An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (20 page)

In the winter of 1944-45, as he left the navy and settled outside of Phoenix to recuperate from back surgery, Jack wrote an article, “Let’s Try an Experiment for Peace,” which he hoped might contribute to postwar stability. The essay formed a sharp departure from the argument in
Why England Slept
. Whereas he had previously pressed the case for a U.S. arms buildup in response to German and Japanese aggression, he now warned against a postwar arms race that could precipitate another conflict and cripple American democracy. He predicted that an American effort to outbuild a big-power rival such as Russia would lead Moscow to match U.S. military might and would provoke smaller states to form alliances against the United States. As bad, such an American buildup would divert resources from productive domestic enterprise and the creation of jobs for returning veterans. Jack feared that an effort “to compete with a dictatorship like Russia in maintaining large armies for an indefinite period” would destroy the U.S. economy and democracy. “Democracy sleeps fitfully in an armed camp,” he concluded. Jack underestimated the economic benefits to the nation from continuing defense production; ultimately, it was, of course, the Soviet Union that could not bear the cost of the arms race. Nevertheless, he accurately foresaw that an international struggle like the Cold War would put a debilitating strain on America’s democratic institutions just as earlier isolationists had warned.

Although Jack saw his essay as innovative, editors at
Life, Reader’s Digest,
and the
Atlantic Monthly
all rejected it.
Reader’s Digest
thought the piece too “exhortative.” The
Atlantic
editor dismissed the article as “an oversimplification of a very complicated subject. Some profounder thinking is needed here and conclusions not based on cliches,” he said. There was some merit in this dismissal: Jack’s argument was in fact not much more than a statement of liberal orthodoxy in 1945 America. Arms limitation, disarmament, and world government were progressive prescriptions for postwar peace; even future conservatives such as Ronald Reagan considered them viable alternatives at the time.

If Jack lacked originality in addressing postwar armament and peace, at least he was well informed about foreign affairs; the same was not true of domestic issues. Yet he worked hard to round himself out. During his stay in Arizona, he became friends with Pat Lannan, a Chicago millionaire who was also nursing himself back to health. Lannan explained that “labor was going to be a very important force in the country.” “Jack,” Lannan told him, “you don’t know the difference between an automatic screw machine and a lathe and a punch press and you ought to!” Jack took Lannan’s words as a challenge and asked his father to send him a crateful of books on labor and labor law. Lannan remembered that Jack, with whom he shared a cottage, “sat up to one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate.” The episode speaks volumes about Jack’s combination of intense curiosity, ambition, and competitiveness.

IN APRIL 1945
, shortly before the war ended in Europe, in response to a suggestion from Joe, the Hearst
Chicago Herald-American
invited Jack to cover the United Nations conference in San Francisco. He jumped at the chance, perhaps seeing his work in journalism as a prelude to a political career—a career whose scope might be hinted at by the fact that writing for Hearst newspapers in Chicago and New York (the
Journal-American
) was not an especially effective way to win political standing in Massachusetts. In addition, in May 1945, when Joe wrote daughter Kathleen about a possible appointment in the new Truman administration, he said, “But if he’s going to give me a job, I’d rather have him give it to Jack and maybe make him minister to some country or Assistant Secretary of State or Assistant Secretary of the Navy.” That said, neither father nor son saw Jack running for office.

In sending Jack to San Francisco, the newspapers were not doing the Kennedys a favor. They received good value for the $250 a dispatch they paid Jack. As the author of a successful book on foreign affairs, someone with access to significant American and British officials—including the ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman; Soviet expert Charles E. Bohlen; and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden—and a navy hero who could speak “from a serviceman’s point of view,” Jack had credibility with his editors and reading audience as an expert on postwar international affairs.

However, just how hard he worked is debatable. Arthur Krock described Jack in his room at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, “dressed for a black-tie evening, with the exception of his pumps and evening coat . . . lying on his bed, propped up by three pillows, a highball in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other. To the operator he said, ‘I want to speak to the editor of the
Chicago Herald American.
’ (After a long pause:) ‘Not in? Well, put someone on to take a message.’ Another pause. ‘Good. Will you see that the boss gets this message as soon as you can reach him? Thank you. Here’s the message: Kennedy will not be filing tonight.’”

But however much of a social lion he may have been in San Francisco, Jack did manage to file seventeen 300-word stories between April 28 and May 28, principally reporting tensions with the Soviets and emphasizing a need for realism about what the new world organization could achieve. Jack explained that Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had shocked and frustrated the American and British delegations by his overbearing manner and insistent demands to ensure his country’s national security. Jack warned against expecting good relations with the USSR: Twenty-five years of distrust between Russia and the West “cannot be overcome completely for a good many years,” he accurately predicted. Yet the fact that the Soviets were participating in the conference and were interested in creating a world organization was a hopeful sign.

But in the end, the conference eroded Jack’s optimism. By the close of the meeting, he saw a war between Russia and the West as a distinct possibility and the U.N. as an ineffective peacemaker. He thought that the new world body would be little more than “a skeleton. Its powers will be limited. It will reflect the fact that there are deep disagreements among its members. . . . It is unfortunate that more cannot be accomplished here. It is unfortunate that unity for war against a common aggressor is far easier to obtain than unity for peace.” Jack feared that “the world organization that will come out of San Francisco will be the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.”

Privately, Jack expanded on his views in a letter to a PT boat shipmate. “Things cannot be forced from the top,” he said. “The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people,” but they were not yet ready for world government. “We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war. . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

With the close of the San Francisco Conference, Jack’s thoughts turned to political developments in Europe, where the British were about to hold an election and the victorious powers were planning a summit meeting in Potsdam, Germany. His U.N. articles persuaded the Hearst editors to send him to England and Germany to cover what they hoped would be the next big international stories.

After a month in England following Churchill’s campaign around the country, Jack reluctantly concluded that despite his indomitable war leadership, Churchill and his Conservative party faced a left-wing tide that seemed likely to sweep them away. Perhaps blinded by admiration for the man he saw as the most extraordinary leader on the world scene, Jack could not bring himself to accept Churchill’s probable defeat, and as the campaign came to a close, he forecast a narrow Conservative victory, although he did not think it would last long. It was only “a question of time before Labor gets an opportunity to form the government,” Jack told American readers. Labour’s triumph came sooner than Jack anticipated: The July elections replaced Churchill and gave Labour a landslide majority.

The conclusion of the British elections freed Jack to travel to the Continent as a guest of U.S. navy secretary James Forrestal. The secretary, who knew Joe well and was greatly impressed by his twenty-eight-year-old son, wanted Jack to join his staff in the Navy Department. But first he invited Jack to go with him to Potsdam and then around Germany for a look at the destruction of its cities and factories from five years of bombing, and assess the challenges posed by rehabilitating a country divided into Russian and Western sectors. In the course of their travels, Jack met or at least saw up close many of the most important leaders of the day: President Harry Truman; General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Britain’s new Labour leaders, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin; and Soviet foreign minister Molotov and Ambassador Andrey Gromyko. When Forrestal’s plane landed in Frankfurt, a journalist recalled, “the plane doors opened, and out came Forrestal. Then, to my amazement, Jack Kennedy. Ike was meeting Forrestal. So Jack met Ike.”

Watching all these influential but fallible men in action stirred feelings in Jack that he could do as well. His assumption came not from arrogance or a belief in his own infallibility or even a conviction that he could necessarily outdo the current crop of high government officials but from the sort of self-confidence that sometimes attaches itself to people reared among power brokers and encouraged to think of themselves as natural leaders. Aside from perhaps Churchill, he believed that his ideas were a match for the officials—East and West—he saw in action. The issue was to how make his voice heard.

ENTERING POLITICS
or taking on public obligations did not intimidate Jack. But it was nothing he had seriously thought to do as long as his brother Joe was alive. As he explained later, “I never thought at school or college that I would ever run for office myself. One politician was enough in the family, and my brother Joe was obviously going to be that politician. I hadn’t considered myself a political type, and he filled all the requirements for political success. When he was twenty-four, he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1940, and I think his political success would have been assured. . . . My brother Joe was killed in Europe as a flier in August 1944 and that ended our hopes for him. But I didn’t even start to think about a political profession for more than a year later.”

In fact, discussions with his father and others about a political career had begun earlier than Jack retrospectively claimed. There is evidence that Joe raised the matter of a political career with his son in December 1944, only a few months after Joe Jr.’s death, at Palm Beach. Paul “Red” Fay, a navy friend from the Pacific, who spent the Christmas holiday with Jack in Florida, recalled Jack telling him, “When the war is over and you are out there in sunny California . . . I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage.” In August 1957, Joe told a reporter, “I got Jack into politics. I was the one. I told him Joe was dead and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress.” At the same time, Jack himself told another reporter, “It was like being drafted. My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He
demanded
it. You know my father.”

But nothing was settled that December. Jack still had not been released from the navy, and his health was too precarious for any firm planning. He was also reluctant to commit himself to a political career. As he told Fay, “Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines ahead full.’” One day in Palm Beach, as he watched his father cross the lawn, he said to Fay, “God! There goes the old man! There he goes figuring out the next step. I’m in it now, you know. It’s my turn. I’ve got to perform.” Arthur Krock was asked later whether he fully subscribed to the theory that Jack was filling Joe’s shoes when he entered politics. He answered, “Yes. In fact, I knew it. It was almost a physical event: now it’s
your
turn.” And Jack “wasn’t very happy. It wasn’t his preference.” Joe himself recalled in the 1957 interview that Jack “didn’t want to [do it]. He felt he didn’t have ability. . . . But I told him he had to.”

Still, despite his father’s wishes, Jack hesitated throughout 1945. When Jack spoke to Lannan in Arizona about future plans early in 1945, “[he] said he thought he’d go into ‘public service.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard that term,” Lannan recalled. “I said, ‘You mean politics?’ He wouldn’t say ‘politics’ to save his life. It was ‘public service.’” Such a phrase covered a multitude of possibilities. “I take it that you definitely have your hat in the ring for a political career,” Billings wrote him in January 1946. But in February, Jack told Lem, “I am returning to Law School at Harvard . . . in the fall—and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it. I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.” Exactly what Jack had in mind remained unsaid, but it was clearly no more than a contingency.

If Jack was a reluctant candidate, he found compelling reasons to try his hand at electoral politics. As his former headmaster George St. John perceptively wrote Rose that August: “I am certain he [Jack] never forgets he must live Joe’s life as well as his own.” Joe Sr. hoped St. John was right. “Jack arrived home,” Joe wrote an English friend on August 22, “and is very thin, but is becoming quite active in the political life of Massachusetts. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him go into public life to take Joe’s place.”

For someone who prided himself on his independence—whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards—taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, “terribly exposed and vulnerable” after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an “unnamed responsibility” to his whole family—to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.