The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [466]
Kennedy stood well ahead of any Republican opponent, but he knew that he was dependent on the will and whim of a fickle electorate. Like any president in the last months of his first term, he had put aside most of his risky ventures. Almost every single initiative and piece of paper coming out of the White House was dedicated to the reelection of the president. His aides thought they were profoundly committed, but he was even more attuned to the subtlest nuances of politics, whether it be matters of life and death, international politics, or some trivial local political squabble.
When Governor Harold Hughes called wanting the president to review a clemency request for a murderer about to be executed, Kennedy sensed immediately that if he reprieved the man, the citizens of Iowa would not be happy, particular in Dubuque, where the victim had resided. “Of course, they are anxious, I suppose, to have the sentence carried out, are they?” he mused, sensing the political danger in saving the man’s life, a danger he was not prepared to take. As he hung up, he asked, “Is your call to me, is that known?”
When Kennedy talked to Treasury Secretary Dillon about narrowing a tax deduction, he did not wonder about the equity of the decision but about the political costs. “I don’t know how much money we are going to collect as a result of all this, and whether it is worth the heat that these people are able to put on,” he said. When Red Fay called from the Pentagon to discuss closing down navy bases in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Boston, the president didn’t press the undersecretary of the Navy about the economic feasibility or the military purpose of doing so. Instead, he told his old friend bluntly: “We might just as well go home ourselves, then. If you like it down here, you better not close down … any of those yards.” And when he was contemplating sending Sam Beer, a Harvard professor, to Latin America as an ambassador, his concern was that Beer would be gone during the election year when he might be needed to placate the liberals “to keep them from going off the deep end.”
As Kennedy tried to tidy up his political shop, placing the most inviting items in the window, he was bedeviled by one matter that threatened to overwhelm everything else. That was Vietnam, an issue that he had hoped would stay dormant until after his reelection in 1964. Of all presidents who dealt with this issue, Kennedy had the least right to plead ignorance of the realities of the situation in Southeast Asia. He had followed these realities since at least 1951 when during his visit as a congressman, Kennedy had seen that however much the French pretended they were fighting a noble cause in Vietnam, they were essentially defending a corrupt colonial empire. He had also seen that an American government that thought it could help its ally by paying in dollars, not in blood, might one day learn that it had to pay in that harder currency as well.
Both the previous postwar presidents had treated communism like a dreadful infectious disease that had afflicted part of the world body and had to be contained or it would destroy the world. Every time it broke out, it had to be excised, driven up the Korean peninsula, bottled up within Cuba, locked behind the Iron Curtain. For a decade and a half, at enormous cost, the regimen had worked, and throughout his entire political career, Kennedy had been a vociferous proponent of this theory. He knew that a president who contemplated withdrawal from Vietnam risked being accused of political malpractice, of allowing the virus to spread across Southeast Asia and the world.
A quarantine, though, is not the only way to treat an infectious disease. In these months Kennedy was like a doctor contemplating radically different treatments. In April, he scribbled a note on a pad in the White House: “withdrawal from Vietnam as requested.” That was one prescription. The other was an escalation, of unknown size and duration, in American involvement. Three weeks later, in a meeting