The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Nehru repeated what was the central theme of many of the leaders and observers whom Jack was meeting: “Asia is at present the scene of great nationalist waves directed against the colonial policies of the West and seeking better economic conditions.” Jack was not blind to the upraised faces of Asia, but there was another issue that took precedence. Jack explained to Nehru that his government ended up supporting colonial regimes “because of our obligation to Europe and its defense and because of our concern for Communists in Ho [Chi Minh] terms…. We found it extremely difficult situation.” Nehru parried by saying that “arrangements could have been worked out with Ho,” the Vietnamese Communist leader fighting a guerrilla war against the French in Indochina. “The poor French, they know that regardless of what happens now … they are going to eventually lose their positions so that they are really fighting for nothing.”

  Jack scratched all sorts of ominous predictions and reflections into his notebook those days in India. It was all enough to jar one’s faith in rational economic and social progress. His own nation had hardly entered the Asian arena, and he was already being told that “when [Indian] independence was granted U.S. most popular country now unpopular.” The United States had given generously to India, but if America gave a loaf of bread and Russia or China only a dried crust, it was the crust that was celebrated. He was told that “USA had given so much to other countries that what it gives is no longer appropriate.”

  Jack saw how the rituals of faith and custom held the populous nation back from what he called progress. Here in India lived the true Brahmins, not the ersatz Boston variety, the highest rung of a rigid caste system that stood against everything Jack believed about the lives of free men in free societies. In America, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews had their quarrels, but it was nothing like the feeling between the Hindus and Muslims that had ended in bloody war and partition. One day, Jack talked to the man fixing his air conditioner, who “would not eat at home with member of different castes. I asked him why he does not like Muslims. ‘Because they eat cow meat and cows Mother of Hindus.’ “

  As seriously as Jack studied the life and politics of India, it was lush, fertile Indochina that stood at the epicenter of Asian cold war politics and his interests. Indochina was the diadem in the crown of the French colonial empire. As Jack flew into Saigon, the heavy stench of war hung over the lush paddies in the North. There the dedicated, determined forces of Ho Chi Minh were fighting the legions of France in a merciless struggle. Jack noted in his diary that an attaché told him that while 184 members of Congress had visited Rome in the past two years, he was the first one to make it to Saigon. That neglect was a tragic dereliction, for American money was helping to finance the French effort. He was told that the United States had already spent over half a billion dollars. Where the dollar ventured, the flag might soon follow.

  Jack was savvy enough to know that he had to reach below the elites of diplomacy and politics to get some semblance of truth. As he arrived at Saigon Airport, he was important enough to merit a greeting by top French officials and American diplomats. He quickly brushed by them and walked across the tarmac to a group of American journalists standing there and started chatting with them.

  “I would like to have a talk with you,” he said to Seymour Topping, the AP’s man in Saigon.

  “All right,” the young journalist told him. “I’ll come to see you.”

  “No,” Jack said, “I’ll come to see you.”

  That afternoon Jack showed up at Topping’s apartment in the center of the city. He spent hours talking with the reporter, who, as Jack noted in his diary, told him bluntly: “Two years ago Americans were popular, now people feel that they are already allied with French, should have maintained that French promise independence before we bought French. Now U.S. is more disliked than the Russians in South East Asia.” Here again was that persistent theme of American unpopularity. Jack listened well, and as he left he told Topping: “I’m going to talk about this when I get home. But it will give me trouble with some of my constituents.”

  Jack also went to see Edmund Guillion, a State Department official deeply critical of the French. Guillion was an idealistic, liberal internationalist whose thinking resonated with Jack’s own ideas. “One great reason why countries are far more successful than ourselves in spreading propaganda is that they have militant organizations within countries which we do not,” Jack wrote in his diary, an idea that probably came from Guillion.

  That logic led to an aggressive American internationalism in which Guillion argued that “we should throw our weight between French and Vietnam in order to encourage support for war.” Another observer told Jack, “Asians feel that the West has always meant imperialism under the strongest power and in the present case it is U.S. U.S. must try to achieve our aims but not expect to be well liked doing so.”

  Time and again Jack was told that the French were defending a colonial regime. (“Last year best year in business in history. Made almost as much as war cost them economically.”) Time and again he was reminded of the determination of Ho’s forces, and of the corruption of the French regime. Time and again too he heard the melancholy logic of the domino theory: if the French lost northern Vietnam, the “country probably would be lost—Burma would go—Malaya would be in a bad way and our entire position in South East Asia would collapse.”

  Jack and Bobby flew over the battlefields in the North where the French Foreign Legion was battling against the forces of Ho Chi Minh. In the besieged city of Hanoi, a visit from an American congressman merited a parade. Along the road the children of the city stood waving flags.

  Jack admired General de Lattre de Tassigny, the haughty French general, for he admired courage and de Lattre was not lacking in that quality. Jack and Bobby had been brought up to believe that each man stood on a road with a direction sign pointing to courage in one direction and cowardice in another. The road that the two brothers were traveling in Vietnam, however, was not so clearly marked. The signposts were obscure, written at times in strange languages. Moreover, courage was a dangerous virtue when it was not tethered to the mind and the spirit.

  De Lattre was a brave man, but he was fighting what appeared to be a doomed conflict, and any admiration of the general had to be tempered by that reality. The French tragedy, as Jack could not help but see, could easily become an American tragedy. One minister shared with Jack his observation “that French realize that now [there’s] no hope of retaining old hold on country, now [they are] only fighting to prevent Tunisia and Morocco from feeling they can break away … so there is danger that French may drop it into our laps.”

  Bobby did not so readily understand that compromise and cowardice were not synonyms. Bobby sought to emulate his brother, but often when Jack painted in subtle strokes, Bobby splattered the canvas with a few bold strokes. Jack’s diary reads like a foreign correspondent’s notebook, listening and learning before he makes his own judgments. Bobby’s diary is full of quick judgments and caustic asides.

  In Japan toward the end of the trip, Jack fell critically ill, his temperature rising to a dramatic 106 degrees. Bobby arranged to fly his brother to a military hospital on Okinawa. “And everybody there just expected that he’d die,” Bobby recalled. Bobby was there for his brother’s deathwatch, and he knew that death was not some distant unmet stranger but a companion his brother might meet at any turn. No one could know how sick Jack had been.

  When Jack returned to the United States, he spent time secreted in Virginia. His office staff was used to Jack’s mysterious periodical disappearances and knew that his absence meant that once again he was sick. “He’d be in the hospital quite a bit, and he didn’t want the reporters to know he was up here, because they’d put it in the paper,” recalled Grace Burke, his Boston secretary.

  When Jack recuperated, he gave a nationwide address on the Mutual Broadcasting Network. Most politicians learn not to stray too far beyond the safe confines of sloganeering and cliché, especi
ally if they are contemplating running for the Senate in a nearly impossible race. Jack, however, had a refinement of mind and perception that he did not discard simply because he wanted to be elected.

  “Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact on our daily lives overshadows everything else,” he told an audience that presumably included a number of insular, skeptical Americans who wanted nothing of the duplicitous world beyond the borders. “Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social service—all hinge on the basic issues of peace or war. And it is a democratic America and not a bureaucratic government that must shape America’s destiny. Just as Clemenceau once said, ‘War is much too important to be left to the generals,’ I would remark that ‘Foreign policy is too important to leave it to the experts and the diplomats.’”

  Here again resounded his greatest political insight: that foreign policy was profoundly limited in a democracy. Before World War II, he had seen how British politicians pandered to their constituents’ fears, tragically slowing the nation’s rearmament. Now in America, he saw the political establishment pandering to the American public’s fear of communism, proudly propounding cliches and simplicities instead of elucidating complex truths.

  In Washington, policymakers envisioned a blood-red tide of communism rising across South Asia. Jack pointed out that communism was a different thing in different countries. In Indochina, what Americans called communism was equally a nationalistic movement. In Malaysia the Communist guerrillas were mainly Chinese, considered alien by the ethnic Malays. The Indonesians, for their part, thought of the struggle in Korea not as one against communism but one of whites against Asians.

  His was not always a welcome message to Americans taught that this was their century and their world. America was a land of quick fixes and problem solvers. Jack, however, saw a world of intractable problems whose best solution was often the lesser of two bad options. Massive poverty was the soil in which communism grew. Yet America had neither the resources nor the ability to turn millions of people away from whatever course they might choose.

  “Our resources are not limitless,” he warned one audience in a statement that his father could have made. “The vision of a bottle of milk for every Hottentot is a nice one, but it is not only beyond our grasp, it is far beyond our reach.”

  Not that Jack wanted the United States to turn away from the world. In a perception that a few years later would be echoed in the popular press, Jack saw America’s diplomats not as ambassadors of diversity, but as a narrow, inbred social set “unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretation to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.” As it was now, these gentlemen were primarily emissaries from one elite to another.

  Jack had a profound gift of political empathy. From the Suez Canal to Tokyo, he ticked off one complex situation after another. In Indochina, Jack’s comments were prophetic. When he talked to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, he did not pander to these businessmen but forcefully told them his rude truths:

  It is France trying desperately to hang on to a rich portion of its former empire against a communist-dominated nationalistic uprising. The so-called loyal native government is such only in name. It is a puppet government, manned frequently by puppeteers once subservient to the Japanese, now subservient to the French. A free election there, in the opinion of all the neutral observers I talked with, would go in favor of Ho and his Communists as against the French. But Indo-China is a rich country. What France takes out of it today pays most of the costs of that bigger war…. We have now allied ourselves with the French in this struggle, allied ourselves against the Communists but also against the rising tide of nationalism. We have become the West, the proponents of empire—carriers of what we had traditionally disdained—the white man’s burden.

  Jack spoke as a new kind of aggressive internationalist, offering not weapons and trade but ideas and aid. He favored a foreign policy not so allied with the imperial empires of Britain, France, and Holland. He envisioned Foreign Service officers whose lives ranged far beyond the diplomatic compounds and who spoke with a new voice of America in the languages of the peoples themselves, offering foreign aid larger in scope and directed toward the masses.

  To another group in Massachusetts in December 1951, Jack talked of a new world in which “young college graduates would find a full life in bringing technical advice and assistance to the underprivileged and backward Middle East.” “In that calling,” he went on, “these men would follow the constructive work done by the religious missionaries in these countries over the past 100 years.” This was one of the earliest suggestions by a politician of the idea that became the Peace Corps. In his own mind, Jack was taking the rituals of true manhood that he had learned from his father and turning them away from the battlefield as the ultimate testing ground to a different field of challenge.

  Jack’s internationalism may have borne the seed for a Peace Corps that would send thousands of young Americans to many of these same countries that he had visited and for foreign aid programs that were supposed to help the poor, not maintain the rich. His aggressive internationalism, however, carried another seed as well, one no larger than the first but of a far darker hue.

  When Jack decided that it was time to announce his bid for higher office in Massachusetts, he called Mark Dalton and asked his 1946 campaign manager to return to run the new campaign. Since Jack had entered Congress, Dalton had been, in Dave Powers’s words, “the closest political adviser … a brilliant man.” Time and again in those years, Dalton had traveled down to Washington on the train, helping out with speeches and ideas, never asking a cent in expenses or even thinking of using his entree to advance himself economically or socially. He didn’t hang out with Jack, and he didn’t care to. If Dalton had an obvious fault, it was that he had something of the vanity of the idealist, believing at times that his words had more moment than they did. Surely Jack valued his counsel and drew on it often, but he never made a decision without asking a myriad of people. That was not a mark of Jack’s insecurity, but his technique of decision making.

  As campaign manager, Dalton had access to Joe’s money in almost limitless quantities. There wouldn’t simply be paltry campaign circulars but tens of thousands of comic books celebrating Jack’s war efforts and reprints of John Hersey’s famous PT-109 article. There would be no smattering of billboard ads but Jack’s face and message blanketing the state, as well as on subway trains and stations of the MTA.

  In one of the crucial campaign moves, Joe signed on Batton, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, the third largest advertising agency in America. BBD&O had such a strong Republican identification that the firm was handling the 1952 presidential campaign of General Dwight Eisenhower. Joe had signed on BBD&O in good part because of their expertise in the dramatic new medium of television. Governor Thomas E. Dewey had won reelection in New York in 1950 with the prophetic use of television advertising.

  John Crosby, the TV critic, had written in the New York Herald Tribune that “no one will ever know how much TV helped Thomas E. Dewey win reelection as governor of New York State. But no one can dispute that Dewey is the first political candidate to understand how to use TV properly.”

  BBD&O told Joe that if Dewey had been the first, Jack would be the second. There would be no static, poised campaign speeches on television but programs “marked by informality and action.” Television audiences get bored easily. Best to keep it short, no more than fifteen minutes. The BBD&O executives decided not to advertise these political programs or even to list them as such in the schedules in the newspapers. They wanted viewers to come upon Jack unannounced. Viewers might even mistake what they saw as a legitimate news program, or at least not realize that the questions seemingly asked so spontaneously by the “man in the street” were as staged as Jack’s answers.

  Dalton would have been appalled if t
he Kennedys had proposed handing out ten-dollar bills at the polls, but he had no complaints about the higher duplicities of the emerging media age. Dalton had a wife and family now, and a legal practice to support them. Running a campaign was more than a full-time job, and for the first time in his dealings with Jack, he became a paid employee. Dalton was under the considerable illusion that being paid changed nothing, but he was now expected to couch his words in an inferior’s deferential phrasing.

  At a meeting with a group of Democratic politicians at the swank Fall River Social Club, Dalton made what he thought was a good solid point when he realized that Jack was glaring at him, apparently angry that he was being upstaged. As they hurried out of the club, a group of men at the bar spotted Jack. “Oh, there’s Kennedy!” one of them shouted. The men jumped off their bar stools and went to embrace the candidate they thought of as a hero.

  Dalton fancied himself the campaign manager, not a bodyguard or a coat-handling lackey, and he left Jack to extricate himself alone from his cloying followers. When Jack finally got back to the car, he turned toward Dalton, sticking his finger at him. “Don’t you ever let that happen to me again! Do you hear me?”

  Dalton was already sick of being pushed around by Jack’s father, second-guessed on everything he did, receiving never a thank-you, never a note of grace, nothing but push, push, push. And now Jack was treating his campaign manager as if he owned him.

  “Ball game over!” Dalton recalled. “Ball game over! The shock of recognition was complete. I knew what I was dealing with, and I was dealing with a really bad man, an absolute ingrate. And also I was insulted because he thought I was a patsy. If I had misestimated him, then he—with all the adulation and sycophants around him—had misestimated me. I was stunned. I had almost an emotional physical reaction.”