The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [184]
“Why should they [the Russians] take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing?” he asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1951. “Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks they don’t have to—especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.” He was all for helping Europe by adding four new American divisions to the two already there, but he was equally in favor of the Europeans stepping up and contributing substantially more to defense. These were impressive, well-considered arguments, and it was not without reason that Boston’s Political Times headlined its article on Jack: “Kennedy Acquiring Title, ‘America’s Younger Statesman.’”
In October, Jack made a second, even more important journey, a twenty-five-thousand-mile, seven-week trip to Asia, traveling with Bobby and Pat. As Jack was about to set out, he mused to Lem about whether Bobby would prove “a pain in the ass.” The two brothers had never spent such an extended period together, and these weeks defined their relationship for the rest of their lives. Bobby admired his brother beyond all men. He admired Jack’s intelligence and grace and wit, but above all he admired his brother’s courage. He admired it because, in Bobby’s own words, “courage is the virtue” that Jack himself “most admired.” In Washington, Jack’s back had been letting him down so badly that he had been on crutches for seven straight weeks; he was finally walking freely only in September.
With his various maladies, Jack might have flown into capitals from Cairo to Tokyo largely to have his passport stamped, returning to Washington to read foreign policy speeches written by Harvard scholars, but he wanted to touch the world with his own mind. As he had done earlier in Europe, he kept a detailed 180-page diary, primarily writing down what others told him.
Jack was a relatively unknown, thirty-four-year-old, third-term congressman, but he traveled at the highest levels of political society. He did not walk into a president or prime minister’s office for a handshake, a photo, and a few perfunctory words, but in many instances sat down for serious dialogues in which he held his own. While many politicians retreated into the easy truisms of Right or Left, Jack was attempting to understand the complex, dark, uncertain world of 1951. This was not easy in an America that adored simplicity.
A dangerous new world was opening up before Americans. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death in April for conspiracy to commit espionage by giving atomic secrets to the Russians. The Rosenberg trial suggested to many that a massive Communist conspiracy was alive in the land. On television Americans were mesmerized by the mobsters appearing before Senator Estes Kefauver’s Crime Investigating Committee, testifying about another dark world that linked racketeers, businessmen, and public officials. A treacherous cloud rose above the atoll of Eniwetok in the Pacific on May 12, when an H-bomb was first detonated. In Korea, GIs were fighting a brutal war against the North Koreans and the Chinese.
In April, President Truman fired General of the Army Douglas MacArthur after he showed his disdain for presidential leadership by calling for a total war against China. As MacArthur made his dramatic, elongated farewell, the United Nations troops continued slogging their way back up the peninsula to roughly the Thirty-eighth Parallel, while UN and North Korean officials began negotiating a truce that none would dare call victory.
In Paris at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) on the first leg of his trip, on October 3, 1951, Jack met General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jack was impressed