Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [131]
7. MCGEORGE BUNDY (1919–1996), an Eisenhower Republican, was the son of a Boston Brahmin mother and a diplomat from Grand Rapids, Michigan, known as "the brightest boy at Yale." Fluent in French, he collaborated at age twenty-six on the memoirs of his father's friend Henry Stimson, FDR's wartime secretary of war, and became the youngest dean of the faculty ever appointed by Harvard. JFK appointed him as national security adviser, which until that time had been something of a clerk's position. After the Bay of Pigs, with his shrewd and gentlemanly instinct for power, Bundy convinced Kennedy that it should be much enhanced, so that the President would have a full-time in-house counselor to protect him against future bad cabinet advice—a redefinition of the job that has prevailed ever since. He also felt such an affinity with the President that he changed his registration to Democratic.
8. J. EDGAR HOOVER (1895–1972) was the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he helped to create, and its predecessor agency, from 1924 until his death. Hoover's admirers cited his success in pursuing criminals and Communists. His detractors noted Hoover's metastasizing hatreds (for example, Martin Luther King and the few journalists and politicians who dared to criticize him), eccentricities (after an automobile mishap while making a left turn, he ordered his driver to abjure all future left turns), abuse of civil liberties, and Napoleonic tendencies. All agreed that Hoover spent his FBI years amassing unprecedented and largely unaccountable power, with his files of potentially damaging information on those who might stop him. In 1960, the newly elected JFK felt that, especially with his narrow margin, he had little choice but to immediately reappoint Hoover. But unlike his predecessors, Kennedy required the old man to deal with the President through the attorney general—in this case, Robert Kennedy, whom Hoover predictably detested—and hoped that resounding reelection to a second term would allow him to fire the FBI director and replace him with someone more cognizant of civil liberties. By contrast, President Lyndon Johnson made Hoover virtually director-for-life.
9. ROBERT LOVETT (1895–1986) was a Wall Street investment banker and Truman's final secretary of defense. JFK was eager to show continuity with the previous Democratic government by appointing a well-respected figure, but Lovett declined any appointment for reasons of health.
10. When he went to Kennedy's Georgetown house to learn about his future, Stevenson was nonplussed when the President-elect offered him not secretary of state but ambassador to the UN. After their meeting, on his doorstep in the cold, Kennedy told reporters that he had asked Stevenson to go to the UN and the Illinoisan declared that he would have to think about it. Stevenson's diffidence was understandable, but at a time when others were happily accepting presidential appointments, Kennedy was annoyed to be so publicly rebuffed. Stevenson's friends persuaded him that if he turned down the UN, Americans would forget about him. Thus Stevenson grudgingly accepted the job.
11. In April 1961, JFK approved a revised version of an existing secret plan left by Eisenhower to launch CIA-backed Cuban exiles in an invasion of Cuba to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. When the landing, on Cuba's Bay of Pigs, failed, causing the President a mammoth embarrassment less than three months into his term, Kennedy publicly took responsibility.
12. C. DOUGLAS DILLON (1909–2003) was a Republican investment banking heir who served as Eisenhower's ambassador to France and undersecretary of state before JFK appointed him as his treasury secretary.
13. ROBERT SARGENT SHRIVER (1915–2011) was working for Joseph Kennedy at the family-owned Merchandise Mart in Chicago when he met his boss's daughter Eunice and married her in 1953. During the interregnum, he served as the President-elect's highly effective chief talent scout. Kennedy made him the first head