The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [187]
Jack scratched all sorts of ominous predictions and reflections into his notebook those days in India. It was all enough to jar one’s faith in rational economic and social progress. His own nation had hardly entered the Asian arena, and he was already being told that “when [Indian] independence was granted U.S. most popular country now unpopular.” The United States had given generously to India, but if America gave a loaf of bread and Russia or China only a dried crust, it was the crust that was celebrated. He was told that “USA had given so much to other countries that what it gives is no longer appropriate.”
Jack saw how the rituals of faith and custom held the populous nation back from what he called progress. Here in India lived the true Brahmins, not the ersatz Boston variety, the highest rung of a rigid caste system that stood against everything Jack believed about the lives of free men in free societies. In America, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews had their quarrels, but it was nothing like the feeling between the Hindus and Muslims that had ended in bloody war and partition. One day, Jack talked to the man fixing his air conditioner, who “would not eat at home with member of different castes. I asked him why he does not like Muslims. ‘Because they eat cow meat and cows Mother of Hindus.’ “
As seriously as Jack studied the life and politics of India, it was lush, fertile Indochina that stood at the epicenter of Asian cold war politics and his interests. Indochina was the diadem in the crown of the French colonial empire. As Jack flew into Saigon, the heavy stench of war hung over the lush paddies in the North. There the dedicated, determined forces of Ho Chi Minh were fighting the legions of France in a merciless struggle. Jack noted in his diary that an attaché told him that while 184 members of Congress had visited Rome in the past two years, he was the first one to make it to Saigon. That neglect was a tragic dereliction, for American money was helping to finance the French effort. He was told that the United States had already spent over half a billion dollars. Where the dollar ventured, the flag might soon follow.
Jack was savvy enough to know that he had to reach below the elites of diplomacy and politics to get some semblance of truth. As he arrived at Saigon Airport, he was important enough to merit a greeting by top French officials and American diplomats. He quickly brushed by them and walked across the tarmac to a group of American journalists standing there and started chatting with them.
“I would like to have a talk with you,” he said to Seymour Topping, the AP’s man in Saigon.
“All right,” the young journalist told him. “I’ll come to see you.”
“No,” Jack said, “I’ll come to see you.”
That afternoon Jack showed up at Topping’s apartment in the center of the city. He spent hours talking with the reporter, who, as Jack noted in his diary, told him bluntly: “Two years ago Americans were popular, now people feel that they are already allied with French, should have maintained that French promise independence before we bought French. Now U.S. is more disliked than the Russians in South East Asia.” Here again was that persistent theme of American unpopularity. Jack listened well, and as he left he told Topping: “I’m going to talk about this when I get home. But it will give me trouble with some of my constituents.”
Jack also went to see Edmund Guillion, a State Department official deeply critical of the French. Guillion was an idealistic, liberal internationalist