Kennedy the Unready

Titles can mislead. English schoolchildren once learned that among Alfred the Great’s successors were Ethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor, and some even entered adulthood still wondering why Ethelred was so perennially unprepared and what was it that Edward had to confess? In reality, “unready” had been a mistranslation and corruption of the Anglo-Saxon term for “ill-counseled,” and “confessor” indicated a saintly person who embodied Christian virtue rather than someone who confided their guilt. No one, I suspect, would consider John F. Kennedy a confessor in this sense, although a 2010 Gallup Poll found Kennedy ranked the highest among their last nine presidents. But Robert Dallek might be drawn to the original meaning of “unready” since his account of the extraordinary group of men who advised JFK is full of examples of bad advice.

Dallek knows well that the question of how Kennedy chose to organize and run the White House is a well-established issue in presidential studies. When revisionism was at its height in the late 1970s, Kennedy was seen as a key figure in the evolution of the imperial presidency, whose dark excesses Watergate had exposed. Kennedy had dispensed with the committee structure and regular Cabinet meetings that had marked his predecessor Eisenhower’s two terms, and the ensuing pattern of ad hoc policy-making by the president’s inner circle had played a part in the expansion of U.S. involvement in Vietnam under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy was known to have prepared for government as President-elect in late 1960 with the assistance of Richard Neustadt, author of Presidential Power, a book that urged activist presidents to be at the hub of all policy-making. The well-known figures in the Kennedy inner circle—Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and of course, brother Bobby Kennedy—were subsequently savaged for hubris in relation to Vietnam by journalist David Halberstam in his famous study The Best and the Brightest. Yet anyone hoping that Dallek will systematically consider the merits of either Neustadt’s prescriptions or Halberstam’s diagnosis will be disappointed. This is not a book that seeks to advance leadership studies in a social scientific way; instead it is a biographical reprise.

The advisors who emerge with least credit from these pages are probably the military chiefs of staff. Dallek notes early that Kennedy entered office with a mistrust of the top brass that dated back to his own, more modest, wartime experience, and that the generals in turn were skeptical that a young man of such limited experience could be their commander-in-chief (pp. 68–70). Dallek portrays the chiefs, beginning with the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, as Eisenhower’s men, a view that understates their unhappiness and resistance to Ike’s efforts to rein in defense spending. Eisenhower’s farewell address, with its warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex, is mentioned (p. 152), but it is not discussed either as a partisan intervention or as advice for the new administration. Since the Korean War, the feeling had been growing among the chiefs that the U.S. needed to be more aggressive while it still had the edge in missile technology. Figures such as Air Force generals Thomas Power and Curtis LeMay were alarmed by civilian squeamishness over nuclear weapons; they saw them as weapons that were meant to be used, and their deterrence value would erode the longer America refused to use them. When Kennedy received a reluctantly given briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war that targeted all major Communist population centers, he remarked: “And we call ourselves the human race” (p. 74).

Dallek’s overall view is that, amidst so much reckless advice, it is as well for humanity that Kennedy was in charge. This opinion is foreshadowed by his discussion of the establishment of the Peace Corps and the launching of the Alliance for Progress ahead of a very familiar account...