[A Thousand Days, a best selling history of the Kennedy administration by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. '38, chronicles three years of close contact between Washington an the academic world, particularly Harvard. Mr. Schlesinger and the Houghton Miffilin Publishing Company have kindly allowed us to print the following excepts from the book. Each deals with a particular man or group of men associated with Harvard who had some inyuence on the political history of the Kennedy years.-- The Editors]

Richard E. Neustadt

Clark Clifford, [asked by Kennedy to analyze the problems of taking over the executive], discussed transition problems with an associate from Truman days, Richard Neustadt, a political scientist who had worked in the Bureau of the Budget and later as a Special Assistant in the White House before becoming a professor at Columbia. Neustadt shared Clifford's concern about the interregnum. Both remembered all too well the lost weeks after the triumph of 1948 when Truman went off to Key West and, in his absence, congressional leaders made bargains with interest groups which deprived him of control over his own legislative program. To his practical experience in government Neustadt added an acute and original approach to the theory of government organization. His interest in the facts rather than the forms of power had already done much to emancipate the study of public administration from its faith in organization charts as descriptions of operating reality. He had summed up his viewpoint in a searching essay on the politics of leadership called Presidential Power, published the previous April.

By the time Clifford spoke to him, however, Neustadt had already been tapped by Senator Henry Jackson, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, for a post-election assignment. Jackson, who was also chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations, was alarmed by testimony indicating that Eisenhower, as his bequest to the nation, might propose change in the organization of the Presidency, especially the institution of a team of grand viziers to be called the First Secretary and the Executive Assistant to the President. In order to combat such proposals, Jackson had asked Neustadt to prepare a memorandum on the problems of change-over for the new President.

Neustadt completed "Organizing the Transition" by September 15. Three days later Jackson took him out to Georgetown to meet Kennedy. Kennedy, sitting in his garden, flipped through the twenty pages of the memorandum in his usual manner. He liked it at once, and it is easy to see why. The presentation was crisp and methodical with a numbered list of specific problems and actions. It began by questioning campaign talk about "another Hundred Days" -- a warning which must have inspired Kennedy, embarrassed by rhetorical excess, with confidence in the sobriety of the memorandum's author. It constantly stressed the importance of flexibility. The President's requirements for his personal staff, for example, "cannot be fully understood, or met until they have been experienced." Kennedy moreover, was probably pleased to have a professor get into the act. At any rate, he told Neustadt to elaborate his argument in further memoranda. "When you finish," he said, "I want you to get the material back directly to me. I don't want you to send it to anybody else." Neustadt asked, "How do you want me to relate to Clark Clifford?" Kennedy replied quickly, "I don't want you to relate to Clark Clifford. I can't a lord to confine myself to one set of advisers. If I did that, I would be on their leading strings." Once Kennedy said that, the author of Presidential Power was thereafter on his leading strings.

...On November 21 Clifford and Neustadt reported their progress to the President-elect and his staff at Palm Beach. After dinner, Kennedy briskly divided up the group, taking Clifford and Sorensen into one room, asking Neustadt to wait in another room, Shriver in still another. When Neustadt's turn arrived, Kennedy raised questions about some of the things his advisers had told him he must do as President -- receiving Congressmen, for example, whenever they requested an appointment. Neustadt said that there were few imperatives in the Presidency; he should feel free to work it out in his own way. He then handed Kennedy a copy of Presidential Power, recommending that he read chapters three and seven ("The Power to Persuade" and "Men in Office"). Kennedy, almost as if surprised at the limited assignment, said, "I will read the whole book." When he did, he found an abundance of evidence and analysis to support his predilections toward a fluid Presidency.

Henry A. Kissinger

On the problem of negotiation [during the Berlin crisis]. Henry Kissinger observed to Bundy that it was wrong "to have refusal to negotiate become a test of firmness.... Firmness should be related to the substance of our negotiating position. It should not...be proved by seeming to shy away from a diplomatic confrontation." If Khrushchev would not accept a reasonable proposal, this, in Kissinger's view, was an argument for rather than against our taking the initiative. Any other course would see us "jockeyed into a position of refusing diplomatic solutions," and, when we finally agreed to discussion, as we inevitably must, it would seem an American defeat. Diplomacy, Kissinger concluded, was the "necessary corollary to the build-up."

As for the proclamation of national emergency,...Kissinger argued that the Soviet Union would be more impressed by a broad and sustained improvement in American military readiness than by a single dramatic gesture, especially one which made us appear "unnecessarily bellicose, perhaps even hysterical." Moreover, if we declared the emergency now, we used up a measure which would be more effective if taken as a response to clear-cut Soviet provocation.

Charles River Strategists

The men who had invented nuclear weapons now began to give hard thought to the idea, not of abolishing them at one stroke, but of regulating them in the interest of stability. Out of this discussion emerged a new approach to the arms race under the banner of 'arms control.' The thinking was particularly hard along the banks of the Charles River, where Jerome Wiesner, Thomas C. Schelling, Henry Kissinger and others worked out the strategy of equilibrium in the nuclear age. A series of seminars and study groups at the end of the fifties culminated in a highly influential paper by Wiesner in Daedalus magazine in the winter of 1960.

The essence of arms control was 'stable nuclear deterrence' -- the view, that is, that the best hope for peace and for ultimate disarmament lay in creating a situation where, in Wiesner's words "a surprise attack by one side cannot prevent retaliation by the other." The temptation of surprise attack in a nuclear age was the hope of knocking out the opposing capability. If each side knew that both its own and the enemy nuclear forces could survive any conceivable assaults -- through making missile bases for example 'hard' or mobile -- then neither side would rationally initiate an attack which would only result in its own destruction. Stable deterrence had interesting implications -- among them that the United States would be better off if the Russian striking force were invulnerable than if it were vulnerable -- and most of its proponents were prepared to follow their logic to this conclusion. A stable deterrent system, they further agreed, would make it possible to limit the size of the deterrent and thereby end the nuclear race...

The Charles River doctrine, in short, appeared to offer a way of reconciling the objective of comprehensive disarmament with the interim requirements of national security. Its evident practicality appealed to Kennedy, and its emergence in 1960 gave him the opportunity for a new start in disarmament policy.

John Kenneth Galbraith

In sending Galbraith as his ambassador to New Delhi, Kennedy deliberately chose a man who could be depended upon to bring to Indian problems his own mixture of sympathy and irony. Kennedy was delighted by Galbraith's wit, effrontery and unabashed pursuit of the unconventional wisdom, and they were now exceptionally good friends. Nor did the President appear to mind Ken's guerrilla warfare against the ikons and taboos of the Department of State. From time to time, the President took pleasure in announcing that Galbraith was the best ambassador he had.