JFK
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*2 Jack, too, received congratulatory letters, including one from his Choate headmaster, George St. John. “God bless you,” the older man wrote, “I have just been reading the account of your rescue—and of the resourcefulness you used in making the rescue possible. I wish I could be with you and the other Choate men these days. To be in the sixties…is almost a humiliation.” Jack replied with warm assurance: “What you and others are doing at Choate and schools like it constitutes an essential ingredient to any worth while peace—which is what we are all hoping and working for.” (George St. John to JFK, August 23, 1943, box 4b, JFK Personal Papers.)
THIRTEEN
LOST PRINCE
In late November 1943, as John F. Kennedy was preparing to depart the Solomons and return to the United States for his thirty-day leave, the “Big Three” of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill held their first-ever joint meeting, in the Iranian capital, Tehran. In strategic and political terms it would prove to be the most important of all the wartime conferences, with monumental implications for not only the rest of the war but the postwar era as well—and for Kennedy’s career. Quite apart from the fact that the three leaders represented, in Churchill’s formulation, the greatest concentration of power the world had ever seen, this was also the first—and last—time they had a chance to thrash out the core objectives of the Grand Alliance before the decisive military campaigns were joined. Though the Yalta Conference of February 1945 is often viewed as the great policy-making conclave of the war, Yalta mostly filled in the outline sketched out at Tehran.1
The cacophonous city was a curious mix of old and new, its boulevards crowded with late-model American cars and horse-drawn droshkies, its architecture blending Mongol and modern. Sidewalks remained unpaved, which gave the city a dusty air; next to luxurious residential neighborhoods stood poor, grimy ones. In anticipation of the conference, many areas of the city had been cordoned off, with only official traffic permitted. Security measures were unprecedented, with Soviet, American, and British soldiers patrolling the streets, and aircraft flying constant vigil overhead.2
From the start of the proceedings Stalin, bedecked in a mustard-colored, tightly buttoned military uniform, projected confidence and energy, and no wonder: his power had risen significantly during 1943 as his forces gained the upper hand on the Eastern Front, this time without the aid of winter weather. In July, the Red Army, under General Zhukov, beat back Germany’s summer offensive against the Kursk salient in history’s greatest tank battle, despite Hitler’s throwing thousands of tanks and planes into the fray. Bit by bit through the year, territory seized by the Germans fell back into Soviet hands, even though Stalin’s troops were up against 80 percent of the Nazi striking force and even though the second front that the Kremlin leader had been promised by Roosevelt had yet to materialize. At the battlefield level, the Germans were still formidable—the Russians were losing five or six men for every German soldier—but they simply couldn’t match the endless Soviet reinforcements. At the same time, Stalin knew he had been liberally supplied with Lend-Lease aid, and during one evening meal he offered a revealing toast: “To American production, without which this war would have been lost.”3
Churchill, too, understood that the United States was the Allied paymaster, and moreover that he was now clearly the junior member of the triumvirate. Over the previous year, global leadership had passed to Washington, which meant that American generals would be commanding the combined Allied forces in the great battles to come. Churchill accordingly stayed mum when Roosevelt refused to caucus privately with him prior to the formal sessions, out of concern that Stalin might think they were scheming against the Kremlin. He smiled gamely when the American teased him in Stalin’s presence and made cutting remarks about the nefarious effects of British and French colonialism. And he acquiesced when Roosevelt turned him down for lunch in order to meet with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. “Stalin hates the guts of all your top people,” FDR told Churchill. “He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to do so.”4 When the prime minister made noises about focusing Anglo-American military efforts in 1944 on the Balkans and the Mediterranean, he was shot down: Stalin and Roosevelt would permit no narrowing of the parameters for the long-planned cross-Channel invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, which the three leaders tentatively scheduled for May 1944. Certain that the Soviet Union would be preeminent in Eastern Europe after the war, Roosevelt hinted to Stalin that he would not challenge Kremlin domination of Poland and the Baltic states, so long as Stalin made token concessions to limit objections in the West. (Here can be found seeds of the Cold War yet to come.)
In exchange, FDR got what he most wanted at Tehran: a pledge from Stalin that once Germany was beaten, the USSR would enter the war against Japan. Stalin also agreed to match the Overlord invasion with a grand offensive of his own, from the east, though he offered few details, and neither FDR nor Churchill pressed him for any. The three men agreed in principle to Roosevelt’s notion of a postwar system in which four policemen—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—would deal with conflicts as they arose (the embryo of the United Nations). France, they concurred, would occupy a much-reduced place on the global stage. And they determined that Germany should be dismembered after its defeat, a plan pushed hard by Stalin, who also wanted to extract heavy reparations. Details, again, were to be tackled later.
Though Roosevelt could later claim, legitimately, that he had made no formal commitments at Tehran, he certainly made tacit agreements, from which could be seen Europe’s future. As Charles Bohlen, a member of the American delegation, summarized the outcome in a memorandum: “Germany is to be broken up and kept broken up. The states of eastern, southeastern, and central Europe will not be permitted to group themselves into any federations or associations. France…will not be permitted to maintain any appreciable military establishment. Poland and Italy will remain approximately their present territorial size, but it is doubtful if either will be permitted to maintain any appreciable armed force. The result will be that the Soviet Union would be the only important military and political force on the continent of Europe.”5
All that still lay ahead. In assessing the war and its outcome, we should avoid the trap of hindsight bias, or what the philosopher Henri Bergson called “the illusion of retrospective determinism”—the belief that whatever occurred in history was bound to occur.6 At the end of 1943, nothing was as yet decided. True, the situation for the Allies had improved dramatically over the preceding months, with the clearing of North Africa in May, Italy’s surrender in September, and the Soviet successes in the east. But uncertainties remained. The Red Army was still confined to Soviet territory; it had yet to break into Eastern Europe, much less into Germany itself. The timing and outcome of the cross-Channel invasion was anyone’s guess. And in the Far East, the Japanese were on the defensive but had long since established their unshakable fighting spirit. The Pacific war might go on for years more—Jack Kennedy, from his perch in the Solomons, had anticipated as much—which is why Roosevelt came to the Iranian capital with the overriding goal of getting the Russians into that theater.
Yet it remains the case that a pronounced optimism permeated the Tehran discussions. No one present—not the leaders, not their chief advisers, not the staff assistants—would have traded places with the enemy, in any of the war’s theaters. And as Stalin’s toast suggested, an enormously important reason for the rosy outlook was that America’s immense productive capacity was now making itself felt. Churchill got the point—recall his relief upon learning of the Pearl Harbor attack two years before. There would be tough fighting to come, but victory would result. “All the rest,” he had then written, “was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”7
The numbers are startling. Beginning in 1942, huge numbers of American factories, many of them in California (which saw its population increase by 14 percent in 1
942), turned to manufacturing for the war. Often they operated around the clock, every day of the week. Auto plants made bombers; typewriter companies turned out rifles; dress factories sewed military uniforms. Rock-Ola, a Chicago manufacturer of jukeboxes, made M1 carbines, while Frigidaire, in Ohio, switched from refrigerators to airplane propellers and Browning M2 machine guns. By 1943, 41 percent of the gross national product went to war production; the arms bill for that year was a colossal $52.4 billion, including $25 billion combined on ships and aircraft and $5.9 billion on vehicles. By early 1944 the United States was producing 40 percent of the world’s weaponry. Over the course of the conflict, U.S. factories turned out roughly 300,000 airplanes, 102,000 armored vehicles, 77,000 ships, twenty million small arms, six million tons of bombs, and forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition.*, 8
At Ford’s bomber-producing Willow Run plant, in Michigan, which featured assembly lines almost a mile long, workers by early 1944 were turning out 650 B-24 Liberators per month, or one every eighty minutes. Pilots and crews slept on cots at the plant, waiting to fly the bombers away as soon as they were built. On the West Coast, Henry Kaiser used mass-production techniques to cut construction time for Liberty ships—the huge 440-foot cargo vessels that transported the tanks, trucks, and guns overseas—from 355 to 56 days. (In one publicity stunt, Kaiser’s Richmond shipyard, near San Francisco, constructed a Liberty ship in four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes.) In Long Beach, California, the giant Douglas Aircraft plant would churn out some 31,000 aircraft over the course of the war. Chrysler, meanwhile, manufactured thousands of tanks for the Army, and refined its technique sufficiently to build one Swedish Bofors anti-aircraft gun in ten hours; it had taken 450 hours to make one by hand in Sweden. In Connecticut, Igor Sikorsky opened the world’s first helicopter assembly line, while, in Maine, the Bath Iron Works launched a destroyer every seventeen days.9
The other combatant nations could only marvel at the output. In the all-important year of 1943, the United States built three and a half times as many aircraft as Nazi Germany and well over five times as many as Japan. In the Battle of the Atlantic, U-boats sank 105 Allied ships in the month of March 1943, but U.S. shipyards were by then producing 140 cargo ships per month, which allowed supplies to keep flowing. German U-boat losses, meanwhile, were mounting, and new ones couldn’t come off the line fast enough to replace them.
The American advantage went beyond industrial capacity and output. In terms of the various basic products critical to war fighting—coal, steel, petroleum, cotton (for explosives), and copper, for example—the United States was the best placed of all the combatants, and by a vast margin. With respect to petroleum, the most vital refined product of them all, the numbers are eye-popping: German crude oil production (including imports) in 1943 had edged up to nine million metric tons; the American total was 200 million metric tons. And the Japanese petroleum disadvantage was even greater—long before U.S. submarines had annihilated Japan’s oil tanker fleet, its navy and air force were already severely hamstrung by inadequate fuel supplies.10
II
Jack Kennedy, like most junior officers in America’s war, could see this transformational change in his nation’s global position. In Red Fay’s recollection, the issue was a frequent topic of conversation in the bull sessions held in Jack’s Tulagi tent in late 1943. “We felt the United States was now numero uno,” Fay said, “that we had taken that role, and the United States was leader of the free world—that the British and the French and the Allies really weren’t going to make it without us.” Isolationism, the young men knew, was dead back home, with only a small handful of senators still calling forlornly for America to go it alone. On the question “Should the Senate resolve its willingness to join in establishing international authority to preserve peace?” the tally was 85 yes, 5 no, 6 absent. The vote on a similar resolution in the House of Representatives was equally lopsided.11
And there would be no going back, Kennedy and his mates sensed. Already a quarter century earlier, Woodrow Wilson had deduced that the United States, secure in its domains, faced a world of qualitatively different threats, on account of the emerging technologies of mass destruction and the insatiable ambitions of great powers in Asia and Europe. Already then, Wilson had determined that Americans could not afford to remain insular, could not depend solely on their own military and the two oceans to protect them; they needed to actively engage with the rest of the world in an arduous but vital long-term project aimed at winning universal respect for the ideals of liberty and the rule of law. Wilson’s vision, which combined idealism and realism in a uniquely potent way, went unrealized through the 1920s and ’30s; now, however, in the midst of another world war, Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants were determined to create a new, Wilsonian world order—one led by the United States and serving U.S. interests but also benefiting other nations—based on free trade, stable currency exchange rates, and multilateralism.12
As the year turned, though, Kennedy’s principal focus was not on the grand political questions of war and peace, nor on the steady march of history, but on something more immediate: taking full advantage of his monthlong leave back home. With Inga Arvad summarily rejecting his attempt at rekindling their romance during his brief stopover in Los Angeles, he headed for the family home in Palm Beach, stopping en route at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, to have his health evaluated. On the plane he penned a brief note of condolence to Clare Boothe Luce, whose daughter had just been killed in an auto accident. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was to hear about Ann,” he wrote. “I thought I had become hardened to losing people I like, but when I heard the news today, I couldn’t have been sadder. She was a wonderful girl—so completely unspoiled, and thoughtful—and so very fond of you—I can’t believe it.”13
In Florida, his mother registered, with uncharacteristic abandon, her joy at having him back. She wrote in her diary, “He is really at home—the boy for whom you prayed so hard—at the mention of whose name your eyes would become dimmed—the youngster who you would think dead some nights & you would wake up with sorrow clutching at your heart. What a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him. What joy to see him—to feel his coat & to press his arms (& know he’s here) to look at his bronze tired face which is thin and drawn.”14
Jack went clubbing the first night with his good friend Chuck Spalding. From the start, something felt off. He’d been to war, had seen death and dying up close, and the sight of young people in a bar living it up as though nothing had changed was too jarring. “It was a great shock,” Spalding said, “having got back from this thing he’d been through, and going to this place where he used to dance all the time, and seeing everybody and trying to fit in. The difference between the tensions of being at war and the pleasures of Palm Beach. It was kind of a tough night, even for him—and he could usually make those kinds of transfers easily.”15
Others, too, noticed that Jack had been changed by his firsthand experience with war. The stabbing memories of violence and death had left their mark. Inga Arvad could see it—both in his letters from the war zone and in person when he stopped by in Los Angeles—as could Spalding and (in letters) Lem Billings. To his mother he seemed tightly wound, like a highly geared racehorse. Al Cluster, Jack’s squadron commander in the Solomons, detected a newfound seriousness in him, and a cynicism that many of Cluster’s men developed as they saw the disconnect between the supposed glamour of PT operations and the dirty, mundane reality, as well as the often nonsensical decisions by woolly-headed superior officers.16 Jack had become jaded, in other words, even as he remained a patriot, even as he held firm to the conviction that the Axis powers must be defeated and the United States must assume the responsibilities of world leadership.
“Munda or many of these spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again,” he had remarked bitterly t
o Inga in a letter not long before leaving the Solomons. “We are at a great disadvantage. The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed. But we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to insure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.” A letter to his parents from around the same time maintained the antiheroic mood: “When I read that we will fight Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must—I always check from where’s he’s talking—it’s seldom from out here.”17
He emerged from his war experience hardened, wiser, more mature, and with self-confidence from having performed his duties and earned the esteem of his men. Thrown together with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and economic circumstances, he developed a greater appreciation for the diversity of the American national experience. He was glad he had served. But perhaps in part because, at twenty-six, he was older than a lot of servicemen, he didn’t find the war as thrilling on a personal level as some did. He didn’t share the perspective, for example, of newspaperman Ben Bradlee, who served on a destroyer in the Pacific and would in time become a close friend, and who wrote of his own service, “I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared.” Kennedy’s view was closer to that of Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Lier-Hansen: “Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.”18