Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [139]
Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s civil rights advisor, described insightfully how he and the others fit in. “The president-elect was a complex political leader in a complex situation. He was not anyone’s man—not Stevenson’s or Bowles’s, and not Mayor Daley’s or John Bailey’s, not the Civil Rights Section’s, and not the Southern senators’; not his father’s and not Bobby’s. He had one foot in the Cold War and one foot in a new world he saw coming; one hand in the old politics he’d begun to master, one in the new politics that his campaign had invoked.”
Kennedy picked Clark Clifford, who’d been President Truman’s counselor, to be his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower staff. An astute observer of men and power, Clifford recognized early on John Kennedy’s ability to detach himself from himself. You’d see him sitting at meetings, Clifford once told me, and you could almost imagine JFK’s spirit assuming a form of its own and rising up, the better to look down on the group and assess its various members’ motives and agendas. It was the same uncanny detachment Chuck Spalding had seen in Jack on his wedding day.
Not all the people in the U.S. government, even at the top, owe their positions to the president. This remains one of the challenges of being chief executive in the American system. The reality of that limited control over people dawns eventually, if not right away. There’s also the need to lay down clear presidential orders.
Take the time JFK and his aides gathered around a swimming pool in Palm Beach, with dark-suited agents wearing sunglasses crouched protectively around them. JFK told O’Donnell, the White House official he’d personally posted to oversee the Secret Service, to have the agents back off. He wanted them to change to sports shirts and lose the fighting stance. “Nobody’s going to shoot me, so tell them to sit down and relax a bit.”
More than one Kennedy friend commented how happy he seemed in those days, making decisions while enjoying the Florida weather and waiting for Inauguration Day. Feeling buoyed up as he did—so thrilled and excited about his new circumstances, and proud to have pulled off what he had—he determined to stay fit as president. Said Charlie Bartlett: “I remember he told me, ‘From now on I’m really going to take care of myself.’ “ Bartlett also heard him make a different sort of commitment to the future. It had to do with his marriage. “ ‘I’m going to keep the White House white.’ He said it right out there on that terrace.”
Kennedy and Ted Sorensen had been devoting a good deal of that Palm Beach time to writing Jack’s inaugural address. Composed in the tropical air, it was delivered on January 20, 1961, when the Washington temperature hovered in the low twenties and eight inches of snow had fallen that morning.
Given the ongoing challenge of the United States–USSR relationship and its immense significance in the election, that theme would command the heart of the speech. Its focus was on strength—not as a prelude to war, but as an instrument for peace. “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
The Churchillian notion of peace through strength had echoed throughout Jack’s adult life. “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” America would arm not to