The Kennedy Years: The View from Within

...Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and real alternatives are...

...Posterity will clearly regard them as indispensable primary sources...

...Schlesinger quotes Kennedy reflecting on the difficulties of assessing Presidential greatness...

...Seeing Kennedy daily at close quarters necessarily induced a false perspective...

...Isolation does not simply limit the view of those on the outside...

...His eloquence was not the synthetic confection of ghost writers but sprang from the man himself...

...All of us have dreadful memories of that November, which still cuts like a scar through our history...

...But if Schlesinger is correct, that speculation was not mere moonshine concocted at the Press Club bar...

...it is redeemed by its superb handling of two great episodes —the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban missile crisis...

...He in fact admired the Secretary's patience in the face of repeated press speculation on his demotion...

...You know what you all are...

...First, the books themselves...

...But even if this view is correct, what does it matter...

...But on balance I think the authors were right in their decision on timing...

...It should be remarked that Sorensen is on this essential point at sharp variance with Schlesinger...

...Much more than Sorensen's Kennedy, Schles-inger's Thousand Days offers a sustained, reasoned political brief for the President...

...Simply, I would argue, this—that dismissal of the Secretary would create too much of a fuss...

...But a larger point is embedded in the jibe, probably accurate, that many of the President's critics rarely left Washington...

...The supreme irony is that Mr...

...Tens of thousands of Americans, most of them young, came as if by secret signal to Washington to form a queue that stretched for miles to the Capitol where Kennedy's body lay in state...

...indeed, sectors of the bureaucracy had to be dragooned into accepting the neutralization of Laos...

...certainly no newspaperman can properly complain about the impulse to prompt disclosure...

...Remembering how it looked then from the outside, I wondered why the view from within was often so different...

...The book is marred by its shapelessness, its overlong quotations, its bulk...

...Schlesinger quotes the wife of W. W. Rostow as saying after the Bay of Pigs...

...Schlesinger says that Mr...

...You are the junior officers of the second World War come to responsibility...

...but during the Kennedy years, outsiders too often saw the fruits of these implacable pressures without gaining any comparable insight from the President about the sources of his frustration...

...is there any point in quibbling about the more prosaic record...

...London TAoes it matter any more...

...He says of Rusk: "At no time, press reports to the contrary, did the President regret having selected him...

...Arthur Schelsinger Jr., as befits the trained historian who has already dealt with the ages of Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, is at home on the larger canvas...

...The legend glows...

...Sorensen then describes Kennedy's reaction: "At times he mused aloud over the academic isolation of many of his intellectual critics and their previous record of misjudgments...

...Sorensen tells substantially, if less explicitly, the same story...

...And yet, in reading these impressive testaments, I found myself troubled again and again by the discrepancy between my personal recall and the portrait embodied in both volumes...

...Though Schlesinger does give Rusk high marks on infrequent occasions— the Secretary's performance, for example, at Punta del Este—the total verdict is unsparingly negative...

...However, said Kennedy of his liberal critics in typical understatement, 'I guess criticism is their special business.' " Indeed, criticism is an incorrigible characteristic of independent journalism, and surely Schlesinger speaks of a more discerning Kennedy when he writes, "despite occasional annoyance over the refusal of some liberals to understand the constraints on Presidential action, he knew at bottom that over the long run pressure from the left increased his freedom of maneuver...

...And this meant," comes the revealing afterthought, "that, if the President were going to get at the 'bowl of jelly,' reorganization would have to start at a lower level...

...The pity is that he did not risk more in the role he relished least...

...in his death, he gave the last full measure of devotion...

...Kennedy seemed reluctant to take the public into his confidence, to appeal over the head of those who bedeviled him, to use his "bully pulpit" for fundamental educational purposes...

...Years ago, as an undergraduate, I remember being provoked by the deflating iconoclasm of the late William B. Hesseltine, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin...

...Kennedy said...

...In 1962, Kennedy is quoted as saying, "I can't do that to Rusk...

...if anything, British politicians seem to quote the American President more often than Winston Churchill...

...During the summer of 1963—both in his speech on civil rights and in his speech at American University—Kennedy had embarked more audaciously than ever before on matters of consequence where the issue was in doubt...

...If there is any villain in Schlesinger's book, it is the hulking institution of bureaucracy...

...Here the relative restraint of Sorensen contrasts favorably with Schlesinger's desertion of Clio for Camelot...

...It seemed evident that his measure of Presidential success," Schlesinger comments, "was concrete achievement...

...Kennedy felt that his greatest failure was the Vietnam impasse, and he suggests that the President felt he had relied too much on Pentagon and State Department counsel...

...The question asks itself: Why then did Kennedy keep him on...

...thus people who educated the nation without necessarily accomplishing their particular purposes rated, in his judgment, below those, like Polk and Truman, who accomplished their purposes without necessarily bringing the nation along with them...

...In his life, he sought to contain the twin demons of violence and bigotry...

...but most compelling perhaps was Kennedy's feeling that dismissal of his Secretary of State would constitute too severe a comment on his own original judgment...

...In those areas in which he conspicuously, and sometimes reluctantly, sought to lead popular opinion—in civil rights, in fiscal policy, and in foreign affairs (most notably in his American University speech)—he provided the indispensable educational foundation for his successor...

...If you don't know that, how can you judge performance...

...The Bay of Pigs had the chastening effect of making Kennedy skeptical of the official wisdom distilled in the out-boxes of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA...

...And Kennedy had no stomach for a scrap with Establishments—official, Congressional, or financial...

...In a moment, I propose to offer an explanation...

...The remark cut deeper than was intended...

...What the world has come to believe about Lincoln is incomparably more important than lapses from grace more evident to contemporaries than to posterity...

...How the hell can you tell...

...But in his passages on the personal and social life of the President and his lady, Schlesinger lapses from reason into rhapsody...

...The value of instant history is that it can be read while events burn with the warmth of topicality, while the recent past is fresh enough to leap from the page...

...The late President acted out on a world scale some of the same themes that Lincoln coped with purely within the framework of a nation: It is no accident that both men are folk heroes in much of independent Africa...

...Kennedy himself may well be judged more as an exemplar and tutor than as an achiever...

...But we are left with what happened and not what might have been...

...A craftsman of the memorandum and brief speech, Theodore Sorensen has written, in effect, an extended staff paper whose subject is John F. Kennedy...

...Schlesinger offers various explanations...

...The ques-tion tugged at me as I unwrapped the bulky parcels that brought these volumes to London, where the apotheosis of John F. Kennedy is virtually complete...

...Surely a corollary ought to be added: Kennedy's immediate staff just as rarely left the White House...

...Schlesinger adds: "He was also an able and useful man...

...Those on the outside were more often confronted with a flickering, disconnected, and frequently contradictory series of impressions...

...That Sunday it was too late...

...Otherwise, the book flounders in its focus, the work of a skilled miniaturist attempting a panoramic mural...

...A brilliant lecturer, Hesseltine cut relentlessly through the thicket of myth that has come to surround Lincoln...

...The most oft-repeated charge made by President Kennedy's liberal and intellectual critics," Sorensen writes with asperity, though with accuracy, "was that he made no crusading commitments of the heart, that he neither possessed nor inspired warmth...

...Kennedy lived...

...If one accepts—and I certainly do— Schlesinger's version of White House dissatisfaction with the State Department, what is one to make of the President's positively Fabian preference for guerrilla infiltration as a solution...

...When Chester Bowles posed problems as Under Secretary of State, the President found ways of executing a bureaucratic Putsch...

...Lincoln presents the same problem...

...They also agree that many of the President's proudest achievements—the test-ban treaty, the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps—took place in the teeth of fierce opposition from the bureaucracy...

...They thought it proof of their complaints that his popularity exceeded Eisenhower's...

...he is such a nice man...

...they were waiting for marching orders that never really came...

...My own include a stabbing sense of grief and pain on the Sunday following the Friday in Dallas...

...More than anyone else, the President's staff was aware of Kennedy's larger purposes, his noblest hopes, his most daunting problems...

...his Lincoln was a shrewd and sometimes cynically devious politician—a semi-Honest Abe whose memory was gilded in part through the tragic alchemy of history...

...His book is written with sweep and dash...

...But to the end, one sensed in this admirer of Lord Melbourne a reluctance to get into the wrestling-pit and risk a fall...

...Many of the noted analysts of public opinion and foreign policy, he said, rarely left Washington...

...As was the case with Lincoln, the evasions were more visible to the outside than the steady intentions apparent to the staff within...

...This is particularly to be regretted, I think, in the troubled area of government itself...

...His supporters, no matter how much they fretted, wanted to cheer...

...Rusk was (and is) the personification of the official American Establishment—in a semi-spoofing Esquire article, Richard Ro-vere once nominated Rusk as The Chairman of the Establishment...

...Both books are magnificently equal to that possibility...

...Each reflects the temper and talent of the writer...

...Though they assumed to speak for the voters, most of them talked mostly to each other—in Washington, on a campus or on an editorial staff...

...Why didn't Kennedy put someone like McGeorge Bundy in command at State...

...This had changed by 1963, and doubtless would have changed even more had Mr...

...In seeking to demonstrate the priority of results over popular education, Kennedy in his own career, abetted by its tragic end, demonstrated the force of a thesis of which he disapproved...

...Hesseltine's Lincoln bore little resemblance to the plaster bust in the schoolroom...

...present readers are able now to debate with new evidence some of the baffling contradictions of the Kennedy Presidency...

...the junior officer is notorious for his deference to rank...

...Schlesinger and Sorensen are in accord in contending that Kennedy was drawn into the Cuban invasion in good part because of his reluctance to take frontal issue with the grandees of the military and intelligence services...

...In Schlesinger's pages, the inbred circumlocution and suffocating orthodoxy of the State Department are personified by Dean Rusk, the man Mr...

...Sorensen might have escaped the opposite complaint of deleting names in his narrative of the position taken by principal participants in the missile crisis...

...Both books were reviewed here primarily in the language of panegyric...

...He goes on, with less accuracy and more asperity: "They wanted him to go in for most lost causes, bigger deficits, grand designs, and 'fireside chats.' They wanted him to pay more attention to Bowles and less to Ach-eson, to denounce the Republicans and to do everything at once...

...the topical chapters are kept trimly within the contours of an integrated design...

...Both authors have been criticized for rushing into print, and no doubt both manuscripts would have benefited from a few more years in storage...

...Lincoln was humane in thought and compelling in manner...

...By waiting longer, Schlesinger would have escaped the reproach of quoting a dead President in ways that undercut a Secretary of State still in office...

...One saw in the faces of those Americans the deep reservoir of emotion that the President was so reluctant to tap while he lived...

...1087 pp...

...I propose to deal with only two points—Kennedy's reluctance to appeal directly and frequently to the country for support, and his diffidence about grappling head-on with an intractable bureaucracy that so often blunted his purposes...

...Kennedy chose as Secretary of State...

...So, too, surely, with Kennedy...

...The distinction shown in these chapters has, I think, an explanation: the events themselves had a beginning, middle, and end that imposed a design on the narrative...

...Fair enough...

...In fact, as Hesseltine acknowledged, notwithstanding the extravagances of the Lincoln legend, it is not made of whole cloth...