Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [138]
31
Inauguration
32
Meeting with Khrushchev
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANDING
He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain
that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in
our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by
the awful grace of God.
—Aeschylus
John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected to the White House, understood how incredibly close the race had been. He also recognized the meaning of his slender margin, a victory that was far from a mandate. Both he and his rival had sought to show the strength and the will with which they would confront the Soviets. Now that he’d triumphed, little, really, had changed. Except that now the task was at hand.
A critical first endeavor involved the reassurance of two important government officials: both J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles—the FBI and CIA directors, respectively—had to be told their jobs were safe. To have done otherwise would have unsettled the country. Therefore, urgent phone calls were placed to each man in the earliest hours of the interregnum. For JFK, retaining Hoover offered the premium of putting a lid on, among other prospects, the troublesome “Inga Binga” material in his files.
President-elect Kennedy put a pair of Republicans in top cabinet posts, naming Douglas Dillon, who’d been Eisenhower’s undersecretary of state, to run the Treasury Department and placing the Ford Motor Company president, Robert McNamara, at Defense. The clubby Dillon, with his old-money connections, appealed to Kennedy the man. McNamara, showing no lack of toughness, made a point, when they discussed the job, of asking Jack whether he’d written Profiles in Courage himself. An air corps lieutenant colonel by the end of World War II, McNamara had a Harvard MBA and at Ford had been one of the famous “Whiz Kids,” a group of ten returning veterans who came in and revitalized the company.
Looking to the liberal faction, which he needed both to acknowledge and include, the president tapped Adlai Stevenson to be his United Nations ambassador, Walter Heller as chief economic advisor, and Arthur Schlesinger as all-around Renaissance man.
Now, as always, concessions needed to be made to the senior Kennedy. It was, after all, the tribute Joe’s money and support deserved. Since his sons’ futures were of the utmost importance to him, posts for both younger Kennedy brothers were part of the bargain: Bobby would be attorney general, Ted would get Jack’s senate seat once he turned the required age of thirty.
Jack laughed with Ben Bradlee at the absurdity of the youngest president ever elected picking his brother, eight years younger than he, as attorney general. When Bradlee asked him how he planned to deliver the news to the press, his probable course of action had a familiar ring. Kennedy said, “I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning around two a.m., look up and down the street, and if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’ “ There was no getting around the appointment for what it was: sheer, unadulterated nepotism.
“I think he hadn’t really thought about how to run the government until he got elected,” Ken O’Donnell said. “He was a very single-minded person. Politically, each battle he fought one at a time. There were very few things that were clear when he was elected.”
Kennedy’s “spokes of the wheel” approach had been championed by the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, but such an organizational principle, in fact, followed his natural inclination. Unlike the former army officer Eisenhower, who appointed a strong chief of staff to run his agenda and team, Kennedy refused to have anyone between him and his advisors. Shrewdly, he set up two doors to the Oval Office, one manned by O’Donnell, the other by his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. This system worked well: cabinet members had to fight their way past O’Donnell, while pals could whiz past Lincoln.
There was