I passed through Rome in February 1962 when Fanfani was about to form a new government, which, contrary to our experts’ prophecies, had the outside support of the Socialists. One afternoon at the house of Tullia Zevi I talked with Nenni, Ugo La Malfa, the brilliant leader of the Republican party, Ignazio Silone, the novelist, and others—a discussion interrupted by several phone calls from Fanfani to Nenni and La Malfa to discuss the ministerial list. Nenni was a charming old man, his style oratorical rather than conversational. I said that Washington was pleased at the prospect of forward movement in Italian social policy but wondered about the implications of the apertura for foreign affairs. Nenni responded at considerable length, stressing his dislike of the Communists, the neutralist traditions of his party, his support of the Common Market and his acceptance of NATO on a de facto basis. As for Berlin, he said that he hoped for a formula which would continue the present arrangement. But the group seemed little interested in foreign matters. It was evident that they were wholly absorbed in the problem, not unfamiliar to us, of getting their nation moving again. In any case, the apertura was on the way. I reported to the President that the Embassy had taken a hands-off attitude—obviously a great improvement over the previous line—but this after saying most of the previous year that the chances of an opening to the left were fading fast, whereas it was evident to most observers that this was not the case. “The result has been that the opening has taken place, not against the United States, but without it.”
The fight continued. In May 1962, the State Department Italianists, apparently unmoved by anything that had happened since the days of John Foster Dulles, declared that the Nenni Socialists were “not anti-Communist” and that their success would strengthen anti-NATO sentiment in Italy. Soon Komer and I enlisted Robert Kennedy, Arthur Goldberg and Walter Reuther in the effort to cajole the Department into abandoning the legacy of the past. It was an odd situation. We had, of course, the presidential decision and the patient backing of McGeorge Bundy. We had the sporadic sympathy of George Ball and William Tyler, when they were not out reorganizing Europe. As for the Secretary of State, he did not have, so far as I could find out, any views on Italian policy beyond a nervous response when President Segni, an old-time opponent of the apertura, told him that American interest in the Socialists would be interpreted as a rejection of our only ‘true’ friends, the Italian conservatives. But in a time when attention at the top was seized by major crises, policy toward Italy inescapably enjoyed low priority; and this gave the officers on the working level a chance to pursue their own preferences, which they did with assiduity.
It was an endless struggle. Meetings would be called, decisions reached, cables sent; then the next meeting would begin with the same old arguments. One felt entrapped as in a Kafka novel. It was worse than carrying Chester Bowles’s double mattress up that winding flight of narrow stairs. A memorandum of mine to Bundy in October 1962, sixteen months after the President had tried to change the policy, began: “As you will recall, the White House has been engaged for about fifty years in an effort to persuade the Department of State that an air of sympathy toward the Nenni Socialists would advance the interests of the United States and of western democracy. . . . During this period, practically all the evidence has supported our view that the Nenni Socialists have split irrevocably from the Communists and are determined to bring their party into the democratic orbit. . . . During this period, however, State at every step along the way has resisted proposals to hasten the integration of the Socialists into the democratic camp.”
Six weeks later—-eighteen months after the Fanfani visit—the State Department offered a new argument against the center-left, this time on the incredible ground that, if the Socialists entered an Italian government, it might encourage the Russians in a miscalculation of the west’s determination!—as if Moscow were going to base its estimate of American will on the composition of the government in Rome. By this time it was evident that, if those in State who wanted to block the apertura had their way, they might well bring into power a right-wing government with fascist support, like the disastrous Tambroni government of 1960, and force the democratic left into a popular front. In January 1963 Komer and I sent the President a melancholy memorandum recalling his Italian directives, describing the present situation and concluding: “Lest you think you run the United States Government, the matter is still under debate.” There is no point in prolonging the agony for the reader; it was bad enough for the participant. It finally came to an end when Averell Harriman became Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the spring of 1963. With his expert knowledge of the Italian situation and his administrative vigor, he turned the bureaucracy around. By the time that Nenni and his party eventually entered the Italian government in December 1963, the Department of State was at last in accord.
Our effort in the meantime had not been entirely wasted. The leaders of the center-left parties had no doubt from mid-1961 on that a change of administration had occurred in Washington; and, if they sometimes found little evidence of it in the Department of State, they knew well enough from their own experience that foreign offices suffered from cultural lags. Kennedy, moreover, appealed greatly to them as both a Catholic and a progressive; the coincidence that he and Pope John came on the world stage about the same time strengthened them both. And the idea of a New Frontier in America was exciting to those who sought new frontiers for their own nation. One leading Nenni Socialist assured me earnestly in the spring of 1962, “So long as we have any influence on the Italian government, you can be sure that there will be no Paris-Bonn-Rome axis against London and Washington.” In February 1963 Anthony Sampson reported to the London Observer from Rome: “Nenni, the old firebrand Socialist, cannot now contain his praise for Kennedy. . . . There is hardly a word of anti-Americanism, except on the far right.”
4. THE EUROPEAN TRIP
The rising confidence in Kennedy among the democratic left was not confined to Italy. Anti-Americanism, so long epidemic in these circles throughout Western Europe, was suddenly suspended. The American President was becoming a hope, if not a hero, for the Labour Party in England, for the Social Democrats in West Germany, for the followers of Mendes-France and Gaston Defferre in France. In London Hugh Gaitskell greatly admired Kennedy (who in turn found him intelligent and delightful and could never understand why Macmillan and Gaitskell, both of whom he liked so much, disliked each other so intensely; I had the sad task of telling the President of Gaitskell’s death in January 1962, and he plainly regretted not only the human loss but the vanished opportunity of their working together in the future). In Berlin, Willy Brandt modeled his political campaigns on Kennedy. In Paris, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in L’Express attacked the idea of eliminating American influence in Europe, accused de Gaulle of adopting the communist slogan “U.S. Go Home” and warned France that the alternative to an Atlantic partnership must be a Russian partnership. Many on the left were not only Kennedyites but McNamaraites: they preferred an American nuclear monopoly and, like the Labour Party, opposed the MLF, not because it promised Europe too little control over nuclear weapons, but because it promised too much; the last thing they wished was for Washington to surrender the veto. Most of these people, outside England, were also sympathetic to the movement for a united Europe. But they were not excited by the technocratic Europe of civil servants, high commissions and supranational bureaucracies. They sought neither the European chauvinism of de Gaulle nor the benign Eurocracy of Monnet but an open and democratic European union, charged with political purpose.
The startling reversal of the democratic left seemed to indicate our real opportunity in European policy—to support the Europe of democracy and freedom against the Europe of paternalistic authoritarianism. To George Ball in February I suggested the usefulness “of shifting at least part of the dialogue from the structure to the content of the New Europe—that is talking less about the modes of supranational affiliation and more about the substance of life within th
e new European society”; we must stand for a Europe des peuples as against a Europe des pères. And to the President in April:
In spite of de Gaulle, the United States appears to be on an ascending curve in Europe today. Certainly the polls suggest this to be the case. . . . The vital fresh source of pro-U.S. feeling in Europe today is the democratic left—and the democratic left is now pro-American in great part because it feels that, with the Kennedy Administration, Washington is once again offering the world progressive rather than standpat leadership. . . . This should not be underestimated just because it is considered bad manners to mention such things in the discussion of foreign affairs. . . . By encouraging progressive tendencies, we can help counter the Gaullist idea of Europe without seeming to challenge de Gaulle directly. This course also—as in Italy—has the effect of isolating and weakening the Communists.
One remembered Fanfani’s remark that democracy was always addressing the leaders: why for once should it not address the masses? The President, his European trip approaching, saw it as an opportunity, with all delicacy, to talk beyond governments to people, especially to the young and idealistic. Early in June he asked me to take a look at the speech drafts prepared by the State Department for the trip. “My general impression,” I reported to him, “is of their predominant banality and vapidity. These speeches could have been given just as easily by President Eisenhower—or by President Nixon. They fail to convey any sense of a fresh American voice or distinctive Kennedy approach.” Obviously the President had to talk about Germany, European unity, our undying commitment to the defense of Europe, the indivisibility of Europe and the United States, Atlantic partnership, low tariffs, and the other respectable issues. But anything he said about them ought to be stated with “due recognition of the fact that Europe considers itself a big boy now—that Europeans are fed to the teeth with what they regard as the American habit of deciding unilaterally what European policy should be and setting out to impose it regardless of what Europe thinks. For example, energetic public advocacy of the MLF would seem to me an error, whatever the merits,” partly because mass audiences couldn’t care less about it, partly because the President should not become personally more identified with the proposal than he was already, “partly because our position should be one of inviting an Atlantic dialogue rather than insisting on American solutions.” And the most important thing was to take advantage of his own issues—to remember that the reason for the rise of pro-American feeling in Europe was not the MLF or our support for British entry into the Common Market but the fact that a young, vigorous, progressive administration had taken over in Washington and was doing things, not for the few, but for the many. Of course “the State Department (as I have noticed so often in Latin American matters) is constitutionally opposed to exploiting abroad the benefits of the change in administration in Washington. . . . This attitude denies us one of the most powerful weapons we have in winning the confidence and the enthusiasm of other peoples.”
The State Department drafts were discarded, and Ted Sorensen applied his brilliant mind and pen to the European tour. On June 23 the President left for Germany, and the triumphal journey began. On June 25 he addressed himself to European issues at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. He multiplied his options, speaking about a “democratic European Community,” a “unified free Europe,” “a united Europe in an Atlantic partnership—an entity of interdependent parts, sharing equally both burdens and decisions.” He emphasized the American commitment to Europe: “The United States will risk its cities to defend yours because we need your freedom to protect ours.” But he also emphasized that “the choice of paths to the unity of Europe is a choice which Europe must make. . . . Nor do I believe that there is any one right course or any single final pattern. It is Europeans who are building Europe.”
Then on to Berlin and the wildest reception of all, three-fifths of the population of West Berlin streaming into the streets, clapping, waving, crying, cheering, as if it were the second coming. Before paying the ordained visit to the city hall and signing the Golden Book, Kennedy made his first inspection of the Wall. No one is ever prepared for the Wall: it shocked and appalled the President, and he was still angry when he came out of the city hall and faced the seething crowd in the Rudolf Wilde Platz, compressed into a single excited, impassioned mass. His words were true but unwontedly harsh:
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world.
Let them come to Berlin!
There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the communists.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
Lass sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin!
The crowd shook itself and rose and roared like an animal. Absorbed in his short remarks, Kennedy hurried on. In a moment he concluded: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” The hysteria spread almost visibly through the square. Kennedy was first exhilarated, then disturbed; he felt, as he remarked on his return, that if he had said, “March to the wall—tear it down,” his listeners would have marched. He always regarded crowds as irrational; perhaps a German one compounded the irrationality. That afternoon at the Free University he talked thoughtfully about human rights and social progress: “The very nature of the modern technological society requires human initiative and the diversity of free minds. So history, itself, runs against the Marxist dogma, not toward it.”
On to Dublin the same night, where he began a blissful interlude of homecoming, at once sentimental and ironic. I imagine that he was never easier, happier, more involved and detached, more complexly himself, than in the next few days. So at Wexford, in the county which his great-grandfather had left on an inexplicable adventure across the Atlantic in the 1840s, when the town presented him with an engraved silver and gold box, John Fitzgerald Kennedy said: “I am proud to haye connected on that beautiful golden box the coat of arms of Wexford, the coat of arms of the kingly and beautiful Kennedys, and the coat of arms of the United States.” He paused, then, “That is a very good combination.” In Cork, after introducing Larry O’Brien and David Powers, beloved friends from so many wars, “And then I would like to introduce to you the pastor at the church which I go to, who comes from Cork—Monsignor O’Mahoney. He is the pastor of a poor, humble flock in Palm Beach, Florida.’’ After receiving honorary degrees from Trinity College, British and secular, and the National University, Irish and Catholic: “I now feel equally part of both, and if they ever have a game of Gaelic football or hurling, I shall cheer for Trinity and pray for National.” Speaking before the Irish Parliament, where, as Frank O’Connor later wrote, “previously Joyce’s name had never been heard except on some debate on evil literature,” he reminded his audience that Joyce had called the Atlantic a bowl of bitter tears. (He also quoted Benjamin Franklin, Lord Mount joy, Charles Stewart Parnell, Yeats, Henry Grattan, John Boyle O’Reilly and Shaw.) Finally at Limerick he recalled the plaintive old song:
Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen,
Come back around to the land of thy birth.
Come with the shamrock in the springtime, Mavourneen. . . .
“This is not the land of my birth,” Kennedy said, “but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection, and I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
Then to Birch Grove in England, where Macmillan said no on the multilateral force and yes on British Guiana; and to Italy for the last lap. One of the President’s purposes in going to Europe that summer was to see the venerable Pope; but John XXIII died on June 3, seven weeks after the publication
of his noble encyclical Pacem in Terris and four weeks before the President arrived in Rome. On June 21 Cardinal Montini, an old friend of the Kennedy family, succeeded as Pope Paul VI; his coronation before 300,000 people in St. Peter’s Square on June 30 apparently exhausted the Roman appetite for galas, because, when Kennedy arrived the next day, he encountered the thinnest crowds of his trip. In the evening Kennedy met the Italian political leaders at a reception at the Quirinale Palace. He had a good talk, he told me later, with Nenni (adding: “So far as I could see, everyone in Italy is for the opening to the left. I was told that they were blaming it all on Fanfani and on us; but I couldn’t find anyone there who was against us”). To Palmiro Togliatti, the astute head of the Communist Party, the President said impenetrably, “It’s nice to be in your country.” To Fanfani, whose government had recently fallen, he said, “We shall meet again at the next Democratic convention.”
Naples, in its vivid excitement, more than made up for Rome. In a farewell speech the President summed up his European impressions. “First,” he said, “it is increasingly clear that our Western European allies are committed to the path of progressive democracy—to social justice and economic reform attained through the free processes of debate and consent. I spoke of this last night in Rome, as I had earlier spoken of it in Germany. And I cite it again here to stress the fact that this is not a matter of domestic politics but a key to western freedom and solidarity.” Later on he spoke of the unification of Western Europe: “the United States welcomes this movement and the greater strength it ensures. We did not assist in the revival of Europe to maintain its dependence on the United States; nor did we seek to bargain selectively with many and separate voices. We welcome a stronger partner . . . The age of self-sufficient nationalism is over. The age of interdependence is here. . . . The Atlantic partnership is a growing reality.”
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