objections was without question. When Ethel Kennedy greeted her husband at the West Palm Beach airport after Jack and Bobby had disclosed the appointment, “she flashed a big smile and shouted, ‘We did it.’ ”
The Kennedys believed that Bobby’s expected effectiveness as attorney general and the success of the administration ultimately would make misgivings about the appointment disappear. But Bobby’s selection generated sharp criticism despite the Kennedys’ manufactured story. Journalists and legal experts complained that Bobby’s background gave him no claim on the office. Political insiders were no less skeptical. “Dick Russell,” Lyndon Johnson told Senate secretary Bobby Baker, “is absolutely shittin’ a squealin’ worm. He thinks it’s a disgrace for a kid who’s never practiced law to be appointed…. I agree with him.” But Johnson did not believe that Bobby’s influence as attorney general would be very great. He also told Baker, “I don’t think Jack Kennedy’s gonna let a little fart like Bobby lead him around by the nose.” Johnson made the same point to his former Senate colleagues, who needed to rationalize voting for Bobby’s appointment. Johnson also appealed to his friends on personal grounds, telling Baker, “I’m gonna put it on the line and tell ’em it’s a matter of my personal survival.” Reluctant to challenge the new administration on a matter of executive privilege—the freedom of a president to choose his cabinet—senators repressed their doubts and confirmed Bobby’s nomination.
Other cabinet and subcabinet appointments came together almost randomly. Kennedy emphasized his eagerness for high-quality people rather than representatives of particular groups or factions. “Kennedy wanted a ministry of talent,” Sorensen said, but he was under constant pressure from private groups advocating one candidate or another. Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina became secretary of commerce not only because he had proven his effectiveness as a public official but also because his reputation as a moderate would appeal to southerners and the business community. Arthur Goldberg and Stewart Udall were appointed labor secretary and interior secretary, respectively, not only because of their competence and ties to Kennedy but also because they satisfied special interest groups in the Democratic party like labor unions and conservationists.
Personal predilections also came into play. Ribicoff turned down Kennedy’s offer of the Justice Department out of concern that civil rights disputes would antagonize southerners, who would ultimately bar him from a high-court appointment. In addition, he did not think it a good idea for a Jewish attorney general to be forcing racial integration on white Protestants at the direction of a Catholic president. Ribicoff preferred and received appointment as secretary of health, education, and welfare, which meant that former governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan, who wanted HEW, would have to become an assistant secretary of state for Africa. When Schlesinger advised Kennedy that liberals were discontented with their limited representation in the cabinet, he replied that the program was more important than the men. “We are going down the line on the program,” he said. Schlesinger interpreted this to mean that it would be an administration of “conservative men and liberal measures.” JFK agreed: “We’ll have to go along with this for a year or so. Then I would like to bring in some new people.” But then “he paused and added reflectively, ‘I suppose it may be hard to get rid of these people once they are in.’ ”
Still, Kennedy believed that a strong president with clear ideas of what he wanted to accomplish would be more important than the men who served under him or their cabinet discussions. One of the things that sold him on Dillon was his almost contemptuous description of Eisenhower’s cabinet meetings, with their “opening prayers, visual aids, and rehearsed presentations.” Although Kennedy invested considerable energy in finding the right people for his administration and even told Sorensen that their decisions on appointments “could make or break us all,” he had a healthy skepticism about whether people he brought into the government would have much impact on the issues he saw as of greatest importance. When he interviewed someone for Agriculture, for example, a department that was never at the forefront of his concerns, he found the man and the discussion so boring that he fell asleep. It was an indication of how little Kennedy intended to rely on cabinet meetings for important administration decisions.
Nevertheless, the cabinet was reflective of the tone and direction the new administration seemed likely to take. Just as Eisenhower’s selection of so many businessmen proved to be a clear signal of policies favoring less government regulation and influence, so Kennedy’s choice of so many highly intelligent, broad-minded men indicated that his presidency would be open to new ideas and inclined to break with conventional wisdom in search of more effective actions at home and abroad. It also promised to embody noblesse oblige—well-off Americans responsive to the suffering of the less fortunate in the United States and around the globe. Kennedy’s presidency, of course, would never be a perfect expression of these values, but if there was an indication of the New Frontier’s distinctive contours, it could be found in the men Kennedy appointed to his government’s highest positions.
Kennedy believed that what he said and the impression he made on the country at the start of his term were more important than who made temporary headlines as cabinet members. Nevertheless, he made every cabinet selection the occasion for a press conference at which he not only emphasized the virtues of the appointee but also his own attentiveness to and knowledge of the major issues facing them. He used the press in other ways, too. Having asked groups of experts to provide task force analyses on everything from relations with Africa to domestic taxes, Kennedy converted the reports during the transition into press releases on current understanding of how to meet various difficulties. The resulting image was one of vigorous engagement, somewhat in contrast to Kennedy’s less than daring cabinet selections. “There is no evidence in Palm Beach,” journalist Charles Bartlett told his readers at the end of November, “that the New Frontiersmen are being moved to temper their objectives for the nation by the close election. The objectives which the candidate enunciated in his campaign were measured statements of intent.” “Reporters are not your friends,” Joe had told his sons. But Jack, like every skillful politician since Theodore Roosevelt, saw how useful they could be in advancing his political goals.
KENNEDY BELIEVED that no single element was more important in launching his administration than a compelling inaugural address. Remembering how brilliantly Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural speech had initiated his presidency, Kennedy wished to use his address to inspire renewed national confidence and hope. True, the current challenge was not as great as that FDR had faced, but fears that communist aggression might force the U.S. into a nuclear war generated considerable anxiety. Pollster Lou Harris, who gave Kennedy periodic soundings on public mood, advised him to concentrate on two major themes rather than on “a plethora of specifics…: The spirit of inspired realism that will be the mood of this new Administration; [and] the nature of the challenge and the broad approaches that can bring about national fulfillment and peace for all peoples everywhere.” Kennedy wished to draw the strongest possible contrast between the “drift” of his predecessor and the promise of renewed mastery.
As one symbol of the change in Washington, Kennedy decreed that top hats were required dress at the Inauguration, a shift from the black homburgs Eisenhower had made part of the 1952 dress code. (When Kennedy spotted a newsman in a homburg outside his Georgetown home, he asked in mock horror, “Didn’t you get the word? Top hats are the rule this year.”) Yet during Inauguration Day, the New York Times reported, “Kennedy, who is usually hatless, seemed self-consciously uncomfortable in his topper. He wore it as briefly as possible in the trips back and forth from the White House to Capitol Hill.” Despite “a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue… [that] turned majorettes’ legs blue, froze baton twirlers’ fingers and drove beauty queens to flannels and overcoats,” Kennedy stood bareheaded and without his overcoat while taking the oath, giving his address, and watching the three-and-a-half-hour inaugural parade along Pennsylvania Avenue. His only concession to the cold was an occasional sip of soup or coffee.
Nothing worried Kennedy more about his appearance than the effects of the cortisone he took to control his Addison’s disease. He was reluctant to take his pills, which made him look puffy faced and overweight. Evelyn Lincoln took responsibility for making sure that he adhered to the regime prescribed by his doctors, keeping daily account of whether he had taken his medicine. She recalled that on January 16, as he dictated a letter and paced the floor of his bedroom, he caught a view of himself in a mirror. “My God,” he said, “ ‘look at that fat face, if I don’t lose five pounds this week we might have to call off the Inauguration.’ I was so full of laughter I could hardly contain myself,” Lincoln recorded. Kennedy’s humor masked a concern that nothing detract from the view of him as in picture-perfect health. When newsmen asked about his medical condition two hours before his swearing in, two physicians announced that an examination earlier in January had shown the president-elect to be in continuing “excellent” health.
He need not have worried. His seeming imperviousness to the cold coupled with his bronzed appearance—attributed to his pre-inaugural holiday in the Florida sun—and his neatly brushed thick brown hair made him seem “the picture of health.” Despite only four hours of sleep following an inaugural concert and gala the previous night, Kennedy “seemed unaffected and unfrightened as he approached the responsibilities of leadership.” “He looked like such a new, fresh man,” Lincoln said, “someone in whom we could have confidence.” One Washington columnist compared him to a Hemingway hero who exhibits “grace under pressure…. He is one of the handsomest men in American political life,” she wrote without fear of exaggeration. “He was born rich and he has been lucky. He has conquered serious illness. He is as graceful as a greyhound and can be as beguiling as a sunny day.”
Using the Inauguration to help rebuild national hope required other symbols. His large family, including Jackie, who was still recovering from a difficult childbirth in November, joined him on the platform. To contrast Eisenhower’s inertia on civil rights and encourage liberals to see him as ready to move forward on equality for African Americans, he asked Marian Anderson to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He also invited Robert Frost to read a poem at the Inauguration as a symbol of renewed regard for men of thought and imagination—another perceived deficiency of Eisenhower’s presidency. When Stewart Udall, a friend of Frost’s, had suggested the poet have a role, “Kennedy’s eyes brightened in approval, but he had quick second thoughts. ‘A great idea,’ ” he said, “but let’s not set up a situation like Lincoln had with Edward Everett in Gettysburg,” referring to the two-hour oration that initially put Lincoln’s brief address in its shadow. “Frost is a master with words,” Kennedy continued. “His remarks will detract from my inaugural address if we’re not careful. Why not have him read a poem—something that won’t put him in competition with me?”
Kennedy assumed that Frost would read the sixteen lines of his “national poem,” “The Gift Outright.” But, eager to celebrate the new generation’s rise to national leadership, Frost composed a new poem for the occasion, titled “Dedication,” in which he announced “The glory of a next Augustan age.” When he stepped to the podium, however, the bright sunlight and wind conspired to rob the eighty-six-year-old Frost of his sight, and despite Lyndon Johnson’s effort to shield the paper from the blinding sun with his top hat, Frost had to abandon his surprise poem and recite “The Gift Outright” from memory.
Jack had started thinking about his inaugural speech immediately after his election, and he had asked Sorensen to gather suggestions from everyone. He also asked Sorensen, the principal draftsman, to make the address as brief as possible and to focus it on foreign affairs. He believed that a laundry list of domestic goals would sound too much like a continuation of the campaign and would make the speech too long. “I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag,” he said. He also made it clear that he did not want partisan complaints about the immediate past or Cold War clichés about the communist menace that would add to Soviet-American tensions. Above all, he wanted language that would inspire hopes for peace and set an optimistic tone for a new era under a new generation of leaders.
Suggestions of what to say came from many sources and took many forms: “Pages, paragraphs and complete drafts had poured in,” Sorensen says, “solicited from [journalist Joseph] Kraft, Galbraith, Stevenson, Bowles and others, unsolicited from newsmen, friends and total strangers.” Clergymen provided lists of biblical quotes. Sorensen searched all past inaugural speeches for clues to what worked best and, at Kennedy’s suggestion, he studied “the secret of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.” Sorensen found that some of the “best eloquence” in past inaugurals had come from some of our worst presidents, and that the key to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was its brevity and use of as few multisyllable words as possible.
Yet for all the advice and numerous drafts produced by others, the final version came from Kennedy’s hand. He was tireless in working to make it an eloquent expression of his intentions, as well as the shortest twentieth-century inaugural speech. Though ultimately he could not be more concise than FDR, whose 1944 address was about half the length of Kennedy’s 1,355 words, compared with the previous forty-four inaugurals, which averaged 2,599 words, Kennedy’s was a model of succinctness. But it was not just the prose and length that concerned him; it was also his delivery: In the twenty-four hours before he gave the speech, he kept a reading copy next to him, so that “any spare moment could be used to familiarize himself with it.” On Inauguration morning, he sat in the bathtub reading his speech aloud, and at the breakfast table he kept “going over and over it” until he had gotten every word and inflection to his liking.
The speech itself was one of the two most memorable inaugurals of the twentieth century and was an indication of the premium Kennedy put on formal addresses to lead the nation. (There would be two other landmark speeches in the next thousand days.) Kennedy’s inaugural stands with Franklin Roosevelt’s great first address as an exemplar of inspirational language and a call to civic duty. It began, as Thomas Jefferson’s had in 1801, during the first transfer of power from one party to another, with a reminder of shared national values rather than partisanship. “We are all Federalists. We are all Republicans,” Jefferson had said. “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom,” Kennedy declared. Though the world was now vastly different—“man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life”—Kennedy asserted that the “same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe…. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
To the Third World, the developing nations “struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” he pledged “our best efforts to help them help themselves… not because the communists may be doing it… but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” And “to our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress.” Lest anyone believe that he was a sentimental crusader oblivious to the harsh realities of international competition, Kennedy laid down a warning to Castro’s Cuba and its Soviet ally: “Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”
Kennedy did not want Moscow to see his administration as intent on an apocalyptic showdown between East and West. To the contrary, much of the rest of his speech was an invitation to find common ground against a devastating nuclear war. He would not tempt America’s adversaries with weakness, he said, “For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed…. Let us never negotiate out of fear,” he advised. “But let us never fear to negotiate…. And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.”
Concerned not to appear naive or overly optimistic about negotiations, and eager to separate himself from FDR and excessive expectations of quick advance, Kennedy predicted, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
The closing paragraphs were a call to national commitment and sacrifice. “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out… a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself…. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The sentence joined FDR’s “nothing to fear but fear itself” as the most remembered language in any twentieth-century inaugural.
Kennedy’s rhetoric thrilled the crowd of twenty thousand dignitaries and ordinary citizens gathered in twenty-degree temperature in temporary wooden grandstands on the east front of the Capitol. President Eisenhower declared the speech “fine, very fine,”and Republican minority leader Senator Everett Dirksen called it “inspiring, a very compact message of hope.” Eisenhower’s speechwriter Emmet John Hughes told Kennedy, “ You have truly inspired the excitement of the people…. You have struck sparks with splendid swiftness.” Democratic senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma was as effusive, describing the address as the best of the twelve inaugurals he had heard, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s second in 1917. Stevenson saw it as “eloquent, inspiring—a great speech,” and Truman believed, “It was just what the people should hear and live up to.” Arthur Krock told Kennedy over dinner the night of the Inauguration that the address was the best political speech anyone had given in America since Wilson. (Eager to encourage views of a new administration likely to rival the best in the country’s history, Kennedy hoped Krock would make his judgment of the speech public, which he did.) But while the positive response to his speech delighted Kennedy, it was not enough to quiet his inner doubts about its quality and effectiveness. A critical editorial by Max Ascoli of The Reporter, who said that he was neither “impressed [n]or stirred by it,” “disturbed” the new president. Kennedy told Jackie that he did not think his speech was as good as Jefferson’s.
Jefferson and his unmatched brilliance were indeed the mark against which Kennedy intended to measure himself. When James MacGregor Burns told Jack during the interregnum that he hoped he would be the Jefferson of the twentieth century, Kennedy, who was preceding him down the stairs of his Georgetown house, turned and looked at him with a smile that suggested both skepticism and satisfaction. During a dinner for Nobel Laureates at the White House, Kennedy told them that this was the greatest array of brainpower assembled in the mansion since Jefferson had dined there alone. He then quoted the description of Jefferson as “a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.”
After Kennedy’s speech, almost three quarters of Americans approved of their new president. The numbers indicated that Kennedy had effectively managed the transition. But he had no illusion that he could maintain public support for long without following through on the commitment to get the country moving again. The problems of leading the nation onto higher ground, however, were more daunting than he ever imagined.