Kennedy, Crisis, and Decision-Making by Edward F
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The Chief Executive: Kennedy, Crisis, and Decision-Making By Edward F. Batchelder Senior Honors Thesis History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill April 29, 2020 Approved: Michael Morgan, Thesis Advisor BenjaMin Waterhouse, Reader 1 Acknowledgments I must thank Dr. Michael Morgan for his support, guidance, and tutelage. I owe hiM a treMendous debt of gratitude. I also want to thank Rachel Kiel, who has helped me every step of the way. My faMily has been incredibly supportive, and I especially thank my dad for instilling in Me a passion for history. This project was also made possible by the financial assistance I received from the Boyatt Award in History and the Tom and Elizabeth Long Research Award. 2 Introduction “How could I have been so stupid?”1 John F. Kennedy posed this question to his trusted advisor and speechwriter Ted Sorenson in April 1961 after he had just publicly accepted blaMe for the recent failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The invasion of Cuba was the president's first Major setback since taking office that January. Up to that point, “everything had broken right for hiM since 1956. Everyone around hiM thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.”2 Frustrated with his foreign policy machinery, which he blaMed for the disaster, the president made changes designed to prevent future policy failures. Kennedy had more faith in his intuition than in his national security advisors, which compelled hiM to take more ownership of policy creation. A few weeks after the invasion, Kennedy ignored the warnings of his advisors and met Soviet PreMier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy was underprepared and outMatched at the Meeting. The unsuccessful sumMit catalyzed a crisis in Berlin. The president once again changed aspects of his foreign policy machinery. This tiMe, however, Kennedy’s changes successfully addressed probleMs with his policy creation process, and his administration outlined a strategy that helped resolve the Berlin crisis. This project explores how Kennedy managed his national security apparatus and oversaw the creation of foreign policy. The narrative and language of the work also connects modern ManageMent theory that eMerged at the tiMe to the Kennedy administration. Beyond its historical applications, the research and analysis given here reveals a lesson about manageMent. As a leader and executive, it may be more iMportant to avoid making bad decisions than to make good 1 Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: BantaM Books, Inc, 1966) 309. 2 Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin CoMpany, 1965) 259. 3 decisions.3 This was certainly true of Kennedy. For a president in the nuclear age, the downside risk of a miscalculation was unliMited. Kennedy recognized the iMbalance of risk and reward, particularly in Berlin. The failures of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vienna sumMit indicated that in order to avoid future bad decisions that might put the country at risk, he needed to overhaul his manageMent style and his policy-Making process. After many growing pains, the Kennedy administration created a successful Berlin policy that resulted from effective institutional decision-Making, not the president's intuition. In 1982, John Gregory Dunne wrote, "There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes.”4 Scholars have not yet used the facts available about John F. Kennedy to connect his leadership to modern ManageMent theory. Former Harvard Business School professor Phil Rosenzweig argued that the measure of a manager is “the willingness to exaMine one’s own actions and seek a measure of wisdom.”5 Evaluating Kennedy against this standard provides a new perspective on his administration. Kennedy’s willingness to learn from his mistakes and change course after his failures in Cuba and Vienna illustrate the two theMes of this thesis: executive manageMent and the iMportance of the decision-Making process. Kennedy’s success in Berlin leads to two central questions. How did the president’s diagnosis of his administration's probleMs affect the process of decision-Making? How did his 3 The iMportance of avoiding bad decisions comes from Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, and professor at Wharton. In an interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Grant spoke about how executives guide company culture. Grant concluded that while it is good to make sMart decisions, it is more critical to avoid decisions that would negatively affect the coMpany. The President of the United States is like a CEO in Many respects. Accordingly, I have applied Grant’s thoughts on decision-making to the Kennedy administration. Reed HoffMan, interview with Reed Hastings and Adam Grant, Masters of Scale, podcast transcript, March 5, 2020, https://Mastersofscale.com/reed-hastings-culture-shock/. 4 John Dunne, “Elephant Man,” Review of The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, by Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books VoluMe 29, NuMber 6, April 1982, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/04/15/elephant-man/. 5 Phil Rosenzweig, “Robert S. McNamara and the Evolution of Modern Management,” Harvard Business Review, DeceMber, 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/12/robert-s-mcnamara-and-the-evolution-of-modern-management. 4 ManageMent style influence foreign policy during the first eight months of his presidency? This thesis argues that after the failures in Cuba and Vienna, Kennedy caMe to several conclusions: elaborate machinery was not innately ineffective; he should trust his advisors; and he should avail hiMself of more dissenting opinions. Based on these lessons, Kennedy rebuilt some of the formal foreign policy machinery that he had previously disMantled, relinquished his grip on policy creation, and halted debate until he could hear from noteworthy advocates of more hawkish policy. The young president initially showed supreMe confidence in his manageMent style. After the election, Kennedy was eager to reach the White House and change the structure of the executive branch to better suit his own preferences. His predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, relied on formal machinery—for exaMple, a subcomMittee of the National Security Council—to inform his foreign policy decisions. The newly elected president preferred a less rigid approach.6 Because he prized efficiency, Kennedy wanted to eliMinate some of Eisenhower’s formal Machinery, which in his view slowed the creation of foreign policy. The new structure was less “elaborate,” which Kennedy hoped would provide “More flexibility than in the past.”7 McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, who had the task of disMantling much of Eisenhower’s machinery, reMarked that Kennedy desired less formality in policy creation because “all Senators are disorderly.”8 The desire for informality was felt throughout the White House. In an interview with the author, on April 24, 2020, Charles Daly, former Staff assistant to the President for Congressional Liaison, claiMed that Kennedy’s style was “very loose and relaxed.” 6 Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: Edward BurlingaMe Books, 1991) 68. 7 Schlesinger, 209-210. 8 McGeorge Bundy quoted in Beschloss, 68. 5 Kennedy’s managerial intuition seeMed reasonable, but his changes caused probleMs. For exaMple, he “wanted his staff to be sMall, in order to keep it more personal than institutional.”9 By changing the machinery to fit his own disorganized manageMent style, he fixed something that was not broken. Kennedy made changes designed to “increase his influence,” and expedite the flow of information. A faster process was intended to give Kennedy “More room to Maneuver” when thinking about different policy proposals.10 No one in Kennedy’s caMp stopped to consider that there might be negative tradeoffs between speed and quality. Terminating ostensibly superfluous staff and reorganizing the White House had the unintended effect of obscuring the flow of information to the president. The president's confidence prevented hiM from seeing iMportant warning signs, and his new systeM failed hiM. The Bay of Pigs was largely the result of Kennedy putting too much faith in military advisors and rushed tiMelines. Instead of having room to maneuver around various policy recomMendations, the president had created a systeM in which “bureaucratic momentum” held hiM hostage and pressed hiM to approve a foolish plan.11 Kennedy felt betrayed by the proponents of the invasion (the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and, to a lesser extent, the State DepartMent). In the wake of the disaster, he “Moved to increase his grip on his foreign policy government” in order to avoid repeating his past mistakes.12 Although Kennedy had lost a brother in the Second World War, he described the Bay of Pigs as the worst day of his life.13 The president was despondent over his shortsightedness, and wanted to rebound by scoring a foreign policy victory. During the Cold War, however, there was 9 Sorensen, 262. 10 Sorensen, 259. 11 Sorensen, 302. 12 Beschloss, 146. 13 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2013) 367. 6 no such thing as a quick or siMple victory. Journalist Stewart Alsop said that the Bay of Pigs was a Moment that should have “cured any illusions that Kennedy had about the certainty of success.”14 After Kennedy had tiMe to process the failed invasion, Eisenhower offered to meet with hiM at CaMp David. The two men discussed the challenges of leading a nation and discussed Kennedy’s next steps. Eisenhower told Kennedy that if he wanted to get out of the situation he was in, the only way to do so was with a success. Kennedy replied, “Well, I assure you that, hereafter, if we get into anything like this, it is going to be a success.”15 Unfortunately, Kennedy could not keep his word. At that tiMe, he did not have a manageMent structure capable of handling complex geopolitical issues.