The Last Patrician Read online

  Roosevelt’s later successes never completely assuaged the humiliations of his early years, when first he had gone into a world that was indifferent to him. This residual bitterness manifested itself most signally in the quite unmistakable cruelty with which he treated others. It revealed itself in what Learned Hand called his vindictiveness, his “willingness to fan incendiary animosities” in ways Hand said he could “never forgive.”23 It revealed itself in the way he manipulated his subordinates, and in the way he dropped them after they ceased to be useful to him.24 Marguerite “Missy” Le Hand, his secretary, devoted her life to him, but when she lay dying, Roosevelt did not bother to call her.25 Cruelty showed itself, too, in the way he played his aides against one another, and in the heavy sarcasm, the petty humiliations, the demeaning nicknames, the relentless teasing to which he subjected them.26 Sometimes this cruelty took the form of a playful, catlike malice, as when Roosevelt asked Joseph Kennedy to drop his trousers in the White House, to see whether it was true that Kennedy was bow-legged (it was true).27 Sometimes it was more brutally blunt, as when once he said to his wife, who was attempting to give her opinion of a pending bill, “Oh, Eleanor, shut up. You never understand these things anyway.”28 Dean Acheson resigned rather than submit to Roosevelt’s daily calisthenics of cruelty. Roosevelt, Acheson said, not only “condescended” to his subordinates, he did so in a particularly “humiliating” way. It was not easy, Acheson wrote, for a person who had done his best to serve the President to receive in return “the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stableboy.”29 Roosevelt was a charming man, the most charming man she had ever known, Rose Kennedy said.30 Winston Churchill compared meeting him to opening his first bottle of champagne. But Roosevelt’s was the charm of Dickens’s Chester, a superficial smoothness that was not in the least incompatible with great personal cruelty.

  The adolescent behavior, the love of sophomoric practical jokes, the delight with which he called Corcoran “Tommy the Cork” and Morgenthau “Henry the Morgue” revealed not merely a man who was capable of a cruelty that was all the more devastating because it was so casual, so careless, so thoughtless, but a curiously underdeveloped man, one who was strong enough to overcome his crippled legs but who never succeeded in overcoming the barriers that had prevented the full maturation of his mind, a man who seemed content with the rather stunted emotional existence to which he was confined.31 There was—everyone who knew him noticed it—a certain dullness in the great man’s conversation and character. There was an air of youthful self-satisfaction about him, the complacent attitude of a flippant schoolboy.32 The President’s table talk, Alsop observed, was remarkably “stale.”33 His sense of fun, Gore Vidal said, was “heavy.”34 The beautiful Dorothy Schiff, to whom for a time the President turned regularly for female companionship, was surprised to find herself growing bored in his company. She listened “over and over again to the same stories—how once when he was going past the Vanderbilt mansion he saw on a clothesline some black chiffon underwear,” and so on and so forth.35 He was incapable, Missy Le Hand believed, of “personal friendship with anyone.”36 And yet Roosevelt was, in spite of his coldness and his cruelty, able to achieve things that the Kennedys, for all their superior warmth and greater personal loyalty, could not. The Kennedys lacked the deep bitterness, what Learned Hand called the “venom,” that gave Roosevelt’s ambition its edge, that made it possible for him to lead an ideological revolution. The unagitated mind does not propose the overthrow of an established order; it may rebel, but it hesitates to destroy. Roosevelt’s bitterness supplied him with the animus he needed to create a system of his own, one in which he would again be the center of the universe, the sun around which everything else revolved.

  Bobby would later question the wisdom of Roosevelt’s revolution, but he would do so only with reluctance, with an ambivalence he did not bother to conceal. He could never have brought himself to denounce the philosophy of the New Deal completely. Bobby may have been, as his enemies said, “ruthless,” but he lacked the capacity for quiet cunning that, far more than energy or intellect, accomplishes the reorganization of a nation, the reformation of a creed. A passage that Bobby quoted in one of his own speeches is revealing: “‘There is,’ said an Italian philosopher, ‘nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.’”37 Bobby no doubt thought it prudent to refer to Machiavelli as “an Italian philosopher”; burdened as he was by a reputation for “ruthlessness,” he could hardly afford to be revealed as a careful student of The Prince.38 And yet the Machiavellian aperçu that attracted Bobby’s eye was a cautionary, not a ruthless one, one that emphasized how difficult and how dangerous revolutions are. Real revolutionaries do not dwell on this fact; only ambivalent ones do. Bobby was not a Machiavellian prince; Franklin Roosevelt was in many ways much closer to being that. Roosevelt, less sensitive than Bobby, was more subtle. Roosevelt did not dwell on the dangers and perplexities of revolution; he would doubtless have denied that the New Deal was a revolutionary program at all. Certainly he never came clean as to the nature of the revolution he was leading; he was not about to alienate his fellow citizens by insisting openly, as the Federalists had done before him, on the virtues of aristocratic governance. Roosevelt instead appealed to the people and, in the temperate language of reform and Enlightened economic policy, denounced the new men, the plutocrats, the representatives of the vulgar “business interests,” the “economic royalists” who had supplanted the ancient gentry. According to Roosevelt, they, and not he, were the real revolutionaries, the real villains.39 Bobby talked of revolution and even fantasized about it, but he was not a genuine revolutionary. Franklin Roosevelt was. Roosevelt was the Moses, the Solon, the Lycurgus of the welfare state, and for a time Bobby could but piously follow in his footsteps.

  The Significance of the Frontier in Patrician History

  BOBBY’S AND JACK’S progressive and idealistic rhetoric, set off by toothy smiles and carefully maintained suntans, did more for the cause of Roosevelt’s paternalistic federal establishment than anything since the great man himself. The brothers’ decision to embrace the cause was not, however, the easy, obvious one it might seem, for by the time Jack and Bobby came of political age, the Stimsonian path had ceased to be a sure way to power. It is true that, in the quarter-century between 1940 and 1965, four brilliant aristocrats were at or near the head of affairs—FDR, Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, and Jack Kennedy himself. But after all, Acheson’s administration could not have survived without the plebeian beard that Truman supplied; Stevenson lost (twice) to the decidedly less Stimsonian Ike, and Kennedy’s own margin of victory over the “classless” Nixon was slim. The paternalistic mentality that had proved popular in the first half of the century, during the climax of immigration in the early years of the century and at the height of the Depression in the thirties, produced far less enthusiasm in the electorate in the postwar years, years in which a booming economy proved that the United States remained a land of opportunity for individuals. In the postwar period Americans regained confidence in their ability to improve their lives through their own individual efforts, without the assistance of the welfare and administrative state. The legacy of that renewed confidence is with us still, in the millions of baby boomers who were born in the prosperous decades that followed the war, a testament to a generation’s faith in its future. That confidence portended ill for the Stimsonians, portended, indeed, their demise as a governing class. Looking from the lofty heights of the presidency on a Massachusetts state Democratic convention in the early sixties, Jack Kennedy was scornful of Irish machine politicians like Edward J. “Knocko” McCormack, Sr., Patrick J. “Sonny” McDonough, and Peter “Leather Lungs” Clougherty. “Their day is gone,” the President told Ben Bradlee, who was covering the convention for Newsweek, “and they don’t know it.”40 Perhaps their day was gone, but so was the Stimsonians’ own. Th
irty years later characters like Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Adlai Stevenson seem hardly less exotic than the Carmine De Sapios and Knocko McCormacks of the period; it is difficult to conceive of a patrician statesman displaying a similarly splendid plumage on the national political stage today. Contemporary patricians in public office, such as former Governor Weld, are reduced to melancholy stunts like jumping into Boston Harbor fully clothed. Jack Kennedy accurately foretold the demise of the machine politicians, the politicians who carried on the tradition of his own grandfather Honey Fitz, the politicians whose style he himself so emphatically rejected, but he seems not to have foreseen the death of the Stimsonian tradition he had struggled to make his own.

  It was not simply their inability to foresee the Stimsonians’ demise that caused Jack and Bobby to adopt the Stimsonian pose, to imitate the old Rooseveltian gestures. Their upbringing had not really prepared them to play any other part. Bred up from birth to aspire to the curule chair, they naturally adopted, when they came of political age, the forms and manners of the patricians. So convincing was their performance that for a moment they revived the enthusiasm for grand government, the high rhetoric of the state, that had flourished during FDR’s administration. Politics, they said, was an “honorable profession,” as though the other ones were less so. When Teddy, running for his first political office in 1962, asked his brother how he should explain why he wanted to be in the Senate, Bobby, tossing a football on the lawn in front of the Ambassador’s house at Hyannis Port, replied: “If you get that question, tell them about public service. Tell them why you don’t want to be sitting on your ass in some office in New York”—as though the work of men sitting in offices in New York was inherently less worthy than the work of Enlightened mandarins sitting in offices in Washington.41 But the Kennedys’ bold language and striking gestures concealed a cautious and pragmatic policy. As President, Jack Kennedy was reluctant to increase the size of the federal establishment to any great degree; in 1962 he actually proposed tax cuts.42 Lyndon Johnson, it is true, knew no such restraint: he shrewdly exploited the idealistic impulses his predecessor had aroused, and drew on them to build the great legislative mausoleum he conceived as a monument to his fame. But the national mood that made the Great Society possible proved ephemeral. Johnson’s successors in the White House shunned the Stimsonian school of statesmanship; Presidents Reagan and Bush sought to demonstrate their closeness not to the Eastern establishment that had built up the paternalistic state, but to the West, the mythical land of rugged individualism and frontier democracy.43 Richard Nixon, at the time of the Manson murders, went so far as to pay tribute to the virtues of a John Wayne movie, Chisum, and suggested that America would be a better place if it revived the harsher code of the lone Western hero whom Wayne played.44 (It is one of the curious ironies of history that Johnson, although he was a far more genuine Westerner than the Illinois-born Reagan, the Massachusetts-born Bush, or even Nixon himself, the product of Southern California suburbia, should have been far less self-consciously Western in his politics than they. Like so many Westerners who come to the East, Johnson was fascinated by Eastern standards; his Great Society was the ultimate homage a Westerner could pay to the Stimsonian ideal of grand government.)

  This preoccupation with Western individualism was nothing new; before the advent of the Stimsonians, American statesmen had, in more and less contrived ways, attempted to identify themselves with the West and the opportunities it represented for individuals in search of freedom and independence. The more memorable presidents before FDR had closely associated themselves with the frontier, had determined to prove themselves Hawk-eyes, not Major Heywards. Washington had been deeply involved in the settlement and colonization of the West and had traveled extensively in the Virginia and Ohio wilderness. Jefferson, in addition to being a backwoods land lawyer, had spoken eloquently of Western lands “with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” Jackson and Lincoln were both men of the frontier, and even Teddy Roosevelt, the cowboy of Harvard Yard, felt a need to grab a gun and roam about the Badlands in search of big game and dangerous men. Franklin Roosevelt broke with this tradition; he made no pretense to being a cowboy, to being anything other than a twentieth-century Major Heyward. Unashamed of his pinstripes, he possessed the easy manners of the faded gentry, and he felt no urge to don denim. Americans ceased, during the heyday of the Stimsonians, to demand in their politics the same Western motifs they enjoyed in their novels and their movies. But the Stimsonian interlude could not last forever; Bobby and Jack might well have been the last major American statesmen to get away with an overtly patrician style, a well-tailored manner, a Harvard accent. In the thirty-five years since President Kennedy’s death, only one genuine patrician has occupied the White House, and George Bush, the second son of a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who for a time represented Greenwich in the Senate, was at pains throughout his career to prove that he wasn’t a patrician, that he was really a Texan, a lover of country music and pork rinds. In his eagerness to repudiate his Stimsonian heritage, President Bush outdid St. Peter, and denied his faith, not three, but countless times.

  For a time Bobby himself considered moving out West and running for office. Dissatisfied with his work as a young lawyer on Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Bobby decided to quit when McCarthy passed him over and named Roy Cohn to the position of chief counsel instead. Bobby told J. B. Matthews, an investigator with whom he worked on the committee, that “some hard work” and “a lot of hand-shaking” could get him the Democratic nomination for Senator in a state like Nevada.45 The example of Teddy Roosevelt perhaps inspired him, and he no doubt genuinely loved the open spaces and severe freedom of the West. But as his brother’s career gained momentum, it became obvious that the family needed him in the East, and the idea of a Western career was quietly dropped. Joseph Kennedy, though he himself had gone West, to Hollywood, to further his own career, would never have permitted Bobby to stray so far from the Stimsonian establishment over which he and his brother were (in the father’s grand scheme) meant to preside. Bobby never became a Western Senator; if he had, he might have learned earlier those lessons he was fated to learn only at the end of his life.

  6

  The Stimsonians were successful in part because they combined two distinct sets of qualities and skills. First, they were intensely practical. “It is common sense,” Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1932, “to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Though he might have lacked intellectual depth or ideological conviction, the Stimsonian statesman excelled at doing things, at setting up commissions, building bureaus, devising programs, processing paper, all of which tended to create the illusion (if not the reality) of progress. McGeorge Bundy, for example, was believed by many of his Stimsonian peers to possess the most brilliant mind of his generation, and yet when Jack Kennedy made him his National Security Adviser in 1961 (Kennedy considered making him Secretary of State), Bundy had, David Halberstam observed, almost no scholarship, no serious intellectual work, to his name.1 His reputation was based solely on the great practical ability he had demonstrated as a Harvard dean. Bundy proved his bureaucratic genius in Washington by setting up what amounted to a second State Department, an enlarged National Security Council that duplicated the work of the actual State Department.

  It was not practical ability alone, however, that distinguished the Stimsonian statesman; he possessed other qualities as well, qualities that were less easy to define but no less readily apparent in his makeup, qualities vaguely allied to birth or class. Bundy himself possessed these qualities to an exceptional degree, as befitted one who was descended from the Lowells and the Putnams of Boston and who had been educated at Groton, where he won all the prizes, at Yale, where he was tapped for Skull and Bones, and at Harvard, where he was awarded a Junior Fellowship.2 The holy trinity of Eastern universities—Harvard, Princeton,
and Yale—played an important role in creating and consolidating the Stimsonians’ sense of themselves as an elite; it took no less than two of the three to create the kind of man that Mac Bundy became. The Stimsonians had the confidence of a caste, a confidence that enabled them to overcome the skepticism of many who would otherwise have been hostile to the kind of privilege they represented. So deeply had the Stimsonian mystique penetrated the American consciousness by the middle of the twentieth century that even a Middle Westerner like Theodore Sorensen could write that a “Harvard diploma is considered by most Massachusetts voters to be evidence of devotion to the public.”3 Jack Kennedy, who was more familiar with the situation, corrected Sorensen’s sentence to read: “A Harvard diploma is considered by many Massachusetts voters, although not all I hasten to add, to be evidence of some talent and ability.”4 The ingenuousness with which Sorensen associated Harvard with an ideal of public service was perfectly understandable. Whether as the result of birth or education, or both, the Stimsonian gentlemen who passed through the halls of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in the first half of this century were in the eyes of many Americans eminently respectable characters, devoted to the common good and in love with civic virtue. The nature of their background, the polish of their diction, the very fact that they had been to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, all seemed a guarantee of probity and integrity: one might call it the Elliot Richardson syndrome. The Stimsonian statesman might have been a manipulative man (FDR was among the most manipulative of democratic leaders), but he didn’t seem like a manipulative man; he seemed like a man you could trust.