In the long sweep of history the decisive mark of the man entering the White House in 1961 will not be his age, or his religion, or his Senatorial background, or the other matters so much discussed this past year. What will be crucial is that once again America has a political craftsman as President.
Born of a political family in one of the most political of cities, Kennedy has spent all his adult life, aside from the war years, in the scuffle of legislative and electoral combat. The key difference between the outgoing and incoming Presidents is that Dwight D. Eisenhower dislikes this kind of politics and that John F. Kennedy likes it. Kennedy considers it indispensable to the operation of a great democracy, even inevitable. “No President,” he says, “can escape politics.”
The great test of Kennedy’s Presidency will be the test he, himself, would be the first to apply: not whether he will be a politician—he will—but what kind of politician he will be, and whether his kind of political craftsmanship will be enough for the staggering job ahead. What are the prospects? The answer turns on the nature of the Presidential office and on the nature of the new incumbent.
Most of the time, the Presidency is not a command post from which clear and concerted orders are issued to troops waiting to spring into action. Most of the time, it is a fulcrum of maneuver and bargaining, with the President seeking to convert a limited amount of power into governmental action. It is a place where he must deal with hundreds of other powerful men and their separate sources of power in and outside the government. Most of the time, the Presidency calls less for a master leader than for a master broker.
By experience and by temperament, Kennedy should qualify as a master broker. The Boston brand of politics in which he was schooled is a kind of institute of advanced training in political manipulation. For fourteen years in the congressional labyrinth, he has learned to negotiate with proud legislative leaders and party factions. In addition, in two years of preconvention delegate hunting, he had to bargain with state officials and city bosses whose political interests were far different from those of a junior Senator on the make.
Like a good poker player, a master broker must be cool-headed and clear-minded, utterly realistic about his own hand and that of his opponents unflustered and unwilling to be hurried. These, too, are keynotes of Kennedy’s political style. Observers have noted again and again his detached attitude toward himself, his cold insight into the balance of power, and his capacity to move quickly or slowly as conditions demanded. His Cabinet-making was a case in point. Despite pressures to hurry on with the job, he took his time as he sorted and measured and cut to fit.
Skill in bargaining is vital not only in negotiation with foot-dragging congressmen and governors. A President must also bargain with Cabinet members and agency heads “supposedly” under him. “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them,” Harry S. Truman said. “That is all the powers of the President amount to.” A new President soon finds that the neat lines of authority on the organization chart are actually snarled and broken by the political tempests that rage around the White House.
“When it comes to power,” says Professor Richard E. Neustadt, of Columbia, a former Truman aide, “nobody is expert but the President; if he, too, acts as layman, it goes hard with him.” Kennedy can be rated as a professional in the care and nourishment of political power. A President, he said to a visitor recently, must be careful not to use up his credit too quickly. He needs the best people around him, but in the end he must depend upon himself. And, he added, he has only four years to make good.
To be effective, a master broker must operate at the center of the political cobweb. He must see to it that lines of influence focus in him and radiate from him. We hear much of a President being his “own Secretary of State,” but in this sense he also must be his own Secretary of the Treasury and Attorney General and all the rest. He must be a silent partner in every office in his administration.
That the new President will operate through a network of personal control, rather than along the stiff lines of an organization chart, was made clear in the way he built his administration. In several cases he selected subordinate officials before he chose the department head; obviously these officials will be as much beholden to him as to their immediate superiors.
As an administrator, Kennedy may remind us of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used to bypass eminent secretaries like Cordell Hull in order to deal directly with second-level men like Sumner Welles. Roosevelt joyously drove a team of spirited horses kept in harness mainly by his own vigor and élan. The result—a disorderly but productive administration—may be duplicated in the days ahead.
It is essential in this kind of personal administration for the President to have all the reins in his hands. He cannot delegate much of the job of persuading and bargaining because success turns so heavily on his personal participation. Representative Joseph W. Martin, former Republican majority leader, has complained that Mr. Eisenhower dealt with congressional leaders through subordinates, “telling them ‘the chief wants this’ or ‘the chief wants that.’” Congressmen “would like to hear it from the Chief himself once in a while,” Martin said. President Kennedy would not make this mistake.
To maximize his bargaining power, a President must have a kind of built-in computer that weighs his personal influence and channels it in the right direction. Recent visitors to Georgetown and Palm Beach have been surprised by the absence of harried staff aides and thick piles of documents. Kennedy seems to hold all the data in his head. So far, top decision-making has been a solo performance. It is not likely to be very different even in the heavily institutionalized White House.
To be a good broker, a President must also be highly accessible to men and ideas. He can never become the prisoner of a tight little staff. Kennedy has reached out over his immediate entourage to hire men whom he had never known. In a manner reminiscent of FDR, he has deliberately set up task forces that will supply him with ideas that may conflict with those of new department heads. He has appointed to staff positions men who may work at cross-purposes, but out of whose arguments new ideas may be heated up. He, himself, makes a point of reading hostile editorials and columns (and he is easily irritated by them).
Only a man confident of his political capacity could run a personal, loose-jointed operation, and Kennedy is such a person. Where does he get his self-confidence? In part from a well-developed competitive sense; he simply feels that he is more effective politically than most of his rivals. In part, too, from his recent political successes, especially during the past year. Recently, while stretched out on a deck chair under a hot Florida sun, he was asked whether he really felt as relaxed amid all the pressure as he seemed. He answered that after the crises of the 1960 campaign, which he named one after another—the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries, the preconvention opposition of powerful party leaders like Truman, the Houston answer to criticism by Protestant leaders, the debates with Nixon—he was ready for anything.
“That was a long year and a tough campaign,” he said with a wry smile, “and I survived it.”
Outwardly, Kennedy does not seem scarred by battle. These days, he appears relaxed, composed, and unhurried; his talk runs easily from foreign-policy problems to the latest political shenanigans in Massachusetts. His face is fuller and stronger than it was two years ago, but still unlined. Men who fight their way to the top often take on a grave mien and ponderous ways; but not so Kennedy. He carries none of the weighty trappings of authority. He is still simple, direct, unaffected, and surprisingly candid about his views and plans. Perhaps he feels that he need not look like a man holding authority; he need simply embody it.
Yet, he is very much the product of political combat. He can be wary about mens’ intentions and cautious about playing out his own political hand. He has dealt so long with intractable problems that he resists sweeping judgments and doctrinaire solutions. His thinking is literal and specific; he personalizes social and political forces, seeing them in terms of individual leaders—an editor, a senator, a union chief—who are hostile or friendly and who can be resisted or bargained with. He has been called ruthless and cold, and doubtless he can be on occasion; more often he is flexible, fast-moving, resourceful, and wily. To him, politics is the art of the possible.
Kennedy is a pragmatist, acting directly in the tradition not only of all our great Presidents since Washington, but of the “near-great” such as Polk and Hayes and McKinley. These latter lacked genius, but because each in his own way was a craftsman, they were effective Presidents. Kennedy’s political skill almost guarantees that he will measure up to this company.
But will political craftsmanship be enough in the 1960s? The great lesson of the Presidency is that the man in the White House must be more than a politician and a hard bargainer and a shrewd broker. He must be a leader—a party leader, a legislative leader, a moral leader. In Machiavelli’s old analogy, he must be a lion as well as a fox.
A great leader must do more than negotiate with men; he must know how to command them. Instead of trying to unravel the tangled threads of politics and administration, he must sometimes cut through them with a decisive stroke. He may have to jettison some of his allies for the sake of an overriding goal. He must sound a note of national purpose to galvanize lesser men into action and sacrifice for ends that they do not wholly perceive. “History is a preceptor of prudence,” wrote Edmund Burke, one of Kennedy’s favorite oracles. But history also teaches that at great turning points and in supreme crises prudence is dangerous, and the leader must boldly throw his whole weight into the balance. And he must do so sometimes when the fog of battle is heavy, when experience offers little help, when the usual guide lines are lacking and ordinary men are terrified of the unknown. “In case of doubt,” Henry Stimson used to say, “march toward the guns.”
It is this quality more than any other that has separated the great Presidents from the merely able ones. During the Civil War, men around Lincoln could think of many reasons for a prudent approach to the complexities of freeing the slaves in the South; but Lincoln finally rose above the doubts and proclaimed emancipation. In 1940, there were many considerations of national defense and foreign relations that counseled against helping Britain; but Roosevelt sent the destroyers. In 1951, there were plenty of ways Truman could have glossed over his differences with General MacArthur, but Truman dismissed him because, right or wrong, the President must be boss.
What about John Kennedy on this score? A year ago, many close observers were skeptical that he had this kind of quality, for he seemed so dispassionate, so levelheaded, indeed so disdainful of dramatics and grandiloquence. His speeches were fact-filled, logical; his numbered arguments were well marshaled, but his speeches had little of Wilson’s golden rhetoric. Often he seemed to drain the sentiment out of situations, in contrast to the first Roosevelt’s showmanship and the second Roosevelt’s ability to make even the mixing of cocktails in his study a dramatic performance.
A year later, it is by no means so clear that Kennedy lacks commitment. To be sure, he still dislikes histrionics and sentimentality, and he does not consider himself bound to deliver on every promise in the party platform within the first few months. And his commitment may be less to a rigid party program than to the changing needs of the less privileged, especially the urban masses and minority groups. But this past year has shown that crises produce in him a zest for action, an intensity of effort, and an instinct for the telling blow, that seem to stem from a strong political and intellectual, if not emotional, commitment to deeply felt goals. Just as Franklin Roosevelt, despite the zigzag routes he seemed to delight in, always came back to a “little left of center,” as he described it, so Kennedy’s convictions seem no less solid because he presents them without sentiment or emotion. His coolness and self-possession apparently do not reflect neutralism at the core.
The campaign proved all this. At the very outset of it, Kennedy declared that “the American Presidency will demand more than ringing manifestos issued from the rear of battle. It will demand that the President place himself in the very thick of the fight, that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads, that he be willing to serve them at the risk of incurring their momentary displeasure.”
He campaigned for the Presidency in the spirit of those words. When it would have seemed prudent to ignore the issue of religion in the Presidential primary in heavily Protestant West Virginia, he met the question directly in every section of the state. When the religious issue was raised again during the campaign, he confronted Protestant ministers on their own home grounds with a point-by-point rebuttal. When he was under pressure to play down civil rights in order to win Southern support, he took the symbolic step of publicly expressing sympathy to Mrs. Martin Luther King. When there was the serious question of whether the voters were responding to his warnings of sacrifice ahead, he insistently repeated that he would ask more from the people than he would offer them. These were not the acts of a volatile, uncommitted man.
But if Kennedy will be just as resolute and strong-willed in his way as earlier Presidents were in theirs, we must not forget that it will still be Kennedy’s way. He has his own political style; he will not change it to please a popular image of strong Presidents based on very different men. If he displays little of Lincoln’s anguish or Theodore Roosevelt’s magnetism or Wilson’s rhetoric or Franklin Roosevelt’s buoyant charm, he is likely to demonstrate his own special qualities, which will be as relevent to our times as the earlier Presidents’ images were to theirs.
Still we must ask the question: Will even these qualities be enough? Granted Kennedy’s political skill, and assuming an underlying commitment and conviction, will the Presidency during the 1960s call for a further capacity that no previous President has displayed? In my judgment, it will.
There is a striking difference, I think, between the major task facing earlier liberal Democratic Presidents in this century and that facing Kennedy. Both Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had to frame and push through Congress some badly needed and long-overdue measures of reform and reconstruction—for example, Wilson’s Federal Reserve Act and Roosevelt’s Social Security program. Once their bills were passed, the two Presidents needed mainly to perfect and defend them, until they each faced a whole new set of problems caused by war abroad. Kennedy’s big job, on the other hand, is not simply to put through some new measures, such as medical aid under Social Security. It is to mobilize, day after day and month after month, America’s economic, military, scientific, and moral power. To do this systematically will call for a continuous and consistent exercise of Presidential power rather than for simply the kind of brilliant and staccato political stroke that marked the early years of Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s Presidencies.
Unhappily, consistently strong Presidential leadership is precisely what our system of government is designed to thwart. It is one thing to utter golden words and to pressure a momentous bill through Congress while the nation watches. It is something else to steer a continuous flow of legislation, especially fiscal measures, through congressional committees, around potent congressional leaders, against aroused interests, amid popular apathy. Even outside of Congress our fiscal machinery is not organized for fast and concerted action. Yet President Kennedy will have to provide economic leadership throughout his years in office, for fiscal policy is framed largely on an annual basis.
But this is only part of the problem. The biggest task facing Kennedy, if, as he has promised, he wants to provide a “thousand days of action” instead of just a hundred, will be to strengthen the whole machinery of government. Some governmental reforms have long been urged and are widely accepted today: curbing the filibuster and other obstructionist devices in Congress, reinforcing the President’s executive power over his administration, recruiting and holding on to the ablest men in government. Others are less known but coming into greater prominence; among them, reconstruction of the regulatory agencies and unifying the Pentagon. Still others are both formidable and controversial; for example, strengthening and perhaps realigning the two national parties.
Whatever the precise nature of the changes, it seems inevitable that the machinery of government must be strengthened if Presidential leadership is to result in sustained action. What can we expect from President Kennedy on this score?
In recent weeks, beset by a hundred pressing problems, he has had little time to think about long-term needs. On structural and Constitutional aspects of government, moreover, he has always been something of a traditionalist; for example, he has been cool to proposals for changing the seniority rule in Congress, and he seems wary of intervening to alter the filibuster rule.
But the main reason Kennedy will go slow in initiating basic governmental changes is his success in operating the present machinery. Like Roosevelt, he is likely to extract the last ounce of energy from it by hard bargaining, and this may little dispose him to junk it. Then, too, the greater his use of the present machinery, the greater becomes his commitment to it. For example, the more he bargains with the senior members of Congress, the more he must offer them political advantages—such as patronage—that they can use to bolster their own independent positions. The more he recognizes existing party leaders and organizations, the more he alienates the reform element that might serve as the basis for a stronger Democratic party.
On the other hand, the new President is history-minded and, as a historian, he knows that in the long run the bargaining power of even the strongest and ablest President has run out. Presidential authority is not limitless—and the claims on it in the years ahead will be extraordinary. This was the experience of all the strong Presidents and most of the others. Wilson managed the machinery of government brilliantly during his first term, only to be thwarted by it during his second. Roosevelt had the same experience; then he made a desperate effort to reform his party, and the executive branch, and the judiciary, and he failed.
Kennedy may, of course, use the Rooseveltian technique of exploiting crisis in order to replenish his reservoir of political and moral authority. But another cardinal difference between the 1930s and the 1960s may be this: It was enough for Roosevelt to cope with crises, but it will be essential for Kennedy to head them off. And to head them off he must act early, systematically, and continuously through the whole machinery of government.
Viewed in these terms, the Presidency in the 1960s will demand as a minimum that Kennedy act with skill and craft. It will doubtless demand much more. Whether the new President must simply rise above the vast give and take that represents the machinery of government, or whether he will have to go much farther and reconstruct the machinery even while he manipulates it, it is certain that he must act with valor and even audacity. Daring in the face of great odds is the single quality that John F. Kennedy has always most admired. Does he still? He must, for the nation will settle for no less than a glowing new profile in courage.
—JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS., 1961