John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  Communist aggression in Korea four months later seemed to Kennedy to vindicate his attack on defense policies. Curiously though (in the light of his China stand), he showed no enthusiasm for Truman’s vigorous stand on Korea. But while all eyes were turned toward the desperate holding operations in Korea, he warned on the floor of the House and in speeches back home against denuding of troops other areas that had more strategic importance. “I think that we are heading for a major disaster in Western Europe,” he told the House in August 1950.

  Late in 1950, as the cold war deepened in Europe and hot war flared and flickered in Korea, Washington came hard up against a pressing question: Should American ground troops be sent to Western Europe to man the defenses against Soviet attack? As a backer of greater military power, Kennedy had little doubt that American divisions must take up their posts in Europe. To him the big question was whether Western Europe would do its part.

  To answer this question, he took a six-week trip to Europe early in 1951. He visited the chief countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe—Britain, France, and Italy—and three other nations—Spain, Yugoslavia, and West Germany—whose policies closely touched the defense of the West. Although Kennedy paid his own way, it was no vacation trip (nor should it have been, since Congress was in session the whole time he was away). He kept notes of his interviews and impressions, sometimes scribbled on the back of hotel bills or envelopes during plane rides. Aside from an interview with Tito and an audience with the Pope, he gained his most useful information from off-the-record talks with second-level officials such as deputy ministers. On returning home, he carefully converted these notes into a long statement of his views.

  Early in 1951, the Senate committees on Foreign Relations and on Armed Services were jointly considering the question that preoccupied Kennedy—the assignment of United States troops to duty in the European area. A closely related issue had been raised by Republican Senator Kenneth Wherry, who had brought in a resolution barring the assignment of troops to Europe without congressional approval. After hearing General Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, the newly appointed Secretary of State, General Marshall, now Secretary of Defense, and a host of generals, admirals, and other famous men, the committee invited Kennedy to testify as an on-the-spot observer.

  Kennedy was not slow to accept. Before a dozen eminent Senators, including the formidable Tom Connally and Richard Russell, he spoke in emphatic terms of the strategic importance of Western Europe, the likely collapse of its defenses without more American troops, and especially of the need to compel the Europeans to intensify their own military efforts. On this last point he urged—in sharp contrast to the administration’s position—the adoption of a ratio system under which the Europeans must supply six divisions for every division sent from America. On the Wherry Resolution itself, Kennedy took no stand, but he urged congressional supervision of the proposed ratio system, arguing that the administration would not favor it and hence would not enforce it. This suggestion ran directly contrary to the advice of administration spokesmen, who saw immense complications in a ratio system, especially in one supervised by Congress.

  If the Congressman seemed to be lining up with the antiadministration forces in Congress, he was not doing so as an isolationist. Under sharp questioning from committee members, he insisted that he wanted to force the Europeans to do more, not to allow America to do less. “It is not a backhanded way of trying to pull out of Western Europe,” he said. Later in the year, Kennedy criticized the White House for not demanding more stringent economic controls for the defense effort, and especially for what he considered Truman’s failure to request the necessary power to head off inflation. He also proposed a rigid embargo on the shipment of materials useful for war to Red China, which he dubbed “trade in blood.”

  By his third term in Congress, in short, Kennedy was staging a personal revolt against crucial parts of the Truman defense policies (though he defended Truman’s position on the MacArthur firing episode). On economic aid to Europe, Kennedy sometimes took a compromising stand. He publicly differed with McCormack on the floor of the House in 1950 when the latter put heavy emphasis on the need for the mutual-aid program. A year later, Kennedy offered an amendment cutting economic aid to Africa and the Near East from $175 million to $140 million, and he voted for an amendment cutting economic aid to Europe by $350 million.

  But he had not lost the capacity to learn. In the fall of 1951, accompanied by his sister Pat and his brother Bob, Kennedy took a trip around the world, with “study stops” in the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Indochina, Malaya, and Korea. Though disturbed by the caliber of some American officials in these areas, Kennedy was impressed with the enormous difficulties and potentialities of this “two-thirds of the world.” The next year he reversed himself and supported Point Four aid to the Middle East. “Many of us feel,” he told the House, “that the United States has concentrated its attention too much on Western Europe.”

  Just after Kennedy had finished testifying in February 1951 before the Senate committee on the issue of sending troops to Europe, courtly old Senator Walter George looked over his spectacles at the witness and said:

  “The question I am going to ask you I want to assure you in advance is an impersonal one, although you might at first blush think it is a personal one. I mean it not as personal.

  “You come from a very distinguished American family that exercises a great influence on American public opinion. I want to ask you very impersonally, whether you remember the able speech of your father in December 1950?” In case he didn’t, the Senator quoted from Joseph P. Kennedy’s address to the University of Virginia Law School Forum two months before, in which he condemned American commitments overseas. He had advised the United States to “get out” of Korea, and he had said, “It is idle to talk of being able to hold the line at the Elbe or the line at the Rhine. Is it not best to get out now? The truth is that our only real hope is to keep Russia, if she chooses to march, on the other side of the Atlantic. It may be that Europe for a decade or a generation or more, will turn communistic.”

  Did the son differ with his father? Senator George asked. Kennedy’s answer was diplomatic. To lose Europe and its productive facilities would threaten American survival. But he knew from his trip the difficulty of building a strong-enough Western European army soon enough, and he could understand his father’s despair: “To him and to a lot of other Americans it looks like an almost hopeless job and that we are committing troops to be lost.” But, adding up all the factors and “considering them as coldbloodedly as I can,” he felt personally that the risk should be taken.

  “That is my position,” he concluded. “I think you should ask my father directly as to his position.”

  A Subject of the Pope?

  Then there was the touchy issue of schools. By the time Kennedy took office in 1947, federal aid to education had become one of the pressing issues before Congress. The problem was immensely complicated by the question of whether federal aid should extend to Catholic and other private schools.

  Kennedy had no illusions about the plight of public education in Massachusetts or in other states. A few months after taking office, he spoke on a radio forum about the educational crisis and came out flatly in favor of federal aid. He avoided for the moment the burning question of federal aid to parochial and private schools. But during the hearings in the spring of 1947 on federal-aid bills before an Education and Labor Committee subcommittee, of which Kennedy was a member, he made no effort to hide his view that federal aid should include funds to parochial schools for such services as school-bus transportation and health examinations.

  It took Elmer E. Rogers, Assistant to the Sovereign Grand Commander, Supreme Thirty-third Degree, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, United States of America, to break through Kennedy’s customary reserve on religious matters. In a long statement to the committee, Rogers declared that the Roman Catholic Church was out
“to destroy our liberties and further expand their theocracy as a world government.” Catholics had a dual allegiance, he said, to their country and to the Vatican.

  Did Mr. Rogers believe, asked Kennedy, that any Catholic parent who did not send his child to a parochial school would be excommunicated?

  Rogers referred to a statement appearing in a Jesuit magazine twenty-four years before.

  “I never went to a parochial school,” Kennedy said. (Canterbury was run by Catholic laymen.) “I am a Catholic and yet my parents were never debarred from the sacrament, so the statement is wrong.”

  “You are pretty prominent people up there in Massachusetts,” Rogers answered. “I know something of the prominence of your father, and the bishops are pretty diplomatic and have good judgment about such things.”

  “But the statement is wrong because you have a living example,” Kennedy said. “I do not want to get in an argument about Catholic theology, but you do not want to make statements that are inaccurate.… Now you don’t mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope? I am not a legal subject of the Pope.”

  Every devout Catholic bore a dual allegiance, Rogers maintained. Under prodding from Kennedy, he cited canon law enunciated by Benedict XV, overriding “all contrary regulations, constitutions” and the like. Kennedy was clearly uninterested.

  “There is an old saying in Boston,” he observed, “that we get our religion from Rome and our politics at home, and that is the way that most Catholics feel about it.…”

  It was one thing to tangle with Freemasons, but what stand would Kennedy take on legislation? So delicate was the issue that the House of Representatives avoided a stand on the question during 1948, although the postwar crop of babies was nearing school age. In 1949, the whole question flared up in what was perhaps the country’s most acrimonious religious quarrel since 1928.

  Late in July 1949, Cardinal Spellman suddenly struck out publicly at Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt for her newspaper columns opposing federal aid to church schools and backing complete separation of church and state. Dubbing her columns “documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother,” the Cardinal ended, “… your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see.…” A public uproar followed, with political leaders and spokesmen for Protestant and Jewish groups springing to Mrs. Roosevelt’s defense.

  In a temperate answer to the Cardinal, Mrs. Roosevelt insisted that “spiritual leadership should be spiritual leadership” and that temporal power should not become too important in any church. “The final judgment, my dear Cardinal Spellman, of the worthiness of all human beings is in the hands of God.” Shortly before, she mentioned her work for Al Smith in 1928 as evidence that religious prejudice did not influence her political decisions. Although the prelate backtracked two weeks later in a moderate statement of his own, the clash hardened further the conflicting attitudes among the public. When Cardinal Spellman stated early in August that the parochial schools wanted funds only for buses, health services, and nonreligious textbooks, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam answered a day later that what the Cardinal really wanted was not milk and medicine, books and buses, but “the support of parochial schools by taxes levied on all the people.” In such a stormy atmosphere no education bill had much chance.

  During the controversy following Cardinal Spellman’s letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, Kennedy introduced in the House a general federal-aid bill authorizing funds for buses, health services, and textbooks for private and parochial schools, but this proposal was turned down in the Education and Labor Committee, whose chairman, Graham Barden of North Carolina, a strong opponent of aid for parochial schools, had been tongue-lashed by Cardinal Spellman in even harsher terms than the Cardinal had used for Mrs. Roosevelt.

  A year later, 1950, Kennedy proposed a new, somewhat milder, amendment. Concerned solely with the issue of school-bus transportation, it provided that in states where state and local funds could be legally spent for such purposes, such states would be permitted to use part of the federal money to augment their own expenditures for school-bus rides for pupils in all kinds of schools. It also provided that in those states where such use of public funds was prohibited, the federal government would pay directly to the school up to half the cost of pupils’ transportation.

  The atmosphere was still too tempestuous for agreement. Catholic spokesmen were insisting on funds at least for buses, while some Protestant and Jewish groups refused to settle for anything less than an outright ban, on the grounds that to yield on the bus issue would mean opening the door to more and more appeals for aid to parochial schools. The New York Times editorially supported Kennedy’s essential position, but at a New York meeting of the Committee on Federal Aid to Public Education, Representative Barden called Cardinal Spellman “a cruel authoritarian,” and Mrs. Roosevelt stated that she was “certainly opposed” to Kennedy’s amendment. In Washington the next day, Kennedy’s amendment was defeated in the committee by a strong margin.

  The 1950 federal-aid bill died in committee at the hands of members, including Kennedy, who felt it did not go far enough to help parochial school children, members who felt it went too far, and conservatives who opposed any bill and were delighted to see proponents of federal aid split apart by the parochial-school issue.

  “A white Knight,” Kennedy was dubbed by the Pilot, Boston archdiocesan newspaper, after his fight for bus aid. “This gentleman of youthful appearance but extremely mature intelligence fought valiantly in the interests of large groups of citizens who are merely asking for their just share.…”

  If there was a “Catholic” side to Kennedy, there was also a conservative side. His conservatism, reflected in votes for government economy, fiscal orthodoxy, congressional restrictions on presidential power, and governmental reorganization, showed itself sporadically during his first three years in the House and seemed to increase toward the end.

  In one of Kennedy’s first votes on an appropriation bill in the House, he favored cutting in half an item in President Truman’s budget of $295 million for the Interior Department. In 1949, he opposed a big veterans’ pension bill, and a year later he joined Republican budget-slasher John Taber in the economy bloc’s effort to reduce total appropriations by $600 million. “How long can we continue deficit financing on such a large scale with a national debt of over $258 billions?” Kennedy demanded of the House. During his last three years in the lower chamber, he voted often to cut Agriculture and Interior Department appropriations. He voted against a Public Library Services Demonstration bill, which authorized federal aid to states for promoting library services, and in 1952 he voted for a cut of $14 million in funds for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

  He took one of the strongest positions in the House for a balanced budget during the Korean war, coming out even for higher excise taxes and increased taxes on personal and corporate income. He generally supported the recommendations for government reorganization of the Hoover Commission, of which his father was a member. He was “agin inflation” and had some ideas of what to do about it. He consistently opposed the dismantling of wage and price controls following World War II and backed Truman’s request for control legislation after the Korean war broke out. Reflecting opinion in his district, Kennedy was particularly sensitive to increases in food prices and rents.

  As for the balance of legislative and executive power, Kennedy’s support of congressional supervision of sending troops to Europe was a policy that many authorities would consider an infringement on the President’s constitutional power. But perhaps his most surprising vote, at least from the vantage point of later years, was that in favor of the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the President to two terms. “When I voted for this amendment,” Kennedy says today, “I had very much on my mind a talk I had had in February 1945 with Dr. Lahey of the Lahey Clinic, who had been one of a three-man committee to look over the President before the 1944 campaign. He felt that the President should not have run again and the doctors should ha
ve told him not to. Two months later Roosevelt was dead.” A two-term limit, however, is scanty protection against presidential illness, as the Eisenhower case later showed; doubtless Kennedy had other motives for this vote, too. The Twenty-second Amendment was something of an anti-Roosevelt gesture, and there was strong feeling among Kennedy’s constituents that Roosevelt had been ill and incompetent at Yalta. More important, Kennedy shared the conservatives’ belief in maintaining the traditional balance between congressional and presidential power, and he was, in effect, voting into the Constitution the anti-third-term tradition that had lasted as an unwritten law for a century and a half until Roosevelt ended it in 1940.

  Kennedy as a Congressman

  It was clear—at least to those few who were following Kennedy’s career at the time—that this man could not be neatly defined and put into a pigeonhole marked “Fair Dealer,” “Conservative,” “Isolationist,” or with some other handy tag. What was he, then? Could his mixed voting record be explained by any single set of motives?