The First Phase of the New Frontier
Shannon, William V.
The First Phase of the New Frontier by WILLIAM V. SHANNONPERHAPS nothing has done a greater disservice to the Kennedy Administration than its own slogan, "the New Frontier." It has the...
...He must, of necessity, fall back either upon a reasoned set of philosophical and moral convictions or upon naked intuition...
...The ulcerous, hot-eyed, skinny intellectuals who were "going to make America over" in the Thirties had given way by the late Forties to paunchy, goodnatured courthouse politicians and settled bureaucratic types...
...Kennedy well in the tricky waters of domestic politics where every reef and shoal could be expertly sounded and charted...
...The Cuban invasion may be an omen of other and worse mistakes to come, or it may have been only a brief, painful learning experience in the education of a great President...
...That definition would also hold true for the Kennedy men...
...The Kennedy staff has filled this intellectual vacuum by developing a cult of toughness...
...The' politics of those closest to the President, the group sometimes called "the Irish maffia," although the most influential, Theodore Sorenson is a Nebraska Unitarian, is personal, not programmatic...
...It would not ordinarily occur to officials around the White House to say, "that's how the ball bounces," but some of the fatalism summed up in this expression (originated by G.I.'s during the Korean War) infects the mood of this Administration as, indeed, it does the mood of the entire country...
...In foreign affairs a President can never hope to know all the factors as well as he knows the political methods of West Virginia or the inner strains and stresses of the California delegation...
...WILLIAM V. SHANNON, Washington correspondent and columnist for the New York Post, is currently on leave for special studies at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Pasadena...
...It may be the final proof of the nation's maturity when by common consent, we, politicians and citizens alike, admit that for nations, as for individuals, problems are not so much solved as managed...
...The effect of this common experience has been to produce a group of politicians and administrators remarkably moderate, pragmatic, restrained, and low-keyed...
...The close brush with death that President Kennedy and several of his colleagues had during their wartime service has also instilled a certain fatalism...
...fanaticism is foreign to them...
...Each had an instinct for where his main strength lay and an ease and confidence in handling voters en masse...
...What has not become clear about the Kennedy Administration in its first phase is the political philosophy and the moral context in which this expertise and competitiveness are centered...
...this is very much a young man's Administration...
...During his rise to the Presidency, Mr...
...There is also a warmer hospitality to ideas and differing viewpoints...
...Dean Acheson, one of the founders of NATO, is the President's chief adviser on the revitalization of that alliance...
...and to Rome, a career diplomat...
...They do not see Mr...
...Eisenhower did the business community...
...But, it is important to note, there has been no fundamental reexamination of the leading ideas in any major area...
...This fatalism, this emotional reserve, this tendency to downplay and understate does not, however, preclude a ferocious aggressiveness and will to win...
...This is also true...
...His choices for major ambassadorships were equally orthodox: to London, a man who had served as ambassador under both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower...
...The appointment of Douglas Dillon, a holdover from the Eisenhower Administration, as Secretary of the Treasury exemplified Kennedy's cautious, pragmatic approach to economic policy making...
...For that reason, they have not moved American policy toward agreements on spheres of interest or neutralized zones in Eastern Europe or Asia...
...On the contrary, their first criterion, sometimes their sole criterion, on every important problem is: how will this help "the boss" get reelected in 1964...
...to Paris, a general...
...If the first phase of the Kennedy Administration demonstrates anything, it demonstrates there are no new problems and no essentially new ways of meeting the old ones...
...On the basic issues of the cold war with the Soviet Union, for example, the Kennedy Admininstration has not veered from the concepts developed by George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and others in the 1946-49 period, and pursued further by John Foster Dulles...
...Roosevelt and the New Dealers provided, politically speaking, the background of their adolescent and college years...
...From the President on down, understatement is the prevailing style...
...In the cold war the United States, now as in the previous two Administrations, relies upon the deterrent power of military strength, and upon political alliances, propaganda, and conventional diplomacy...
...Eisenhower's purposes in the foreign aid field were often savagely undercut by some of his less enlightened subordinates from the business world, but the grand design of his policy in this field was always clear...
...Kennedy has already developed a comparable poise and assurance...
...John F. Kennedy, both as candidate and President, has variously defined it as the challenge posed by new problems, a program to meet those problems, and the spirit in which Americans are to respond to the challenge...
...Crusades are not their style...
...Truman warmed over and served up as Fair Deal hash...
...It has the initial flaw of obscurity...
...There are, of course, men of brains in every Administration but Kennedy cultivates, admires, and relies upon the men • of the intellectual community—the universities, the foundations, and research centers— just as Mr...
...It did not sustain him in the weeks leading up to the unsuccessful invasion of Cuba last April...
...Individuals are chosen or rejected quickly, often arbitrarily, on the basis of whether they seem "tough" or "soft...
...Unlike many of the New Dealers of thirty years ago, they have no illusions about remaking America...
...It merely modulates and curbs its expression...
...As his chief staff assistant in foreign affairs, Kennedy chose McGeorge Bundy, the biographer of Henry Stimson and the compiler of Acheson's official papers...
...Elections occur, Presidents come and go, but the three fundamental problems confronting American statesmen remain stubbornly what they were sixteen years ago when the United States emerged from World War II into the cold war: how to contain the outward thrust of Soviet imperialism, how to bring the underdeveloped countries out of the past without subjecting them to the rigors of totalitarian tyranny, and how to manage our industrial economy, the foundation of the nation's wealth and power, without inflation or depression...
...Another distinguishing characteristic is political skill...
...It seems reasonable to expect on the basis of his career thus far that he will establish himself in the history of the Presidency as a domestic political strategist and party leader rivaling Franklin Roosevelt...
...This means that the top echelon of government has a rather uniform body of experience...
...Of all the characteristics that the President and his colleagues possess, ranging from leanness and youth to articulateness and political sophistication, perhaps the single most important one is simply youth...
...In terms of policies, this cult of toughness provides a built-in bias toward the course that seems most realistic, most clearly grounded in existing fact, most readily defensible in the immediate future...
...anyone in military service who boasts about his status in civilian life or, even worse, his deeds in combat is regarded by his fellows as a phony...
...War and the threat of war, therefore, have become part of the natural fabric of their lives in a way that they are not for the older generation...
...He wants to combine the best insights of both liberal, Keynesian thought and orthodox central bank theory, but commit himself to neither...
...They are men young enough to have served in World War II...
...This is partly in reaction to the fervor and outsized rhetoric of the Thirties that Mr...
...Only future events can make clear whether President Kennedy has the moral vision necessary to give steady leadership and fulfill the promise of his intellectual force and political acumen...
...But worse, the phrase, with its implicit suggestion of dramatic initiatives and a sharp break with the past, arouses false hopes and distracts attention from both the problems the new Administration faces and the way in which it proposes to meet them...
...Richard Nixon, ironically, was haunted in the 1960 campaign by the fear of being tagged as the "Madison Avenue candidate," but it was actually his successful opponent who had mastered and assimilated whatever is politically usable in the techniques and insights of Madison Avenue...
...Eisenhower's Inter-American Bank and "atoms for peace" projects left off...
...it inhibits rather than inspires idealism, and over the long term may serve as the invisible leash on the leap of the President's imagination and on the range and pace of his policy initiatives...
...This is also true...
...This attitude tends to drain out enthusiasm...
...But one failure is not the whole story...
...They have made their mature careers in the years of the cold war...
...What is wanted are men who can handle their own problems—with Congress, with the press, with other bureaucrats—and not get themselves in trouble or embarrass the President...
...Truman's Marshall Plan and Point Four began, and where Mr...
...Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, notwithstanding their dissimilar personalities, were superb natural politicians...
...This article is adapted from the original which appeared in the autumn issue of The American Scholar and is copyrighted by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa...
...They have not dismantled any military alliances...
...The real motif of Kennedy's campaign was Let's get going, Let's get America moving again...
...Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" in Latin America and his Peace Corps take up where Mr...
...It is made up of men old enough to remember clearly the great depression of the Thirties but young enough not to have been scarred permanently by it nor to have any emotional investment in the ideological quarrels of that decade...
...This preoccupation with the political welfare of John F. Kennedy is not in itself deplorable but it is not a preoccupation that provides any dependable, objectively valid guidelines in making up one's mind about a specific person or problem...
...There is at work here a subtle glorification of the decision-making process as such, independent of the content of the de1 cisions, an exaltation of managerial style over substance...
...John Fischer, writing in Harper's a dozen years ago, defined the difference between a Roosevelt New Dealer and a Truman Fair Dealer as about thirty pounds...
...Their approach to politics is managerial and manipulative...
...Kennedy never engaged the services of a public relations firm because, as an aide once explained, "They never showed us anything they could do for us that we didn't already know how to do for ourselves...
...there are no new frontiers nor brave new worlds to which we can escape...
...To emphasize the basic conservatism of the Kennedy Administration and its many links with the past is not to deny that, within the inherited framework of national policy, this regime represents some interesting shifts in style and outlook...
...The result is an Administration highly educated and notably literate and articulate...
...They have been unwilling to take any extensive gambles on disarmament...
...The Cuban defeat shook the morale of the President and his Administration, and many weeks passed before the effect wore off...
...Although there are several men on the White House staff and in the agencies who are still in their early thirties and two or three figures of considerable influence who are past sixty, power, to an extraordinary extent, is wielded by men between the ages of forty and fifty...
...It is also a carry-over from the war...
...It would have been more honest and more educational for his fellow citizens if he had frankly avowed that the problems were old and stubborn, that he had no new solutions for them, and that all he or any man could offer was a vigorous, intelligent effort to cope with them...
...Kennedy's handling of the recession that he inherited from the Eisenhower Administration was only moderately more spirited than it would have been if his Republican predecessor had continued in office...
...But he did not so believe, gambled on force and lost...
...This is an aspiration not easily reduced to a satisfactory slogan...
...Kennedy and his advisers do not think the basic issues of the cold war/ are negotiable...
...They are children of the New Deal...
...Kennedy as an instrument for putting into effect a social program...
...These appointments are significant only as they underline this Administration's continuity with the past and symbolize its traditional approach to policy making...
...What is true for the cold war is true also for the problems of the underdeveloped countries and for the national economy...
...only a fundamental shift in the nature and dynamism of the Communist empire could make a negotiated settlement practical and durable...
...One of the professors left behind in Cambridge after Kennedy completed his raid on the Harvard faculty has privately offered still a third definition...
...Shannon has written frequently for The Progressive...
...Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, is an Acheson protege...
...They are "inside dopesters" who have an insatiable curiosity about public affairs...
...They are men of power who enjoy high office because they like to run things...
...If Kennedy had deeply and firmly believed that political warfare is the only way effectively to combat a totalitarian radical like Castro, he would have instinctively and at once rejected the military adventure proposed by the Central Intelligence Agency...
...In the clinches, he's always in there, giving everything he's got...
...The selection of Dean and McCloy, two eminent Republicans, was dictated primarily by political considerations since the Administration would need Republican assistance to get any disarmament treaty through the Senate, but since the President worked in complete harmony with both men, no grounds exist for believing these politically inspired choices were not also intellectually congenial to him...
...On disarmament matters, the President turned to two veteran members of "the establishment," Arthur Dean, the late John Foster Dulles' law partner, and John McCloy, the former head of the Chase Manhattan Bank...
...Acheson has also been advising on West Berlin as that crisis re-emerged in the summer of 1961...
...One highly placed official, not a member of the Kennedy inner circle but handsomely rewarded for his critical help in the Presidential primaries, has remarked privately: "Kennedy is not the kind of leader who strikes sparks or stirs people up, but he does want to win...
...Power-oriented pragmatism served Mr...
...There is no talk in this Administration about public service being a burden, no nostalgia for the joys of private life in Grosse Pointe or Winnetka...
...In short, the Kennedy Administration has not taken any of the conceivable initiatives favored by left-wing and neo-pacifist critics of America's postwar foreign policy...
...moreover, he stands well above his immediate predecessors in his expert knowledge of the politics of each state, his skill in gaining publicity and cultivating the press, and his adroitness in using the machine politicians for his purposes rather than being used by them for theirs...
...From Eisenhower to Kennedy," he said, "is a shift from the 'gentlemen's C boys to the Phi Beta Kappas...
...More recently, Walter Lippmann suggested the difference between the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations was about thirty years...
...Yet it comes closer to expressing what the President and his colleagues essentially represent, which is a fresh access of executive energy, verve, and venturesomeness...
...Because of a stale tradition in American politics (the New Nationalism, the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New America, not to mention Modern Republicanism and the Great Crusade), candidate Kennedy unfortunately felt that he, too, needed a catchword that would connote newness, modernity, action...
...They have not recognized Communist China...
...Realism carried to excess is earthbound...
...This is a new generation in power...
...not everyone may play touch football but this is not a fat man's Administration...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
