While Stevenson and Kefauver went down to defeat in November, the Democrats held their majorities in both houses of Congress. It was vindication for the judgment of Kennedy’s father; it is doubtful that even if Kennedy had been on the ticket Stevenson would have done much better outside Massachusetts and perhaps Rhode Island. The fruit that Kennedy had sought and narrowly missed turned out to be hollow. It was Kefauver who was to go into a political eclipse, while Kennedy’s sun was rising.
Two weeks after the election, Stevenson wrote to Kennedy: “I should have thanked you long before this. I can think of no one to whom we should all be more grateful than to you. And I am only sorry that I did not better reward you for your gallantry in action. I have confident hopes for your future leadership in our party, and I am sure you will help immeasurably to keep it pointed in a positive direction. With my boundless gratitude, and affectionate regards.…”
A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy
Ironically, Kennedy and Kefauver clashed again at the start of the new session in January 1957, but this time the Massachusetts man won. A vacancy had been left on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by the retirement of Senator George. There was no committee assignment that Kennedy prized more highly. Kefauver wanted it, too, however, and he had four years’ seniority over his rival. After a quiet undercover tug of war between the two, the Democratic steering committee, headed by Lyndon Johnson, gave the place to Kennedy. That the Democratic “insiders” would ignore the Tennesseean’s seniority was a sign of Kennedy’s popularity and Kefauver’s unpopularity with the conservatives and moderates in the Senate’s “inner club.” As in the House, Kennedy had got along well with all factions of the Senate, and with the older members; Kefauver had not.
Kennedy wanted Foreign Relations not only for its obvious political advantages, but because he believed that he belonged there. His youthful experiences at his father’s embassy, his interest in foreign policy while in the House, and his extensive travels equipped him, he felt, to shape foreign policy with other committee members like Fulbright, John Sparkman, and Morse. He saw no reason to act the part of a self-effacing freshman.
Later in the year, Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter appeared before the committee in the wake of a storm over the appointment of Maxwell Gluck and other Republican campaign contributors to ambassadorships. Gluck, it had turned out, knew nothing about the country, Ceylon, that he was headed for.
Wouldn’t it be in the best interests of the United States to reassign Gluck? Kennedy asked the Acting Secretary bluntly.
“I’m very glad to have your views on that,” Herter said. But it was a presidential appointment, and, anyway, the costs of an embassy were so high that people with means had to be sent. This led Kennedy into a denunciation of the social demands on ambassadors by Americans abroad.
“I really don’t see any reason why United States Ambassadors should be obliged by custom to give a party for tourist Americans and visiting Americans, two or three thousand of them, who come and eat up in one day his whole representation allowance for the year,” he told his fellow Bostonian. It was up to the department to prohibit it.
“I’m sure the ambassadors would be awfully glad,” Herter said, “but the Congress would have to take the rap on that one.”
“I think it is a most defensible rap that we could take,” Kennedy said. Then, returning to Gluck, he made a formal request that Gluck’s reassignment be considered.
A few months later, Kennedy took on John Foster Dulles himself during hearings on the Mutual Security Act of 1958. Citing the Secretary’s own figures, Kennedy observed that Russia’s ratio of economic aid to its military aid was far greater than America’s.
“Don’t you think,” he asked Dulles, “that, while it is very important that we maintain our own national defense, particularly in the missile field, the Soviet Union may be using better judgment in concentrating on the economic, rather than the military, in contradistinction to ourselves?” This question of Kennedy’s suggested a shift of emphasis in his own thinking since the days when he stressed military aid.
Dulles dwelt on the need for military aid to countries to combat internal communist subversion.
“Mr. Secretary,” Kennedy persisted, “the point I want to make is that I think the economic assistance that is proposed in this bill is inadequate, in view of the very serious nature of the problems within those underdeveloped countries, the population increase and the effort that the Soviet Union is making.” He went on to talk knowledgeably about the rate of interest of the Export-Import Bank, hard loans and soft, the record of Germany, and the special problem of India. The two ended up by agreeing, however, on the need to amend the Battle Act, which restricted aid to Soviet satellites like Poland.
Kennedy was not content merely to take potshots at Dulles’s foreign policy. In July 1957, he made himself a target by speaking up on the Algerian question. Just as he had criticized French policy in Indochina in earlier years, now he delivered to the Senate a long and devastating indictment of the refusal of France to make needed concessions to the Algerians. The speech was carefully prepared, and advance copies were distributed to senators and the press and to opinion leaders throughout the country.
Kennedy’s analysis offered little that was new; it was his concluding proposal that contained the bombshell. Tired of American “pieties” that had been addressed to France, he urged that the President try to achieve a solution through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or through the good offices of the Prime Minister of Tunisia and the Sultan of Morocco—a solution, moreover, that would recognize the “independent personality of Algeria.” If this attempt failed, he proposed that the United States support an effort to gain for Algeria straight independence. Kennedy’s speech was “perhaps the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office,” asserted a New York Times correspondent in a front-page story.
A small tempest ensued. Eisenhower said in a news conference that the United States must be fair to both sides and would jeopardize its role as peacemaker if it began to “shout about such things.” Dulles said acidly that if the Senator wanted to tilt against colonialism, he ought to concentrate on the Communist variety. French officials charged that Kennedy’s meddling would only prolong the struggle and cost more lives, and in Brest, civic groups pointedly boycotted the American Fourth of July celebration.
Senate liberals, including Humphrey and Mike Mansfield, rallied around Kennedy, but an unkind cut came from a fellow Democrat, Dean Acheson. The former Secretary of State, whom Kennedy had criticized in the past, attacked the Senator’s position as a threat to vitally needed Western solidarity.
Disappointed, Kennedy telephoned his father and wondered aloud whether he had made a mistake. Replied Joseph P.: “You lucky mush. You don’t know it and neither does anyone else, but within a few months everyone is going to know just how right you were on Algeria.” It didn’t quite work out that way. Two years later, with France still grimly holding on to Algeria, Kennedy regretted that so little attention had been given to his suggestions for negotiations for self-determination and so much to his reference to independence.
A few weeks after this venture into international politics, Kennedy sent to the scholarly quarterly Foreign Affairs for publication a piece that put the problem in wider perspective. Entitled “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy,” the article was a sweeping statement of the philosophy that underlay Kennedy’s approach to specific foreign-policy problems. Appropriately, it was printed in the journal directly after a defense of American policy by Dulles.
“To an observer in the opposition party,” wrote Kennedy, “there appear two central weaknesses in our current foreign policy: first, a failure to appreciate how the forces of nationalism are rewriting the geopolitical map of the world—especially in North Africa, southeastern Europe and the Middle East; and second, a lack of decision and conviction in our leadership which
has recoiled from clearly informing both the people and Congress, which seeks too often to substitute slogans for solutions, which at times has even taken pride in the timidity of its ideas.
“International events today are subject to a double pull—a search for political identity by the new states and the search for unity among the established states of the world. As Europe draws in upon itself toward a Common Market and greater political integration, Africa, its former colonial estate, is breaking apart into new and emergent states. Through the world today runs both a tide toward and away from sovereignty.…
“The task,” Kennedy continued, “is to strike a realistic balance between the legitimate appeals to national self-determination which pulsate through the uncommitted world and the gravitational pulls toward unity which grow from the technological and economic interdependence of modern states. This is a very difficult exercise in political ballistics. Different parts of the world are at divergent points along the trajectory of political independence. Both democratic self-government and large supra-national mergers have preconditions—a capacity to govern and a communality of interests which cannot be created only out of military fear or idealistic impulse. Americans have always displayed a faith in self-enforcing moral principles and have hankered for apocalyptic solutions and fixed patterns; they must learn that most current issues in international politics do not encourage such unrealistic hopes. Many of the old conceptions of war and peace, friend and foe, victory and defeat, must be reshaped in the light of new realities.”
Kennedy warned against rigidity of policy, against relying on “paper defenses” like the Baghdad Pact, against irresponsible promises such as “liberating” the satellites, against our unwillingness to accept partial gains, against getting “lashed too tightly” to a single man and party, such as Adenauer and his Christian Democrats, against the American tendency to seek absolutist solutions, against “old liberal bromides” that had no appeal to nations seeking a quick transition to industrialization and admiring “the disciplined attack which Communism seems to make upon the problems of economic modernization and redistribution.” He attacked the use of foreign-policy bipartisanship to stifle dissent, the lack of presidential direction, the “mongrelization of clashing views” from agencies operating in a vacuum that led in time to central policy-making bodies becoming “mere vendors of compromise.”
What, then, would Kennedy do? In the spirit of his criticism, he offered no sweeping programs or solutions. In the interstices of his article, though, was a series of specific proposals: amendment of the Battle Act and other acts in order to provide help to Communist satellites; the forging of closer ties with younger leaders and opposition parties such as the German Socialists; encouragement of independence for Algeria within a framework of economic interdependence with France; a broader-gauge and more sustained policy in the Middle East, embracing a multilateral regional-development fund, the Jordan River scheme, a food pool backed by our farm surpluses, and a program for Arab refugees; selective, long-term, better-planned economic aid; higher allowances for ambassadors so that the best career men could serve; and, above all, leadership and a “clear articulation of policy at the pinnacle.”
The essay was stronger on criticism than positive proposals; and it had its inconsistencies, most notably in its upbraiding of Dulles for the “jagged” ups and downs of his Middle Eastern policies while offering no Kennedy alternative that would not prolong shifting policies of immediacy and expediency. Still, it was a signal achievement—meaty, informed, insightful, and candid. Our foreign-policy makers, Kennedy said, must avoid both the utopian moralism of Don Quixote and the doubt and vacillation of Hamlet. It was clear that he proposed, as a possible top foreign-policy maker, to be neither.
Moreover, the articles served as a kind of prologue to Kennedy’s foreign-policy stands during 1957 and the next two years. Following a trip to Poland, he made some major speeches on the importance of re-establishing ties with that country to pull it out of Moscow’s orbit through peaceful means, and he fought hard and successfully in the Senate for an amendment to the Battle Act that would permit United States aid to Poland. Working closely with former Ambassador to India John Sherman Cooper, Republican Senator from Kentucky, he helped gain Senate approval of a resolution urging United States support of India’s efforts to stabilize its economy, and during 1959 a plan for long-term and intensive aid to India was one of the key points in his foreign-policy program. He also introduced a bill to provide assistance to South Asia by encouraging the establishment of an international mission to co-ordinate aid programs of all Western countries to India and other South Asiatic nations. With Humphrey and Fulbright, he cosponsored a five-year Development Loan program that, in modified form, was incorporated in the Mutual Security Act. More recently, as chairman of the Africa Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he turned his attention to some of the acute problems of that turbulent continent.
Kennedy’s heightened interest in aid programs, however, did not change his views on the need for a full-scale, modern weapons program for defense. In 1958, in a speech in the Senate on the widening arms gap, he warned that Soviet missile gains were shifting the world balance of power toward Russia, and he predicted that the gap between Russian and American missile strength would be largest—and most dangerous—during the early 1960’s. The “deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviet so heavily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a new shortcut to world domination. A portion of their homeland would still almost inevitably be destroyed, no matter how great their defenses or how decimated our retaliatory power. And without doubt world opinion would not tolerate such an attack. But our experience with the illogical decisions of Adolf Hitler should have taught us that these considerations might not deter the leaders of a totalitarian state—particularly in a moment of recklessness, panic, irrationality, or even cool miscalculation.…
“In the years of the gap, every basic assumption by the American public with regard to our military and foreign policies will be called into question.” One by one, Kennedy ticked them off: the assumption that peace is the normal relation between states, that “we should enter every military conflict as a moral crusade requiring the unconditional surrender of the enemy,” and so on. He attacked the administration’s willingness to “place fiscal security ahead of national security.”
“We have been passing through a period aptly described by Stanley Baldwin … in 1936, as ‘the years the locusts have eaten.’”
Senator Symington rose. Would his able friend from Massachusetts agree that the situation faced by America in the late 1950’s was considerably comparable to that faced by the British in the late 1930’s?
“The Senator is completely correct,” Kennedy answered.
Civil Rights: A Profile in Cowardice?
On a midsummer day in 1957, a New Yorker who had long battled for civil rights wrote to Kennedy a letter bristling with indignation. He recounted how he had headed a civil-rights group working for Stevenson and Kefauver in the preceding year’s campaign, how he had had to combat the Republican pitch that “a vote for any Democrat is a vote for Eastland,” how he had worked hard to minimize the defection of Negro voters from the Democratic candidates.
“Your vote, and those of the other ‘liberal’ Democratic Senators came, therefore, as a distinct shock and surprise to me. The vote plainly and simply confirms … the previously mentioned charge of the Republican party and will without question force thousands of loyal Democrats, both Negro and white, into the ranks of the Republican party in future elections. Speaking for myself personally, I made the switch as soon as I saw your ‘Profile in Cowardice’ in my copy of this morning’s New York Times.
“Since, Senator, you are a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, and even though I abhor Richard Nixon, I must in good conscience inform you that I will do all in my power to see that you lose not only in New York State but in New York City as well.
The letter was passed along, and Kennedy replied that he thought the writer’s interpretation of his actions entirely wrong and he hoped that he would see this after “more sober reflection.” He added, “Frankly, I have never been impressed by threats, especially when the results of actions which I have taken after thorough and conscientious thought.”
The exchange reflected the passion surrounding the Civil Rights Bill of 1957. The bill, in turn, issued from a tangle of conflicting ideologies, sectional strife, party maneuvering, and presidential ambitions. Eisenhower and Stevenson had stressed civil rights in their campaign talks, and now Nixon and Knowland, their eyes on the White House, were pressing for action. The Southerners, of course, were hostile; liberal Democrats wanted to push ahead of the administration, and Lyndon Johnson was negotiating for a compromise that would help hold his shaky coalition together. For Kennedy, the bill posed a sharp political dilemma, for he had close ties with Southern political leaders and they had come through for him at Chicago; yet he had to prove his liberalism in the eyes of the Northern progressives.
Unluckily for Kennedy, the very first vote on the bill theatened to throw him into a political embrace with Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, the hated symbol of Southern racism. Under the regular procedure, the civil-rights bill passed by the House would go to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Eastland, before coming to the Senate floor. Knowing of the Mississippian’s dexterity in bottling up such measures, liberals sought to invoke a little-used Senate rule that would let the bill bypass the committee.
Kennedy would have none of it. The temporary advantage to be gained by bypassing Eastland’s committee, he felt, was not worth a dangerous precedent that might come back to haunt liberals. He argued, too, that a discharge petition could be used to pry the bill out of Eastland’s pocket, and he promised to vote for such a petition if one was needed. Morse strongly supported this view, but most liberal Democrats, including Humphrey and Symington, favored the bypass, which barely carried the Senate.
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