WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: One of the things I’ve admired, Bob, from you career … You know I’ve followed from the very beginning.
ROBERT DALLEK: Yes. He examined me before on my orals. He may not remember.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: What we are talking about is that Bob was a graduate student when I was on the faculty of Columbia University and I, along with Richard Hofstadter, sponsored his dissertation, which became his first book on William Dodd, the American Ambassador under Franklin Roosevelt to Nazi Germany. And what I was starting to say, Bob, is that one of the things I most admired about your career is what huge subjects you’ve chosen to write about, Franklin Roosevelt and foreign policy, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and, now, John F. Kennedy.
The fact that you’ve written about both Johnson and Kennedy, it occurs to me, may put you in a somewhat odd position in that the more you credit Kennedy with, as you have in your opening remarks, the less is the contribution of the protagonist of your earlier book. There is a contrary position, as you know. And nobody is better qualified than you to deal with it. The contrary position is that Kennedy was not a very effective legislative leader, that he did not have a remarkable record in the United States Senate, that he was not a skillful legislative tactician and that, if you look at the record in the fall, just before he was assassinated, each of the programs, like Civil Rights, the tax cut, Medicare, they all bogged down.
And Kennedy, himself, as you say in your wonderful book, is deeply discouraged. And that argument is that required somebody with the skills of a Lyndon Johnson to put these programs across. How would you respond to that, Bob?
ROBERT DALLEK: Bill, I don’t want to detract from Johnson’s achievement, in the sense that he did enact all those pieces of legislation and he was a great legislator. He was probably the greatest majority leader in the country’s history. But I think the crucial difference was in the ’64 election because Kennedy, as you well know Bill, was up against such a difficult, essentially conservative Congress, which was so resistant to his reform suggestions or initiatives.
I think he did make one great legislative error in not putting forth a Civil Rights bill in ’61 or ’62. He waited until ’63 on the assumption, the hope, that it would give him a kind of credential with southern congressmen and senators. They would see him as more accommodating. But it didn’t serve him one whit because they didn’t care. And if he had put forward a Civil Rights bill in ’61 or ’62, he could have gone to the country and the Congress in ’63, after all that rioting and terrible events had occurred in Alabama and said, "Look, I tried to get this in ’61. If we had this maybe we wouldn’t have had all this rioting by ’63."
But I think the crucial difference is that in ’64 election, running against Goldwater, I think he would have won as big a landslide as Johnson. I think he would have had those big majorities in the House and Senate. And then I think they would have been receptive to passing those bills. I don’t think he ever would have been as aggressive as Johnson was about passing all sorts of other Great Society measures, because Johnson was just gung ho to do a million things. And Kennedy was, essentially, a foreign policy president and I think he would have been much more focused on things like Vietnam and maybe improving relations with the Soviet Union.
But those major Great Society bills, like the ones you just mentioned, I think all would have come to fruition. Now, nobody can ever prove this but it’s, I think, reasonable speculation.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Certainly I think that is a powerful response. Kennedy did not have the kind of majorities in either house of Congress that Lyndon Johnson had after 1964. But if I could persist just for a moment, in 1964, before Johnson has the advantages of those majorities as a result of the election, he is able to put through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, certainly one of the half dozen most important pieces of legislation in all of our history, the tax cut and the war on poverty without that. So what do you think?
ROBERT DALLEK: There, Bill, what I think he did have was Kennedy’s death. And he was able, and I tracked Johnson’s speeches and what I was struck by was the extent to which, before the ’64 election, he constantly invokes John Kennedy’s name. And he’s appealing to the public and to the Congress in terms of his martyrdom. Once he’s elected in his own right, he wants to push Kennedy, so to speak, off the radar screen because he, as you know, he doesn’t want Bobby Kennedy as a running mate. He and Bobby Kennedy are at loggerheads, to put it politely.
But he was going to be president in his own right. He was not going to be seen in JFK’s shadow. But he was a very shrewd politician and he understood how powerful an initiative this was to talk about, "You’ve got to do what the martyred President would have wanted." Of, course, it also got him into trouble because in Vietnam he said he was doing what the martyred President wanted, and there I think he was off on the wrong track.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Well, I certainly think you’re right on both points, Bob. In his very first address to the new Congress, Lyndon Johnson asked the Congress to enact the Civil Rights Bill as a tribute, as a memorial to John F. Kennedy. And on your other point, I can give personal testimony. In September, 1965, I was invited by the Johnson White House to conduct an interview with him and normally you have maybe 10 or 15 minutes with the President. I had about an hour and a half and he was totally indiscreet.
And when I walked out, Bill Moyers was then his press secretary, and I said to Bill’s assistant, "You don’t need to tell me I can’t use 90% of this." And the man replied, "Better make it 95%, especially about John Kennedy."
ROBERT DALLEK: Bill’s not telling you that he published this as an article in American Heritage, a wonderful article, so revealing about Lyndon Johnson. And at the end of the article what Bill said was, "Watching Johnson, I felt like I had watched somebody defecate on the presidency." Remember that line?
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Oh, yes.
ROBERT DALLEK: Johnson was not a very refined fellow in dealing with these things. It was astonishing how abusive he was to Kennedy’s memory and in some ways to you as well because he saw you as a liberal who he was going to beat up on. You’re an Arthur Schlesinger type, I recall you …
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Right. Right. Yes. He said, "I’m not like you, people like Schlesinger, who think all Senators have got gravy down their suits." Let’s follow up on the Vietnam comparison that you’ve just alluded to, again, Bob, because, as you know, there’s also a contrary argument there. The one strong argument you’ve already acknowledged, that the acceleration in Vietnam begins not under Johnson but under Kennedy, though, of course, not to the dimensions of the hundreds of thousands of troops that eventually would be there.
But from the point of view of Johnson and, indeed, from the point of view of some Johnson scholars now who look on him somewhat more sympathetically, it was Kennedy who gave Johnson a legacy in Vietnam that it was hard for him to get out from under. You were mentioning that you don’t see a poll about Vietnam until some time in 1964. By that same measure, it’s arguable, that it was Kennedy who put it on the front burner, that it was he who could have walked away from that issue and, finally, that the people who are the architects of the expansion of the war in Vietnam are Dean Rusk, Rostow, Bundy, and Bob McNamara.
Well, they’re Kennedy people so that it’s then an uphill argument to say that the Kennedy people around Johnson would have agreed with withdrawing.
ROBERT DALLEK: Bill, I’ve thought about this and a number of people asked me, well, what about the fact that these were the same advisors, and they were pushing the envelope in terms of Vietnam. Bob McNamara himself and Mac Bundy, both of whom I’ve spoken to about some of these matters over time, both of them said they think Johnson a different man, a different time, they concede that he acted differently from Kennedy. And also, I’m of a mind to think that in some ways these advisors are sort of chameleons on plaid. And they take their impulse from the president they are dealing with.
Kennedy was an independent-minded fellow. And I think that people like McNamara … You know, Kennedy ordered him to make a plan to get out of Vietnam. He didn’t come back to Kennedy and say, "Oh, you’re making a big mistake, this is wrong." He conformed to what the President was telling him to do. I think the great difference between Kennedy and Johnson here is the fact that Kennedy, going to a second term, had political credibility, had credentials that Johnson simply lacked. He had the Cuban Missile Crisis behind him. He had the Test Ban Treaty.
He had standing as a foreign policy president to the degree that he certainly didn’t have as a domestic executive or president. And I think he could have managed a kind of stand down from Vietnam in a way that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t because Johnson was so on edge and talked about the possibility that if he leaves Vietnam, the Communists can see him as weak, as a kind of nervous Nellie, that he’s going to be getting out, that he’s got to show them that he’s standing up to them. And Kennedy didn’t have to do that. It was a very different sort of perspective for him.
And I think the public would have seen him in a very different way than they saw Johnson. So, again, we can’t say. Nobody can ever say definitively. But I think it’s reasonable speculation to think that his credentials and standing in foreign policy would have given him the leeway to shift ground.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: I’m sure that you’re going to be on talk shows all over America in the coming weeks. And I was so fascinated by your opening remarks, that I’ve led off with these questions instead of asking you the unavoidable question that every talk show host in America will lead off with, "Why another book on Kennedy, given all of the books that already have been written, including overall judicious books, Herb Barnett, people like that?" How would you respond to that? Or how will you be responding to it, Bob?
ROBERT DALLEK: Or how have I been responding to it because I have been on, thanks to Clare McKinney, a million of these talk shows already. And a lot of them ask just this question. What I say is that presidential history, especially modern, recent presidents like Kennedy, like Johnson, like Richard Nixon, it’s frontier scholarship. Thanks to Deborah Leff, a lot of material is opening up at this Kennedy Library. I had confidence that there would be new interesting material, National Security files, oral histories, maybe the medical records.
I didn’t know that I would get into them, but I was hopeful. And I was not disappointed because, for example, the McNamara memo from Kennedy to McNamara, I’ve never seen that cited or quoted by anybody else. I also found out about Joe Kennedy, junior. How he was killed in the Second World War. An English member or a British member of the Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers sent a letter to the library about a year and a half ago in which he said, "I was there, I saw the Kennedy plane go down."
And he explained the reason it went down was because the American Air Forces forgot to tell British radar to turn off their radars. It triggered the electrical mechanism on the plane, and blew it up and killed Joe Kennedy. It was a kind of friendly fire. I found a memo about Robert Kennedy. The whole idea that Robert Kennedy was eager not to serve in his brother’s administration, I think that’s nonsense. I think Robert Kennedy was going to be there in the administration in one major capacity or another. And what did I find?
On December 15th, the traditional story goes, Robert Kennedy calls up Jack and he says to him, "Jack, I don’t want to do it." Jack says to him, "Come to the Georgetown house tomorrow morning and have breakfast and we’ll work this out." Bobby goes there the next morning and brings with him John Seigenthaler, the journalist. Why in the world did he bring a member of this Tennessee press corps and friend of his to a private meeting like this?
Well, they wanted to put out a story, a kind of fiction. They were going to spin. They were nervous about the fact that The New York Times had picked up on a discussion that Bobby Kennedy might become Attorney General. They said, "This is outrageous. He is not suited. He doesn’t have the experience, the background." And then the Kennedy’s put out the idea that Bobby didn’t want to do it and Joe, the father, was insisting that Bobby do.
And so we find a memo in the papers from Bobby Kennedy to Drew Pearson, dated December 15th. And he says to Pearson, "Drew, Jack and I have decided I’m going to do it." This is the day he is supposed to call Jack up and say, "Oh, I don’t want to do it." And they have the breakfast meeting and perform this dance in front of Seigenthaler, who then writes up the idea that Bobby Kennedy had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this. And Jack says to him, "Don’t smile when we go out to see the press. We don’t want them to think you’re happy," you know, this sort of invention of … Well, that was yet another thing I found. And so, you know, Bill, you do this kind, I learned from you to do this kind of research. You go into the archives and you look at the papers, interviews, yeah, but always papers are essential. So I found it very exciting. And then, finally, I would say agree with the famous comment of the Duchess Pied de Faille (?), "History is argument without end." And we’re all talking about different perspectives.
And people say to me, "Oh, wonderful, this may be a definitive book." And I say, "Ah, there’s no such thing. Ten years from now someone is going to be writing, as well they should, a big biography of J.F.K." And, of course, 40 years down the road, Jacqueline Kennedy’s oral history of 500 pages is going to be opened and who knows what’s there. So there will be plenty of books in the future. And we just keep doing it. Besides, we’re compulsive fellows and we’ve got to do something.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: I was planning to ask you something else, next, Bob, but your reference to Jacqueline Kennedy reminds me of a different train of thought. When Jacqueline Kennedy died, I was on CBS television much of the day with Paula Zahn and Harry Smith in the morning and I was at the anchor desk with Dan Rather in the afternoon. And I was struck afterwards by how many women came up to me and said how important Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was as a role model.
And on another television program I was on with Michael Beschloss, he said the she played a larger role in policy than is generally believed. In assessing the Kennedy presidency, what kind, if any, role does Jacqueline Kennedy play?
ROBERT DALLEK: Bill, I did not find her fingerprints, so to speak, on policy making. I did not find that he was consulting her about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe there was discussion that was very private. But I did not find that evidence. What I think, though, that is quite compelling is the fact that so many women or people came up to you and remarked on her importance to them. And that I think is quite understandable because I think what she’s remembered for is her extraordinary dignity in the face of the terrible tragedy of her husband’s assassination.
And what a wonderful mother she was, and how effective she was with her two children, and how sensible a person she was, and how much dignity she gave to the White House, the re-decoration of the White House, her behavior when they went to Paris, France and de Gaulle was so taken with her. And, also, one must say, she shouldered a great, painful burden. You know, as Mrs. Johnson did, as I guess Hillary Clinton has. This surely is not easy on these women. It must be a very painful and difficult business. Yet she comes across, I think, and deserves to come across to us as someone with great dignity and really, in many ways, a model of what a First Lady should be.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: You were talking about the burden that she shouldered. And I’m sure you’re referring to all of Kennedy’s relationships with other women.
ROBERT DALLEK: Yes.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: This is actually your point, Bob. As my wife and I were driving up, we stopped for breakfast in Stonington, Connecticut. And after breakfast we went to the rear of the restaurant and the men’s room there is labeled. B. Clinton. And the ladies room there is labeled M. Lewinsky. This, just in a small restaurant in a seacoast town! When the Clinton presidency was coming to an end, The Boston Globe called me in North Carolina and, among other things, I said that the Lewinsky affair and the ensuing impeachment, Clinton being the only elected President in our history ever to have been impeached, is going to be in the first paragraph of every obituary.
Now, nobody would ever say this about John F. Kennedy. And yet, as your book brings out, the transgressions of John F. Kennedy were infinitely greater than those of Bill Clinton. How do you account for that?
ROBERT DALLEK: Well, Bill, I have 38 words, two lines in the book about the famous intern. And how did I get to this? Barbara Gamarekian who was in the press office of the Kennedy White House with Pierre Salinger, she had an oral history. Seventeen pages were blacked out. My historian’s curiosity said, "Gosh, what could be here?" I went to her. She lives in Washington. And she said, "All right, I’ll open it to you." And, lo and behold, there’s this material about the intern.
Now, it was fascinating because the connection to Bill Clinton was so striking to me, and particularly this question that you’ve asked me. How could it have been that John Kennedy carries on this way and Bill Clinton gets caught, so to speak, and is embarrassed and is impeached and this doesn’t come forward as something which jeopardized his presidency? I think the answer is that it was a very different media and political culture in the 1960s. I spoke to a number of journalists who said to me they knew about Mr. Kennedy’s womanizing and if they didn’t know about it, they strongly suspected it. But they were not aggressive about pursuing it.
And what Kennedy understood was this was something, at the time, which was largely out of bounds. There was a right wing press that did talk about his womanizing. But as Kennedy himself once said, "It’s not news until it is on the front page of The New York Times. Well, even if it were in some of the other mainstream press on page ten or something, they didn’t pursue it. They didn’t do it. And, of course, Gary Hart says, "Follow me." And the press has ever since.
And, of course, it’s a changed world with all these cable channels and Murdoch comes into our media culture and tabloid journalism. And I guess, also, I’m a bit naïve. I put these two lines in the book. "Date Line," which interviewed me almost two weeks ago now, they ran a story on a Sunday and that afternoon a guy from The New York Daily News calls me up. And he says, "I want to talk to you about the intern." And I said, "How do you know about this?"
And he said, "Of course, ‘Date Line’ has put this out as a press release." And he asked me a couple of questions. And I naively said to them, "You’re going to run a story about this?" He said, "Man," he said, "we are going to it on the front page." And he says, "Kennedy’s Monica." And on page three is not only a story but a picture of me and Monica. And what did I let myself in for? To my great joy, my daughter called us up on Sunday and she said, "Dad," she said, "there’s this fellow, Goldstein, who was the editor of NewYorkTimes.com, and he was on a local NBC station in New York City this weekend. And he said, ‘I want to tell you about this Kennedy book. This fellow Dallek. It’s amazing. He revealed this stuff about medical history, about the intern. This guy’s a professor. You couldn’t meet somebody who is more professorial.’" So, emphasizing it. And I was very gratified. I don’t want to be known as a scandalmonger. But, essentially, it’s a change in the culture. And, of course, I hold no beef for what Kennedy did. I mean, it’s sad and in some ways it’s shocking.
One has to ask, what is there about the man that he had to engage in this sort of behavior, a 19-year old. He’s President of the United States. It is so distressing to think. And Bill Clinton, he should have known better in the sense that the media, by this point, was on everybody’s case. And so, different world, different time, I think is the answer.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: If it’s any satisfaction to you, Bob, this can happen to you even if you haven’t written a word about it. Some years ago I was reviewing a very long book by Jonathan Daniels, which had a small passage in it about Franklin Roosevelt’s relationship to Lucy Mercer. And I wasn’t sure it was credible. How wrong I was. But beyond that, it was, in the few words I had, hardly worth mentioning. The New York Times broke the story on the front page as happened to you. And then, they did something that never happened to me in my life before or since, they inserted a sentence about Lucy Mercer in my review that they printed in the subsequent Sunday New York Times. So that’s how eager the press sometimes is to grab bits of this sort.
ROBERT DALLEK: Well, my follow up if I may make just one very brief anecdote. In The New York Times Metro Section on Wednesday after all this stuff came out, it was pointed out to me that there was a little squib about a New York Times journalist who was attending some social function celebrating another New York Times journalist, and Bill Clinton was there. And she went up to Bill Clinton and she said, "Oh, nice to see you." And he said, "Oh, lovely to see you." And she said, "Have you seen or read this new book by Robert Dallek on Kennedy?" And he said, "Oh, I know Dallek’s work. Wonderful books on Lyndon Johnson, just splendid." And she said, "But have you read the Kennedy book?" "No. No. I haven’t read that yet." And then she said, "Have you read Robert Caro?" And he said, "Oh, yes, terrific books on Johnson, wonderful work." And she said, "But you haven’t read Dallek on Kennedy?" And he said, "No. I’ve got to go now."
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Right. Right. If we could, I think one of those things that we at least want to do is spend a lot of time on something that is being talked about only for its sensationalist aspect. And I know that anybody who reads your book knows what a small part that particular episode plays. But there is -- and just one other question in this area -- isn’t there something more significant here than the single episode of the intern?
You quote a good number of Jack Kennedy’s letters as a teenager and as a college student, which I found truly shocking, the way in which he treats women, the demeaning way he treats women. He says at one point that, "I want to separate one out of the herd of cattle and brand her," for example. Isn’t there a further problem of his having a liaison with the woman with Mafia connections?
ROBERT DALLEK: Yes.
WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG: Isn’t there a further problem with his having a liaison with a woman who was a security risk? And then, finally, isn’t there a problem in our assessment of the Kennedy presidency in that, because as we were saying earlier, the legislative record is so thin, so much of his reputation rests on style. And the aura that was cast about this wonderful marriage in the White House with the young children, when you set the sexual behavior against that, then isn’t it a legitimate subject for historians to be concerned about.
ROBERT DALLEK: Bill, I think, when I wrote this book, I included all the incidents you mentioned because it seems to me you cannot write a book about John Kennedy’s life at this point and exclude those letters and exclude that material because there was something off center about the man’s behavior and I tried to understand it. I think in some ways he learned it at his father’s knee. I think he also modeled himself after British aristocrats who had an impulse towards this kind of womanizing as well.
I think he was also driven by this feeling that his older brother died, his younger sister, Kathleen, died. It was going to be a short life. He had all sorts of medical problems and he was living it to the fullest. But, still, that does not explain what you are describing, which really was a very abusive approach, one might say. And also, abusive to his wife because, I mean, it was ugly, the kinds of things that have been described about what he did, being at a party with her, walking out with some young woman. And, gosh, it really is … Doris Kearns Goodwin revealed that years ago in The Fitzgerald’s and Kennedy’s.
And I have that one episode in my book in which he is on the campaign trail and he goes into a hotel, he nudges one of his aides and points to one of the pom pom girls there, and the guy goes up to her and says, "The Senator would like to see you in his room." And the story is she goes up to the room and she walks in. He looks at his watch and says, "Well, we have 15 minutes." What happened after that, I have no idea.
But it is so striking that he was a kind of, I don't know how you would quite describe it, except maybe abusive. And sure, it’s relevant. It’s certainly part of the man’s history and part of the story, and it’s a fixed part of the story. That those four Secret Service agents gave Seymour Hersch that material and I trust that they were speaking the truth.
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