The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (52 page)

Joe made sure that Jack received major publicity during his trip. Upon his return he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and gave a talk over the Mutual Broadcasting Network on “Issues in the Defense of the West.” Most politicians fly off on junkets to stamp authority on their firmly held opinions. Jack had gone to learn. Nothing mattered more to him intellectually than these crucial issues.

For the moment Jack threw away the little drum of anticommunism that he and his colleagues had beaten on so loudly that they had drowned out most other sounds. He picked up a different instrument now that played subtle, complicated notes. He and his colleagues had helped create an image of a Soviet monolith ready to strike, but now he had grasped the truths of nuclear detente.

“Why should they [the Russians] take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing?” he asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1951. “Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks they don’t have to—especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.” He was all for helping Europe by adding four new American divisions to the two already there, but he was equally in favor of the Europeans stepping up and contributing substantially more to defense. These were impressive, well-considered arguments, and it was not without reason that
Boston’s Political Times
headlined its article on Jack: “Kennedy Acquiring Title, ‘America’s Younger Statesman.’”

In October, Jack made a second, even more important journey, a twenty-five-thousand-mile, seven-week trip to Asia, traveling with Bobby and Pat. As Jack was about to set out, he mused to Lem about whether Bobby would prove “a pain in the ass.” The two brothers had never spent such an extended period together, and these weeks defined their relationship for the rest of their lives. Bobby admired his brother beyond all men. He admired Jack’s intelligence and grace and wit, but above all he admired his brother’s courage. He admired it because, in Bobby’s own words, “courage is the virtue” that Jack himself “most admired.” In Washington, Jack’s back had been letting him down so badly that he had been on crutches for seven straight weeks; he was finally walking freely only in September.

With his various maladies, Jack might have flown into capitals from Cairo to Tokyo largely to have his passport stamped, returning to Washington to read foreign policy speeches written by Harvard scholars, but he wanted to touch the world with his own mind. As he had done earlier in Europe, he kept a detailed 180-page diary, primarily writing down what others told him.

Jack was a relatively unknown, thirty-four-year-old, third-term congressman, but he traveled at the highest levels of political society. He did not walk into a president or prime minister’s office for a handshake, a photo, and a few perfunctory words, but in many instances sat down for serious dialogues in which he held his own. While many politicians retreated into the easy truisms of Right or Left, Jack was attempting to understand the complex, dark, uncertain world of 1951. This was not easy in an America that adored simplicity.

A dangerous new world was opening up before Americans. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death in April for conspiracy to commit espionage by giving atomic secrets to the Russians. The Rosenberg trial suggested to many that a massive Communist conspiracy was alive in the land. On television Americans were mesmerized by the mobsters appearing before Senator Estes Kefauver’s Crime Investigating Committee, testifying about another dark world that linked racketeers, businessmen, and public officials. A treacherous cloud rose above the atoll of Eniwetok in the Pacific on May 12, when an H-bomb was first detonated. In Korea, GIs were fighting a brutal war against the North Koreans and the Chinese.

In April, President Truman fired General of the Army Douglas MacArthur after he showed his disdain for presidential leadership by calling for a total war against China. As MacArthur made his dramatic, elongated farewell, the United Nations troops continued slogging their way back up the peninsula to roughly the Thirty-eighth Parallel, while UN and North Korean officials began negotiating a truce that none would dare call victory.

In Paris at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) on the first leg of his trip, on October 3, 1951, Jack met General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jack was impressed enough by Eisenhower to keep a detailed account of his meeting. Eisenhower appeared willing to grapple with the terrible postwar complexities and to forgo simpleminded solutions.

Eisenhower looking very fit … Attacked those who criticized those who attacked settlements made during 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 can be frightened into aggressive war by the limited forces we are building up.

In Israel both Jack and Bobby kept extensive diaries, and there is scarcely any overlap in their accounts. Jack stood back from the accusations and hatreds and emotions and sought to understand. One of the burning questions of his life was whether a man who stood at such a psychological distance from the world could help to change it. These pages suggest that in this world detachment was a burning and necessary gift. “You can feel sense of dedication—especially in young people—willingness to endure hardship—essential,” he wrote, celebrating the strengths of the Israelis. That did not mean he was any less understanding of the plight of the Arab refugees whom the Israelis refused to take back, saying that “during war [they] went on own accord.” The Arabs refused resettlement elsewhere, however, because “Arabs don’t want to say ok for internal reasons.” As always with Jack, the omnipresent threat in the world lay in the Soviet empire. “We must convince Arab and Jews threat not each other but from the north,” he wrote.

One evening in Jerusalem, Jack and Bobby went to the modest home of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for dinner. Jack celebrated leaders who shaped history, and in helping to create the Israeli state out of the Palestinian desert, Ben-Gurion had surely done that. Jack was an observer of men, and by the evidence of his diary, he did not impose himself on this evening as much as take his measure of those around him, including the American ambassador, Monnett Davis, several other Israeli ministers, and New York Congressman Franklin Roosevelt Jr. The late president’s son was a large, handsome, and verbose political gentleman. Like his mother, he was considered a friend of Israel. FDR’s namesake was the center of this evening, not Jack, whose father’s reputation always went before him. “It was almost as if we weren’t there,” Bobby recalled of their time in Israel with the former president’s son.

Roosevelt asked the inevitable question: Could there be a real peace between Arab and Jew? “It depended on the recognition of the liberal elements, responsive to the peoples wishes,” the prime minister said. “Present gov[ernment] not concerned with peace but protecting own action.” In this spirit of candor, Ambassador Davis boldly told Ben-Gurion that the Arab states were afraid of Israel. “How could Egypt with its large population be frightened” Ben-Gurion replied, with rhetorical flourish. “We wouldn’t want to go back to Egypt again. We had enough the first time.”

As the evening grew late, his hosts led FDR Jr. up onto the roof, where he and others looked out on the ancient city. The Jewish sections were all lit up, while the Arab sections were as dark as the night, a distinction that said more
about the differences between these two peoples’ lives and their conditions and the chances of peace than anything that had been said that evening.

This was Jack’s last night in Israel. After writing in his diary about the dinner, he ended with a few lines of poetry. He kept his love of poetry private. Indeed, a few years later, when he would read poetry in his Capitol office with Jackie’s cousin Wilson Gathings, the young man had the impression that Jack feared that others in the family might find his interest unmanly.

This evening, though, Jack wrote down four lines of a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. That year British troops fired upon a gathering of unarmed, peaceful Manchester radicals and about fifty thousand supporters seeking the reform of Parliament. When the troops finished, eleven people lay dead and one hundred more were injured. Shelley blamed Lord Castlereagh, then the government spokesman for civil matters in the House of Commons. That may not have been a judicious rendering of the culpability, but in “The Mask of Anarchy,” art has triumphed over the interminable debates of history. Castlereagh stands remembered and condemned in a work of great and savage splendor.

Was there a Castlereagh among the leaders Jack had met this evening, an arrogant, myopic, reactionary politician leading his nation into unnecessary death? Was that why Jack chose these words? Or did he mean to suggest that a bloody hand reaches out to grasp a public man who seeks to change society radically? Was it that death waited up the road, an assassin holding a cool grip on his trigger, with history herself in his gun sights? Whatever Jack meant, a half-century later one reads these words with dread foreboding.

I met murder [on] the way,
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.

Unlike Jack, Bobby personalized politics; he always hung ideas on a human face. On his earlier trip to Israel, he had seen Jews acting nothing like the devious, avaricious race he had learned about sitting at his father’s feet. Nonetheless, he was still more offended by those speaking with what he considered a pro-Jewish bias than by those who vociferously expressed a pro-Arab position. “Drove to Haifa with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and had all my questions on Israel answered but of course with a very pro Jewish slant,” Bobby wrote. “I think he has gotten so he believes it though…. U.S. consul a Jew. Talks about Arabs as if a teacher talking about child. FDR Jr. talks
about Arabs ‘These people must learn if they don’t get on the ball we’ll cut them off without a penny.’ His love for common man stops at Jews and Negroes.”

In this part of the world, history was written with blood and vengeance, and a man who entered politics knew that he might die if he lost, or die even if he won. Four days after Jack and Bobby met with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, he was assassinated. In his diary Jack noted that “assassinations have taken heavy toll of leaders in Middle and Far East,” and then made a list of some of the murders. Jack tallied seventeen assassinations in the past four years alone. From Mahatma Gandhi in India to Count Folke Bernadotte in Palestine, murders often changed history the way few laws or mandates ever could. Jack was a student of power, and the lesson of this lengthy list was that in Asia the assassin and his dagger always lurked in the shadows of the throne.

Jack was far subtler in his judgment of others than his brother, and more understanding of the limitations of what some would call courage. When he sat down for lunch with Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not find the neutralist Indian prime minister to be a coward betraying the West. “Nehru—handsome … intelligent, good sense of humor,” he jotted in his diary. “Bored by westerners believes he is right—interested in … bigger questions.” Jack considered Nehru a wise leader who had made a shrewd assessment of the precarious position of his nation set between East and West.

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.’ “