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by Ted Sorensen

Does the volley of slings and arrows aimed at the Obama White House staff, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel – with even wise man Les Gelb calling for “a sweeping staff shakeup” ousting most of the principal players “to save his presidency” – mean that our president selected the worst and dumbest; or is this simply an overreaction in the national press and Democratic Party to the aberrational Senate election in Massachusetts?

I remember all too clearly 48-49 years ago when my colleagues on the Kennedy presidential team, previously called “the best and the brightest,” were the target of similar attacks, as most White House staffs in their first two years have been. It is easy to criticize. Mr. Gelb even condemned Obama’s “flagrantly foolish rhetoric,” making one wonder how he could ever have been elected.

The underlying premise is the claim that Obama’s first 15 months were a failure. Failure? The man who stemmed the initial hemorrhage of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, who raised our international standing from near zero (due to repeated torture and other violations of international law, and unilateral military interventions as a substitute for multilateral diplomacy) to a renewed level of widespread international respect, who obtained passage by the House of his first dozen or more legislative proposals? A failure? Similar epithets were hurled by pundits and political detractors at Kennedy and his team during and after his first year or two in office, when they asked:

Why is there no ‘grand design’ for global policy? Why is the president taking on all the international crises inherited from his predecessor? Why are his poll ratings not as high as they were soon after his election? The president is occasionally inconsistent, changing his mind or position; the president has not achieved all of his formidable objectives in one year; the president should not have raised expectations so high; the president is all speeches, no accomplishments, yet calling on us self-appointed experts very rarely; the president is relying more on principle than politics by seeking lofty goals instead of small accomplishments; why can’t his staff work more than 24 hours a day to return our calls?

After Kennedy left behind the first step toward arms control in the nuclear age, new success in the conquest of space as he literally reached for the moon, new legislative protection for the minimally paid, the mentally ill and challenged, plus a comprehensive civil rights program reversing centuries of discrimination, plus the Peace Corps, expanded world trade and a host of measures reviving the eroding protective networks of the Roosevelt/Truman New Deal/Fair Deal, no one was asking those questions. I predict they will not be asked about the Obama administration at its close in 2016.

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