The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [310]
Bobby was not about to be imprisoned in the dignity of office or to use his exalted new position to distance himself from friends he had known all his life. On the day after the inauguration, Bobby insisted on a football game, even though his old Harvard teammates had only their good clothes. After the football game came tobogganing. The men vied for the high honor of sharing a sled with Kim Novak, the movie star, who wrapped her long legs around her momentary companion. Ethel stood on the sidelines, not amused that her husband was competing for this honor. “I don’t understand, Ethel,” Bobby said, as he stood holding his daughter Kathleen’s hand. “Why can’t a father go sledding with his daughter?”
As Kennedy was staffing his New Frontier, he talked to an old family friend, Kay Halle. She was one of the few women who spoke to the president-elect on terms approaching equality. Halle suggested that he should choose more women. He abruptly changed the subject, for as Halle observed, he considered women largely “decorative butterflies and lovely to look at.” Kennedy was simply not comfortable being in a room with women who sought to be equal partners in the political process. Women tended to clutter up meetings, forcing a tedious decorum on the manly, often profane lingo of political endeavors. The best way to deal with the problem was simply not to have women present at all.
The Kennedy staffers were mainly in their thirties and early forties. They were for the most part veterans of World War II who, like their leader, had served in combat. They had the stamina to work twelve-hour days, six days a week. Like soldiers in the front line, they worked all night when they had to, and through the next day. They shared a deeply rooted patriotism and a can-do attitude about endeavors large and small. Kennedy was fond of quoting the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother”). Kennedy paid each member of his band of brothers the same salary, $21,000, and would gladly have given them all the same title, special assistant. He wanted no staff meetings, no thicket of bureaucracy. He wanted his men to come to him.
Shortly after the election, Kennedy’s staff had sat with the president-elect trying to figure out how they could make sure that only important information got to the Oval Office. Kennedy was obsessed with the fear that he would be locked off from knowledge. “Listen, you sons of bitches, I want you to remember one thing,” he exclaimed as his neighbor and friend, Larry Newman, sat listening. “You know there’s a guy right behind each of you who’s working for me. And there’s a guy behind him who’s working for me. So there’s not a goddamn thing any one of you guys can do to keep things away from me. So if you try to pull any bullshit, the next thing you know you’ll be out.”
Kennedy set up a system so that there would be no crucial information that he did not hear. He was interested in the most arcane nuances of policy, in the details of initiatives, and in the most trivial gossip. Although he appeared to take no pleasure in reading the FBI reports on his aides, he told Feldman, “I never knew my staff led such interesting lives.”
Bundy’s deputy, Walt Rostow, observed that Kennedy “was capable because of his great energy and human capacity to maintain more reliable bilateral human relations than any man I have ever known.” He rarely praised. These were his men, and it was praise enough that they served him. They may have been his band of brothers on the field of political combat, but he would no more have socialized with them than Henry V would have sat down to dinner with his soldiers.
For the first time since the New Deal, sizable numbers of people wanted to come to Washington to work in this new administration. The presidentelect deputized Shriver to seek out the best whether or not they appeared ready to come to Washington. The word went out that the Kennedy administration sought not only men who were