Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek Read Free Book Online

“fencing” with each other about “political things. And I always thought Lyndon was arguing with him or being rude, but Jack was sort of parrying with such amusement, and he always sort of bested him. Lyndon would give a big elephant-like grunt,” grudgingly conceding that he was the subordinate in the relationship.
    Kennedy’s determination not to be the captive of any individual or set of advisers partly rested on a reading of Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume The Age of Roosevelt , a reconstruction of the first years of FDR’s presidency. Schlesinger’s history provided Kennedy with a useful model of how to manage advisers. Roosevelt had encouraged competition for influence among his closest associates. It was his way of compelling them to turn to him for final decisions on all the big issues of his presidency. Kennedy intended to do the same.
    Moreover, he was determined to be an activist president, a chief executive who placed “himself in the very thick of the fight,” a president unlike Harding and Coolidge in the twenties and now Eisenhower. Ike’s contemporary reputation for passivity was overdrawn, but it was the conventional wisdom of 1960, and it was the sort of leadership that Kennedy believed current sentiment wished him to shun. The moment demanded a president more like the two Roosevelts and Truman—someone who would risk “incurring” the “momentary displeasure of the public” by exercising “the fullest powers of the office—all that are specified and some that are not.” It was the picture of a president less interested in domestic affairs and day-to-day battles with congressmen and senators to pass legislation than in formulating and executing foreign policies to protect the nation from external threats and find ways to assure immediate and long-term peace.
    But whatever Kennedy could take away from the experience of the Roosevelts and Truman to make himself a successful president, it was clear to him that there were no hard and fast formulas for presidential effectiveness, and that circumstances and his own temperament would determine his fate. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian who had designed Truman’s containment policy, believed that Kennedy’s personal attributes set him apart from other political leaders and gave him the wherewithal to be a great president. Kennan, who agreed to become ambassador to Yugoslavia after discussing the job with Kennedy, described him as “the best listener I’ve ever seen in high position anywhere.” He was not a poseur or classic political glad-hander who loved to hear the sound of his own voice and craved the adulation that was expected in response. “He asked questions modestly, sensibly,” Kennan recalled, “and listened very patiently to what you had to say and did not try, then, to tell jokes, to be laughed at, or to utter sententious statements himself to be admired.” He did not “monopolize” a conversation but tried to learn from it—“a rare thing among men who have arisen to very exalted positions.”
    At the start of his term, Kennedy believed that most of those who would serve with him could make a significant difference in shaping his administration. He was determined to seek out the best and the brightest for the top White House jobs and then talk them into taking on the sometimes thankless work that carried risks to their reputations and peace of mind—not to mention the diminished public pay compared with what they could earn in the private sector. But to Kennedy and the people he brought into his administration, public service was a calling that gave them satisfaction and served the national well-being—at least that was the ideal that drew others to work for a president they believed was about to make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of Americans and people everywhere.
    Yet the strengths that Kennedy personally and the men advising him brought to the presidency provided no guarantee of a