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Authors: David Halberstam
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cause—or, as Luce decided to put it more positively—if he shows any weakness in defending the cause of the free world, we’ll turn on him. There’s no chance of that, Joe Kennedy had guaranteed; no son of mine is going to be soft on Communism. Well, if he is, Luce answered, we’ll have to tear him apart.
Then they went back to watching the acceptance speech, and Kennedy, the sire of a great political family, his own driving ambitions now close to realization, thanked Luce for all he had done for the Kennedys in the past, a gesture Luce accepted cordially at the time. Later, however, as the campaign progressed, he would wonder if Time and Life were doing too much for young Jack Kennedy—had they been too favorable, too straight in their reporting? It was, he realized, a hard line to draw, and made more difficult not so much by personal obligations to the Kennedy family, but by the difficulty in finding real differences between the Nixon and the Kennedy foreign policies. In fact, during the fall, when Life was geared up to run a major editorial praising Nixon’s foreign policy, the editors, at Luce’s suggestion, held off a week because Nixon had not made his stand any noticeably more anti-Communist than Kennedy. Later, when the election was over and the narrowness of Kennedy’s margin became clear, Luce’s good Republican conscience would bother him: perhaps, if he had been truer to his party, Nixon would be in the White House. But it did not bother him so much that he turned down a chance to attend the Kennedy inaugural ball, and sit, just by chance, in the box with the Joseph P. Kennedys.
Which was far from where Chester Bowles sat that night. He sat with some of his boys, that special group of talented young men which he regularly seemed to discover and propel into public life, some of whom (like Jim Thomson, Abe Chayes, Tom Hughes and Harris Wofford) would do particularly well in the new Administration. That night he was with Wofford, who was to be a White House Special Assistant for Civil Rights, and Tom Hughes, who would become Director of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Hughes was one of the few genuine intellectuals of the era, a funny, skeptical, almost cynical man who had worked earlier for Bowles, then for Humphrey (who in 1959 was a hotter political figure), and finding Humphrey a less interesting man, had returned to Bowles. Wofford had been Bowles’s main link to the Kennedys, the man who had worked hard to bring him into the Kennedy campaign. Replacing Bowles during the Wisconsin primary, Wofford had said in Madison, a hotbed of liberalism, “There is a Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles view of the world, and Jack Kennedy is the most likely man to carry it out.” Later, when Kennedy was elected and his first two announcements were the reappointment of the heads of both the FBI and the CIA, Hughes sent Wofford a postcard saying: “I want you to know that I finally voted for your StevensonHumphreyBowlesKennedyHooverAllen Dulles view of the world . . .”
For ever since he gained the nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy had changed: he did not need the liberals that much; they had nowhere else to go. It was no longer Kennedy versus Humphrey or Stevenson; it was Kennedy versus Nixon. He turned to face different doubts and different suspicions. On the way to the nomination the question had been whether or not he was sufficiently liberal; then it became a question of whether he was sufficiently mature, tough and anti-Communist. He was facing a candidate who had been catapulted into American life on the issue of anti-Communism, and who had been the hatchet man against the Democrats in previous campaigns on the issue of softness on Communism, to such a degree that his superior, Dwight Eisenhower, was sometimes made uneasy (not so uneasy as to make him stop; Eisenhower was not uneasy when that rhetoric benefited Dwight Eisenhower, simply dubious whether a man who depended upon it was
Then they went back to watching the acceptance speech, and Kennedy, the sire of a great political family, his own driving ambitions now close to realization, thanked Luce for all he had done for the Kennedys in the past, a gesture Luce accepted cordially at the time. Later, however, as the campaign progressed, he would wonder if Time and Life were doing too much for young Jack Kennedy—had they been too favorable, too straight in their reporting? It was, he realized, a hard line to draw, and made more difficult not so much by personal obligations to the Kennedy family, but by the difficulty in finding real differences between the Nixon and the Kennedy foreign policies. In fact, during the fall, when Life was geared up to run a major editorial praising Nixon’s foreign policy, the editors, at Luce’s suggestion, held off a week because Nixon had not made his stand any noticeably more anti-Communist than Kennedy. Later, when the election was over and the narrowness of Kennedy’s margin became clear, Luce’s good Republican conscience would bother him: perhaps, if he had been truer to his party, Nixon would be in the White House. But it did not bother him so much that he turned down a chance to attend the Kennedy inaugural ball, and sit, just by chance, in the box with the Joseph P. Kennedys.
Which was far from where Chester Bowles sat that night. He sat with some of his boys, that special group of talented young men which he regularly seemed to discover and propel into public life, some of whom (like Jim Thomson, Abe Chayes, Tom Hughes and Harris Wofford) would do particularly well in the new Administration. That night he was with Wofford, who was to be a White House Special Assistant for Civil Rights, and Tom Hughes, who would become Director of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Hughes was one of the few genuine intellectuals of the era, a funny, skeptical, almost cynical man who had worked earlier for Bowles, then for Humphrey (who in 1959 was a hotter political figure), and finding Humphrey a less interesting man, had returned to Bowles. Wofford had been Bowles’s main link to the Kennedys, the man who had worked hard to bring him into the Kennedy campaign. Replacing Bowles during the Wisconsin primary, Wofford had said in Madison, a hotbed of liberalism, “There is a Stevenson-Humphrey-Bowles view of the world, and Jack Kennedy is the most likely man to carry it out.” Later, when Kennedy was elected and his first two announcements were the reappointment of the heads of both the FBI and the CIA, Hughes sent Wofford a postcard saying: “I want you to know that I finally voted for your StevensonHumphreyBowlesKennedyHooverAllen Dulles view of the world . . .”
For ever since he gained the nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy had changed: he did not need the liberals that much; they had nowhere else to go. It was no longer Kennedy versus Humphrey or Stevenson; it was Kennedy versus Nixon. He turned to face different doubts and different suspicions. On the way to the nomination the question had been whether or not he was sufficiently liberal; then it became a question of whether he was sufficiently mature, tough and anti-Communist. He was facing a candidate who had been catapulted into American life on the issue of anti-Communism, and who had been the hatchet man against the Democrats in previous campaigns on the issue of softness on Communism, to such a degree that his superior, Dwight Eisenhower, was sometimes made uneasy (not so uneasy as to make him stop; Eisenhower was not uneasy when that rhetoric benefited Dwight Eisenhower, simply dubious whether a man who depended upon it was
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