The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

All of these major responses of the Kennedy Administration in the first year were based on two major premises: first, that the Communists were indeed a harsh and formidable enemy (if it was not a monolith, it was still treated as one) and that relaxation of tensions could only come once the Administration had proven its toughness, and second, that Kennedy’s political problems at home were primarily from the right and the center, that the left could be handled, indeed that it had nowhere else to go, and that it must accept the Administration’s private statements of good will and bide its time for the good liberal things which might one day come. The latter attitude, the belief in the essential political weakness of the liberal-left, encouraged the Administration in some of its harder-line activities and limited its inclination to look for diversity within the Communist world. If there were changes within the Communist world, Washington believed they were certainly not changes immediately apparent to most Americans, and this was politically crucial to the Administration. The Administration still felt itself under pressure to prove its own worth to centrists and conservative Americans, and it believed that liberal-left Americans would simply have to accept the Kennedy proposition that the Administration was by far the best they could hope for. Most of the key moves by Kennedy in 1961 reflected this attitude, including not just the decisions which followed the forthcoming Tayl...