The Last Patrician (29 page)

Was Bobby, as President Johnson maintained, a “dove” on the question of Vietnam? One might more accurately say that he was continuing to press, as he had pressed in the past, for a political solution to the conflict—a negotiated peace, a settlement along the lines of the one that Averell Harriman had negotiated for his brother in Laos half a decade before. At their February meeting Bobby urged the President to halt the bombing of targets in the north, agree to a series of cease-fire arrangements, and permit the presence in South Vietnam of international peacekeeping troops, which in time could replace the American forces stationed there. But he failed to persuade the President to adopt these proposals. (“There just isn't a chance in hell that I will do that,” Johnson said, “not the slightest chance.”
4
) Privately Bobby wondered whether there was any point in even trying to work constructively with the President. The two men had, Schlesinger said, “reached the end of the road.”
5

While continuing to advocate a political settlement, Bobby began to denounce the war with a passion and a zeal that had been absent from his earlier pronouncements. In the Senate he rose to condemn the “horror” of the war, and he asserted that every American was morally responsible for the chemicals that scarred Vietnamese children and the bombs that destroyed Vietnamese villages. He said that what Americans were “doing to the Vietnamese” was “not very different than [
sic
] what Hitler did to the Jews.” Critics, among them Richard Nixon, accused him of “prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy” and denounced him for using Vietnam to further his own ambitions.
6
Bobby himself was undaunted.

The Less Courageous Act

T
HE MELANCHOLY SPRING
of 1967 gave way to a hot and violent summer. Deadly riots in Newark were followed by still deadlier riots in Detroit, and there were violent clashes in the streets of Boston, New Haven, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Tampa. In a distressing turn of events, civil unrest occurred even in cities that had made extensive use of Great Society urban aid programs.
7
President Johnson responded to the crisis by appointing a commission to investigate the underlying causes of the violence. Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois was made chairman, and a number of Stimsonian respectables (John Lindsay, Cyrus Vance) were appointed to give it an air of credibility. Bobby doubted whether it would do any good.
8
The cities were crying out in pain, and so even were the suburbs. It was a time of “social hemorrhaging,” Joan Didion wrote, “of commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.”
9
It was unlikely that yet another assemblage of wise men could do anything to remedy the deeper evils that had taken root in the country.

Although the events of the summer confirmed Bobby's view of the seriousness of the crisis of the ghetto, he did not pique himself on his prescience. The cities had ceased to be his principal concern. Adam Walinsky was wrong: the ghetto would not carry him to the heights. Never again in his career would Bobby display such boldness of conception, such originality of thought, such richness of imagination, such contempt for established opinion, as he did when he challenged the welfare state. But that act of rebellion, however courageous it might have been, did not bring him the glory he craved. It was the decidedly lesser act of opposing the war in Vietnam that made him into a hero and a presidential candidate.

The Pleasures of Empire

M
ORE THAN FIFTEEN
years had passed since he and Jack Kennedy had visited Vietnam together. In 1951 the two brothers had made a grand tour of the Orient, and French Indochina had been among the last stops on their itinerary. The disaster of Dien Bien Phu was still in the future, and it was the corrupt and romantic Saigon of Graham Greene's
The Quiet American
that the young Kennedys encountered: ceiling fans and drinks at the Continental, vermouth cassis and gunfire in the night, silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, and golden rice fields shimmering in the late-afternoon sun.
10
It was, for both of them, an introduction to the pleasures of empire. The faults of the American Empire have been copiously cataloged; its pleasures have never been properly documented. Which is odd: those pleasures had a good deal more to do with its success than any number of diplomatic cables and State Department white papers. Since Virgil's time men have complained at tedious length of the burdens of empire, but few who have stared empire in the face have had the presence of mind to refuse its pleasures. The hope of gain, the love of power, the feeling of self-importance, are only a part of the explanation of empire; the other part has always lain in the pleasure man takes in strange and exotic things.

Ever since Alexander went east in the name of glory and conquest, the imperial man has found pleasure not merely in the strangeness of Persepolis, or even in the release from the burdens of his own civilization that life in a remote capital and a distant province affords. He has derived pleasure, too, from the experience of being, in a strange place, an exotic being himself, a sahib, a great man among little people, a lord among the coolies: thus Lawrence in Arabia, Clive in India, Kurtz in central Africa. Sojourns in the world's backwaters have brought out the patrician instinct latent even in very egalitarian natures. In his mind the egalitarian man may be committed to the principles of the democratic civilization he represents, but in his heart the sahib loves the feeling of being superior to the simpler, less complicated, more primitive beings whose pressing poverty surrounds him. The most innocent traveler is sensible of the gulf that separates him from the mass of humanity that sends forth the men and women who make his bed, polish his shoes, and mix his drinks. The less innocent traveler is not only sensible of this gulf, he thrives on it.

Nowhere is the complicated allure of the exotic more evident than in the farthest reaches of the East, where in the humid and fragrant air a belief in the white man's burden merges easily and ineluctably into a belief in the white man's prerogative, and where in the tropical heat the essential rightness of democracy becomes indistinguishable from the essential rightness of a vermouth cassis at the Continental. In
Lord Jim
Conrad described how corrupting was the effect of the East on a certain type of European man. Such a man at first became attached “to the eternal peace of the Eastern sky and sea,” to the “softness of the sky,” to the “languor of the earth,” to the “bewitching breath of the Eastern waters”; at last he became addicted to the simple “distinction of being white.”
11
In
A Passage to India,
Forster depicted Englishmen who at Chandrapore were as “little gods” in their smooth-skinned whiteness; he described how painful it was for these pink-faced divinities to retire to little suburban villas in England, where they lived out their lives far removed from their former glory.
12
Nor was the hierarchical Englishman alone in being susceptible to the bewitching mixture of sensual charm and native subservience of the East; the egalitarian American was not less susceptible. Alden Pyle, the quiet American of Greene's story, annoys the jaded journalist Fowler precisely because he is so authoritarian a democrat; when Pyle speaks of liberty, he does so in the patronizing manner of one who has been bred up on principles of noblesse oblige. Joseph Alsop was in love not simply with Chinese silk and porcelain, but with the memory of a place where he had been more fully an aristocrat than he could ever be—than anyone could ever be—in the United States. Even the prosaic McNamara succumbed to the East's flattering charm; in an otherwise colorless memoir of the Vietnam era he dwelt uncharacteristically on the poetry of the place, on the whirring ceiling fans of the Presidential Palace and on the beauty of Madame Nhu, a woman who knew well enough how to charm the Western man by making him feel important, potent, desirable. A few years ago I chanced to read an unpublished manuscript by a man who as a young State Department officer in the early sixties had been posted to Saigon to assist the Ambassador. Like Alsop, McNamara, Pyle, and all the others, he had quite obviously become a victim, a victim of the most pathetic kind. I suppose even a more stoical soul than he was would have found it difficult
not
to be carried away by the pleasures of that vanished world, by the sensation of being a member of the charmed circle to which one's status as an American, a diplomat, and a white man gave one an automatic entrée. It was all plainly, ingenuously there: the games of tennis with the powerful, the unending round of garden parties and grand meals with the local elite, the diplomatic intrigue, the exhilarating sensation of participating in matters of high state, the obligatory affair with a beautiful Vietnamese woman, a femme fatale on the model of Madame Nhu. The manuscript made it abundantly clear that the burdens of empire had become indistinguishable from its pleasures, that the empire was about something more than power—that it was about a perverse form of joy.

Decline and Fall

S
ALLUST DATED THE
corruption of the Roman republic from the time when Roman soldiers, in Greece on an errand of empire, began to admire the sculpture and art of the subject race. Perhaps some future Sallust will date the corruption of the American empire to the time when Joseph Alsop returned from the East in love with Chinese silk and the idea of a permanent American commitment to the peoples of the Asian mainland. It was heady stuff, to be thirty-odd years old and know that one's actions could alter the course of Chinese history. Alsop loved it. So did Jack Kennedy. The future President might have been less enamored of the idea of putting American troops on the Asian mainland than Alsop, but he was just as addicted to the pleasures of making imperial policy.
13
Not long after he entered the Senate, Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, the young Nebraskan he had recently hired for his Senate office, were discussing their interests and ambitions. Would it be fun to be in the Cabinet? Which portfolio was the most desirable to hold? Sorensen thought “Justice, Labor, and Health-Education-Welfare” the most interesting positions. Jack Kennedy demurred; he “wouldn't have any interest in any of those” jobs. Only the State Department and the Defense Department, he told Sorensen haughtily, interested him.
14
They were more fun.

Although their father was, like Senator Taft, a critic of the insidious “imperialism of mind” that threatened to corrupt the American people, Jack and Bobby themselves believed in the empire. They believed in it in part, of course, because it promised to bring democracy and constitutional government to the dark places of the world. Bobby, traveling in Soviet Central Asia with Justice Douglas in the middle fifties, was, in his eagerness to promote the American way in hostile and uncomprehending lands, the spiritual twin of Alden Pyle. (Partway through the trip an exasperated Douglas told Bobby to keep his mouth shut and stop waving the flag.)
15
But the brothers believed in the empire, too, because the activity of empire is inherently exciting, challenging, fun. This, of course, is the reason why even those Presidents who run for office on solidly domestic platforms end up devoting so much of their time, after they are elected, to foreign affairs. In 1993 Richard Nixon predicted that President Clinton himself, a domestic politician if there ever was one, would discover this—or risk being forgotten by history. History “will not remember him for anything he does domestically,” Nixon said of Clinton. “The economy will recover; it's all short-term and, let's face it, very boring.”
16
In time even Sorensen came to prefer foreign affairs to “boring” domestic ones; the young man who, fresh from the progressive politics of Nebraska, had wanted to run HEW later embraced more global pursuits. After leaving the White House, Sorensen went to practice international law at Paul, Weiss in New York City. Arthur Schlesinger observed that even so decent a man as Hubert Humphrey, the embodiment of the virtues of Middle Western reform politics, was eventually corrupted by the pleasures of empire; Schlesinger recalled how disappointed he was by the “obvious delight” Humphrey had come to take “in hobnobbing with statesmen,” in recounting his conversations with “the Pope, de Gaulle, Radhakrishnan, etc., etc.”
17
In succumbing to the pleasures of empire, the Kennedys were not alone.

That pleasure was a motive force behind the creation of the American empire is demonstrated, I think, by the speed with which the Stimsonians abandoned it as soon as it ceased to be fun. It is not my purpose here to describe the policies that, had the Stimsonians persuaded their Presidents to pursue them, might have spared the United States the horror of war in Vietnam. Nor is it my purpose to criticize the Stimsonians for failing to heed the warnings that, if they had been heeded earlier, might at least have limited the scope of the disaster. (George Kennan, a tragic Cassandra in the Stimsonian citadel, expressed doubts about the way his theory of containment was being applied as early as 1947.
18
) What is distressing about the Stimsonians' involvement in Vietnam is not the role their policies played in creating the crisis—anyone can make a mistake—but rather the way they tried to walk away from it once the magnitude of their miscalculation became apparent. Dean Acheson, according to journalists Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, “preferred to think about Vietnam as little as possible.”
19
Jack McCloy thought Vietnam a “distraction” from the problems of the European nations, which he said constituted “the Big Leagues.”
20
Chip Bohlen was “quite content to have as little as possible to do with the Vietnam War.”
21
Paul Nitze never bothered to formulate a coherent position on the war.
22
A critical part of their imperial strategy had become painful to them, and the Wise Men did their best to stay away from it, to confine themselves to more pleasant subjects.