Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [29]
For Jack Kennedy, the U.N. Conference was the right place at the right moment, offering as it did an irresistible mix of high ideals and high life. It gave him a view of the political arena that now beckoned him. The atmosphere he found himself immersed in was electric with the sounds and sights of a new world being born.
Wherever he went, Kennedy worked contacts both old and new, honing his skills at making professional allies out of social friends, and vice versa. You never knew where you’d see him, but he seemed to be everywhere. For instance, when he hosted a briefing on Russia by the diplomat and Soviet scholar Charles “Chip” Bohlen, he found himself in distinguished company that included the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman.
Along for the ride in San Francisco were two of Jack’s pals: Red Fay and Chuck Spalding. For the former he’d wangled the boondoggle of acting as his aide at the conference, while Chuck Spalding somehow was hanging out on the strength of a best-selling book he’d cowritten, Love at First Flight, a memoir of his wartime training experience. Young men home from the front, they managed to share laughs despite all the speeches and earnestness, including one memorable moment that occurred in the midst of Bohlen’s deadly serious analysis of Soviet intentions.
It was Jack who first noticed the elegant Harriman had slipped away from the room in the Palace Hotel where the briefing was taking place, and out onto the balcony with a young woman. “I give him about two more minutes, and then he’s going to hang himself,” Jack whispered to Fay. Focused on Bohlen, Fay wondered why his pal would say such a thing.
“I’m not talking about Bohlen,” Kennedy shot back. “I’m talking about Harriman!”
Also in the group with whom Jack socialized at the conference were Cord Meyer, another young veteran with big political hopes, and his attractive, vivacious wife, Mary. Meyer, at this time, was an aide to the Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen, but would go on to join the CIA.
For Kennedy, the business at hand was not just about filing stories or making the scene. As always, it was his curiosity that drove and excited him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the Soviet delegation, led by the coldly robotic Vyacheslav Molotov.
Along with the rest of the world, he’d seen President Roosevelt concede the territories of Eastern Europe to Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that February, only weeks before his death. Critics saw this concession of important strategic and autonomous lands to the Soviets as an unconscionable giveaway to a soon-to-be enemy.
FDR’s failing health might have been a factor in the outcome at Yalta; there on the shore of the Black Sea, he was pushing himself hard and losing the battle with his own body. But equally at play were other factors that Kennedy, with his growing fascination with the way nations behaved, saw and grasped.
But if he didn’t like the agreement Roosevelt had signed off on, he was able to assess it from more than one perspective. He knew his history, and saw clearly the unyielding strength of Russian nationalism. Napolean had invaded her in 1812. To repel the Grand Army, the Russians had been forced to burn Moscow. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Russians, once again invaded, were facing the harsh fact that they’d lost 20 million people fighting the Germans mostly on Russian soil, with their Allies slow to open a second front.
Jack Kennedy was displaying an ability to regard an adversary’s situation without emotion. In one of the pieces that ran in the Herald-American under his byline, he offered his own take on how the Soviets thought, and he ended it by reminding his readers of “the heritage of 25 years of distrust between Russia and the rest of the world that cannot be overcome completely for a good many years.”
Also, true to his mission,