A Thousand Days Read online

  When Stevenson broached this idea in the meeting, Rayburn said vigorously and profanely that it violated all tradition and logic. Butler backed Rayburn, and Johnson was plainly cool. But Finnegan spoke resourcefully for the open convention and finally prevailed. Later Stevenson told me that he regarded it as a gamble, since it might put a weak candidate on the ticket (he named a couple of Democratic politicians, neither of whom in the end was a serious contender), but that, in the circumstances, it was a risk he was willing to run.

  Whatever else it did, the move brought the convention to life. The vice-presidential candidates spent the next twelve hours in frantic efforts to organize headquarters, track down delegates and plead for support. Estes Kefauver led on the first ballot, Kennedy was second. Then Lyndon Johnson announced that his state was switching to Kennedy (‘‘Texas proudly casts its vote for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle”), and Kennedy went ahead. There were a few moments of pandemonium until Albert Gore arose to say that Tennessee was shifting to Kefauver. This set off the stampede, and Kefauver soon was over the top. A few moments later Kennedy, who had been taking a bath in his headquarters in the Stockyard Inn, made a poised good-loser speech asking that Kefauver be named by acclamation.

  The open-convention device left a wake of obscure resentments. Both Kennedy and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had expected Stevenson’s backing (though neither had solid ground for such hopes), and both now felt let down. Stevenson, in Kennedy’s case, thought that, in asking him to make the nominating speech, he had already given a thirty-nine-year-old first-term Senator an unexampled opportunity to impress the convention and the nation and that Kennedy should appreciate this. Kennedy instead began to look on Stevenson as indecisive and elusive. Up to this time, the two men, without knowing each other well and divided by seventeen years, had had the friendliest feelings for each other. Now their relationship began to take on a slight tinge of mutual exasperation. In later years, however, Kennedy rejoiced that he had lost in Chicago. Had he won the nomination for Vice-President in 1956, he might never have won the nomination for President in 1960.

  2. KENNEDY AND THE LIBERALS

  Eisenhower’s personal popularity, replenished by his success in ending the Korean War, proved invincible in the presidential contest; but the Democrats came out with control of both the Senate and House. This Democratic success, however, hastened the division of the party into what James MacGregor Burns has called its presidential and congressional wings. In the years after 1952 Stevenson had sponsored a small brain trust organized by Thomas K. Finletter, who had been Secretary of the Air Force under Truman and was now a leader of the reform Democrats of New York City, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, my Harvard colleague and Cambridge neighbor. The Finletter group now became the basis for a new body, the Democratic Advisory Council, set up after the election by Paul Butler. The DAC, as an agency of the presidential party, was regarded with mistrust by the congressional leaders. Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn both declined to join. Humphrey became a member, however, and so eventually did Kennedy, though Kennedy took no very active part. The DAC pursued an aggressive line both in attacking the Eisenhower administration and in developing new Democratic policies. The congressional party was inclined to work with Eisenhower and accept the national mood of moderation. In the meantime, battle lines began to form for 1960.

  Early in 1957 Lyndon Johnson wrote me that he understood I was critical of the congressional leadership and suggested that I call on him when next in Washington. Accordingly I dropped by the majority leader’s office on a Saturday noon late in March. Johnson was affable and expansive. He began by saying that he was a sick man (his heart attack had taken place in 1955) with no political future of his own. His main desire, he said, was to live. He had no interest at all in the presidential nomination. He did not even mean to run again for the Senate. He planned only to serve out his present term. Being entirely disinterested, he wanted only to do the best he could for his party and his nation in the three, or two, or one year remaining to him.

  He then poured out his stream-of-consciousness on the problems of leadership in the Senate. He described the difficulties of keeping the conservative southerners, whom he called the Confederates, and the liberal northerners in the same harness; he analyzed a number of seemingly insoluble parliamentary situations which he had mastered through unlimited perseverance and craft; and he gave a virtuoso’s account of the role which timing, persuasion and parliamentary tactics played in getting bills through. Saying, “I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with,” he ran down the list of forty-eight Democratic Senators, with a brilliant thumbnail sketch of each—strength and weakness, openness to persuasion, capacity for teamwork, prejudices, vices. In some cases he amplified the sketch by devastating dashes of mimicry. (My notes report him “highly favorable about Kennedy, but no special excitement.”)

  He went on to express his annoyance over the unwillingness of the organized liberals to accept him as one of their own. “Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” he said. “They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s?” Thereupon he pulled out of a desk drawer a comparison of his voting record with those of five liberal Republicans on fifteen issues. On each, he had voted on the liberal side and Case on the conservative. “And yet they look on me as some kind of southern bigot.” He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. “But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.”

  He talked for an hour and a half without interruption. I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership; but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind. When he finally paused, I found I had little to say. It was my first exposure to the Johnson treatment, and I found him a good deal more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected. After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion. Later I gathered that this was part of a broader Johnson campaign to explain himself to the liberal intellectuals. In a few weeks, when Kenneth Galbraith visited him on his Texas ranch, Johnson told him, “I had a good meeting with Schlesinger. I found him quite easy to get along with. The only trouble was that he talked too much.”

  As for Kennedy, he too was having his problems with the liberal intellectuals. The Chicago convention had made him a national figure; and it was increasingly clear that the vice-presidential nomination would not satisfy him the next time around. In 1958 he came up for his second term in the Senate. His hope was to return to Washington by the largest possible vote in order to lay the basis for a presidential try two years later. His wife later remembered it as “the hardest campaign ever . . . just running, running.” He won by 875,000 votes, the greatest margin up to that point in Massachusetts history.* Now his presidential campaign was starting in earnest.

  Many liberal Democrats regarded him with suspicion. In part this went back to the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early fifties. Kennedy at first had not taken the Wisconsin Senator very seriously. “I think that the stories of communism within the executive branch of the government have more or less died out,” he had said optimistically on Meet the Press in December 1951, “and I think that determined efforts have been made to rid the executive branch of the government of the communists, and I think it’s been done on the whole.” But by 1953 it was impossible to dismiss McCarthy any longer. When I mentioned him from time to time those days to Kennedy, he referred to the McCarthy Committee with articulate dislike but showed no interest in saying so publicly. He put this to me on political grounds—“Hell, half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero”—and the political grounds were, I suppose, compelling. No one in the Senate in 1953, except for Herbert Lehman and, on particular occasions, Estes Kefau
ver and J. W. Fulbright, showed much courage about McCarthy. Even Senators like Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey kept out of McCarthy’s way; and the fate of Millard Tydings and William Benton, who had taken him on and lost their seats, presumably in consequence, remained instructive.

  One might have hoped that Kennedy, another Irish Catholic Senator and a genuine war hero, would have seen himself in a particularly strong position to challenge McCarthyism. But there were perhaps deeper reasons for his lack of involvement. His family’s relations with McCarthy were certainly an important factor. His father liked McCarthy and invited him once or twice to Hyannis Port. The Wisconsin Senator could be engaging in the Victor McClaglen manner, and the Ambassador even perhaps saw the campaign against this fighting Irishman as one more outlet for the anti-Catholic sentiment which had so long oppressed the Irish-American community. Moreover, Robert Kennedy worked for a time on the staff of the McCarthy Committee, though he soon found himself in disagreement with the Committee’s procedures and resigned, returning later as counsel for the Democratic minority.

  As for John Kennedy himself, McCarthyism simply did not strike him as one of ‘his’ issues. This diffidence was no doubt related to his exasperation with the ideological liberals of the day and what he regarded as their emotional approach to public questions. A writer in The Saturday Evening Post in 1953 quoted him as saying, “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.” Liberalism for him still existed mainly in terms of social and economic programs. As he later said to James MacGregor Burns, “Some people have their liberalism ‘made’ by the time they reach their late twenties. I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.”

  Still, Kennedy’s actual position was no better and no worse than that of most Democrats, including those more clearly in the liberal stream of things. It was always a puzzle why the liberals took so long to forgive him when they forgave Hubert Humphrey immediately for his sponsorship of a bill to outlaw the Communist Party—an act of appeasement in excess of anything undertaken by Kennedy. Certainly, in spite of the whispering campaign against him in 1960, Kennedy never gave the slightest support to McCarthyism. He had no sustained social relations with McCarthy (his wife never even met him), did not question the motives of people who advocated unpopular policies* and voted consistently as Senator against McCarthy on matters close to McCarthy’s heart, such as the confirmation of Charles E. Bohlen as ambassador to Russia and of James B. Conant to West Germany. He prepared a speech in August 1954 explaining that he would vote for McCarthy’s censure, though he planned to rest his case on rather technical grounds; when the vote finally took place in December, he was gravely sick in the hospital, awaiting a critical operation on his back. If he did not join Americans for Democratic Action, he always served as sponsor for ADA’s annual Roosevelt Day dinners in Boston. And, if he kept out of the public debate, he did not hesitate to intervene privately. About this time John Fox of the Boston Post, who had backed Kennedy for the Senate in 1952, scheduled a series of articles exposing the reds at Harvard. My name was high on Fox’s list. Hearing about the series, Kennedy protested on my behalf. “Fox didn’t like it much,” he told me later. “He probably suspects me of being a Communist now.”

  Nonetheless, Kennedy’s silence on McCarthy contrasted with Stevenson’s eloquent defense of civil freedom; and, if Humphrey had been silent too, he had not made the mistake of writing a book called Profiles in Courage. Mrs. Roosevelt was the conscience of the liberal community, and her reproach carried force: “I feel that I would hesitate to place the difficult decisions that the next President will have to make with someone who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it.” (I once suggested to Kennedy that he had paid a heavy price for giving his book that title. He replied drily, “Yes, but I didn’t have a chapter in it on myself.”)

  Old New Dealers, moreover, cherished an ancient and ardent suspicion of Kennedy’s father. And his candidacy touched uglier strains in the liberal syndrome, especially the susceptibility to anti-Catholicism. Most liberals, in addition, already had their hero in Stevenson and continued to hope that he might change his mind about not running in 1960. If Stevenson remained unavailable, then Humphrey, by temperament, record and rhetoric, better fitted liberal specifications than Kennedy. The Minnesota Senator was a man of exuberance, charm, courage and political skill, who had given unstintingly of himself to liberal causes, and his inexhaustible flow of language did not conceal his sharp intelligence and discriminating judgment. Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditioned reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry. He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his sleeve.

  3. KENNEDY AND CAMBRIDGE

  To those who knew Kennedy in Massachusetts the liberal mistrust seemed unfair and unwarranted. My main interest in these years, like that of Kenneth Galbraith, was in having a liberal nominee in 1960, whether Kennedy, Humphrey or, if he became a candidate, Stevenson. Kennedy and Humphrey seemed likely to be the active contenders; and we feared that, if the rivalry between them turned into enmity, it might divide the liberals and permit a conservative to seize the prize. When I wrote Kennedy to this effect in the spring of 1959, he replied, “I agree with you, of course, on the principle of avoiding any fratricidal blood-letting between Hubert and myself.” Galbraith and I talked the problem over in the winter of 1959–60 and hoped that we might somehow serve as moderating influences in what threatened to become a bitter battle within the liberal family. But, though Humphrey was an old friend and a man we greatly admired, Kennedy, of course, was our Harvard and Massachusetts Senator. More important, we found ourselves, as we saw more of him, bound to him by increasingly strong ties of affection and respect.

  Kennedy himself was now prepared to go some distance to propitiate the liberals. After 1956 he made a special effort with issues in the civil liberties field, such as getting rid of the loyalty oath in the National Defense Education Act, and he counted on the strong liberalism of his senatorial record to overcome doubts. He was unwilling, however, to engage in retrospective denunciations of McCarthy; it seemed to him undignified. This reluctance only confirmed his critics in their view that he lacked moral sensitivity.

  Galbraith and I resolved to do what we could to combat the continuing mistrust. We declared our confidence in Kennedy’s basic liberalism. We also tried to help recruit people for his growing brain trust, though we had little or nothing to do with its actual operations. One day in 1959 Kennedy phoned that he was feeling increasingly guilty about constantly imposing on Galbraith and Seymour Harris, the other politically concerned Harvard economist, for economic counsel and wondered whether there was not an economist in Massachusetts who could devote steady time to helping him. I consulted with Galbraith and Harris. Our first choice, Carl Kaysen of Harvard, was about to leave for a year in Greece. We then thought of Kermit Gordon, an able economist at Williams. Gordon had had government experience—I had known him first fifteen years before in the OSS—and I was confident that he and Kennedy would be temperamentally congenial. But when I called Gordon he was distinctly cool. Finally he said that I could mention his name to Kennedy so long as I made it absolutely clear that he was not for Kennedy in 1960 but for Stevenson. When I reported this to Kennedy, he sighed and said he would try Gordon anyway; but the negotiations came to nothing at that time.

  There was also concern about the lack of relationship between Kennedy and the reform movement in New York. Here Mrs.Roosevelt, Governor Lehman, Thomas Finletter and the other reformers yearned after Stevenson, while Carmine De Sapio and the Tammany crowd inclined toward Johnson, and only Charles Buckley and Peter Crotty, old-line bosses in the Bronx and Buffalo, backed Kennedy. It seemed useful not only to broaden Kennedy’s New York base but to dispel the suspicions of him entertained by the l
iberal group in New York City, so important both as a source of funds and as a shaper of opinion. Finletter, who was then using his mordant executive capacities in a brave effort to hold together the divergent and adolescent energies of New York reform, was obviously a key figure.

  Kennedy and Finletter had a talk in the early spring, but it was followed by trivial misunderstandings. Then in May 1959, Kennedy wrote that he was planning to attend the Harvard Commencement in June, when the Finletters, I knew, would be on their way to Bar Harbor. Accordingly I arranged a dinner on Commencement evening in one of those dark-paneled rooms upstairs at Locke-Ober’s to permit Kennedy and Finletter to have a second talk. The Galbraiths were along, and the McGeorge Bundys and one or two others. Finletter and Kennedy were both rational and sardonic men, and they got along well. Finletter thereafter succeeded to some degree in tempering the anti-Kennedy reflexes of the New York reformers.

  What stands out from the evening, however, was a discussion of the confirmation of Lewis Strauss, whose name President Eisenhower had recently submitted to the Senate as Secretary of Commerce. It was politically essential for Kennedy, as a liberal Democratic presidential aspirant, to vote against Strauss. But, though he had no use for him, he had a belief, with which I sympathized, that any President was entitled to considerable discretion in naming his cabinet. In addition, though this mattered less, his father, an old friend of Strauss’s, strongly advocated confirmation. My impression was that Kennedy was looking for a respectable reason to oppose Strauss. At this point, Mac Bundy, whose ancestral Republicanism had survived Dewey and Eisenhower, suddenly spoke up for rejecting the nomination. The backing of Harvard’s Dean of the Faculty may have somewhat reassured Kennedy, who voted against Strauss a few days later. Probably also Kennedy then began to realize that Mac Bundy, in spite of the certified propriety of his background, had an audacious mind and was quite capable of contempt for orthodoxy.