The Structure Itself Must Change
In 1959, little over a year after graduating from law school, I went to work in the Senate office of John F. Kennedy, from which, the next fall, 49.7% of the American voters unwittingly sent me to the White House as assistant special counsel to the president. A few hours after the Inaugural Parade, while exploring our new quarters in the now notorious West Wing of the White House, my employer called to me through the open door of the Oval Office.
“Did you see the Coast Guard Academy in the parade?”
I tried to remember. Were they in blue? Or was that the Navy? But he did not wait for an answer.
“There wasn’t one black face. Call Dillon [the new secretary of the treasury, the department with jurisdiction over the Coast Guard]. Have him do something.”
I took the stairs to my West Wing office three at a time. It was real. The controls were in our hands, liberal and still tough-minded; we could now proceed to build a better, freer country, starting with the Coast Guard Academy.
***
On Friday, December 14th, 1963, along with Arthur Schlesinger, I sat in the attorney general’s spacious office, whose walls had drawings by his young children Scotch taped to the wood paneling, while we discussed some difficulties which Governor Averill Harriman was having with the State Department.
“I don’t want to see Averill Harriman get hurt, or anyone else,” said Robert Kennedy. “Harriman’s got his faults. I’ve got my faults. We’ve all got faults. The secret is collective action. I haven’t thought through how to go about it. But the secret is collective action. There are hundreds of guys around here in positions of influence. We’re important to Johnson. I’m the most important because my name happens to be Kennedy. But we’re all important. I haven’t thought it through yet, but we are.”
He stood rigidly next to his desk, beside the special telephone connected to the White House, his hands tensely at his side, head down, working to suppress a show of emotion.
“Sure I’ve lost a brother. Other people lose wives,” his voice trailed off. “I’ve lost a brother. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what we were trying to do for this country. We got a good start.
“We had a committee working on poverty. A juvenile delinquency study. You can’t do a lot in three years, but we’d gotten started. We could have done a lot in five more years. There are a lot of people in this town. They didn’t come here just to work for John Kennedy, an individual, but for ideas, things we wanted to do.
“It’s one thing if you’ve got personal reasons for leaving, like you may want to leave, Arthur. But I don’t think people should run off. We’re very important to Johnson now. After November 5th we’ll all be dead. We won’t matter a damn. A lot of people could scramble around now, get themselves positions of power and influence. I could do that. But that’s not important. What’s important is what we can get done. Remember, after November 5th we’re all done. We won’t be wanted or needed.”
As we got up to go, I pointed out a column in the afternoon paper in which public-opinion analyst, Samuel Lubel, reported that Southerners violently opposed Kennedy for vice president but that Negroes were for him. Kennedy, still standing, studied the paper and, without raising his head, mused flatly, “Well Johnson’s already got the Negroes . . . but he’s already got the Negroes.”
***
Late one evening in the spring of 1968, just a few days before his victory in the Indiana primary, Robert Kennedy sat talking in an Indianapolis restaurant after a 12-hour campaign day of that continual movement which reduces towns and neighborhoods to an almost indistinguishable series of platforms, crowds and outstretched hands. “Even if I get to be president,” he said to me, “how can you do everything you want to do with Congress, and the newspapers, and the establishment pressing down on you all the time? How can you accomplish anything important?”
Within four months, my passage from the confident ambitions of 1960 was complete. The events of one day in a Los Angeles hospital and a week in a maddened Chicago catalyzed a steadily growing awareness that we had misconceived the nature of America’s afflictions, failed to understand fully the sources of that oppressive power which was now visibly constricting the fair expectations and the freedom of the citizen.
Surely the declining conditions of a colossal society could not be ascribed to misjudgments, flawed character, accident or conspiracy. And if we had not been America’s “best and brightest,” still we were as good and intelligent as any likely to inhabit the government. If one could expect better only from a government staffed by men of improbable and unprecedented nobility, then perhaps we were asking of politics what it could not give; perhaps, at our best moments, we had been battling imaginary enemies for an illusory prize.
In 1969 I moved to a farm overlooked by the mountains of west central Maine, thus concluding a decadelong engagement with public life. The isolated study and writing of the nearly five years which followed gradually enlarged my understanding of society, and of the relationship between politics and the economic structures which dominate society.
This did not, however, constitute a belated acquiescence in the anti-liberalism which was proclaimed by every infant Lenin of the televised Sixties. For New Left politics, lacking any roots in economic radicalism, can be placed alongside the politics of Richard Nixon as a demonstration that liberalism is the most benign form of public power possible within the present structure of American society. But it is also true that no form of truly liberating politics is possible within that structure. It is the structure itself which must be changed. And that task is beyond the reach of politics.
The Structure Itself Must Change, Page 1 of 8