Like Jackie Kennedy and Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen struggled to make sense of Kennedy’s death and committed himself to advancing his historical reputation. Although, as the record of Kennedy’s interactions with his advisers shows, Sorensen played a limited role in policymaking, he was Kennedy’s principal wordsmith. But Johnson viewed him as among the White House officials most closely identified with Kennedy and believed that his continuing presence as a speechwriter, at least for a time, would help to preserve the country’s sense of continuity. Johnson pressed Sorensen to remain in his job and convinced him to help write a post-assassination speech for delivery on November 27. In the address, Sorensen had Johnson declare, “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.” Johnson, however, deleted Sorensen’s opening statement: “I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” There were limits to how far Johnson would go in paying tribute to the fallen president. Sorensen resented the deletion at the time and was eager to begin work toward the goal he set for himself of advancing Kennedy’s “ideals and objectives.” Vowing to “do all I could to keep John F. Kennedy’s legacy alive,” Sorensen persuaded Johnson to let him resign at the end of February 1964.
At once, he began writing Kennedy, which was published the following year to much acclaim. While he announced his determination not to produce a eulogy, noting Kennedy’s acknowledgment of “imperfections and ignorance in many areas,” the biography was a celebration of Kennedy’s many personal and political attributes. Sorensen decried those who spoke more of Kennedy’s “style than of his substance.” Yes, his “style was special—the grace, the wit, the elegance, the youthful looks will rightly be long remembered. But what mattered most to him, and what in my opinion will matter most to history, was the substance—the strength of his ideas and ideals, his courage and judgment.”
Forty-three years later, in 2008, two years before his own death at the age of eighty-two, Sorensen returned to the subject of his years with Kennedy in a memoir, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. “For eleven years,” he wrote, “it had been my full-time job to advance his interests, invoke his name, and articulate his message in the struggles for justice at home and peace around the world. For the succeeding forty-plus years, I have made it my part-time mission to do the same.” And in Counselor, he continued his efforts to secure Kennedy’s historical reputation.
No one was more determined to carry John Kennedy’s legacy forward than brother Bobby. His presence in the Johnson administration as attorney general was a source of mutual tension; their interactions during Kennedy’s thousand days had intensified their reciprocal antagonism dating from the fifties. Bobby was angry at what he saw as Johnson’s excessive haste in taking control of Air Force One and the Oval Office following the assassination, while Bobby angered Johnson when he ran past him to comfort Jackie after she had returned to Washington with the president’s body. Momentarily, however, each saw a need to mute their differences for the sake of the country. At two meetings in the days immediately after Kennedy’s death, Johnson told Bobby, “I need you more than the President needed you.”
But the truce could last only so long. Tension between the two remained palpable. During Johnson’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress on November 27, Bobby sat “pale, somber, and inscrutable, applauding faithfully, but his face set and his lips compressed.” It impressed Schlesinger as “a particularly unbearable moment.” Conflict over Bobby’s possible candidacy for the vice presidency emerged during the first half of 1964. Johnson didn’t want him, believing history would say that Bobby’s presence on the ticket elected him president. Even though he told Bobby that he was out of the running and described it as part of a decision not to take anyone in the cabinet, Johnson couldn’t free himself from the overdrawn fear that Bobby would steamroll the Democratic convention in August into selecting him anyway. That summer, after Johnson won passage of JFK’s civil rights bill, Bobby decided to resign and run for a New York U.S. Senate seat. It was a relief to both him and Johnson.
After Bobby won his Senate election in November, he spent the next four years promoting the causes he associated with his brother’s agenda. He wrote Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which celebrated John’s masterful resolution of the potentially disastrous confrontation with Moscow. He also sat for a number of oral history interviews with New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis; John Bartlow Martin, a journalist and JFK ambassador to the Dominican Republic; Burke Marshall, an attorney and head of the Kennedy Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Schlesinger. Covering everything from civil rights, with which Bobby was most intimately involved, to Kennedy’s decision to name Johnson vice president, to his choice of advisers and cabinet officers, and the administration’s Cuban and Vietnam policies, Bobby, like Schlesinger and Sorensen, recounted events as Kennedy might have described them in a memoir. Like Jackie Kennedy’s reflections, some of Bobby’s descriptions of people and events were seen as too candid to release while he remained actively involved in politics. In 1988, twenty years after he had run for president and been assassinated at the age of forty-two, Bobby Kennedy’s recollections, which had become less controversial with the passage of time, appeared in print.
Bobby’s own unrealized potential and his brother’s unfinished presidency have given both of them an enduring hold on the public’s imagination as heroic leaders who could have spared the country from missteps at home and abroad. They answer yearnings for better leadership in a more harmonious nation and world.
McGeorge Bundy was one member of a quartet of advisers who hoped to advance Kennedy’s legacy by remaining at their jobs. The day after the assassination, Bundy told Schlesinger that “he intended to stay on as long as Johnson wanted him.” Bundy was particularly intent on making sure that Vietnam was not lost to the communists, seeing this as a fixed Kennedy aim. When Johnson began expanding the war in March 1965 with Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, Bundy warmly supported the decision. In the spring, he was eager to debate antiwar opponents, whom he saw as undermining the public backing he believed essential to a sustained war effort.
Although Bundy had serious doubts about the wisdom of dispatching large numbers of ground forces to Vietnam, he did not raise them directly with Johnson. He believed that “an effort had to be made” to save Vietnam “even if the odds favored defeat.” Bundy’s focus remained on the need to educate the public about the necessity of making the commitment to prevent a communist victory. But he and Johnson fell into conflict over building a consensus for the war effort. Bundy was critical of Johnson’s decision to announce the first troop escalation in Vietnam in July 1965 at a noon press conference, “when no one was watching TV.” Johnson dismissed Bundy’s pressure for greater openness, saying, “If your mother-in-law . . . has only one eye, and it happens to be right in the middle of her forehead, then the best place for her is not in the livin’ room with all of the company!” Mindful that Johnson “doesn’t pay any attention to what I’m telling him,” Bundy decided to resign in February 1966. He compared his last days in the White House to advisers in the Kremlin who were ignored and abused by Stalin.
After he left the government, Bundy served as president of the Ford Foundation for thirteen years, until 1979, when he became a professor of history at New York University, where he taught for ten years, followed by six years as a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation. He died in 1996. In 1988, although he would publish Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, reflections on nuclear weapons, it was the failed Vietnam War that cast a constant shadow over his historical reputation. As Gordon Goldstein made clear in his 1998 book, Lessons in Disaster, a cooperative study with Bundy, Bundy struggled to make sense of the terrible misjudgments that led to the failed conflict. Although he knew it would seem self-serving, Bundy believed that the war was principally the result not of what the Kennedy and Johnson advisers, including the military chiefs, told th
em, but of what Kennedy and Johnson chose to do. It is perhaps more accurate to say that a close reading of the records shows Kennedy’s responsibility to have been less the product of active commitments to fight a large war in Vietnam than his ambivalence: his eagerness to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam matched by his reluctance, indeed refusal, to turn the conflict into America’s war, which risked Saigon’s collapse. His unwillingness to come down decisively on one side or the other of these competing policies opened the way to Johnson’s unequivocal determination to use U.S. power to preserve South Vietnam’s autonomy, arguing that this is what Kennedy would have done.
In his pursuit of this goal, Rusk, McNamara, and Rostow aided and abetted Johnson. Rusk’s nondescript posture under Kennedy, “his Buddha-like face and half-smile,” Schlesinger called it, joined to “a montage of platitudes” in a soft-spoken Georgia drawl, made him something of a nonentity in Kennedy’s circle of high-powered opinionated advisers like McNamara, Harriman, Rostow, and LeMay. His deference to Kennedy annoyed the president, who complained that Rusk “never gives me anything to chew on. . . . You never know what he is thinking.” Rusk’s courtly manner and deferential regard for higher authority perfectly suited Johnson. Regular foreign policy briefings for the vice president, in which they shared an enthusiasm for the Cold War clichés of the day like the defense of “the free world,” gave Rusk an immediate place at the center of Johnson’s administration. It did not hurt that they were both southerners who agreed on the compelling need for a civil rights revolution that would end segregation and disarm African American anger by giving blacks the chance to vote and compete on level ground with whites for a better life.
Rusk’s determination not to allow communist control of South Vietnam, which he feared would lead to other acts of aggression and touch off a new round of recrimination against loyal public officials, echoed Johnson’s openly stated pronouncement to Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, McCone, and Lodge on the third day of his presidency: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” Through all the turmoil over the next five years—the bombing of North Vietnam punctuated by pauses in hopes of inducing peace talks, the dispatch of more than 500,000 U.S. troops, with the deaths of more than 30,000 by 1968, and the eruption of antiwar protests that moved a French travel agent to advertise, “See America while it lasts”—Rusk backed Johnson’s escalation and direction of the conflict at every turn, believing that a communist victory would be an impermissible blow to U.S. national security.
Like his many years in government, Rusk’s post–State Department career was publicly muted. A professor of international law at the University of Georgia from 1970 to 1984, he did not publish a memoir, As I Saw It, until 1990, four years before he died at the age of eighty-five. It was an uncontroversial account with few recriminations, leaving it to history to render an independent verdict on his career. Unfortunately for Rusk, like Johnson he is doomed to be remembered not for any great advances in foreign affairs but as one of the principal architects of America’s disastrous losing war in Vietnam.
Robert McNamara’s historical reputation bears an even heavier share of the burden. Staying on as secretary of defense until February 1968, McNamara was even more instrumental than Rusk in encouraging first Kennedy and then Johnson to fight and win the war. Although he made an impressive mark as an industrial leader on the Ford Motor Company before becoming defense secretary; won plaudits for proposing Kennedy’s quarantine of Cuba, which contributed so much to the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis; wisely backed the test ban treaty and, subsequently, nuclear disarmament; and provided well-regarded leadership at the World Bank between 1968 and 1981, he is largely remembered for his unyielding support of the decisions on bombing and troop deployments that went so wrong in Vietnam.
By 1968, McNamara understood how mistaken he, Johnson, Rusk, and the Joint Chiefs had been in their assumptions about Vietnam. He became overtly morose about the war and began pressing Johnson to do whatever possible to end the conflict as soon as possible. After leaving the government, he remained largely silent about the war until publishing a mea culpa in 1995, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. The book was a confession of sorts that brought him more criticism than praise for having finally owned up to the terrible miscalculations he did so much to produce. McNamara was no more successful in disarming critics when he sat for a series of interviews for a 2003 documentary, Fog of War. It was another attempt to win forgiveness for his unforgivable errors in Vietnam. McNamara passed away in 2009 at the age of ninety-three. His reputation as the longest-serving secretary of defense in U.S. history will be part of an endless argument about the triumphs and defeats of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.
Walt W. Rostow was the most unrepentant of all the Kennedy-Johnson architects of the war. In 1966, when Bundy resigned, Johnson made Rostow his national security adviser. As with Kennedy, Rostow urged Johnson to expand U.S. involvement in Vietnam to prevent a communist victory. He never regretted that advice or, unlike McNamara and Bundy, saw any reason to apologize for it. On the contrary, to the end of his life in 2003, at the age of eighty-six, he argued that the war may not have saved South Vietnam from communism but it gave the rest of Southeast Asia time to build its defenses. Like General William Westmoreland, who served as Johnson’s top commander in Vietnam, Rostow believed that the United States did not lose the war but gave up the fight because of public weariness over the conflict. He asserted that those who lost loved ones in the war could take satisfaction from knowing that the United States stopped the dominoes from falling.
John McCone and Maxwell Taylor, two other administration hawks, did not stay on for very long with Johnson. McCone left in April 1964, and Taylor resigned as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in July 1964, when he became ambassador to Saigon for a year. It is doubtful that either one would have remained through a second Kennedy term. By November 1963, Kennedy had lost confidence in their respective judgments. Both had been hawkish during the missile crisis and much more committed to military interventions in Cuba and Vietnam than Kennedy. As for other members of the Joint Chiefs, they quietly retired in time, except for LeMay, who was forced to step down in February 1965. He remained in the public eye for more than three years after, declaring that the United States should bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age or at least, as he claimed he said, America had the capability to do it. The remark haunted him in 1968 when he agreed to become Alabama governor George Wallace’s vice presidential running mate on the failed American Independent Party ticket. Unfairly identified with Wallace’s segregationist views, LeMay retreated into private life, living in relative obscurity for twenty-two years before his death in 1990.
Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987, believes that a president without advisers “is crippled in developing, defending and administering his policies.” Kennedy’s experience suggests a more complicated result. Through his thousand days in the White House he learned that even the brightest and most well meaning of advisers misjudge a situation and offer poor counsel. De Gaulle’s guidance about gathering a variety of opinions on big policy questions and then following your own judgment resonated forcefully with Kennedy after two years as president. By November 1963, seeing how limited the expertise of the so-called experts was had made him a wiser decision-maker. While there would have been stumbles and reassessments during a second term, it is impossible to say exactly how the experience of his first four years would have played after his likely reelection. The initial hard lessons of his first term undoubtedly would have made him a more effective president in a second go-round. His tragic assassination in Dallas, however, deprived us of the chance to judge a second-term performance. It is easy nonetheless to believe that his premature death opened the way to events—the expanded Vietnam War, Nixon’s election, Watergate—that changed America and the world for the worse.
Kennedy’s death leaves us with unanswered questions: Would he have won reelection in 1964? And
assuming that he did, would his health have held out in a second term? Would his womanizing have caught up with him and jeopardized his presidency? Would he have persuaded Congress to pass his four major legislative initiatives? Would he have reestablished relations with Cuba and found a way out of Vietnam? Would he have moved toward détente with the Soviet Union and possibly China?
Had Kennedy had a chance to write about his administration, he undoubtedly would have reflected on the cloud of uncertainty that hovered over everything they did and might have done in a second term. His time in the White House underscored for him that there are no experts in public policy—only men and women, with the best of intentions, guessing at what would work. The principal lesson of any presidential term, he would surely have acknowledged, is the anguish of choosing between imperfect options and having to take responsibility for lives lost and money wasted when fallible advisers and chiefs take wrong turns.