JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Joe Kennedy’s position was in fact a reasoned one, and he held it consistently. He viewed Communism in the forties as he had viewed Nazism in the thirties—as a wrongheaded system but not one that fundamentally threatened U.S. security. Such were America’s geographic and demographic advantages that it did not need to project its power globally in some kind of crusade for democratic capitalism. No urgency required it, and moreover any such crusade risked bankrupting the Treasury and spawning endless charges of imperialistic meddling. “Russia does not want a major war now or in the near future,” he wrote as early as March 1946, expressing a view that more than a few historians of the period would come to share. Stalin was a realist, flexible and cautious, and he would always subordinate Soviet Communist ambitions to Russian national ambitions, which were regional rather than global. Kennedy’s more thoughtful critics, among them his son, conceded him these points, even if they disagreed with them. Where they objected sharply was to his claim that the United States had no meaningful stake in preserving a balance of power in Europe or, later, East Asia. For them, Jefferson’s declaration from 1814 still held: “It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy”; it would be preferable to wage war than to “see the whole force of Europe wielded by a single hand.”38

  IV

  When the “great debate” about foreign policy spilled into Congress in January 1951, Jack was happy to skip town for an extended European tour, again with Torby Macdonald along for the ride. Such was the luxury of being wealthy and occupying a safe House seat: one could zoom off for weeks without worry about the monetary or political costs involved. Always keen to spend time in the Old World, Jack also saw in the trip (which consumed a month and took him and Torby to England, France, West Germany, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Spain) an opportunity to bolster his foreign policy credentials in advance of a potential Senate run the following year. With luck, he could avoid embarrassing questions from journalists about the growing chasm between his father’s worldview and his own.

  He kept a diary on the trip, which ran to 158 pages and which has been preserved for posterity. To read it today is to see, in addition to the characteristic sloppy handwriting and questionable spelling, that its author had a keen journalistic eye, and moreover that he carried on much like a diplomatic correspondent: that is, he liked to spend his days meeting with governmental leaders, U.S. and foreign diplomats, and journalists, and cared far less for communing with ordinary men and women. If he paid much attention to his physical surroundings, he didn’t think it important to make note of it, but he had considerable powers of observation when he decided to use them:

  Yugoslavia—Belgrade—Stones cold and damp—no heating—windows bleach clothes of poor quality—the streets full of crowds—partly due to the fact that there are such few stores. The crowds seem young and energetic many soldiers among them. Tito guards with…machine guns over their shoulders—all with red stars on their vests. Though they look strong, they are not healthy—the disease rate particularly tuberculosis is the highest rate of any country in Europe.

  While in Belgrade, Jack had an hourlong session with Marshal Josip Broz Tito at the Yugoslav leader’s luxurious villa on the outskirts of town. Tito had broken with Stalin two and a half years before and proclaimed an independent Communist state. The Truman administration, hopeful that his action could serve as a model to others within the Soviet orbit, sent him economic and military assistance. Tito, affable and charming and chain-smoking through the entire conversation, advised Jack to ignore rumors that several Warsaw Pact nations—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania—intended in the spring to attack Yugoslavia on Stalin’s orders. Nor, he went on, did it seem remotely plausible that Stalin planned an onslaught on Western Europe; the Kremlin leader was having enough trouble holding what he already had. “My people are confident of the future,” Jack recorded his host as saying. “But I am not a prophet and we are preparing for any eventuality.” Tito added that the Americans were playing Moscow’s game, getting bogged down in an unwinnable war on the Korean Peninsula.39

  To Jack’s suggestion that the 1938 Munich Conference and the political misjudgments that led up to it had caused grievous and lasting damage to the world, Tito was dismissive. If anyone blundered in 1938, he charged, dubiously, it was the Czechs. They were well armed and had strong defenses, and should have stood their ground. They lost their nerve, failed to think clearly, and thereby allowed Hitler to seize his opening. Yugoslavia would not make the same error; it would take on the Red Army if necessary. Jack was impressed by his host’s passion and obvious intelligence, but he held firm to his long-held view: Munich was the disastrous by-product of appeasement, the failure not of the Czechs but of Britain and France.40

  Here and elsewhere in the diary, Jack was content mostly to record what others said rather than offer his own analysis. Still, it is clear on the pages that, as on his previous European sojourns, his interactions with people in other countries deepened his appreciation for the complexities of the modern age, and for the hard choices that leaders everywhere had to confront. The easy left-right verities that worked so well in American political discourse didn’t cut it so easily overseas, he realized anew. Thus, while the Italians should rightly have to contribute to their own defense, “the Italian economy is so precarious—so poor—with the necessity of paying for food 6% of which they must export, that they hate to give up economic recovery for rearmament.” The French, for their part, felt overwhelmed, beleaguered by the “overpowering” strength of Soviet power, causing Jack to “doubt if the French who are expected to provide the mass of land troops for the defense of Europe can do so.” From David Bruce, the charming and sagacious U.S. ambassador in Paris, Jack heard that NATO was Europe’s best hope.41

  From Belgrade it was on to Rome, where Jack and Torby had a private audience with Pope Pius XII. They genuflected before him and kissed his hand, and the pope reminisced nostalgically about his past meetings with the Kennedy family. He gave the young men rosaries and Catholic medals and pronounced a blessing upon each of them. Thence to Spain, where Jack came away impressed by the staunch anti-Communism of the military officials he met. Their armaments were obsolete, however, and Jack found himself in full agreement with one of David Bruce’s claims to him in Paris: that Spain needed American military assistance and should be offered NATO membership.

  On his return to America, Jack offered a nuanced assessment of the trip, first in a nationwide radio address carried on 540 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting Company on the evening of February 6, then in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees. The radio talk, a kind of public tutorial of the type American politicians no longer give, ran twenty-five hundred words in length and concerned “Issues in the Defense of Western Europe.” Utilizing parts of his diary, Jack offered a general survey of the countries he’d visited and made no effort to talk down to his audience: “The tax structure [in France], where only fifteen percent of the tax receipts come from direct taxation with the balance derived from hidden taxes, seems to slant away from bringing home to the public the burdens that a defense effort must entail. Wages are low and prices high and no adequate price control exists. A prevalent criticism of France’s government is that it is unable to get through to working people whereas the Communists succeed in doing so.”

  Would America’s transatlantic partners make the commitments necessary to stand up to Soviet pressure? Kennedy left the answer disconcertingly open: “The firmness and quality of Europe’s will to resist is not an easy subject of analysis. Besides the war-weariness of her peoples, there are the conflicting political ambitions of her nations. There is the precariousness of her hard-won economic recovery that could be overthrown by the heavy drain of rearmament, while waiting for just such an opportunity are the millions of disloyal Communists within her own borders.”42

  Yet this was no time for undue alarm
ism, Jack cautioned when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 22. (Presiding during the session and calling Jack to the stand was his potential election foe Henry Cabot Lodge.) His conversations with European leaders as well as U.S. representatives had convinced him, he told the lawmakers, that the Soviets were not about to invade Western Europe. Why should they, “when the best that they could get would be a stalemate during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing?” And even if they could somehow succeed with such an invasion, how would they cope with ruling over the conquered peoples? Even feeding them would be an immense challenge. Jack saw no reason why the Soviets would take such a huge gamble when they didn’t need to—“especially when things are going well in the Far East. In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.” The congressman had no objection to adding four new U.S. divisions to the two already in Europe, but he stressed that the Europeans had to step up and contribute more to their defense.

  Inevitably, the senators asked Kennedy to account for his father’s Virginia speech, in which the older man had urged withdrawal from Europe. He calmly replied that he and his father viewed the situation differently: whereas Ambassador Kennedy, like many other Americans, saw the creation of a viable European defense posture as a nearly hopeless endeavor, he himself felt certain that losing the “productive facilities” of Western Europe would be potentially catastrophic for U.S. security, which meant “we should do our utmost to save it….That is my position,” he said firmly. “I think you should ask my father directly as to his position.”43

  It was the perfect ending to Jack Kennedy’s European expedition of 1951. He had indulged his love of visiting the Continent, whose culture and politics and history had so defined his early adulthood years. He had met interesting and important people in six countries and deepened his understanding of the issues facing the Western alliance at this fulcrum of the century. He had returned to an attentive and appreciative American audience and received a respectful hearing in the Senate, whose halls he hoped soon to walk himself. And he had demonstrated that he was no puppet of his controversial father. Small wonder that Boston’s Political Times ran a flattering front-page article headlined “Kennedy Acquiring Title, ‘America’s Younger Statesman.’ ”44

  Encouraged by the burst of attention provided by the trip, Jack laid the groundwork for another overseas journey, this time starting in the Middle East and winding up in the Far East, to take place in the late summer or autumn. In his Senate testimony he had noted the growing danger of Soviet expansion in Asia, and he elaborated the point in remarks at a meeting of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation in Boston in April. He also sensed growing agitation throughout the colonial world, telling the Boston audience that “nationalistic passions” were stirring against the European imperial powers, with major implications for American security. Military techniques would not be enough to keep the Communists from taking control in these areas, Jack continued, which meant it would be vital for Washington and the West to stand for something that these oppressed peoples would find appealing. If Communism prevailed in Asia, it would be because the democracies failed to offer a compelling alternative. Yet U.S. policy seemed to consist mostly of rushing to support anyone and everyone who professed to be anti-Communist. “That puts us in partnership with the corrupt and reactionary groups whose policies breed the discontent on which Soviet Communism feeds and prospers—groups which might have long ago collapsed if it had not been for our assistance. In short, we even support and sustain corruption and tyranny to maintain a status-quo wherever we find existing regimes anti-communistic.”45

  V

  The fall trip would be a monster, covering twenty-five thousand miles over six-plus weeks, with stops in France, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, French Indochina, Malaya, Burma, Korea, and Japan. With his various aches and ailments, the congressman could have been forgiven for keeping the itinerary crisp and clean, flying into one capital city, having a meeting or two and a photo op, and then zipping off to the next country. That’s usually how it went on lawmakers’ “fact-finding” junkets, after all. But that wasn’t Jack Kennedy’s way, never had been. He wanted to see things for himself, get a feel for the place, talk with more people (if mostly of the well-placed variety). This required more time—and more planning. For weeks the congressman’s staff was kept busy arranging logistics, making reservations, scheduling meetings.

  It would prove to be a highly consequential trip, and not only for substantive policy reasons but for personal ones as well. Accompanying Jack this time around were brother Bobby, age twenty-five, and sister Patricia, twenty-seven. For the two brothers in particular, the experience was a revelation. They had never spent this kind of extended time together, at least when they were old enough for it to be meaningful—the eight-and-a-half-year age difference was too great. Jack wondered how it would go, musing to Lem Billings about whether Bobby would be “a pain in the ass.” Bobby, for his part, had no such worries. Jack’s wit, his intelligence, his grace, his courage in war—Bobby revered it all. And now he would get to be side by side with him as they traversed much of the globe.46

  In personality, Bobby was intense and combative, more akin to the departed Joe Junior than to Jack, though also more straitlaced than either.47 Always close to his mother, he shared her religiosity, but it was his father’s love and approval he especially craved. Following Milton Academy and a stint in the Navy Reserve (1944–46), Bobby scraped by at Harvard, graduating in the class of 1948, then set his sights on law school. His grades were too low for Harvard or Yale, his and his father’s preferred choices, but the University of Virginia took him, albeit with a warning that he would need to step up his academic game.48 While in Charlottesville, Bobby earned a reputation for rudeness and pugnacity, and he had few friends.49 But he showed promise in the classroom (if also a tendency toward absolutist, black-and-white judgments) and graduated in the middle of his class, in the spring of 1951, while serving in his final year as the president of the Student Legal Forum. By then he was married, to the former Ethel Skakel, an athletic, spirited, and devoutly Catholic extrovert who had volunteered on Jack’s 1946 campaign and was a close friend of sister Jean’s. Jack served as best man at the wedding, and younger brother Teddy was an usher.

  In addition to inviting his father to speak to the forum, Bobby also brought in other luminaries, among them Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and former Harvard Law School dean James M. Landis, both Joe Kennedy cronies. Then, in the spring of 1951, shortly before graduation, Bobby welcomed Joe McCarthy, whose visit was notable less for his lecture than for the dinner afterwards, at Bobby and Ethel’s home. As the evening progressed, the senator consumed more and more alcohol and became less and less coherent, until embarrassed attendees began to slip out. At one point McCarthy groped a female guest. Bobby eventually had to help him into bed, but the incident did not sour him on the lawmaker. “I liked him almost immediately,” Bobby later said.50

  At the start of October 1951 the siblings set off, with a brief initial stop in Paris, where Jack met with General Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe on October 3. Once again keeping a detailed travel diary, he jotted down the legendary commander’s take on the postwar situation:

  Eisenhower looking very fit….Attacked those who [disavowed criticism of the] settlements made during the war. Said he was merely fighting a war. Had very little to do with them. States that he asked Truman at Potsdam not to beg Russians to come into war….He mentioned that only one conversation he had had of importance at Potsdam and Truman mentioned there about supporting him for Pres in 1945 and had done so several times since….Said $64 question was whether Kremlin leaders were fanatics—doctrinaires—or just ruthless men—determined to hold on to power—If first, chances of peace are much less than 2nd….He talked well—with a lot of God damns—completely different type than
MacArthur, seems somewhat verbose as does Mac. Does not believe Russ[ia] can be frightened into aggressive war by the limited forces we are building up.51

  A page in Kennedy’s diary from fall 1951. The first part reads: “Oct. 3—Paris—I talked with General Eisenhower Biddle and MacArthur at SHAPE Headquarters. Eisenhower looking very fit—seemed disturbed at news of last few days.”

  In Israel, Jack was the same detached yet empathetic observer he had been on his visit in 1939. He was impressed by David Ben-Gurion’s leadership of the three-year-old nation, but also expressed understanding of the plight suffered by Arab refugees whom Israel refused to take back. Back in his hotel after the dinner, Jack—who had a love of poetry that he kept mostly hidden, perhaps for fear that it seemed unmanly—jotted down four lines from a poem by Shelley penned in 1819, after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester that year, in which government forces fired on a gathering of unarmed protesters seeking Parliament reforms. The poem, harshly critical of government ministers Sidmouth and Castlereagh, has been called an early statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance, and one wonders why Jack excerpted it. Whatever his reason, one reads the lines today with foreboding: