American Experiment (344 page)

All of us

Why not take all of us

Fabulous

You can’t live without us

My son Jack

Heads the procession

Groomed for succession.…

Brilliantly supported by a small campaign group headed by the versatile Sorensen, amply financed by his father, intensively covered by television that projected his image to millions of new tube watchers, and assisted by Kennedy enthusiasts who traveled hundreds of miles to “help Jack,” Kennedy picked his way adroitly through the political minefields and lined
up enough Democratic convention delegates weeks in advance to bring him victory on the first ballot in Los Angeles.

Trounced on the convention floor, Johnson now had to contemplate the humiliation of being passed over for running mate. He wanted to be Vice President, both to position himself as JFK’s successor someday and because he believed that he could convert any job—even Throttlebottom’s— into a power base. Kennedy’s first-ballot victory was followed by a wild day in which the candidate and his brother Robert lost control of the process of picking a running mate—a process that LBJ would have handled with brutal skill. The struggle over the vice-presidential choice was so complex and murky that historians were still differing in their accounts decades later, but this much seemed clear: in the maneuvering before the convention, Kennedy had long and seriously considered LBJ, but the names of Humphrey, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, Governors G. Mennen Williams of Michigan and Orville Freeman of Minnesota, and others had also been put forward; in a typical politicians’ confrontation, the nominee halfheartedly offered his beaten rival the nomination and LBJ halfheartedly declined, in part because “Mr. Sam” Rayburn opposed acceptance; labor and liberal leaders implored the Kennedy people to reject Johnson; hours of confusion passed as pro- and anti-Johnson people pressured Kennedy, and LBJ’s friends pressured him to run and not to run; Bobby offered to try to persuade LBJ not to accept and Jack wished him good luck; Bobby’s missions ran into an increasingly indignant Johnson and retinue; and JFK suddenly put an end to the whole business by telling Johnson he not only wanted him but would fight for him. That was what Johnson, burning with indignation at “that little shit-ass” Bobby, wanted to hear.

One vice-presidential nomination was far from enough, however, to assuage the various wounds left by the Los Angeles convention. Even before it ended, the party seemed to crack: Russell had quit the convention early because he feared the “evil threat” to “our Southland” of the pro-civil rights party platform, while Eleanor Roosevelt quietly departed out of disappointment that her close friend and ally Adlai Stevenson had neither made much effort for the nomination nor been accorded the support she felt was due him. Harry Truman hadn’t put in an appearance; nine days before the convention opened, he had blasted Kennedy at a televised press conference and condemned the convention as a “prearranged affair.” Protestant spokesmen were hostile; some leading Catholics feared that a Kennedy campaign would simply exacerbate ancient hostilities.

Of all the specific fence-mending he had to do, the most crucial to Kennedy was a reconciliation with Eleanor Roosevelt, the conscience of
the party and the channel to alienated Stevensonians and ADA liberals who could have critical influence in California and New York. So skillfully did Kennedy handle a showdown meeting with the former First Lady in Hyde Park—like Napoleon and Alexander’s meeting on their “raft at Tilsit,” he called it—that she warmed to him and soon became one of his most enthusiastic campaigners.

Some of his fences mended, Kennedy plunged into his campaign. Awaiting him was Richard M. Nixon, who had won Ike’s glum support, easily fought off an inept challenge by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and been nominated by acclamation.

The battle that followed left glowing images on the nation’s memory: Nixon’s lightning trips to all fifty states, including Hawaii and Alaska, as he had rashly promised—Kennedy’s audacious mission to Texas, where he assured a gathering of the Houston Ministerial Association, chaired by Norman Vincent Peale, that he believed in “an America where the separation of church and stale is absolute”—the first of four televised debates, with Nixon holding his own on substance but losing on the television screen—Kennedy’s compassionate and astute telephone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., after her husband was jailed in Georgia—and the huge crowds, swollen by the debates, and fronted by long lines of “jumpers” bobbing up and down in waves as the candidates passed. Then the long tense election evening, as Kennedy took an early lead, only to watch it slowly erode and leave him with the narrowest of victories.

“To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” John F. Kennedy looked out at the sea of faces in the Capitol Plaza reflecting the cold January sun. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The new President’s voice was strong and confident.

“To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge— to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every
other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

So finely honed were the bracing inaugural words, so masterfully delivered, so euphorically received, that many missed the deep ambivalences and dichotomies interwoven throughout:

Man “holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” Americans still had their old “revolutionary beliefs.”
But:
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights … to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Let every nation know that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy decried the cost of arms, the “steady spread of the deadly atom” and urged that “both sides begin anew the quest for peace.”
But:
“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.”

“Let us never fear to negotiate.”
But:
“Let us never negotiate out of fear.”

“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
But:
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”

The whole inaugural address, like many before and since, was a “celebration of freedom,” in Kennedy’s words—of liberty, the ranks of the free, of revolutionary rights, of a free society, of free men and free governments, of the freedom of humankind. But far more than the other addresses, Kennedy’s reflected the nation’s uncertainty and confusion over the meaning of freedom.

Did Kennedy’s ambivalences reflect, in his own character and ideology, polarities that had originated in his earlier divided self? Or were they merely the familiar hedging of the American politician? Probably both, but the sheer breadth of his inaugural dichotomies suggested more that they
were deep-seated. In the end, however, the new President’s words would be tested in action. Within two months of his inaugural Kennedy spoke to the Latin American diplomatic corps in the East Room of the White House in the language of hope:

“I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—
Alianza para Progreso
—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—
techo, trabajo y terra, salud y escuela.
” He laid out a program for economic development through national planning, regional marketing, commodity stabilization, hemispheric cooperation in education and research. “Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts—a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women—an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand.”

Enchanted by this eloquent, dynamic young President, inspired by both his rhetoric and his recommendations, the diplomats in the East Room that day burst into applause. “We have not heard such words since Franklin Roosevelt,” the Venezuelan ambassador remarked to Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger. But mixed with the new hope of the Latin Americans was their collective memory of their earlier relationship with the “colossus of the North.”

It was only a half century since imperial American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, hardly more than thirty years since Calvin Coolidge had sent troops into Nicaragua to help check the insurrectionist leader Augusto Sandino. To be sure, President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson had talked a less interventionist line in the early 1930s, and FDR and Hull’s Good Neighbor policy, with its emphasis on the lowering of trade barriers and nonintervention, had come as a powerful breath of fresh air to Latin Americans. Even under FDR, however, Washington remained deeply involved in the internal affairs of nations such as Cuba, and the Good Neighbor idea itself had been more a fine helping of rhetoric about freedom and the equal rights of all the American nations than a vehicle of economic or social reform. The main continuities of Washington’s interventionist policy toward Latin America over the decades had been unpredictability and volatility. For most Americans, Latin America was the great “invisible” land that burst onto the national consciousness only when some crisis—a revolution, a natural catastrophe, a phenomenon like Juan and Evita Perón of Argentina—for a brief time seized the headlines.

The diplomats facing Kennedy in the East Room represented a region with some of the most entrenched poverty on the globe. The Latin American per capita income was not only low—$325 a year—but seemed static. Over two-thirds of the Latins lived in dire want. This figure both reflected and concealed the enormous disparity of income: 2 percent of the people owned three-quarters of all arable land and about one-half of all personal wealth. Twenty-four million Mexicans, out of a population of 35 million, lived in homes without electric lights; 30 million urban Latins lacked city-controlled drinking water; the average Peruvian subsisted on 1,900 calories a day, enough for bare survival.

But even these figures hardly told the story. While the Latins had scored some notable economic achievements, their poor lived in a Gordian knot of poverty, the thongs of which pulled ever tighter in its crushing embrace. Against limited resources the population was expanding faster than any other in the world. Only half of children under eighteen—only a quarter in rural areas—attended school. Half of the whole Latin population was illiterate. Life expectancy ranged from 33 years in Haiti to 39 in Brazil to 57 in Argentina—as against 67 years in the United States. Investigating the human condition behind such figures, an anthropologist found a “culture of poverty” in the very heart of great cities like San Juan and Mexico City—a poverty of “segregation and discrimination, fear, suspicion or apathy” thwarting involvement of the poor in the wider society; a poverty that drained hope, expectation, motivation, morale, opportunity; a “family” poverty comprised of the “absence of childhood” as a long, protected stage in the life cycle, “early initiation into sex, free unions of consensual marriage,” frequent abandonment of wives and children, “a trend toward female- or mother-centered families,” individual feelings of helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. These were the truly mute, invisible Latins; these were the unfree.

The bewildering diversity of Latin American peoples, nationalisms, cultures, and subcultures had produced a variety of American diplomatic and military responses over the decades. After the earlier times of hostility and intervention Washington’s relations with Mexico had come to a happy plateau. Two fine ambassadors, Coolidge’s and Hoover’s Dwight Morrow and FDR’s Josephus Daniels, helped to defuse and finally settle through skillful diplomacy and political compromise the long-simmering issue of Mexican expropriation of the oil properties of United States companies. Mexico, under its own able leadership, appeared to help teach Americans how to live with avowed revolutionaries next door.

The rest of Latin America made up a patchwork of old-style
caudillo
regimes, such as Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo’s in the Dominican
Republic, François Duvalier’s in Haiti, and Somoza’s in Nicaragua; of conservative, more or less democratic regimes, as in Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and Peru; of newly established liberal regimes, as in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela; and of revolutionary regimes in Bolivia and most notably Cuba. The “postrevolutionary” regimes of Mexico and Uruguay had demonstrated that Latin American nations could pass through upheavals and achieve “politically durable and relatively prosperous regimes” without undue guidance from the “motherland” of American nations born in revolution—the United States of America. Latin Americans had long been familiar with Washington orators who declaimed about glorious revolutions in history and in theory—United States style, of course—and attacked contemporary revolutions in process.