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

was too cool, too hard-line in his foreign policies, too devoid of commitment. To them, Kennedy seemed so much the new breed, so devoted to rationalism instead of belief that even his first biographer, James MacGregor Burns, had angered the Kennedy Senate staff, particularly Theodore Sorensen, by suggesting that Kennedy would never risk political defeat on behalf of a great moral issue. They felt he had made too many accommodations in deference to the Cold War climate and adjusted his beliefs; he in turn thought them more than a little naÏve and unrealistic about what was then considered a real Soviet threat. As a young congressman, then very much his father’s son, he had been capable of being pleased by Richard Nixon’s defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, a race marked by the shabbiest kind of Red-baiting. In Massachusetts, where McCarthyism was a particularly emotional issue, dividing the Catholic mass and the intellectual elite, he had carefully avoided taking a stand. He was in the hospital in December 1954 at the time of the Senate vote on McCarthy, but it was said that he had intended to vote for the censure; his evasion of the issue, however, combined with liberal suspicion of both his father’s wartime beliefs and his own Catholicism, did not endear him to traditional liberals. As he moved toward becoming a presidential candidate, he had decided first to ease liberal doubts. He wanted Stevenson’s support, but that would not come. Since he sensed that Stevenson, though playing Hamlet, rather badly wanted the nomination, Kennedy moved after the next-best thing, the support of Chester Bowles, a hero of the liberal left.
    Bowles seemed so attractive a figure that even in 1958, when Kennedy talked with friends about his own future and candidly admitted that he planned to run for the Presidency, 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, he said, citing the political liabilities of each. At the moment it looked very good, he confided, and the only real problem was that 1958 was likely to be a good Democratic year and might produce new candidates who could become instant national figures. Two men in particular might pose a real threat: Richardson Dilworth of Pennsylvania, an aristocratic liberal, and Bowles, then contending for a Connecticut Senate seat. Both, he said, could carry the New Republic crowd, the intellectuals and the liberals, and they had as good or better a claim on the constituency which he sought; but unlike him they were Protestants, and thus might serve the purpose of his enemies, many of whom were uneasy about his Catholicism. It was a revealing conversation, about the way he saw the road to the nomination, and the cold and tough-minded appraisal of the problems he faced.
    The twin threat did not materialize. Bowles was unsuccessful in securing the nomination; he was not particularly good at dealing with professional politicians like John Bailey, head of the Connecticut party, who was deeply committed to Kennedy, and 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, in that he would freely admit in private what he could not afford to admit publicly (such as telling Bowles and Stevenson after the election that he agreed completely with their positions, that our own policy on China was irrational, but that he could not talk about it then—perhaps in the second term).
    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 had gone after Bowles early in 1959, but first he romanced one of Bowles’s chief aides, Harris