Making the Transition

As John F. Kennedy’s election as president was finally confirmed shortly after noon on November 9, there were seventy-two days before his inauguration—“seventy-two days in which to form an administration, staff the White House, fill some seventy-five key Cabinet and policy posts, name six hundred other major nominees” and “to formulate concrete policies and plans for all the problems of the nation, foreign and domestic, for which he soon would be responsible as President.”1

Kennedy did not begin this crucial transition period from scratch. After the party conventions, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, had urged both candidates to begin to prepare for the transition, should they be elected. In September, Kennedy had asked high-powered Washington law­yer Clark Clifford, who had been a senior adviser to President Harry Truman and who had successfully represented Kennedy against allegations that he was not the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Profiles in Courage, to be his primary transition adviser. Kennedy also had asked Columbia University professor Richard Neustadt, a leading scholar of the American presidency and author of the recently published Presidential Power,2 to provide his views on how best to organize the presidency.

Neustadt earlier in 1960 had begun to work on transition issues at the request of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA). Jackson and Kennedy were similar in their strongly anticommunist views and on giving priority to military strength, and Kennedy had included Jackson on his short list as a running mate. Neustadt had prepared a twenty-two page memorandum by September 15 on “Organizing the Transition.” In this memo, Neustadt made a prescient observation: “The Vice President-elect will be looking for work.” Jackson took Neustadt to meet Kennedy on September 18, and the candidate was immediately impressed by Neustadt’s memo. Kennedy asked Neustadt to elaborate his arguments in additional memoranda, saying some­one in the campaign would get back to him in due time. As was typical of Kennedy’s style, he asked Clifford and Neustadt to work without consulting

one another, ensuring that he would have two independent sources of transi­tion advice.3

Neustadt heard no more from the Kennedy campaign until late October, when he was contacted by one of JFK’s associates, asking how he was pro­gressing. On November 4, Neustadt joined Kennedy on his campaign air­plane to hand the candidate several of the memorandums he had prepared. Within thirty minutes, Kennedy came to Neustadt, saying that he found the material “fascinating.” What he may have found most interesting in Neustadt’s analysis was the recommendation that he adopt a staffing pat­tern in the White House that was much closer to that used by Franklin D. Roosevelt than the military-like arrangements that had been set up by Dwight Eisenhower. “You would be your own ‘chief of staff,’ ” suggested Neustadt. “Your chief assistants would have to work collegially, in constant

touch with one another and with you_____ There is room here for a primus

inter pares to emerge, but no room for a staff director or arbiter, short of you. . . You would oversee, coordinate, and interfere with virtually every­thing your staff was doing.” Neustadt noted that “no one has yet improved on Roosevelt’s relative success in getting information in his mind and key decisions in his hands reliably enough and soon enough to give him room for maneuver.”4 This was a pattern that Kennedy as president would adopt for his space decisions, among many others.

Clifford delivered his transition memorandum and back-up notebooks to Kennedy on November 9, the day on which Kennedy’s election victory was confirmed. The president-elect then asked Clifford to serve as his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower administration during the transition. Kennedy’s biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who lunched with the president-elect that day, reports that Clifford’s memorandum was “shorter and less detailed than the Neustadt series,” but that “in the main the two advisers reinforced each other all along the line.” Both Neustadt, who stayed on as a consultant dur­ing the transition and in the early months of the Kennedy administration, and Clifford emphasized that Kennedy should organize the White House to serve his needs as president, with no chief of staff to control who had access to the president and thus whose advice he received.5

On November 10, John Kennedy met with his key campaign advis­ers before heading off for a much needed vacation. After the meeting, he announced three key appointments to his personal White House staff: Pierre Salinger as his press secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell as his special assistant and appointments secretary, and Theodore Sorensen as his principal adviser on domestic policy and programs, with the title of special counsel to the president. Salinger was a former journalist who had served as Kennedy’s press secretary during the campaign. O’Donnell had served as the orga­nizer and scheduler of Kennedy’s senatorial and presidential campaigns, and was part of the protective Massachusetts “Irish mafia” that had emerged around Kennedy during his political career. Sorensen was from Nebraska, the son of a Unitarian minister, and very different in style from Kennedy’s Massachusetts associates. He had joined JFK’s Senate staff in 1953 and had

become his chief speechwriter and domestic policy adviser and in many ways his alter ego on policy matters. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Harvard histo­rian who was Kennedy’s link to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, notes that with respect to Sorensen, “it was hard to know him well. Self­sufficient, taut and purposeful, he was a man of brilliant intellectual gifts, jealously devoted to the President and rather indifferent to personal relations beyond his own family.”6 All three of these men were a generation younger than their equivalents in the Eisenhower administration; as they entered the White House in January 1961, Salinger would be 35, O’Donnell, 36, and Sorensen, 32. Kennedy was 43, the second youngest man ever to become U. S. president.

Salinger reports that during the 1960 campaign, O’Donnell “was con­stantly at JFK’s side. He took his orders directly from the candidate and saw to it that the rest of us carried them out—and to the letter.”7 Once Kennedy was in the White House, O’Donnell as appointments secretary controlled most access to the President; he also acted as Kennedy’s chief “enforcer” within the executive branch, making sure that senior agency officials acted in accordance with White House priorities. However, it appears that O’Donnell had relatively limited involvement in space-related issues other than those associated with the political ramifications of NASA’s facility location and contract award decisions.

Sorensen saw himself serving “as an honest broker, determining which decisions could be made by me and which could only be made by the presi­dent. . . In meetings where the president was not present, I often did not distinguish between my views and his.” Sorensen also notes that he and Kennedy were “close in a peculiarly impersonal way”; there was little social contact between him and Kennedy either as senator or president. There was no love lost between O’Donnell and his staff and Sorenson and his depu­ties during the time they served President Kennedy. Although O’Donnell’s hostility toward Sorensen and his staff was well known to most in the White House, Sorensen professes to have been unaware of the antagonism until years later.8

On space issues, it clearly was Sorensen who had more influence on President Kennedy’s thinking than O’Donnell, particularly during their early months in the White House. Sorensen, in fact, appears to have been something of a latent space enthusiast. As he speculated during the cam­paign about what job he might want if Kennedy were elected president, he wondered whether he “might fit in at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, using my ability to translate scientific and technologi­cal terms into layman’s language.” He also comments that “I had no real aptitude for science and astronomy. . . Space, like so many other issues, was one I learned on the job.” Sorensen later suggested that this “was just free­wheeling speculation as to whether I would have a post and what would be the most suitable post for me. But it didn’t take me too long to realize that that would have been totally inappropriate for me and inconsistent with the President’s wishes.”9

After this November 10 meeting, the exhausted president-elect did not return to active engagement with the transition process until the end of the month, although Clifford, Sorensen, and others were meeting during this period with their counterparts in the Eisenhower administration. Once he did become fully engaged, Kennedy first focused on selecting the ten mem­bers of his Cabinet; his first nominee was announced on December 1 and the final one on December 17. On that latter date, sixty additional key policy posts and several hundred more other key positions remained to be filled. As he met with Neustadt and Clifford while the search for the people to fill administration positions continued, Kennedy complained about the diffi­culty of finding the best individuals to staff his “ministry of talent,” saying: “People, people, people! I don’t know any people. I only know voters.”10 To help him understand the issues he would confront in the White House, the president-elect had during the campaign commissioned seven task forces; in December, an additional nineteen more were added, and three more in January. One of the December groups, discussed in more detail below, was on outer space; it worked under Sorensen’s guidance. The Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report called these task forces an “important innovation” in the presidential transition process, noting that there was “no precedent for the large number of task forces. . . with wide memberships.”11 As he received the reports of his twenty-nine teams, which were composed of the best avail­able individuals and who worked without compensation, Kennedy’s reac­tions ranged from “helpful” to “terrific.” Twenty-four of the twenty-nine teams, including the outer space group, turned in their reports before the January 20 inauguration.