Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (16 page)

The fifty-one-year-old, tall, stately Dillon, with his receding hairline and tailored suits, appealed to Kennedy not only as someone with impeccable social credentials but also as an establishment figure with a personal history that belied his public image. He was the grandson of Samuel Lapowski, a Polish Jewish immigrant, whose success in Texas business ventures gave his son Clarence the opportunity for a Harvard education and entrée to the world of high finance. Clarence Dillon made a fortune as the CEO of the investment bank Dillon, Read (after changing his name to Dillon, his mother’s maiden name). Clarence’s son, C. Douglas, had all the advantages money could buy: elementary education at a private school in New Jersey, with three Rockefellers as schoolmates; the storied Groton School in Massachusetts, whose alumni included Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and McGeorge Bundy; and Harvard. The clinching argument in Kennedy’s decision to appoint him may have been Dillon’s tongue-in-cheek description of Eisenhower cabinet meetings, where high-powered officials sat around batting clichés back and forth. “It was great fun if you didn’t have anything to do,” Dillon said. Where Dillon would be comfortable with Kennedy, who shared some of his elitist background, he would later find himself horrified by Lyndon Johnson, who drove him out of the government by insisting that they hold consultations in bathrooms while Johnson performed a bodily function.

For both substantive and political reasons, Kennedy wanted to balance Dillon’s selection as Treasury secretary with more liberal appointees to the Council of Economic Advisers and the Bureau of the Budget. His first choice as council chairman was MIT’s Paul Samuelson, a brilliant economist whose 1948 textbook,
Introduction to Economics
, had become the most influential exponent of Keynesian theory, advocating deficit spending as a remedy to economic downturns. When Samuelson rejected Kennedy’s invitation, he turned to Walter Heller, professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and another prominent Keynesian. Hubert Humphrey had introduced Kennedy to Heller during the 1960 campaign.

Kennedy had grilled Heller about actions that could boost the country’s economic growth: Could they achieve a 5 percent expansion through a combination of a big tax cut and accelerated depreciation allowances for businesses? Heller’s concise affirmation of these options as the path to sustained development impressed Kennedy, who had little patience for complicated economic explanations and wanted a council chairman who could match Dillon’s intellect and not be intimidated by him. When he invited Heller to take the council chair he candidly told him, “I need you as a counterweight to Dillon. He will have conservative leanings, and I know you are a liberal.”

Before Kennedy selected Dillon and Heller to preside over economic affairs, he had invited David Bell, another Harvard academic, to become the director of the Bureau of the Budget. Because budgetary decisions would face him as soon as he became president, Kennedy wanted a budget director in place as soon as possible. Clark Clifford, Dick Neustadt, and Ken Galbraith suggested Bell; though he was only forty-one, his intellect and background made him worthy of consideration. Bell had served in Truman’s budget bureau, worked in Pakistan on economic development, and recently taken a faculty post at Harvard. Kennedy sent his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to interview him, and Shriver promptly reported that Kennedy would like Bell as a person and see him as well suited to the job. Shriver described Bell as “low-key, well-informed, experienced, un-ideological, sensitive, quick, somewhat ironic, and good-humored.” Kennedy did indeed like him—not only because he was everything Shriver described but also because he echoed Kennedy’s belief that the budget office should be more than an accounting agency; he urged expanded influence for a budget bureau committed to growing the economy.

A last consideration for Kennedy as he prepared to launch his administration was assigning some aides to develop a civil rights agenda. He was not keen to face up to a domestic issue that seemed likely to provoke conflicts that would distract him from what he believed were more compelling national security challenges. However, he understood that he could not just put the matter aside and have it fester for the next four years, and so he wanted people in place who would persuade liberals that he was not inattentive to reforms they believed should have a high priority. And he hoped that these advocates could find means to satisfy some of the complaints of aggrieved African Americans.

The key figure in assembling personnel and a program for the fight ahead was Harris Wofford. The thirty-four-year-old Wofford was a New Yorker devoted to idealistic goals such as world government and equal rights for all Americans. From 1954 forward, after undergraduate schooling at the University of Chicago and law studies at Yale and Howard University, the black college in Washington, D.C., where whites making a statement in favor of integration were in the minority, Wofford had served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His connection to Kennedy began when he wrote the senator to praise his thoughtful speeches on anticolonialism. In the spring of 1959, while writing a commission report on civil rights for Congress and the president and serving as a law professor at Notre Dame, Wofford received a personal invitation from Kennedy to join his presidential campaign. Kennedy’s compelling appeal to him focused on foreign affairs and included a promise to “break out of the confines of the cold war.” Although agreeing only to part-time work for Kennedy, Wofford suggested that Kennedy publish his speeches as a book.
The Strategy of Peace
, which Wofford edited, became a magnet to intellectuals looking for a candidate with an idealistic foreign policy plan.

But a need for campaign help on civil rights made Wofford Kennedy’s point man on the issue. “In five minutes tick off the ten things a President ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess,” Kennedy directed him during a car ride to his Senate office in August 1960. It spoke volumes about Kennedy’s wish to put civil rights aside that he wanted only a five-minute tutorial on how to manage the greatest domestic challenge of 1960. Wofford’s recommendation that a president bypass the Congress, where southern committee chairmen formed insurmountable obstacles to effective legislation, and rely on executive action struck resonant chords with Kennedy. Wofford suggested that he criticize Eisenhower and Nixon for not ending discrimination in federally assisted housing, by saying that here was a problem that could have been resolved “with one stroke of the pen.” In collaboration with Shriver, Wofford had persuaded Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King and help arrange the release of her husband from the Reidsville, Georgia, state prison where he had been sent for having an expired driver’s license. In addition, Wofford had helped prepare a statement signed by Democratic senators pledging to carry out their party’s platform pledge on civil rights legislation. Wofford also talked Kennedy into sponsoring a national conference on constitutional rights, at which he promised to support legislation and take executive action “on a bold and large scale,” including the “moral question” posed by equal rights.

Wofford and other civil rights advocates were disappointed after the election, when Kennedy announced J. Edgar Hoover’s reappointment as head of the FBI. Hoover’s “agents in the South, all white, had been of almost no help to us,” Wofford complained. Hoover’s “antipathy to Negroes and the cause of civil rights was well known.” In the interregnum between the election and the inauguration, Kennedy “gave only passing attention to civil rights.” The economy and foreign dangers were foremost on his mind. Three weeks into the administration, when Chairman John A. Hannah, Michigan State University president and University of Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh, members of the Civil Rights Commission, complained to Kennedy during a White House meeting that no one had been appointed as a special assistant on civil rights, Kennedy said that he had given that post to Wofford. They replied that Wofford told them that he was working on establishing the Peace Corps. “Oh,” Kennedy explained, “that’s only temporary.”

Within minutes, Wofford received a call to come to the White House. As he waited to see the president, “a solemn-looking man in a dark suit” appeared and asked Wofford to raise his right hand so that he could swear him in. “What for?” Wofford asked. The man didn’t know and said the president would tell him after the swearing-in. Ushered into the Oval Office, Wofford was informed that he was now special assistant to the president on civil rights and instructed “to do these things we promised we were going to do.” Kennedy explained, “The strategy for 1961 would be ‘minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.’”

Despite Kennedy’s directive to Wofford, the watchword at the White House on civil rights was caution. Kennedy said more than once: These domestic disputes can wound an administration but unlike international conflicts, they can’t kill you. Bobby Kennedy was convinced, however, that controversial rights disputes could create differences that would undermine the president’s ability to lead. When Deputy Attorney General Byron White suggested that the White House coordinate all federal action on rights initiatives, Bobby directed that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which had been established in 1957, take the lead. Moreover, Bobby opposed choosing someone with a high profile on civil rights to head the group; better to keep the whole thing as low-key as possible.

Wofford seemed like the natural choice for the post, but Bobby saw him as too “committed . . . emotionally. . . . [W]hat I wanted was a tough lawyer who could look at things objectively and give advice—and handle things properly,” he said. Wofford was “a slight madman. I didn’t want to have someone in the Civil Rights Division who was dealing not from the fact but was dealing from emotion and who wasn’t going to give what was in the best interest of President Kennedy—what he was trying to accomplish for the country—but advice which the particular individual felt was in the interest of a Negro or a group of Negroes or a group of those who were interested in civil rights.” Bobby wanted someone who would not automatically agitate protests from southern segregationists complaining that Kennedy was stacking the cards against states’ rights advocates and throwing the White House into a distracting political battle.

Kennedy’s choice for the post was thirty-eight-year-old Burke Marshall. He was a Yale Law School graduate, working at the Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling, but with no special credentials as a civil rights lawyer; his focus had been on antitrust law for large corporate clients. But people close to Bobby recommended Marshall as a very smart lawyer who could handle a variety of issues. Marshall’s interview did not go very well. His conversation with Bobby generated no chemistry between them. Eager for an appointment to the Justice Department, Marshall was terribly nervous, said little, and left Bobby believing that they couldn’t work well together. But White and Wofford persuaded Bobby that Marshall would be just the sort of deputy he was looking for—very bright, unemotional about the tough issues facing them, and prepared to apply the law objectively. Marshall proved them right when his personal history and low-key, matter-of-fact responses to questions convinced Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, not to oppose his nomination, though he would vote against him. “I’d vote against Jesus Christ if he was nominated for that position,” Eastland told Bobby.

Executive action on civil rights was also a good place to occupy Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy hoped partly to satisfy his appetite for important assignments by telling him that leadership of the new President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) could blunt southern concerns: Having a southerner as head of a committee charged with combating discrimination in hiring of federal employees and by private businesses with government contracts seemed like a good way to mute southern fears of an aggressive push by the White House for integration. However, the likelihood that Johnson and Bobby Kennedy would have to cooperate to make CEEO a success put the program in doubt. They would have to overcome an intense dislike of each other that threatened the committee’s effectiveness.

The president-elect also asked Johnson to head the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which acted as an advisory board to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was essentially a response to the Soviet’s successful launching of the first Sputnik, an earth satellite, which seemed to demonstrate an advantage in rocket technology. As majority leader, Johnson had led the charge to establish a space agency in response to the Soviet achievement, but he resisted suggestions that it be an arm of the U.S. military; it seemed certain to provoke a battle among the armed services for rich budgetary resources. Instead, Johnson created NASA as a civilian agency principally devoted to scientific exploration. He hoped that the emphasis on greater understanding of the universe would forestall an arms race in space. He also expected NASA to have a significant impact on domestic affairs. The federal monies flowing into industries building spacecraft and the domestic sites that housed space operations were economic and political plums that a seasoned politician could use to his advantage. Kennedy saw Johnson’s leadership of the Space Council as an ideal assignment that would provide an outlet for his considerable energy and would serve the administration’s political interests.

The person most notably absent from Kennedy’s inner circle of advisers was the thirty-one-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, whose interests were much more in art and literature than in politics. She was never included in discussions of domestic or foreign policies or relied on as a sounding board for how to deal with the administration’s daily challenges. Kennedy’s idea of a wife’s function was revealed in an anecdote Jacqueline related to Schlesinger about the deputy defense secretary Roswell Gilpatric and his wife. At a dinner in which Gilpatric’s wife “was saying to Jack . . . ‘I say to Ros when he comes home every night, How can they say those things about you? Aren’t they all awful?’ And he [Jack] said to her, ‘My God, you don’t say that to your husband when he comes home at night, do you? That’s not what you should do. Find one good thing they say, say, Isn’t that great? Or bring up something else that will make him happy.’ And so, that’s how I sensed what he wanted me to be,” Jackie said.