President Kennedy's weekend shake-up of his administration is "definitely an attempt to turn the StateDepartment into an agency of the Presidency," Charles R. Cherington, professor of Government, said last nigh in a statement typifying Faculty analysis of the situation, both on and off the record.
Washington statements over the past months by such officials as Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy have supported the theory that State cannot have as much independence as other departments, and the matter is also discussed in the reports of Sen. Harry M. Jackson's Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery. Kennedy has already "got his stooge in there--Rusk--and now he's moving in his assistants," Cherington said.
At the same time, it seems likely that some of these assistants, particularly Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 and Bundy, are more firmly entrenched in the White House with the President than ever. The key factor determining who went and who stayed was whether a man was a policy "originator" or a policy "judger," Faculty members suggested.
Bundy, for example, is "quite aware that he could complicate matters" by originating policy--a State Department function--while working in a White House office, one Faculty man recently back from Washington explained. But until two days ago, Kennedy also had on his White House staff Richard N. Goodwin, who was actively formulating policy for Latin America.
'Originators' Go to State Dept.
Goodwin is now Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, and this sort of switch is analyzed as reflecting the President's desire to clarify the lines of responsibility in foreign policy, putting all the originators under Rusk and judgers under the White House, at the same time as he pulls the two groups closer together.
The exception to the "originator-judger" distinction is Chester Bowles, considered primarily an idea man, who was moved out of the regular State hierarchy. But at least one Faculty member, Robert G. McCloskey, professor of Government, cast grave doubt on the assumption that Bowlee had been moved in anywhere. "There's no real 'high position'", he said, referring to the vague terms of the official statements about where Bowles was to go.
Some of the transfers can be viewed as simple reflections of Kennedy's original intontions. Moving Walt W. Rostow, whom McCloskey described as another "idea man," over to the State Department fits in with the President's early plans for him in that part of the Government, for example.
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