Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [96]
In this way, Kennedy senior and the influential Krock were able to get the job done. Rose, not always happy with her husband’s backroom activities, loved this bit of work. “Things don’t happen,” she said with untroubled pride, “they are made to happen.” That May, no doubt in recognition of the Pulitzer honor, Jack was named to chair the panel to select the five greatest senators in history, their portraits to be hung in the Capitol’s Senate Reception Room. The quintet chosen were Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Robert La Follette, Sr., of Wisconsin.
The fact that Kennedy now was being taken seriously as a historian exerted its appeal over the Stevenson crowd, as it was meant to. Meanwhile, Kennedy won another distinction, one that would carry him nearer to the goal of influencing international affairs that had motivated him since first entering politics. He found himself appointed to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Now came his first curtsy to the Democratic Left, which needed to be a clear sign that he’d departed from his rigid orthodoxies of the early postwar years, a semaphore signaling that he shared the liberals’ more sophisticated attitudes.
On the Senate floor in July 1957, Kennedy called boldly for revision of the Eisenhower administration’s Eurocentric foreign policy. America, he said, should end its automatic alliance with its colonialist World War II allies and recognize instead the rising aspirations of the developing world. “The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile,” he began. “It is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” His criticism was aimed at French colonial rule in Algeria. Kennedy explained that France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu had not resulted from a shortage of military power. France would have lost the war in Indochina, he argued, even if it “could afford to increase substantially the manpower already poured into the area.”
The speech, certainly prophetic for U.S. policy, stirred up the pot, just as he intended. “His words annoyed the French, embarrassed the American administration, and almost certainly would not satisfy Algerian nationalist leaders,” the London Observer tartly noted at the time. “But they did one thing: they introduced Kennedy the statesman.” This is precisely what he intended. Lou Harris, Kennedy’s new pollster, was to confess that the “Algeria speech” had, in fact, been customized to appeal to the wing of the party whose backing his client needed. It was meant to show the liberals just how far Joe Kennedy’s boy had come. The irony, Harris noted, like everyone else who knew Jack, was that his boss probably read more and was a good deal more informed than those on the Democratic Left into whose political bed he was trying to climb.
Kennedy had been careful to embed his argument in sound Cold War thinking; that is, that the fight in North Africa was weakening the far more important contest with the Soviet Union. “The war in Algeria, engaging more than 400,000 French soldiers, has stripped the continental forces of NATO to the bone,” he declared. “It has undermined our relations with Tunisia and Morocco.” And, more directly against U.S. interests: “It has endangered the continuation of some of our most strategic airbases, and threatened our geographical advantages over the Communist orbit.” Kennedy was still anti-Communist, but now he was connecting this great cause with America’s revolutionary roots. “The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.”
Kennedy was remembering