JFK
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In his cottage he also pecked out a draft article, “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace,” which focused on rearmament and the prospects for postwar stability. Whereas previously Jack had championed military preparedness to counter the threat of German and Japanese aggression, he now warned that a postwar arms race could threaten great-power peace and undermine American democracy. (“Democracy sleeps fitfully in an armed camp.”) Instead, U.S. leaders should pursue the kind of “intelligent and imaginative statesmanship” required to prevent a renewed arms scramble after the Axis powers were defeated, lest a rival power—here he anticipated it would be the Soviet Union—should try to match America’s might, and lest weaker nations “bind together for security against us.” Reader’s Digest took a pass on the article, as did The Atlantic Monthly, its editor lamenting that Jack had tried to cover too much ground in too little space, “with the result that your argument does not clinch the reader as it ought.” It was a fair critique; the draft lacked spark, and Jack did not offer a particularly novel argument in the context of early 1945, when innumerable other observers were likewise preaching the importance of disarmament, arms limitation, and vigorous diplomatic engagement. Still, the piece provides insight into its author’s evolving views on the efficacy of military power, and on his concern—well founded, it would turn out—that postwar strife among world powers could put serious strains on American democratic institutions.65
Most notable of all was this farsighted passage: “Science will always overtake caution with new terrors against which defense cannot be anticipated. It is not an exaggeration to expect that missiles will be developed to a point where theoretically any spot on the globe can send to any community in the world, with pinpoint accuracy, a silent but frightful message of death and destruction.”66
Foreign affairs remained, as always, Jack’s principal policy interest, but he sought in Arizona to round himself out by learning a bit more about domestic issues. He befriended a wealthy Chicagoan named Pat Lannan who was likewise in the desert to gain back his health. Lannan impressed on Jack his belief that organized labor would be extremely influential in American politics going forward, and he urged him to learn all he could about the subject. Jack promptly got his father to ship a crate of books on labor unions and labor law, and he dove into them as soon as they arrived. Lannan recalled that Jack, with whom he shared a cottage, “sat up until one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate.”67 The episode spoke to Jack’s curiosity and drive, and was a further clue that he saw elected office in his future.
Lannan, however, didn’t necessarily see presidential material in his new friend. “Certainly when I met Jack in 1945,” he later said, “never in my wildest imagination was there an idea that he would become a future president of the United States!” Rather, Jack struck him as a “thoroughly amusing guy,” but normal and pragmatic, not on the fast track to high office. What did come through, however, was Jack’s devil-may-care bravado, back problems notwithstanding, especially when the two went riding in the hills. “It was a wonderful place to ride horses, and we did that every day. He was a wild rider. He would charge his horse down a mountainside. He loved speed. He was a very daring fellow, but not that good a horseman. He was always taking chances. He always wanted a race—he was very competitive, but in a nice way.”68
As the two young men whiled away their days in the Arizona sunshine, they could sense that big changes were in the offing. War, it seemed, would soon give way to postwar, and to uncertainty over what that would mean for America, for the world, and for their own futures.
* To put these numbers in some perspective, consider that when the Germans launched their blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in May 1940, they utilized 3,034 aircraft, 2,580 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 4,000 trucks.
FOURTEEN
“POLITICAL TO HIS FINGERTIPS”
In April 1945 Jack Kennedy was still in the West recuperating when shocking news arrived from across the country: President Franklin D. Roosevelt had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, and died. He was ten weeks beyond his sixty-third birthday.
For several years Roosevelt had suffered from hypertension, but it had been mostly ignored—his blood pressure, measured at 188/105 on February 27, 1941, was seldom checked again until 1944. That spring, the president was diagnosed with acute bronchitis, hypertension, breathlessness, cardiac failure of the left ventricle, and long-term heart disease, all showing themselves in a gray pallor and listlessness. His appearance worried friends and associates, including his running mate in the presidential election that November, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. (FDR, determined to see the war through to the end, had decided much more quickly than in 1940 that he would seek another term.) Voters were mostly unaware of his condition, however, and gave him a fourth election win, albeit with a smaller popular-vote margin than in the past.1
By then, victory in both theaters looked increasingly likely. Though the D-Day invasion, in June 1944, could have ended in catastrophe—Nazi forces put up fierce resistance—the Normandy beachhead became the center of a huge buildup; by late July close to a million and a half troops had been transported across the English Channel and were beginning to break out of the coastal perimeter. By the end of August the Allies had liberated France and Belgium. (On the twenty-fifth, Free French leader Charles de Gaulle made his triumphal march down the Champs-Élysées.) In September, they reached the Rhine as the Wehrmacht conducted a fighting retreat. Canadian forces cleared the Scheldt estuary, and General George Patton’s U.S. Third Army captured Strasbourg and Metz.
It had the makings of a rout, until Hitler launched a ferocious counterattack in December in the Ardennes, scene of the Panzers’ triumph in 1940. After weeks of heavy fighting in what came to be called the Battle of the Bulge—because it created a bulge sixty miles deep and forty miles wide in Allied lines—U.S. forces gained control in late January 1945, but not before incurring 100,000 casualties, including nineteen thousand killed. By that point, strategic bombing had drastically debilitated Germany’s war-production capacity and devastated its economy. Meanwhile, battle-hardened Soviet troops marched through snow-covered Poland and East Prussia and cut a path to Berlin. (They entered the death camp at Auschwitz, in southern Poland, on January 27, liberating more than seven thousand surviving prisoners, most of them ill and dying.) In the south, the Red Army took Budapest and pressed up the Danube valley toward Vienna, and American forces crossed the Rhine and took the heavily industrial Ruhr valley. In the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz’s amphibious campaign, in which Jack Kennedy had played a part, was readying for assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, stepping-stones to the Japanese home islands, while in the Philippines, MacArthur’s units were bearing down on Manila.2
As the vise closed on Nazi Germany, with the Western Allies coming in from the west and the Red Army standing on the Oder River, within walking distance of Berlin, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill convened again to discuss the peace, this time at Yalta, the Black Sea resort town on the Crimean peninsula, in early February. In ten days of back-and-forth bargaining, the leaders agreed that Germany would pay reparations but not the full cost of the struggle, and that some eastern German territory would be transferred to Poland (in compensation for the Soviets’ taking a comparable amount of eastern Poland), with the remainder of Germany divided into four occupation zones—one each to be administered by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. Berlin, within the Soviet zone, would itself be divided among the four victors. Roosevelt, weak and ailing, lobbied hard for the establishment of the United Nations and prevailed, though with the proviso that the major powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China—would be permanent members of a Security Council and would have veto power over any resolution of the body. Stalin, for his part, appeared to get his way on Eastern Europe, insis
ting that the Soviet Union must have nonhostile governments on its western borders, lest the region again be a launching pad for an invasion of the USSR. Roosevelt and Churchill were hardly in a position to argue. In exchange for an American vow to back Soviet claims on territory given up to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, and to grant Moscow concessions in northeast China, Stalin agreed to sign a treaty of friendship with Chiang Kai-shek, America’s ally in China, rather than with the Communist Mao Zedong, and to declare war on Japan within three months of Hitler’s defeat.3
For the remainder of the century and beyond, critics on the right would refer to Yalta as a sellout, an abandonment of Eastern Europe’s people by a dying U.S. leader who ended his presidency preferring cosmetic cooperation and easy deals to conflict with a Kremlin antagonist clearly bent on aggression and expansion.4 (In the early years after the war, Jack Kennedy himself would occasionally level this charge.) A simpler and better explanation for Roosevelt’s behavior holds that the military realities at the time of Yalta gave him few cards to play. Soviet troops occupied Eastern European nations they had liberated, including Poland, where Moscow had installed a pro-Soviet regime despite a British-supported Polish government-in-exile in London. With the Soviet Union having suffered twenty to twenty-five million killed in the war, and with Red Army troops already in place, FDR and Churchill had limited negotiating power over Eastern Europe.5
II
After the three leaders left the Crimea, the onslaught continued as the Allies enveloped the Ruhr and captured more than 300,000 German prisoners, then seized Mannheim and Frankfurt. The end was near. In early April, Paris once again became the City of Light as the blackout was lifted. Vast sections of major German cities—Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Essen, Nuremberg, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt—had been reduced to rubble. On April 11, the U.S. Ninth Army reached the Elbe and was a mere fifty-seven miles from Berlin.
The following day, FDR died. His performance as president and commander in chief had its critics, then and later, but of his immense and lasting influence there can be no doubt. His New Deal fundamentally changed major facets of American life: labor relations, welfare, economic security, conservation, banking, infrastructure, and agriculture, to name but a few. Under Roosevelt, the federal government entered irreversibly into the economic life of the nation—even “small government” conservatives of later decades, while inveighing rhetorically against the welfare state, had no choice but to accept its parameters. In foreign policy, too, Roosevelt claimed enhanced presidential authority, especially after Congress passed Lend-Lease, in early 1941. Here he oscillated between an idealism verging on utopianism and a hardheaded pragmatism, between espousing a capacious global vision and contenting himself with narrow, piecemeal, short-term aims, taking care always to preserve his power in a world of shifting allegiances and constant intrigue. (Here indeed lay part of his strength: it was never easy to know which Roosevelt one was dealing with.) “The Juggler,” historian Warren Kimball called him, and the name fits. And certainly, Roosevelt’s role in the Allied war effort was colossal—more than anyone, he was the architect of the core strategic decisions that had, by the time of his death, brought victory within sight. To the American men and women engaged in the vast struggle, he was a brilliant commander in chief, superbly adept at articulating the ideals of freedom for which they and their nation were fighting.6
Small wonder that historian William E. Leuchtenburg titled his synthesis of the later twentieth-century presidencies, including John F. Kennedy’s, In the Shadow of FDR.7
FDR’s singular service to humankind, said Isaiah Berlin, who had served in the British embassies in Washington and Moscow during the war, was in showing that “it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that the promotion of liberty and social justice need not mean the demise of effective government; and that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with an “indispensable minimum” of organization and authority.8
Skeptics would note that Roosevelt could be temperamental and spiteful, and that he did not always exhibit grace under pressure. They would say he made contradictory promises, cynically and unabashedly, to groups and individuals and foreign governments. They would point to the black marks on his record—the forced internment during the war of 100,000 Japanese Americans, notably, and the inaction in the face of the Holocaust. (To critics he should have done more to disrupt the death camps; they were unmoved by his claim that the best way to rescue European Jewry was to win the war as fast as possible.9) To this one could add his undue caution, right up to the Pearl Harbor attack, in confronting isolationist strength in Congress.
Yet it remains that as the news of his death hit, that spring day in 1945, many Americans were left bereft, uncomprehending. It seemed impossible. Those in their teens and twenties had never really known another president—Jack Kennedy was fifteen when FDR first took the oath of office, sister Eunice was eleven, and brother Bobby was seven—and even older Americans, including many who opposed him, found it hard to imagine life without the thirty-second president. He had led the country through the depth of the Depression and the challenges of a two-front war. Even in the darkest days of 1942, when it seemed the Axis steamroller might be unstoppable, he had maintained his firm belief that victory would come in the end—made possible by America’s industrial and manpower might. Anne O’Hare McCormick, writing in The New York Times soon after his passing, said Roosevelt had “occupied a role so fused with his own personality after twelve years that people in other countries spoke of him simply as ‘The President,’ as if he were President of the World. He did not stoop and he did not climb. He was one of those completely poised persons who felt no need to play up or play down anybody. In his death this is the element of his greatness that comes out most clearly.” For GOP senator Robert A. Taft, the message was simple: “He dies a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people.”10
And there was something else, something of particular interest to our story: Roosevelt’s extraordinary capacity to connect with voters, partly through his dauntless optimism and charismatic appeal and partly because of his expert exploitation of the newest technological innovation of the era, radio. His mastery of the medium proved a remarkable political asset. In particular, radio allowed him to make emotional connections with the electorate in a way previous U.S. politicians—remote figures, for the most part, visible only in grainy photographs on the front page of newspapers—had not. In this way Roosevelt was the first media president, the originator of what came to be called media politics, which a quarter century later, under John F. Kennedy, would produce a television presidency.11
Not all Americans grieved the great man’s passing. Joseph P. Kennedy, though he offered a tribute in the press, told daughter Kick that Roosevelt’s death was “a great thing for the country.” Still smarting over being bypassed for a cabinet position after resigning from the ambassadorship, Kennedy also in effect blamed FDR for causing Joe Junior’s death. By pushing Britain toward war, and in particular by pushing Neville Chamberlain to guarantee Polish sovereignty in the spring of 1939, Kennedy told former president Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt had steered Britain and ultimately the United States into an unnecessary conflagration. It was a dubious interpretation of events, especially coming from an up-close observer, but the Ambassador was adamant. According to Hoover’s notes, “Kennedy said that if it had not been for Roosevelt the British would not have made this, the most gigantic blunder in history.” Hitler, left to his own devices, would have turned his attention to the east, and Western Europe would have been spared. Roosevelt’s subsequent embrace, at Casablanca in 1943, of the doctrine of “unconditional surrender” was another foolhardy move, in Kennedy’s judgment: it foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace that might have shortened the war.12
Nor, in the Ambassador’s myopic vie
w, had Roosevelt laid the basis for a sound postwar order. Where others saw the emergence of a new, U.S.-led framework for world politics, Kennedy saw just waste and anarchy. “It’s a horrible thing to contemplate,” he wrote to Kick, “with the death of all these boys and with the world economically and socially in chaos, that we haven’t anything to look forward to in the line of peace for the world as the pay-off for everyone’s sacrifices.”13
Absent was any acknowledgment of what the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps that spring had shown: the profound malevolence of a system of systematic terror, torture, and killing, one with a genocidal component at its core. The appalling film footage from Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald shocked even the most hardened of observers, as much for the neglect it showed as for the cruelty, with huge numbers of unburied dead who were the victims of starvation and unchecked disease. Suddenly, it seemed Winston Churchill had spoken the most basic of truths when he had told his compatriots, in the gloomy days of June 1940, “If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”14 This dimension of the war as a moral struggle that saved liberal civilization never fully registered with Joe Kennedy.