An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
It was, of course, rather courageous of a retired navy lieutenant and junior senator to take on a popular president whose credentials as a successful World War II and NATO military chief had carried him to the White House. But Jack believed that the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of reduced defense spending to balance the federal budget and reliance on massive retaliation or nuclear weapons rather than more conventional ones was an inadequate response to the communist menace. His recollections of misguided naval actions initiated by high-ranking officers in World War II encouraged his outspokenness.
In a Jefferson Jackson Day speech in May 1953, Kennedy said that it may be that Moscow will continue to rely “on the weapons of subversion, economic disintegration and guerilla warfare to accomplish our destruction, rather than upon the direct assault of an all-out war. But we cannot count on it.” The Soviets and their satellites were devoting a large percentage of their national production to war preparations. Their large land armies supported by air and sea forces exceeding those in the West put America’s national security in peril, especially when one considered the military budget cuts proposed for 1954 by the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy could “not see how the Western Alliance with a productive potential substantially larger than that of the Communist bloc, can be satisfied with anything less than a maximum effort, one that has some relation to the unrelenting efforts of the Soviets to build irresistible military strength.” This was not an issue “on which the Democrats can win elections, for only disaster can prove us correct.” Rather, it was a matter of serving the cause of peace and national well-being, or so he believed.
Kennedy had little impact on the Eisenhower defense budgets, and his fears of an all-out war were a misreading of Soviet intentions. As George Kennan, the architect of containment, understood at the time, the Soviets viewed their buildup as defensive, a response to Western plans for the destruction of communism. Their goal was to defeat the West not with a full-scale war, which they saw themselves losing, but by political subversion. Kennedy’s defense proposals, however, were an improvement on Eisenhower’s policy of massive retaliation, which provided “more bang for the buck,” as the administration advertised, while reducing America’s capability to fight a limited or non-nuclear war. Nevertheless, the increased defense spending Kennedy favored threatened to expand the arms race and bring the two sides closer to an all-out conflict. Kennedy’s proposals were less an imaginative way to ease tensions with Moscow than a variation on what Kennan described as “the militarization of the Cold War.”
KENNEDY’S EFFORTS to alter the American response to France’s struggle in Indochina were wiser than his pronouncements on defense budgets. As France’s hold on the region became increasingly tenuous, Jack’s concern to find an effective means of addressing the crisis was amplified. He asked Priscilla Johnson, a foreign-policy specialist on his staff, to calculate the extent of French spending on Indochina’s economic welfare and to suggest reforms that would spur the anticommunist war effort. Johnson replied that the proportion of French spending on welfare was very small compared with military aid. She added that the French had given limited control of affairs to citizens of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—the three Associated States, as they were called; it was difficult to suggest reforms, Johnson reported, “since the problem is not that of changing existing institutions, which are being maladministered, but of introducing institutions which so far do not exist at all.”
In May 1953, Jack privately told Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that increasing aid would give the United States the right to insist on changes that would give “the native populations . . . the feeling that they have not been given the shadow of independence but its substance. The American people want in exchange for their assistance the establishment of conditions that will make success a prospect and not defeat inevitable.” The State Department agreed that a transfer of authority to the Associated States was desirable but saw no way to make this more than a “gradual” process.
In response, Kennedy put his case before the Congress and the public. In the summer of 1953, he urged the Senate to make U.S. aid to the French in Indochina contingent on policies promoting freedom and independence for Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. He believed that French resistance to reform was retarding the war effort. Jack acknowledged that these were “harsh words to say about an ancient friend and ally,” but he spoke them in the belief that America’s financial share of the fighting, which was at 40 percent and rising, entitled the United States to recommend changes that held out greater hope of success than the stumbling French policy followed since 1946. He was reluctant, however, to give the French an ultimatum, as Arizona’s Republican senator Barry Goldwater urged; withholding aid unless France initiated democratic reforms in the Associated States seemed likely to force Paris to abandon the war in Indochina and open all of Southeast Asia to communism. Jack proposed instead that American aid “be administered in such a way as to encourage through all available means the freedom and independence desired by the peoples of the Associated States.”
As French military failure grew more likely in the winter of 1953-54, Jack pressed the case for a French commitment to end its colonial rule. He also asked the White House to explain how massive retaliation could save Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia from communist control. He wondered “how the new Dulles policy and its dependence upon the threat of atomic retaliation will fare in these areas of guerilla warfare. . . . Of what value would atomic retaliation be in opposing Communist advance which rested not upon military invasion but upon local insurrection and political deterioration?”
On Meet the Press in February 1954, Kennedy was asked if he was suggesting that the United States replace France in Indochina. No, he answered, because without commitments to independence for these French colonies, the United States would be facing a hopeless task. Since he was on record as saying that to lose Indochina was to lose all of Asia, didn’t he believe it essential for the United States to fight? No, he said, because he saw no prospect of victory, “and therefore it would be a mistake for us to go in.” However, he still had hope that the French could alter matters by promising independence and bringing educated local leaders and enough manpower to their side to reverse the tide of battle. But U.S. military involvement without this promise would be doomed to failure: “No amount of American military assistance in Indochina,” he told the Senate, “can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” The only path to victory was through the creation of a “native army” that expected sacrifices in blood and treasure to bring self-determination.
Kennedy’s assessment of French policy received strong support in the United States. But it meant nothing to the outcome in Southeast Asia, where French resistance collapsed in May 1954 with the defeat at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Vietnamese highlands. As agreed to by China, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union at a Geneva conference later that year, the country was split in two at the Seventeenth Parallel—a North Vietnam under a communist government in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh and a South Vietnam under a pro-Western regime in Saigon led by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic backed by promises of U.S. economic and military aid. Determined to supplant French influence in the south, Washington engineered Diem’s replacement of Bao Dai, the ruling emperor, who had been a figurehead chief beholden to French power.
Kennedy was now more emphatic than ever that U.S. military involvement would be a mistake. In a TV appearance in May, he emphasized the pointlessness of committing U.S. forces, which echoed what the White House was saying. He feared that Indochina “is lost, and I don’t think there is much we can do about it. . . . There is no outright military intervention that the United States could take in Indo-China which I believe would be successful.” Indeed, U.S. intervention seemed certain to provoke a Chinese reaction, and “we’d find ourselves in a much worse situation than we found ourselves in Korea.”<
Kennedy’s response to the crisis won him substantial attention and considerable praise in the press for sensible realism. His disagreements with earlier predictions by Eisenhower officials that “the French are going to win” moved commentators to describe Kennedy as an astute foreign policy analyst with a bright political future. No one noted, however, that Kennedy had exaggerated hopes for what could be expected of a so-called autonomous Vietnam—a country that would be dependent on American money and supplies in any further struggle against communist insurgents. This imperfect judgment would become apparent to Kennedy himself and others only in time.
KENNEDY’S POLITICAL FUTURE partly depended on finding ways to avoid alienating antagonistic factions debating McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. Because McCarthy had little proof to back up his charges and kept changing the number of subversive government officials, opponents labeled him a reckless demagogue. Yet others saw the loss of China, the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, and the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for atomic spying and of Alger Hiss, a once respected State Department official, for falsely denying that he had passed secrets to the Soviet Union as giving the ring of truth to McCarthy’s accusations.
In spite of increasing doubts about McCarthy’s reliability, in November 1953, 46 percent of those surveyed said it was a good idea for the Republicans to raise fresh questions about communists in government during the FDR-Truman years. The following month, the public listed getting rid of communists in government as the country’s number one problem, and 50 percent approved of McCarthy’s commitment to do so.
But they did not like his methods. In the first months of 1954, 47 percent of Americans disapproved of his behavior, and when he launched an investigation of subversion in the U.S. Army in the spring, it further undermined confidence in his tactics. In May, 87 percent of Americans knew about the McCarthy hearings, but a majority thought they would do more harm than good. By the summer, 51 percent of those with an opinion were opposed to McCarthy.
His intemperateness had largely contributed to his decline. He had called President Truman “a son of a bitch” counseled by men drunk on “bourbon and Benedictine,” and he had attacked General George C. Marshall, a World War II hero, as the architect of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” When he also accused Protestant clergymen and U.S. Army officers of, respectively, supporting and shielding communists, it increased public doubts about his rational good sense.
Democrats, led by Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, now saw an opportunity to break his hold on the country. McCarthy is “the sorriest senator up here,” LBJ had told Senate secretary Bobby Baker. “Can’t tie his goddamn shoes. But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death some Communist will strangle ’em in their sleep, and anybody who takes him on before the fevers cool—well, you don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.” Understanding how daily exposure would go far to defeat him, Johnson arranged to have McCarthy’s army hearings televised. Thirty-six days of TV coverage between April and June 1954 allowed people, in Johnson’s words, to “see what the bastard was up to.” McCarthy’s physical features—his unshaved appearance and nasal monotone—joined with evidence of his casualness about the truth to ruin him. In September, after nine days of hearings orchestrated by LBJ, a special Senate committee recommended that McCarthy be “condemned” for breaking Senate rules and abusing an army general. In December, after the congressional elections, the Senate voted condemnation by a count of 67 to 22.
The only Senate Democrat not to vote against McCarthy—or more precisely, not vote on the issue—was Kennedy. Jack had no illusions about the man’s ruthlessness and unreliability. In 1953, when a reporter asked what he thought of Joe, he replied, “Not very much. But I get along with him. When I was in the House, I used to get along with [Vito] Marcantonio and [John] Rankin,” demeaning McCarthy by lumping him with extremists on the left and the right. In January 1953, when Jack heard that his father had arranged for Bobby to be appointed as counsel to McCarthy’s subcommittee on investigations, he regretted what his father had done. “Oh, hell, you can’t fight the old man,” he said in disgust. Jack was especially critical of the false charges McCarthy brought against foreign service officers for the “loss” of China. He dismissed as “irrational” allegations of communists in the diplomatic corps. In February 1954, he publicly complained of McCarthy’s “excesses.” “You reach the point of diminishing returns in all of these extreme charges and countercharges,” he added.
Jack also differed with McCarthy on a number of appointments needing Senate confirmation. In 1953, Jack voted in support of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to Russia and in 1954 for James Conant as ambassador to West Germany, despite McCarthy’s attacks on both men as insufficiently anticommunist. These votes, however, required no direct confrontation with McCarthy. Neither did Jack’s support of a ban on speeches by former McCarthy aide Scott McLeod, who, as a State Department employee, was violating civil service rules against political activities. But Jack’s successful opposition to appointing former senator Owen Brewster, a McCarthy friend, as counsel to the investigations committee, and Robert Lee, another McCarthy friend, to the Federal Communications Commission incensed McCarthy. “Now wait until you try to get some special legislation for Massachusetts,” McCarthy threatened Jack. “He was really furious,” Jack said. “After that, it was just ‘Hello Jack’ when we passed in the hall, but he never really talked to me again after that.”
Kenneth Birkhead, who was assistant to the Senate Democratic whip and the party’s expert on McCarthy, later recalled that Kennedy was in constant touch with him about McCarthy’s background and current accusations. “I don’t think there was any other member of the Senate,” Birkhead said, “who spent as much time contacting me about McCarthy as did the then Senator Kennedy.” In July 1954, at the close of the army hearings, when the Senate initially considered censuring McCarthy, Jack was ready to vote against him. Sorensen prepared a speech that Kennedy never delivered, because of a decision to delay consideration of the charges against McCarthy until after formal hearings and the November elections. In July, however, Jack was prepared to say that the issue of McCarthy’s censure “is of such importance that it is difficult for any member not to set forth clearly his position on this matter.” Though the speech was hedged with numerous qualifiers, it defended the “dignity and honor” of the Senate by censuring McCarthy’s conduct—or more precisely, the conduct of two of his aides for whom he was responsible.
Why then did Jack fail to vote for condemnation, a lesser charge than censure, at the end of 1954? After all, by then McCarthy had been largely repudiated. Historian and Kennedy supporter Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later said that an unequivocal stand against McCarthy might have antagonized some Massachusetts Catholics, but it would have improved Jack’s standing with millions of others in the state. Connecticut senator Brien McMahon, from a state with a similar percentage of Catholics to that of Massachusetts, had openly opposed McCarthy, and Schlesinger said that “it didn’t hurt him.” But not everyone concurred. One Massachusetts newspaper may have accurately described the current mood in the state when it said: “[It was] certainly futile to expect any candidate running for Massachusetts statewide political office with any chance of winning to criticize Senator McCarthy. Adherents of both parties are evidently scared to death of offending the Boston electorate.” Ex-governor Paul Dever said, “Joe McCarthy is the only man I know who could beat Archbishop Cushing in a two-man election fight in South Boston.” Most important, Kennedy’s gut told him that his constituents would punish him if he acted against McCarthy. Reflecting on these judgments, Jack told one critic of his failure to take a stand, “What was I supposed to do, commit hara-kiri?”
Jack came to regret his decision. His failure to join all his fellow Democrats and a majority of the Senate in condemning McCarthy’s disgraceful behavior became an enduring po
His father, Kennedy also claimed, exerted pressure. “He liked McCarthy,” Jack said in the same interview. “He still has a good word to say for McCarthy if you were sitting around with him in the evening. Contribute money to support McCarthy? I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”
In addition, Jack’s non-vote rested on a detached view of the people McCarthy attacked. “I had never known the sort of people who were called before the McCarthy committee,” Jack later told a journalist. “I agree that many of them were seriously manhandled, but they all represented a different world to me. What I mean is, I did not identify with them, and so I did not get as worked up as other liberals did.” Unquestionably, former Communist Party members, 1930s radicals hoping Marxism might rescue America from the Depression, were not part of any circle Jack frequented. But intellectuals and foreign service officers? They were objects of McCarthy’s public attacks as well, and Jack knew and admired some of these people.
In the final analysis, Jack offered a legalistic explanation for his non-vote. Reminding critics that he was in the hospital for back surgery during the Senate’s final deliberations on McCarthy, Jack said he was like an absent member of a jury who had not heard all the evidence and was not entitled to vote. This is, to say the least, not very convincing. The matter was more a moral issue than a legal or technical one, and it had not come out of the blue but after years of McCarthy’s misbehavior. Jack may have been more candid when he told a journalist in 1960, “I went into the hospital and I heard nothing about it and cared less and I didn’t have any contact with anyone at my office and maybe Ted [Sorensen] should have paired me [i.e., joined someone with an opposite vote in abstaining], but at the time I didn’t care about the thing. I couldn’t care less. I was in bad shape and I had other things on my mind.” His preoccupation with his health is no doubt true. Yet it seems inconceivable that Joe, Bobby, and others attentive to Jack’s political future would have let the vote on McCarthy slide by without a decision on what he should do. For someone who admired courage of any kind—physical, emotional, political—Kennedy failed the test by ducking the vote, avoiding taking a stand for reasons of political expediency, and short-term political expediency at that.