John F. Kennedy's Two Fathers

Kennedy’s Two Fathers

            In my first essay I explored how Obama’s foreign policy instincts are deeply Neibuhrian, in that they embody the tension between the cynic and the idealist, between the children of darkness and the children of light. In Chris Matthew’s recent biography Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, there is also that similar lifelong tension between conservatism and liberalism . While Barack Obama was a lifelong liberal for whom Neibuhr would add a sharp biting edge, John F. Kennedy lived most of his life as a conservative or a moderate and would only proudly label himself a “liberal” a couple years before he ran for president. As a youth, Kennedy was weaned on the great stories of Arthurian literature, and this deep identification with heroism and eloquence eventually projected itself onto Winston Churchill, the great conservative leader who would define a generation and become his personal idol. Yet, just as he admired Churchill from afar, the young Jack was well aware that his own father, the American ambassador to Britain, was a staunch supporter of Neville Chamberlain’s good-intentioned but ill-fated appeasement policies which Churchill vehemently opposed. The tension between his biological father and his metaphorical or intellectual father would define Kennedy’s life, from his senior thesis at Harvard, Why England Slept, all the way up through his presidency in which he strived to construct a Churchillian foreign policy.

            Matthew’s primary goal in Elusive Hero is to portray Jack Kennedy as a “hero” and as an independent thinker, not truly beholden to any counselor but himself. Kennedy’s story, therefore, truly begins in his prep school years at Choate, where as a sickly youth he found himself often in the infirmary with nothing to do other than to read. In these long hours of solitude, the boy would read the New York Times daily and close his eyes after reading each article to recall its every detail. The boy who had loved King Arthur and His Knights picked up biographies of the great men of British and American history: Lord Melbourne and Henry Clay, Lord Byron and John Quincy Adams. Of course there were also the many histories penned by Winston Churchill. “And it wasn’t knowledge for its own sake, it was the grander world he glimpsed through it,” Matthews notes. “Such habits of mind as thinking about Churchillian views of history were the glimmerings of the man he was shaping himself to become.” The young Jack’s best conversations were not with his fellow peers, but with the great heroes of history, and in engaging with these grand lives he began to realize his life too could become one of these stories.

            His fascination for Churchill’s pen in the history books soon translated into rapt attention for the man’s silver tongue in parliamentary debates, but as Jack matured and the specter of world war grew closer, his loyalties would be split between both sides of the political aisle. Kennedy’s 1940 thesis to complete his international affairs B.A. at Harvard was titled “Appeasement in Munich” and went on to be published as the bestselling book Why England Slept. It is a nuanced defense of appeasement, while at the same time a subversive critique of his father’s views. While his father Joseph Kennedy opposed fighting Hitler under any circumstance, Jack’s hero Winston Churchill had been steadily sounding the alarm against Hitler for years. Jack argued that the 1938 Munich Agreement was wise in the face of Britain, France, and America’s weak Depression-era militaries and industrial output. Fighting the Nazis so early would have been disastrous, and putting off the war a little longer through appeasement would give Britain time to re-arm and eventually properly fight the menace.  Kennedy’s thesis was a skillful political compromise between two poles, and much of Matthews’ book teases out this critical theme. “His career,” Matthews wrote, “would go on to be a similar balancing act between the nobility of valiant death on the battlefield, so admired by Churchill, and the horror of war itself, so understood by Chamberlain and his supporter Joseph Kennedy, Sr” (Matthews 38).

            After the war, Kennedy won the Massachusetts 11^th district Congressional seat in 1946, successfully defending it in 1948 and 1950. He then won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1952, which he would hold until he became president in 1960. In most of the campaigns, particularly in the first decade of his career in politics, Kennedy would define himself exclusively as a “conservative” or as a “moderate.” Running relentless door-to-door campaigns to the right of his opponents as a “fighting conservative,” he channeled his heroism in the war into repeated victories at the polls.

In those days of ethnic politics before the parties organized themselves along ideological lines, Kennedy could easily exist as conservative within the Democrat Party. His Irish Catholicism and staunch anti-Communism would make him and his family political allies of the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy. Jack’s brother Bobby had been a staffer in the Republican senator’s office and the boys’ father Joe had helped finance McCarthy’s campaign. Jack had danced at the Senator’s wedding. As McCarthyism and the Red Scare heated up in the early 1950s, Jack avoided the McCarthy issue at every juncture. Ken O’Donnell, who was running the Kennedy office in Boston, advised the Senator that voting to censure McCarthy would end his career. The Irish in Massachusetts, for better or worse, were standing by a fellow Irish Catholic: McCarthy. “The passions of that historic moment created strange alliances,” Matthews writes. And Jack understood the populist rage. “A part of him, the stubborn part—the part then still dominant—cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate” (Matthews 181). Because he was not a liberal, Jack was relatively unmoved by McCarthy’s accusations of liberals. And because he was such a Cold Warrior—Jack had criticized FDR’s concessions at Yalta and Truman’s loss of territory in Asia—he was even less compelled to censure McCarthy. He coincidentally had scheduled a life-or-death surgery at the same time as this life-or-death vote, and was able to escape being pinned down on one side of the issue or other. Every Democrat and half the Republicans had voted for censure. Voting against censure, had Kennedy done it, may have saved his career in Massachusetts but would have ruined his national ambitions.

Much of Matthews’ thesis rests on the idea that Jack was an independent-minded thinker, but it’s hard not to acknowledge that events like McCarthyism showcase a young politician beholden to his greatest financial backer—his father. Betraying his father and his family would have been a far more grave offense than going against his constituents. Yet although it’s tempting to use this example to counter Matthews’ thesis, we can’t help but remember that Kennedy’s position on McCarthy (one he was very lucky not to have to express publicly) was perhaps not so different than what his other “father” Churchill would have believed. Irishness may have been the rare occasion in 1954 for the two poles of Joseph Kennedy and Winston Churchill to more easily converge in Jack’s life.

Not long later, Jack was researching and writing Profiles in Courage with his counsel and speechwriter Ted Sorenson. The book, which would win the 1957 Pulitzer Prize, highlighted eight key legislators in American history who had taken positions against their constituents in order to make votes of national importance. Could the boldly ambitious Kennedy have counted his position on McCarthy’s censure as his own “profile in courage?” History will never know, but we are left with the words of Kennedy friend and British conservative politician David Ormsby-Gore, which Matthews quotes at length on Kennedy’s moral lessons from the research on Profiles in Courage:

“He said that one of the rather sad things about life, particularly if you were a politician, was that you discovered that the other side really had a good case. He was most unpartisan in that way…. He wondered whether he was really cut out to be a politician because he was so impressed by the other side’s arguments when he really examined them in detail. When he thought there was a valid case against his position, he was always rather impressed by the arguments advanced.” (Matthews 192-193)

            It was not until this period that Kennedy began to consciously court liberal support. Between the years of 1956 and 1960, Kennedy crisscrossed the nation, shoring up support among party leaders in every state. Where before Kennedy had used the Democrat Party to help him win elections, now he was actually seeking to lead it. As a merely state-wide politician, he’d never needed to court the liberals in the party. The Massachusetts Democrats were not “as liberal as the national party. The reputation that Massachusetts would gain for liberalism, never fully on the mark, was not the case even then. In 1956, it was Joe McCarthy country” (Matthews 200). One such instance of Kennedy increasing his liberal appeal was his July 1957 Senate speech calling for a total revision of the Eisenhower Administration’s Eurocentric foreign policy of holding fast to World War II alliances and not recognizing the aspirations of developing countries. The speech was a necessary debut as an important voice of principled dissent. As the London Observer noted, his words “introduced Kennedy the statesman.” But even more importantly, the speech was a deft political calculation. Kennedy’s pollster noted that the speech had been “customized to appeal to the wing of the party whose backing his client needed. It was meant to show the liberals just how far Joe Kennedy’s boy had come. The irony, the pollster noted, like everyone else who knew Jack, was that his boss probably read more and was a good deal more informed than those on the Democratic left into whose political bed he was trying to climb.” His speech had been precisely steeped in Cold War logic but had also made the leap to connect anti-Communism with the yearnings for sovereignty present in America’s founding. “Whatever maneuvers he was slyly executing in order to win over the liberals,” Matthews writes, “he wanted, at the same time, to keep himself positioned as the best hope of moderate and conservative Democrats.”

            This ongoing paradox between conservatism and liberalism, war and peace, would immediately manifest itself in Kennedy’s presidency, beginning with his inaugural speech in January 1961. On a freezing day with eight inches of fresh snow on the ground, the new president called from the Capitol steps in his Boston accent, “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” It was a statement that could have been printed in the history books he read in the Choate infirmary as a boy, and the concept was still ingrained in his mind decades later. Matthews tells us, “The Churchillian notion of peace through strength had echoed throughout Jack’s adult life” (Matthews 325).  But the bumper sticker slogan wasn’t deployable in every international showdown. He would soon realize that while it was one thing to talk in such ringing and eloquent tones from the podium, living such blustery confidence would be much more complicated.

            The president learned heavy lessons about the brutality of nuclear realpolitik when he met Russian premier Nikita Kruschev at a summit in Vienna in 1961. Marvelling at how the Russian leader seemed nonplussed about a nuclear exchange killing 70 million people in ten minutes, he later told a close friend he’d “never come face to face with such evil” (Matthews 344). The crucial discussion at the meeting had been Berlin, with the Russians pressing for total control of West Berlin and a willingness to go to war over it. With only 11,000 Allied troops in West Berlin to face the Soviets’ 350,000 based in East Berlin, the president who had argued in campaign speeches that Berlin was the crucial front of the Cold War was faced with a massive dilemma:

“So, he knew how to talk like a war hawk. But what did it actually mean—words like that, all the threats and gun-cocking—if you’re the first American president to come into office aware of your enemy’s nuclear stockpile? It’s one thing to use words such as appeasement and surrender and vital principle with regard to Berlin when someone else is making the decisions. It was the Munich argument—the one that had so obsessed him that he’d written a book about it—adapted to the nuclear age. (Matthews 344)

            The stalemate at Berlin would extend throughout the summer of 1961, and in a pivotal July speech, the president announced that although he planned to stand firm on West Berlin, he would be prepared to give the Soviets other concessions. Eventually the stand-off ended when the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall that August, making it impossible for either side to make quick claims on the other half of the city, and symbolizing a boundary settled for the time being. Kennedy wouldn’t have to find out whether Krushchev was bluffing about going to war over Berlin. His decision resonated with his own careful big-picture argument for appeasement two decades before. In the face of the overwhelming defeat of the Soviets taking West Berlin, then Germany and Europe, and then Asia (as he argued would happen in his campaign speeches, at least), he had kept peace. But was it peace through strength or peace through concessions? Did Jack’s steady hand in 1961 give the world a better result than Joe Kennedy or Winston Churchill would have yielded? Would Joe Kennedy have argued not to fight, to let the massively stronger Soviet army have West Berlin…in order to prevent the far, far greater horror of a nuclear war? Would Winston Churchill have called the “evil” premier’s bluff, if it really was a bluff? These are the impossible questions of trying to understand why rational men make the decisions they do, of trying to understand the unique psychology of being an fallible human being charged with making earth-shattering decisions.

            We would do well to remember Neibuhr’s words in The Ironies of American History:

  We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized.

            Obama and Kennedy represent two different sides of “the business of taking morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.” The Obama we know was the anti-war candidate who renewed the Patriot Act and increased drone strikes in the Middle East. Kennedy was the lifelong Cold Warrior who campaigned on strength, but would stare the prospect of nuclear war in the face many times and consider his greatest foreign policy achievement the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Rather than the mainstream Niebuhrian idea of recognizing evil in the world and taking up arms against it, Kennedy turned the notion inside out: the Churchillian who believed in peace through strength would learn that the most morally hazardous action he could take to preserve civilization would be to take steps to disarm.