Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
On Name-Dropping
Books, like those who write them, have an unplanned
life of their own. The very act of writing
has a controlling role. When I started this book, I
intended to describe the political personality the personal
and public traits that, as I saw them, allowed the
great leaders of our century to influence or dominate the
political scene. There are still elements of this intention
in the pages that follow. But it faded as a central purpose.
Instead, as the work proceeded, there was more interest
for the author, as I trust there will be for the reader,
in how the great political figures appeared to their contemporaries,
of whom I was one. What did I recall of
personal encounters or public association with Franklin
Roosevelt, Eleanor, the Kennedys, Nehru and others?
Such recollections took over, but with them came a certain
risk.
Reminiscence and anecdote, as they tell of one's meetings
with the great or the prominent, are an established
form of self-enhancement. They make known that one
was there. This is not my purpose; my aim is to inform
and perhaps, on occasion, to entertain. The risk,
nonetheless, exists that critics who are less than tolerant
may suggest that I am indulging in name-dropping.
Hence the title of the book and that of this chapter; nothing
so disarms a prosecutor as a prior confession of guilt.
Not all that follows concerns the political figures of
my time. I frequently digress to write of my own experience
and of responsibilities accorded me. This tells something
of those of whom I speak. Not exceptionally in
writing of this kind, it may well tell more of the author.
Here also is an occasional event or personal encounter
of which I have told before. For this I do not apologize.
All education and all worthwhile writing is, in some
measure, a recapture of the already known.
Much of this bookmost, in factis centered on now-distant
times; an important part dates to the first half of
the century that is now drawing to a close. It was with
the events of this period and the people that I was involved.
I now read of, and from time to time encounter,
the influential men and women of the present day. It is
for others to tell of them; this I do not, in all cases, regret.
There will be question less as to those who have been selected
for recollection and celebration here than as to
those omitted or discussed only briefly. The reason is not
far to seek; it is whether or not I was there and have
something to add. On one or two occasions I met Dwight
D. Eisenhower; he was and remains one of the underestimated
Presidents of our time. A Republican, he accepted
the great social legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
twenty-year New Deal era and made it an integral part
of American life. F.D.R. initiated, Truman continued,
Eisenhower confirmed. He also left the deathless and
death-defying warning as to the military-industrial complex.
But when I have said this of Ike, I have very little
else to say.
As to another major figure, one exactly of my generation,
there is a similar problem. Ronald Reagan and I
were fellow founders of Americans for Democratic Action,
once and still a dominant liberal voice in the land.
Ronnie, as he was known, left us when his screen career
diminished and he began giving well-paid lectures on, as
it was then denoted, the free enterprise system. His regression,
we always said, was not from any commitment
to newly acquired belief; it was only for the money. On
his later career there was nothing of which I had firsthand
knowledge. This, I do slightly regret, for Ronald
Reagan was the first wholly uninhibited Keynesian President eager
public spending to provide economic stimulation
and employment, all financed by large public
borrowing, with the resulting budget deficit. However,
there was a dark side, to which Keynes would have reacted
adversely: the spending was for extensively unneeded
armaments.
With Jimmy Carter, whom I first met in Georgia and
saw on later occasions, I had only a distant association. It
was his special tragedy that, while Ronald Reagan succeeded
with the economic policies his party had so long
opposed, Jimmy Carter was taken to defeat by those
conservatives had long urged. His highly reputable economists,
in pursuit of economic virtue, accepted that a
President seeking re-election could survive inflation attacked
only by its traditional and painful remedies: high
interest rates, economic stagnation, unemployment. It
was a triumph of rigorous economic orthodoxy; ignored
only was Jimmy Carter's all-but-certain fate.
One of my closest and certainly one of my most admired
friends in politics over many years has been George McGovern,
presidential candidate in 1972 against Richard
Nixon. I had a small role in his selection as a candidate
and a not insignificant one in his defeat. At the Democratic
Convention that year, as a leader of the Massachusetts
delegation, I vetoed his first choice for Vice
President, Kevin White, the Mayor of Boston. I did not
think I could win state support for his nomination because,
among other things, White had endorsed McGovern's
opponent in the primary. There would be an unseemly
row on the floor. McGovern went on to Tom
Eagleton, who, it soon became known, had once had
some modest, wholly curable psychiatric problems. Unwisely,
George dropped him from the ticket and then
was involved in an embarrassing search for a substitute.
In consequence, his campaign had a very bad start. He
should have ignored my advice. I haven't told here of
George McGovern perhaps because, again, I have little to
add, perhaps more because I prefer to write about those
with whom my association was less disastrous.
Also passed over with McGovern, but for a very different
reason, is Richard Nixon. In 1942, in the tense
months after Pearl Harbor, he served in the Office of
Price Administration as an attorney on rubber-tire rationing,
of which I was then in charge. He drafted my
letters, but I did not, as I recall, ever meet him. I became
fully aware of his existence and character only with
his crusade against Communism and Alger Hiss. Later
when his enemies' list became known, my name was
present, adorned, according to my recollection, with
two checkmarks. In one of his taped and reluctantly released
conversations in the White House, he dignified
me as the leading enemy of good public process in our
time. But, to repeat, I never met him, so Richard Nixon
is not here.
I once contemplated, a chapter in this book on Winston
Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Not in recent times,
not perhaps ever, have two politicians accepted greater
risks with greater ultimate success. How grim and dim
the prospect in 1940; how enormous our debt to their intransigent
stand. During my wartime years in Washington,
Churchill was especially a presence; one thought
of him, more even perhaps than of F.D.R., as the guiding
military force of the war. I did meet both Churchill
and de Gaulle but only after the war was over and for
no deeply operative purpose. To have made anything
of these encounters would, indeed, have been namedropping.
A more serious matter is the very few womenonly
Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedypresent in
these accounts. That, very simply, is because, for most of
the period here covered, women were not visible in the
political world. The concern here is with high office; this
was the virtually exclusive domain, the preserve, of men.
Among presidential wives some did step forward. In her
husband's presidency Nancy Reagan was an evident
force; with her, not surprisingly, I had no personal acquaintance.
John F. Kennedy, in a conversation of which I have
told on other occasions, once raised with me the question
of women in politics. He advanced what I thought
the deeply retrograde thesis that women were naturally
lacking in political talent. He asked me to name some
outstandingly successful women politicians. I responded
with Eleanor Roosevelt. He agreed and asked for another.
I was troubled for the moment and, in some desperation,
proposed Elizabeth I. Kennedy laughed scornfully
and said, "Now you have only one left, Maggie
Smith." Margaret Chase Smith, pioneer woman senator
from Maine, was nothere we differeda favorite
of his.
Were Kennedy now alive, he would not be making the
point; women are still underrepresented in politics, but
the change in the last thirty-five years strongly affirms
their political aptitude. Alas, it came too late for this volume.
And there is yet to be a woman President.
I turn now to Franklin Roosevelt, the first and in many
ways the greatest of those I encountered over a lifetime.
And the one, more than incidentally, who accorded me
the most responsibility. It was no slight matter to have
control over all the prices of all things sold in the United
States. And briefly over consumer rationing as well. My
role in the Office of Price Administration was my principal
association with F.D.R., but I also observed his leadership
in the New Deal and, more generally, in the war,
and of this I will tell as well.