Free The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam Page A

Bowles would later try and tone down the foreign policy statements, which they had come to refer to as “Acheson’s declarations of war.”
    The second wing of the party had its roots in the Roosevelt era, and its chief proponent was Eleanor Roosevelt. (The grande dame of the party had retained her suspicions of Jack Kennedy despite his attempts to convince her that he was committed to the same ideals. Shortly after his election he made one last journey to see her at Hyde Park and found her once again filled with suspicion. You don’t really trust me entirely, he said. No, that’s right, she answered. “What can I do to ease your suspicions?” he asked. “Make Adlai Secretary of State,” she answered. Later he left, shaking his head and smiling, impressed by her for the first time: “She’s really tough, isn’t she?”) During the fifties, this wing had found its principal spokesman in Stevenson, with his elegant prose, his self-deprecating wit. It felt that the United States must take more initiatives to end the arms race, that if America did not recognize Red China it should at least begin to move toward that goal, that nationalism was the new and most potent force in the underdeveloped world, that the United States must support it even at the expense of weakening ties with NATO allies, and finally that the greatest threat in the world might prove to be not Communism, but the combination of the arms race plus hunger and poverty in the Third World. To the Acheson group, the members of this wing, particularly Stevenson, seemed soft; they were do-gooders who did not understand power and force, who were too quick to believe in the UN. Adlai became a ready target—he was depicted as being too quick to talk and too slow to act; he was indecisive. In the great drawing rooms of Georgetown such as the Harrimans’, they would tell their Stevenson jokes (Stevenson about to give a speech and being told that he would go on in five minutes, asking an aide, “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Being assured that he did, then asking, “Do I want to go to the bathroom?”). The Stevenson group was seen as too committed to some vague idea of morality in world affairs and too committed to the search for world opinion, willing to waste real relationships with solid European nations in return for vague promises from untrustworthy little wog nations that would probably vote against us in the UN, anyway.
    In this party division Kennedy had managed very well to straddle the factions. Since his own sense of style and presence was akin to the Stevenson group’s, he had attracted some of its members, having made speeches critical of French colonialism and French colonial wars, as well as the U.S. policy supporting the French. By the same token, in 1959 he had told Harris Wofford (knowing full well that this was exactly what moved Wofford) that the most important thing about the coming election was to change America’s foreign policy, to get away not just from the Dulles years but from the equally inflexible views of Acheson, which were so dominant within one section of the Democratic party; that we had to have new policies on China and on the underdeveloped world; and that we had to get away from the rigidity of the Cold War.
    Kennedy’s speeches on Algeria and French colonialism had angered Acheson and the French in approximately that order. Acheson subsequently wrote a book called Power and Diplomacy, which cited the Kennedy Algerian speech as a classic example of how not to make foreign policy, “this impatient snapping of our fingers.” This was not the way to treat our oldest ally, which was still smarting over the defeats of World War II and which bore an inferiority complex. Acheson was obviously angered that a United States senator should take the liberty of being critical of American foreign policy, no matter how, as in this case, dubious and ill-conceived it was; if nothing else, Acheson’s wrath was a reflection