July 21, 2006
John Bolton and Joseph Kennedy Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Last year Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, opposed the nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a tearful speech to the Senate he thought him far too bumptious and unwilling to suffer fools gladly to be a good steward of American interests at the United Nations. Partly as a result, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent the nomination to the floor without a recommendation, a highly unusual move when the President’s party controls the Senate. When the Senate failed to act before recessing last summer, President Bush gave Bolton a recess appointment. Now Senator Voinovich has changed his mind about Bolton after he’s been on the job for a year. The White House has said the nomination is still before the Senate and would like it to act. Otherwise Bolton’s recess appointment will expire with this Congress at the end of the year and he will have to be renominated next year. This is all reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination of Joseph P. Kennedy to be chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Kennedy, of course, had been one of the most active and successful speculators on Wall Street during the bull market of the 1920s, deeply involved in all the shenanigans that the SEC was created to curb. Roosevelt’s more centrist advisers argued that Kennedy was a solid Roosevelt man and New Dealer and that if anyone knew where the bodies were buried on Wall Street it was Kennedy. FDR’s more liberal advisers thought that Kennedy’s appointment would be a classic case of setting the fox to guard the henhouse. There was an immediate uproar in the press. Newsweek wrote that, “Mr. Kennedy, former speculator and pool operator, will now curb speculation and prohibit pools.” The New Republic called him “the worst of all parasites, a Wall Street operator.” Although the Democrats had 60 of the 96 seats in the Senate, it indefinitely postponed his confirmation, and Kennedy went to the SEC as acting chairman. Kennedy, of course, was far too smart and ambitious—not to mention rich—to try to personally profit from his position. Instead, he threw himself into the job, hiring top-drawer talent (such as William O. Douglas, who would himself be the SEC chairman for three years and then sit on the Supreme Court for more than thirty), issuing new trading rules that protected investors and curbed speculators, and logging 65,000 miles by air, a huge amount for the early 1930s, in his first year on the job. Kennedy, an adroit practitioner of public relations as well as an effective executive, soon established the SEC in the mind of the country as an active and reliable policeman of Wall Street and as one of the better examples of the “alphabet soup” agencies created in the New Deal.
Six months after his tenure began, the Senate, without debate or dissent, confirmed him as chairman. I hope John Bolton fares as well.
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