Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (54 page)

It seems certain that, regardless of the sovietisation of Eastern Europe, differences would have arisen over Germany between the Allies. Indeed, this would have been the case whether Russia was run by Stalin or the tsars. But, that said, the key point surely is that the sovietisation of Eastern Europe was
not
merely a natural geopolitical response to a long-term security challenge. However hard some tried - and both Carr and Litvinov in their own way did so as an article of faith - one simply could not remove the ideological factor from international relations and substitute for it the mechanistic philosophy of the balance of power characteristic of the eighteenth century and the latter half of the nineteenth. In this sense perhaps the Cold War was inevitable - just as Gladwyn Jebb suggested.

Diane Kunz

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

 

 

 

The Cold War is over and the statues of Marx and Lenin have fallen to the ground - but John F. Kennedy’s image, though tarnished, remains fundamentally intact. In the years after his death, a legend of Camelot on the Potomac took root. According to this myth, propagated in large part by the Kennedy family and court, John F. Kennedy was a kind of King Arthur in modern dress. His advisers were modern Knights of the Round Table and Jacqueline Kennedy his noble Guinevere. More recently, it has become clear that Kennedy’s private life was anything but Arthurian. But his reputation as a
public
figure - as a great President gunned down in his prime - has been subjected to far less scrutiny.

Not surprisingly, no aspect of the Kennedy legend has proved more durable than the notion that, had he lived, the United States would never have become mired in the Vietnam conflict. That faraway war in a country of which Americans knew next to nothing gravely weakened the power of the Democratic party while making many Americans question the value of democracy. Not only was it the first war that the United States clearly lost. In addition, the shameful aspects of the American role in the conflict and the ignominious departure from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) of the last remaining American personnel in the spring of 1975 gave rise to a vociferous anti-establishment movement, deeply dividing American society. How nice it would be to believe that the Vietnam débâcle was not the result of ill-timed and ill-conceived American ideas but rather the fault of one man: Lee Harvey Oswald.

This myth has respectable sponsors. Former presidential advisers such as McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, for example, (as recently as 1993 and 1995) have speculated that Kennedy would have ended the American military commitment after the 1964 presidential elections.
¹
Less respectably but more influentially, the film-maker Oliver Stone has suggested in the movie
JFK
that because Kennedy was about to order the United States to pull out of Vietnam a dark conspiracy of munitions-makers and military officers - perhaps with Lyndon Johnson’s support - arranged to have him killed.
²

The Kennedy myth has a domestic component too, inspired by the persistent racial divisions within American society. This is that Kennedy, together with his brother Robert, had a unique empathy with African-Americans. After all, did not Jack preside over the beginning of the civil rights revolution? With memories of the inspiring March on Washington of August 1963 still vibrant, Americans of all races continue to carry a torch for both Kennedys. Had Jack lived, so the argument runs, the second American reconstruction of the South might have come to fruition without the bloodshed and racial division of the past thirty years.

Fairy stories are necessary for children. Historians ought to know better. In fact, John F. Kennedy was a mediocre president. Had he obtained a second term, federal civil rights policy during the 1960s would have been substantially less productive and US actions in Vietnam no different from what actually occurred. His tragic assassination was not a tragedy for the course of American history.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917. His name reflected his dual Irish heritage. His mother’s father and his namesake John Fitzgerald had been among the first generation of Irish politicians to wrest political office from the Yankee WASP elite. Honey Fitz was mayor of Boston, the most Irish city in the world, from 1906 to 1908 and again between 1910 and 1914. A politician down to his core, he was driven from public life by a scandalous relationship with a twenty-three-year-old cigarette girl named Toodles.
³
His daughter Rose was educated to be at home in the Catholic woman’s world of domesticity and devotion.

The Kennedys occupied a lower rung of Boston’s immigrant Irish social ladder. Patrick Kennedy was the son of a saloon keeper, who became a local politician and power broker. True, his son Joseph P. Kennedy obtained admission to Harvard, the oldest university in the United States. But Kennedy’s Cambridge years followed a different path from that enjoyed by WASP scions such as Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt. The elite clubs that loomed so large in both Roosevelts’ remembrances of their bright college years barred their doors to the likes of Joe Kennedy: Irish Catholics were not welcome in those exclusive precincts. Both Roosevelts had politics firmly at the centre of their ambitions at an early age. By contrast, Kennedy - though his father and father-in-law were politicians - intended to make serious money. His trajectory during two decades after his graduation in 1912 was financially if not socially upward: banker, steel man, movie mogul, bootlegger and stock-market speculator. Having the sense to sell most of his Wall Street holdings in the spring and summer of 1929, he escaped the crash unscathed with a spectacular fortune that he hoped would buy him social respectability and national political power. During the 1920s Joe had thumbed his nose at Boston and New York society. He now backed Franklin Roosevelt for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, expecting a serious
quid pro quo.
As chairman of the newly established Securities and Exchange Commission Joe, poacher turned policeman, enforced regulations prohibiting others from making money in the underhand ways he himself had employed. Although disappointed by his next job as chairman of the Maritime Commission, Kennedy nevertheless made the most of his continuing role on the political stage. His success at bureaucratic re-engineering, coupled with his understanding that what you did was less important than what people thought you did, brought him steady publicity.

Eager to reward Kennedy for a job well done (and get him far away from Washington), Roosevelt appointed Joe ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. Having grown up with WASP prejudices against shanty Irish ringing in his ears, Kennedy relished becoming the first Irish-American ambassador to the Court of St James. With him to London came Rose and their nine children. The eldest, Joe Jr, bore lightly the strains of being his father’s chosen vehicle for the next level of achievement - Joe Jr would enter politics and nothing would stop his rise to the top. Jack, a sickly version of his elder brother, became the family clown. But all the Kennedy children were raised with the same principles: winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing; anything is permissible to succeed; have no idols except for the family - the Kennedy family, that is. Why the family should want political power was not discussed; it was accepted that power was its own reward. Indicative of the prevailing attitude was Jack’s observation in 1960 that Eleanor Roosevelt (widow of Franklin) disliked him because ‘She hated my father and she can’t stand it that his children turned out so much better than hers.’ It never occurred to him that Eleanor Roosevelt might dislike him on principled political grounds.
⁴
No doubt, worship of the family is a virtuous secondary good. But democratic rule is based on a devotion to ideas not siblings. Though they portrayed themselves as the inheritors of Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt, the Kennedys proved to be more akin to the Medici.

Jack’s career reflected his upbringing. The wartime death of his brother Joe left him the heir apparent. Stepping into Joe’s shoes, he followed his father’s programme, successfully running for Congress in 1946, for Senator in 1952 and for President in 1960. Rumours still persist that the Kennedy forces ‘stole’ the election. Richard Daley, Chicago mayor and boss of the formidable Cook County Democratic machine, allegedly held back Chicago’s heavily Democratic votes until the downstate Illinois Republican numbers had been tallied. In the event, Chicago’s Kennedy votes swung the state for the Democratic nominee. That the Texas returns gave that state narrowly to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket did not go unnoticed either; allies of vice-presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson controlled its electoral machinery too. But outwardly each campaign was a family effort, featuring Rose’s teas for Democratic women, brother Bobby’s generalship and, most importantly, Joe’s money. Like father, like son: Jack’s passions were about evenly divided between the chase for office and the chase for women. Joe’s conquests ranged from the famous, such as movie star Gloria Swanson, to his sons’ and daughters’ less celebrated friends. His son ranged still wider, carrying on with Marilyn Monroe, alleged Nazi and East German spies, Mafia molls, the wives of his friends and the friends of his wife.

The Kennedy years coincided with the apogee of the civil rights movement, the push by African-Americans for the legal and constitutional rights that had been denied them most egregiously in the South since the American Civil War a century before. The 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision by the Supreme Court outlawing segregated facilities had spawned a revolution and counter-revolution in the Southern American states. Emboldened by the decision, African-Americans organised as never before to dismantle the dual-system apartheid of schools, parks, buses, housing and public facilities that characterised the United States below the Mason-Dixon line. At the same time, Southern whites closed ranks, determined to enforce ‘our way of life’ against all challenges. In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower, who personally wished that the Supreme Court had not overturned statesponsored segregation, reluctantly sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the peace during the integration of its Central High School.
⁵
Kennedy, then a Senator, criticised the President for sending these soldiers. The photographs of federal troops pointing rifles at angry mothers and fathers provided a propaganda feast for the Soviet Union.
⁶

During the 1960 campaign the Kennedy people did their best to keep civil rights from becoming an issue. But on 19 October local policemen arrested the Revd Martin Luther King Jr, soon to become the most prominent individual in the movement, while he was attempting to desegregate Rich’s department store in Atlanta. Other demonstrators were released on bail but six days later the judge sentenced King to four months in jail. Hard evidence supported widespread fears that King would be killed while incarcerated. Vice-President and Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon believed that King was ‘getting a bum rap’ but, bowing to legal niceties, he refused to intervene. Robert Kennedy, serving as his brother’s campaign manager, made that effort while Jack called Mrs King to reassure her. As a result, King, who had voted Republican in 1956, and his father, the Revd Martin Luther King Sr, who had endorsed Nixon, both switched sides. The senior Revd King announced, ‘I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr Kennedy and dump them in his lap.’ Nixon had counted on significant support from African-Americans still grateful to the party of Lincoln; his hopes now vanished.
⁷

Kennedy’s inaugural address, given on an unusually cold 20 January, summoned Americans to ‘bear the burden of a long twilight struggle’, to ‘ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country’.
⁸
Although Martin Luther King did not receive an invitation to the inaugural ceremonies, millions of his followers took Kennedy’s soaring words as a call to action. In the spring of 1961 members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began the so-called ‘Freedom Rides’. Their goal was to test the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s December 1960 ruling which declared unconstitutional the segregation of facilities serving interstate travellers. When they reached Rock Hill, South Carolina, a mob of whites severely beat a fifty-fiveyear-old white Freedom Rider. Then, in Anniston, Alabama, all hell broke loose. A group of whites ambushed two buses, setting upon the Riders as they desperately sought to escape the fire-bombed vehicles. Pictures of these outrages flashing around the world on 15 May presented Kennedy with his first civil rights crisis. He was angry at his lack of control over the Freedom Riders and furious that they had created an opportunity for a Communist propaganda coup. As Kennedy and his brother Robert, now US Attorney-General, conferred they drew two conclusions: that ‘this whole thing and the people behind it were a giant pain in the ass’ and that, albeit reluctantly, the federal government had to take the side of the Riders.
⁹
As was his wont, Kennedy tried to steer a middle course between the two extremes as he saw them - the one embodied by civil rights demonstrators and the other exemplified by the civil rights deniers. Most of all the President wanted to avoid any confrontation over the issue - with African-Americans or white Southerners.

Political imperatives only increased Kennedy’s reluctance to intervene in this issue. The most powerful members of Congress were Southern Democrats who, because of the South’s entrenched one-party system, had amassed the seniority to control powerful Congressional committees. These so-called Dixiecrats had the power to block any legislation Kennedy sought. His reaction was not to argue but to buy them off. For example, Kennedy appointed to the federal courts in Alabama the rigid segregationist lawyers suggested by Southern senators.
¹⁰
The one thing the President wanted to avoid was a call to principle. Believing that the nation was not yet ready to deal with the agenda formulated by Civil Rights leaders, Kennedy hoped that blacks would take a forbearing, low-key approach.
¹¹
African-Americans, understandably impatient after a century of waiting for equal rights, declined to fit into the President’s agenda, forcing Kennedy repeatedly to confront civil rights crises. In 1962 the issue was the attempt by air force veteran James Meredith to integrate the University of Mississippi. The following year volunteers sought to integrate the University of Alabama. In both cases the President initially pandered to grandstanding segregationist governors, Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama, rather than send in federal troops. He bobbed and weaved, attempting to avoid a presidential call to the people of the sort other chief executives had given. Without principles himself, he could not invoke them for America.