Gentlemen-in-Waiting: The Democratic Shadow Cabinet
Bethell, Tom
Gentlemen-in-Waiting: The Democratic Shadow Cabinet by Tom Bethell For the Gentlemen-in-Waiting it had been a long wait, and a treacherous one. But now, at last, after almost eight long years...
...Here the lawyers, especially, were adept at maintaining the degree of discretion that was politic, Of course, among the candidates there were obvious favorites...
...Mostly they were Democrats...
...There had been Vietnam, of course, which had taken a dreadful toll...
...But, at the outset, there had been a pleasant surprise...
...In the fall of 1969 Holbrook, then only 28 years old, got a phone call from Samuel Huntington asking him if he would like to be managing editor of Foreign Policy, which was then gearing up for publication...
...Along with Cyrus Vance, who had been Deputy Secretary of Defense under Johnson and had made a similar tactical withdrawal to the New York law firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, Warnke would become by 1976 one of the most eminent Gentlemen-in-Waiting, of just the right age and seniority and experience for a new Democratic administration, and, vying with Vance, he was a name at the top of almost everyone’s short list-a strong possibility for the top job at Defense or State if the right candidate came along...
...In 1961, Richard Rovere had half-humorously drawn attention to the Council as “a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation...
...Read, it was felt, was not right for Kissinger’s job, but was right for Brent Scowcroft’s-the National Security Council Adviser, in other words-and those who felt they had a good chance of getting into the White House with Read in this new capacity especially tended to “recommend” him for the job...
...He was also making key appearances in those important instmments of visibility, the op-ed pages of the Times and The Washington Post...
...In Robert Brookings’ day, for example, there had been entirely too much efficiency and not enough equality...
...Walt Rostow had been banished from Harvard to Texas...
...One had made one’s pitch for prominence-in the pages of 5% e New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, on the editorial pages of the two papers...
...It was characteristic of the Gentlemen-in-Waiting that, when they drew up these lists, they also mentally decided who should get which precise job, as though they were at that moment President themselves...
...From that point on the magazine provided Holbrooke with just the visibility that he needed to rise above the common run...
...that was completely out of bounds, even though, as everyone remarked on Lake’s behalf, he had done so out of principle, discreetly, quietly, without making too many waves, without an obvious intention to harass and embarrass his former boss...
...Now it was time for the courtiers to find their king...
...Those with a good, solid working knowledge of Washington and its ways were clearly favored because they already carried around in their heads a Who’s Who in Washington and would not, therefore, have to be laboriously instructed in this important matter...
...They were, in the most apt phrase, an “available resource,” the recipients of the best education available at the best schools, equipped with the finest brains, and they were ready to serve their country...
...Holbrooke, in contrast, had proceeded more circumspectly...
...But now, at last, after almost eight long years of Republican rule, it looked as though the exile might soon be at an end...
...Let others decide about home mortgage interest rates...
...Whether this was intended as a tiny rebuke of Foreign Affairs, it was hard to tell...
...Many other jobs opened up with a change of administration, jobs in departments like Agriculture and HEW and HUD, but for the most part the gentlemen sniffed at them...
...To bomb...
...They were not necessarily the brightest of their generation, and very probably were not the best, but very likely they were the most ambitious of the young men aiming for careers in government...
...Beating a Tactical Retreat When the call came from Kissinger, the Gentlemen-in-Waiting were happy to join the team...
...Louis, had publicspiritedly donated his fortune, which derived from the sale of woodenware (clothespins, it was said), for the creation of an institution where men could be stimulated to think over questions of government and economics and social relations...
...Fortunately for the Gentlemen-inWaiting, however, exile wasn’t the end of everything...
...Another important refuge was the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a well-heeled redoubt of Democratic liberalism, presided over by Thomas L. Hughes, a former assistant secretary of state, who was, like Warnke and Vance, a prominent Gentleman-in-Waiting, and, because of his job at Carnegie, also a prominently displayed Gentleman-in-Waiting...
...In the economics field, men like Charles Schultze, head of the Bureau of the Budget under Johnson, and Arthur Okun, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had taken up senior positions at Brookings sufficiently comfortable that some observers felt nothing less than Secretary of the Treasury could entice them back into government (which, whatever its advantages, tended to be a good deal more exhausting than life at Brookings...
...The war dragged on, despite the best efforts of the increasingly disillusioned Democratic holdovers, who had felt that they could be more effective in government than out, but found that they had little influence on Kissinger...
...By 1976 Halperin had changed direction considerably and had moved across town from Brooki n g~to the Center for Strategic Studies, housed in an elegant building that was a part of General Motors heir Stewart Mott’s counter-corporate conglomerate...
...There was, in brief, a theology at stake, and herein lay the GentlemeninWaiting’s chief weapon, because, in indoctrinating the candidates into some of the theological mysteries, they could at the same time create the illusion that they were indispensable...
...The Gentlemen-in-Waiting did not themselves run for office...
...Purely at the salary level, of course, there was a big pick-up if you went from Brookings middle-level into government at the deputy assistant level-from, say, $25,000 to $36,000...
...It was their city...
...By 1976, then, the Gentlemen-in-Waiting were well rested up, and they were getting restless...
...Take Brookings, for example...
...D. from Yale, an assistant professorship of government at Harvard . . . . In other words, Halperin was a full-blooded Ivy League intellectual, who had written several books, hobnobbed with Democrats in Cambridge, served them in Washington...
...Foreign Affairs, of course, was the quarterly publication of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, presided over by Bayless Manning, edited by William Bundy, founded shortly after World War I, and frequently thought to be the spiritual home of “the establishment...
...Both Richard Holbrooke and Tony Lake had entered the Foreign Service in 1962-a difficult time, in retrospect...
...Holbrooke’s career seemed to consist, whether by design or accident it was hard to tell, of a series of delicately executed steps-a cautious (or fortuitous) negotiation of the recent mine-strewn years...
...Lake got a masters degree in public affairs, and then joined the National Security Council staff at the beginning of the Nixon Administration...
...He had- met Kissinger in the mid- 1960s...
...As one economist who worked there commented, the conservative economists who thought market forces were sufficient tended to talk themselves out of jobs...
...He had to,” Richard Holbrooke would say, “there’s no one else available...
...Holbrooke had gone on to be a member of the U. S. delegation to the Paris peace talks, where for two and a half months he helped grapple with the problem of the shape of the negotiating table (South Vietnam wanted a rectangular table, North Vietnam a square one, the U. S. a round one, and here at least, if not in Vietnam itself, the U. S. prevailed), and was able to observe admiringly and at first hand the Harriman ap proach to diplomacy, one of “creative ambiguity...
...Holbrooke was looking forward to getting away from Washington for a while, and in fact it was a good time to be gone...
...Courtiers and Their King There were, in fact, quite a number of rules to the foreign policy game, Halperin reflected...
...Despite the intense rivalries, the foreign policy Gentlemen-in-Waiting in some respects resembled a club, if only because of their small numbers...
...Indeed, one young lady who knew a number of the Gentlemen-in-Waiting on a personal basis had been heard to express the opinion that governors of states, and especially ex-governors, should not be allowed to run for President because they didn’t have the proper background or experience...
...Having resigned, to speak out...
...The Carnegie Endowment also gave free office space to and paid off half the debts (about $60,000 annually) incurred by Foreign Policy, a quarterly publication wherein Gentlemen-inWaiting could sound forth on foreign affairs to one another and anyone else who cared to listen...
...And there was a good historical reason for this, too...
...The new role the Hill was playing with respect to foreign policy was a problem the Gentlemen-in-Waiting would have to contend with if they were moved back into the executive branch...
...But primarily the latter...
...Its offices were more or less carrels, after all...
...It was said of these meetings that more thought was given to who attended them, and who spoke, in what order, than was given to the agenda...
...But even in his lifetime old Andrew Carnegie had seemed to want to make expiation for the harsh rigors of capitalism, and if so, his money ($5@odd million, at the mercy of the stock market), was clearly being spent in accordance with his intentions at the Carnegie Endowment...
...In any event, the new publication was the perfect forum for Gentlemen-in-Waiting...
...After a stint with the Carnegie Endowment in 1973, studying U.S...
...It was in the area of foreign policy that the Gentlemen-in-Waiting especially tended to concentrate their advice...
...Later he went one step further and wrote an article for The Atlantic...
...Holbrooke himself was realistic enough to know that the GentlemeninWaiting were actually quite dispensable, that, as he put it, if they didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have to invent them, but others, such as J h y Carter, didn’t see it this way, necessarily...
...So the institution had a decidedly Keynesian, “liberal,” and Democratic bias, although every prospectus emphasized its objectivity...
...In May 1970, following the invasion of Cambodia, Lake resigned from government, an unusual event in foreign policy circles, and he then worked on his doctoral dissertation before assisting Edmund Muskie’s short-lived 1972 presidential campaign...
...Afterwards, Warren Manshel came up to him and said he would like to speak to him in private...
...Foreign Policy seemed to suggest that cracks were beginning to appear in the old foreign affairs establishment, fragmenting it, and certainly it drew attention to the havoc wrought by Vietnam...
...But even before he spoke Holbrooke knew what he would sayit was that rare situation where you are offered the same job twice...
...For others, the last ten years had been a minefield, and not many had traversed it without suffering some injury...
...If power itself was an intangible abstraction, so too, Holbrooke’s history seemed to say, was its pursuit...
...Under the aegis of Foreign Policy, Holbrooke could attend conferences, undertake tours of inspection, travel abroad (he had spent seven of the past 12 years abroad, and time spent abroad was an important credential for Gentlemen-in-Waiting...
...Lake might or might not have gone too far, but there was no doubt that Halperin had...
...After the Cambodian invasion, in the spring of 1970, most of them had gone back into exile, and their period of government service was subsequently used as a pretext to continue tapping their telephones, revealing, among other things, preliminary planning for Muskie’s 1972 campaign...
...An editorial board was assembled which included such key courtiers to power as Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Po1i.h immigrant who was director of the Institute of International Change at Columbia University, and who was inevitably compared with Kissinger as much because of his foreign accent as because of his teaching position at an Ivy League university...
...He already had, in fact...
...It was, once again, a problem of timing similar to the one now facing many of the same people in their re-enlistment efforts with the new candidates...
...Thus, testifying on behalf of Ellsberg was all right for some, e.g...
...and here, too, was a port in the storm for Morton Halperin after his short-lived National Security Council venture, and Leslie Gelb, a refugee from the Pentagon, where he had coordinated the Pentagon Papers project...
...But that bias was, perhaps, inevitable...
...You could travel widely at government expense for four years, have access to chauffeur and car pool during working hours, and a large office with two secretaries in an outer room would be yours...
...Among them was Morton H. Halperin, who became chief of the NSC planning group, and whose background, as J. Anthony Lukas would remark, was “certain to make H. R. Haldeman’s crew cut stand up straight and quiver: a B. A. from Columbia, a Ph...
...Warnke had already been a partner in the important law firm of Covington and Burling before becoming the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in 1967...
...For men such as these, in midcareer and awaiting a new opportunity, Brookings provided a position, a salary (about $25,000-a-year for middle-level research fellows, about $36,000 for those at the senior level), research facilities without the bother of students, a platform from which to issue dissenting policy statementsstatements which, during the Nixon years, were often prominently played up by a press which often found the Brookings position more to its taste than the Nixonian position...
...One had to become known, to rise above the common herd, small though the herd was...
...Running “against Washington” might be winning votes this year, but as far as the Gentlemen-in-Waiting wre concerned it was considered a joke in rather dubious taste...
...why, some of them, such as Mort Halperin, had not even spent one day in Vietnam) give speeches, and even, in the selection and encouragement of the articles that would appear in the magazine, maintain a semblance of influence over foreign policy itself...
...He went on to say that those who had been entrusted with responsibility by a President had been handed a pistol along with that trust, and that those who later spoke out not merely broke their trust but turned that pistol onto the President and shot him in the head...
...There were rules in the foreign policy game, and it was nice to know that even an exgovernor from Georgia could so quickly learn the most basic rule of all, which was that, in the end, the king must come to the Gentlemen-inWaiting, not vice-versa...
...He was soon warned that this was incorrect behavior...
...Carter had already come to Washington and dined at the home of Liz Stevens with Frank Mankiewicz, Holbrooke and a number of George McGovern’s former advisers, and Carter had said that he needed them...
...He too was suing Kissinger, Haig, the FBI, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, but in his case he was doing so noisily, which made it far worse...
...He could easily be swung toward the center, told what was what and who was who as others had been in the past...
...He always had in the past, and he would this time, too...
...Hundreds of people were seeking dozens of jobs...
...Both Holbrooke and Lake had then gone on to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton for a course of advanced international study...
...It had never failed...
...Two years later, while Holbrooke was in Nepal on a trip, he received a cable from the Peace Corps informing him that Campbell had died very suddenly of an undiagnosed cancer...
...He was working with the Amekican Civil Liberties Union, directing a project on national security and civil liberties-his new obsession...
...precarious for some, disastrous for others...
...For some, the law firms provided a secure haven...
...Ball was now a partner in Lehman Brothers, an investment banking f m in New York, and the speculation was that he would be likely to return to Washington as Hubert Humphrey’s Secretary of State-should the convention deadlock and the call go out to Waverly, Minnesota...
...They all tended to know one another...
...Thomson’s wife gave her husband a nudge in the ribs and said, “He’s talking about you...
...Making amends required fairly strong government control of the economy, of course, because people, if left to their own devices, tended to end up rather unequal, but this enhancement of the role of government was not incongenial to those economists and aspiring rulers at Brookings...
...To some extent, it depended who you were and what your position was, Halperin thought...
...He knew he had broken several cardinal rules, of course, just as Daniel Ellsberg had...
...For others, there was the less secure but nevertheless comfortable world of the foundations, those institutions where old capitalist money laboriously accumulated was spent, a generation or two later, in searching for a more perfect society than had hitherto existed...
...You didn’t make personal attacks, that was another rule-you didn’t call Dick Helms a liar...
...One could jump from one candidate to another, of course, but more than one jump was considered poor form...
...Dean Rusk was in exile in Georgia...
...they could safely be left to unknown arrivistes from the hinterland...
...The professoriat, it was said, would serve almost any master-it beat grading papers, after all...
...For the younger men Vietnam had created the familiar dilemma: to resign (and abandon the reins of power) or to stay on (and risk becoming entangled in the sinking wreckage...
...That they left to the politicians, or whoever had the time and money and fortitude to undertake such a risky enterprise...
...And Kissinger, it turned out, was willing to sign on as aides just those Gentlemen-inWaiting who might well have imagined that they would have to wait for Nixon’s departure, four years away at best, perhaps eight, until they could return to the centers of power...
...Foreign policy, especially, had to be properly conducted according to canons already laid down: the Russians dealt with in the manner to which they had become accustomed, the mysteries of SALT comprehended, there was a military litany to be recited, a protocol to be observed...
...Here the GentlemeninWaiting could find suitable interim employment...
...By the time of the 1976 campaign, Halperin did not seem to be taking much notice of it...
...If so, not too late...
...Meanwhile, his telephone was being tapped, as a result of which he would sue Kissinger, Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the FBI...
...The founding fathers had not, after all, thought it a function of government to collect money from people when they worked so that it could be returned to them in retirement, nor to provide medical care for its citizens...
...It attracted a very talented, very competitive group of young men who often tended to devote a good deal of their energies to eliminating rivals to power in an ongoing, discreetly subterrane an W a s h ing ton dogfight...
...It was the next best thing...
...To negotiate...
...But he could still dare to conjure with the notion that he might someday return to government...
...He had moved to the left of center, and he was becoming increasingly indifferent to playing the game by the rules, more ideologically committed to environmental and third-world themes...
...Lake and Holbtooke An important part of the life of the foreign policy courtiers was the schedule of conferences that could be attended and study groups that could be assembled...
...During the Nixon years, the Congress had voted itself the necessary appropriations to create this alternative pool of expertise, and so now they waited, Richard Moose (in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), Robert Hunter (on Senator Kennedy’s staff), Richard Perle (on Senator Jackson’s) and David Aaron (on Senator Mondale’s...
...but everyone knew that he had, and that he was one of the brightest talents available, thoroughly honest, outspoken and courageous...
...You did not get caught up too much in the Peace Corps mentality, you did not become too obviously involved with the “human rights” outlook...
...There were, as James Thomson had remarked seven years earlier, rules in the foreign policy game...
...There was a non-leak rule, which of course Ellsberg had egregiously broken...
...An example was the Trilateral Commission, which stressed that the U. S., Western Europe and Japan should work together closelyeven more closely than they already did...
...whereas the Democrats lived there all the time...
...The lawyerly background encouraged discretion, of course, and if Warnke was doing position papers for candidates, he was doing so discreetly, confining himself publicly to the statement that he “hadn’t a clue” about Democratic politics this year...
...But he had been a most readily available resource, having advised nearly all the Democratic candidates, and recently he had invited a Jackson aide to one of the foreign policy get-togethers...
...knew each others’ positions, latest successes, latest gaffes...
...Holbrooke felt “sort of weary,” Lake felt “glad the fighting is coming to an end,” Halperin “relieved that it’s over...
...Washington was perhaps the only city in the world where one could accrue greater status by attending a breakfast meeting than a cocktail party...
...It was also the flagship of the numerous extragovernmental enterprises that flourished in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, ranging from the Institute of Policy Studies on the left to the American Enterprise Institute on the right (but by far the majority were on the left, usually stressing anti-business and environmental themes...
...You had to have the purist mentality of a scholar to stay there for more than a few years...
...In part this was because of the theology...
...The point was, you didn’t leave government and then go around telling everything-especially people’s positions-Kissinger’s position on Vietnam, Nixon’s position on China, and so on...
...Brookings was in the center, ideologically, and prestigious enough to make an ambitious professor quiver with anticipation at the prospect of a research position there...
...Another name frequently considered by Gentlemen-in-Waiting when they drew up lists of their rivals was Benjamin H. Read, the president of the German Marshall Fund and a respected member of the foreign policy establishment, also close to Humphrey...
...One who had beaten a tactical retreat to the world of Washington law without making so much as a misguided step in the direction of the Nixon minefield was Paul Warnke...
...Enough time had been spent in the cubby holes and the carrels...
...that vas what got onto the front page of The New...
...In May 1969 a story by William Beecher appeared in The New York Times reporting B-52 bombing in Cambodia, a story that was regarded as a breach of governmental security, and very shortly thereafter wiretaps were installed on the home tele phones of a number of Kissinger’s associates, among them Halperin and Davidson...
...Life in these liberal or left-of-center institutions dotted around Washington was fairly congenial and easy-going, it was true, but for those who had tasted power at the center, the sensations on the periphery tended to seem a bit attenuated at times...
...And so, in a field of arcane disputes, it was not easy to make a name for one self-especially for gentlemen waiting in the wings...
...In March 1968, after Thomson’s article had appeared, McGeorge Bundy, former NSC adviser to President Kennedy but by then president of the Ford Foundation, prefaced a public debate with Stanley Hoffman, a professor at Harvard, with the remark that he would not talk about the past-period...
...McGeorge Bundy, because it took on the appearance of atonement for him...
...and there were rather ominous candidates, such as Jimmy Carter, who was from Georgia, and who, as far as anyone knew, had hardly been to Washington and so had a rather limited knowledge of how things worked in the capital and who might not, therefore, make an ideal President...
...Harriman’s Georgetown mansion, as Nixon well knew and worried, would become the courtly venue where the Ambassador-at-Large, siurounded by footmen, retainers and Democrats-in-Exile, would plot a return to power...
...And last, but not least, there was the perception-often illusory but no less heady for that-that one would be influencing the course of events in the nation...
...Few of Kennedy’s or Johnson’s top advisers had emerged unscathed...
...Here Holbrooke could animadvert upon Kissinger’s performance, Nixon’s world view, and detente, with one or two bold cultural diversifications thrown in, such as a description of meeting Pablo Casals, or reflecting upon snowfall in New York, which in sum demonstrated a breadth of outlook appropriate to the embryonic statesman...
...Plus the intangibles: an assured place on the social circuit, and, even better, breakfast meetings...
...Kennedy or Humphrey would be heavenly...
...The Gentlemenin-Waiting were indispensable after all, because every king needs a court and every court must have its courtiers...
...But like Ellsberg, who had wondered even after the Pentagon Papers leak if he could get his security clearance back and retwn to govern-ment in a fresh and more liberal administration (and had recently publicly endorsed the candidacy of Fred Harris, although whether with Harris’ encouragement it was not clear), so Halperin entertained similar hopes -not the Pentagon, no doubt, not the National Security Council, but conceivably there was a slot, if someone from the left wing of the party was nominated, in the vaguely defined area where civil liberties and national security overlapped...
...policy toward Rhodesia, Lake became director of an organization called International Voluntary Services, often described as a private Peace Corps...
...To be a participant in the realms of foreign and defense policy was to be in the limelight...
...The Gentlemen-in-Waiting were the courtiers who gave advice-highly trained professionals in many instances, expert in the preparation of a position paper, generous with their expertise, ready for consultation at any hour...
...As they became more senior they would be in and out of government, withdrawing at intervals to realms of influence that were both more discreet and more lucrative than governmentinto investment banking and the law firms near the White House, in the grand tradition of the McCloys and the Stimsons-but the younger men had little to market but their foreign policy expertise, and, perhaps more important, a public awareness of their expertise...
...It could hardly have been a better megaphone, far better than the relatively weak voice available to those at Brookings and Carnegie and the Kennedy Institute at Harvard (another foreign policy redoubt, where the proceeds of Joseph Kennedy’s millions were carefully portioned out to worthy recipients...
...Both had gone to Vietnam, and both had been staff assistants to U. S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge...
...Well, he was learning fast...
...Udal1 was the big hope...
...He was on the Foreign Policy Advisory Task Force for the Democratic National Committee, but he was looking more and more dependent on a Fred Harris long shot-or Udal1 possibly...
...He could, for example, write an article about China for The New Republic, as he recently had, and its substance would be somehow subordinate to the fact that the president of Carnegie, Tom Hughes, was making a statement on foreign affairs in a popular forum...
...In short, the last two years of the Johnson Administration had been a difficult time for the Gentlemen-inWaiting with ambitions to last the course, and with the arrival of Nixon, of course, the minefield had stretched on further...
...more and more Halperin was getting away from his former foreign policy beat and becoming a dissenter, growling at government from his third-floor perch in the Mott building, where plants dangled from almost every window...
...Under differing circumstances, the rules could get quite esoteric...
...And the research library with its dusty old treatises on economics, its cafeteria of the type where, at the end of the meal you pick up the tray and throw the whole remains, utensils and all, into a big plastic container, were more than a little reminiscent of life at Iowa State...
...He quickly became skeptical and dovish on Vietnam, befriended Clark Clifford, who would soon become Secretary of Defense, and with the onset of the Nixon Administration he became a partner ii, the law firm of Clifford, Warnke, Glass, McIlwain and Finney...
...To resign...
...Zbig the Hankerer Foreign Policy was not antiestablishment, exactly, but it was sometimes irreverent, at least, while Foreign Affairs was always dusty dry...
...Although a detractor had described Hughes as a one-carat diamond endlessly repolished, whose decisions tended to be wait-and-see, no one could fault him for a lack of humanitarianism in the study-projects undertaken by Carnegie...
...If and when the time came, the boys from Macon and Athens and Augusta who had been working for Carter since he left the governor’s mansion could be moved aside...
...It had many times been said of Washington that the Republicans lived there during Republican administrations, but that during Democratic administrations they returned to their homes in Wyoming or Kansas, or wherever it was that Republicans came from...
...They were waiting in the law firms (patiently), and they were waiting in the foundations (impatiently...
...By the 1970s, 40 years after the founder’s death, with his money wisely invested on Wall Street, the thinking was being done by men who tended to perceive the most beneficial society as one in which a certain “tradeoff” between equality and efficiency was desirable...
...Halperin just kept on creating a great commotion of publicity about what he was doing...
...Thomson knew the implications: To be asked back, you must behave like a team player...
...Later evidence suggested that Thomson’s wife had been right...
...By 1976 he was advising a number of presidential candidates on foreign policy, but not Carter or Jackson...
...The formulation and implementation of the nation’s foreign policy, and its defense, constituted the most basic, the most traditional, and the most irreducible function of government in any country, and its custodianship was appropriately rewarded in terms of social prestige...
...Wallace was out, of course, and Henry Jackson was a serious problem, because he was threatening to enlist Daniel P. Moynihan, who was anathema to most Gentlemenin-Waiting, as were Jackson’s foreign policy advisers (the feeling was reciprocated), but almost any of the others were suitable...
...Prominent advisers conferred a cachet that was much more important then the advice itself...
...To invade...
...Holbrooke returned to New York for the funeral, and, together with George Ball, made a brief speech in Campbell’s memory...
...He had already turned to exactly the same people as everyone else (among them Brzezinski, Milton Katz, Paul Nitze...
...It was said of both that they were the best of their class...
...During the Republican interludes the Democrats waited nearby, and if they could not find employment in government, they could often find employment criticizing government...
...Here Warnke could wait in comfort, with an office suitably overlooking Lafayette Square and the White House...
...The reason for this was partly historical, partly social...
...This was the difficult part of the game and the essential part...
...Decide it at a breakfast meeting, amid the maps and blackboards...
...Perhaps worst hurt had been those Democrats of John Kenneth Galbraith’s generation, who, in the past decade, had gone from their late 50s to their late 60s, and so had missed the prime opportunity to join government as experienced and senior sages...
...and there were ideal candidatesSenator Kennedy came to mind, but alas he was not running this year, he had said so over and over again, but many of the Gentlemen-in-Waiting did not want to believe him, especially the ones who were waiting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was perhaps the favored waiting place outside of Washington itself...
...The letter of invitation was dated the day of the Massachusetts primary, but postmarked two days later...
...The big new social welfare agencies like HUD and HEW lacked the prestige and social cachet that was an integral aspect of the departments dealing with foreign policy...
...If it were possible, they risked seeming too humanitarian, dealing with places like Biafra . and Micronesia, and were beginning to look too “soft” at a time when the American will with regard to foreign policy appeared to be moving to the right, and threatened to make Hughes look too dovish, too supportive of the view that the State Department needed to be presided over by a Ralph Nader...
...So many Democrats were running, and it was tactically unsound, obviously, to become too visibly a part of the entourage of one candidatewho might not turn out to be the right candidate-just as it was tactically unsound to be too notice-ably lingering in the wings...
...But the next day Schlesinger denied this, saying that Bundy had been referring to Kenneth Galbraith and Richard Goodwin...
...The foreign policy calling was a peculiar one, in some ways as intangible and abstract as power itself...
...One of the most regular conferenceattenders was also the managing editor of Foreign Policy, Richard Holbrooke, and his name came up so automatically whenever the Gentlemenin-Waiting were mentioned that he sometimes seemed to be the principal courtier, whose achievement consisted primarily in being well known, rather than being well known for his a chi e vements...
...Nixon, disappointing some of his long-time aides, had selected as his top foreign policy adviser a club member in good standing, Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor, to occupy the National Security Council position...
...And so, after almost eight lean Republican years, the Gentlemen-inWaiting were waiting hungrily...
...They were ready with their advice, but there was a troublesome difficulty brewing this year, a minor matter, perhaps, but in any event a hazard of the primary process: whom to advise...
...But the gravitational pull, back to the centers of power was keenly felt, as the red telephone on Halperin’s desk seemd to imply...
...Back in the U. S. Holbrooke became an assistant to Bob Komer, who headed up the misleadingly titled “Pacification Program” in Vietnam, and then to Nicholas Katzenbach, when he was under secretary of state...
...Robert Brookings, a self-made millionaire from St...
...The Brookings Institution on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington was perhaps the prototype...
...The election was upon us again, and with any luck a Democrat would win in November, and so would restore the GentlemeninWaiting from the nooks of Brookings and the crags of Carnegie, and other second-class accommodations in and among the liberal foundations, to a more commodious seat in the staterooms of government...
...But there were additional perquisites of power...
...And this was not easy, because in the broad area that was of interest to the public there was a fundamental agreement between all participants (all would agree, for example, that nuclear war with Russia was to be avoided), whereas in the detailed debates as to the ways and means of policy-which is what the Gentlemen-in-Waiting argued about, often with great displays of erudition-the general public tended not to take much notice or even to care very greatly...
...By 1974 Holbrooke had been selected as one of Time’s “200 Faces For the Future” (being one of those who exemplified “leadership with civic impact”), and by 1975 he had clearly become a member in good standing of the foreign policy “Quote Circuit,” being tapped for a comment by The New York Times after the fall of Saigon, as were Lake and Halperin...
...he had been “humanised,” some said...
...No, Thomson whispered, he’s talking about Arthur Schlesinger...
...The Center promulgated all the usual disclaimers about being independent and nonpartisan, but it was left wing in orientation, there was no getting away from it...
...But the honeymoon was over soon enough...
...Others said several hundred...
...Campbell had published five issues, had done a fine job, and circulation was up to 5,000...
...He spoke to friends about putting Kissinger in jail, in blithe disregard of the fact that the Secretary of State, whatever your opinion of Kissinger, was the high priest, and you did not subject him to such embarrassment...
...It had begun publication in 1970, under the editorial direction of Samuel Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard, and Warren Manshel, a public-spirited investment banker, both of whom felt that rational discussion of the new directions required of American foreign policy was urgently needed...
...others remarked that his advice came from the left-hand edge of the acceptable spectrum of opinion-perfect for Udall or Kennedy...
...Perhaps the best approach was to give advice to as many candidates as possiblediscreetly...
...Jimmy Carter would in the end, no doubt, be realistic enough to realize that assistant peanut farmers could not hope to become assistant secretaries of state...
...In the public arena, scarcely a week passed, it seemed, without a new article appearing by Halperin in The New Republic, or some civil liberties publication, about the outrage of wiretaps, leaks, and bugging, the incompetence of the CIA, the distortion of the truth, secrecy in government, possible perjury by Richard Helms...
...It was something of a mystery to Holbrooke why he was made this offer, because he barely knew Huntington, but in any event he could not accept because he had already made arrangements to take a leave of absence from the Foreign Service and become the Peace Corps director in Morocco...
...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Foreign policy was a mystery not given to many mortals to understand-especially those who had not attended Harvard and Yale and Columbia...
...James C. Thomson, a former National Security Council adviser who left government in 1966 and went to Harvard, there to write a letter to TheNew York Times protesting foreign policy, a daring move at the time, knew the unwritten rule, and hence the danger: When you leave, you go quietly...
...Behave Like a Team Player The wait, some called it exile, had been protracted...
...York Times, that was where the heady action was...
...And you didn’t make irresponsible proposals, either, like testifying before the Church committee that covert activities should be entirely abolished, as Halperin had recently done...
...Wooden furniture was available, courtesy of the General Services Administration, including an executive desk with 66-by-40-inch top dimensions (an $836 item), and perhaps a judge’s rotary tilting chair (they recently went up from $234 to $380), a credenza, occasional tables, wall-towall carpets...
...In the primary campaigns, for example, there was scarcely a mention of foreign policy, beyond a decision by President Ford to abolish the word detente...
...And it was a mistake to imagine that Carter was a really serious threat...
...Here Jonathan Moore and other professors were eagerly awaiting the opportunity to serve their country once again...
...theory, airborne at last, would be put to the practical test...
...Brzezinski was a prominent Gentlemanin-Waiting, and another was George Ball, a former under secretary of state and a major figure in the foreign policy councils of Kennedy and Johnson, who was well known for having “spoken out” on Vietnam, for having published his “Skeptical Thoughts,” even though, as detractors were not slow to point out, they had turned out to be ineffectual...
...They were thinking, of course, of Mort Halperin...
...Not suing was one, certainly...
...They were waiting at Harvard, at the Kennedy Institute, and at the Harvard School of Government...
...Perhaps, if all went according to plan, the BostonWashington air shuttle service, discontinued in 1969, would be revived again next year...
...you certainly did not sue the Secretary of State...
...In fact, it was probably the only city in the world where they had breakfast meeting, and where it was actually chic to work a 16-hour day, (No wonder it was necessary to rest up at places like Brookings from time to time...
...This time Holbrooke accepted the job of putting out the magazine...
...He had been for the war, so it was all right for him...
...But it wasn’t all right if you had been against the war-in that case testifying for Ellsberg identified one too much as an anti-war activist...
...It might even be worthwhile to include a few of them as leavening, but Carter himself would turn to the GentlemeninWaiting for advice...
...Brzezinski, it had been reported in Newsweek, “hankered after” Kissinger’s job, too, but Brzezinski himself would only respond that he was too realistic to engage in such daydreaming...
...Now it was the season for the Democrats again...
...but no one doubted that he was ready to make the financial sacrifice that would in his case be necessary to serve his country once again...
...Here then, was a welcome refuge...
...So while Tony Lake was suing the Secretary of State, Dick Holbrooke was evaluating him-carefully-and to the impartial observer there could be no doubt which of the two had played his cards more cleverly in the past few years...
...Concepts such as “public accountability” were bruited about at Carnegie, and there was even something called Project Dialogue-a “way within the American construct of values to explore different perspectives among people who don’t trade views very often”-that smacked too much of Dupont Circle and not enough of Foggy Bottom...
...They were waiting on Capitol Hill, where one of the big developments in foreign policy had been the great increase in the number of foreign policy advisers attached to the Senators’ staffs...
...He recommended a replacement to Huntington, his good friend John Franklin Campbell, who had entered the Foreign Service in the same class with Lake and Holbrooke...
...So in that sense Holbrooke was wrong...
...knew who was supporting whom, and would speak of one another very politely for the record, but often condescendingly in private...
...Oddly enough, Halperin was a Republican, but a number of other liberals who were Democrats enrolled with Kissinger-Tony Lake for example, who had joined the Foreign Service in 1962 and worked as a staff assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Vietnam, and Daniel Davidson, who had been a personal assistant to the grey eminence of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, w. Averell Harriman, during the 1968 Paris peace talks...
...According to an estimate by one member, there were fewer than 200 all told...
...Despite their massive budgets, recently acquired, the agencies of domestic welfare were essentially innovations in the realm of government, and therefore suspect...
...for such people, the name of Nixon often tended to be anathema, even before Watergate...
Vol. 8 • April 1976 • No. 2
