Chapter Six

In Asia, the first confrontation would take place over Laos. Even before Kennedy took office he had met with President Eisenhower, whose proudest boast for his term of office would be that no shooting war had started during his two-term Presidency; and that man of peace had shocked Kennedy by saying that it looked like we might have to go to war over Laos. It was the day before the Kennedy inauguration, and each man had been surrounded by members of his team, Kennedy guided through the rituals by Clark Clifford, the skilled Democratic link to the past who had handled Kennedy’s part of the transition period. It was a somber meeting. The great crisis, Eisenhower said, was in Southeast Asia, Laos was the key to it. If we let Laos fall, we have to write off the whole area. We must not, Eisenhower said with considerable emotion, permit a Communist takeover. We should get the South-East Asia Treaty Organization or perhaps the International Control Commission for Laos to help us defend the freedom of the country. We should get allies, perhaps the British, but failing that, we must do it unilaterally, a last desperate measure if necessary, he said. Both his outgoing secretaries, Christian Herter at State and Thomas Gates at Defense, supported this intervention. Kennedy asked quietly how long it would take to get troops into Laos. Gates said twelve to seventeen days, less time if they were already in the Pacific. It was not an encouraging answer. Kennedy left the meeting profoundly shaken; the old President, who had come to symbolize peace, was now offering his young successor a war in Southeast Asia over Laos, and was of course offering his support from the farm in Gettysburg. But go to war over Laos? This from Eisenhower, the fumbling, placid man whose lack of will and lack of national purpose the Democrats and Kennedy had just finished decrying.

At that point Laos seemed a dubious proposition; if ever anything was an invention of the Cold War and its crisis psychology, it was the illusion of Laos. It was a landlocked country, a part of the Indochina nation, and the Laotians, a peaceful people living on the China border, had managed to participate as little as possible in the French Indochina war. Of the Indochinese peoples it was the Vietnamese and particularly the North Vietnamese who were considered warriors, but Dulles had decided to turn Laos into what he called “a bastion of the free world.” It was the least likely bastion imaginable; it seemed like a country created by Peter Ustinov for one of his plays. The best writing about its military and political turmoil was found not on the front pages of the great newspapers, but rather in the satire of Russell Baker and Art Buchwald. Its people were sleepy, unwarlike, uninterested in the great issues of ideology; yet unlikely or not, it bore the imprimatur of American foreign policy of that era: the search for an Asian leader who told us what we wanted to hear, the creation of an army in our image, the injection of Cold War competition rather than an attempt to reduce tension and concentrate on legitimate local grievances or an attempt to identify with nationalist stirrings, no matter how faint. Since there was neither a hot nor a cold war in Laos, the problem fell between State and Defense—the very small war, semi-covert—and thus it was a CIA show, the country perilously close to being a CIA colony (in the sense that the local airline was run by the CIA, and a good many of the bureaucratic jobs were financed by the CIA).

Our man there, so to speak, was a general named Phoumi Nosavan, a right-wing strong man, to use the phrase of that era, but more of a comic-strip figure. Meeting him in Washington for the first time, Kennedy said, “If that’s our strong man, we’re in trouble.” On a more practical level, he found Phoumi so small that he, assuming that generals are bigger than privates, called for an immediate check on weapons carried by Laotians, knowing instantly that the basic American infantry weapon, the M-1, was too large for them. Since 1958, Phoumi had lived well off the Cold War, like many a strong man, but there were additional benefits to being a Laotian military leader: he was also in the opium trade, from which he profited considerably. He had an army handsomely paid, but worthless in battle. “Your chief of staff couldn’t lead a platoon around a corner to buy a newspaper,” the American ambassador, Winthrop Brown, once told him. “I know,” Phoumi answered, “but he’s loyal.” When once, by mistake and by lack of opposition, his troops captured Vientiane, the Laotian capital, Phoumi refused to go there for the swearing in of his government because his soothsayer had warned that he would die a violent death.

While American policy might have worked to diminish international tensions, and indeed the very importance of Laos, it had done quite the opposite. During the Dulles years, when neutralism was considered somewhat sinful, the Americans had deliberately sabotaged indigenous Laotian attempts, led by their ruler, Prince Souvanna Phouma, at neutralism and a coalition government between the various factions. Graham Parsons, ambassador to Laos during the latter Dulles years, when American ambassadors in Asia were particularly rigid in their anti-Communism, later testified before a congressional committee: “I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition.” With our money, our CIA men and our control of the Royal Laotian Army, we had in fact systematically destroyed the neutralist government of Souvanna, eventually forcing the neutralists to the side of the Communist Pathet Lao (though in 1962 we would spend millions and millions of dollars to re-create the very neutralist government we had toppled). One month before Kennedy entered office in 1961 Souvanna had fled to Thailand, and Kong Le, the military leader of the neutralist forces who wanted above all to be left alone, had joined the Pathet Lao to fight against General Phoumi’s army. In the next two months, skirmishes took place (the Laotian civil war, which flared up periodically, was distinguished by considerable journalistic coverage, troops moving through on sweeps, maps on the front pages of American newspapers, and the fact that there were almost never any casualties). When the two sides finally met in early February on the strategically important Plain of Jars, General Phoumi’s army, better equipped, better paid, predictably broke and ran. As they ran, the Kennedy Administration had its first Asian crisis.

 

It was the classic crisis, the kind that the policy makers of the Kennedy era enjoyed, taking an event and making it greater by their determination to handle it, the attention focused on the White House. During the next two months, officials were photographed briskly walking (almost trotting) as they came and went with their attaché cases, giving their No comment’s, the blending of drama and power, everything made a little bigger and more important by their very touching it. Power and excitement come to Washington. There were intense conferences, great tensions, chances for grace under pressure. Being in on the action. At the first meeting McNamara forcefully advocated arming half a dozen AT6s (obsolete World War II fighter planes) with 100-lb. bombs, and letting them go after the bad Laotians. It was a strong advocacy; the other side had no air power. Thus we would certainly win; technology and power could do it all. (“When a newcomer enters the field [of foreign policy],” Chester Bowles wrote in a note to himself at the time, “and finds himself confronted by the nuances of international questions he becomes an easy target for the military-CIA-paramilitary-type answers which can be added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. . . .”) Rusk, who had seen the considerable limits of air power in jungle terrain when he was in the China-Burma-India theater during the war, gently dampened the idea; in addition, given the size of the Plain of Jars, the effectiveness of six small fighter-bombers was bound to be limited.

There were other ideas; some of the civilians were interested in the possibility of a quick strike at the Plain of Jars, an airborne landing. Could we get them in there? Kennedy asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “We can get them in there, all right,” General Lemnitzer answered. “It’s getting them out that worries me.” What quickly became clear was that the military, particularly the Army, were in no rush to fight a ground war in Laos. The Army still felt itself badly burned by its experience in Korea, where it had fought a war which was immensely frustrating for commanders who felt they were sacrificing their men for limited political objectives, a kind of rationing of men for politics, which was difficult for officers to come to terms with. In addition, the impact of the Eisenhower years on the Army, years of cutback and depletion, had left the strategic reserve seriously reduced. “If we put as many as one hundred and twenty-five thousand into Southeast Asia, we wouldn’t be able to fight a war in Florida,” one general told the President. Yet the Chiefs of Staff did not recommend against the Laotian commitment; rather, they said that if we were to get involved, we should go in with a large force, and the use of force should be open-ended—thus the possible use of nuclear weapons was implicit. They wanted 250,000 men for the invasion. At one of the National Security Council meetings someone asked what would happen if the Chinese came in—in that case a quarter of a million Americans would not be enough. “We’ll take care of that,” Lemnitzer answered somewhat vaguely. But when the civilians pursued the questioning, it became clear that if the Chinese or the Soviets moved in combat troops, the main military contingency plan would be the use of nuclear weapons.

Kennedy in particular was annoyed because he felt the Chiefs were not being candid; that they were building a record against him, covering themselves against an invasion and putting the onus on him; that they were hiding behind the nuclear weapons, and yet not stating the case explicitly. (The same ambiguity would recur without fail as the Laotian crisis resurfaced from time to time, usually in the rainy seasons, when the Pathet Lao could move with greater protection. A year later there was a new Laotian crisis, and after a NATO conference in Europe, McNamara went back via Saigon to meet with top U.S. officials. He asked each one in turn what the United States should do. First was Admiral Harry Felt, commander of all American forces in the Pacific. “We have the Seventh Fleet and we have the planes to wipe Tchepone off the face of the earth.” Then McNamara turned to Lemnitzer. “Well, Lem, what do you think?” “I don’t think air power alone will do it. We need to challenge them on the ground. Secure the Mekong. Use SEATO Plan Five . . . Put some men in there.” Then to General Paul Harkins, commander of Military Assistance in Vietnam: “Paul, you’re the theater commander, what do you think?” “I think the situation is very serious. Naturally we have to respond. We have to impress the Communists with the seriousness of our intention. And yet we must act within our capabilities.” McNamara then turned to Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who replied, “I look upon our Asian policy having two pillars, South Vietnam and Thailand. Laos is the keystone supporting them. If the keystone falls, the pillars will collapse.” It was all fairly chilling, and McNamara, a little better informed than the year before when he lived in a world of AT6s, said, “Let me play the devil’s advocate: if we intervene in Laos, if we overfly North Vietnam, will the Chinese let us do it? Lem, you want to use the SEATO plan. What will Hanoi do? Will they just sit there or will they come in?” Then he leaned back. “Now let us get down to it.” He waited. Their staffs had long since left the room. What ensued was one of the longest and most appalling silences McNamara had ever sat through. They had all been pushing hard, willing to commit troops, in effect go to war if necessary, but they had given little or no thought to what the other side might do. Now they had no answers, nothing to say.)

 

It was at this point in the first Laotian crisis that Harriman entered the picture, in April 1961. He was a man who had lived through most of the past Cold War policies and had helped create them, but he was not tied to them; above all, he was not an ideologue. He was a man of power, but he knew that power was always changing, also that the most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable, and he had serious doubts about the value of an American commitment to Laos. He differed from the other high officials in understanding that the pluralism of the Communist world was a real thing, that it had changed, that the Communist world was in flux. As it was changing, genuine new opportunities would present themselves and he was determined that this Administration take advantage of them, and that he play a part. It was something in the darker days of 1961 that he never lost sight of and he would see to it that the chance for progress was interrupted as little as possible. As roving ambassador he had talked with Khrushchev, who had not thought Laos was worth war (“Why take the risk?” Khrushchev told Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson. “It will fall into our lap like a rotten apple”). In March, Harriman had arranged to see Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist leader the United States had succeeded in ousting. They met at an airport in New Delhi, and although they shared no common language, Harriman had broken through. He came away convinced that this was a man you could deal with, that he represented something viable in Laos.

He had returned to Washington, and knowing the importance of repetition within a government, he had started repeating a litany whenever he could at Washington meetings, at dinner parties—Souvanna Phouma, Souvanna Phouma, Souvanna Phouma—until at a certain point close friends were somewhat alarmed; perhaps this time Averell really was showing his age. It was not long after that Kennedy assigned him the job of getting a Laotian settlement at the conference in Geneva in May; it was not something he particularly wanted, and it was distant from the area of his prime concern. He did not think a decent settlement was really possible, but it was a job; he was underemployed and he needed to show these young people that he could run with them. He was willing to work for an accord, however, not just because he had a high opinion of Souvanna but because he had also formed a low opinion of the right-wing forces there (arriving in Vientiane, he sensed that the right-wing forces had no legitimacy, were an American creation; when CIA agents gave him carefully prepared briefings on the Laotian desires for freedom, they were annoyed to find Harriman simply turning off his hearing aid. They had no answers he was interested in). Indeed, the way he carried out what he himself would describe as a “good bad deal” so impressed the President that Harriman started an upward journey which might have brought him the Secretary’s job itself were it not for the assassination.

Harriman himself did not have great hopes for the mission, but he went at it doggedly. At one point a friend asked how it was going, and he answered, “Just about as unsatisfactorily as we expected.” He was appalled by the size of the mission he took over in Geneva, and by the amount of deadwood. He did, however, like one member of the staff, Bill Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old officer way down the list in seniority. Bill Sullivan had served in Asia as a young man and did not seem to spout the clichés of most of the mission, and Harriman immediately offered him a job as his deputy. Sullivan declined, noting there were a dozen people senior to himself in the mission. Several days later Harriman called Sullivan in again and offered him the same job; by this time he had sent home everyone senior to Sullivan. This did not endear him to some of the departed who were connected with the Department’s traditionalists, and as he continued to negotiate with the Soviet delegate, G. M. Pushkin, there were mutterings that he was giving away too much of Laos, that great bastion. “I think the next cable will be signed 'Pushkin,’ ” said one high-level official. Harriman’s reaction when he heard of the remark was swift and devastating (he was not called “The Crocodile” for nothing), he decided that the man be transferred to . . . he thought for a minute and then chose . . . Afghanistan.

In Geneva he worked single-handedly toward the neutral settlement, trying to convince the Soviets that they had little to lose, that the real problem for them was the Chinese, and that neutralism was more of a problem for the Chinese than for the Russians. At one point during the negotiations Pat Moynihan, who had worked for him during the Albany days, ran into him in Geneva.

“What are you doing now?” he asked Harriman.

“Oh, I’m just waiting. We’ve done all the talking we can do. And the Russians are making up their minds and I’m waiting for them. That’s all, waiting.”

Eventually a neutralist agreement met with all the delegates’ approval, much to the anger of the hard-liners such as Alsop, who said it reminded him of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland teaching herself to believe six impossible things before breakfast. So the Kennedy Administration had moved away from force in Laos, but not without first a show of force, by stationing U.S. Marines on Okinawa and in Japan for possible forays into the Mekong Valley, and not without a grand son et lumière show, a television spectacular starring Kennedy himself, with maps, charts, clichés about Laotian freedom being tied to American freedom. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all. I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved,” he said on television, while telling Arthur Schlesinger at lunch of the discrepancy between what he thought he could say and what he believed: “We cannot accept a visible humiliation.” The opposition to the use of force at the high levels of the U.S. government was remarkably frail; the President himself, wiser now (he would say later that the Bay of Pigs had saved us from going to war in Laos), still felt that he could not be candid about the stakes or lack thereof in Laos.

So the Laotian crisis had been brought to a successful negotiated settlement, but it was an eerie and unsettling experience to the men in Washington, for they had come far too close to involvement within a country where the faction they supported lacked any chance of success. What really saved the United States from confrontation in Laos was not the Bay of Pigs, or even Harriman, but the Laotians themselves. For the Pathet Lao were not a classic guerrilla force. If Phoumi was a foolish figure, Souphanuvong, leader of the Pathet Lao, was a Communist counterpart. Neither he nor his people had invested the kind of sacrifice and commitment to the struggle that the Vietcong had in South Vietnam; the force and dynamism of the Indochinese guerrilla movement had never really touched Laos. A major Communist power, such as the Soviet Union, could in fact serve as a broker for an agreement, which it could not do in Vietnam, where the indigenous Communist force was all that mattered. (This led to a misconception in Washington: a belief that the Russians, if they wanted to, could control and negotiate events in Vietnam as they did in Laos, and that eventually the Russians would help us out.) In Vietnam, however, the Americans would learn that the indigenous force was far more real, far tougher (the very quality of the fiber of the Vietnamese people which encouraged Washington to make a stand in Vietnam instead of in Laos would work against us there as well). In Vietnam a dynamic, relentless guerrilla movement was in the fifteenth year of an endless struggle to take over and unify the whole country, and for the leaders of that movement what the United States did or did not do was irrelevant. They would continue at their own pace. In addition, if the Communist investment in Laos was marginal, so was the American one, compared to Vietnam. Phoumi may have been a strong man, but no one would ever accuse him of being a Miracle Man, as Diem was called, for in Vietnam we had committed more, made more speeches, trained more troops. There was the beginning of a Vietnam lobby in the United States, and in fact both the President and his father had in some way been part of it.

With luck the United States had managed to stay out of Laos, and though there were protests from the hard-liners, most of the country greeted the decision not to fight either with boredom and indifference or with relief. There was one small footnote to the Geneva agreement, and though it did not seem important at the time, in retrospect it would take on considerable significance. After the agreement had been reached, Kennedy assigned his own liaison man with Harriman, the young Wall Street lawyer Michael Forrestal, to brief Lyndon Johnson on the settlement. Johnson, of course, already knew of the accords, and Forrestal arrived to find that the meeting had been arranged so that Forrestal would get there about ten minutes after Johnson’s masseur had arrived. Forrestal began to discuss the accords, only to find himself blocked again and again by the masseur. Forrestal spoke, the masseur chopped, Forrestal spoke, the masseur rubbed. For ten minutes Forrestal tried to explain the agreement and found no way of getting Johnson’s attention; it was, Forrestal thought at the time, and even more so later, Johnson’s way of showing contempt for the Laotian accords.

 

Of all the members of the new Administration only one man besides Bowles had ever shown much interest in the underdeveloped world, or much feel for it. It was not McNamara, for whom it might have factored in as a potential future market for the 1980s, or Rusk, who felt himself more sympathetic to the colored of the world than Acheson, but had managed to deliver some of the State Department’s best speeches in defense of the French position in Indochina; nor Bundy, who was classically a man of the Atlantic. It was, oddly enough, John F. Kennedy. He had been to Indochina twice, in 1951 and 1953, once as a congressman and once as a senator: the first time he was met at the airport by half the French army ready to brief him, to convince him of victory, to introduce him to a few Vietnamese officers bursting from their paratroop uniforms to prove to him how committed the natives were to a French type of freedom. He went to the official briefings, but he also jumped the traces, got the names of the best reporters in town and showed up unannounced at their apartments, looking so young and innocent that they had trouble believing that he was really a member of the Congress of the United States. There he asked his own questions and got very different briefings from the official ones: the pessimism was considerable, the Vietminh were winning the war, and the French were not giving any real form of independence to the Vietnamese (ironically, a dozen years later in exactly the same situation, on the same soil, Kennedy would rage at the reporters for their pessimism, while at the same time occasionally confiding in Schlesinger that he learned more from their dispatches than he could from his generals and ambassadors. In 1952 he was particularly impressed with the work of one reporter, Homer Bigart, then of the New York Herald Tribune, and wrote him a personal letter of congratulation, while a decade later his embassy in Saigon singled out the same skeptical and pessimistic Bigart, by then with the New York Times, as the major problem in winning the war). He also met at length with Edmund A. Gullion, a young foreign service officer who was the leader of the dissenters at the mission (starting a friendship which would continue for ten years, with Gullion eventually becoming his ambassador to the Congo). He finally told Gullion that he was right, there had to be more pressure on the French to give independence (“This is going to cost me some votes with my French Catholic constituents, but it seems like the right thing to do”).

Those trips to Vietnam had begun Kennedy’s education on the underdeveloped world and colonialism. Later he spoke twice against the French position in Indochina (there was a third speech on Vietnam, which was pro-Diem) and continued with a major address against the French position in Algeria. It was not an expression of great passion, rather it was a reflection of his almost Anglicized nature, his distaste for colonial callousness and vulgarity. He did not like the French colonial officials; they seemed stupid and insensitive, trying to hold on to something in a world which had already changed. In addition, he felt a distaste for the harshness that their particular role apparently brought about. They were bad politicians and they were living in the past; by contrast, he was impressed with what the British had done in India, leaving when they should, with none of the worst predicted consequences taking place.

Kennedy’s understanding of Indochina was not, aides would recall, particularly sophisticated; it was more an intuitive feeling, and he was less than anxious to see the countless Vietnamese exiles who headed for his office. But having sensed which way the wind was blowing in Vietnam, he continued with much the same feeling about the French colonial war in Algeria, and his Algerian speech became one of his best known. In June 1957 he talked casually with his staff about the connection between Vietnam and Algeria and suggested that Fred Holborn, a young speech writer and former Harvard government instructor, write the outline of a speech. Holborn came up with what was essentially a critique of the colonial position; Kennedy thereupon surprised Holborn by sharpening the arguments rather than softening them, as he usually did. The speech was a good one, and it went against the traditional foreign policy of supporting the French blindly no matter what they did, on the grounds that our oldest ally was also a weak oldest ally, given to great internal division and lack of fiber, and thus might come apart at the slightest prod of an American finger. Just how rigid and centrist American foreign policy was at that moment could be judged by the vehemence of the reaction to so mild a speech. It was hardly a radical speech; yet it was criticized not only by Eisenhower and Dulles’ allies in the Republican party, but by the New York Times, by Adlai Stevenson, and of course by Dean Acheson. How could he do this, he was damaging an ally; he was young and inexperienced, he lacked expertise, this was a serious business, criticizing your own country and an ally over foreign policy. Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, went to see him to present an official complaint. Kennedy deliberately kept Alphand waiting, then again, deliberately, served him a terrible lunch, and did not back down a bit. Instead he went right at Alphand, reminding him how little support the war really had in France.

It was the first major speech for Kennedy on an international issue, and the first time a speech brought him serious criticism. Later he would recall that it was also the only speech he had made which helped him after he became President; it gave him an identification with independence movements throughout the world. But he was, he told aides, wary of being known as the Senator from Algeria and immediately looked around for another country to give a speech on, choosing Poland this time, a reasonably safe and secure topic, since he could be for freedom without offending his constituents. Yet his overall view on colonialism was now clearly stated, it was above all rational and fatalistic. It wasn’t that he liked Algerians or Vietnamese. He was bored by them; their intensity and parochial views did not much interest him. He was intrigued by some of the revolutionary figures; they, unlike some of the bureaucratic figures in the underdeveloped world, caught his imagination.

It was almost as if the colonialists’ lack of style offended him the most, and this was not surprising, because the thirty-fifth President of the United States paid great attention to style; style for him and for those around him came perilously close to substance. He did not like people who were messy and caused problems, nor did he like issues that were messy and caused problems. He would make his own limited commitment to Vietnam in a few short months, not so much to embrace the issue as to get rid of it, to push it away. He was the new American breed, not ideological, and wary of those who were; among the most frequently quoted remarks of the 1960 campaign was the fact that he did not like the doctrinaire liberals of the Americans for Democratic Action, he did not feel comfortable with them.

Kennedy was committed only to rationality and brains, nothing more. Rational decisions were to be welcomed; presumably the other side, the Soviets, would be as rational as we were; they would, despite a different language and a different system, have the same basic symmetry of survival and thus the same basic symmetry of rationality: they would no more want Moscow destroyed by a nuclear attack over a squabble about the access routes to Berlin than we would want Washington blown up.

Kennedy was almost British in his style. Grace under pressure was that much-quoted phrase describing a quality which Kennedy so admired, and so wanted as a description of his own behavior. It was very much a British quality: to undergo great hardship and stress and never flinch, never show emotion. Weaker, less worthy Mediterranean peoples showed emotion when pressure was applied, but the British kept both their upper and lower lips stiff. The British were loath to show their emotions, and so was Jack Kennedy. He could forgive his opponent Richard Nixon for many of the egregious slurs Nixon had cast upon the Democratic party in the 1950s, but he could not forgive him for his lack of style and class in permitting Pat Nixon to be shown on Election Night 1960 as she seemed to be close to a breakdown. Kennedy himself was always uneasy with emotion; James MacGregor Burns would note that when, as President, Kennedy visited Ireland and thousands upon thousands of Irishmen wildly cheered, his reaction was to tug self-consciously at his tie and straighten it. His style and speeches were restrained, as if to contrast them with the exhibitionism which had been identified with the Irish politicians of another era, most notably his own grandfather, Honey Fitz Fitzgerald.

He did not like people who pushed and crowded him, who told him of their cause or their problems. He wanted in his career no one’s problems but his own. He had come to the Presidency at an important time in American history, when many of the forces which had produced the worst and most emotional tensions of the Cold War were fast ebbing, but when American political rhetoric had not yet adapted to those changes. As a political figure his perceptions were particularly good, and he was more sensitive to changes in the world than most of his contemporaries; but as a political figure he was cautious and almost timid. If the world was changing and the Cold War tensions were abating, he did not intend to accelerate those changes at the risk of his own career; he wanted to keep up with them, but not to be either ahead of the changes or behind them.

For the thirty-fifth President of the United States was a classic expression of the democratic-elitist society which had produced him in the middle part of the twentieth century. As the country expanded, the old elites in the East had opened up their universities to the best qualified of the new elites, and his education had been superb. As the Democratic party had been the natural home of the newer immigrant groups of America, so he and his family had made their way to that refuge, though by economic impulse their more natural home would have been the Republican party. As money was important in American egalitarian politics, he was at once very rich without seeming rich or snobbish and he spent his money wisely and judiciously, allowing it to make his political way easier, yet using it in ways which were carefully designed not to offend his more egalitarian constituency. So it was not surprising that many of his fellow citizens found reassurance in the fact that he was President (“Superman in the Supermarket,” Norman Mailer once wrote of him). In a country which prized men who were successful and got ahead, he had always been marvelously successful, and he had gotten ahead. He had made no false moves, no votes had been cast in the heat of idealism to be regretted later. Each move had always been weighed with the future in mind. Better no step than a false step. Never would he be too far ahead of his own constituency, even when that Massachusetts constituency was wallowing in the worst part of the McCarthy period.

With television emerging in American politics as the main arbiter of candidates, his looks were striking on the screen, and he was catapulted forward in his career by his capacity to handle the new medium, thus to be projected into millions of Protestant homes without looking like a Catholic. And he was, despite all the advantages, still very hungry; he had all the advantages of the rich, with none of the disadvantages. The Kennedys had not grown soft, they still wanted almost desperately those prizes which were available. It was not by chance that Nelson Rockefeller, the one candidate who probably could have beaten him in 1960, the Brahmin WASP Republican with all the advantages of Kennedy, just as photogenic, just as rich, perhaps not quite as bright, was above all a Rockefeller and thus lacked the particular hunger, the edge, the requisite totality of desire for the office, and so even before the primaries had allowed himself to be bluffed out by Richard Nixon. Lack of hunger was a problem which might affect subsequent generations of Kennedys, but in 1960 the edge was there. Nelson Rockefeller’s father had never had to leave one city and move to another because he felt there was too little social acceptance of his children, but Joseph Kennedy had moved from Boston to Bronxville for precisely that reason when his sons were teen-agers.

Yet if many politicians are propelled forward and fed by the tensions and deprivations of their youth, Kennedy was again different. Being Irish may have been an incentive; Jack Kennedy felt no insecurity about it. The drive was there, mixed in with the fatalism about it all. Lyndon Johnson, product of a poor and maligned section of the country, may never have lost his feeling of insecurity about his Texas background; Richard Nixon, poor and graceless and unaccepted as a young man, the classic grind, became the most private and hidden of politicians, always afraid to reveal himself, but Kennedy bore no scars. He had been excluded from the top Boston social circles as a young man, but he felt no great insecurity about it. His social friends at the White House tended to be the very people who had ruled those social sets, and he clearly enjoyed having them come to him. But he was unabashedly proud and sure of himself. Someone like John Kenneth Galbraith could note that he had never met a man who took such a great pleasure in simply being himself and had as little insecurity as Kennedy (which allowed him to accept the failure of the Bay of Pigs, without trying to pass the blame). Once during the 1960 campaign against Nixon someone had asked Kennedy if he was exhausted, and he answered no, he was not, but he felt sorry for Nixon, he was sure Nixon was tired. “Why?” the friend asked. “Because I know who I am and I don’t have to worry about adapting and changing. All I have to do at each stop is be myself. But Nixon doesn’t know who he is, and so each time he makes a speech he has to decide which Nixon he is, and that will be very exhausting.”

If John Kennedy was cool and above the fray, detached, seeing no irrationality in the awesome Kennedy family thrust for power, he could well afford that luxury, for the rage, the rough edges, the totality of commitment bordering on irrationality belonged to his father. If John Kennedy was fatalistic about life, Joseph Kennedy was not. You did not accept what life handed you and then just tried to make the best of it; instead you fought ferociously for your chance, you pushed aside what stood in your way, the civilized law of the jungle prevailed. Joe Kennedy was a restless, rough genius anxious to shed his semi-immigrant status, anxious to avenge old snubs and hurts; having failed to do so despite his enormous wealth, he was determined to gain his final acceptance through his sons. What better proof of Americanization than a son in the White House, a son running the Justice Department, and a son in the Senate (the last triumph would become somewhat unsettling to the elder boys, who thought perhaps the family was overdoing it, though the patriarch himself knew the code better than they—there was no way of overdoing it). If Joe Kennedy’s daughters had been sent to the very best Catholic schools, the better to retain the parochialism and tradition in order to pass it on to his grandchildren, his sons had been educated exactly for the opposite reasons—to shed it. There would be no Holy Cross, or Fordham, or Georgetown Law School in their lives. They were sent instead to the best Eastern Protestant schools, where the British upper-class values were still in vogue. For Jack it had been Choate, not Groton or St. Paul’s perhaps, but still a school for proper Christian gentlemen, who understand duty and obligation, and then Harvard. Eventually, after the service in World War II, a political career; the thrust at the beginning was certainly Joseph Kennedy’s rather than that of his son, who seemed to be merely pursuing the obligatory career. Later, of course, there was no absence of his own ambition, and he became a remarkable American specimen, carrying in him an immigrant family’s rage to get their due, but carefully concealed behind a cool and elegant façade: in the prime of his career in the late fifties as he prepared to run for President, he did not seem an upstart and an outsider raging to get his due, but rather a very fine, well brought up young man dealing with an outmoded unfortunate prejudice. The perfect John O’Hara candidate for President. Once during his Administration a scandal broke out over the fact that the Metropolitan Club, Washington’s most elite social and political meeting place, did not encourage Jewish or Negro membership. Many of Kennedy’s friends resigned, but not McGeorge Bundy. Kennedy was amused by this and began to tease Bundy, who became irritated and lashed back. Kennedy, he said testily, belonged to clubs which did not have many Jews and Negroes, such as the Links in New York. “Jews and Negroes,” laughed Kennedy. “Hell, they don’t even allow Catholics!”

 

He had, both as congressman and senator, avoided attachment to particular programs, issues or causes; the one issue on which he used the full force of his intellectual powers during the senatorial period was labor-reform legislation, a curious passion for a Democratic politician. He symbolized that entire era—post-Depression, postwar, post-McCarthy America. Ideology seemed finished, humanism was on the decline as a political force; rationality and intelligence and analysis were the answers. There was no limit to what brilliant men, untrammeled by ideology and prejudice and partisanship, could do with their minds in solving the world’s problems. Indeed, making the case for Kennedy in a 1960 campaign tract, Arthur Schlesinger wrote:

 

It should be evident that Kennedy is an exceptionally cerebral figure. By this I mean that his attitudes proceed to an unusual degree from dispassionate rational analysis. If elected he will be the most purely cerebral President we have had since Woodrow Wilson. “Purely cerebral” is in this case a relative term. Wilson’s rationalism masked deep passions, and Kennedy has the normal human quota of sympathy and prejudice . . .

 

Good intelligent men could go beyond their own prejudices and escape the rhetoric of the past. George Kennan, Kennedy’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, and the most cerebral member of the foreign service himself, would never be so impressed as when Kocá Popovic, the Yugoslav foreign minister, visited Washington and met with Kennedy. Instead of being filled with the usual East-West rhetoric and debate, the conversation began with Kennedy leaning over toward Popovic and asking in a particularly disarming way, “Mr. Minister, you are a Marxist and the Marxist doctrine has had certain clear ideas about how things were to develop in this world. When you look over things that have happened in the years since the Russian Revolution, does it seem to you that the way the world has been developing is the way that Marx envisaged it or do you see variations here or any divergencies from Marxist predictions . . .?”

It was also symbolic of the era that Kennedy wanted to be his own Secretary of State, not Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, not Secretary of Labor, not Attorney General. It was symbolic because in the universities, in the journals and in the intellectual circles it was generally held that the real action was in determining the role America played in the world, rather than redefining America domestically. It was where the excitement was, this competition with the Soviet Union, a competition of politics and of economics and ideas. Kennedy believed in it, and so did other men of power and ambition in that era. Bright young men off the Eastern campuses went to Mississippi to redefine America in 1964, but in the 1950s they had gone into the CIA and into the State Department, and even in 1961 they went into the Peace Corps and the Defense Department. Even as a congressman Kennedy had asked Ted Sorensen what Cabinet post he wanted. Sorensen had talked about HEW, but Kennedy was different, Jack Kennedy as Cabinet officer wanted only State or Defense, that was where the power was. The real power and resources and energies, financial and intellectual, of the United States were committed to the cause of the new American empire, in bringing proof that our system was better than theirs. Neither Kennedy nor very much of the country, including the press, was particularly interested in domestic reform. In his inaugural address Kennedy gave short shrift to domestic issues, and no one criticized him. Joseph Swidler, chairman of the Federal Power Commission, a man strongly committed to regulating the big power and utility interest, found his first year with the Kennedy Administration immensely frustrating. He had gone to Washington because he had been promised a strong anti-interest commission. That commission, he soon found out, would not be forthcoming. It was bogged down in the pluralism of American politics and by the President’s primary concern with foreign affairs: in order to get his key foreign aid bills through Congress, Kennedy needed the co-operation of men like Sam Rayburn and Senator Robert Kerr. The price they exacted from the President was at the expense of the Federal Power Commission; they wanted and received men sympathetic to their and the big interests’ views. This left Swidler angry, and with a feeling that he was being betrayed by the Administration. He would tell friends of how he set out from his office for the White House to let the President know just how bitter he felt, with thoughts of resignation flashing through his mind. On the way he would think of the President’s problems: Berlin. Laos. The Congo. Disarmament. The Middle East. The foreign aid bill. Khrushchev. All those burdens. And minute by minute as he approached the office Swidler felt his anger lessen, until by the time the President’s door opened, he heard his own voice saying: “What can I do for you, Mr. President?”