Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  It will never be known what Kennedy would have done had he been reelected to a second term; he had ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 men (out of about 16,000) from the mission in Vietnam by the end of 1963. This writer’s suspicion is that he would have found the whole proposition so uncertain, the military advice so questionable, and the political difficulties of reversing Laos neutrality and cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail so daunting, in the world and in the country, when feeding untold tens of thousands of draftees into such a dodgy mission, that he would have made the most elegant exit he could have, and simply said that taking a stand there would have been the stupid option. This was no Quemoy and Matsu, and even there, Eisenhower had no troops on the ground. But this is conjecture. This was where things stood at the end of the Kennedy presidency.

  On June 26, 1963, Kennedy spoke in West Berlin to a wildly applauding audience of over two million and uttered the famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a citizen of Berlin), which he held, in contemplating Khrushchev’s hideous wall, to be the proudest claim a free man could make. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.” It was a memorable speech and Kennedy’s suavity, courage, and eloquence made him very popular in the world. (As he left Berlin, he told an aide, “We will never have another day like this one, as long as we Live.”195 He didn’t.)

  Kennedy had taken up the torch of a nuclear-test-ban treaty, originally Stevenson’s idea, in 1956, which Eisenhower had ridiculed successfully and then exhumed in the last year of his presidency, only to have it torpedoed by Khrushchev in his histrionic reaction to the U-2 incident. They had agreed at Vienna that they should restart this process, and in July 1963 Kennedy sent the ageless Averell Harriman back to Moscow, where he had been the ambassador 20 years before, to negotiate such an agreement. By this time, newly launched American satellites had confirmed that the missile gap was nonsense and that the American position was superior. This unfortunately did not bury McNamara’s enthusiasm for allowing a complete Soviet catch-up, to make agreement easier, rather than to tempt the Russians with the prospect of outright nuclear superiority. An agreement was reached, which the U.K. but not France immediately endorsed, banning nuclear tests on the ground, in the air, or underwater, but not underground. It was a substantial achievement in restricting radioactive contamination and counts as a solid accomplishment of the administration.

  7. THE DEATH AND LEGACY OF JOHN F. KENNEDY

  In domestic policy, President Kennedy ambitiously called his program the New Frontier, to continue the New Deal, and sought tax simplification and reductions, unequivocal civil rights for African Americans, greater funding for education, and universal medical care for the elderly. Despite the presence of the legendarily able manipulator of the Congress, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, as president of the Senate, nothing significant had been enacted when John F. Kennedy was assassinated with a telescopic rifle while riding in an open car beside his wife, past very friendly crowds in Dallas at midday on November 22, 1963.

  This grisly scene was almost exactly captured on film and was, in its impact on the country, the most horrible single episode in American history, rivaled, if at all, only 38 years later with the suicide aircraft attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York. There was a splendid and poignant funeral, distinguishedly attended in bright, crisp, autumn weather, with the late president’s young family unforgettable in their poise and dignity, a piercingly sad and crystalline moment in the lives of all the hundreds of millions of people who watched it on television. Charles de Gaulle, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, and Ireland’s 83-year-old president Eamon De Valera were the senior foreign mourners. Elder statesmen Eisenhower and Truman were reconciled when they met before the obsequies, after more than a decade of a frosty lack of rapport. But there was no contact between them after that.

  John F. Kennedy’s presidency is hard to categorize definitively Certainly, he was an intelligent, apt, stylish, dynamic, and popular leader, probably more admired in the world than any modern American president except Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was a very charming public and private personality, and despite the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was never much embarrassed, even to the extent Eisenhower had been by the Sputnik and U-2 episodes. The Bay of Pigs was such a shambles, no one could really credit that it was the United States putting out a serious effort, and it had been erased by the Cuban Missile Crisis, even if this was not the decisive victory pretended by Kennedy’s posthumous mythmakers (and they were numerous and perfervidly active, not least with Jackie’s bunk about his administration having been some sort of “Camelot” idyll).

  President Kennedy renewed American government and carried forward the highest traditions of the three distinguished presidents who preceded him. Unlike them, he saw the benefit of higher growth through lower taxes, and moved the Democratic Party to the imaginative center in economic terms. He put the federal government squarely on the right side of civil rights and made an important contribution to addressing this policy with the extreme determination it required, after what can only be called preliminary, though vital, steps under Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. He and his wife brought immense elegance and glamour to the office, which raised public and international interest in it, even if this did invite some of the frippery and evanescence of the American star system to attach itself to the headship of the nation and the Western Alliance.

  In strategic terms, he held the line well in Europe, but had no real idea of how to deal with de Gaulle, and though he impressed and got on well with the French leader, he could not get beyond the American bugbear about trying to make all Western military forces effectively subaltern resources of an American-led alliance, even promoting a completely fanciful notion of an Atlantic Nuclear Force, which would put British and French forces practically into locally manned squadrons of the U.S. Navy. He didn’t grasp Europe’s desire to be allied, and even subordinate, but not strategically subsumed, and had no idea of de Gaulle’s potential for intellectually and oratorically plausible mischief, which Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower had discovered when Kennedy was a lieutenant commander in the Pacific. There was nothing to suggest that he would be more than a competent continuator of the Western Alliance, though doubtless a suave and personable one.

  He never really focused on the Middle East, and where his record lurches off into unknowable or disquieting hypotheses is in the Far East and in nuclear strategy. He should never have run any risk of seeming to be partly responsible for the murder of Diem. It is unlikely that he would have plunged into Vietnam with ground forces, and certainly unlikely that he would have done so without a clear mandate. But the nonsense about fighting Ho Chi Minh with social work, like the breeziness about assisting in the ejection of the long-standing American protégé, Diem, when the Buddhists at one pagoda held a few full-press immolations, was both objectively bad and amateurish strategic management. He had largely given away Vietnam when he gave a green light to turn Laos into a superhighway for infiltration, and though his management would probably have been better than that of his immediate successor, he is not completely free of blame for the failures of the ensuing administration, stuffed as it was with his choices for high office, starting with Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and Rostow.

  In nuclear strategy there was also room for concern. He opened the gates to “bear any burden” and effectively abandoned Eisenhower’s policy of keeping defense expenditures under control while maintaining and extending nuclear superiority, ducking land wars, building and helping indigenous forces, and threatening to turn Russia and China into charnel houses if they crossed the double white line of American national interest, while offering Atoms for Peace, Open Skies, and other confidence-building measures. To the extent Kennedy endorsed—as he appeared to do in his inaugural address and in subsequent Defense Department and National Security Council position papers—letting the USSR build up to American nuclear attack capabilities, and also t
he possibility of U.S. involvement in more than one local war at a time, he was disposing of his greatest deterrent on the false supposition that this would encourage Soviet reasonableness, while handing the client, robot states of Moscow and Beijing the ability to draw American draftees into war and send them home in large numbers in body bags.

  The fact that these infelicitous and strategically disastrous events befell his successors, whom he had named and installed and tended to listen to, does not convict him of their failings. And he does appear to have been a man able, especially after the Bay of Pigs, to override advice, but he can’t be entirely exonerated from those errors or cleared of suspicion that he might have partially committed them, either. He also deserves some credit for the great advances in tax reform and reduction, and in civil rights, and medical care for the elderly, which he ineffectually proposed and his successor enacted. On balance, and as far as he went, John F. Kennedy was a good and beloved president, who remains yet in the hearts and imaginations of the nation and the world, nearly 50 years after his tragic death.

  9. PRESIDENT LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

  Lyndon Johnson was a Washington legend 15 years before he moved into the White House. The variety of personalities and backgrounds in the succession of the Atlanticist, multilingual patrician Roosevelt; the hardscrabble, night law school Man from Missouri, Truman; the plain man of Kansas become conqueror of continents and leader of transoceanic alliances, Eisenhower; the rich, smart, brave, and charming son of plutocracy and of Irish Catholic exclusion, Kennedy; and the poor but irresistible Texas legislative and commercial wheeler-dealer, Johnson, showed as nothing else could the immense variety but rigorous coherence of the unimaginably diverse and powerful nation the United States had become in the 180 years of its independence.

  Johnson was a large, overpowering, tactile, and crude man, with a tremendously effective way of bringing those whom he could influence into line. He knew the vulnerability of everyone—their ambitions, foibles, and weaknesses—and was one of the all-time, supreme masters of the logrolling, back-scratching American political system. His technique and personality were well-known before he became president and he applied them with maximum force to the waverers, along with the bandying about of the name of the late president, to get through the civil rights act that Kennedy had presented but that was being filibustered in the Congress. Johnson crushed the filibuster and the historic act passed.

  In the spring of 1964, at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in accepting an honorary degree from the University of Michigan, Johnson enunciated his “Great Society” program, which essentially consisted of massively increased assistance to the needy of all descriptions, as well as particular assistance to disadvantaged blacks, while cutting everyone’s taxes. It did not foresee the corruption of the teachers’ unions, and was naïve about what unmarried African American men would do with the captive money paid to the mothers of their children.

  With much of what was left over of the New Frontier passed, the Republicans nominated the conservative senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona for president, and the Republican party chairman, Congressman William Miller, a pool hall owner from Lockport, New York, as vice president. Johnson was renominated for president at Atlantic City, New Jersey, on his 56th birthday, August 27, 1964. The long-serving liberal senator from Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey, was the nominee for veep. It was an epochal night for the Democratic Party. Adlai Stevenson eulogized Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt; Roosevelt’s long time party chairman, James A. Farley, eulogized Speaker Sam Rayburn (both had died in 1962; Rayburn had been Speaker a total of 17 years, and one of the leaders of the House of Representatives for a decade before that). And Robert Kennedy eulogized his brother, drawing heavily from apposite quotes from Shakespeare. All spoke well, and none, nor Johnson either, would be seen at a Democratic national convention again, they who between them had been key figures at Democratic conventions for more than 30 years. The party barons and notables appeared on the balcony overlooking the sea, and on the beach a mighty fireworks converted night into day. Lyndon Johnson, with all the powers of incumbency, the martyrdom of his predecessor, and his call for civil rights, playing well, and facing a not overly distinguished opponent on the far right, seemed to have all the power in the land, as he waved at the tens of thousands of people beneath him. He did, but in the way of politics, he soon yielded much, to hubris and to nemesis.

  After a lackluster campaign, in which the Democrats tried to frighten the country with the possibility of Goldwater repealing Social Security and governing for the exclusive benefit of the Republicans’ wealthiest supporters, as well as blowing up the world by reckless mismanagement of atomic weapons, the people spoke, appropriately and in a mighty voice: 43.1 million votes for Johnson to 27.2 million for Goldwater, 61.1 percent to 38.5, and 486 electoral votes to 52. It was one of the greatest landslides in American history. Apart from Johnson and Humphrey, the big winner of the night was former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, elected U.S. senator from New York (where he had not lived and could not vote). He was a challenger in the wings against Johnson from the start. Despite the debacle, the Goldwater movement has remained a turning point and force in American history, as the right recaptured the Republican Party for the first time since Coolidge and pledged it to smaller government. The country knew it was, for now, going cock-a-hoop for the Great Society, but millions wondered what would happen in South Vietnam. The answer would not be a comforting one.

  On balance, and by most measurements, the United States had risen steadily in the world under four consecutive talented presidents through 30 years. Lyndon Johnson had been in Washington throughout that time, having arrived as an aide to a congressman in 1932. (He was elected congressman in 1937, senator in 1948, and majority leader of the senate in 1954.) The United States was now an unrecognizably rich and confident country. Its rivals of 30 years before were now junior allies. Its only persistent rival was not really its peer. (In the midst of the 1964 election campaign, the Soviet leadership sacked the bumptious and erratic Khrushchev and replaced him with the more stable and apparently less bellicose Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary and Alexei Kosygin as premier. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev did not die in office, and there were no liquidations following the transition.)

  The immense power of America ensured that its errors could ramify widely, but its potential to lead the world further toward wider democracy and greater prosperity was unlimited. Russia and China were antagonists, and the world was full of treacherous problems. But America was approaching the high-water mark of America’s century.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Vietnam and Détente

  The Beginning of the End

  of the Cold War, 1965–1973

  1. THE GREAT SOCIETY

  President Johnson formulated his legislative plans with great breadth of vision, and after passing Kennedy’s civil rights and tax reduction bills, and winning his overwhelming reelection, he presented and jammed through the Congress a flurry of social measures, including the Voting Rights Act (putting teeth into the federal guarantee of the right of African Americans, in particular, to vote) and a raft of measures connected to what was officially described as the War on Poverty. These included the Higher Education Act of 1965, which poured federal money into the promotion of education.

  Johnson had briefly been a school teacher in the early 1930s in Depression-era southwest Texas, and had great faith in the propositions that education was the key to eliminating poverty and that money was the key to better education. He broke the barrier against the funding of private schools, a taboo that Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic, had been afraid to touch, and his initiatives improved the physical plant and educational materials available to the nation’s schools. Unfortunately, time would determine that the persistence of poverty had much more to do with family stability and social conditions than with access to education. And educational standards in fact declined over time.

  There was a raft of welfare programs and alt
erations that assisted poor areas of the country but inadvertently undermined the family, especially in the African American community. Medicare was enacted to assist the elderly and Medicaid for the economically disadvantaged, and these programs were popular and durable. The tax reductions proved more helpful in encouraging and generalizing prosperity, by stimulating economic activity and private-sector job creation. Johnson also radically altered the pattern of immigration. As a product of the Texas Hill Country and the areas that had received a good deal of poor Mexican migrants, he changed the ratios and was the chief generator of a sharp evolution in American immigration. In 1970, 60 percent of foreign-born immigrants were from Europe, but in 2000, this had declined to 15 percent. The numbers of first-generation immigrants quadrupled from 1970 to 2007, from 9.6 million to 38 million. (These trends were greatly accentuated by the deliberately tolerated entry into the country from Mexico of 15 million or more illegal or underdocumented Latin Americans in the last third of the twentieth century.)

  There was a pervasive spirit of support for the end of racial discrimination in all forms and for adherence to the equality of rights and opportunity that infused the founding texts and sustaining national self-image, not to say mythology, of America. This heady atmosphere was topped up by steady major achievements in space exploration, as Johnson financed and promoted first the Gemini and then the Apollo program and the United States edged ever closer to a manned landing on the moon, which Kennedy had promised before the end of the decade. A military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, though it aroused some protest in liberal circles, was quickly followed by a fair election and democratic stability and was seen everywhere as a success. By mid-1966, however, all was overshadowed by Vietnam.