The Best and the Brightest (22 page)

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!”