Col. Hugh F. Richardson

Washington bureaucrats will long remember John F. Kennedy as a President who stood them on their heads. Quick and impatient, he could not understand how Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon could take so long to answer his questions. Furthermore, he condoned unorthodox procedures on the grounds that order implied an absence of creativity. As Professor Neustadt has in effect pointed out, however, government officials prefer to go by the book. The result of this conflict was an encounter from which Washington has yet to recover.