In later years, however, Kennedy rejoiced that he had lost in Chicago. Had he won the nomination for Vice-President in , he might never have won the nomination for President in This Democratic success, however, hastened the division of the party into what James MacGregor Burns has called its presidential and congressional wings. In the years after Stevenson had sponsored a small brain trust organized by Thomas K. The Finletter group now became the basis for a new body, the Democratic Advisory Council, set up after the election by Paul Butler.
The DAC, as an agency of the presidential party, was regarded with mistrust by the congressional leaders. Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn both declined to join. Humphrey became a member, however, and so eventually did Kennedy, though Kennedy took no very active part. The DAC pursued an aggressive line both in attacking the Eisenhower administration and in developing new Democratic policies.
The congressional party was inclined to work with Eisenhower and accept the national mood of moderation. In the meantime, battle lines began to form for Early in Lyndon Johnson wrote me that he understood I was critical of the congressional leadership and suggested that I call on him when next in Washington.
Johnson was affable and expansive. He began by saying that he was a sick man his heart attack had taken place in with no political future of his own.
His main desire, he said, was to live. He had no interest at all in the presidential nomination. He did not even mean to run again for the Senate. He planned only to serve out his present term. Being entirely disinterested, he wanted only to do the best he could for his party and his nation in the three, or two, or one year remaining to him. He then poured out his stream-of-consciousness on the problems of leadership in the Senate.
Saying, I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with, he ran down the list of forty-eight Democratic Senators, with a brilliant thumbnail sketch of each—strength and weakness, openness to persuasion, capacity for teamwork, prejudices, vices.
In some cases he amplified the sketch by devastating dashes of mimicry. My notes report him highly favorable about Kennedy, but no special excitement. He went on to express his annoyance over the unwillingness of the organized liberals to accept him as one of their own.
Look at Americans for Democratic Action, he said. They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Thereupon he pulled out of a desk drawer a comparison of his voting record with those of five liberal Republicans on fifteen issues. On each, he had voted on the liberal side and Case on the conservative. And yet they look on me as some kind of southern bigot.
He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism. He talked for an hour and a half without interruption. I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership; but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind.
When he finally paused, I found I had little to say. It was my first exposure to the Johnson treatment, and I found him a good deal more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected.
After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion. Later I gathered that this was part of a broader Johnson campaign to explain himself to the liberal intellectuals. In a few weeks, when Kenneth Galbraith visited him on his Texas ranch, Johnson told him, I had a good meeting with Schlesinger. I found him quite easy to get along with.
The only trouble was that he talked too much. As for Kennedy, he too was having his problems with the liberal intellectuals. The Chicago convention had made him a national figure; and it was increasingly clear that the vice-presidential nomination would not satisfy him the next time around. In he came up for his second term in the Senate. His hope was to return to Washington by the largest possible vote in order to lay the basis for a presidential try two years later. His wife later remembered it as the hardest campaign ever.
He won by , votes, the greatest margin up to that point in Massachusetts history. Many liberal Democrats regarded him with suspicion. In part this went back to the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early fifties. Kennedy at first had not taken the Wisconsin Senator very seriously.
But by it was impossible to dismiss McCarthy any longer. When I mentioned him from time to time those days to Kennedy, he referred to the McCarthy Committee with articulate dislike but showed no interest in saying so publicly.
He put this to me on political grounds— Hell, half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero —and the political grounds were, I suppose, compelling. Fulbright, showed much courage about McCarthy. One might have hoped that Kennedy, another Irish Catholic Senator and a genuine war hero, would have seen himself in a particularly strong position to challenge McCarthyism.
But there were perhaps deeper reasons for his lack of involvement. His father liked McCarthy and invited him once or twice to Hyannis Port. The Wisconsin Senator could be engaging in the Victor McClaglen manner, and the Ambassador even perhaps saw the campaign against this fighting Irishman as one more outlet for the anti-Catholic sentiment which had so long oppressed the Irish-American community.
This diffidence was no doubt related to his exasperation with the ideological liberals of the day and what he regarded as their emotional approach to public questions. Liberalism for him still existed mainly in terms of social and economic programs. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things. It was always a puzzle why the liberals took so long to forgive him when they forgave Hubert Humphrey immediately for his sponsorship of a bill to outlaw the Communist Party—an act of appeasement in excess of anything undertaken by Kennedy.
Certainly, in spite of the whispering campaign against him in , Kennedy never gave the slightest support to McCarthyism. Bohlen as ambassador to Russia and of James B. Conant to West Germany. And, if he kept out of the public debate, he did not hesitate to intervene privately. About this time John Fox of the Boston Post, who had backed Kennedy for the Senate in , scheduled a series of articles exposing the reds at Harvard.
Hearing about the series, Kennedy protested on my behalf. He probably suspects me of being a Communist now. Roosevelt was the conscience of the liberal community, and her reproach carried force: I feel that I would hesitate to place the difficult decisions that the next President will have to make with someone who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it.
I once suggested to Kennedy that he had paid a heavy price for giving his book that title. And his candidacy touched uglier strains in the liberal syndrome, especially the susceptibility to anti-Catholicism. Most liberals, in addition, already had their hero in Stevenson and continued to hope that he might change his mind about not running in If Stevenson remained unavailable, then Humphrey, by temperament, record and rhetoric, better fitted liberal specifications than Kennedy.
The Minnesota Senator was a man of exuberance, charm, courage and political skill, who had given unstintingly of himself to liberal causes, and his inexhaustible flow of language did not conceal his sharp intelligence and discriminating judgment. Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditioned reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry.
He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his sleeve. To those who knew Kennedy in Massachusetts the liberal mistrust seemed unfair and unwarranted. My main interest in these years, like that of Kenneth Galbraith, was in having a liberal nominee in , whether Kennedy, Humphrey or, if he became a candidate, Stevenson. Kennedy and Humphrey seemed likely to be the active contenders; and we feared that, if the rivalry between them turned into enmity, it might divide the liberals and permit a conservative to seize the prize.
When I wrote Kennedy to this effect in the spring of , he replied, I agree with you, of course, on the principle of avoiding any fratricidal blood-letting between Hubert and myself. Galbraith and I talked the problem over in the winter of —60 and hoped that we might somehow serve as moderating influences in what threatened to become a bitter battle within the liberal family.
But, though Humphrey was an old friend and a man we greatly admired, Kennedy, of course, was our Harvard and Massachusetts Senator. More important, we found ourselves, as we saw more of him, bound to him by increasingly strong ties of affection and respect. Kennedy himself was now prepared to go some distance to propitiate the liberals.
After he made a special effort with issues in the civil liberties field, such as getting rid of the loyalty oath in the National Defense Education Act, and he counted on the strong liberalism of his senatorial record to overcome doubts.
He was unwilling, however, to engage in retrospective denunciations of McCarthy; it seemed to him undignified. This reluctance only confirmed his critics in their view that he lacked moral sensitivity. Galbraith and I resolved to do what we could to combat the continuing mistrust. We also tried to help recruit people for his growing brain trust, though we had little or nothing to do with its actual operations. One day in Kennedy phoned that he was feeling increasingly guilty about constantly imposing on Galbraith and Seymour Harris, the other politically concerned Harvard economist, for economic counsel and wondered whether there was not an economist in Massachusetts who could devote steady time to helping him.
I consulted with Galbraith and Harris. Our first choice, Carl Kaysen of Harvard, was about to leave for a year in Greece. We then thought of Kermit Gordon, an able economist at Williams.
Gordon had had government experience—I had known him first fifteen years before in the OSS—and I was confident that he and Kennedy would be temperamentally congenial.
But when I called Gordon he was distinctly cool. Finally he said that I could mention his name to Kennedy so long as I made it absolutely clear that he was not for Kennedy in but for Stevenson. When I reported this to Kennedy, he sighed and said he would try Gordon anyway; but the negotiations came to nothing at that time.
There was also concern about the lack of relationship between Kennedy and the reform movement in New York. Here Mrs. Finletter, who was then using his mordant executive capacities in a brave effort to hold together the divergent and adolescent energies of New York reform, was obviously a key figure.
Kennedy and Finletter had a talk in the early spring, but it was followed by trivial misunderstandings. The Galbraiths were along, and the McGeorge Bundys and one or two others. Finletter and Kennedy were both rational and sardonic men, and they got along well.
Finletter thereafter succeeded to some degree in tempering the anti-Kennedy reflexes of the New York reformers. What stands out from the evening, however, was a discussion of the confirmation of Lewis Strauss, whose name President Eisenhower had recently submitted to the Senate as Secretary of Commerce. It was politically essential for Kennedy, as a liberal Democratic presidential aspirant, to vote against Strauss.
But, though he had no use for him, he had a belief, with which I sympathized, that any President was entitled to considerable discretion in naming his cabinet. My impression was that Kennedy was looking for a respectable reason to oppose Strauss. At this point, Mac Bundy, whose ancestral Republicanism had survived Dewey and Eisenhower, suddenly spoke up for rejecting the nomination. Probably also Kennedy then began to realize that Mac Bundy, in spite of the certified propriety of his background, had an audacious mind and was quite capable of contempt for orthodoxy.
One morning in mid-July , as I was sitting in the sun at Wellfleet, Kennedy called from Hyannis Port to invite me for dinner that night. This was my first visit to the Kennedy compound; and, though I had met Jacqueline Kennedy several times since their marriage, it was really the first occasion for a leisurely chat with her. My wife was not able to come, and there were only the three of us. Jacqueline was reading Remembrance of Things Past when I arrived.
In the course of the evening I realized that, underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment. As for Kennedy, our relations had hitherto been more political than personal; this was the freest, as well as the longest, talk I had ever had with him. I was struck by the impersonality of his attitudes and his readiness to see the views and interests of others.
I was also a little surprised by the animation and humor of his assessment of people and situations. I now began to understand that the easy and casual wit, turned incisively and impartially on himself and his rivals, was one of his most beguiling qualities, as those who had known him longer had understood for years. Kennedy was fairly optimistic over his presidential chances. He did not think that Humphrey could win the nomination.
He supposed that Lyndon Johnson would edge out Symington, and that Johnson could not win either. And he said that he would have to go into the primaries in order to maintain his momentum. His greatest need, he thought, was to give his campaign identity—to distinguish his appeal from that of his rivals and suggest that he could bring the country something no one else could.
He observed in this connection that he had been stimulated by a memorandum I had written and Finletter had circulated called The Shape of National Politics To Come. This memorandum had argued that the Eisenhower epoch, the period of passivity and acquiescence in our national life, was drawing to its natural end.
This thesis was an extension of the cyclical account of American politics which my father had set forth twenty years earlier in an essay called Tides of National Politics. He had forecast in that the then dominant liberal impulse would taper off around The ensuing conservative period, if the rhythm held, could be expected to run its course about — Invoking this analysis, I had gone on to propose that the approaching liberal epoch would resemble the Progressive period of the turn of the century more than it would the New Deal.
The New Deal had taken its special character from the fight against depression; but the Progressive revolt grew out of spiritual rather than economic discontent; and this seemed the situation in I hazarded the guess that a revival of a new sense of the public interest will be central to the new period.
Aspects of this argument—the belief that we stood on the threshold of a new political era, and that vigorous public leadership would be the essence of the next phase—evidently corresponded to things which Kennedy had for some time felt himself. He was caustic about Eisenhower: I could understand it if he played golf all the time with old Army friends, but no man is less loyal to his old friends than Eisenhower.
He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since He talked too about his senatorial concern with labor. He was fascinated by Jimmy Hoffa, whom he described as a man of great vitality and intelligence and, in consequence, of great danger to American society.
The only man in the labor movement who could deal with Hoffa, he said, was Walter Reuther; but the Republicans on the Senate Labor Committee were anxious to use Hoffa to beat Reuther. He spoke with scorn of Senators Capehart, Curtis and Mundt, who seemed, he thought, to care about labor corruption mostly as a way of compromising the trade union movement; they really detested the incorruptible Reuther far more than they did Hoffa.
However, Barry Goldwater, he said, was a man of decency and character. He said that after the war fevers associated with malaria had produced a malfunctioning of the adrenal glands, but that this had been brought under control. My Harvard classmate Theodore H. White has described it vividly in The Making of the President: ; and I can only add a few notes from the outside.
Stevenson was seizing every opportunity to insist that he was not a candidate, though he was clearly the favorite of some politicians and many voters. As for Johnson, Kennedy told me in July that he had recently encountered the Majority Leader, who put out his hand, looked him straight in the eye and said, As you know, John, I am not a candidate.
This seemed certain to change. Six months later, Philip L. He predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the convention with sizable blocs of delegates—about for Kennedy, perhaps for Johnson. But Kennedy would not quite make it, and after one or two ballots Stevenson would emerge as the northern candidate. Then the convention would settle down to a struggle between Johnson and Stevenson. In this fight, the northern pros—Truman, Daley, Lawrence, De Sapio—would go for Johnson partly because, Graham said, they disliked Stevenson and partly because they did not think he could be elected.
This talk took place in December A few days later a hand-written letter arrived from Kennedy in Palm Beach. He said he was coming to Cambridge on January 2, , to do a television program with Mrs. This had been arranged by Galbraith with considerable ingenuity and effort in order to advance the rapprochement with the liberals.
I shall be finished around or 8, he wrote. Is there any chance you both might be free that evening for dinner? This turned out to be the day that he announced his candidacy. The Galbraiths joined us in an upstairs room in the old restaurant. I noted of Kennedy later, He was, as usual, spirited and charming, but he also conveyed an intangible feeling of depression.
I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how this circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.
The religious issue, he said, left him no choice but to go into Wisconsin. It would be a gamble, but his only hope of forcing himself on the party leaders was to carry the primaries. A victory over Humphrey in Wisconsin would make his case irresistible.
When someone asked what he considered the main source of his appeal, he said that obviously there were no important differences between Humphrey and himself on issues; it came down to a difference in personalities. Hubert is too intense for the present mood of the people.
He gets people too excited, too worked up. He went on ironically, What they want today is a more boring, monotonous personality, like me. He added that he anticipated that Symington would emerge as the safe-and-sane candidate of the party professionals. A week later, I chanced to see Johnson in Washington. He too was gloomy about election prospects. He had recently visited a number of states and did not think the Democrats could carry any of them. The Democratic liberals in the Senate had put over the picture of a divided party with a militant wing of wasters, spenders and wild men.
The country wants to be comfortable. He again defended his strategy as leader. Congress is not the action arm of the government, and the things we can do are limited. We sought the best and did the possible. He brushed off talk about his own candidacy, implying that he had not made up his mind. Then he said, I would support Stevenson with enthusiasm. I would support Humphrey with enthusiasm. After a long pause, he added, I would support Kennedy. I would support Symington.
After the Jefferson-Jackson dinner that night, I drove back to the hotel with Sam Rayburn, who reminisced about the House with great charm. He had begun his service in Congress, he noted, before Jack Kennedy was born, and forty-seven of his boys —men who had served with him in the House—were now in the Senate.
He said that the one of whom he had the lowest opinion was Nixon. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Release 03 June Search for a digital library with this title Search by city, ZIP code, or library name Learn more about precise location detection. View more libraries A Thousand Days. Copy and paste the code into your website. Account Options Sign in. Try the new Google Books.
Check out the new look and enjoy easier access to your favorite features. Try it now. No thanks. View eBook. A Thousand Days : John F. Kennedy in the White House. Arthur Meier Schlesinger. Schlesinger Jr.
Kennedy throughout his presidency -- from the long and grueling campaign to Kennedy's tragic and unexpected assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. In A Thousand Days , Schlesinger combines intimate knowledge as one of President Kennedy's inner circle with sweeping research and historic context to provide a look at one of the most legendary presidential administrations in American history.
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