Picking the Team

With less than two months left before the end of the Great Crusade and the opening of the New Frontier, the Kennedy Administration last week began to take shape. Announcing four key appointments and nearing final decisions on several others, President-elect Kennedy, by the nature of his selections, indicated that his Administration will be generally moderate, eschewing the radicalism of the 1960 Democratic platform. Named by Kennedy to high Government posts: North Carolina's Governor Luther Hodges as Secretary of Commerce; Connecticut's Governor Abraham Ribicoff as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Harvard Economist David E. Bell as Budget Director, and Michigan's Governor G. Mennen Williams as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

The appointment giving Kennedy the most trouble was the most important one of all: Secretary of State. One by one Kennedy ran down a list of eligibles, rejecting them for various reasons. By week's end his strongest preference was for Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, 55, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A three-term Senate veteran, Fulbright is a former Rhodes scholar, was president of the University of Arkansas, is the father of the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship student-exchange program. An outspoken opponent of the late Senator Joe McCarthy, he was the lone Senator to vote in 1954 against providing McCarthy with additional investigating funds. For his pains, Fulbright won a sneering sobriquet from McCarthy: "Senator Half-bright." As a persistent critic of Eisenhower foreign policies, Liberal Fulbright's views coincide closely with Kennedy's.

Yet despite his desire to appoint Fulbright, no one knew better than Kennedy that Fulbright has one great debit. One of the heaviest responsibilities of the new Secretary of State will be in dealing with restive African nations--and Fulbright, though no racist, is a political segregationist who remained conspicuously silent during the Little Rock school crisis in his home state.

To some Kennedy advisers, that fact alone was enough to eliminate Fulbright from consideration. (Said one: "We can't have a Secretary of State from Little Rock.") But as the moment of decision neared, Jack Kennedy still thought that Fulbright's talents outweighed his drawbacks--and that all the other top contenders also had drawbacks. He went off to Florida, still open to argument, still showing a strong inclination for making up his own mind in his own way.

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