The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [309]
As his chief foreign policy adviser in the White House, Kennedy brought in McGeorge Bundy as special assistant for national security affairs. The Harvard dean had arrived by bicycle for his first meeting with the president-elect at Arthur Schlesinger’s Cambridge house, but there was nothing casual about either Bundy’s manner or his mind. Bundy had a crucial mandate. Kennedy believed that he could not make innovative foreign policy employing the rigid, militarylike structure that Eisenhower had created with the National Security Council. The president thought the only thing to do was to pull the structure largely down, and Bundy was his engine for doing so.
Kennedy could not run his own foreign policy if he had a powerful secretary of State such as Adlai Stevenson, who lobbied for the position and was shuttled to the United Nations ambassadorship. Instead, Kennedy chose Dean Rusk, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former assistant secretary of State, who willingly wore the shackles of subordination.
There was one man whom all the pundits thought would have inordinate power in the White House, and that was the president’s own father. “I want to help, but I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Joe confessed to Steve Smith, his son-in-law. “Can you tell me: do they want me or don’t they want me?”
Steve told Bobby what his father had said, and Bobby thanked his brother-in-law and said nothing. A few days later, seventy-two-year-old Joe sailed for Europe, and that entire year visited the White House only once.
Kennedy’s closest White House aides had a fierce, loving loyalty to the president they served and comradely joy in what they were doing. “We had this confidence about ourselves that seems lost from the world of power now,” reflected Feldman. “We thought we could do anything. We wrote over a hundred messages to Congress in our first hundred days. Those days were filled with so much excitement and such a feeling of euphoria because we achieved our goal and now we were doing what we looked forward to and you have a superhuman ability when you feel that way.” The working atmosphere was one of nonchalance and wit. Sorensen occasionally sent serious memos to Feldman in rhymed couplets, and Feldman, not to be bested, replied in kind.
The humor often had a serrated edge, however, that left its mark. When Kennedy decided to find a place in the White House for his young Boston mistress who had graduated from Radcliffe, he placed her in the office of her former dean. “Kennedy put the knife into Bundy by putting her on the staff,” recalled Marcus Raskin, who was only twenty-six years old when he entered the White House to serve as the resident liberal gadfly on Bundy’s staff. “And since I was the junior-most person on the staff, she was put to work for me, and Bundy said to me, ‘Well, I have a present for you.’ I knew something was going on because the president called my office a couple times not to speak to me but to speak to her. So even I figured it out at that point. And eventually she personally told me about it.”
The Kennedy humor featured put-downs in which the victim proved his mettle by quickly attacking with an even ruder counterblow. In such matters Kennedy and his friends had decorous limits that Bobby and his friends did not observe. What daring, taunting irreverence was it that allowed Claude Hooton to cable the new attorney general to remind him of the time during the campaign when he and Teddy had salted Bobby’s luggage with ladies’ underwear (I AM SURE THAT THE ATTORNEY GENERAL HAS NO RETROACTIVE POWERS CONCERNING PERFUMED UNDERGARMENTS INSERTED IN SOMEONE ELSES BAGGAGE). And what of Bobby, who did not fancy himself too powerful or too important to reply in kind: “There is some talk that I might turn the FBI loose on you and Teddy and that would be a full time task for all of their agents.