you must be slipping

July 15th, 1960, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his journal about the Democrats' nominating convention in Los Angeles, to select a candidate for president.

-------[excerpt] One great difference between Stevenson and Kennedy is the amateur vs. the professional. There is no "we happy few" nonsense about the Kennedy camp. And this is part of a more decisive difference -- the difference in their attitude toward power. The thought of power induces in Stevenson doubt, reluctance, even guilt. He is obsessively concerned with the awesome responsibilities of the presidential office. Possessing the genuine modesty of a profoundly civilized man, he is hesitant about imposing his own views on others.

Feeling (or claiming to feel) inadequacy in the face of high office (for which no one is adequate), at the same time he recognizes that he has seemed on occasion to work almost willfully toward his own defeat. Lauren Bacall once argued persuasively to me that he had a political death wish. I have never believed that Stevenson is essentially indecisive in the sense that he would balk for a moment at executive necessities. I am sure that he would have ordered American troops into South Korea quite as swiftly as Harry Truman. Yet the exercise of power does present a problem for him.

Kennedy, on the other hand, is like FDR. The thought of power neither rattles nor discomposes him. He takes power in his stride. He had absolute assurance about his own capacity to do the job, and he has a sure instinct about how to get what he wants. In Jack Kennedy the will to victory and the will to command are both plain and visible.

I have no regrets about having backed Kennedy. I think that Adlai Stevenson would have made a great President, but I do not think he could have made it against Nixon. Yet I find myself feeling much cooler about Kennedy at the end of the convention than at the beginning.

I believe him to be a liberal, but committed by a sense of history rather than consecrated by inner conviction.

I also believe him to be a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man. I rather think, for example, that Ken and I were in a sense had by him; that he sought our support when he considered it useful before the convention to have liberal Democratic names behind him, but that, if he thinks our names would cause the slightest trouble when he starts appealing to Republicans, he will drop us without a second thought. I am not even sure that he has at any time seriously intended to make Stevenson his Secretary of State -- not that he has anyone else in view for the job, but that in his own mind he has always reserved the decision till after the election, while leaving contrary impressions in the minds of others.

I do not dispute -- indeed, I have recognized -- the inevitability of Kennedy. But I feel that my own pleasure in national politics is coming to an end. Nothing again will ever be as agreeable as those days with Stevenson. If I go into the Kennedy campaign, it will be into something quite different; and I don't really much care whether I get into it or not. And, while understanding why Kennedy had to win and Stevenson had to lose in this convention, one must understand at the same time what Stevenson accomplished in the last eight years.

Under his leadership a revolution took place in the Democratic party. Almost single-handedly, he wrought a transformation in the party's ideas and style and sense of purpose. Thus no one in Los Angeles sounded like Harry Truman; all the contenders, even Johnson, were speaking in the spirit and often in the idiom of Stevenson, and none more so than Kennedy.

Under Truman the essence of the Democratic appeal was to promise benefits; under Kennedy it is to demand sacrifices; what conclusive evidence of the Stevensonian triumph! Kennedy is the heir and executor of the Stevenson revolution -- whether either Jack or Adlai realize this fact. In the long perspective of history, as I said on Tuesday, Stevenson must go down as the true victor in the convention.

But I cannot find it in me to blame Kennedy for being as he is. Indeed, I fear he may have learned too well the lesson of the last part of The Coming of the New Deal. He has commented to me several times in the past how illuminating he found my discussion of FDR's executive methods. I am quite sure now that Kennedy has most of FDR's lesser qualities. Whether he has FDR's greater qualities is the problem for the future.

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(Journal, 1960) August 6
Last Tuesday night (the 2nd) Jack Kennedy called up, in person, and invited us for lunch on Saturday, the 6th. This was my first communication with him since the convention.

We drove down from Cambridge on a beautiful summer day....
He had lunched the day before in NYC with Luce and the editors of Time and Life. ...

Jack said that he rather liked Luce. "He is like a cricket, always chirping away. After all, he made a lot of money through his own individual enterprise so naturally he thinks that individual enterprise can do anything. I don't mind people like that. They have earned the right to talk that way. After all, that's the atmosphere in which I grew up. My father's that way. But what I can't stand are all the people around Luce who agree with everything he has to say." He imitated Luce saying to Hedley Donovan, "Well, Hedley, what's your view on all this?" and Hedlely's hasty agreement with whatever Luce had just said.

He said that everyone was excited about Galbraith and regarded him as a great radical. "Actually," Jack said, "he is a conservative." He then said to me, "You had better watch out for yourself. In 1952 everyone was mad at you. Now people seem to like you. Everyone is mellow about you. You must be slipping."

General attitude. Jack seem still to be reading a great deal. He had read a good part of The Liberal Hour. He spoke with appreciation and enjoyment of Murray Kempton's stories from Hyannis Port in the New York Post. He had read the Time cover story on Che Guevara (which I had not) and had read Dick Rovere's convention pieces in the New Yorker. Norman Mailer had been there in the morning when we arrived; Jack quoted a sentence from a Mailer story for a paper in Provincetown in which Mailer said that he had thought Stevenson's speech on the Friday night much better than Kennedy's; Jack added to me, "You wrote Stevenson's speech, didn't you?"
------- [end excerpt]

---------------------------------
{Journals. 1952 - 2000.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. edited by Andrew
Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger.
The Penguin Press. New York. 2007.}

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