The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [212]
There were moments, though, when another Jack Kennedy rose from his seat, a man imbued with the highest aspirations of his office. In his first term in the Senate, he did few things as memorable as his speech on Vietnam in April 1954. Everything he said that day could have been extrapolated from what he had seen and felt three years before on his trip to Asia. But he said it now on the floor of the Senate, his words unparsed by expediency, his logic true, and his words audacious in their implications. He saw that in Vietnam there was no possibility of preventing a Communist takeover unless the French granted a subject people their independence. He was in favor of the $400 million aid program only if the French worked toward ending their colonial regime.
“I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people,” he told the Senate. “Moreover, without political independence for the Associated States [Vietnam], the other Asiatic nations have made it clear that they regard this as a war of colonialism; and the ‘united action’ which is said to be so desperately needed for victory in that area is likely to end up as unilateral action by our own country.”
After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the French settled for an ignominious peace that split Vietnam in two, with Ho Chi Minh in the North believing that he had won only half a victory, and the South left a dissident, troubled land riven with all the scars of colonization.
In speech after speech, politicians had taught Americans to think of communism as a massive Red tide, the onrushing currents crushing everything in their wake. Jack thought, or at least part of him thought, that communism was more like a malignancy, a fungus that grew in darkness and want and could be cured or arrested by men of will and foresight. It was that image of Marxism-Leninism as “a kind of disease which can befall a transitionary society” that was promoted by MIT Professor Walt Rostow, whose thinking would influence Jack. This disease did not threaten healthy societies, or threatened them only fitfully.
Jack began to hold a very different, contradictory vision of the situation in Indochina. In some of his speeches he now saw the non-Communist South Vietnamese as a people worthy of American help, no matter what the cost. He took a step away from what he had seen and felt and knew to embrace ideas that pandered to American political clichés and paranoia.
“Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” Jack said in 1956. If South Vietnam was indeed the finger in the dike saving the West from drowning in a sea of communism, then its people had to be given whatever they needed, at whatever cost.
A scarlet thread ran through Jack’s beliefs. This was his concern over the omnipresent threat of the Soviet Union. He saw Russian communism as a singular monolith, the world’s greatest colonial power, an aggressor tempered by neither time nor opposing might. To him, this cold peace of the modern age was the continuation of war by other means.
In his private reflections, Jack could be as dark as his father. In preparation for one 1957 speech,