I saw the President soon after he heard that Diem and Nhu were dead. He was sombre and shaken. I had not seen him so shaken since the Bay of Pigs. No doubt he realized that Vietnam was his great failure in foreign policy and that he had never really given it his full attention.
There are, of course, plenty of white hats. It seems to help greatly in these books to be a friend of the author's. Adlai Stevenson is an ever-valiant fighter, winning commendation from the President every chapter or two. Of Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger writes that "I do not know of any case in contemporary American politics where there has seemed to me a greater discrepancy between the myth and the man." Averell Harriman is the lone guerilla fighter standing up for truth in the State Department.
Many of the friends Schlesinger writes about came from Harvard, and this book is going to be gobbled up by every Cantabridgian who wonders just what happened to the people who disappeared in 1961. Schlesinger includes detailed accounts of what many of them were doing (there are times when J. Kenneth Galbraith seems almost to be running the government singlehandedly), and there are bits of information about the less exalted that illustrate just how closely Washington was tied to Cambridge for those three years. When, at the time of the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Revolutionary Council needed a manifesto of its intention for a non-Communist Cuba, John Planck, former professor of Government, and William Barnes, assistant dean of the Law School, were asked to provide suggestions. When a dangerously hard-line Berlin policy seemed to be taking hold in 1961, a Harvard all-star team moved in. On the diplomatic front, "Abram Chayes, Carl Kaysen and I got together to express a collective concern" in the form of a memorandum to the President. Meanwhile "McGeorge Bundy and Kissinger were bringing the President comparable questions about the state of military planning." So many Faculty members were called to Washington that Kennedy was often reluctant to appoint a professor because "we've taken so many Harvard men that it's damn hard to appoint another."
Schlesinger dismisses the campus left very briefly. Many students will feel he does not give the radicals credit for being ahead of the administration occasionally, particularly on civil rights. He also uses H. Stuart Hughes as a leftist straw man and has quite clearly removed some Hughes statements from their context. If he is dissatisfied with his role in the text, however, Hughes can be consoled by a moral victory in the index: he gets seven references to five for Edward Kennedy.
It is in confronting John Kennedy that Schlesinger's reconstruction seems to grow a bit wobbly. Though he is critical at times, his basic tone is apologetic. If Kennedy had followed his inclinations at the time of the Bay of Pigs, if he had devoted his full energy to Vietnam, his major foreign problems might have been solved. Then, there is the apparently unconfrontable fact of his death--what might not have followed in that unforgettable second term with its Decade of Development for the third world and its war on poverty at home. And there it is: we don't know. Every time Schlesinger seems to be bringing himself to voice a major criticism of the President himself, rather than his policies, something intervenes, and we are awash in Mrs. Kennedy reading "I Have a Rendezvous With Death," and the Presidential foresights of doom, and the drums rolling, and the procession marching up Capitol Hill.
Theodore Sorensen doesn't even try to stay afloat. The faults of his book are as obvious as the virtues of Schlesinger's and they have been freely jumped on by reviewers for a month now. Sorensen's virtues are less obvious.
Kennedy has its virtues, but they are well hidden. It is, to begin with, not terribly well written. Sorensen simply isn't the narrator Schlesinger is; stories that are well-told in one book come out flat in the other. Parts of the Sorensen book, too, sound embarrassingly like Kennedy speeches:
The three marble monuments and memorials--to the men who forged in the Presidency an instrument of power and compassion--remind a grateful nation that it has been blessed in its gravest trials with its greatest leaders. In the distance, the dome of the Capitol covers a milieu of wisdom and folly, Presidential ambitions and antagonisms, political ideals and ideologies.
It is also disappointingly uncritical. Sorensen says at one point that this is his substitute for the book Kennedy would have written; at another he apologizes for appearing biased by saying "My only obligation is to the truth about Kennedy."
But he never gets at that truth. Instead, Superman too frequently appears to be in charge of the government. When "a mistake" is made (anything from the Bay of Pigs to the cancellation of the White House's subscription to the Herald-Tribune) the implication is always that all the information wasn't considered, and that if they had been, everything would have worked out for the best.
Ersatz Perfection
No man is supposed to be a hero to his valet, and Sorensen was Kennedy's intellectual valet too long for his praise to seem altogether honest. Richard Neustadt has called the book a lawyer's brief for the Kennedy Presidency, but no good lawyer would have written it this way, as Kennedy himself knew. Schlesinger shows him reading Eisenhower's memoirs and clucking that Ike apparently hadn't made any mistakes, and saying he wasn't about to write his own book that way.
What is interesting about Kennedy is what it reflects about the topic of Sorensen's last book, Decision-Making in the White House. The last half is arranged in chapters that discuss the development of issues--the economy, civil rights, the alliance--from the beginning to the end of the administration. These chapters leave one with two impressions: first that the process of Presidential decision-making is frequently very hectic, and second that the President, and especially the White House staff, is ordinarily very isolated.
The book makes the President's reactions appear to be disorganized, often emotional, provoked by crises. Only when the crowds massed in the streets of Birmingham and Bull Connor beat them back did Kennedy begin to think of a strong civil rights bill, according to Sorensen. He makes Kennedy's speech on the enrollment of two Negroes at the University of Alabama appear the most important civil rights development of the administration, and he never recognizes those critics of the 1964 civil rights act who felt that it didn't go far enough. Polls showed that Kennedy was losing votes over the issue, and this proves to Sorensen's satisfaction that a strong stand had been taken.