The Last Patrician Page 10
Not all Stimsonians, of course, were products of the “Who was she?” classes; as the century wore on, the Stimsonian club became an almost meritocratic one. A man who was considered “able”—a favorite Stimsonian term of praise—could expect preferment regardless of his background, provided, of course, that he was willing to embrace the fundamental tenets of the Stimsonian code. One of the more important achievements of the Stimsonians was to put an end to the gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) anti-Semitism that prevailed in the highest reaches of American public life in the first half of the century. Stimson himself recruited Felix Frankfurter for his staff in the United States Attorney’s office; Dean Acheson considered Frankfurter his best friend.18
If religion was gradually ceasing to be a barrier to entry in the club, geography had never really been one. John W. Davis came from West Virginia, Bob Lovett from Texas, Clark Clifford from Missouri, George Kennan from Wisconsin, Adlai Stevenson from Illinois, Robert McNamara from California, Dean Rusk from Georgia, and William O. Douglas from Minnesota and Washington State. The very fact that they came from the South or the West made many of these men all the more ardent in their profession of the Stimsonian faith. Their first encounter with Eastern standards and institutions was often a decisive—sometimes a traumatic—chapter in their lives. George Kennan, who had suffered from an acute feeling of inferiority at Princeton in the twenties, wept over the pages in Gatsby in which Nick Carraway describes the cultural bewilderment experienced by those who come to the East from beyond the Alleghenies.19 In time, however, even the most self-consciously Southern or Western of the Stimsonian statesmen established ties to the East and its aristocratic institutions. They spent summers in places like Fishers Island, Dark Harbor, the Vineyard, and Newport; packed their children off to schools like Groton, St. Paul’s, and the Phillips academies; and sent updated information concerning new wives, children, houses, and yachts to the Social Register Association at New York.
Their anomalous position as an elite in a democracy helps to explain the curious isolation of the Stimsonians, their lack of engagement in the life of the great mass of the people, their lack of sensitivity to changes in public opinion. One is not surprised to discover that they were often out of touch with the deeper currents of popular feeling. When he was not in Washington administering an agency, or establishing a commission, or planning a clandestine operation, the Stimsonian could be found not actively engaged in the politics of his community, but in his law firm or investment house, at his country seat or on the Vineyard. Although the Stimsonians could plausibly claim to represent popular sentiment where the Cold War was concerned, even here they seem not to have chosen the most popular (or economical) way of fighting that war.20 By the time Jack Kennedy became President, America had, Neil Sheehan wrote, “built the largest empire in history,” and the most expensive one. The United States
had 850,000 military men and civilian officials serving overseas in 106 countries. From the combined-services headquarters of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific on the mountain above Pearl Harbor, to the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, to the shellproof bunkers along the truce line in Korea, there were 410,000 men arrayed in the armies, the fleets, and the air forces of the Pacific. In Europe and the Middle East, from the nuclear bomber bases in the quiet of the English countryside, to the tank manoeuvre grounds at Grafenwöhr on the invasion route from Czechoslovakia, to the aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet waiting in the Mediterranean, to the electronic listening posts along the Soviet frontier in Turkey and Iran, there were another 410,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen deployed. When the diplomats from the State Department, the agents from the CIA, and the officials of the sundry other civilian agencies were counted, the United States had approximately 1.4 million of its servants and their families representing it abroad in 1962.21
Some historians have found it convenient, by way of apology, to blame the excesses of the national security state on the pressures to which Joseph McCarthy and middlebrow Republicans subjected the Acheson regime in the early fifties. A tempting thesis, but not, finally, a convincing one. For after all, the first shot in the “Who lost China?” war was fired by Alsop himself, not McCarthy, in a series of articles that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post early in 1950. Three years before, in March 1947, Truman had ordered loyalty tests. The first State Department casualty of China, John Stewart Service, was a victim not of McCarthy’s capricious whims, but of Acheson and Truman’s blunt administrative fiat.22 And this was at a time when Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” was skeptical of the need for an American empire, a Cold War waged on a dozen fronts. Taft, who voted against NATO legislation, worried that America, in the vainglorious pursuit of imperial power, would sacrifice her republican and democratic character on the altar of Empire, just as Athens and Rome had sacrificed theirs before her.23 (Joseph Kennedy would call Taft’s death in 1953 “the greatest tragedy to befall the American people in the loss of a statesman since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.24) In the late fifties Ike believed that the national security state was secure enough, was perhaps too secure; in his farewell address he famously warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” It was Acheson, Alsop, and Jack Kennedy who continued to insist on the precariousness of the nation’s defenses; in 1960 Kennedy campaigned on a pledge to end a missile “gap” that didn’t exist.25 However much support Cold War policies may have had in the nation at large, the method of their execution bears the unmistakable impress of the Stimsonians.
If the Cold War policies of the Stimsonians had a solid basis of popular support, the same cannot be said of their domestic agenda. The Stimsonians’ enthusiasm for the welfare and administrative state, an enthusiasm that lacked a foundation in what Bobby would later call “the shaping traditions of American life and politics,” was increasingly at odds with the mood of the American people in the postwar period. A perceptive observer even in 1960 might have detected those undercurrents of dissatisfaction with bureaucratic bloat, regulatory overkill, and selective federal largesse that would later manifest themselves so signally in Ronald Reagan’s rebellion against the welfare and administrative state. The Stimsonians, if they were adept at identifying the nation’s problems, never sought to solve them in a way that was consistent with the nation’s history and traditions. The crises were real enough, but the methods chosen to solve them, and the philosophy brought to bear upon them, tending, as they did, to exalt the grandeur of the state at the expense of the individual, were repugnant to the character and genius of the American people. It is not enough, Burke long ago observed, for a statesman to solve problems; he must make the additional effort of solving them in a way that furthers rather than undermines the first principles of his country.
Toward Camelot
JACK AND BOBBY might have chosen to question the prerogatives, the privileges, and the priorities of the Stimsonian establishment, but they did not. It was not in Jack’s—or, at the time, in Bobby’s—nature to be a heretic. Jack did not propose a radical overhaul of the Stimsonian system; he merely promised to get things “moving” again, whatever that meant. As a pledge of his good faith, he filled the executive establishment with Stimsonians of the highest caliber, men who had spent time in the best schools, the best colleges, and the best law firms in America. For his chief minister Jack wanted nothing less than a bona fide protégé of Stimson himself: among those he considered for Secretary of State were Bob Lovett, Jack McCloy, and McGeorge Bundy, each of whom had at one time worked for Stimson (as had Bundy’s father). In the end Jack chose, in part on the basis of Lovett’s recommendation, Dean Rusk.26 Harriman, Bowles, and Stevenson were given diplomatic posts in the administration, Stevenson as Ambassador to the United Nations. Douglas Dillon went to the Treasury, David Bruce to London. Allen Dulles was kept on at the CIA, where Richard Bissell was a rising star and James Jesus Angleton performed with ponderous solemnity the role of high priest of the national security state. Kennedy made Ro
bert McNamara, a Stimsonian by conviction and temperament rather than by blood, Secretary of Defense. McNamara’s Defense Department could by itself have furnished an enviable Wall Street law practice; filling positions in the defense establishment were Roswell Gilpatric from Cravath, Cyrus Vance from Simpson, Thacher, Stan Resor from Debevoise & Plimpton, and Peter Solbert from Davis Polk. (Bill Bundy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was an alumnus of Dean Acheson’s law firm, Covington, Burling & Rublee; Bundy was also Acheson’s son-in-law.) At the Department of Justice Bobby brought in a younger but no less respectable staff. The influence of Yale Law School was particularly strong, with Byron R. “Whizzer” White becoming Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach heading the Office of Legal Counsel, Louis Oberdorfer the tax division, and John Douglas the civil division.27 The Solicitor General’s office went to Harvard’s Archibald Cox.
Bobby’s administration of the Justice Department remains a lasting example of Stimsonianism at its best; the department’s work in securing the equal protection of the laws for blacks stands as one of the great achievements of the Stimsonian establishment. For once, the methods and tools the Stimsonians employed were equal to the crisis they confronted; for once, their lawyerly approach to human problems, their practice of hiring Ivy League lawyers and setting them to work to find legal and administrative answers to complex social and economic questions, resulted in accomplishments that withstood the test of time. Bobby himself became deeply involved in his department’s civil rights work. He brought first-rate lawyers to the Civil Rights Division and put the admirable Burke Marshall in charge of them. He traveled to Georgia to announce in person the administration’s commitment to school desegregation. He battled segregationists in Mississippi when they refused to allow James Meredith to enroll at the State University at Oxford. He flew to Alabama, at a time when even brave men might have stayed away, to try to persuade Governor Wallace to permit the registration of black students at the University of Alabama. He helped to prepare the landmark civil rights legislation his brother sent to Congress in June 1963, and he served as the administration’s lead witness before the Senate committees that initially reviewed the bill. He even found time to master the cases and issues involved in an important apportionment case, Gray v. Sanders, which established a “one man, one vote” standard in voting controversies. Bobby personally argued the Gray case at the bar of the Supreme Court; his wife, his mother, two sisters, his younger brother, a sister-in-law or two, and four of his children were present to hear him deliver his argument before the justices.28 And yet if Bobby’s civil rights work represented one of the great successes of his Stimsonian Justice Department, it at the same time revealed—to him no less than to his critics—the limits of the Stimsonian technique. Legal and administrative remedies might make it possible for oppressed minorities to enjoy the full complement of civil rights, but those remedies could do little to give them the self-confidence they needed to take advantage of their new opportunities.
The record of his brother’s administration in other areas was less enviable. Most of Jack Kennedy’s energy and imagination was consumed, during his presidency, by foreign crises, by the ongoing melodrama of Cold War confrontation, by the constant need to defend an empire whose far-flung frontiers the Romans themselves would have thought presumptuous. Jack Kennedy seems not to have foreseen, when he took office, the extent to which his achievements were destined to be the achievements of reaction—reaction to missiles in Cuba, to a wall in Berlin, to guerrilla activity in Indochina. His administration responded to history, responded, indeed, “flexibly” to it, to use the jargon of the time, but it did not shape history. History had been shaped for it—shaped by an earlier generation of Stimsonians, by those who, in Dean Acheson’s words, had been “present at the creation” of the postwar order.
But all of this lay in the future. The burdens of history were as yet unrevealed to Jack Kennedy when he took the oath of office on a cold sunny day in January 1961. David Halberstam has given, in The Best and the Brightest, the definitive account of the confidence and mutual admiration that prevailed during the first months of Camelot. The men who came to Washington to serve under the Kennedys, Halberstam wrote, believed that there “was no limit to what brilliant men, untrammeled by ideology and prejudice and partisanship, could do with their minds in solving the world’s problems.”29 The administration was at once the culmination and the perfection of seventy-five years of Stimsonian aristocracy. Jack himself gracefully accepted the challenge of the moment, and articulated, more memorably than any other Stimsonian of his generation, the purposes and premises of their leadership, their vision of a group of Enlightened statesmen solving the problems of the nation and the world through a careful deployment of the resources of a powerful government. With its confident assertion that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish … all forms of human poverty,” with its famous pledge to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to ensure the survival and the success of liberty and the American empire, Kennedy’s inaugural address is a classic statement of the Stimsonian creed, an eloquent declaration of the principles on which the welfare state and the national security state rested.30 Joseph Alsop could not have been more pleased, and when, a few months later, his dear friend the President came to dine at his house on Dumbarton Avenue, and complimented him upon his selection of wines (a stomach complaint prevented Kennedy from actually drinking them), we may fairly suppose that Alsop’s ecstasy was complete.31
It is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that the Kennedys were not simply the last, but in some ways the most brilliant representatives of a dying aristocracy. As is so often the case with aristocratic castes, the rich and fermenting processes of decay brought forth the most splendid growths. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England meant the end of the Tory Party as it had been constituted in that country for two centuries, but its leadership was never more memorable than at the time when its fortunes began to decline and its principles came to be discredited, when it brought forth Disraeli (who like Jack and Bobby had not been born into the aristocracy he was later to lead) and Randolph Churchill. It was during the last years of its ascendancy that the ancient republican aristocracy of Rome produced its most memorable men: Cato the Younger, Brutus, and Caesar himself. The extinction of the Roman aristocracy coincided with the collapse of the Republic, and afterward the emperors filled the Senate with mediocrities and nobodies, with scribes and centurions and the sons of former slaves.32 In America half a century of Stimsonian aristocracy culminated in the rise of Jack and Bobby Kennedy—outsiders to begin with, but men whose names came in time to be synonymous with the idea of aristocracy in the United States.
PART II
The Portrait of a Rebel
8
On the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, the Attorney General presided, in his office in the Department of Justice, over a discussion of the problem of organized crime in the United States. Among the federal prosecutors in attendance were Robert Morgenthau, scion of a prominent New Deal family and now in Henry Stimson’s old job as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his assistant, Silvio Mollo, the chief of the criminal division in the Southern District. When, about noon, the meeting adjourned, Bobby invited the two lawyers to luncheon at Hickory Hill. The day was warm, and the three men sat out of doors, on a patio beside the swimming pool, where a meal of tuna fish sandwiches and New England clam chowder was served. Later Ethel joined them, and Bobby swam in the pool.1
The Kennedys had recently added a new wing to the house, and in the distance a group of workmen were painting it. Some time after one-thirty one of the workmen, a radio in his hand, came running toward the luncheon party in a state of agitation. At the same time, a maid, or possibly a butler—Morgenthau’s memory was uncertain—approached the little group and announced that the director had telephoned and wished to speak to the Attorney General. The director, of course, was J
. Edgar Hoover, and he was not in the habit of telephoning the Attorney General at home. Bobby went to the telephone, and all at once Morgenthau began to comprehend the agitated workman’s words. A moment later Bobby put his hand to his mouth; Ethel went to his side. When he put the telephone down, Bobby was at first silent. At last he spoke, and told the group that his brother had been shot.2
The four of them returned to the house. Morgenthau and Mollo were shown to a television set in the drawing room; Bobby and Ethel went upstairs, where Bobby attempted to telephone Kenny O’Donnell in Dallas. Failing to reach O’Donnell, he spoke instead to Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who a short time before had leapt aboard the presidential limousine in a Dallas street. The President, Hill said, was gravely wounded. Bobby asked whether they had summoned a priest, and Hill replied that they had. Half an hour later the Attorney General spoke again by telephone to Dallas; this time he was informed that the President was dead. Bobby went downstairs. “He’s dead,” he announced, in an oddly casual way, to Morgenthau and Mollo, and then he went outside.3
In the gathering dusk he paced the great lawn of his estate. Friends and lieutenants joined him for brief periods of time, as did his own children, whom Ethel had fetched from school.4 “He had the most wonderful life,” he told them as he embraced them. He shed no tears, but Ethel gave him a pair of dark glasses, lest his red-rimmed eyes betray him. In the early evening he changed clothes, put on a black suit, and was driven to Secretary McNamara’s offices at the Pentagon; from there he traveled by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base. When, about six o’clock, the Boeing 707 bearing the new President, the dead President, and the dead President’s widow taxied to a halt on the Andrews field, Bobby, avoiding the television lights that illuminated one side of the great airplane, slipped through the shadows to the darkened side of the jet and climbed aboard unnoticed. He hurried past President Johnson and his party, who were gathered at the front of the plane, and went at once to the private apartments in the rear of the aircraft, where his sister-in-law, in her bloodied clothes, had kept a vigil beside her husband’s coffin. Bobby held her hand as they stepped out into the brilliant glare of the television lights, and escorted her to the ambulance that was to bear the coffin, first to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, and then to the White House itself.5 Bobby slept in the Lincoln Bedroom that night; his friend Chuck Spalding brought him a sleeping pill. After Spalding closed the door, he heard an anguished cry from within: “Why, God?”6