Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Author:Jeff Greenfield [Greenfield, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Published: 2011-01-26T08:00:00+00:00

IT WAS ONE A.M. on November 1, and Clark Clifford lay awake in the master bedroom of his fifty-year-old house in Bethesda, Maryland, profoundly troubled. That would have surprised anyone who had worked with the sixty-one-year-old Secretary of Defense, who had spent a lifetime conveying a sense of serene assurance. It came from his six-foot two-inch, 180-pound frame, topped by a mane of wavy silvery hair. It came from the impeccably tailored double-breasted pin-striped suits, the soothing, cultured voice with the faint echoes of his roots in Kansas and Missouri. From his first days in Washington, something about him had gained him easy entry into the corridors of power. As a young naval aide at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, he had gone to Samuel Rosenman, one of Truman’s top aides, asking for more work to do. Let’s keep that man at the White House, Rosenman had said to Truman. It was Clifford who helped shape Truman’s 1948 upset, urging the civil rights strategy that drove Southerners out of the convention but won critical liberal votes in the North, urging Truman to recognize the state of Israel that year even as Secretary of State George Marshall threatened to quit.

His calm demeanor—no one ever remembered him raising his voice or losing his temper—won him the confidence of everyone around him. Truman raised the idea of a Supreme Court appointment; admirers urged him to go back to Missouri and run for the Senate, but Clifford had another target in mind. In 1950, he opened a law firm in Washington and quickly became the highest-paid lawyer in the capital. His clients included TWA (Howard Hughes was among his first clients), AT&T, RCA, ABC, GE, DuPont, Standard Oil. He’d greet his clients in his paneled office on Connecticut Avenue, give them all the same speech about how he would not represent them before the President or his staff: “If you want influence,” he would say, “you should consider going elsewhere. What we can offer you is extensive knowledge on how to deal with the government on your problems.” And his clients would nod, Yes, of course, and think to themselves, This man can open every door in this town.

He was a trusted and discreet advisor to Presidents; he’d helped Jack Kennedy with his transition, “and all that he asked for,” Kennedy said at a pre-election dinner, “was that we advertise his law firm on the back of one-dollar bills.” Kennedy had put him on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board after the Bay of Pigs debacle, and Johnson had made him one of his closest counselors on Vietnam. Clifford had been a consistent voice for escalation, for increased military pressure on the North. Only air and ground power, he argued, would force North Vietnam to abandon its goal of conquering the South. So it was only natural that when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara seemed to be weakening in his resolve, seemed more and more to be doubting whether more bombs and troops could ever prevail,

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