The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  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. Hesymbolized 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?”

  Chapter Seven

  Yet if there was a problem with the pragmatism of the period, it was that there were simply too many foreign policy problems, too many crises, each crowding the others, demanding to be taken care of in that instant. There was too little time to plan, to think; one could only confront the most immediate problems and get rid of them piecemeal but as quickly as possible, or at least postpone any action. Long-range solutions, thoughtful changes, would have to wait, at least until the second term. And thus it was the irony of the Kennedy Administration that John Kennedy, rationalist, pledged above all to rationality, should continue the most irrational of all major American foreign policies, that policy toward China and the rest of Asia. He was aware of the change in the Communist world, he was aware of the split between the Chinese and the Russians; it was, he realized, something very important. But he would deal with it later.

  Early on, when Stevenson and Bowles repeatedly mentioned China to Kennedy, saying that the policy was absurd and that it was urgent to try to change it, Kennedy would smile and agree and say yes, it was a stupid policy, but it would all have to wait. Until the second term. It could not be changed now. There was a limit to the things he could do. Nor was anyone other than Bowles at the State Department eager to look ahead; Rusk believed in the demonology of China, the yellow giant inhaling her neighbors. At State’s Policy Planning Council, the one organ of government which was charged with long-range thinking on foreign policy issues, there was no change. George McGhee, Rusk’s hand-picked man there, called in his staff very early in the Administration and made it clear that he wanted no new ideas on China. The Policy Planning Council, he told a meeting of its staff, was a sacrosanct place. It had never been investigated by the Congress, and he did not want it to be. “Now,” he said, pausing and looking around the room, “I’m sure no one in this room is in favor of recognizing Red China and now that we’re all agreed, we can go ahead . . .” At virtually the same time, at a meeting of the Committee of Principals (the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the head of the CIA), Jerome Wiesner, the President’s Science Adviser, suggested that there be a major review of America’s China policy. He was met by total silence. If discussed at all, he learned, China must be discussed in private, not even at the most secret meetings, for fear that the idea that the Administration was even thinking of China might somehow leak out to the press and arouse the primitives.

  Even at a personnel level there could be no change or re-examination. A number of people had already begun to push for another look into the case of John Paton Davies, Jr., one of the most grievously wronged China officers. The new Administration was well stocked with friends and admirers of Davies’ who thought that rehabilitating him was long overdue, and more, would be a sign, albeit a small one, that the new Administration was going to make amends for old wrongs, and also to take a new and more rational look at China and Asia. Harriman, Bowles, Kennan, Schlesinger and McGeorge Bundy all brought up the issue of John Davies at various points (Harriman was the most vociferous, feeling that it was one of the major injustices of the Eisenhower years), but nothing came of their efforts. Rusk, though an old friend of Davies’, did not push the idea, and Kennedy was in no rush to take the political heat for what might be a peripheral issue. Not that he thought Davies was a victim of anything but gross misjustice. He told White House aides that he wanted, while in office, to clear two people, J. Robert Oppenheimer
and John Paton Davies, and he wanted Charlie Chaplin to perform once more in this country. He got only as far as Oppenheimer, whom he gave the Fermi Award; Davies and Chaplin would have to wait. When the issue of Davies was brought before him he said yes, it was a terrible injustice, but it would have to be postponed until the second term.

  All of this was part of one of the great illusions of the country and the Administration in 1961, the belief that the McCarthy period had come and gone without the country paying any real price, that the Administration and the nation could continue without challenging or coming to terms with the political and policy aberrations of that period. If there were problems, the Administration would somehow glide around them, letting time rather than political candor or courage do the healing. It was a belief that if there were scars from the period (and both the Democratic party and the Department of State were deeply scarred), they were by now secret scars, and if there were victims, they were invisible victims. If one looked away and did not talk about them, somehow they would go away. Yet the truth was altogether different: the scars and the victims were real, and the McCarthy period had frozen American policies on China and Asia. The Kennedy Administration would in no way come to terms with the aberrations of those policies; it had not created them, as its advocates pointed out, but it did not undo them, either. It would take no new stands on China (the one Kennedy Administration speech on China, by Roger Hilsman, was not given until after the President’s assassination), and Davies was finally cleared by the State Department in the last few months of the Johnson Administration.

  The failure to come to terms with China and with the McCarthy period was costly, because without looking realistically at China, the Administration could not look realistically at the rest of Southeast Asia. It was failures and frustrations over China which had involved the United States in Vietnam and changed American policy there in 1949; now, because it was not coming to terms with China, the Kennedy Administration would soon expand the Eisenhower Administration policy and commitment in Vietnam. Above all, John Kennedy did not want to revise America’s Asia policy (even in October 1963, with Vietnam falling apart, he told television interviewers that he did not want to cut off aid to Vietnam because that might start events comparable to those preceding the fall of China, and that was the last thing he wanted). Thus, because he did not look back on America’s China policy, it was easier for him, in 1961, to move forward in Vietnam.

  American policy in the immediate postwar years had been marked by uncertainty and ambivalence. Although the French were allowed to return to Indochina, they were not given the arms they wanted, the transport they said they needed, the economic assistance they sought. The United States was traditionally anticolonial, and anti-Communism as a major issue had not yet arisen, though there were already some disturbing signs; the 1944 Dewey-Roosevelt race had seen the first use of major Republican Red-baiting. In Indochina, American sympathy for nationalism was muted, not so much for fear of Communism as by a kind of inertia, a preoccupation with other areas, an unwillingness to go against an old and threatened ally. But an even-handed approach, if such was the case, obviously worked in favor of the French; a status quo attitude meant they would reassert their control of Indochina, perhaps not as readily as with U.S. aid, but a reassertion nonetheless. What was most striking about this first failure of American policy was that it took place before the Cold War had hardened, before the Iron Curtain descended, at a time when there was still some residual influence from Roosevelt, essentially anticolonial in his viewpoint, and when the Secretary of State was George Catlett Marshall, who was more dubious about an American order, a man of some modesty in his view of what the U.S. role in the world should be, a representative of an older and more modest generation, a pre­American-empire generation. (Thus in 1947 Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, the first of the militant Cold Warriors, would write of Marshall: “The only areas where I am not sure of his equipment are, first, the economic background, and second, awareness of the nature of Communist philosophy. However, he learns fast.”) Marshall, as Roosevelt before him, saw a more diverse and pluralistic world, but their successors in the world of national security would not be quite so tolerant of the world’s instincts to go its own way. The Cold War was coming and the American empire would be part of it.

  Yet even in the years of Secretary of State Marshall, the policy was a particularly unsatisfactory one, and in 1946 he cabled Paris instructions which noted both the injustices of the colonial regime and Ho Chi Minh’s Communist associations. The cable concluded: “Frankly we have no solution of the problem to suggest.” If the State Department did not apply adequate pressure on the French to negotiate (it applied pressure without leverage, knowing full well the limits of its position), by the same token it did not accept the French tenet that this was a free-world fight against Communism, an idea close to the hearts of the French government. Though the American press did not delve with great insight into the struggle between the Vietminh and the French, it did not accept the assumptions of the French that this was a great Western crusade against Communist hordes. The war was, in fact, viewed as a colonial war.

  Two events would change the American perceptions, and equally important in this case, the disposition to perceive nuances. (Many things, after all, were perceptible, if one wanted to see them, but the seeing involved increasing risk. It became better not to see the shades of difference—the fact, for instance, that Ho, although a Communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese and under no orders from Moscow.) The first event was the hardening of the Cold War as tensions in Europe grew; the second was the fall of China, which sent deep psychic shock waves into the American political structure. These events, coupled with the Korean War and the coming of Senator Joseph McCarthy, would markedly change the American perceptions of international Communism, and more important, change the disposition of high political figures to discern subtleties within the Communist world. The spectrum of American political attitudes would sharply narrow, and there would be an enormous two-party consensus of anti-Communism. The only main difference was on how to implement it, one centrist group believing in subtle anti-Communism, using economic aid as a weapon, using nationalism as a weapon; the other believing more in sheer military force. A major party would find itself on the defensive on the charge of having lost a major country to the Communists; and most remarkable of all, the key architect of an entire era of militant anti-Communism, Dean Acheson, would find himself the center of a national political campaign, the charge being not that he was too harsh in his anti-Communism, but that he had been too soft.

  It was an unreal time. The events in Europe, the postwar drawing of lines between the Communists and the Western powers, probably had a historical inevitability to it. Two great and uncertain powers were coming to terms with each other, a task made more difficult by their ideological differences (each believed its own myth about itself and its adversary) and by the additional frightening factor of the atomic weapon. Long-range historical analysis will probably show that in those years they were like two blind dinosaurs wrestling in a very small pit. Each thought its own policies basically defensive, and the policies of its adversary basically aggressive. Out of this would come new tensions and new fears for a new world power like the United States. But the China issue, even more emotional, and the coming of the Korean War, would legitimatize the fringe viewpoints, would limit rational discussion and rational political activity. China would help freeze American policy toward Communism. A kind of demonology about a vast part of the world would become enshrined as accepted gospel. One major political party would be too frightened to challenge it, the other delighted to reap the benefits from it. All of this would affect Indochina.

  Nineteen forty-seven and forty-eight were the watershed years. The lines of a hard peace were becoming apparent; the foreign ministers’ meeting had failed. Czechoslovakia went Communist in a coup, and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk jumped or was pushed to his death. A few months later the
Berlin blockade took place.