I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he look’d, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him.52
The Israel stay established the basic pattern that Jack followed throughout the trip: he would meet with high leaders of the country in question as well as top U.S. and foreign representatives, then some journalists or intellectuals. Sometimes Bobby joined him, and, more rarely, also Pat; often he went solo.53 And whereas a different politician might have been content with a handshake, a few minutes of desultory chitchat, and a photograph, Jack sought serious dialogues with his interlocutors. Thus, in Tehran, scene of the great Allied wartime conference eight years before, he met at length with U.S. ambassador Loy Henderson to discuss President Mohammad Mossadegh’s decision, only days before, to seize British-controlled oil fields. “The British have been extremely shortsighted here,” Henderson told him, in failing to give Iranians a large share of the spoils. “Almost stupid.” Yet the British officials Jack encountered seemed unfazed, assuring him that Mossadegh was a clown who wouldn’t last long. Jack doubted this assessment, and he sensed trouble ahead for the British in Iran—and, by extension, for the United States.
The tensions were no less great in Pakistan—four days after Jack and Bobby held a lengthy session with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, one of the nation’s founders, he was gunned down by an assassin. In his diary, Jack noted that “assassinations have taken a heavy toll of leaders in the Middle and Far East,” and then listed some of the killings of the previous four years. The Khan murder reinforced the congressman’s sense of the precariousness of political power in newly emerging nations, and his belief that Asia would become an increasingly vital concern for U.S. foreign policy. Khan had stressed the importance of Kashmir, which both Pakistan and India claimed as theirs, and gave his guest no sense that the issue could be resolved peacefully anytime soon.
Next it was on to India, where Jawaharlal Nehru offered no more assurances on Kashmir and proved an indifferent yet inspiring host. Over a lunch at the presidential palace, attended also by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, he mostly ignored Jack and Bobby and focused his charm on Pat, but after the meal he and Jack met for an extended discussion. Suave and self-assured, the British-educated Nehru, who would soon turn sixty-two, eschewed specifics in favor of the big picture (he breezily professed to have no clue when Jack asked him how many divisions the Indian army could field), and he defended forcefully his nation’s neutrality in the Cold War. Aware that the Kennedy trio would soon be visiting Indochina, Nehru called the French war against Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist forces there an example of doomed colonialism. Communism, he stressed to Jack during a dinner conversation, offered the masses “something to die for,” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War of the type the French were attempting against Ho would never stop Communism; it would only strengthen it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.”
Jack found power in this argument; indeed, he had argued similarly in his speech to the taxpayers’ group in Boston in April. And he could see the force of the Indian leader’s personality. Normally scornful of people who didn’t know their topics down to the specific details, Jack in this case gave the older man a pass, so taken was he with Nehru’s quiet eloquence. “He is interested only in subtler and higher questions,” Jack jotted approvingly in the diary. “Generally agreed Nehru is everything in India—the works. Tremendously popular with the masses.”54
In Thailand, the Kennedys toured the sites, including the Grand Palace and its Temple of the Emerald Buddha, and Jack got an audience with the prime minister. From there the Americans pressed on to Indonesia and Singapore and then Malaya and French Indochina. The Malaya stop was brief but gave the Kennedys a snapshot of the country’s protracted guerrilla struggle against British rule: on October 6, just days prior to their arrival, revolutionary forces had ambushed and assassinated the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney. Tensions, already on the rise that fall, ratcheted up further, and British officials insisted on giving Jack heavy police protection as he traveled without his siblings to see a mining operation just a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur.55
But it was the ten days in Indochina that would be the most momentous stop of all during John F. Kennedy’s globe-trotting adventures of 1951. (“The most interesting place by far,” he wrote his father.56) Even before the aircraft touched down at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat airport on a sunny day in mid-October, Jack felt a special sense of anticipation, for he knew that the war had become a major skirmish in the broader East-West struggle, transformed from its initial status as a straightforward Franco-Vietnamese affair into something broader, something that took it into the epicenter of Asian Cold War politics. Over the previous year and a half, Washington had steadily stepped up U.S. aid to France and its Indochinese allies, while on the other side Mao Zedong’s Communist Chinese government provided growing (if still comparatively modest) assistance to the Ho Chi Minh–led Viet Minh. As such, Jack understood, the Indochina war could have major ramifications for American foreign relations and, by extension, for his own political future.*3, 57
At the airport, the Kennedys were greeted by Bao Dai, the former emperor of Annam (central Vietnam), whom the French had ensconced as a token head of state. Jack noted that he seemed “in [S. J.] Perelman’s words—‘fried in Crisco.’ ” Then, on the drive into the heart of Saigon, they were startled to hear small-arms fire nearby. “Another attack by the Viet Minh,” the driver calmly explained. It was proof positive that the siblings were now in the midst of a shooting war, and that the appealing bustle of this “Paris of the Orient” was a thin veneer over deep insecurity and tension. The heavy police presence gave it away, as did the anti-grenade netting over the terraces of many restaurants. The heavy fighting might have been in the north, in Tonkin, where the Viet Minh were concentrating their forces, but Saigon lay in the heart of a contested area.58
That evening the three Kennedys whiled away the hours on the rooftop bar of the Majestic Hotel. Occasionally they caught glimpses of artillery fire in the night sky as the French took aim at Viet Minh mortar sites across the Saigon River. “Cannot go outside the city because of guerrillas,” Bobby wrote in his diary. “Could hear shooting as the evening wore on.”59
General de Lattre, second from right, with U.S. general J. Lawton Collins in Hanoi, October 23, 1951. Congressman Kennedy is visible in profile at right in the rear.
The next afternoon, keen to gain a deeper understanding of developments, Jack headed off alone to the apartment of Associated Press bureau chief Seymour Topping. The two talked for hours, and Topping laid out why the war was going badly for the French and likely wouldn’t get better: Ho Chi Minh’s support was too broad and too deep, plus he had the backing of Mao’s China, immediately to the north. Jack was struck by what he heard, and he got a similar downbeat assessment from Edmund Gullion, the young counselor at the U.S. legation, who told him American officials in Saigon were split in their views on French prospects in the war.60 In the days to come, Jack asked tough questions during briefings with the U.S. minister, Donald Heath, and the charismatic French military commander and high commissioner, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. De Lattre, who impressed Jack with his dynamism and self-assurance, insisted that France and its allies would see the challenge through and would prevail, but Jack was dubious. His doubts didn’t fade when de Lattre, after complaining to Heath about the congressman’s frank and questioning attitude, hosted the Kennedy siblings for a fancy dinner and arranged for them to travel north to see the fortifications guarding the Red River Delta approaches to Hanoi.61
“We flew over the paddies of the Delta where the French and the guerrillas were locked in a deadly struggle, and through which the Chinese must come if they seize Southeast Asia,” Jack related in a speech a few weeks later, when back
on U.S. soil. “Marshal de Lattre pointed from the window of the plane with the cane he had carried since his only son’s death in the fighting of last summer. ‘As long as the Delta can be held,’ he said, ‘Indo China can be held, but if the Delta is lost, Indo China and all of Southeast Asia will be lost with all of its resources and all of its manpower.’ ” All well and good, Jack thought, but how could such an outcome be prevented? The key to victory, he told his audience, “is to get the Asians themselves to assume the burden of the struggle. As long as it’s a conflict between native communists and western imperialists, success will be impossible. This then must be the pattern for all of our future actions in the Far East. The support of the legitimate aspirations of the people of this area against all who seek to dominate them—from whatever quarter they may come.”62
In a diary entry from Vietnam, he spoke in similar terms: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want.” U.S. officials, he said, must avoid the path trodden by the declining European empires and instead demonstrate that the enemy is not just Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which were a feature of life for millions of Asians and Arabs.
Bobby saw things in much the same way. “It is generally agreed,” he wrote his father from Saigon, “that if a plebiscite were held now throughout the former Indochina the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would receive at least 70% of the vote. Because of the great U.S. war aid to the French we are being closely identified with the French the result being that we have also become quite unpopular. Our mistake has been not to insist on definite political reforms by the French toward the natives as prerequisites to any aid. As it stands now we are becoming more & more involved in the war to a point where we can’t back out….It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a very bright future.”63
VI
Jack’s fears that Bobby would be a “pain in the ass” travel companion proved wholly unfounded. From day one to the end, he found he valued his little brother’s insights, his energy, his good cheer. They grew closer, bonded in a way they had never done before. Pat could see the change in their relationship, as could other family members after they returned home. They themselves sensed it. When Jack fell deathly ill in Tokyo—most likely from a flare-up of his Addison’s disease—and was rushed by military aircraft to a U.S. Navy hospital on Okinawa, Bobby never left his side.64 As Jack’s temperature soared past 106 degrees and the hospital staff feared they would lose him, his brother’s steadfastness calmed everyone’s nerves, including the patient’s.
Earlier in the trip, Jack had jotted down some lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which now seemed addressed specifically to him:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
Later, Bobby related of the Okinawa scare that “everybody there just expected he’d die.”65 But he didn’t. Within a few days Jack regained his strength and the crisis passed, whereupon the trio continued on to Korea, where the war was stalemated around the thirty-eighth parallel, with no end in sight. The sheer difficulty of the rugged terrain surprised the brothers and helped them better understand why the fighting had proved so challenging for American troops. Jack further concluded that inadequate airpower had been instrumental: if MacArthur had been given a sufficient number of planes, he never would have been subjected to the massive counterattack the Chinese had launched against his units the previous fall.
Upon returning to the United States, Jack wasted few opportunities to talk up the expedition and to stress that Americans ignored world developments at their peril. Foreign policy mattered enormously, he told several audiences, indeed overshadowed all else. But the choices for statesmen were not easy, for the world was a complex place. Communism might mean one thing in country A and something else in country B and yet another thing in country C; U.S. policy had to respond accordingly.
“I cannot say that I have returned pleased by our achievements through these critical post-war years,” he told a nationwide radio audience over the Mutual Broadcasting Network in mid-November. “Certainly, I do not and one cannot blame America and her policies for all that has happened, for no matter what America might have done, nothing could have avoided nor will avoid the inevitable birth-pangs of Asia’s rising nationalism. But mindful of this turmoil I should have hoped that with our traditional concern for the independence of other peoples, our generosity, our desire to relieve poverty and inequality, we would—whatever else happened—have made friends throughout this world. It is tragic that not only have we made no new friends, but we have lost old ones.” More than anything, the experience of seeing the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Far East up close demonstrated for him that the Communist threat “cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. It is the peoples themselves that must be led to reject it, and it is to those peoples that our policies must be directed.”66
With respect to Indochina, Jack declared before the Boston Chamber of Commerce a few days later that France was “desperately trying to hang on to a rich portion of its former empire against a communist-dominated nationalist uprising.”
The so-called loyal native government is such only in name. It is a puppet government, manned frequently by puppeteers once subservient to the Japanese, now subservient to the French. A free election there, in the opinion of all the neutral observers I talked with, would go in favor of Ho and his Communists as against the French….We have now allied ourselves with the French in this struggle, allied ourselves against the Communists but also against the rising tide of nationalism. We have become the West, the proponents of empire—carriers of what we had traditionally disdained—the white man’s burden.67
On NBC’s nationally televised Meet the Press on December 2—a show on which no junior congressman had ever appeared—Jack stayed on the theme, telling the journalist panel that in Asia and the Middle East, the United States had “fallen heir to much of the hatred [the European imperial powers had] incurred by their policies,” and that it could never succeed if it sought merely to impose its will on other countries.68 To panelist May Craig’s suggestion that U.S. troops in Korea were not being permitted to fight to win, Jack gently pushed back; military victory might not be possible, he told her, and thus the administration was doing the right thing in pursuing a negotiated settlement. (“Yes, I do believe that we ought to take agreement where we can get it.”) And to Newsweek’s Ernest Lindley he said that in Indochina no success would be possible until the “natives” were promised the right of self-determination and the right to govern themselves—and by a specific date. “Otherwise this guerrilla war is just going to spread and grow and we’re going to finally get driven out of Southeast Asia.”69
Kennedy before the Boston Chamber of Commerce after his return from Asia, November 1951.
Here we find the second reason why Jack Kennedy’s Asian tour of 1951 matters in historical terms (the first being that it caused him and Bobby to grow much closer): it altered his outlook on U.S. diplomacy in what would come to be called the Third World. Already in previous months he had moved away from the simplistic idea that the spread of Communism in Asia occurred only or mostly because of State Department bungling; the expedition reinforced this shift. More important, the trip convinced him that America must align itself with the newly emerging nations, that colonialism was a spent force, and that Communism could never be vanquished exclusively or even principally by military means. One had to meet colonized and recently independent peoples where they lived, had to speak to their needs, their aspirations. Did U.S. officials understand these essential truths? Jack was skeptical. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he told r
eporters in November, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”70
In Robert Kennedy’s later assessment, the trip left “a very major impression” on his brother, for it showed “these countries from the Mediterranean to the South China sea all…searching for a future; what their relationship was going to be to the United States; what we were going to do in our relationship to them; the importance of the right kind of representation; the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional, transitory; the mistakes of the war in Indochina; the mistake of the French policy; the failure of the United States to back the people.”71
Jack’s problem, one he would wrestle with throughout the rest of the decade, was how to align this more subtle interpretation of Communism and Cold War dynamics with the increasingly Manichaean political debate at home in the United States. As an ambitious politician angling for higher office, he understood that many voters liked simple explanations and quick fixes, and moreover that Republicans in the forthcoming 1952 election would seek to discredit the Democrats at every turn, hammering hard on the theme that Truman’s party was weak-kneed and irresolute on combating Communist agitation at home and abroad.
He knew, moreover, that Joe McCarthy continued to ride high. Back in April, after Truman fired Douglas MacArthur for publicly airing his disagreements with the White House over the conduct of the Korean War, the Wisconsin senator condemned the action and called for the president’s impeachment. Two months after that, on the Senate floor, McCarthy had gone after none other than General George C. Marshall, who had been Army chief of staff during World War II and then had led the State and Defense departments. He was a national symbol, an icon, a man seemingly beyond reproach, yet McCarthy charged him with “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man; a conspiracy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” Specifically, McCarthy proclaimed, Marshall had willfully allowed China to be lost and had squandered American prestige and power. Democrats were outraged and called on GOP leaders to condemn the speech, but McCarthy’s colleagues mostly stayed silent, while the right-wing press heaped praise on his assessment. That fall, while the Kennedy siblings journeyed through Asia, the Wisconsin man again claimed that the State Department harbored Communists.72
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