An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Nevertheless, in 1949-50, despite his hyperbole about China and uncritical support of Smathers, Jack was relatively restrained in his attacks on Truman’s national security and foreign policies. He did focus on “the lack of adequate national planning for civil defense in case of a national emergency,” complaining that only one man was working full-time on the matter of “wartime civil disaster relief. . . . It is amazing to learn, particularly in view of the President’s recent disclosure of Russia’s Atomic Bomb, that at this late date no further progress has been made in setting up an adequate and organized system of Civil Defense.” Jack’s office informed forty-five newspaper editors in Massachusetts about a letter he had sent to Truman regarding the problem. Kennedy worried that in case of an atomic attack no one would have a clear idea of how to respond. By July, with the United States now fighting in Korea and the administration giving little heed to Jack’s warnings, he decried the “inexcusable delay” in the failure to set up an adequate program to cope with a surprise attack. When ten thousand copies of a government manual on how to protect oneself from atomic radiation “sold like hot cakes,” Jack saw it as a kind of vindication.
But nothing provoked Jack’s criticism of the administration more than initial U.S. defeats in Korea. He said that the reverses in the fighting in the summer of 1950 forcefully demonstrated “the inadequate state of our defense preparations. Our military arms and our military manpower have been proven by the Korean incident to have been dangerously below par.” He had already taken the administration to task on preparedness in February, when he had inserted a column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in the Congressional Record attacking Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson for failing to tell the public about U.S. military weakness. Jack now also attacked Truman for failing to prepare the country to defend its interests in Europe as well as in Asia. He believed that the United States had insufficient forces to fight in Korea and hold the line in Western Europe, where he said the Soviets had eighty divisions to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s twelve.
Jack’s criticism reflected popular feeling: Whereas a majority of Americans consistently approved of Truman’s leadership in 1949 and initially rallied around him after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, only 37 to 43 percent thought he was doing a good job after that. By November 1950, Americans were more critical than approving of the administration’s Korean policy. After driving North Korean forces back above the Thirty-eighth Parallel in September and then crossing into North Korea in hopes of unifying the peninsula under a pro-Western government in Seoul, the United States found itself in a wider war with China, which had entered the fighting in November. A Chinese offensive that pushed U.S. forces back below the Thirty-eighth Parallel—arousing fears of an extended, costly war—convinced 71 percent of Americans that the administration’s management of the conflict was only fair or poor.
In November 1950, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, Jack spoke candidly about many of the key issues and personalities of the times. In contrast with Truman, who had vetoed the McCarran Act, which required the registration of communists and communist-front organizations and provided for their internment during a national emergency, Jack said that he had voted for it and complained that not enough was being done to combat communists in the U.S. government. He also said that he had little regard for the foreign policy leadership of the president or Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
As for Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who early in 1950 had begun stirring sharp debate with unproved accusations about widespread subversion among government officials under FDR and Truman, Jack had little quarrel with him, saying, “He may have something.” It was not simply that his father, sister Eunice, and he were personally acquainted with McCarthy; Jack valued his anticommunism, even if it were overdrawn, as well as his “energy, intelligence, and political skill in abundant qualities.” At a Harvard Spee Club dinner in February 1952, when a speaker praised the university for never having produced an Alger Hiss, a former State Department official under suspicion of spying for Moscow, or a Joe McCarthy, Jack uncharacteristically made a public scene, angrily saying, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Jack was just as sympathetic to Richard Nixon, with whom he had established a measure of personal rapport during their service in the House. He openly declared himself pleased that Nixon, a tough anticommunist, had beaten liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in a 1950 California Senate race, and he had no complaints about Nixon’s depiction of Douglas as a “fellow traveler” or the “Pink Lady.”
Like so many others in the country, Jack was partly blind to the political misjudgments and moral failings generated by the anticommunism of the time. Fearful that America was losing the Cold War, supposedly because of disloyal U.S. officials, and that McCarthy was correct in trying to root out government subversives, millions of Americans uncritically accepted unproved allegations that abused the civil liberties of loyal citizens. Unlike Truman, who in March 1950 called McCarthy “a ballyhoo artist” making “wild charges,” Jack was all too ready to take McCarthy’s accusations about government spies at face value. Overreacting to the events of 1949-50, Jack saw the dangers of communist success compelling the sacrifice of some traditional freedoms. He was ready to place limits on dissent as a way to give it freer rein at some future time. Less than two years later and forever thereafter, Jack tried to deny the generally accurate portrayal in a New Republic article of what he had said at the Harvard seminar.
Unlike Joe McCarthy, Kennedy never engaged in systematic red-baiting or the repeated use of innuendo to destroy anyone’s reputation. And by the end of 1951, he publicly declared that the issue of communists in the executive branch was no longer of importance and that accusations of communists in the Foreign Service were “irrational.” Yet there is no question that he had taken advantage of the anticommunist mood to advance his political standing in Massachusetts by voicing policy differences with Truman and his administration, though, unlike McCarthy, Kennedy’s opposition rested principally on matters of substantive concern that had some merit.
The issue of how to defend Western Europe with limited resources in the midst of the Korean fighting is a case in point. Jack believed that Europe was America’s first and most important line of defense against a Soviet advance in the Cold War. To better inform himself about European defense needs, he spent five weeks in January and February 1951 traveling from England to Yugoslavia. On his return, Jack gave a nationwide radio talk carried by 540 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting Company on “Issues in the Defense of Western Europe.” Sixteen days later he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. His balanced, sensible analysis of European dangers was in striking contrast to some of his earlier overdrawn rhetoric about foreign affairs and won bipartisan approval. His conversations with U.S. representatives and high government officials in England, France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Spain, he said, made clear that the Soviets would not invade Western Europe in the coming year. Since “the Russians had not attacked before, why should they now when the bomb is still as much a deterrent as it was before?” An additional restraint on Soviet aggression was the “tremendous” problem Moscow would face of feeding Western Europe following any conquest. More important, Jack wondered why they would “take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate, during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing? Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks that they don’t have to—especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.”
Because “a series of chain events as in the first war” might produce a conflict anyway, Kennedy continued to urge a military buildup. He was against strict reliance on U.S. forces, however, instead encouraging a ratio system in which the Europeans would match each American division with
In his testimony, Jack had the added satisfaction of directly separating himself from his father’s continuing advocacy of isolationism. Georgia senator Walter George asked him to comment on a speech Joe gave in December 1950 urging withdrawal from Europe. Joe’s speech was another demonstration of his inability to translate his realistic prognostications on the domestic economy into wise assessments of international affairs. “The truth,” Joe said, “is that our only real hope is to keep Russia, if she chooses to march, on the other side of the Atlantic. It may be that Europe for a decade or a generation or more will turn communistic.” In contrast, Jack testified that losing the “productive facilities” of Western Europe would make matters much more difficult for the United States in the Cold War and thought “we should do our utmost within reason to save it.” Jack’s differences with his father on foreign affairs were no bar to the great family enterprise of advancing Jack’s political career: Joe promptly paid for the printing and distribution of ten thousand copies of Jack’s testimony.
Jack’s conviction about the importance of foreign affairs to the nation’s future and, more narrowly, to his 1952 political campaign moved him to focus his attention on more than Western Europe. In April 1951, he spoke to a Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation meeting in Boston about Middle Eastern and Asian problems susceptible to Soviet exploitation. In Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, Jack said, the “nationalistic passions . . . directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West” were of great consequence to America. To combat Soviet efforts to take control in these countries, Kennedy wanted the United States to develop nonmilitary techniques of resistance that would not create suspicions of neo-imperialism or add to the country’s financial burden. The problem, as Jack saw it, was not simply to be anticommunist but to stand for something that these emerging nations would find appealing. Communism was spreading because the democracies had failed, especially in Asia, to explain themselves effectively to the masses or to make the potential ameliorating effects of democracy on their lives apparent. Too many subjects of Western colonial rule remembered the cruelty of their masters to accept their systems of self-government as transparently superior to communism.
To learn more, Jack—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Pat—made a seven-week, 25,000-mile trip that fall to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Korea, and Japan. “I was anxious to get some first-hand knowledge of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our policies in the Middle East and in the Far East,” he told a nationwide radio audience on his return. He had wanted to learn “how those peoples regarded us and our policies, and what you and I might do in our respective capacities to further the cause of peace.” Along the way he met with U.S. and foreign military chiefs as well as prime ministers, ambassadors, ministers, consuls, businessmen, and ordinary citizens willing to speak spontaneously about current and future international relations.
The journey became a chance for Jack not only to educate himself about regions, countries, and peoples with which he had small acquaintance but also to get to know his twenty-six-year-old younger brother, Robert, better. The eight-year gap in their ages had made them almost distant relatives, separated by the different rhythms of their lives. Robert, who had briefly worked in Jack’s 1946 campaign after returning from navy service, had graduated from Harvard in 1948, where he had majored in “football” and earned poor grades. He was reluctantly accepted by the University of Virginia’s law school, where his diligence carried him through to an L.L.B. and a respectable grade point average that placed him in the upper half of his class.
Unlike Jack, who found much attraction in iconoclasm, Robert was a conformist who courted Rose and Joe by being as devout as his mother and a faithful reflector of his father’s views and wishes. Bobby, as his siblings and friends called him, was the first of the Kennedy children to have a profession, get married, and have children. In 1950, at the age of twenty-five, he wed Ethel Skakel, the next-to-youngest of seven children of a wealthy Chicago Catholic family that shared the Kennedys’ conservative values.
Only after prodding from Joe had Jack taken Bobby with him on his Middle Eastern and Asian trip. Jack feared that his often moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative brother would be “a pain in the ass.” But Bobby’s lighter, less apparent side as a relentless teaser endeared him to Jack. There was more at work than shared humor. Because both brothers, as historian Ronald Steel believes, “shunned open displays of emotion as a sign of weakness, the preferred mode of discourse was kidding. This permitted familiarity without the danger of vulnerability or sentiment.” As important, Bobby’s determined efforts to make objective sense of what they were finding and his unblinking realism deepened Jack’s respect for him. Bobby’s emphasis on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional, transitory; the mistake of the [French] war in Indochina; . . . [and] the failure of the United States to back the people” echoed Jack’s thinking. He began to see Bobby as an asset in future political contests and challenges.
Kennedy believed it imperative for the United States to align itself with the emerging nations. But he acknowledged this as no easy task. Because of its wartime and post-1945 policies, America was “definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Western Europe.” “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people,” he noted in a trip diary. “Because everyone believes that we control the U.N.—because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want done.” America needed to throw off the image of a great Western power filling the vacuum left by British and French decline and to demonstrate that its enemy was not just communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” “injustice and inequality,” which were the daily fare of millions of Arabs and Asians. “It is tragic to report,” he said in his radio address, “that not only have we made no new friends, but we have lost old ones.” U.S. military strength was only part of the equation. “If one thing was bored into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East,” he said, “it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. The central core of our Middle Eastern policy,” Jack asserted, “is [or should be] not the export of arms or the show of armed might but the export of ideas, of techniques, and the rebirth of our traditional sympathy for and understanding of the desires of men to be free.”
The U.S. dilemma was most pronounced in Indochina, where America had “allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire. . . . To check the southern drive of Communism makes sense,” Jack also said prophetically, “but not only through reliance on the force of arms. The task is rather to build strong native non-Communist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense rather than upon the [French] legions. . . . And to do this apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.”
For Jack and Bobby the trip evoked a mutual affinity for noblesse oblige—the family’s moral imperative, bound up with Rosemary’s disability, to emphasize the obligations of the advantaged to the disadvantaged, the need of the rich and powerful few to help the less fortunate many. Joe had always had an evangelical streak that made him such an outspoken isolationist, and he had clearly instilled in his children an affinity for crusading fervor. Now his sons had together found a cause worth fighting for.
Yet Jack’s enthusiasm was largely self-generated; back home and among Americans abroad, his journey of discovery evoked more indifference and hostility than encouragement or praise. In the Middle East, he crossed paths with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who told an Arab leader urging U.S. sympathy for nationalistic revolutions that the really important issue was the U.S.-Soviet struggle. FDR Jr. had “simply, completely missed the whole point of the nationalist revolution that is sweeping Asia,” Bobby wrote his father. Bobby personally did not think there was a chance of changing anything unless the whole State Department crowd was swept aside.
In India, where they dined with Nehru, the prime minister seemed bored, looking at the ceiling and speaking only occasionally to Pat Kennedy, Bobby and Jack’s attractive twenty-seven-year-old sister. When Jack asked Nehru about Vietnam, he condescendingly dismissed the French war as an example of doomed colonialism with U.S. aid being poured down a “bottomless hole.” Like a schoolmaster lecturing mediocre students, Nehru explained that communism had offered “something to die for” and the West proposed nothing but the status quo. French officials in Saigon, who were more in need of Nehru’s lecture than Jack and Bobby, complained to the State Department that the Kennedys were trying to undermine their policy. Nor did most U.S. diplomats see Jack’s criticism as helpful.
Jack’s call for a change in perspective and policy did not alter his father’s thinking, either. He followed Jack’s radio address with one of his own, urging not an effort to align ourselves with the struggling masses but to shun additional alliances that could further undermine our autonomy in dealing with international affairs. “Perhaps our next effort will be to ally to ourselves the Eskimos of the North Pole and the Penguins of the Antarctic,” he sarcastically announced.