7. UNIFORMITY VS. DIVERSITY
But what was American democracy to say? USIA could only repeat, not invent, policy. The problem remained of giving substance to our conception of the world. Dulles had talked of the Free World, and the State Department continued to blow on this worn locution like a stuck whistle. The phrase was, I suppose, innocent enough, but, among other things, it was innocent of meaning. When printed in capital letters, it had to my mind a portentous and sleazy appearance; and in my first enthusiastic days in Washington I made a mild bid to abandon this bit of Dullese.
Toward the end of May 1961 Secretary Rusk had to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He sent his testimony over to the White House for suggestions; and I proposed an introductory paragraph which, in due course, he spoke to the committee. “We seek, above all,” Rusk said, “a world of free choice in which a great diversity of nations, each faithful to its own traditions and its own genius, will learn to respect the ground rules of human survival. We do not wish to make the world over in our own image—and we will not accept that the world be made over in the image of any society or dogmatic creed. Against the world of coercion, we affirm the world of choice.”
That, alas, was about the last one heard of the world of choice. The Free World continued to dominate State Department rhetoric. The President, however, always restless with clichés, sought continually for a more exact statement of our issue with communism. At the end of July 1961 Khrushchev put out the draft program for the Soviet Communist Party, a document filled with glowing (and extremely bourgeois) assurances that the Soviet Union would do everything from surpassing the per capita production of the United States by 1970 to abolishing the income tax. Harriman, reading this new Communist manifesto in Geneva, cabled the President proposing a democratic counterstatement. On Averell’s return to Washington, Kennedy called him over to discuss the idea and asked me to join them.
The President said he was not interested in an exchange of standard-of-living boasts with the Russians or in an anthology of cold war banalities. What he wanted was a fresh analysis of the conceptions of history and the future implicit in the democratic position. “One object of the document,” I noted afterward, “would be to destroy the idea of communist inevitability. But the main point would be to provide an affirmative description of the kind of world we seek and the reason why we believe that the pluralistic world will win out over the monistic world.”
This was one of those projects always shoved aside by the daily importunities of the in-box, and I am ashamed to say that I never did anything about it in the form the President originally proposed. But the concept of diversity remained very much in his mind. It seemed the key to so much we were doing. Moreover, it expressed the nation’s deeper traditions; for what was the idea of diversity, after all, but the expression in politics of William James’s radical empiricism, that most American of philosophies? It was James’s vision of the pluralist universe, where free men could find partial truths but where no one could ever get an absolute grip on Absolute Truth. It sprang from the sense that, as James put it, “the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle . . . with so strange and elaborate an excitement.”
Above all, the concept of diversity seemed more and more vindicated by the movement of events—in the end, paradoxically, by events in the communist world as in our own. For by the spring of 1962 the reality of the quarrel between the Soviet Union and China was beginning to become clear to everyone (except the aficionados of the ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’ in the Department of State). In traveling around Latin America, Asia and Europe in January and February of 1962, I was struck most of all, as I reported to the President on my return, “by the extent to which, since my last foreign travel, the Russo-Chinese tension has become a dominating issue throughout the world.” It was draining away the power of the communist mystique, for one great source of communist appeal had been the belief that it was a universal creed capable of abolishing the contradictions of life and ushering in the brotherhood of man. The communist empire itself was “increasingly dividing between the relatively sedate and conservative communist parties of the developed world and the hungry, angry and revolutionary communist parties of the underdeveloped world.” The historic forces of diversity were bursting communist discipline and shattering communist ideology.
The forces of diversity, my report added, were operating on our side of the fence too. “Pluralism is splitting both blocs apart and blurring the old, tidy divisions of the cold war. One could almost say that the process of competitive coexistence has turned into one of competitive disintegration. Still, one basic difference remains, and a difference everlastingly to our advantage. Pluralism is incompatible with the communist system; but it is wholly compatible with—indeed, should be the basis of—our system.” The memorandum concluded: “What we must do is both to reemphasize the fact that our objective is a pluralist world and to rethink our international relationships in these terms.”
All this, of course, corresponded very much with Kennedy’s longtime view. The pluralist world, indeed, was inherent in the standstill thesis he had set forth to Khrushchev in Vienna—a thesis which implied that nations should be free to seek their own roads to salvation without upsetting the balance between the superpowers. It also fitted in with the conviction he had been expressing in recent months that the power of the United States to prescribe the arrangements of mankind was strictly limited. “We must face the fact,” he had told an audience at the University of Washington the previous November, “that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 per cent of the world’s population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 per cent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
No great power could run the world: variety was the stubborn and irreducible reality. The policy of the two blocs was played out. And, if the monolithic vision was against the grain of history, the pluralist universe was of its essence. Kennedy felt more than ever that the time was coming to crystallize a new view of the world. Soon after my return, he remarked that he had to give the Charter Day address at the University of California later in the month. “I am tired,” he said, “of the headlines. All they describe is crisis, and they give the impression that we have our backs against the wall everywhere in the world. But this is an optical illusion. Look at it from Khrushchev’s viewpoint. He has China, Albania, agriculture, the intellectuals, eastern Europe”—ticking them off on his fingers—“and I’ll bet he feels just as harried as we do—probably more so. The fact is that the world has changed a lot in the last decade, and most of the change has been in our favor—national independence and all that. I want to talk about these things. Let me have your ideas.”
Meanwhile Ted Sorensen also prepared a Berkeley draft, this one eloquently devoted to the contrast between the “age of knowledge” and the “age of hate.” The day before the speech, the President called us both to the Mansion after luncheon. His luncheon guest, J. Edgar Hoover, was leaving as we arrived. Kennedy carefully refrained from introducing us, explaining a moment later that he did not want to upset Mr. Hoover too much. Then we discussed the two speeches. Kennedy said he liked the part in the Sorensen draft about the “age of knowledge” but not the part about the “age of hate”; he found both the idea and the word repugnant. He added that he also liked the passages in the other speech explaining that the pluralistic world and not the monolithic world was the wave of the future. Finally he handed both drafts to me and issued the classic presidential injunction: “Weave them together.” Ted and I protested mildly that they were two separate speeches. The President got up and headed toward the bedroom for his nap, kidding us as he went. “I think you fellows have enough to go on,” he said. “Just go out and write it up and have a new draft here by five o’clock.” He added, “Thi
s reminds me of my father. When someone gave him an idea or a memorandum, he would say, ‘This is lousy. It’s no good.’ Then they would ask what he wanted, and he would say, ‘That’s up to you,’ and walk out of the room. That’s what I am doing now.”
I went back to my office and began to weave together the age of knowledge and the inevitable triumph of the pluralistic world. By five I dutifully returned with a new draft. Kennedy read it with care and made a number of suggestions. I changed the text as he indicated and went off to a banquet given by the Harvard Club of Washington. In a few moments I was told I was wanted on the telephone. It was the President calling from the swimming pool with some new thoughts. I added these later in the evening, and he extensively reworked the text the next day on the plane to California.
“It is the profound tendencies of history,” he said at Berkeley, “and not the passing excitements that will shape our future. . . . The long view shows us that the revolution of national independence is a fundamental fact of our era. This revolution will not be stopped. As new nations emerge from the oblivion of centuries, their first aspiration is to affirm their national identity. Their deepest hope is for a world where, within a framework of international cooperation, every country can solve its own problems according to its own traditions and ideals.”
This meant a world, he continued, marked by “diversity and independence.” Such a world, “far from being opposed to the American conception of world order,” expressed “the very essence of our view of the future,” and movement toward this world was “the unifying spirit of our policies.”
The purpose of our aid programs must be to help developing countries move forward as rapidly as possible on the road to genuine national independence.
Our military policies must assist nations to protect the processes of democratic reform and development against disruption and intervention.
Our diplomatic policies must strengthen our relations with the whole world, with our several alliances and within the United Nations.
Above all, “this emerging world is incompatible with the communist world order,” for the communists rested everything on the idea of a monolithic world, “where all knowledge has a single pattern, all societies move toward a single model, and all problems and roads have a single solution and a single destination.” The monolith, he suggested, was doomed by the tides of history. “No one who examines the modern world can doubt that the great currents of history are carrying the world away from the monolithic toward the pluralist idea—away from communism and toward national independence and freedom. . . . Beyond the drumfire of daily crisis, therefore, there is arising the outlines of a robust and vital world community, founded on nations secure in their own independence, and united by allegiance to world peace.”
There were indeed grounds for optimism in the spring of 1962. Not only was the communist empire itself faced by incipient crack-up, but the Russians had receded from Berlin and Laos, had made a botch of things in Africa and had their troubles at home. “I’m not so much impressed by the challenge of their system,” Kennedy told Stewart Alsop about this time. “The most impressive thing they have done is their achievement in space. But there is a lot that is not so impressive.” In the meantime, we had enormously strengthened our military position, we were making substantial progress in the third world, we were watching Western Europe grow every month in strength and vitality and we hopefully discerned a new spirit in our own society.
Vienna had shown that the communist leaders would not be persuaded by logic; but, if we could prove that, contrary to Marxist hypothesis, the democratic nations could maintain their unity, a rising rate of economic growth, a strong military capability, a creative relationship with the new nations and a foreign policy at once firm and restrained, then, in the longer run, we could perhaps expect the Soviet Union to reshape its policy to fit these facts. Moreover—as David Ormsby Gore used to urge on the President and the Attorney General—a new generation was emerging îii the Soviet Union with values and aspirations of its own, and with this new generation the dialogue would be easier.
Where the unitary American dogma of the fifties had dismayed our allies and, in effect, excommunicated the unaligned nations, Kennedy’s doctrine of diversity now offered a common cause which even carried its appeal far beyond the Iron Curtain itself. As no one since Roosevelt, he was identifying the United States with the movement toward national independence and popular democracy and, perhaps even more than Roosevelt, with the hopes and aspirations of distant peoples. He made their longing for bread and schools and dignity his own. Most of all, he was giving the younger generation around the earth, as the foreign minister of Austria, Dr. Bruno Kreisky, later put it, “the courage to test their mettle in a field which had been barred to too many of them too long.” Around the earth the young looked to him increasingly as their leader. Always he spoke for reason, recognizing the intractable diversity within the human family, eschewing the moralistic crusade, striving, in an age when war could mean the end of civilization, to move beyond war and offer humanity a chance to control its own destiny.
In seeking to build the world community on the idea, not of uniformity, but of diversity, the President expressed his own sense of the grand dynamic of modern history; and, in summoning history as his witness, he struck hard at the heart of the Marxist case. Moscow seems to have felt the blow. By 1964 Kommunist, the theoretical organ of the Soviet Communist Party, had inverted the Dulles doctrine, adopted it for itself and issued an irritable démarche to the new nations: “The leaders of young countries who really desire progress for their peoples cannot occupy intermediate positions between contradictory social systems. There are only two paths of development—one path leads to capitalism and the other to socialism. There is no third way.”
In his vision of a world of diversity united by allegiance to peace, Kennedy established the basis for a wise and strong American policy—a basis from which he could move with equal ease toward conciliation or confrontation with the Soviet Union. Whichever way circumstances compelled him to move, he could act with the deep conviction he set forth at Berkeley: “No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.”
XXIII
The Country Moving Again
THOUGH FOREIGN AFFAIRS CONSUMED the major share of Kennedy’s time and attention, foreign policy, as he conceived it, had to draw its vitality and purpose from the energies liberated and the goals pursued within the United States. The Fourteen Points, he had remarked in the campaign, had been the “logical extension” of Wilson’s New Freedom; Franklin Roosevelt had succeeded as a good neighbor in Latin America because he had been a good neighbor in the United States; Truman’s Marshall Plan was the international “counterpart” of his Fair Deal. These three Presidents, Kennedy said, had been so notably successful around the world “because they were successful here, because they moved this country ahead, because they demonstrated that here in this country we were still revolutionaries.” America, in short, had to start moving at home if it were to move the world.
And in motion the country was certainly not. The fifties had hardly been a notable season of innovation in our national life. The politics of boredom had produced widespread public apathy. National policy had been complacent and lethargic. Young people had become so circumspect that they were known as the ‘silent generation.’ Economic growth had puttered along at an average rate of 2.5 to 3 per cent a year. There had been recessions in 1954 and 1958. In the early spring of 1960, the economy had begun to sink into another recession. Gross national product stagnated. Unemployment increased by 1.2 million between February and October. If Kennedy were to start the country moving again, he would have to begin with the economy.
1. KENNEDY AND ECONOMICS
Kennedy had received his highest grade and only B in freshman year at Harvard in the introductory course in economics. The course made
no deep impression on him. Indeed, he remembered his grade as C, or so at least he liked to tell his economists in later years. Nevertheless it was fortunate that this early exposure to economics came in the later days of the New Deal, when the Keynesian revolution was having its first effect. This saved him from being taught that government intervention in the economy was wicked per se or that a balanced budget should be the supreme goal of economic policy. Unlike F.D.R., he never had to unlearn classical maxims in order to meet contemporary problems.
His experience as a young Congressman watching the fluctuations of the economy in the late forties confirmed him in an incipient Keynesianism. Thus just after the election in 1952, when Sylvia Porter, the financial columnist, asked him on Meet the Press whether he now expected inflation or deflation, he replied, “Deflation is going to be the more serious problem particularly if efforts are made which General Eisenhower and Senator Taft and others have talked about of reducing our federal expenditures. Once we begin to balance the budget or begin to reduce our national debt, then deflation obviously is going to be the major issue.” The proper policy, he continued, should be “to build up sufficient consumer purchasing power to absorb our increased productivity,” and he was prepared to do this either through maintaining government expenditures or cutting taxes—“anything to put enough consumer purchasing power in the market, and obviously that’s both ways.” If unemployment continued, “then I’d be in favor of unbalancing the budget, not enough to cause a severe economic dislocation but enough to keep a reasonable level of prosperity.” If we went into a recession, “one of the steps to meet the recession obviously is going to be government expenditures as it was in the thirties.”
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