Free The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam Page B

of how centrist that policy was, and how little real criticism was permitted. Some of the antipathy lingered on, with Acheson in 1960 telling a Washington luncheon club that Kennedy was an “unformed young man” (a comment ironically not particularly different from Mrs. Roosevelt’s), and with Acheson’s son-in-law William P. Bundy, who often reflected the Achesonian viewpoint, expressing his doubts about Kennedy’s toughness.
    If Kennedy was not exactly in the Acheson group, there was nonetheless an element of the hard-liner in him, as there was to almost everyone in politics at that point; at best he was cool and cautious and not about to rush ahead of events or the current political climate by calling for changes in the almost glacierlike quality of the Cold War. He was the epitome of the contemporary man in a cool, pragmatic age, more admiring of the old, shrewd, almost cynical Establishment breed (he was quite capable of telling John McCloy, another senior statesman of the Establishment, after trying to get him to take a high post, that the trouble was that the younger breed wasn’t as good, they lacked the guts and toughness of the McCloy generation) than of the ponderous do-good types like Bowles, who talked too much and might lose you countries (even in the business world Bowles’s success by Establishment lights was judged dubious; he had made millions, to be sure, but he had made them in advertising, which was not a serious profession, was in fact a noisy, splashy profession given to arousing people’s emotions rather than soothing them, a craft to be watched circumspectly). So if Kennedy straddled the two positions, it was not surprising—given the era, the Cold War still a major part of our life—that in January 1960 when he announced his candidacy for the Presidency his friend Joseph Alsop, the liberal hard-line columnist and journalistically a purveyor of the Acheson line, watched him and said enthusiastically to Earl Mazo, another reporter, “Isn’t he marvelous! A Stevenson with balls.”

 

     
    Chapter Three
     
    Kennedy had decided early on to be his own Secretary of State, a decision which was much applauded, since he was obviously well read (followers of newspapers and magazines were regularly apprised of what he and Jacqueline were reading that week, and when Jacqueline, meeting Ian Fleming, the British suspense writer, inquired if he was the Ian Fleming, the latter’s position as a major culture figure was assured, doubly so because it soon became apparent that the young President himself wanted to meet Fleming); he had served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (largely thanks to Lyndon Johnson, who did not so much want to put Kennedy on the committee as he wanted to keep Estes Kefauver off, and needed someone with a party following in order to justify the exclusion of Kefauver); and he was, in Washington terms, considered conversant with the great problems of the world.
    This confidence in his ability had not always existed; indeed, Kennedy had not been a towering figure in Washington prior to his 1960 race, one main reason being that since 1956 he had almost never been there, always dashing out of town, meeting delegates, in preparation for the 1960 campaign. Lyndon Johnson was considered a more formidable force in Washington, in part because he was highly visible, a definitive man of Washington who reveled in the city, its intrigues, its power, whereas during much of the late fifties Jack Kennedy was a figure darting into the airport, sending an aide to the paperback-book counter to buy something for the trip, preferably history. There was a great Trevor-Roper phase in 1958, an aide remembered; one learned too little from fiction. But the 1960 campaign had changed his reputation in Washington. He had won the nomination, and had been given the chance to run for the Presidency, perhaps a more bully pulpit than the bully pulpit itself, Americans liking competitions as much as the