JFK and the Neocons Pt. 2

Kennedy Returns to Roosevelt

                         

When John F. Kennedy was first elected to congress in 1946, it is safe to say that, from the adduced record, he could be labeled a Truman Democrat. As author John Shaw notes in his book Kennedy in the Senate, the young congressman assailed President Truman and the State department for the alleged loss of China to communism. He also seemed to abide by George Kennan’s doctrine of containment and the domino theory.

But Kennedy’s views on these matters changed markedly in the fifties. Most commentators would say this began with his visit to Vietnam in 1951. There he met with reporter Seymour Topping and diplomat Edmund Gullion.  They both told him that France would not win the war and if America took up that cause, the same thing would happen: we would be on the wrong side of history.  According to Bobby Kennedy, who accompanied him on that journey, this input had a deep impact on his brother’s thinking. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 12)

This was reflected in some speeches and radio talks Kennedy did. For instance he said in the senate in 1953 that the Vietnam War could not be won unless the people “are assured beyond a doubt that complete independence will be theirs at…the war’s end.” (Speech of 7/1/53). Kennedy then offered an amendment to a military aid bill making “…continuing US military support for the French war effort contingent on French agreement to grant Indochinese independence.” The Eisenhower administration defeated the motion.

In 1954, Kennedy heard about Vice-President Richard Nixon’s attempt to herd public opinion into an intervention to save France at Dien Bien Phu. This included the possible use of atomic weapons. Kennedy harshly criticized this as wreckless and futile: “no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” (Speech of 4/6/54) In reaction, 24 hours later, President Eisenhower invoked the domino theory as a specter hanging over Indochina if America would depart. Therefore, John Foster Dulles now formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to protect all of Southeast Asia.

Kennedy would not let up and he decided to make this foreign policy dispute a campaign issue in 1956. At a speech in Los Angeles, Kennedy made his strongest attack yet on the orthodoxies governing both parties:

…the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies…In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution….has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism. (9/21/56)

After this, Adlai Stevenson’s office asked that the senator not make any more foreign policy statements for the candidate’s campaign. (Mahoney, p. 18) Kennedy pressed onward with his critique of John Foster Dulles and his dual penchants of ringing the world with alliances and attacking the Soviets with a string of bromides e.g. ‘godless Communism” “the Soviet master plan”.  He called these slogans “false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive co-existence in which we live.” (ibid, p. 19)

The showdown in the creeping confrontation came  on July 2, 1957 with Kennedy’s epochal Algeria speech. Kennedy seemed to be looking for a place where he could attack Foster Dulles,  Eisenhower and Nixon on the issue of colonialism vs nationalism in the Third World, while also bringing up the shadow of America’s support for the French defeat in Vietnam.  He reportedly spent about a year researching and writing this senatorial polemic. His wife translated certain articles from the Spanish and French. I will not go into detail about the speech, since I have written about it on this site already. (See “Kennedy’s Great Algeria Speech”). But I will say that if controversy and attention were the senator’s aim, it paid off in spades. For example, the New York Times called the speech, “the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.” (7/3/57)

I would go further than that.  It was probably the boldest and most important speech given by a senator in the decade. The simple message was that the USA should not back European colonialism anymore; that phase should be concluded. France had 400,000 men in Algeria but, as in Indochina, they could still not win a guerilla war. Kennedy said America should have two goals on the issue: to save the French nation, which was splitting apart over the war, and to free Africa.  In other words, in the midst of the Cold War, Kennedy was courageously and imaginatively harkening back to Franklin Roosevelt. (The entire address is in the book The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allen Nevins, pp. 66-80)

The speech created a firestorm. It was so candid and hard hitting that not only did the White House reply with howls of protest, but even Democrats—like Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson—were critical of Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy was so angry with Acheson that she bawled him out while waiting for a train at New York’s Penn Central Station. (Mahoney, pp. 20, 21) 

Kennedy was taken aback by the negative reaction. His office hired a clipping service, and out of the 138 newspaper editorials and columns, the ratio was 2-1 against. The senator was so surprised by this wave of negativity that he called his father and asked him if he had made a major miscalculation.  Joseph P. Kennedy told his son that he didn’t realize how lucky he was. Because the Algerian conflict would only worsen, and in several months everyone would look back on him like he was some kind of seer. (ibid, p. 21)

Which is what happened.  Five months later, Kennedy was on the cover of Time magazine. The inside story was titled “Man out Front”.  This result had also been predicted by  British writer Alistair Cooke. Cooke noted that by such a full bore attack on the Republican obeisance to European colonialism in such a brutal, ugly civil war, Kennedy’s somewhat shadowy figure was now spotlighted all over Europe. But more importantly, he had now made himself the Democrat who the Republicans had to ‘do something about”. As Cooke concluded concerning the upcoming presidential race of 1960, “It is a form of running martyrdom that Senators Humphrey and Johnson may come to envy.” (Toledo Blade, July 14, 1957)

Three months later, Kennedy repeated the themes of his Algeria speech in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine. (October, 1957, “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy”) In 1958, Kennedy took out a full page ad in the New York Times for the book The Ugly American and he sent a copy to every senator. That book billed itself “as the inside story of how we’re losing the Cold War.” (JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 377). The authors noted that if all the USA had to offer in The Third World was a demonic anti-communism then we might as well retreat to our own shores and build Fortress America. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, p. 23)

To demonstrate that this was not rhetoric,  during the 1960 primary campaign, Kennedy was rather simple and straightforward about why he was running.  In recruiting Harris Wofford as his civil rights advisor, he said that the most likely Democratic alternatives were either Lyndon Johnson or Stuart Symington. But if either of them was the nominee, we might as well elect Dulles or Acheson.  Because it would be the same tired cold-war foreign policy all over again. (Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 37). As we shall see, Kennedy was utterly correct about Johnson.  And on the eve of the Democratic convention, Harry Truman went on TV to denounce Kennedy and endorse someone like Johnson or Symington, among others.(ibid, p. 49)

Let us now turn to some of the things that Kennedy did once in office that were in keeping with Roosevelt. As mentioned previously Roosevelt and his emissary Patrick Hurley wanted Iran to be a free and independent country after World War II. Like Roosevelt, Hurley had little sympathy with British imperialism. He wrote in a report to FDR that the British must be made to accept “the principles of liberty and democracy and discard the principles of oppressive imperialism.”  He then advised that America must aid Iran in building infrastructure and communications. (“Hurley’s Dream” by Abbas Milani, at Hoover Digest)

Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson pronounced Roosevelt’s ideas about Iran as “hysterical messianic global baloney.” (ibid) After he resigned, Iran Ambassador Henry Grady criticized Acheson for not following through on Hurley’s large aid package and also letting England more or less run its own policy there. (Grady, “What Went Wrong in Iran” Saturday Evening Post, 1/5/52) We know what the results of that were: the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh and the reinstatement of the Shah.

The Kennedy State Department, led by Iran specialist John Bowling, analyzed the political forces there at the time and concluded that it would be likely favorable to support a nationalist Mossadegh restoration.  Kennedy was so opposed to the Shah that he even considered a forced abdication and rule in the interim by a regency under his son. But the ultimate decision was that there was simply not enough popular support left to return Mossadegh. (Devil’s Game by Robert Dreyfuss, pp. 224-25) Therefore, Kennedy insisted instead that the Shah reform his government to make it less despotic and more democratic. Thus the White Revolution was formed.

In Indochina, it was too late to make Vietnam into an independent country. John Foster Dulles had eliminated that option by splitting Vietnam in half and having Edward Lansdale install Ngo Dinh Diem as dictator in the south. But due to some archival releases in the nineties, there is little serious doubt today that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his assassination.  The May 1963 declassified record of Robert McNamara’s Sec/Def conference in Hawaii, where he was requesting withdrawal schedules from each agency—State, CIA, Pentagon—proved this.  (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126) It was so convincing  that even the New York Times had to admit Kennedy was planning to get out of Indochina at the time of his murder. (12/23/97)  

If there was a sliver of doubt left, John Newman in JFK Revisited closed it down. Newman listened to McNamara’s exit debriefs. There, McNamara said he and Kennedy had decided that once their advisory mission was over, America was getting out of Vietnam. And it did not matter who was winning or losing at the time; America could not fight the war for Saigon.  (James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 187)

A third example of a restoration  of a Rooseveltian policy is Kennedy’s attempt to forge a détente with Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis. No author has illustrated this in as much detail as James Douglass. Kennedy was aided in this effort by Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and Pope John XXIII. In fact, before Cousins visited Nikita Khrushchev in late 1962 Kennedy told him, “…I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.”  When the Russian leader heard this, he replied, “If that’s the case, he won’t find me running second in racing toward that goal.”(Douglass, p. 340-42; this issue is also dealt with in the film JFK: A President Betrayed) It was this opening which lead to what Kennedy thought was a crowning achievement of his presidency: the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963.

It tells us much about what happened afterwards that first, Khrushchev was blinking back tears when he paid his respects to Kennedy’s memory at the American embassy in Moscow. (DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 81) Secondly, that Bobby Kennedy wrote a letter to Khrushchev after his brother’s death telling him that their attempt at détente would now be put on hold due to Lyndon Johnson’s closeness to big business. But it would resume when he resigned as Attorney General and later ran for president. (Douglass, pp. 380-81)

As we shall see, this was only the beginning of several momentous and permanent changes.