Decline and Fall
SALLUST DATED THE corruption of the Roman republic from the time when Roman soldiers, in Greece on an errand of empire, began to admire the sculpture and art of the subject race. Perhaps some future Sallust will date the corruption of the American empire to the time when Joseph Alsop returned from the East in love with Chinese silk and the idea of a permanent American commitment to the peoples of the Asian mainland. It was heady stuff, to be thirty-odd years old and know that one’s actions could alter the course of Chinese history. Alsop loved it. So did Jack Kennedy. The future President might have been less enamored of the idea of putting American troops on the Asian mainland than Alsop, but he was just as addicted to the pleasures of making imperial policy.13 Not long after he entered the Senate, Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, the young Nebraskan he had recently hired for his Senate office, were discussing their interests and ambitions. Would it be fun to be in the Cabinet? Which portfolio was the most desirable to hold? Sorensen thought “Justice, Labor, and Health-Education-Welfare” the most interesting positions. Jack Kennedy demurred; he “wouldn’t have any interest in any of those” jobs. Only the State Department and the Defense Department, he told Sorensen haughtily, interested him.14 They were more fun.
Although their father was, like Senator Taft, a critic of the insidious “imperialism of mind” that threatened to corrupt the American people, Jack and Bobby themselves believed in the empire. They believed in it in part, of course, because it promised to bring democracy and constitutional government to the dark places of the world. Bobby, traveling in Soviet Central Asia with Justice Douglas in the middle fifties, was, in his eagerness to promote the American way in hostile and uncomprehending lands, the spiritual twin of Alden Pyle. (Partway through the trip an exasperated Douglas told Bobby to keep his mouth shut and stop waving the flag.)15 But the brothers believed in the empire, too, because the activity of empire is inherently exciting, challenging, fun. This, of course, is the reason why even those Presidents who run for office on solidly domestic platforms end up devoting so much of their time, after they are elected, to foreign affairs. In 1993 Richard Nixon predicted that President Clinton himself, a domestic politician if there ever was one, would discover this—or risk being forgotten by history. History “will not remember him for anything he does domestically,” Nixon said of Clinton. “The economy will recover; it’s all short-term and, let’s face it, very boring.”16 In time even Sorensen came to prefer foreign affairs to “boring” domestic ones; the young man who, fresh from the progressive politics of Nebraska, had wanted to run HEW later embraced more global pursuits. After leaving the White House, Sorensen went to practice international law at Paul, Weiss in New York City. Arthur Schlesinger observed that even so decent a man as Hubert Humphrey, the embodiment of the virtues of Middle Western reform politics, was eventually corrupted by the pleasures of empire; Schlesinger recalled how disappointed he was by the “obvious delight” Humphrey had come to take “in hobnobbing with statesmen,” in recounting his conversations with “the Pope, de Gaulle, Radhakrishnan, etc., etc.”17 In succumbing to the pleasures of empire, the Kennedys were not alone.
That pleasure was a motive force behind the creation of the American empire is demonstrated, I think, by the speed with which the Stimsonians abandoned it as soon as it ceased to be fun. It is not my purpose here to describe the policies that, had the Stimsonians persuaded their Presidents to pursue them, might have spared the United States the horror of war in Vietnam. Nor is it my purpose to criticize the Stimsonians for failing to heed the warnings that, if they had been heeded earlier, might at least have limited the scope of the disaster. (George Kennan, a tragic Cassandra in the Stimsonian citadel, expressed doubts about the way his theory of containment was being applied as early as 1947.18) What is distressing about the Stimsonians’ involvement in Vietnam is not the role their policies played in creating the crisis—anyone can make a mistake—but rather the way they tried to walk away from it once the magnitude of their miscalculation became apparent. Dean Acheson, according to journalists Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, “preferred to think about Vietnam as little as possible.”19 Jack McCloy thought Vietnam a “distraction” from the problems of the European nations, which he said constituted “the Big Leagues.”20 Chip Bohlen was “quite content to have as little as possible to do with the Vietnam War.”21 Paul Nitze never bothered to formulate a coherent position on the war.22 A critical part of their imperial strategy had become painful to them, and the Wise Men did their best to stay away from it, to confine themselves to more pleasant subjects.
Lyndon Johnson, to his credit, forced them to confront the unhappy progeny their geopolitical policies had spawned. The results were disappointing. When pressed for counsel, the Wise Men gave advice that was sadly lacking in perspicacity: they limited themselves to baseball analogies and locker-room pep talks, delivered with all the eloquence of a high school football coach. They vacillated, equivocated, talked themselves in and out of half a dozen positions. Here is McCloy in 1965, as described by Isaacson and Thomas:
He spoke at length about how “impressed” he was with the “toughness of the situation.” He doubted that merely “blunting the monsoon offensive” would bring Hanoi into a “negotiating mood.” He predicted that the situation would remain “critical” for a long time. Yet after carefully laying out his doubts, he proclaimed that there was really no choice. America’s credibility depended on her meeting her obligations and honoring her commitments. To Rusk and McNamara, he was adamant: “You’ve got to do it,” he said. “You’ve got to go in.”
Acheson had at least the presence of mind to give his advice bluntly and forcefully; the only problem with that advice was that it changed dramatically from one year to the next. In 1965 he told Johnson that the President was “wholly right on Vietnam” and “had no choice except to press on.” By 1968 he was telling the President that he must get out immediately and bring home the troops within a matter of months.23 The lordly Dean was obviously frustrated by the crisis his policies had helped to create, and at times the frustration showed. “You go tell the President,” the normally unflappable patrician snapped in a moment of irritation, “and you can tell him in precisely these words, that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”24 Perhaps it would be too much to expect of the Stimsonians the kind of comprehensive moral and intellectual analysis of the problem of empire that Burke put forward in the eighteenth century when he tried to persuade successive British ministries to adopt more far-sighted policies toward Britain’s colonies in America and India. But baseball analogies and talk of the President “sticking Vietnam up his ass”? These were the Wise Men?
The Stimsonians abandoned the bastard child that their passionate embrace of empire had produced with the same guiltless ease that characterized so many of their activities: they would make no shrift, confess no error, beg no forgiveness. In Georgetown drawing rooms where scarcely twenty years before the right people had gathered to celebrate the triumphant creation of a new imperial order, their counterparts in the middle sixties politely turned their backs on those who had the temerity to support the war in Vietnam. The role played by their own class and coterie in creating the policies that led to the disaster was conveniently forgotten, and the denizens of the salon turned their wrath not indeed upon themselves, but upon the convenient scapegoats in the White House.25
Bobby deserves credit for having taken upon himself, in a March 1967 speech in the Senate, a share of responsibility and blame for the decisions that led to the war. But his criticisms of the war itself, while they may have been just, cannot be called courageous. To criticize the war in 1967: it was the popular, the fashionable, the easy thing to do. The really courageous aspect of Bobby’s statesmanship lay in his challenge not to the empire, but to the welfare state. By 1967 the American empire had ceased to be a vital force, a compelling ideal, in American life. It had ceased to be the kind of institution that young men and women grew up hoping one day to
serve. Alden Pyle’s counterparts in the 1960s did not go to Vietnam, as Pyle himself had done, to fight for democracy: they stayed home to protest the fight for democracy in Vietnam. The empire could not long endure in the face of such unpopularity as this, and it was only a matter of time before the processes of contraction began. But three decades were to pass before a serious attempt was made to reform the welfare state.
17
On a cold day in January 1968 he went to Walter Lippmann’s apartment in New York. Arthur Schlesinger accompanied him. Lippmann, now an old man, had long been an adviser and friend to eminent Stimsonian statesmen; in different periods of his life he had been on close terms with Theodore Roosevelt, Learned Hand, Felix Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan. And yet he was also among the most perceptive critics of the policies of the Stimsonians. Although as a young man he had been attracted to the dogmas of Fabian socialism, in the 1930s he emerged as one of the wisest and most thoughtful opponents not only of the New Deal itself, but also of the President who, “drunk with power,” stood behind it.1 After the war, casting about for a suitable term to describe the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, he had come up with the phrase “the cold war,” and in his newspaper columns had criticized the methods with which the United States had chosen to fight it.2
Now the great man’s career was drawing to a close, and Bobby, looking for the kind of guidance that only long experience can give, sought him out for a talk. Should he run for President in 1968? Lippmann’s reply was Delphic. Although he agreed that the reelection of Johnson would be a “catastrophe” for the nation, he stopped short of openly advising Bobby to run. When Bobby left Lippmann’s apartment, he was strangely elated; perhaps his encounter with the ancient sage, a relic from another age, a man who had known Shaw and Freud and William James, had heightened his consciousness of the jealousness of time, of the elusiveness of historic destiny: one had to seize one’s opportunities when one could. He would, he told Schlesinger, “wash” 1972 out of his thoughts altogether; he would concentrate his efforts on 1968.
But the euphoria subsided, and he was no closer to a decision. War councils and strategy sessions did little to help him make up his mind. “It’s all so complicated,” he told Jack Newfield. “I just don’t know what to do.”3 His friends and advisers were divided. Ted Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, Fred Dutton, Bob McNamara, and Dick Daley all said that he would be foolish to run in 1968; Allard Lowenstein, Adam Walinsky, Arthur Schlesinger, and Dick Goodwin countered that it would be wrong not to. His wife and sisters wanted him to run; his brother Ted didn’t. Joseph Alsop penned a column in which he warned Bobby to stay out of the race; Jack Newfield wrote in The Village Voice that the best part of his character would die if he did not challenge Lyndon Johnson.4
Eugene McCarthy was running. Bobby, fantasizing about the kind of campaign he wanted for himself, said that McCarthy should “run against the organization, against the Democratic establishment, against the big shots.”5 He didn’t like McCarthy, thought him a lazy, self-indulgent man, a spiteful Senator who “felt he should have been the first Catholic President because he knew more St. Thomas Aquinas than my brother.”6 No doubt Bobby resented the fact that McCarthy had dared to do the very thing he himself hesitated to do. He hated to hesitate, and he knew that others hated him for his hesitation. A student at Brooklyn College confronted him with a cruel sign: “RFK: Hawk, Dove, or Chicken?”7 At a cocktail party at El Morocco, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri “harangued him for ten solid minutes on the moral imperative of his running.”8 Afterward, dining at Le Pavillon, Bobby told his sisters that he “thought he would run.”9 A week later he changed his mind. At the end of January he told a National Press Club breakfast that he would not oppose President Johnson under any “foreseeable circumstances.” Although the careful language left him a degree of room for maneuver, he had for all apparent purposes taken himself out of the running.
It was a spectacular miscalculation, for on the very day he announced his decision, the Tet offensive began. Targets across South Vietnam were attacked; the United States embassy in Saigon was fired upon. Ellsworth Bunker, the American Ambassador, was awakened in the middle of the night by his Marine guards, led to an armored personnel carrier, and taken through the streets of the capital to a more secure hiding place. Eugene McCarthy all at once became a credible opponent of Lyndon Johnson; it was even conceivable that he might defeat the President in the New Hampshire primary. In gloomy isolation Bobby lamented his decision to stay out of the race.10 When on March 12, 1968, McCarthy won 42 percent of the New Hampshire vote, opponents of the war rejoiced. Bobby himself retreated moodily to the “21” Club to ponder the future.11
Eventually, of course, he did enter the race. The circumstances surrounding his decision to do so are full of perplexed uncertainty. Schlesinger and Newfield claim that he made up his mind before the results of the New Hampshire primary were known.12 Schlesinger’s own book, however, casts doubt upon this assertion.13 In it Schlesinger quotes from a letter written by Bobby to Anthony Lewis the day after the New Hampshire primary, a letter in which Bobby confides that, although his “basic inclination was to try [to run] … everyone who I respect with the exception of Dick Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger have been against my running.” That he had not yet made a final decision is clear: “What should I do?” he at one point asks Lewis. “By the time you receive this letter,” he concluded, “both of us will know.” He remained hesitant about running even after the New Hampshire results revealed the extent of Johnson’s vulnerability. The day before the primary he authorized Ted Sorensen to look into the possibility of a deal with Johnson. In exchange for Bobby’s implicit promise to stay out of the race, Johnson would appoint an independent commission to examine American policy in Vietnam. Bobby, instead of frankly telling both Sorensen and the President that the time for commissions had passed, spent a day or two after the New Hampshire result puzzling over the proposal until word reached him that Johnson had rejected it.14
Campaigning Against the Welfare State
AT LAST THE announcement was made. A speech was quickly put together. Bobby delivered it in the caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building on Saturday, March 16, 1968. It was not a masterpiece; it was not even wholly consistent with the themes of his campaign. He was running, after all, against the imperial policies of the Stimsonians, yet he nevertheless dutifully recited the lines that Sorensen, who was now more than ever a Stimsonian manqué, fed him about the necessity of American leadership in the world. To the horror of Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, Bobby told the world that the presidential contest was about nothing less than America’s “right to moral leadership on this planet.”15
After the announcement he flew to New York to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade there. (As he walked up Fifth Avenue, he was booed and jeered by supporters of the war.) And then he went to Kansas, the first of more than a dozen states he visited in the ensuing weeks. The crowds that greeted him wherever he went were for the most part enthusiastic. In Kansas and in California they were more than that: they were roused by his presence to a pitch of feverish ecstasy.16 To cheering audiences Bobby denounced President Johnson for “dividing the country.” He accused the President of calling upon “the darker impulses of the American spirit.”17
It was a tumultuous and terrible spring. At the end of March Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as President. A few days later, in early April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis. Bobby, shocked by the rioting that followed, speculated on the underlying causes of violence in America. “What has violence ever accomplished?” he asked. “What has it ever created?” The answer, of course, is that violence has accomplished many things, both good and bad. The American republic was founded in an act of violent revolution; the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as vital a part of the nation’s charter of liberty as any, were the product of four years of violent civil
war. And yet there was a difference between these extraordinary, isolated acts of organized and, as it were, idealistic violence and the random, pointless violence that too often prevailed in the America of the 1960s. Bobby wondered whether this new and unprecedented violence was not in some way the product of the country’s institutions; after King’s death he dwelt at length upon “the violence of institutions,” institutions that destroyed the dignity of individuals and broke “a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among men.”18 His target was obvious enough: the institutions of the welfare state—institutions that forced fathers out of their homes and lured them away from productive work—were one cause of the unprecedented violence of the sixties.
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