Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [41]
In May, Jack outdid that performance. He won a perjury citation against a Communist labor leader, Harold Christoffel, for his role in a wartime strike against a huge defense plant in Milwaukee.
He asked the witness why the union newspaper had strongly opposed war aid to Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of Russia, only to back it strongly thereafter. Why did it condemn “Roosevelt’s War Program” when Hitler was in league with Stalin, then call for “All Aid to Britain, Soviet Union” in a banner headline once the Hitler-Stalin alliance was broken?
Kennedy had harder evidence that the labor leaders were under Communist Party discipline from Moscow. A former party member had testified that the 1941 Milwaukee strike was part of a “snowballing” of such work stoppage aimed at crippling the U.S. defense buildup. The labor leaders had been lying and Kennedy had caught them.
“Would you call Russia a democracy?” Kennedy asked one. “I would not know. I do not think so,” he replied. “I think I would like to inform you on what I believe to be the main difference between socialism in England and socialism in Russia,” Kennedy said. “They have freedom of opposition which they do not have in Russia.” When his witness said he didn’t know if that was true or not, Jack went at him.
“Well, I do not think you are equipped to tell whether a member of your union is a Communist if you do not know any of the answers to any of the things that I have asked you.”
Deeply impressed by his young colleague’s work, the Republican chairman of the committee compared it to the opening shots at Lexington and Concord.
On June 5—two years to the day after the Allies had met in Berlin, affirming the total defeat of Germany—Secretary of State George C. Marshall was Harvard’s commencement speaker. He used the occasion to unveil a massive, complex plan for the economic reconstruction of war-torn Europe, funded by U.S. dollars. Though the Marshall Plan doesn’t seem controversial today in the aftermath of its great success—Time called it “surely one of the most momentous commencement day speeches ever made”—it had its detractors.
One of them was Joseph Kennedy, Sr., who regarded the European Recovery Plan—the Marshall Plan’s official name—as a terrible idea. A shrewder plan, he calculated, would be to let the Communists grab Europe, creating economic chaos that would lead to greater opportunities for businessmen like him down the road. His son disagreed. He believed that serious efforts to halt the Soviet advance in Europe were the only way to avoid repeating the mistake made at the Munich Conference of 1938, when Hitler was allowed free rein.
Had the Third Reich been confronted at a decisive moment, it was now believed, Germany might have retreated and never come to stage a deadly attack on Poland as it did the following year. The outcome of Munich, along with the thinking behind it, meant the Allies were thrown on the defensive. The World War II generation, having lived through the prewar appeasement and its consequences, had returned from the theaters of war in the South Pacific, Europe, and Africa determined to prevent a sequel to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives—and erased so many more. This time, the dictator bent on encroachment and annexation must be stopped in his tracks.
To young men like Kennedy and Nixon, the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which had divided up postwar Europe, carried whiffs of another Munich. It represented a buckling under to a new enemy, but one even more subversive in its methods and more pervasive in its ambitions than the one who’d died in his Berlin bunker.
This firm resolve to defend Europe from Stalin was hardly a policy Jack’s father, the ruthless builder of wealth, could embrace. Joe Kennedy had gone back to the isolationism he’d preached throughout the 1930s; his son, meanwhile, was moving in his own direction. “So many people said that the ambassador was pulling the strings for Jack,