Quote of the Day | August 3, 2008: Like a Professional Athletic Scout

From David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, a 1972 account of Kennedy's crack staff and the origins of the Vietnam War.

So that cold December day Kennedy was lunching with a man who not only symbolized a group, the Establishment, and was a power broker who carried the proxies for the great law firms and financial institutions, but was also tied to a great and seemingly awesome era. If Kennedy, as he always did in that period, complained that he knew no experts, that was no problem; the Establishment had long lists and it would be delighted to co-operate with the young President, help him along. It was of course above politics. It feared the right (the Goldwater campaign of 1964 was an assault on the entrenched powerful Eastern money by the new and powerless Southern and Western money; it was not by chance that the principal villain for them at San Francisco had been Nelson Rockefeller), and it feared the left; it held what was proclaimed to be the center.

More often than not it was Republican, though it hedged its bets. A few members were nominal if cautious Democrats, and some families were very good about it -- the Bundy family had produced William for the Democrats, and McGeorge for the Republicans -- and it was believed that every major law firm should have at least one partner who was a Democrat. In fact, on the question of Kennedy and Nixon there had been an element of indecision in the Establishment world. One had a sense of the Establishment in an election year being like a professional athletic scout watching a championship match, emotionally uninvolved with either competitor, waiting unitl it was over and then descending to the locker room of the winner, to sign him on, to offer him the club's facilities -- in this case the trusted, respectable, sound men of the establishment.

Kennedy believed in the Establishment mystique; there had, after all, been little debunking of it in early 1960. Rarely had there been such a political consensus on foreign affairs: containment was good, Communism was dangerous, there was of course the problem of getting foreign aid bills through Congress, bills which would help us keep the Third World from the Communists. Besides, he was young, and since his victory over Nixon was slimmer than he had expected, he needed the backing of this club, the elitists of the national security people. And he felt at ease with them.

Tags: David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest