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Historical Notes: Disenchantment with State

3 minute read
TIME

In the memoirs busting out all over about life under John Kennedy, last week’s crop was mostly devoted to a re-examination of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (see TIME ESSAY). But in LIFE magazine this week, Historian Arthur Schlesinger moves on to discuss another facet of the New Frontier—the President’s disenchantment with the State Department.

“Damn it,” Kennedy would complain to Jacqueline, according to Schlesinger, “[McGeorge] Bundy and I get more done in one day at the White House than they do in six months in the State Department.” The President was impatient with the department’s smothering bureaucracy, angered at its unimaginative approach to foreign policy, irked by its pedantic literary style. Once in 1963 after receiving a draft for a congressional message about a National Academy of Foreign Affairs, Kennedy bounced it with these comments: “This is only the latest and worst of a long number of drafts sent here for presidential signature. At the very least, each message should be (a) in English, (b) clear and trenchant in its style, (c) logical in its structure and (d) devoid of gobbledygook. The State Department draft on the academy failed each one of these tests (including, in my view, the first).”

But the State Department remained pretty much unchanged by Kennedy’s efforts. Writes Schlesinger: “Kennedy used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of 30 people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a facade in which people might carry papers from bureau to bureau.”

The President also became increasingly exasperated by the performance of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Says Schlesinger: “At White House conferences Rusk would sit calmly by, with his Buddhalike face and his half-smile, often leaving it to Bundy or to the President himself to assert the diplomatic interest. He rarely seemed to have strong views as to what should be done beyond continuing what we were already doing, and he rarely argued a position.” Kennedy, says Schlesinger, was “impressed by Rusk’s capacity to define but grew increasingly depressed by his reluctance to decide.”

Once, after he was urged to sack Rusk as Secretary and appoint him Ambassador to the United Nations, Kennedy said sadly, “I can’t do that to Rusk; he is such a nice man.” Nevertheless, writes Schlesinger, Kennedy finally decided that he would eventually have to install a more dynamic man at State. “By the autumn of 1963,” says Schlesinger, “the President had reluctantly made up his mind to allow Rusk to leave after the 1964 election and to seek a new Secretary of State.”

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