The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Throughout his book, Kennedy accepts and repeats Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that “a democracy is always two years behind the dictator.” Absolute rulers can plan ahead, free of the necessity of coaxing votes from the populace: “A democracy will merely try to counter-balance the menaces that are actually staring it in the face.” Thus the effort to rearm England had to be abandoned in the crucial year, 1935, because of the General Election: “For election year is the time when the public rules—it is then that the politicians acknowledge its superiority. Then, as at no other time, do they try to strike on the policy most acceptable to the mass of voters.” Dictators manage the news to alarm their subjects into activity, while a free press lulls the citizenry: “A democracy’s free press gives the speeches of the totalitarian leaders, who state their case in such a ‘reasonable’ manner that it is hard always to see them as a menace.” Even Hitler had a plausible case to make in such a press: “As Hitler pointed out with some truth, in his cleverly worded letter to Daladier in August, 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, much of what he had done in Europe rectified wrongs that had been done at Versailles, and which should have been righted long before.”

  Beyond this continuing problem of a democracy, England of the 1930s had gone soft under the preaching of idealists (the John Buchan view). “Numerous political federations and councils throughout the country opposed it [rearmament] also. Groups, like the League of Nations, protested that it was a desertion of collective security; and others, like the National Peace Council, the National League of Young Liberals, the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches, were equally outspoken in their opposition. In any discussion of groups opposed to rearmament, no list would be complete without including the completely pacifist wing of the Labour Party led by men like George Lansbury and Dick Shepherd. Though the number of people who supported their advocacy of complete and final abolition of all weapons of warfare was limited, yet their indirect influence was considerable.”

  England, in short, had an enemy within, for which young Kennedy was supplying a kind of Attorney General’s List. The country’s spirit had been sapped by dangerous books: “The whole spirit of the country was pacifistic—probably more strongly than it had ever been. Numerous books against war like Cry Havoc! by Beverly Nichols were widely circulated and avidly read. In an article on Illusions of Pacifists, the writer began, ‘Disarmament and peace are among the most discussed topics of the day.’” Kennedy repeatedly denounces “the strength of the pacifist movement and the general feeling against disarmament,” “the strongly peaceful attitude of the people.”

  The structural and the incidental problems, combined, posed the dilemma for British statesmen (who were wise enough to see the danger): how to flatter the people’s pacific instincts enough to get elected, yet defy them enough to rearm? The resolution of this problem depended on buying time. Since that was the goal, it became for Kennedy the justification of the appeasers:

  In his [1936] acceptance address, Chamberlain announced the policy that was to become known as “appeasement.” Appeasement to us now has a bad sound—it connotes Munich and backing down. In a vague way we blame it for much of Europe’s present trouble, but there was more to it than that when Chamberlain announced it back in 1937. It was a double-barreled policy; he would “continue our program of the re-establishment of our defence forces, combined with a substantial effort to remove the causes which are delaying the return of confidence in Europe.” That Chamberlain’s policy was not merely an unsuccessful effort “to remove the causes delaying the return of confidence” is not popularly realized. It is the other part of his program, “continuing our program of the re-establishment of our defence forces,” with which we are chiefly concerned.

  The policy of appeasement, while it was partly based on a sincere belief that a permanent basis could be built for peace, was also formulated on the realization that Britain’s defence program, due to its tardiness in getting started, would not come to harvest until 1939.

  Taking all these factors into consideration, the Munich Pact appears in a different light from that of a doddering old man being completely “taken in.” It shows that appeasement did have some realism; it was the inevitable result of conditions that permitted no other decision.

  But time ran out on the men trying to overcome the mass’s dangerous reluctance to face danger, and Baldwin became a scapegoat while Chamberlain became a figure of sad comedy.

  The Cliveden Set had taught Joseph Kennedy that the British public was at fault for the country’s weakness—especially the labor unions:

  The question has come up again and again, as the great increase in production has been made by the recent great sacrifices of labor in England—why wasn’t this done more than a year ago? Why didn’t the Chamberlain Government organize labor in this way? Why weren’t strikes outlawed months before, as was done on June 6? Why wasn’t labor conscripted and the country organzied at the end of 1938 and through 1939? This has all been done by Mr. Bevin, the new Minister for Labor under the Churchill Government. But Mr. Bevin was the great leader of the Trade Unions in England before the war. What was his and Mr. Greenwood’s attitude at that time about this problem?

  So strong was John Kennedy’s defense of the ruling class in his earlier draft that even his father told him to tone it down. The book should not look like a whitewash. So there is a perfunctory “blame all around” conclusion, which—like the book’s rambling structure—encourages people to call it evenhanded where it is just confused. The only real criticism of the rulers in the body of the book is directed at Baldwin’s “great mistake” in telling the truth about the 1935 election—admitting that he played down the need to rearm during the election period, to gain time for developing his plans:

  The speech Baldwin delivered was one of the gravest political “boners” that any politician ever made. His “appalling frankness” has resulted in his being blamed for the entire condition of Britain’s armaments. Although a master politician, he made the most elementary mistakes in phrasing, and from this time on he became the political scapegoat for Britain’s failure to rearm. Much of what Baldwin said was true, but the manner in which he worded the truth made it appear that he had put his party’s interest above the national interest, and that was fatal.

  It is hard to see, in retrospect, how reviewers took seriously a book that presented Baldwin’s speech as the appeasers’ one great mistake. The whole book is a hodgepodge of disconnected and ill-grounded assertions: “There is no lobby for armaments as there is for relief or for agriculture.” The basic argument was hard to follow, since the volume was first planned as a chronological treatment of military production, year by year. For this Ambassador Kennedy supplied masses of ill-related statistics and charts, shoved into the different time slots. The argument was made, as it were, in the interstices of this less ambitious account—and it derives less from a reasoned chain of thought than from the father’s odd blend of prejudices, fears, and ambitions. The book, like the Ambassador, is anglophile-isolationist and warhawk-appeasing. Even in its amended version it struck Luce as too charitable to the appeasers: “On the very difficult subject of Munich, I agree with Mr. Kennedy to the extent that he rebuts the cheap-and-easy vilification of Mr. Chamberlain by many American writers. I do so even though, on balance, I cast my own jury-vote against Mr. Chamberlain.”

  Why England Slept was a passable undergraduate paper that never quite became a book. The disparate things stuffed into it have obscured its principal argument; its only unity comes from a cluster of attitudes John Kennedy had drawn from his reading, his experience of England, and his dependence on his father for information and point of view. That is why the book should be read in relation to his contemporary enthusiasms for Lords Cecil and Tweedsmuir. The “English attitude” toward politics was, for young Kennedy, the English attitude toward sex. He admired adventurer-aristocrats, who could save the people by guiding them, sometimes without their knowledge. The book’s only i
mportance is its way of striking these notes. They would sound for a long time in Kennedy’s political career.

  It is said that Kennedy’s early friendship for Joseph McCarthy derived simply from his father’s ties to the man, or from the Irish Catholic constituency of Massachusetts. But the heated attack on pacifist books, authors, and organizations in Why England Slept shows that Kennedy thought subversive ideas could undermine people’s will to resist. It might be necessary, in such circumstances, to limit civil rights—the right to strike, the “misleading” tendency of a free press. A country exposed to peril by an enemy within may have to submit to a period of voluntary totalitarianism:

  The nation had failed to realize that if it hoped to compete successfully with a dictatorship on an equal plane, it would have to renounce temporarily its democratic privileges. All of its energies would have to be molded in one direction, just as all the energies of Germany had been molded since 1933. It meant voluntary totalitarianism because, after all, the essence of a totalitarian state is that the national purpose will not permit group interest to interfere with its fulfillment.

  This is the earliest formulation of “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

  Sometimes enlightened leaders must hide from their subjects the reasons for their acts (avoiding Baldwin’s mistaken candor with the electorate), or even the acts themselves. The world of aristocratic rakes like Melbourne has an underside, the dark area where T. E. Lawrence moves, and Richard Hannay, and James Bond, all the Green Berets and gentlemen spies of the CIA. Presiding over this potentially dangerous world is the honor of the aristocrats, their code of national service. When it came time for Kennedy to praise his forebears in the United States Senate, he sought men with Melbourne’s sense of personal honor, which precludes a servile deference to constituents. All eight of his heroes are praised for defying the electorate, sometimes quixotically:

  It may take courage to battle one’s President, one’s party or the overwhelming sentiment of one’s nation; but these do not compare, it seems to me, to the courage required of the Senator defying the angry power of the very constituents who control his future. It is for this reason that I have not included in this work the stories of this nation’s most famous “insurgents”—John Randolph, Thaddeus Stevens, Robert LaFollette, and all the rest—men of courage and integrity, but men whose battles were fought with the knowledge that they enjoyed the support of the voters back home.

  Kennedy’s father tried to instill in each of his children a sense of their own worth. It was a miniature aristocracy he created, hovering above the Irish-American scene. Those clustered on that space platform did not so much have roots as sources—and the principal source was an imagined English aristocracy of public service.

  7

  Honorary Kennedys

  I would have the courtier devote all his thought and strength of spirit to loving and almost adoring the prince he serves above all else, devoting his every desire and habit and manner to pleasing him.

  —CASTIGLIONE

  Victor Navasky attributes much of Robert Kennedy’s success in the Justice Department to the talented circle of men he calls “honorary Kennedys.” Though Kennedys are attuned mainly to Kennedys, their superheated mutual admiration sets up a magnetic field energizing others in their vicinity. Without being fully admitted to the family (even by marriage), friends and allies rotate loyally and lend their skills. Navasky studied the resources this system made available to Attorney General Kennedy. Not only could he recruit from his own cluster of friends and past associates, but from those of his father and brothers. People who would not have served at second or third level posts, just for a minor title, were happy to serve a Kennedy. And their performance was spirited, not only from a sense of obligation or office, but from reinforcing motives of pride and ambition—to make a Kennedy recognize their ability.

  The use of honorary Kennedys was not restricted to formal appointments at the Justice Department. When the Attorney General took it as a family obligation to free those captured at the Bay of Pigs invasion, powerful friends organized a private ransom fund. Cardinal Cushing, for instance, pledged the first million dollars. In Navasky’s words: “He called upon a Kennedy potpourri, a public-private mix of family, friends, ad hoc committees, free-lance lawyers, sympathizers, bankers and power brokers within, without and throughout the government, the network, the charismatic authority structure, the honorary Kennedys.”

  When, as Senator from New York, Kennedy decided to do something about slum conditions in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he set up the same kind of task force. McGeorge Bundy was now at the Ford Foundation, Burke Marshall at IBM, Douglas Dillon back at his firm—the voices of wealth and influence. Civil rights workers from Robert’s Justice Department—including the admired John Doar—dropped other work and took up Robert’s project. Money and talent were instantly available for the Senator’s personal poverty program.

  When, sudden and late, Kennedy decided to run for President in 1968, he could compensate for prior delay by turning to this instantly mobilizable network. Jack Newfield describes his first move: “So the phone calls began to go out, and dozens of men agreed to abandon their families, and their jobs with law firms, newspapers, and universities, and go to Indiana, or Oregon, or California, to work for the Restoration.”

  Joseph Kennedy had organized the first generation of honorary Kennedys, which included Arthur Krock, William Douglas, and James Landis. The fast-moving businessman knew how to use the talents of such adjuncts, but he had neither the leisure nor the reputation to acquire them on the scale that his sons later did. To have courtiers, you must maintain a court—something he made possible for his family rather than himself. For every Krock he collected, his sons would have dozens of bright journalists in tow. At different times, the honorary Kennedys included Philip Graham, Ben Bradlee, Joseph Alsop, Bill Lawrence, Roland Evans, Sander Vanocur, Hugh Sidey, Hayes Gorey, Henry Brandon, Theodore White, Charles Bartlett, Anthony Lewis, Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Jeff Greenfield, John Bartlow Martin, and—ironically—Roger Mudd. For every Dean Landis of Harvard Law, the sons would have courtier-professors bowing in with book after book. Arthur Schlesinger abandoned his major work on the New Deal to write—endlessly—for and about the Kennedys. He and James MacGregor Burns alternate volumes on the Kennedys, creating one-man libraries.

  Service for one brother became a claim on the next, building up ring on ring of variously influential allies. Loyalty was expected of them, understandably. If the real Kennedys set family above all else, those who share in the Kennedy magic without owning it by birth should, clearly, take up their share of service to the clan. Navasky describes the reaction when Nicholas Katzenbach, Robert’s friend and successor as Attorney General, “disloyally” refused to issue a statement exonerating Kennedy from all complicity in FBI buggings.

  Katzenbach rationalized his resolution of the conflict between loyalty to law and loyalty to friend by arguing—to himself and to RFK—that there was no conflict, that by leaving out the requested language he was acting in Robert Kennedy’s best interest as well as the Justice Department’s. Nevertheless, he had violated one of the unspoken tenets of the Kennedy code—that when there is a disagreement between a hard-core Kennedy and an honorary Kennedy such as Katzenbach, the former prevails, even when a non-Kennedy like Johnson happens to be President—and the relationship was never quite the same thereafter. The story is important less for what it shows about Katzenbach’s decision than for what it suggests about Kennedy’s assumption in dealing with other members of the extended Kennedy family: that where the formal requirements of the legal system and the informal requirements of politics or personal obligation conflict, the code of the Kennedys should prevail, or at least be given great weight.

  In the 1968 campaign, Robert told Jack Newfield how McNamara had observed the Kennedy-first rule: “Bob McNamara twice turned down the Vice Presidency just because he felt I should ge
t it.” The standards varied as one went up or down the social scale of Kennedy attendants. A gran rifiuto was expected of Robert McNamara. For Paul (“Red”) Fay, an aborted checkers game would show proper respect for John Kennedy’s supremacy: “I was winning the first game when I noticed a warning look in his eyes. He coughed suddenly, sending the checkers onto the floor or helter-skelter across the checkerboard. ‘One of those unfortunate incidents of life, Redhead,’ he said with a touch of a smile. ‘We’ll never really know if the Under Secretary was going to strategically outmaneuver the Commander-in-Chief.’”

  The natural order of things was several times enforced on Sargent Shriver, as Harris Wofford describes in his book Of Kennedys and Kings. Shriver’s interest in running for governor of Illinois had to be sacrificed in 1960 to the presidential race of John Kennedy—lest he distract people with another Catholic who was part of the senior Kennedy’s business world. When Lyndon Johnson thought of offering the vice-presidency to Shriver, and Bill Moyers said that Robert would not object, Kenneth O’Donnell blurted, “The hell he wouldn’t.” Then, when Humphrey considered Shriver for the same post, Edward Kennedy vetoed the idea. When Shriver did accept appointments from President Johnson—to the poverty program, and as Ambassador to France—this caused hard feelings in the family, reaching their climax in the 1968 race. Wofford writes: “It was the first time when family loyalty broke down, to the disservice of both Shriver and Kennedy—and Johnson—each of whose effectiveness would have been greater if they could all have worked together.”