American Experiment (346 page)

Within a few months of inauguration, Kennedy was plunged into both an intellectual and a military struggle over the meaning and application of those evocative terms, Freedom and Revolution. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had no doubts about these ideas and their relationship. If Khrushchev sensed in Vienna that the young President had never seriously read “Lenin or any of the Soviet theoretical writers,” which doubtless was the case, Khrushchev could not have known that Kennedy had read few of the Western theorists either. “Kennedy wanted to maintain the status quo
in the world,” the Soviet First Secretary would recall, including the “inviolability of borders
plus the enforced preservation of a country’s internal social and political system.
” More than ever Khrushchev saw his own opportunity to appeal to the potentially revolutionary masses of the world.

Fidel Castro was quick to advance his own Marxist-Leninist concept of revolution. Washington’s baleful hostility to him after the missile crisis— its continued efforts to bring down his regime, to sabotage electric power plants and other targets, and even to assassinate him—combined with his own increasing ideological militancy, helped to push the Cuban revolutionaries deeper into their embrace with the Soviet Union. But Castro continued to have his differences with the Kremlin, and not least of these was his rejection of sacrosanct Marxist-Leninist doctrine that revolution must grow out of the urban proletariat; Cuba had a paucity of urban proletarians. Régis Debray, a young Frenchman teaching in Havana, wrote, with the help of Castro and others,
Revolution in the Revolution?,
which turned upside down traditional Leninist dogma that revolutionary mass consciousness aroused by militant party leadership must precede revolutionary action. Military action must come first to produce that consciousness, argued Debray. And Castro’s close friend Ché Guevara prepared to crusade through Africa and Latin America preaching the need for revolutionary guerrilla action. Still, while communism looked monolithic to many in Washington, doctrinal disputes and personal rivalries sharply divided communist parties and leaders the world over.

More than ever Kennedy staked his Latin American hopes on the Alliance for Progress. Conceived in large part as a response to Castroism, guided by meetings of Latin representatives, buttressed by investment money from the developed countries, the Alliance was Kennedy’s kind of revolution. Two years after the euphoric White House kickoff, however, the Alliance was making slow progress in overcoming poverty in Latin America. The effort in Washington suffered in part from the usual bureaucratic delays, competing interests, and inadequate funding, in part from lack of political leadership strong enough to prevent diversion of effort away from the imperatives of the antipoverty struggle and toward the demands of the nation’s corporations and military. But the transcending problem was that Washington was attempting to work through existing Latin governmental structures and political processes, and with capitalist enterprises and assumptions, such as the protection of private property, that were inadequate to the aims of the Alliance.

The Bay of Pigs had been, for this vigorous young President, a bitter lesson in the confines and cunning of history—in the momentum of events, the tangle of conflicting forces, the power of bureaucracies, the volatility
of mass opinion. In the end he had settled for the middle way between no invasion and an all-out one—and the middle way had turned out to be perhaps the worst way of all. In the missile crisis he had finally settled on a mid-course between an air strike on Soviet installations and Stevenson’s proposal for yielding Guantánamo as well as Turkish and Italian missile bases in return for missile withdrawal from Cuba. This time the middle course had worked, but largely because the Soviets did not wish to gamble further on war when they still lagged behind the United States in nuclear arms.

From Western traders and missionaries Asian leaders had been hearing for almost two centuries about the republic that had rebelled against its English masters. Even in the 1780s American revolutionary scenes were portrayed on Chinese porcelain and wallpaper. Japanese in Nagasaki heard that “a military official named Washington, and a civil official named Franklin,” had stood up in an assembly and cried, “We must not lose this heaven-given opportunity” to sever relations with the English forever. After the revolution, rulers and subjects lived alike, Nagasaki heard, with similar homes and food; even when officials were clothed with authority and the masses regarded them “with respectful fear,” it was only for a fixed term of years.

Later, despite America’s imperial ventures, the Chinese still seemed to have a special regard for the white people almost halfway across the world. Sun Yat-sen, “father of the Chinese Republic,” noted how Westerners had extolled liberty and had even said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” though he added that “liberty develops as the power of the people develops.” Chiang Kai-shek studied the implications of the French and American revolutions for Chinese nationalism and anticolonialism. The young, poverty-stricken Mao Tse-tung, after reading about the American struggles for independence in a borrowed book, remarked to a friend about the “eight long, bitter years” of the fighting under Washington. During World War II, Mao praised FDR and Henry Wallace as worthy heirs of Jefferson and Lincoln. But the American war of independence was never really his kind of uprising. A revolution was not a dinner party or painting a picture or doing embroidery, he wrote sternly, but “an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Southern and southeastern Asians as well as Chinese could hardly ignore the lustrous example of a developing young nation that had thrown off the shackles of its own mother country. But Americans could ignore
them;
in a 1942 poll 60 percent of Americans could not locate either China
or India on a map. This was after Pearl Harbor, an event that swiveled American eyes westward and would forever alter United States relations with Asian peoples.

Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter of August 1941 had apparently proclaimed the self-determination of all peoples, but Churchill told Parliament that the Charter applied only to those under the Nazi yoke. FDR was in a quandary. Mohandas Gandhi, leading the nationalist forces in India, repeatedly appealed to the President for support, while the Prime Minister remained adamantly opposed to granting India its independence until after the war. As the Japanese advanced through Burma toward India following Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had pressed Churchill for a compromise acceptable to Gandhi and Nehru, and Vice President Wallace spoke publicly of America’s duty to oppose imperialism in all forms. Encouraged by Washington’s stand, Gandhi and Nehru were all the more disappointed and angry when FDR repeatedly backed off from a showdown with Churchill.

“Dear Friend,” Gandhi wrote Roosevelt on July 1, 1942. He told of his and his country’s many connections with the United States, of how he had profited from the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, how he cherished his personal friendships in Britain. Then the thrust to the heart: “I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home.” Chiang Kai-shek too urged the President to help “restore to India her complete freedom.”

Despite pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt and Administration officials, the President put first his military partnership with Churchill, and the imprisonment of Gandhi, Nehru, and other nationalist leaders in August 1942 ended hopes for a compromise. Roosevelt blew hot and cold over India throughout the war. Only a few weeks before his death he complained to an adviser that Churchill failed to understand that 1.1 billion “brown people” resented rule by a “handful of whites”—and “1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous.”

The struggles of the billion “brown people” gripped the conscience of American leaders following the war. Indian leaders—most notably Nehru himself—asked why a “revolutionary country” like the United States gave so little help to Indians in their struggle for freedom. The United States, in the eyes of many Asians, was tainted by its merely passive opposition to the efforts of the colonial powers to hang on to their possessions in Asia—especially in India and Indochina.

Onto this uneasy scene in southern Asia in 1952 came the sturdy figure
of Eleanor Roosevelt, fresh from her work on the United Nations Human Rights Commission. She had her own special recollections of the Indian struggle—not only of FDR’s deference to Churchill but of a curious telegram of condolence from Gandhi on her husband’s death that included “congratulations” that the President had been “spared humiliating spectacle of being party to peace which threatens to be prelude to war bloodier still if possible.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s journey to the old colonized nations of the Middle East and southern Asia became a kind of triumphal procession. In India she suffered endless entertainments, paid homage to Gandhi at the spot where he had been assassinated, visited famous caves, worked an old spinning wheel in the spirit of the Mahatma, dealt amiably with aroused students, met with as many women and women’s groups as possible, and was upset only when she was denied a ride on an elephant.

By the 1960s Americans had come to know much more about this Asian 1.1 billion—now approaching 2 billion—especially about India, which had a population greater than Latin America and Africa combined. They knew something of the intractable poverty that held village people imprisoned generation after generation, the staggering health problems, the literacy rate that ranged from 15 to 35 percent across the continent, the tens of thousands living their lives out on the streets of Calcutta and Bombay. What the American people did not know fully was the potential for protest and violence among the hundreds of millions whom the colonial powers had made dangerous. Gauging this potential was a task for leadership. As a senator John Kennedy had won attention for his anticolonial speeches. As a congressman he had toured Indochina and India, even interviewing a rather distant Nehru. Now, as President, he viewed India as the “key area” of Asia:

The new Administration, recognizing that India’s first need was stepped-up economic aid, quickly won from Congress a massive increase in funds for Indian development. Even half a billion dollars, spread over a period of years, amounted to only pitifully few dimes for every Indian and could have no more than a marginal influence on the vast subcontinent’s economy. More important were the psychology and politics of the new approach to India. Perceiving that no government is touchier than one that has just achieved independence, the Kennedy White House put far less emphasis on policies that had antagonized New Delhi in the past, such as “buy American” requirements encased in foreign aid provisions. It was now accepted that tax money exacted from Americans, including capitalists, would flow into India’s “public sector”—i.e., socialist enterprises. American politicians who abhorred planning had to accept the Indian determination to fit foreign aid into a series of five-year plans. And
Kennedy adroitly recognized India’s need for self-esteem when he sent to New Delhi John Kenneth Galbraith, perhaps the ablest—certainly the drollest—of a string of prestigious envoys assigned to the Indian capital.

Still, Indian policy under Kennedy continued to be heavily influenced by the cold war strategy that under both Truman and Eisenhower had tilted economic aid toward Western Europe, as a counterweight to Soviet power, and hence given aid to developing countries a low priority. While Moscow had its doubts about the Indian brand of socialism, the Kremlin had been only too happy during the 1950s to exploit Washington’s heavy-handedness toward New Delhi. The Kennedy Administration indeed inherited a set of Indian attitudes that would have given any cold warrior pause. Public-opinion polls in India during the late 1950s, even accepting a fairly large margin of error, indicated that Russia enjoyed more prestige and popularity than the United States.

How could this be? It seemed incredible to American pundits and politicians that the Soviet Union, which they viewed as a boorish, aggressive nation, could have made such inroads among the Indian masses. Certainly the reason in part lay in Soviet anticolonialism and its acceptance of India’s revolution. The situation changed abruptly in the fall of 1962, however, when Chinese and Indian troops fought obscure battles over disputed frontier areas. When Khrushchev informed New Delhi that Moscow would not intercede in behalf of India, Nehru turned to Kennedy for assistance. Putting aside his long irritation over New Delhi’s nonalignment policies and its preachings against the cold war, Kennedy responded quickly, graciously, and—within several constraints—practically, with light armaments.

Close working relationships between Nehru and Galbraith, and Galbraith’s successor, Chester Bowles, took some of the kinks out of the grim interplay of ideology and strategy. And a different kind of sojourner in India leavened the two nations’ relationship. During a visit to Washington late in 1961 Nehru had appeared cool and aloof even during informal talks in the White House, perhaps because of disappointment over Kennedy’s first year of militant foreign policy-making. The President later told Schlesinger that it was the “worst head-of-state visit” he had had. But the one time Nehru appeared his old self, the President noted, was in animated talk with Jacqueline Kennedy. When the Indian Prime Minister invited the First Lady to India, she and the President had accepted with alacrity.

The trip was a total success. The Prime Minister was most gracious, the First Lady most captivating—and she went on to Pakistan to maintain Washington’s evenhandedness toward the rival nations. Her journey to
southern Asia was the capsheaf of one of the notable foreign policy successes of the Kennedy Administration—winning the friendship of the Indian people and most of its leaders. And Jacqueline Kennedy got to ride an elephant.