The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam Read Free Book Online Page A

Kennedy asked what makes a good Secretary of Defense.“A healthy skepticism, a sense of values, and a sense of priorities,” Lovett answered. “That and a good President, and he can’t do much damage. Not that he can do much good, but he can’t do that much damage.” They discussed men of intelligence, men of hardware, men of the financial community, men of driving ambition. The best of them, said Lovett, was this young man at Ford, Robert McNamara, the best of the new group. The others, people like Tom Gates, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, were getting older. Lovett had worked with McNamara in government during the war, and he had been terrific: disciplined, with a great analytical ability, a great hunger for facts.
    Then the meeting was over, and the young man guided the older man through the throng of waiting reporters, saying that he had asked Mr. Lovett to come down and have lunch with him to see if he could get him for State, Defense or Treasury. (That night Lovett’s old friend Arthur Krock, the New York Times columnist, called him to ask, “My God, is there any truth in it—it’s going all over town,” and Lovett answered, “Oh, I think he was just trying to make me feel good.”) Since it was cold and there were no taxis, Kennedy gave Lovett his own car and driver, having failed to give him State, Defense or Treasury.

 

     
    Chapter Two
     
    If lower Manhattan Island and State Street, Boston, and the rest of the world of both Louis Auchincloss and John O’Hara read of the Kennedy-Lovett meeting with considerable reassurance, the first sign that the man in the White House, though young, Irish and a Democrat, knew his shortcomings and that they could deal with him, then there was at least one man who learned of it with a haunting sense of confirmation of what he had always feared. This was not someone who had run against Kennedy or opposed his nomination, but curiously enough someone who had worked very hard for Kennedy’s election and was technically his chief foreign policy adviser—Chester Bowles of Connecticut, liberal icon, whom Kennedy had so assiduously cultivated and pursued just one year earlier, and whose views on all matters of foreign policy Kennedy had seemed, at that moment, to share with such great devotion. Now Bowles watched from a distance what was happening as Kennedy prepared to take office; his phone did not ring often, and what he knew about the Kennedy-Lovett meeting was largely what he read in the New York Times. He sensed that the young President-elect was flashing his very considerable charms at Robert Lovett, just as he once had done with Bowles himself.
    It had been very different in 1959. Then Jack Kennedy had readied himself to run in his party’s primaries, and he had done this as a good liberal Democrat. He was by no means the most obvious of liberals, being closer to the center of his party, with lines put to both the main wings. He knew from the start that if he was going to win the nomination, his problem would not be with the professional politicians, but with the liberal-intellectual wing of the party, influential far beyond its numbers because of its relations with, and impact upon, the media. 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. That feeling of suspicion was by no means unreciprocated; the New Republic liberals were well aware who had fought their wars during the fifties and who had sat on the sidelines.
    The true liberals, those derivative of Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, were at least as uneasy about Kennedy as he was about them, sensing that he