The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [186]
This evening, though, Jack wrote down four lines of a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. That year British troops fired upon a gathering of unarmed, peaceful Manchester radicals and about fifty thousand supporters seeking the reform of Parliament. When the troops finished, eleven people lay dead and one hundred more were injured. Shelley blamed Lord Castlereagh, then the government spokesman for civil matters in the House of Commons. That may not have been a judicious rendering of the culpability, but in “The Mask of Anarchy,” art has triumphed over the interminable debates of history. Castlereagh stands remembered and condemned in a work of great and savage splendor.
Was there a Castlereagh among the leaders Jack had met this evening, an arrogant, myopic, reactionary politician leading his nation into unnecessary death? Was that why Jack chose these words? Or did he mean to suggest that a bloody hand reaches out to grasp a public man who seeks to change society radically? Was it that death waited up the road, an assassin holding a cool grip on his trigger, with history herself in his gun sights? Whatever Jack meant, a half-century later one reads these words with dread foreboding.
I met murder [on] the way,
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
Unlike Jack, Bobby personalized politics; he always hung ideas on a human face. On his earlier trip to Israel, he had seen Jews acting nothing like the devious, avaricious race he had learned about sitting at his father’s feet. Nonetheless, he was still more offended by those speaking with what he considered a pro-Jewish bias than by those who vociferously expressed a pro-Arab position. “Drove to Haifa with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and had all my questions on Israel answered but of course with a very pro Jewish slant,” Bobby wrote. “I think he has gotten so he believes it though…. U.S. consul a Jew. Talks about Arabs as if a teacher talking about child. FDR Jr. talks about Arabs ‘These people must learn if they don’t get on the ball we’ll cut them off without a penny.’ His love for common man stops at Jews and Negroes.”
In this part of the world, history was written with blood and vengeance, and a man who entered politics knew that he might die if he lost, or die even if he won. Four days after Jack and Bobby met with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, he was assassinated. In his diary Jack noted that “assassinations have taken heavy toll of leaders in Middle and Far East,” and then made a list of some of the murders. Jack tallied seventeen assassinations in the past four years alone. From Mahatma Gandhi in India to Count Folke Bernadotte in Palestine, murders often changed history the way few laws or mandates ever could. Jack was a student of power, and the lesson of this lengthy list was that in Asia the assassin and his dagger always lurked in the shadows of the throne.
Jack was far subtler in his judgment of others than his brother, and more understanding of the limitations of what some would call courage. When he sat down for lunch with Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not find the neutralist Indian prime minister to be a coward betraying the West. “Nehru—handsome … intelligent, good sense of humor,” he jotted in his diary. “Bored by westerners believes he is right—interested in … bigger questions.” Jack considered Nehru a wise leader who had made a shrewd assessment of the precarious position of his nation set between East and West.
Nehru repeated what was the central theme of many of the leaders and observers whom Jack was meeting: “Asia is at present the scene of great nationalist waves directed against the colonial policies of the West and seeking better economic conditions.” Jack was not blind to the upraised faces of Asia, but there was another issue that took precedence. Jack explained to Nehru that his