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Pentagon.” But Eisenhower put him off with the recommendation that he delay “any reorganization before he himself could become well acquainted with the problem.” Ike’s advice did not sit well with Kennedy, who believed that Eisenhower’s affinity for a military command system had produced an overly cautious administration reluctant to act boldly and move in new directions. Kennedy gave Eisenhower the impression that he intended to set up a government that relied on having the right man in the right place. Eisenhower, who believed that successful administration depended more on smooth-running bureaucracies than on ambitious men pressing their personal agendas, considered Kennedy naïve in thinking that he could find miracle workers who would help him solve national and international problems.
    Kennedy, however, had no precise plan for how he would organize his administration. He believed that it required considerable forethought and preparation. Consequently, after winning the nomination, he had invited Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s White House counsel and architect of his 1948 election victory, to discuss campaign politics. At the end of a breakfast meeting, Kennedy made “a request that had no precedent in American politics, one that was to set a pattern for future transfers of presidential power,” Clifford recalled. Kennedy said, “Clark, I’ve been thinking about one matter where you could be of special help to me. If I win, I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and say to myself, ‘What do I do now?’ I want to have a plan. I want someone to be planning for this between now and November 8.” He asked Clifford to prepare a memorandum “outlining the main tasks of the new Administration.” A week later, Kennedy told Clifford that a Brookings Institution group was studying past transitions and discussing ways to improve on them. He persuaded Clifford to be his representative on the committee.
    At the same time, Kennedy invited Columbia University political scientist Richard Neustadt, who had just published a widely discussed book, Presidential Power , to write a transition plan for him as well. Neustadt, who knew that Kennedy had also directed Clifford to develop a strategy for taking control of the government, asked how he should coordinate his efforts with Clifford. Kennedy instructed him to ignore Clifford. “I can’t afford to confine myself to one set of advisers,” Kennedy told him. “If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”
    Kennedy knew that the most effective presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts—had consulted various advisers but at the end of the day had relied on their own counsel to make the most important decisions of their terms. As Harry Truman had said, “the buck stops here.” It was the president who had the responsibility for choosing between the options available to him. Besides, for someone as young and inexperienced as he would be on entering office, Kennedy needed to insure against impressions of him as a cipher, a novice simply following the lead of subordinates who thought they knew better than their chief.
    Neither Clifford nor Neustadt expressed an interest in becoming a part of the new administration, which pleased Kennedy. Tall, handsome, with the looks of a matinee idol and a reputation as a political miracle worker who had engineered Truman’s 1948 upset victory, Clifford would be a competitor for center stage with any president who brought him into the White House. Moreover, Kennedy saw Clifford as someone whose ambition for control would provoke clashes with other advisers and create unwanted tensions in a new administration trying to develop policy initiatives. Kennedy joked that Clifford wanted nothing for his services “except the right to advertise the Clifford law firm on the back of the one-dollar bill.” Kennedy had no interest in surrounding himself with yes-men, but he was determined not to be intimidated