His second problem was of more recent origin, though hardly brand-new: the human juggernaut called Joe McCarthy. For four years, ever since the Wisconsin demagogue burst onto the scene with his notorious speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Kennedy’s strategy had been to sidestep the issue, to keep private his misgivings about McCarthy’s charges and tactics and to say as little as possible publicly. McCarthy was a family friend, much cherished and admired by Joseph Kennedy in particular, and had attended Eunice’s wedding to Sargent Shriver in May 1953. That year, at the urging of the Ambassador, McCarthy had hired Robert Kennedy to serve as assistant counsel for his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; although Bobby lasted only seven months in the position, he remained devotedly loyal to McCarthy, as did his wife, Ethel.1 Four Kennedys attended McCarthy’s own wedding, to Jean Kerr, in September 1953: Joe, Bobby, Pat, and Jean.2
Beyond the family ties, Jack understood all too well that McCarthy maintained broad and deep support among the huge bloc of Irish Catholics in Massachusetts. Yet he had no desire, on intellectual grounds, to back him—McCarthy was, to his mind, a cynical and dishonest bully who scoffed at the legislative procedures and senatorial good manners he himself prized. What’s more, he knew that retaining strong Democratic credentials required that he keep his distance, especially if he hoped at some point to win his party’s nomination for higher office. Nor could he hope to retain support among the Harvard and MIT intellectuals, whose respect he coveted, if he was perceived as cozying up to McCarthy.
And so he played for time—on both issues—and instead focused his efforts early in 1954 on staking out a more national profile. In January he shocked his Bay State constituents by announcing his support for the St. Lawrence Seaway, a proposed river transit system through eastern Canada, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes, that had been urged by president after president, by Canadian authorities, and by engineering and transportation experts, all of whom argued its value to the national economy in general and the Midwest in particular. In opposition stood an alliance of regional New England interests, and especially the Port of Boston, which felt imperiled by the low shipping rates that the seaway would permit. Their combined efforts had been enough to kill the project. As Kennedy himself pointed out, in twenty years of deliberations on the issue, not one Massachusetts senator or representative had ever voted for it.
Until now. When he rose on the floor of the Senate to speak on the seaway bill, Kennedy admitted that he had agonized over which way to go. There were compelling arguments on both sides, he told his colleagues, but the best one was in favor of the bill. Drawing on research done for him by Ted Sorensen, he declared that the seaway would not do the harm asserted, would serve the national interest, and would in all likelihood be built by the Canadians regardless of what the United States decided. Mindful of the hostile reaction that awaited him from Boston’s longshoremen, Kennedy insisted that the city’s port would suffer only minimally from the seaway and in the long run would indeed gain from its benefits to the larger economy. “I am unable to accept such a narrow view of my function as United States senator,” he said to hometown critics of his stance. The defection of a senator from a key anti-seaway state made a difference in the debate, and the bill at last passed. President Eisenhower signed the legislation in May. The Boston Post accused Kennedy of “ruining New England,” and even friendly editorial pages said he was committing political suicide. A friend on the Boston City Council advised him against walking in the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day parade, lest he suffer catcalls or worse. He ignored the warning and marched—and encountered only limited griping. He took it as an important lesson: one could go against the easy vote, the vote favored by one’s political base, and do the right thing, without suffering grievous damage as a result. Others agreed. “If I ever saw a person make a decision in conscience and on the merits,” said Joe Healey, one of his father’s attorneys, “it was the St. Lawrence Seaway decision made by Jack Kennedy.”3
An idea took hold in his mind. There might be an article worth writing, he told Sorensen, about senators in American history who had bucked popular opinion and risked their careers for the sake of principle. In Herbert Agar’s The Price of Union and Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, he had come upon stories of the attacks Adams endured almost a century and a half earlier after likewise voting against the Bay State’s narrow economic interests when he backed President Jefferson’s embargo on Great Britain in 1807. Why not write a series of compelling portraits of Adams and a few others who had shown similar political courage and lived to tell about it? Kennedy asked Sorensen to do some digging and pull some materials together.4
Tip O’Neill, who now held Kennedy’s old seat in the House, saw a larger purpose in the seaway vote. “I knew Jack was serious about running for president back in 1954, when he mentioned that he intended to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway Project,” O’Neill remembered. “The whole Northeast delegation was opposed to that bill, because once you opened the Seaway, you killed the port of Boston, which was the closest port to Europe. The Boston papers were against it, and so were the merchant marines and the longshoremen. But Jack wanted to show that he wasn’t parochial, and that he had a truly national perspective. Although he acknowledged that the Seaway would hurt Boston, he supported it because the project would benefit the country as a whole.”5
II
On Indochina, too, Kennedy struck an independent line. As 1954 began, the outlook was grimmer than ever for French Union forces, but Paris leaders were staying in the fight. They felt the need to justify the deaths they had incurred (a sunk-cost dynamic the Americans would themselves encounter in Vietnam a dozen years later), and moreover their U.S. patrons, who were paying an ever greater share of the war-related costs, would countenance no thought of withdrawal. To Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, Indochina was a key theater in the broader Cold War struggle, which meant France had to remain in the fight. At every opportunity, they told their Paris counterparts that seven years of war had not been in vain, that the anti–Ho Chi Minh cause was both just and essential, and that negotiations should be avoided until the military picture had improved and France and the West could dictate the terms.6
“If Indochina goes,” Eisenhower warned in a Seattle speech in August 1953, in an early articulation of the domino theory, “several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, with its valuable tin and tungsten, would become indefensible, and India would be outflanked. Indonesia, with all its riches, would likely be lost too….So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing.” A few days later, the president told two British officials over lunch that Indochina was more crucial strategically than Korea. It was the neck of the bottle, and it was essential to keep the cork in, which meant Congress needed to support an “all-out” effort in Vietnam for a year or eighteen months, even if it required the allocation of large additional sums. Vice President Richard Nixon spoke in similar terms, as did Secretary Dulles, with the latter telling Congress that defeat in Indochina could trigger a “chain reaction throughout the Far East and Southeast Asia.”7
Senator Kennedy was not immune to this kind of thinking. In late January 1954, he used the occasion of a speech before the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn to warn that Ho Chi Minh’s long-standing campaign against French colonialism had given him broad support among the Vietnamese people. Almost certainly, he would win a free election. Yet the loss of Indochina, Kennedy went on, whether by military or electoral defeat, would constitute a serious blow to Western security—“undoubtedly within a short time, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia and other new independent states might fall under the control of the Communist bloc in a series of chain reactions.” Most alarmingly, the administration, with its emphasis on military means and the threat of atomic retaliation, seemed to have no plan for
preventing this outcome: “Of what value would atomic retaliation be in opposing a Communist advance which rested not upon military invasion but upon local insurrection and political deterioration?”8
In March 1954, as it began to appear that France might soon lose the war, Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that such a result would inevitably cause the loss of the rest of Southeast Asia.9 Eisenhower, in a National Security Council meeting on April 6, endorsed this view, mixing his metaphors with aplomb. “Indochina was the first in a row of dominoes,” according to the notes of the meeting. “If it fell its neighbors would shortly thereafter fall with it, and where did the process end? If he was correct, said the president, it would end with the United States directly behind the 8-ball.”10 The next day, Eisenhower formally introduced his theory at a press conference: “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”11
It was a curious theory, really. In no previous case had the fall of a country to Communism triggered the rapid collapse of a whole string of other countries. Even in a weaker form, envisioning only a short row of dominoes, the theory seemingly bore little relation to reality. China, the most populous nation in the world, had gone Communist in 1949, but that event had not caused dominoes to fall (though many worried about what might have ensued in Korea had the U.S.-led forces not intervened). Yet the falling-domino notion would take hold of the American imagination for the rest of the decade and beyond, animating much of the public discourse about Vietnam and what needed to happen there.
Eisenhower’s immediate concern was a big battle under way at Dien Bien Phu, a remote outpost in northwestern Vietnam near the Laotian border. Contrary to expectations, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap got his China-supplied heavy artillery up the hills and thereby trapped the French garrison on the valley floor. By the end of March the Viet Minh forces had destroyed the garrison’s airstrip and were closing in on the main base. Recognizing the symbolic importance of the battle—which had become a media sensation around the world—the White House considered direct U.S. military intervention, in the form of air strikes, to try to save the French position, under an operation code-named Vulture. (Some American analysts even contemplated the use of tactical nuclear weapons.12) Congress would be leery of any unilateral U.S. effort, administration officials knew, especially on the heels of a frustrating and bloody war in Korea, and thus Dulles introduced the concept of United Action, whereby a coalition of non-Communist nations would pledge collectively to defend Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia against outside aggression.
Jack Kennedy was skeptical. In a powerful Senate speech on April 6, he blasted the administration for its lack of candor on the conflict. The time had come, he said, “for the American people to be told the truth about Indochina.” United Action had logic behind it, the senator went on, and he personally was prepared to back a limited multilateral military effort to prevent an all-out Viet Minh win, but he feared where such a policy would lead the nation: “To pour money, matériel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and destructive.” More to the point, would the United States ever be able to make much difference in that part of the world? “No amount of American military assistance can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” Any satisfactory outcome, he stressed, depended on France according the Associated States full and complete independence; without it, adequate indigenous support would remain forever elusive. It followed that, absent such a French move, the United States should under no circumstances send its men and machines “into that hopeless internecine struggle.” Kennedy concluded by quoting Thomas Jefferson on the vital importance of enlightening the public rather than hiding the truth.13
His grudging and qualified support for United Action was shared by many colleagues in both parties, as was his conviction that securing greater indigenous support was a prerequisite for success. Some lawmakers went further, wondering if any U.S. military intervention could be kept limited. “Once you commit the flag,” Senator Richard Russell asserted, in words that would take on a haunting prescience a decade later, “you’ve committed the country. There’s no turning back. If you involve the American air force, why, you’ve involved the nation.” And if you involved the nation, ground forces would soon follow. Russell said he was “weary” of “seeing American soldiers being used as gladiators to be thrown into every arena around the world.”14 Kennedy agreed, and he reiterated his skepticism that the military measures, if undertaken, would yield significant results. Turning the discussion to the practical implications of United Action, Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana, asked Kennedy what he believed John Foster Dulles had in mind when he’d announced the concept in an address before the Overseas Press Club in New York the previous week.
“There is every indication,” Kennedy replied, “that what he meant was that the United States will take the ultimate step.”
“And that is what?”
“It is war.”15
Kennedy maintained this cautionary line in speech after speech that spring. At a Cook County Democratic Party dinner in Chicago, for example, he stressed that the United States “cannot save those who will not be saved,” and that Asian nations must do their part in regional and continental defense. “Indo-China should teach us,” he went on, “that in the long run our cause will be stronger if it is clearly just, if we remain true to our traditional policies of helping all oppressed people, even though it may require unpleasant pressures in our relations with colonial powers and friends.” In Los Angeles, he declared that the American people were being deceived about the true situation on the ground, while in Princeton, New Jersey, he bemoaned the seeming American inability to perceive the actual nature and significance of the Vietnamese independence movement. In a television interview, he in effect called Indochina a lost cause and warned that U.S. intervention with combat forces would fail, because Mao’s Chinese Communists would only widen the struggle.16
Ultimately, Congress refused to give its support for military action in Indochina unless Great Britain also joined the effort. Dwight Eisenhower, who was more militant on Vietnam in 1954 than sympathetic historians and biographers generally acknowledge—much more serious about intervening militarily, at least with aerial bombing—now undertook an intense and concerted administration effort to persuade British leaders to get on board, but it was to no avail: Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were dubious that any multilateral military intervention had much hope of salvaging the French position, and they worried that it might precipitate a disastrous war with China, if not with the Soviet Union, too. Eisenhower refused to go in alone, and no U.S. military intervention occurred that spring.17
Instead, following France’s defeat and the (ostensibly temporary) division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, Eisenhower committed the United States to building up and sustaining a non-Communist regime in the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem. It was, time would reveal, a hugely fateful decision, not merely for his presidency but for the three that came after.
III
Kennedy’s comments on Indochina that spring, even more than his bold vote on the St. Lawrence Seaway, touched informed observers and ordinary voters like nothing he had said before. Letters flooded his Senate office, the overwhelming majority of them lauding him for his skeptical stance regarding military intervention and for, as one constituent put it, “remember[ing] there are Asians in Asia to be considered.”18 Editorials from coast to coast noted his admonitory words and ano
inted him an emerging leader in his party in the complex arena of foreign policy. “Keep your eye on young Democratic Senator John Kennedy,” declared a columnist in the Brooklyn Eagle. “He’s been getting a buildup for a nationwide campaign such as a Vice Presidential candidate.” Hanson W. Baldwin, the respected military correspondent of The New York Times, said Kennedy’s assessment of the war situation in Indochina was more accurate than that offered by the White House; Walter Lippmann did the same in his syndicated column.19
Others remarked that his growing visibility meant he would be utilized heavily as a Democratic warhorse for the coming midterm elections. And indeed, in the spring and early summer he crossed the country to champion party candidates for the House and Senate—he gave dinner speeches in Boise, in Chicago, in Pasadena, in Hartford, and elsewhere, delighting the attendees with his zingers aimed at the GOP in general and the Eisenhower White House in particular. In Malden, Massachusetts, in mid-May, a few weeks after attending his sister Pat’s New York wedding to the British actor Peter Lawford, he spoke on behalf of none other than Torby Macdonald, running for Congress as a Democrat in the heavily Republican Eighth District. (Macdonald would win the election and go on to have a long and estimable House career, serving for more than two decades.)
The heavy travel schedule wreaked havoc on his fragile body and did nothing for his young marriage. Newspaper and magazine editors, eager to cover the handsome couple, ran feature stories depicting a model marriage, in which husband and wife worked, studied, and socialized together. The reality was different. Jack’s dalliances with women continued. Jackie, like her mother-in-law early in her marriage, found herself alone for long stretches, and with few ways to nourish her interests in the arts. At Jack’s suggestion, she took an American history class at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (the only part of the university that admitted women) with Professor Jules Davids, earning B’s on her papers and an 89 on her final exam. When Jack signed up for a speed-reading class in Baltimore, with brother Bobby and Lem Billings, in order to keep up with the mass of Senate work, she found one for herself to take locally. (Both of them became amazingly fast readers, and with their superb recall scored high on retention. Jack, in particular, would regularly astonish associates with his ability to quickly absorb the contents of books and memos and then recapitulate entire sections with ease.) But they bickered over what he considered her profligate spending habits, and she chafed at his long hours and at the frequent work-related phone calls when he was home. “It was like being married to a whirlwind,” she later told a reporter. “Politics was sort of my enemy as far as seeing Jack was concerned.”20
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