During the 1930s Nehru was repeatedly imprisoned for his resistance activities, and he was jailed again in World War II when he opposed aiding Great Britain unless Britain immediately gave India its independence. He did some of his best writing in prison, including his autobiography and also a history of the world in the form of letters to his daughter. At the end of the war he took part in the negotiations that led to the division of the subcontinent and the creation of the independent nations of India and Pakistan. He became India’s first Prime Minister in 1947 and held that post until his death in 1964.
A man of moderate height, about five feet ten inches, Nehru had regular features, an aquiline nose, and rather somber brown eyes that were capable of great intensity. He carried himself with an aristocratic grace. His English, both written and spoken, was impeccable and restrained. He could also be an enormously effective charismatic speaker. While I never heard him address a crowd, his ability to mesmerize huge audiences was legendary. He was said to have once held a crowd of a million people spellbound. The hundreds of thousands who could not hear his words were captivated simply by his presence.
Of all the world leaders I have met, Nehru would certainly rank among the most intelligent. He could also be arrogant, abrasive, and suffocatingly self-righteous, and he had a distinct superiority complex that he took few pains to conceal.
He also faced challenges that would have staggered a lesser man.
The last time I saw the Shah of Iran, when I visited him in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1979, he discussed some of the problems that had confronted Nehru and all other Indian leaders. He contrasted India with China. “The Chinese,” he said, “are one people. They may speak different dialects, but their written language is universal. They have a sense of community wherever they live, either in China or outside China, which draws them together. They may violently disagree with each other on political matters, but in the final analysis they all consider themselves to be Chinese and are proud of their Chinese heritage.” India, he noted, “is a vast jumble of races, religions, and languages. There is no basic Indian language. The only way Indians can understand each other in their parliament is by speaking English.”
He pointed out that the people of the Indian subcontinent represent six major religions and speak fifteen major languages and thousands of minor languages and dialects, and that India’s history is so complex that racial and other ethnic groups cannot even be counted. He noted that India had not been a nation before it was brought together by the British under their colonial rule. He also observed that India was a country that had too many people and too few resources, while China, despite its huge population, has enormous resources and the potential to feed and clothe itself.
The Shah’s point was that India was almost impossible to govern and that anyone who succeeded in holding it together had to be a political genius. Nehru did this. He also, to his great credit, insisted on the retention and development of democratic institutions, despite enormous economic and social problems and the consequent temptation to turn toward dictatorship.
• • •
Before I met Nehru in 1953 in India, some people told me he was anti-American. Others told me that he was anti-British. Still others told me that he was just antiwhite. There may have been a grain of truth in each of these charges, but based on my own conversations with him I would agree with the late Paul Hoffman, who told me that Nehru was simply passionately pro-Indian.
Despite the years he spent struggling against British rule and languishing in British jails, Nehru continued to enjoy English poetry and sometimes spent holidays in Britain. He pushed himself forward as a spokesman for the Third World and architect of “nonalignment,” but he gave every indication of wanting India to be taken seriously as a major power. Proud man that he was, he must have bitterly resented the second-class treatment Indians received from their British rulers. But the condescension and hauteur with which he later addressed the rest of the world seemed to come naturally, from within. These probably were increased by the adulation he received from the Indian people. As his popularity grew during the 1930s, his wife and daughter sometimes playfully teased him. “O, Jewel of India, what time is it?” they would ask, or “O, Embodiment of Sacrifice, please pass the bread.”
When I met with Nehru in 1953, he spent less than a quarter of the time talking about U.S.-Indian relations. He spent more than half the time lecturing me about what he claimed were the dangers India faced from a militaristic Pakistan. Though his words concerned Pakistan’s supposed threat to India, his demeanor foreshadowed the time eighteen years later when India’s Soviet-supplied army, under his daughter’s leadership, dismembered and threatened to extinguish Pakistan, a goal I may have helped to deny them by “tilting” U.S. policy in the conflict toward Pakistan.
This, in retrospect, was his great weakness: diverting so much of his undeniably superior talents and energy to India’s conflict with Pakistan. Nehru was able enough and strong enough that, if he had lived, he might have bitten the bullet on the Pakistan issue and resolved it peacefully. Unfortunately, however, he could not bring himself to do this during his life. The Indo-Pakistan conflict is one of the most tragic examples of senseless military spending in postwar history. For decades two of the world’s poorest nations, with hundreds of millions of people living in abject poverty, have spent billions of dollars a year for arms aimed primarily not at defense against the threat of aggression from the north but against each other.
Nehru did, however, make one point in our talks that I think had merit. He argued that India with its four hundred million people was trying to achieve prosperity, progress, and justice through democracy. China with its six hundred million people was trying to achieve these goals through dictatorship. He therefore insisted that it was in the interest of the United States and the West to do everything possible to ensure that India succeeded, so that as others in the Third World embarked on self-government they would see that the democratic experiment, not the Communist experiment, was the one that worked. This argument served Nehru’s purposes. He wanted more aid. But it also had a substantial measure of validity.
One reason for the persistence of India’s economic woes, of course, was Nehru’s own stubborn adherence to socialism. While it was true, as Nehru argued, that China and India represented competing tests of totalitarianism and democracy, India was not a test of free enterprise. Nehru read Marx in prison; by the mid-1930s he was preaching socialism and urging that his followers organize into workers’ and peasants’ unions. His initial attraction to Socialist doctrine is hardly surprising. He was a child of privilege raised with a social conscience. The India he grew up in was not an industrial or even an agricultural democracy. It was a rigidly stratified caste system in which enormous wealth supported legendary opulence for some while millions of others could look forward to nothing more than the sort of grinding poverty from which early death might even be a form of deliverance.
India needed productivity from the bottom up. Instead, on the economic front, it got ideology from the top down, with layer upon layer of flypaper bureaucracy to snare the feet of anything that moved. The United States alone has provided India with more than $9 billion of aid since independence. But this has gone to remedy the results of Socialist failure rather than to build the foundation of a self-sustaining economy.
Nehru’s romance with socialism and his obsession with Pakistan were, unfortunately, among the prejudices that he passed on to his daughter, Indira Gandhi. She was an interested bystander and listener in the conversations that I had with Nehru in 1953, and she served as his hostess for Mrs. Nixon and me. She was gracious and thoughtful throughout our visit. When I encountered her years later, however, when she was Prime Minister and I was President, there was no doubt that she was her father’s daughter. Her hostility toward Pakistan was, if anything, even stronger than his.
Jawaharlal Nehru was without question a great revolutionary leader. In my own talks with him I could sense why he had s
uch a powerful appeal to the Indian people. He had an almost otherworldly quality of mysticism, but I could see that he also combined this with a shrewd knowledge of the elements of power and the willingness to use power—even use it to the hilt—when necessary.
His legacy is India. It also is the persistent bitterness of India’s conflict with Pakistan.
Only an immensely powerful man could have held India together during those critical early years, maintaining it as a single nation against all the forces pulling it apart. For, as the Shah’s comments indicated, it was no more in the natural order of things for all India to be one country than it was for all Europe to be one country; linguistically, ethnically, and culturally, India is even more diverse than Europe. But whether this accomplishment benefited the Indian people is another question. Unity is sometimes more important to the unifiers than to the unified. If less energy had been dissipated in combating the country’s natural centrifugal forces, perhaps more could have been done to improve the people’s living conditions.
It has become a cliché to speak of India as “the world’s most populous democracy.” Whether or not India would have been better off as several nations, Nehru made it into one, and he made it and kept it a democracy. His daughter has resorted at times to dictatorial devices to keep power or regain it. Whether Nehru himself would have done so I seriously doubt. He impressed me as being firmly dedicated to retaining and expanding democratic institutions and procedures. Considering the magnitude of the tasks that he faced, his success at doing so has to rank as one of the most extraordinary achievements of the postwar era.
A PHILIPPINE NATION BUILDER: MAGSAYSAY
History is filled with tantalizing questions of “What if . . . ?” and “What might have been?” To me one of the saddest of these is what might have been if Ramon Magsaysay, the President of the Philippines, had not been killed in a plane crash in 1957 at age forty-nine.
Of all those who emerged as leaders of new nations after World War II, Magsaysay was among the most impressive. He had not led his country to independence, as Nkrumah, Sukarno, and Nehru led theirs. The Philippines was freely given independence by the United States in 1946. Magsaysay became its President in 1953. At the time of his death he was on the verge of what promised to be a landslide reelection victory.
Perhaps this was one reason for his success. He had not been a revolutionary leader; he had neither a psychological nor a political need to manufacture a continuing revolution or to create its substitute in foreign adventuring. The whole focus of his extraordinary talents was to bring security, stability, and progress to the people of the Philippines.
In pursuing these goals, however, Magsaysay had staked out as tough a fight as any faced by a postwar leader. MacArthur had liberated the Philippines from the Japanese but not from the devastations of war. Both its economy and its spirit had been ravaged by war and the Japanese Occupation. After it was granted its independence in 1946, it embarked on a struggle for survival as dire as those of the defeated nations of World War II. A free-trade agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines helped, as did over $800 million in American aid between 1945 and 1955. But the government had to contend not only with a ruined economy but also with a nation divided by bitter political disagreements.
In certain key respects the postwar Philippines resembled postwar Italy. Both nations had been ravaged spiritually and economically by the war. Both faced threats from the Communists that were substantially more dangerous than those in Japan, West Germany, or any other European nation. Both were essentially on their own after the war’s end, so that they had to deal with the Communist threat themselves, without turning to the ultimate authority of an occupying power. And both nations had leaders at critically important times—de Gasperi in Italy from 1945 to 1953, Magsaysay in the Philippines from 1950 to 1957, first as Defense Minister and then as President—who met the challenges courageously, imaginatively, and forthrightly.
When the Communists promised to deliver the Italian people from poverty and despair, de Gasperi could not, as Adenauer could, simply gesture across the border and tell his people that the proof of Communist promises was in the East German pudding. He had to outwit and outmaneuver the Communists and at the same time show the Italians that his was the way to prosperity and freedom. His task was on two interrelated but often separate levels: beating the Communists, and feeding, clothing, and inspiring his people.
When his turn came in the Philippines, Magsaysay also waged a two-pronged fight against communism. His nation had been as emotionally drained by the war and the Japanese Occupation as Italy had been by the war and fascism. In fact, MacArthur once pointed out to me that a larger percentage of the Filipino people had died in the Pacific war than of any other nation. De Gasperi had to contend with a well-organized, well-funded Communist party; Magsaysay had to fight a powerful group of insurgent Communists, the Hukbalahaps, and at the same time invigorate his exhausted people and, like de Gasperi, give them a productive alternative to the alluring siren song of communism. Though he died before he could complete his work, he made tremendous progress in a short time, and his example shone like a beacon throughout free Asia.
Magsaysay was one of those rare leaders who combined immense popular appeal with boundless energy and also with plain good sense. When I first met him in 1953, he was still President-elect. I was struck at once by his size. At nearly six feet, he was very tall for a Filipino. He had natural presence, great personal charm, and a pure animal magnetism that showed itself dramatically whenever he appeared before a crowd. On that 1953 visit I addressed twenty thousand Philippine Junior Chamber of Commerce members one afternoon in Manila. When Magsaysay strode in, even though it was only to sit on the platform, the crowd went wild at the sight of him. The electricity that surged between Magsaysay and the throng in front of us was like a lightning bolt.
Magsaysay was active in the resistance movement in World War II, a guerrilla leader throughout the Japanese Occupation. He caught MacArthur’s attention, and in 1945 the general made him military commander of Zambales province. But it was his successful fight against another enemy, the Huks, that made him a major national hero.
Within a few years after the war, the Huks had become so strong that they were able to maintain openly a headquarters in Manila. By 1950 there were over sixteen thousand Huks, and in some parts of the Philippines they actually collected taxes to pay for their own schools and factories.
Morale in the Philippine army was desperately low, and the army provided little effective defense against the Huks. Conditions in the countryside were abysmal. MacArthur once commented that if he were a Philippine peasant, he would probably be a Huk himself. One source of the Huks’ strength was their promise of land reform. Those who worked the land paid an average of seventy percent of their meager income from crops to a hereditary landowning class.
Magsaysay, then a member of the Philippine Congress, was made Minister of Defense in 1950, and he quickly and vigorously embarked on a two-pronged initiative against the Huks. First he revitalized the army, flying between scattered camps for surprise inspections and firing negligent officers. He captured the top Communist leadership. But he also launched an ambitious resettlement program for farmers. Thus he executed a kind of political pincer movement that destroyed the Huks’ power base. “I don’t know where to put all the Huks that have surrendered,” he said proudly at one point.
When I saw him in 1953, he explained his approach to the Huks. “Guns alone are not the answer,” he said. “We must provide hope for young people for better housing, clothing, and food, and if we do the radicals will wither away.” Yet despite his belief that guns alone were not the answer, he was not one of those naive idealists who believe that no guns are necessary to resist totalitarian aggression. He strongly supported our mutual defense efforts, defeated the Huk terrorists in battle, and was unswerving in his commitment to using force whenever necessary to fight the Communists. “Between our way of life and communism,”
he declared, “there can be no peace, no paralyzing coexistence, no gray neutralism. There can only be conflict—total and without reconciliation.”
When I first met Magsaysay, he had just won the presidency by an overwhelming margin. When he was nominated by the Nationalist party (after turning aside party leaders’ suggestions that he lead a military coup), he had opened his campaign with what must be the briefest acceptance speech on record. He stood up and said, “I am a man of action; therefore, I am not a speechmaker,” and sat down. On my second trip to the Philippines, in 1956, I saw him in action as a speechmaker. Half a million people were gathered in Manila’s Luneta Park for a ceremony celebrating the tenth anniversary of Philippine independence. I spoke first, representing the United States. Then, just as Magsaysay stepped to the podium, the gray skies opened in a tropical cloudburst, and it began to pour. Aides rushed to his side with umbrellas. He pushed them away. He had brought a prepared text, which lay on the podium in front of him. The rain soaked it through, leaving it useless. He set it aside and delivered virtually the entire speech extemporaneously. When the rain started, I had expected the crowd to scatter. Many did, but thousands more stayed in place, their eyes fixed on Magsaysay, ignoring the rain, enveloped by his voice, his cadences, his words, his presence. When he finished, still ignoring the rain, they erupted into an ecstasy of applause. It was one of the most stunning oratorical tours de force I have ever seen.
Magsaysay broke the rules of Philippine politics. In a country where corruption was rife, he was stubbornly incorruptible. In the elections of 1951, as Defense Minister, he fought to reduce the influence of local bosses and the military in politics (in one town, the police forces had gone so far as to murder opposition voters) and he prevailed; the elections that year were honest. As President, he opened his palace in Manila to everyone and listened patiently to the complaints of peasants and workers. He distrusted the opinions of so-called experts on issues and preferred to travel to the barrios and villages to find out for himself what the people felt and needed. As he drove along, he would reach out and touch the hands of the Filipinos who had come out just to see him drive past.
Leaders Page 37