The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [311]
The man who probably exemplified the ideals of these Kennedy men better than anyone was Robert McNamara, the new president of Ford Motor Company. McNamara and his “whiz kids” had transformed the automobile industry with their acumen. The incoming administration had the audacious idea that McNamara could do the same with the Defense Department, though he professed ignorance about defense. “Well, you better give me a day to familiarize myself with this,” McNamara said. He began shortly after dawn in a room at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel reading memos, books, and briefing materials and talking to knowledgeable sources. He worked until late that night and began again the next morning. Within two days he could give the reasonable impression of a man deeply versed in the theory and practice of defense policies. By these efforts, McNamara had become a legend even before Kennedy took power.
McNamara had one other quality that Kennedy found essential in his associates. He spoke the fast-paced, urgent shorthand that was the natural language of Kennedy and his siblings. It was a cinematic way of talking, following the basic rule in scriptwriting: always enter the scene as late as you can. Everyone knew the back story, and if you didn’t, if you asked for it to be repeated, then get out, get away, be quiet. “People, even if they were brilliant and even if they had things he was very interested in, if before they came to the point they had to explain the whole build-up and background to what they had to say, these people in the end bored him,” reflected his old friend David Ormsby-Gore, the British ambassador in Washington. And if they bored him, if they courted him with their meandering soliloquies, they were often soon gone, exiled to some region where he would not have to endure their endless pedantries. Most of these men may have been numbing bores, but at times men are ponderous because there is much to ponder, and slow making decisions because the decisions are hard and close.
On his first day in office, Kennedy walked into the Oval Office early in the morning. Only a fool or a megalomaniac—and the new president was neither—would have entered what was now his citadel of power without a momentary sense of inadequacy, uncertainty, or self-doubt. Despite his accomplishments as a politician, he had never administered anything grander than the PT-109. The new president sat in an office stripped of photos, paintings, and memorabilia behind a desk suitable for a middling insurance executive. He stared at a floor that looked as if it had been savaged by a regiment of termites who had begun gnawing their way from behind the president’s desk, continuing their meal out to the door. The holes, as Kennedy soon realized, were left by the golf shoes that Eisenhower wore when he used the putting green outside his window. By the evidence, he had practiced regularly, a fact that brought the figure of the former president down to a mortal level.
“We ought to have a list of all the promises we made during the campaign,” Kennedy said as he sat there for his first hours of work. His inaugural address had been singularly devoid of specific proposals, but now was the time to begin. “Didn’t we promise West Virginia that we would do something about poverty? We ought to do something about it now.”
“We thought about increasing the food allotment to those getting surplus food,” Feldman said.
“How do we do that?” Kennedy asked, still unsure about the mechanisms of governance.
“You write an executive order,” Feldman replied.
“Well, do it,” Kennedy said, and turned