In addition to the O’Brien and O’Donnell offices a third position in the Kennedy White House which was concerned primarily with politics was held by Ralph Dungan. Dungan had worked with the Shriver group in the great “talent hunt” that had taken place during the transition months and he continued to be concerned with personnel. He was the key patronage man in the White House and was also a valuable assistant on labor politics.
The position of Press Secretary was by now one of the oldest presidential staff positions, Press relations were particularly crucial for Kennedy after the narrow
Pierre Salinger. He was assisted by one of the few Negroes to hold a Presidential Me victory of 1950, and this position was held by another veteran of the campaign wars, staff position, Andrew Hatcher. In addition to the regular duties of Press Secretary, Salinger held frequent briefings for public information officers from the departments.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., held a unique White House staff position. He was the White House’s liaison with intellectuals in general and with Adlai Stevenson in particular, Kennedy did not know Stevenson well, but Schlesinger had assisted in Stevenson’s campaigns and was a natural choice for this job. Schlesinger was not actively involved in the day by cay work of the White House, although he did get special assignments from time to time. He was the idea man in the White House and kept a steady stream of memoranda on the President’s desk.
Although he dropped the title of Cabinet Secretary, Kennedy kept the function and assigned the job to Timothy J. Reardon. He was responsible for preparing agenda for Cabinet meetings and his duties also included some coordination of Presidential relations with the executive departments and agencies. However, he was by no means the exclusive staff member for the latter duty.
President Kennedy reacted strongly against the abundance of titles used for staff members in the Eisenhower Administration. Titles were meaningless in the Kennedy Administration. Most of the staff members were simply “Special Assistant to the President” and, Kennedy once remarked that he wished that all the staff members had had that title.
The old title of Administrative Assistant was rarely used by Kennedy. In fact, it was given only to Reardon and to O’Brien’s assistants, Manatos and Wilson. Paradoxically, the “passion for anonymity” attributed to the original Brownlow Committee creation was also not a particularly strong characteristic of the Kennedy staff. It was inevitable that the position of staff assistant to the President of the United States should be glamourized eventually, and this occurred as the youthful, active President Kennedy attracted unprecedented public attention to the White House. Most of the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower respondents in this study indicated that offers of speaking engagements or other public appearances were rejected as a rule of thumb. When I asked one Truman man if he had given interviews to reporters, he immediately told me that this would have been “unheard of behavior” for a staff member. Most of the respondents from the earlier administrations vowed that they would never write memoirs about their White House years unless asked to do so by the President— because “it would not be proper to do so.”
In sharp contrast to most of their predecessors the Kennedy men were constantly in the news. They did make speeches and public appearances. The mass circulation magazines carried detailed and frequently romantic stories about them. Already, three of them have written memoirs. They gave interviews to reporters rather freely. However, most of the Kennedy men did try to insulate themselves as much as possible from the great pressures for publicity. Too much publicity would have made them their own men and by definition useless to the President. As one of them put it, “While few of us had a 'passion for anonymity,' most of us had a preference in that direction.”