The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [189]
“Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact on our daily lives overshadows everything else,” he told an audience that presumably included a number of insular, skeptical Americans who wanted nothing of the duplicitous world beyond the borders. “Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social service—all hinge on the basic issues of peace or war. And it is a democratic America and not a bureaucratic government that must shape America’s destiny. Just as Clemenceau once said, ‘War is much too important to be left to the generals,’ I would remark that ‘Foreign policy is too important to leave it to the experts and the diplomats.’”
Here again resounded his greatest political insight: that foreign policy was profoundly limited in a democracy. Before World War II, he had seen how British politicians pandered to their constituents’ fears, tragically slowing the nation’s rearmament. Now in America, he saw the political establishment pandering to the American public’s fear of communism, proudly propounding cliches and simplicities instead of elucidating complex truths.
In Washington, policymakers envisioned a blood-red tide of communism rising across South Asia. Jack pointed out that communism was a different thing in different countries. In Indochina, what Americans called communism was equally a nationalistic movement. In Malaysia the Communist guerrillas were mainly Chinese, considered alien by the ethnic Malays. The Indonesians, for their part, thought of the struggle in Korea not as one against communism but one of whites against Asians.
His was not always a welcome message to Americans taught that this was their century and their world. America was a land of quick fixes and problem solvers. Jack, however, saw a world of intractable problems whose best solution was often the lesser of two bad options. Massive poverty was the soil in which communism grew. Yet America had neither the resources nor the ability to turn millions of people away from whatever course they might choose.
“Our resources are not limitless,” he warned one audience in a statement that his father could have made. “The vision of a bottle of milk for every Hottentot is a nice one, but it is not only beyond our grasp, it is far beyond our reach.”
Not that Jack wanted the United States to turn away from the world. In a perception that a few years later would be echoed in the popular press, Jack saw America’s diplomats not as ambassadors of diversity, but as a narrow, inbred social set “unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretation to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.” As it was now, these gentlemen were primarily emissaries from one elite to another.
Jack had a profound gift of political empathy. From the Suez Canal to Tokyo, he ticked off one complex situation after another. In Indochina, Jack’s comments were prophetic. When he talked to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, he did not pander to these businessmen but forcefully told them his rude truths:
It is France trying desperately to hang on to a rich portion of its former empire against a communist-dominated nationalistic uprising. The so-called loyal native government is such only in name. It is a puppet government, manned frequently by puppeteers once subservient to the Japanese, now subservient to the French. A free election there, in the opinion of all the neutral observers I talked with, would go in favor of Ho and his Communists as against the French. But Indo-China is a rich country. What France takes out of it today pays most of the costs of that bigger war…. We have now allied ourselves with the French in this struggle, allied ourselves against the Communists but also against the rising tide of nationalism. We have become the West, the proponents of empire—carriers of what we had