by David Nasaw
Kennedy took the brunt of the criticism, as his proposals for total withdrawal from Europe and Asia were far more extreme. Joe Alsop, now writing with his brother Stewart led the charge. “Under normal circumstances,” they wrote, “there would be no great interest in the political views of a successful stock market speculator who makes it a habit to propose surrender whenever surrender is feasible. At present, however, when the threat of Soviet triumph is actually greater than the threat of Nazi triumph ten years ago, the Kennedy program deserves analysis.” Kennedy’s recommendations, if followed, the Alsops declared, would ensure “total triumph for Stalin. . . . Perhaps, of course, during the early stages of our digestion as a Soviet satellite, men like Kennedy, the advocates of isolation, the gravediggers of the republic, might be permitted to keep their villas at Palm Beach. The best Christmas thought that can be offered this year is that most Americans would rather be dead.”7
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On January 5, 1951, three weeks after Kennedy’s speech in Virginia, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican,” joined the “great debate” with a ten-thousand-word address on the Senate floor that sounded very much like an affirmation of Kennedy’s views. Why, he wanted to know, was President Truman preparing to send General Dwight David Eisenhower to Europe as supreme commander of NATO forces? Why was he planning to send hundreds of thousands of American troops to Europe? What did he hope to accomplish by provoking the Soviets? Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and a variety of Democratic senators attacked Taft viciously, as Kennedy and Hoover had been attacked, for being a muddle-headed appeaser and Communist dupe. Among his harshest critics was his fellow Republican, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts.
What had begun as a policy argument quickly turned into a larger debate about congressional authority. Could the president send American troops overseas on his own, or did he require explicit congressional approval to do so? Two days before Taft’s speech, Republican congressman Frederic Coudert, Jr., from New York introduced a resolution in the House that would have required such approval. On January 8, Republican senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska introduced a parallel resolution in the Senate.
Congressman John Kennedy, knowing he would eventually have to take a position siding either with his party, his president, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whom he was considering running against in 1952, or with his father and Republicans Taft and Coudert, announced the day after Taft’s speech that he was going to “spend the next four weeks in Europe,” determining for himself whether the nations of Western Europe were committed to “rearming themselves.” If not, it made no sense sending American troops to defend them against communism.8
It was a brilliant maneuver—and it worked well. Congressman Kennedy would be absent from the country for at least a month, during the height of what was going to be a highly contentious debate. When he returned, it would be as an expert who had made an independent, on-the-ground study and was guided by that, not party orthodoxy or his father’s opinions. Kennedy thought the trip a grand idea and recommended that Jack issue regular press releases from Europe, detailing his meetings with American and European diplomats, military experts, Pope Pius XII, and Marshal Tito. When he returned, his father purchased radio time for him to report his findings to the country over the Mutual-Yankee Networks.
In early February, Kennedy flew north to welcome Jack home, help him prepare for his radio speech, and give his own talk at a luncheon at the Harmonie Club, where he declared without equivocation that he opposed sending any financial assistance to Europe or Asia. “Asia for the Asiatics is an intelligible theme, as plain to Pakistan as to Peiping. . . . The overthrow of Communism in China is rightly a crusade for the Chinese, but not the responsibility of an alien race.” He called for the withdrawal of American troops from Korea, the end of support for Chiang Kai-shek in Formosa, and the cessation of financial assistance to the French in Indo-China.9
Every time he opened his mouth now, Kennedy made it easier and more necessary for Jack to separate himself from his rabble-rouser, extremist, provocateur father. Three days after his father had spoken at the Harmonie Club, Congressman Kennedy presented his findings calmly, almost dispassionately, in a nationwide radio broadcast. He reported on European military readiness and civilian morale, but it was near impossible to tell where he stood on the major issue: whether American troops should be sent to Europe. That, of course, was his intention. The Boston Herald chose to emphasize his dismay “that Europe is not making the sacrifices necessary for survival and by no means is making an effort to match America’s contribution. . . . It is important that Western Europe be saved, but we cannot do so ourselves or pay a price that will endanger our own survival.” The Boston Traveler declared, on the contrary, that the congressman had repudiated “the gloomy defeatism of his father’s December speech,” that he did not, “like the ex-Ambassador, declare that Europe is physically and morally bankrupt and that Americans had better huddle within their borders until the Communist storm blows itself out.”10
Two weeks later, on February 22, Congressman Kennedy presented his findings before the Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Armed Services, which were meeting jointly to consider Senator Wherry’s resolution prohibiting the president from dispatching troops to Europe without congressional approval. Of the thirty-seven witnesses called in eleven days, he was the youngest, least experienced, least known, and only junior congressman called to testify. He read his report on rearmament programs in Great Britain, France, and Italy and, based on it, offered a compromise proposal, that the United States supply military assistance to its European allies but limit it to the four divisions Truman had already asked for. In the future, American troop deployments to Europe would be determined by a ratio system policed by Congress: no more than one American division for every six supplied by the Europeans. Congressman Kennedy’s compromise solution was similar to that already put forward by several Republican senators, but it was in direct opposition to his party’s refusal to approve any restrictions on the president’s right to send troops to Europe.
After he had read his report, the congressman was questioned by committee members, including Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whom Jack Kennedy would soon challenge for his seat in the Senate. Senator Walter George of Georgia prefaced his remarks by assuring Congressman Kennedy “in advance that the question I am going to ask is an impersonal one. . . . You come from a very distinguished American family that exercises a great influence on American public opinion. I want to ask you impersonally whether you remember the able speech of your father in December 1950? I think you know me well enough to know that I do not share his point of view, but I respect his sincerity.” The senator then cited Joseph P. Kennedy’s statement that the United States should get out of Europe because if the Soviets chose to move west or should any European nation “turn communistic,” there was little the United States could do about it. “Now, my question is this,” Senator George continued. “Am I right in my interpretation of your testimony here today that although you think there is a danger or a possibility that Europe might go communistic, nevertheless you think we should take such steps as we can in cooperation with our allies in Europe, to prevent her from going communistic, and not get out of Europe now, as was indicated, if I read his language right, by your father in his December speech?”
Having been fed a friendly softball from the distinguished senator, Jack Kennedy proceeded to knock it out of the park. “I do not like to speak for my father, because I think he could do that better than I could.” He then declared that the effect of “losing Europe and losing its productive facilities, and so forth, would be such that while I think we could survive, it would be difficult and I think we should do our utmost within reason to save it. Therefore, I am in favor of sending these four divisions. . . . I still feel that we should take the risk to save Western Europe. . . . This is my position. I think you should ask my father directly as to his positi
on.”
Congressman Kennedy had demonstrated precisely what he had hoped to: that he was not a marionette controlled by his father or his party. In opposition to Joseph P. Kennedy, Congressman Kennedy favored sending four divisions of American troops to Europe. In opposition to the Democratic majority, he was not, however, in favor of giving Truman carte blanche. When Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked if he was in favor of the Wherry resolution, which the Republicans supported but the Democrats opposed, he answered with a definitive yes and no. He was not in favor of the resolution if it was going to mandate that Truman withdraw the four divisions that he had already requested. But he did favor one that regulated the dispatch of additional divisions.11
In the end, the nonbinding and therefore meaningless resolution that was passed by the Senate was close to the compromise Congressman Kennedy—and the majority of Republican senators—had pushed for. After three long months of debate, acrimony, and much name-calling, the Senate approved the sending of four divisions to Europe but admonished Truman to send no more without congressional approval. Each side claimed victory and blamed the other for attempting to desecrate the Constitution and bring havoc to the world. Congressman Kennedy was one of the few winners, having established a name for himself as a reasoned and independent voice in foreign policy.
While the son was enjoying a fleeting moment in the spotlight, one he cherished to the point of having ten thousand copies of his Senate testimony printed up and distributed, the father was on his way to Europe for his spring vacation. Rose was already in Europe and met up with him in Paris. “Dad is in very good form,” she wrote the children back in the States, “and takes me out every night so I have never been so gay. The last time he was here with me was just after Bobby was born, so there are quite a few new sights since then.”12
From Paris, Kennedy took the train to Rome, where Count Galeazzi had arranged an audience with the pope and discussions with Vatican officials, including the secretary of state. Upon his return to Paris, he met with Anthony Biddle, who, after a distinguished career as a diplomat and in the military, was serving as the army’s foreign liaison officer. Biddle invited Kennedy to visit U.S. Army headquarters “and see some of the topside men.” The next day, he called to say that General Eisenhower wanted to see Kennedy on Friday morning at the Astoria Hotel, where he had set up his offices. After being held up by security officers who didn’t know who he was, Kennedy was escorted upstairs, where Eisenhower saw him without delay.
“I had never met him before,” Kennedy recalled in his diary, “and he unquestionably is a very attractive man to meet. He was sitting behind his desk, got up and shook hands, and said let’s sit over here where it is more comfortable and so we sat in lounge chairs facing one another. He started off by asking me what I had noticed.” Kennedy told him that most of the Frenchmen he had talked with claimed to prefer occupation by the Soviets to “all-out war.” Eisenhower did not disagree. He had come to Europe, in part, to “make the people realize that they must improve their spiritual attitudes towards this whole problem of Russia.” Eisenhower then launched into a general discussion of American foreign policy by “saying he was against my general plan to withdraw to the North American continent.” Kennedy corrected him by saying that he would “be willing to give some help provided Europe showed the real attitude of a desire to fight; but, in the absence of that, I thought we would be just pouring our resources down a rat-hole.” They moved on to other subjects “because I was convinced neither could persuade the other.” Kennedy questioned Eisenhower about his views, then tore them apart one after another. He was aggressive, relentless, without a hint of deference to the general, who was arguably the most popular and respected American on two continents. As Kennedy continued to pummel him, Eisenhower got more defensive. He wasn’t part of the Truman-Acheson team, he insisted; he didn’t want to get the country involved in any more wars; he understood the great difficulties and potential consequences of standing up to the Soviets.13
Kennedy came away from their meeting, as he wrote Galeazzi, assured that though Eisenhower agreed with the Democrats on foreign policy issues, he “would much prefer, I would think, to be the candidate of the Republican party. . . . I am sure he is going to get in there somewhere along the line. Personally I don’t like to see any military man president of the United States but I think I would take anybody in preference to Truman.”14
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Joseph P. Kennedy had always prided himself on being an independent thinker who said what he thought regardless of the consequences. In great part, that had been part of his downfall and exile from Washington.
What he feared now was that he was the last of his breed. Regardless of his disputes with individual journalists and columnists, Kennedy had always believed in the power of an independent press, and he wanted to now. But as he looked around him, he found that everyone he could once have counted on to make noise was gone—the naysayers, the provocateurs, the newspaper editors and publishers—all gone. William Randolph Hearst had died that August. Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune was still alive, but ailing. They had been replaced by a generation of sycophants, men who catered to the powerful instead of holding them to account for their mistakes. In the fall of 1951, Kennedy accused James Reston, chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times and, within government circles, as powerful as any journalist in the country, of being less than “independent” in his judgments, of being too close to the government, too uncritical of the administration. The world was falling apart, the future was dire. Why couldn’t Reston see this—and write about it? (Kennedy was not the only one who thought Reston was too close to his sources. It was widely known that Dean Acheson, a good friend of Reston’s, regularly leaked information to him.)
Reston defended himself by insisting that Kennedy was the one who was unable to see clearly what was going on in the world. “Your view of our time is one of unrelieved anxiety. You see the policy of the present as a catastrophe for your country. . . . I do not, however, share your melancholy view of our time.” Although Kennedy refused to concede to Reston that his judgment might be biased by his “unrelieved anxiety,” he came close to admitting as much in a condolence letter to the Duchess of Devonshire on the death of her husband: “I suppose the fact that nothing in the world seems to be right these days may be the result, for some of us, of having lost those who were near and dear to us. When that kind of love goes out of one’s life it is very difficult to replace it with anything else, and it is almost impossible to see with any degree of reasonableness all the good things that are left.”15
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Approaching his middle sixties, Joseph P. Kennedy lived a strangely bifurcated life, swinging back and forth between what Reston had referred to as his “melancholy” and a kind of manic exhilaration. When he was with his friends and family, he was a very different man from the one who delivered angry speeches and lectured President Truman in the White House and General Eisenhower in Paris.
Now that he was retired and had more free time, his need to surround himself with family and friends was stronger than ever. His buddies—old friends such as Arthur Houghton, Phil Reisman, Morton Downey, and Joe Timilty and new ones such as Lucius Ordway, the St. Paul businessman and founder of 3M who had retired to Palm Beach, Carroll Rosenbloom, Baltimore businessman and NFL team owner, and Father Cavanaugh of Notre Dame—took his mind off his cares, made him laugh, and gave him an outlet for the caustic, mocking, but usually good-natured teasing at which he excelled. His letters to Houghton and Ordway and Rosenbloom, written in his sixties, were (absent the anatomical references) very much like those his son Jack had written in his teens and early twenties to his college friends: sophomorically funny, cuttingly sarcastic, irreverent.
“You were very smart to go to Mayo,” he wrote Ordway from Hyannis Port in June 1951. “Of course I go to the Lahey Clinic twice a year
; but then, I always do things twice as well as you. . . . Houghton and I are thoroughly convinced that there is something more than just slightly wrong with that. You crab in a golf game; you abuse the nice woman who is now your wife; you’re anti-social; you don’t spend any of that thirty million dollars you have; in fact, we think you’re pretty nearly hopeless regardless of your condition from your neck down. I can imagine we could get testimony that that isn’t so good either! However, we like you for some strange reason and we like your wife even better.”16
For those he counted as his friends, he would do anything. There were times when he almost begged them to let him help them, to accept his business advice, to visit his doctors at his expense, to accept his offers of loans or investment capital. When William O. Douglas suffered a dreadful mountain-climbing accident in 1949, Kennedy paid his hospital bills and invited him to recuperate in Palm Beach. He worried especially about friends such as Count Enrico Galeazzi, whose employment as a lay adviser to an aging, infirm pope did not afford him much financial security. In the summer of 1950, he offered to secure for Galeazzi and his son-in-law a Coca-Cola distributorship, but Galeazzi was not interested. Kennedy promised to keep looking. “I spend most of my life writing how grateful I am to you for all the favors you do for me and my family, and I just feel that I never have a chance to do anything for you.”17
Carroll Rosenbloom believed that Kennedy kept secret many of these acts of kindness because “he rather enjoyed being thought of as ‘tough’ rather than ‘soft.’ . . . In his personal relationships, he has always been the ‘softest touch’ I have ever known.” Friendship was, for him, a priceless commodity. “I remember his telling me once that a man was fortunate if he could count his real friends on the fingers of one hand. . . . Friendship has always meant a great deal to him—it is a deep, abiding thing. To him friendship could never be casual.”18