The Last Patrician Page 4

  The corporations, of course, were only the apparent villains; the real villains were the “new type of men,” the men who, like Joseph Kennedy, stood at the head of the corporations, or who controlled their capital stock.16 The politics of both of the Roosevelt cousins, Theodore and Franklin, were in part a reaction against Adams’s “new type of man.” Implicit in the political programs of the two Roosevelts was the idea that, if Americans were to continue to make progress, if they were to continue their marvelous ascent from pain and privation to ever loftier heights of prosperity, they would have to put their fate once again into the hands of the aristoi, into the hands of Enlightened statesmen who, through a rational application of modern theories of economic planning and control, could mitigate the more pernicious effects of a market economy—and not incidentally frustrate the ambitions of the tycoons and stock speculators (Joseph Kennedy among them) who were trying to take over the country.17 Drawing on novel theories of economic regulation and European ideas of social reform, America’s twentieth-century patrician reformers discovered a new means of enjoying the old feudal pleasures, and they found in the Creed of the Expert a way to effect their salvation as a class. They claimed a mandate for a new and Enlightened approach to the problem of human pain and human suffering, but beneath the trappings of science and economic sophistication lurked the familiar paternalistic ideas of the past.18 The patricians succeeded in creating a grand seigneurial role, not indeed for themselves, but for the state, which in their theory was to function like a benevolent paterfamilias, helping people who (it was argued) could not help themselves. When he declared that he was going to be “President of all the people,” Edmund Wilson observed, Franklin Roosevelt “meant that, as lord of the nation, he was going to take responsibility for seeing that all the various ranks of people, as far as was in his power, were going to be given what was good for them.”19

  The Idea of a Capitalist Villain

  JOSEPH KENNEDY, THE Irish Catholic boy who dreamed of one day attaching his family to the aristocracy, was, of course, precisely the kind of interloper the patricians most feared when they denounced the “anarchy” of the free market. Kennedy was precisely the kind of capitalist predator whom the patricians believed effective government regulation would eliminate. Thirty years after his death, this picture of Joseph Kennedy as unprincipled capitalist villain continues to be a seductive one. To us no less than to his patrician contemporaries he appears crude, unscrupulous, untrustworthy. We picture him crossing the Atlantic (with Gloria Swanson in tow) or sitting amid the ticker-tape machines on the veranda of his house in Palm Beach, the very embodiment of a certain type of tycoon, a type that flourished in the twenties and thirties. To us he figures almost as a caricature, the Sinister Capitalist in a Graham Greene novel (cf. Lord Benditch in The Confidential Agent), a vulgar philistine who, if he enjoyed classical music, rarely read a serious book.20 We put him in the same class with Max Beaverbrook and Waugh’s Rex Mottram: a transatlantic adventurer, a cad, floating above the world on his own little cushion of capital, beholden to no one, selling short stocks and governments with equal ease, ready to do business with whoever made him the highest bid. Waugh’s Charles Ryder says of Rex Mottram:

  One quickly learned all that he wished to know about him, that he was a lucky man with money, a member of Parliament, a gambler, a good fellow; that he played golf regularly with the Prince of Wales and was on easy terms with “Max” and “F.E.”21

  For the patrician, however, revenge is always sweet, and in the literature of aristocratic elegy the philistine stockjobber always gets his comeuppance. The “world was an older and better place” than men like Joseph Kennedy and Rex Mottram knew, and it soon enough saw through them. Like Joseph Kennedy’s, Rex Mottram’s ambition is frustrated by the orthodox patricians:

  Things had not gone as smoothly with him as he had planned. I knew nothing of finance, but I heard it said that his dealings were badly looked on by orthodox Conservatives.… There was always too much about him in the papers; he was one with the Press lords and their sad-eyed, smiling hangers-on; in his speeches he said the sort of thing which “made a story” in Fleet Street, and that did him no good with his party chiefs.22

  Waugh’s Rex Mottram is a caricature; Joseph Kennedy was not. Like Mottram, Kennedy, too, was a friend of Beaverbrook and Luce and the other “Press lords”; he, too, got his name in the newspapers and used public relations men to “make a story” in the press; he, too, was accused of irregular business dealings and did things that got him into trouble with his party’s chiefs. Joseph Kennedy might not have “played golf regularly” with the Prince of Wales, but long before his English embassy he succeeded, through a combination of brash and charm, in meeting the prince at a fashionable Paris restaurant and persuading him to give him letters of introduction to influential London businessmen.23 And yet the picture of Joseph Kennedy that the patricians have left us is a deceptive one; the relevant evidence has been arranged to show him in the worst possible light. His mistakes are magnified, and his virtues are ignored or, worse, made to seem like vices. Shrewdness and entrepreneurial spirit become synonymous with dishonesty and treachery. Financial success becomes indistinguishable from moral corruption. Did Kennedy urge FDR to make a deal with Hitler? If he did, it was an unforgivable mistake. Did this mistake mean that he was rotten to the core?24 It depends on the standard against which he is judged. Neville Chamberlain, after all, tried to make a deal with Hitler; but while we—very properly—censure Chamberlain’s judgment, we do not question his integrity. Joseph Kennedy, however, is held to a different standard, for he was a Sinister Capitalist, unlike Chamberlain, who was merely descended from Sinister Capitalists. We are unable to resist the patrician interpretation of Joseph Kennedy precisely because we have been so powerfully influenced by it ourselves; we, too, tend instinctively to confound new money and entrepreneurial energy with lack of moral scruple. Even today we are quick to perceive villainy in the capitalist and the entrepreneur: Bill Gates, we are sure, must be violating the antitrust laws; Joseph Kennedy must have been a crook.

  The elder Kennedy was shrewder, tougher, quicker than most of his patrician contemporaries; FDR alone, whom Kennedy called “the hardest trader I’d ever run up against,” was a match for him.25 In the relatively unfettered markets of the twenties Kennedy laid the foundations of a fortune that would in time dwarf the inherited wealth of most of his Harvard classmates. But although he had benefited greatly from the very opportunities the aristocrats sought to foreclose, Kennedy was nonetheless determined to ally, first himself, and later his sons, with a patrician caste eager to avenge the insults of the nouveaux riches by getting its hands on virgin markets as yet innocent of the government’s suffocating embrace. Kennedy himself became the first full-time federal regulator of capital markets in the United States.26 His Securities and Exchange Commission did not, it is true, have the cachet of Jerome Frank’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Mecca of the new regulatory state, the place to which bright young men like Adlai Stevenson, Telford Taylor, and the most talented of Frankfurter’s “hot dogs” went to be confirmed in the New Deal faith, but the SEC could nonetheless boast of talented regulators like William O. Douglas of Yale and James Landis of Harvard.27 Whatever doubts Kennedy might have had about the aristocratic program of federally sponsored paternalism, he eventually embraced it, and with some fervor. “An organized functioning society,” he wrote in his 1936 book, I’m for Roosevelt, “requires a planned economy.” The “more complex the society,” he declared, “the greater the demand for planning.” Certain “things have to be done,” he concluded, “which no one but government can do.”28

  Half a century earlier, when the power of the patricians was at its lowest ebb, a tycoon such as Joseph Kennedy might have eschewed an alliance with the aristocracy, might have balked at the feudal sentimentality of the grand seigneurs, might have insisted on the critical role that unconstrained private initiative must always play in increasin
g a nation’s prosperity. By the thirties, however, the idea of private initiative, the grand idea of Adam Smith and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, was thought to be passé; the patrician reformers with whom Joseph Kennedy cast his lot drew instead on French theories of Enlightenment and Fabian notions of an elite class of “capable men.”29 Only a people who have been guided by wise and prescient leaders could ever hope to see the light, or know the truth. If Kennedy’s decision to embrace FDR’s theories of grand government was in part an act of prudence—he was afraid that if FDR failed, a purer form of socialism might triumph in America—it also represented a calculated gamble for power.30 He had made his millions; he could afford to embrace the generous politics of noblesse oblige. “The boys might as well work for the government,” he said of Bobby and his brothers, “because politics will control the business of the country in the future.”31

  The Traitor to His Class

  IN SELLING OUT to the aristocrats, Joseph Kennedy, the self-made man, the brilliant entrepreneur, was a much more genuine “traitor to his class” than Franklin Roosevelt ever was. It is sometimes said that Roosevelt betrayed his class when he exacted his pound of flesh from the “economic royalists” during the New Deal. But in doing this, Roosevelt was not betraying his class, he was avenging it, avenging it against a class of new men, a class composed of the Wall Street speculators and big businessmen and great industrialists who had overthrown the old nobility. A few patricians, like Dick Whitney, the New York Stock Exchange president from whose gold watch chain dangled a little Porcellian pig, might have consented to join this aspiring class, and others, like the Morgans, might have helped to sustain it by raising capital for its ventures.32 Many more patricians were compelled by financial necessity to act as lawyers for it.33 But it was never Franklin Roosevelt’s class; Roosevelt belonged to a family whose mercantile success had long before permitted its scions to set themselves up as country gentry.34 The Roosevelts had once occupied the highest places in society, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the family came to be overshadowed by the magnificoes of the new plutocracy.35 Roosevelt himself practiced law in a Wall Street firm after studying the profession at Columbia, but he quit in disgust after a few years. It was not a Roosevelt’s job to do a Rockefeller’s bidding.36 Franklin Roosevelt did not belong to the aspiring class of plutocrats and would-be plutocrats that came into being after the Civil War. But Joseph Kennedy did belong to that class, and in rallying to Roosevelt’s standard he betrayed it.

  It is not difficult to see why Joseph Kennedy should have succumbed to the charms of the rejuvenated aristocracy. The risorgimento of the patricians represented one of the more astonishing comebacks in the history of American political power. Thrown out by Jefferson at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the patricians returned to power at the beginning of the twentieth, and the second time they did not make the mistake of alienating the common man. On the contrary, the patricians assiduously courted the people and, following the example of Caesar, promised no end of federally sponsored bread and shows. In the first half of the twentieth century the seemingly moribund aristocracy to which the Roosevelts belonged produced a succession of brilliant statesmen, administrators, and jurists; men like Elihu Root, Gifford Pinchot, Henry Stimson, Learned Hand, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Sumner Welles, Francis Biddle, James V. Forrestal, Robert Lovett, Jack McCloy, Adlai Stevenson, Desmond FitzGerald, Richard Bissell, and the Alsop and the Bundy brothers represented a formidable collection of talent, of energy, of social and intellectual distinction. These statesmen were educated at the same schools; they belonged to the same clubs; they worked in the same law firms; they summered beside the same New England harbors. Their careers were advanced by the same Roosevelt patronage. In my own mind I call them Stimsonian statesmen, for Colonel Stimson, although he was not the most distinguished, was perhaps the most representative of the breed.37 He was given his first government job by Theodore Roosevelt (as United States Attorney in New York) and his last by Franklin Roosevelt (as Secretary of War), and his public career coincided with the golden age of patrician governance. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Stimson (Andover ’84, Yale ’88, Harvard Law ’90) practiced law on Wall Street, and though he was a much greater success at the bar than FDR ever was, he never liked being a corporate lawyer; it was a living, he said, and nothing more. It was not until he became a federal prosecutor that he felt himself “out of the dark places” where he had been “wandering all his life” and in a place where he “could see the stars.”38

  The men who followed in Stimson’s footsteps to a large extent shaped the great public debates of the first half of the twentieth century. If this has been the “American century,” it is because they made it so. Other groups besides their own, and other leaders besides themselves, were committed to many of the same ends, but none was as successful in articulating the new theory of government, and none was as effective in translating theory into practice. Their belief that a government composed of dedicated and Enlightened public servants could remake the world did more than give new purpose to a disaffected social class; it gave the nation a new sense of direction and aspiration, a new conception of its destiny.

  The Stimsonians came to define twentieth-century American liberalism—a very different kind of liberalism from the nineteenth-century free-market liberalism they questioned. Their belief in the beneficent power of a government directed by brilliant Stimsonian illuminati received its most enduring expression, in domestic affairs, in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its insistence that government, not private enterprise, could best improve the conditions that had left a third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. It received its most enduring expression, in foreign affairs, in the Pax Americana advocated by Dean Acheson, General Marshall, and Joseph Alsop after the war, a policy whereby the American government, like the Roman one in a previous age, took upon its shoulders the burden of governing the world, of resisting, with the assistance of a vast military and intelligence establishment, the great heresies, and of improving, through lavish grants of money and matériel, the conditions of life in those countries that had been admitted to the American imperium.39

  The twin orthodoxies of the New Deal and the Pax Americana were the foundations upon which both the twentieth-century welfare state and the twentieth-century national security state were constructed.40 The molders of these orthodoxies were themselves members of one of the most extraordinary clubs the world has known, a national aristocracy which, with its belief that there were few problems an aggressive, conscientious cadre of public servants could not solve, and through its control of a complex web of bureaucratic and administrative machinery, influenced the life of the nation and the world to a degree unprecedented in the history of the United States. It was into this tradition of aristocracy and Enlightened liberalism that Bobby Kennedy and his brothers were eventually inducted; they would become, indeed, the last American statesmen to campaign, openly and unapologetically, as heirs to the Stimsonian conception of progressive aristocracy.

  They were the last of the old, but they were also the first of the new. The last of the great aristocratic families in twentieth-century American politics, the Kennedys produced the first mainstream critic of the orthodoxies on which the old Stimsonian arrangements rested. Bobby Kennedy, who in the first phase of his career was almost a parody of a young Stimsonian statesman eager to make his mark in the world, would emerge, in the last years of his life, as a great though reluctant critic of the world the Stimsonians wrought.

  3

  The desire to possess a paramount purpose in life, more pronounced in some men than in others, is probably innate, but the form which that purpose assumes, in the life of a particular man, must depend upon the man’s education. Of the nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Bobby had perhaps the greatest need of a grand and overarching purpose in life; men who are indifferent to this need do not consider becoming priests. Left to its own devices, Bobby’s hunger f
or purpose might have found expression in a life in the Church, in a life of piety and contemplation. But his father had determined that he would have a secular career, and as a matter of course Bobby adopted as his own those secular purposes that were held up to him at St. Paul’s, at Milton, and at Harvard as being the most noble and fulfilling a man could have.

  The ease with which he was converted to the creed of Stimson and the two Roosevelts is striking evidence of how skillful the New England academies had become, since Henry Adams’s time, in producing pious ephebes eager to devote themselves to the cause of grand government. In his first months at Milton, Bobby attempted to lead “an underground movement” to convert his Protestant form-mates to the Roman Church, but his religious zeal quickly subsided, and his Roman Catholic faith became, in time, a merely secondary one, a Sunday faith. The achievement of secular power replaced the hope of eternal salvation as the principal object of his daily devotions, and he was soon writing home that the Protestant ministers who visited Milton, schooled in the ethic of public service propounded by Dr. Peabody and Dr. Drury, were more intellectually impressive than the Catholic priests who spoke of St. Augustine and St. Paul.1

  The exercise of political power is, of course, as gratifying a form of egotism as any, but in the New England academies in which he passed his youth, Bobby learned to think of it as a selfless and even a noble activity, an obligation that, under the more pleasing appellation of “public service,” the graduates of the New England schools had a sacred duty to discharge. Ever since Endicott Peabody had modeled Groton (founded in 1884) along the lines of Dr. Arnold’s Rugby, the New England academies had attempted to imitate the English public schools in their mission of transforming well-born and not infrequently rich young gentlemen into conscientious wielders of political and administrative power. It was at these schools that patrician youths were initiated into the grand tradition of politics that men like Stimson and Theodore Roosevelt had recently revived. (Roosevelt sent his sons to be educated by Peabody at Groton; their Hyde Park cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, was also a Grotonian.2) It was in these schools that young men learned to look upon engagement in private business as a selfish and spiritually unrewarding activity; it was here that they learned to look upon government service as superior to those careers that existed only because a market had need of them.3 (Bobby’s own aversion to business, Schlesinger says, was confirmed during a summer he spent working in a Boston bank: it was “as close to business as he ever got”.4) A collection of authorities, beginning with Aristotle, was cited as evidence of the proposition that a public career was the noblest of all, and a strict regimen of athletic competition was instituted in order to prepare the budding young statesman for the rigors of political life.