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

by David Halberstam

What about an article on McGeorge Bundy? suggested our executive editor at Harper’s, Midge Decter (not yet identifiably in her neoconservative incarnation). A light went on immediately.

Cowles seemed to be suggesting that a considerable injustice had been done. His letter was not without its clubby overtones—he constantly referred to me as Halberstam and to Bundy as Mac.

I cut my base salary, which had been all of about $20,000, to a much smaller retainer. My financial dilemma was fairly typical of that of many a young writer trying to branch out from magazines while doing a major project: how to devote some 80 percent of my energy to one all-consuming project, while making only about 25 or 30 percent of my income from it. Though I did have the retainer from Harper’s, in truth for the first time in my life I was effectively self-employed. The advance from Random House was hardly grand even for those days of more limited advances, and reflected the somewhat limited view of the commercial possibilities inherent in my topic. A book on the origins of the Vietnam War was not considered a hot topic. The total, after commissions, was $41,000, and it was to cover the four projected years of work. It was not a bad sum in those pre-inflation days, but if amortized over four years, it was less than a news clerk at the Times was making. Whatever else I had in mind when I took on the book, it was not money.

Ours is a profession built upon the immediacy of reward: We graduate from college, and our peers go off to law school and graduate school and medical school. They have barely started their first-year classes, and our names are bannered across the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. They get their medical or law degrees, and start out in their residencies or as the lowest hirelings in a law office, and we are old-timers, covering the statehouse, or on our way to Washington, by now, we believe, the possessors of a well-known brand name.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money.

If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not ins...

Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to...

A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

Journalists by and large, like people in other professions, mirror the form of their work. If they are always asked to write in 800-word takes, they will end up thinking in 800-word takes;

Interviews for daily newspapers are rarely long; interviews for magazines at Harper’s tended to last an hour to an hour and a half. The interviews for this book were different; they might last three or four hours.

Very early on I went to visit Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles. We had known each other in college, and I had given him an early briefing in 1964,

The one member of the Administration who had deigned to enter pluralistic politics was the President himself.

“Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War.

Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.”

I did not see Kennedy as a romantic figure (although, later, I saw his younger brother Robert that way)

Because I saw him as cool and skeptical it always struck me that he would not have sent combat troops into Vietnam.

The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China.

In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

That small group of policy makers came from the great banking houses and law firms of New York and Boston. They knew one another, were linked to one another, and they guided America’s national security in those years, men like James Forrestal, Douglas Dillon and Allen Dulles. Stimson and then Marshall had been their great leaders, and although they had worked for Roosevelt, it was not because of him, but almost in spite of him; they had been linked more to Stimson than to Roosevelt.

a sense that Acheson felt that much of Truman’s greatness came from his willingness to listen to Acheson.

Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security). Averell had, after all—there was no getting around it—run for public office and won; he seemed too much the politician and too much the intriguer for them. Perhaps not as bad as Roosevelt, but not exactly one of them, either.

Acheson was a link too, but somehow Acheson had been scarred during the McCarthy era; it was not so much that he had done anything wrong as the fact that he had been forced to defend himself. By that very defense, by all the publicity, he had become controversial. He had been in print too often, it was somehow indiscreet of Dean to be attacked by McCarthy.

When Kennedy asked Lovett what the financial community thought of John Kenneth Galbraith’s economic views (Galbraith being one of the President’s earliest and strongest supporters), he was much amused when Lovett answered that the community thought he was a fine novelist.

a young fellow who had been a particular favorite of General Marshall’s—Dean Rusk over at Rockefeller. He handled himself there very well, said Lovett. The atmosphere was not unlike a college faculty, but Rusk had stayed above it, handled the various cliques very well.

It was a section of the party not only dubious of him but staunchly loyal to Adlai Stevenson after those two gallant and exhilarating defeats.

That very exhilaration had left the Kennedys, particularly Robert Kennedy, with a vague suspicion that liberals would rather lose gallantly than win pragmatically, that they valued the irony and charm of Stevenson’s election-night concessions more than they valued the power and patronage of victory.

Chester Bowles’s name hung over the conversation. Kennedy thought he had a very good chance at the nomination, certainly better than Symington, Humphrey or Johnson,

Dilworth made the mistake of declaring that Red China ought to be admitted to the United Nations, a statement which contributed mightily to his defeat in Pennsylvania. Dilworth’s brand of candor was somewhat different from the Kennedy candor, which was private rather than public,

Bowles’s standing with the party’s liberals was not diminished after his setback, since defeat was never a liberal dishonor; if anything, it was more of a decoration.

Kennedy approached Wofford both for his own availability and as a bridge to Bowles. There was a major staff position open for Wofford, Kennedy said, as a speech writer right next to Sorensen himself. Their meetings were impressive; Kennedy, Wofford later reflected, knew exactly which issues would touch Wofford.

He had an old and abiding loyalty to Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had fought so many battles all those lonely years—for civil rights, for foreign aid, for disarmament—but as a professional politician he was able to look coolly at the field and decide that Kennedy might be able to go all the way and beat Nixon, while Humphrey might fall by the wayside.

Now it was done: Chester Bowles would become Jack Kennedy’s chief foreign policy adviser.

He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy.

Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

more than most liberal politicians, his internationalism seemed to be a reflection and an extension of his domestic political ideals.

(largely thanks to Lyndon Johnson, who did not so much want to put Kennedy on the committee as he wanted to keep Estes Kefauver off,

Arthur Krock, stomped out of his office, smoke belching from his cigar, saying, “Well, I may be getting old, and I may be getting senile, but at least I don’t fall in love with young boys like Walter Lippmann.”

running against impossible odds in 1952, at the height of the Korean War and McCarthyism, with the party already decaying from the scandals of twenty years in power.

If Jack and Robert Kennedy seemed to symbolize style in politics, much of that was derived directly from Stevenson.

During the Cuban missile crisis, when Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, both good friends of the President’s and disciples of Acheson’s, wrote a semiofficial account of the events, they quoted one high official as saying that Stevenson wanted a Munich. The article was published in the Saturday Evening Post and there was a great storm over those particular quotes; most Washington insiders suspected McGeorge Bundy, the sharp, caustic Bundy who had so frequently been critical of Stevenson. Only later, after the death of Kennedy and the end of the Saturday Evening Post, did one of the editors admit that the statements had come from Kennedy himself and that he had insisted that they be published.

as Stevenson described his meeting with the President, it soon became clear why he was so enthusiastic: as soon as he had walked into Johnson’s office, the latter had risen, pointed to his chair and said, “Governor, by all rights you should be sitting in this chair and in this office.”)

(Later, when Fulbright visited Palm Beach, Joe Kennedy took him aside and said it was a great shame about his not becoming Secretary of State, but the NAACP, the Zionists and the liberals had all screamed bloody murder about the appointment.

Six years later, when there were several hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam, and Fulbright had become the Good Fulbright, he was at a cocktail party where he ran into Joe Rauh, the ADA man who had opposed his nomination as Secretary of State and had helped muster lobby groups against him. “Joe,” asked Fulbright, “do you admit now that I was right on my stand on civil rights so that I could stay up here and do this?” Rauh, somewhat stunned by the statement, could only mumble that it was an unanswerable proposition, “to do wrong in order to do right.”

So Stevenson, unable to attain what he wanted, had retained, if nothing else, something of a veto power. This he used against McGeorge Bundy, brilliant intellectual, great liberal, who had voted for Tom Dewey over Harry Truman, and twice for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. If there were limits to Bundy’s liberalism, there were also limits to Stevenson’s tolerance.

Dean Rusk. He was everybody’s number two.

Only one person, McGeorge Bundy, was strongly opposed to Rusk.

(he holds his job at the Foundation not so much through the courtesy of the Rockefellers as through John Foster Dulles, who got it for him).

(not surprisingly, the best article ever to appear about him was written late in his second term, by Milton Viorst in Esquire under the title “Incidentally, Who Is Dean Rusk?”).

“We couldn’t communicate. If the idea of my being Secretary of State ever entered his mind, it’s dead now. We couldn’t talk to each other. It’s all over.” “I doubt it,” said Bowles. They were both right.