The Last Patrician Page 9

  Alsop’s power derived from his newspaper column, a column that owed much of its interest to its author’s Stimsonian connections. During the Truman and Eisenhower years Alsop became an influential figure in a powerful preppy coterie known as the Sunday-night supper club, so called because of the potluck dinners its members attended on their maids’ night off.42 Georgetown had only recently been discovered by fashionable people, and it was to one or another charming eighteenth-century town house that Alsop repaired each week with friends like Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, Richard Bissell, George Kennan, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, and their wives.43 (It was at a Sunday-night supper that Averell Harriman famously switched off his hearing aid to avoid having to make conversation with Richard Nixon.)44 Alsop himself became one of Georgetown’s most conspicuously successful hosts; so packed with power and celebrity were the parties he gave with Susan Mary Alsop, with whom for a time he had a marriage of convenience, that they amounted almost to an unofficial policymaking arm of the United States government.45 It is no wonder that the Soviets should have attempted (unsuccessfully) to blackmail Alsop with compromising photographs depicting him in the arms of a KGB agent during a visit to Moscow in the late fifties. In the years since George Kennan had sent his Long Telegram outlining the strategy of containment and Paul Nitze had drafted his blueprint for the national security state—the NSC-68—Alsop had become giddy with the responsibilities of empire. By the time the Soviets tried to snare him he had been among the nation’s most influential Cold Warriors for at least a decade.46

  Alsop spoke for only one of the Stimsonian factions: the diplomatic schemers and intriguers who, filled with the insolence of empire, had in the years since 1945 become accustomed to the exercise of proconsular power around the globe. He spoke, in other words, for the Achesonian wing of the establishment, the wing that descended directly from Stimson himself, an internationalist, a diplomat, a soldier, a man who, though he was skeptical of certain aspects of the New Deal, had played an important role in creating the American empire and the national security state.47 Alsop did not speak for the more aggressively liberal Stimsonians, for Adlai Stevenson, for Chester Bowles, for Mrs. Roosevelt, for those who were less interested in raw imperial power than in principled reform at home and abroad. Bowles and Mrs. Roosevelt, although their outlook was no less global than Alsop’s or Acheson’s, were critical of America’s lack of sympathy for the democratic yearnings of emerging nations around the world. The gulf between Stimsonian bleeding hearts and Stimsonian Cold Warriors should not, however, be exaggerated; there was a great deal of common ground. One faction was enthralled by the Wilsonian vision of an America good enough to make the world safe for democracy, the other by an Achesonian vision of an America strong enough to make the world unsafe for communism. In the area of domestic policy there was an even greater degree of unanimity. If different factions within the establishment disagreed about the pace of reform, none disagreed about the need for it. By 1960 there was a consensus among the Stimsonians in favor of preserving and indeed expanding the welfare and administrative state. Reformers like Mrs. Roosevelt preferred Stevenson to Jack Kennedy in part because they believed Stevenson to be the more faithful proselyte of the welfare state. The Cold Warriors (like Alsop) and the old imperial proconsuls (like Harriman) came to prefer the leadership of Jack Kennedy, and so did the most influential member of the “Groton clique” in intelligence, Richard Bissell.48 To these men Kennedy was indeed a “Stevenson with balls,” a man who would make foreign policy exciting again. In supporting him they had nothing to lose but their places in a Stevenson administration, and as 1960 began many even of Adlai’s supporters doubted that there would ever be a Stevenson administration.

  7

  Unlike his older brother, Bobby was from the first impatient of the Stimsonians. The duller specimens of the breed might have bored Jack Kennedy; the more stylish ones intrigued him. Men like Bob Lovett, Chip Bohlen, and Averell Harriman possessed a combination of charm and cunning, of perfect manners and worldly shrewdness, that appealed to the man who admired—or affected to admire—Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. The Stimsonians of Jack and Bobby’s day were less fastidious, less stuffy, less stiff, than they had been in the past, when Henry Stimson had felt compelled to sever personal relations with those of his friends who divorced their wives. The new generation drank more often, fornicated more freely, divorced more readily, than their fathers had done; work appeared at times to be a mere interlude between Georgetown cocktail parties, a way to pass the time until the next Sunday-night drunk—Joseph Alsop’s name for the Sunday-night supper—where the martinis were passed around like so many glasses of water.1 In the pulpit at Groton, Endicott Peabody had preached incessantly of the dangers of loose morals and marital infidelity, but the moral of his sermons was lost not only on many of the boys who graduated from his school, but even on the members of his own family. In 1947 Peabody’s granddaughter Marietta divorced Stimsonian spymaster Desmond FitzGerald to marry Ronald Tree, a rich Tory politician. Could the Rector have foreseen the fate of his daughter’s niece Edie Sedgwick, he would doubtless have given up altogether.2

  It was not, however, the Stimsonians’ standard of private morality that bothered Bobby Kennedy, it was their standard of professional competence. The Stimsonians piqued themselves on their tough, efficient, pragmatic conduct of public business, but even in the earliest period of his career, Bobby seems to have detected those qualities of seigneurial sentimentality, that love of lordly ease, that fatally undermined the Stimsonians’ efforts at efficient administration. The liberal Stimsonians—Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, and Mrs. Roosevelt—were in Bobby’s view completely useless: they did not understand political power. Stevenson was, of course, the very model of a Stimsonian statesman. His grandfather, the first Adlai Ewing Stevenson, had been Vice President during Grover Cleveland’s second administration; his grandmother, Letitia, had been three times the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution.3 Educated at Choate, Princeton, and Harvard (where he failed out of the law school), the young Stevenson married an heiress before going on to work in FDR’s Washington, where he held a variety of New Deal and national security posts in between intervals of legal work at what is now the Sidley & Austin firm in Chicago.4 Stevenson’s patrician languor appalled Bobby; the man was all but incapable of making decisions. Bored with his law practice, Stevenson was intrigued when his Lake Forest friends suggested that he run for the Senate in 1948. But if the prospect of a Senate race thrilled him, it also, he said, “troubled” and even “frightened” him.5 It was the great theme of his career; he could not make an important decision without agonizing for days or sometimes weeks over its possible consequences. The prospect of running for office in Illinois in the late forties (he eventually became governor of the state) excited and repelled him in precisely the way the prospect of running for President would excite and repel him in the fifties. Although Bobby worked on Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign, he was disgusted by Stevenson’s laziness and seemed out of place among the candidate’s passionate admirers. Looking back on Bobby’s role in the ’56 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger, who had not yet become friends with his hero, could recall only “an alien presence, sullen and rather ominous, saying little, looking grim, and exuding an atmosphere of bleak disapproval.”6 On election day Bobby voted for Eisenhower.

  The Stimsonians were supposed to be master administrators, but they were never able to move fast enough for Bobby. He did not bother to conceal his exasperation with, for example, the preppy clique at the CIA; he is said at one point to have told Richard Bissell, who had dropped the ball on a plan to eliminate Castro, to “get off his ass” and get a plan off the ground.7 Even those Stimsonians who were undeniably energetic often angered Bobby with their ostentatious displays of antiquated honor. No one could accuse Chester Bowles, the Yale man who made a fortune on Madison Avenue before going to Washington to run the Office of Price Administration, of being lazy, but if B
owles displayed a fanatical zeal in working to set the nation’s prices, he was curiously reticent when it came to practical politics.8 Although Bowles thought nothing of incurring the wrath of Senator Taft, a staunch opponent of price controls, during his stint at the OPA, the fastidious Connecticut Yankee could not bring himself to campaign for Jack Kennedy in Wisconsin in 1960, even though he was, at the time, one of the candidate’s principal foreign policy advisers.9 His friendship with Hubert Humphrey, Bowles said, meant too much to him.10 (Bowles was equally reluctant to campaign against Stevenson, an old friend from his Choate days.) Bobby was not impressed.

  Establishment Theory

  WHY DID JACK and Bobby want the support of the Stimsonians? Jack could have gotten the nomination in 1960 without it. The Stimsonians had, as a rule, very little power at the polls or in the primary contests. Particular Stimsonian candidates might, with their eloquence and their grace, possess exceptional vote-getting ability, but as often as not their aristocratic demeanor worked against them on Election Day, made voters uneasy, made them sympathetic to the plainer candidate, the Everyman who reminded them of themselves. Whatever the strength of such individual candidates as Roosevelt and Rockefeller, the Stimsonians as a group had neither a political base nor even a political party to which to look for consistent support (some Stimsonians were Republicans, others were Democrats). The great majority of those statesmen we might classify as “Stimsonian” were not politicians at all; they were administrators, mandarins who relied for their immense authority on the patronage of those who, like the Kennedys, like the Roosevelts, like the Rockefellers, actually won elections by doing the dirty work of politics—courting obscure state party officials and shabby local politicians, speaking at their banquets, flattering their vanity, making them promises of patronage. In New York in 1960 prominent Stimsonians opposed Jack’s candidacy; a number of important (non-Tammany) bosses, however, supported him (Peter Crotty, Charles Buckley, Eugene Keogh).11 In the end it was the bosses who delivered the delegates.12 The Kennedys didn’t need the political support of the Stimsonians in 1960, but Jack Kennedy, perhaps because he was less proficient than Bobby in those bureaucratic arts at which the Stimsonians were supposed to excel, desperately wanted their approval. Kennedy, David Halberstam observed, believed in, was fascinated by, “the Establishment mystique.”13 His brother Bobby could not have cared less.

  Halberstam was right: an establishment mystique did exist in America in 1960. But what of the establishment itself? Did it exist? And if it did, what part did the Stimsonians play in it? Certainly they constituted an established authority in the America of 1960. But they were hardly the establishment, and it would be misleading to describe the complex of institutions and individuals they represented as constituting something so solid and so supreme as to justify the use of the definite article. The very term “the establishment,” and a half-dozen similar ones (the “Eastern” or “Northeastern” establishment, the “WASP ascendancy,” the “Protestant establishment”), suggest that there existed in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century a single monolithic entity that somehow controlled American life, or was closely connected to the institutions that did—the “military-industrial complex,” the “power elite,” the “real” power structure that the “paper” one masked.14 Such a supposition is misleading, for a nation as large as the United States will always contain not one, but a number of elites, a number of “establishments,” and these elites will be not static and unchanging, but constantly evolving, growing, and, as it were, interbreeding in a complicated process of cross-fertilization and parasitical growth. There are today in the United States, as there were at mid-century, regional elites, business elites, the banking community, the capital markets, the military establishment, the great universities, the political parties, Hollywood, the legal profession, the medical profession, and a dozen others, and so interconnected are these various groups, and so fluid and mobile is the society in which they have their existence, that it would be impossible to assign them places in a neatly drawn schematic map of power in America. It is not wrong to speak of the existence of a “Stimsonian establishment,” a nexus of men and institutions that during a large part of this century exercised a peculiarly extensive influence in American life, but it must always be borne in mind that this establishment was not the only one in the United States, that it was neither all-powerful nor all-controlling, and that in no sense was its jurisdiction in the various spheres in which it operated exclusive.

  If absolute precision were required in the use of descriptive terms, the Stimsonians might with considerable justice be called a “court party,” just as individual Stimsonians might with accuracy be described as aristocratic courtiers or mandarins, ones who were recruited from a variety of regional, hereditary, and scholastic elites. (The nation’s founders used the term “court party” to describe factions that exercised an often hidden and usually sinister influence on the administration of government.) But the term “establishment” is not utterly out of place when applied to the Stimsonians, and can indeed more fittingly be applied to them than to the so-called Protestant ascendancy, the monolithic caste that supposedly dominated the life of the United States before World War II. The term “Protestant establishment” was never particularly helpful. Its weakness lay in its breadth: it encompassed too many people, too many regional elites, too many Protestant sects (Quaker, Puritan [or Congregationalist], Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, etc.) to be analytically useful. It failed to take into account the fissures that divided what was all too often considered—in an age when the assumptions of Marx were all but inescapable—a single united class. But this class unity was largely specious; a prominent Middle Western family whose industrial fortune dated from the decades after the Civil War would have had, after all, next to nothing in common with a Brahmin family in Boston, one whose scions, supported by an older and smaller fortune, spent their lives toiling in the service of scholarship or one of the learned professions. Old money looked down upon new money; old cities looked down upon new cities; readers of old books looked down upon those who, they supposed, did not read books at all.* However subtle one’s theory of an American Protestant “establishment”—of an American “upper class,” a “WASP ascendancy,” an “old school tie,” a mythology of “old money,” a “leisure class”—the reality was always more complicated.

  At the same time, the term “Protestant establishment” exaggerated the religious tendencies of the people it purported to describe, as if religion were their most remarkable characteristic (and not simply one they happened to share with others), as if the Protestants themselves retained, in the twentieth century, the evangelical fervor or ascetic piety that had characterized their ancestors in the past. Nor can one escape the semantic difficulties of the term. In order to constitute an “establishment,” as that word is defined by the Oxford philologists, the entity in question must either be maintained at the expense of the sovereign or in some way enjoy the patronage of the state (the military establishment, an established church).15 Although this was not true of the Protestant establishment, it was eminently true of the Stimsonians. They were at home in the corridors of the federal government; they insinuated themselves into its affairs and made themselves indispensable to its rulers by developing expertise in programs and policies they themselves helped craft. Once in power, they tended to perpetuate themselves, to “establish” themselves, through a skillful practice of the arts of nepotism and favoritism (the “old boy network”).

  The “Stimsonian establishment,” then, is not simply another name for the old Protestant elites, for those classes that Joseph Alsop labeled the “Who was shes?” (since the leading families in these classes were related to one another by marriage, it was particularly important to know a matron’s maiden name. Hence the critical question “Now, let me see, who was she?”).16 But the Stimsonian establishment was to some extent descended from these declining elites; its members were
largely recruited out of their ranks. The Stimsonians belonged to the same clubs (Century, Union, Links, Knickerbocker, Racquet, Somerset, the Brook, etc.) and took pride in the same hereditary organizations (Society of the Cincinnati, Mayflower Descendants, Daughters of the American Revolution) as their brothers and friends who made peace with the marketplace and devoted themselves more exclusively to the law, business, finance, or (more rarely as the century wore on) the Church (almost always the Episcopal one, although it was fashionable to have at least one member of the family enamored of the doctrines of Anglo-Catholicism or even of Rome itself). During the thirties tensions emerged between those patricians who worshipped capital and those who worshipped the state: while scions of some of the old-old and newly old families hated Roosevelt, others went to work for him. And yet even at the height of the New Deal FDR’s patrician admirers were not as estranged from their brothers in finance and industry as might be supposed, and a surprising number of Stimsonians were able to lead double lives. In private life men like Harriman and Stimson were capitalists or the servants of capital; in public life they offered their services to a state increasingly eager to regulate and control capital. (Harriman, for example, served as an administrator of FDR’s National Recovery Administration.17) The “Who was she?” classes were by no means united in their hatred of FDR, and indeed it was a rare patrician who would not have been happy to see his son benefit from the great man’s patronage.