American Experiment (347 page)

John Kennedy could get along with Nehru and other Indian leaders, for they spoke the same language. This was true literally—Nehru and others spoke the King’s English better than most Americans. It was true intellectually too, for the President could talk Indian revolutionary language. He could understand something of the nature and needs of India’s revolution—really a struggle for independence against the English not wholly unlike the American experience almost two centuries earlier, save for the nonviolent tactics of the insurrection and the bloody civil strife that erupted between Moslem and Hindu in the wake of partition. In Southeast Asia, however, the Kennedy White House had to deal with revolutionary ideas and leaders of a very different sort.

For centuries Southeast Asia had been the tinderbox of Asia. After countless wars, civil and uncivil, and bloodily suppressed uprisings, this land of great mountain ranges and long valleys, of thin upland soil and lush deltas, of ancient hatreds and polyglot cultures, had come in the main under harsh colonial rule. By the 1930s and 1940s intellectuals, peasants, and workers were listening to Marxist revolutionary voices as well as to revolutionaries American style. Perhaps more than others in Asia, Indo-chinese peoples took heart from the Japanese blows against white prestige, even as they suffered under Japanese occupation. Freedom—early liberation from Tokyo’s iron hand, final liberation from colonial rule—was the rallying cry for Burmese, Siamese, Indonesians, the peoples of Indochina. But what kind of freedom? A rising leader in Indochina, Ho Chi Minh, later asserted his agreement with the American Declaration of Independence and its evocation of equality as well as liberty, by opening his own declaration of independence with the words of Jefferson.

Probably no Western leader had a more abiding concern for the future of Indochina than Franklin Roosevelt: Impelled in part by Wilsonian idealism and even more by a bitter scorn for French colonial oppression and cruelties, especially in Vietnam, FDR made clear to his wartime partners— Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang—that he would veto any return of French troops to Indochina after the war. The danger of setting off Churchill’s explosive temper, however, was so contrary to Roosevelt’s feline approach that he preferred to put his case to Anthony Eden, who liked to describe back in London FDR’s “cheerful recklessness” about such matters.
Feckless Roosevelt was not; but he subordinated long-run political planning to immediate military needs, just as he subordinated Asian strategy to European. Roosevelt until his death stuck to his principled opposition to French reoccupation but his month-to-month dealings with allies on the matter were ambiguous enough to enable Truman to accept the French return to Indochina without appearing to challenge his predecessor’s anti-colonialism.

From his House and Senate vantage points John Kennedy watched while the Truman While House and the Acheson State Department pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the French effort allegedly to defend the principles of freedom in Indochina; while the Eisenhower White House in 1954 stood twice at the edge of war in northern Vietnam as Dulles, Nixon, and military leaders urged American air strikes to rescue the beleaguered French troops in Dien Bien Phu; while the Geneva Accords of the same year, which the United States did not sign but had pledged halfheartedly to support, provided for armistices in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia and partitioned Vietnam at the 17
^th
parallel until a nationwide election could be held in 1956 under the supervision of an international commission; while Washington backed the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the south despite its increasing corruption and incompetence; while Diem put off promised reforms and, with quiet American acquiescence, the unification election, lost support in the country, and tried to cope with communist National Liberation Front insurgents—known pejoratively as Vietcong—in the south.

And now John Kennedy as President confronted this tangle of complexities. He was convinced that he could certainly do better in Indochina than had the dispirited Eisenhower Administration, but the new President’s problem lay not only in the quagmire that was forming in Vietnam, or in the readiness of American war hawks and McCarthyites to pounce on any sign of Administration willingness to “lose Indochina” as the Truman Administration had “lost China.” Part of the problem lay in Kennedy’s head—in the major articulate premises he brought into the White House, in the deep division within him over fundamental strategy, in his “pragmatic solutions” of taking small, “practical” steps in order to avoid or postpone a decisive intellectual and strategic commitment.

On Capitol Hill, Kennedy had echoed the conventional wisdom: that the United States must help thwart “the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all Asia,” that Vietnam was a “proving ground for democracy in Asia” and a test of “American responsibility and determination,” that—the domino theory—“our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country.” And he dared not run the risk—at least before the election of
1964—of appearing soft on the Indochina issue. Still resonating to the Bay of Pigs failure and feeling vulnerable on a compromise settlement in Laos he had agreed to, he told Galbraith, “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period.”

On the other hand, Kennedy was a seasoned and sophisticated politician who loved to prick banalities and challenge shibboleths. Believing more in the “confusion theory” of history than the “conspiracy theory,” he did not conjure up terrifying images of the Soviet Politburo sitting at the center of a web of world power and masterminding grand strategies for the military conquest of the West; indeed, tension between Moscow and Peking in these very years was refuting the theory of monistic communist power. As for the threat from Republican and other war hawks, he knew that at times presidential politicians must take risks in order to pursue responsible policies. And after all, who had won fame for a book called
Profiles in Courage
?

Kennedy’s response to his own intellectual dilemma was reflected in the diversity of advisers he consulted. On Vietnam policy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow, and most of the military leaders were generally hawkish, at least initially; George Ball of the State Department, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and Galbraith were decidedly dovish. Some of Kennedy’s advisers shared his view that the United States must recognize and even aid the revolutionary forces that were rising out of the peasant villages of Asia; others shared his view that the Indochinese revolutions were not good revolutions of the American or even the French variety, but malevolent revolutions of Marxist inspiration and Leninist strategy.

The result was a tendency on Kennedy’s part to take the middle ground between strategies and advisers on the day-to-day problems that inexorably surfaced. Thus between those who argued for a heavy military commitment in Vietnam and those for a minimal one, he initially sent to Vietnam 400 soldiers from the Special Forces and 100 additional military advisers; and at the same time authorized secret warfare against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese trained and directed by the CIA and the Special Forces. He evaded a negotiated settlement but also spoke of the danger of escalation. He devoutly wished to win the allegiance of the peasants of Indochina but his Special Forces used tactics of defoliation, flesh-burning napalm, and forced penning of farmers in “strategic hamlets” that gained countless recruits for the communist adversary. He wanted Diem toppled but feared to take overt steps; his signal to Vietnamese generals that the United States would not “thwart a change of government” spurred a coup, but he was
sickened by Diem’s brutal assassination. Each of the middle-of-the-road steps in fact pulled the Administration deeper into the Vietnam morass— but without the debate and decision, both comprehensive and focused, that at the least might have prepared the American people for the perils ahead.

As he entered his third summer in the White House, John Kennedy’s progress in defining the dimensions and prospects of popular aspirations for freedom in the Third World was lagging far behind the benign rhetoric of 1960 and 1961. He and most of his advisers had assumed that peoples like the Cubans and the Vietnamese aspired at least as strongly to Western-style liberal constitutional procedures and Bill of Rights protections as they did to national independence and to revolutionary concepts of social and political equality. Chester Bowles, a key drafter of Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” during the war and ambassador to India under Truman, had as Under Secretary of Stale in the Kennedy Administration a firsthand view of the White House “realists” who had made error after error in dealing with Third World nations. Exiled back to New Delhi in 1963 as a fuzzy-minded idealist, Bowles went off with the dismal conclusion that the Kennedy Administration had fallen far short of his hopes. He had found “almost no intellectual leadership that has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom or ventured beyond the limited and now inadequate concepts of the New Deal.”

Even sterner challenges to Kennedy’s and Johnson’s intellectual leadership lay ahead, at the hands of some of their fellow Americans.

D
URING THE KINDLING TIMES
of the 196os hitherto little-known persons— blacks, women, college students, southern preachers—took moral and political leadership of the nation in boldly claiming their civil rights. For a few brief shining years, neighborhood people challenged authority, aroused the consciousness of followers as to their true needs, and spurred the conscience of their fellow Americans. Day after day, for weeks at a time, the national media—especially television and the picture magazines— brought into tens of millions of homes images of helmeted troops with upraised clubs, snarling police dogs lunging at protesters, black persons kneeling in prayer for their persecutors as well as for themselves. The black protesters—and the student and women activists who would follow—for a decade would stir the conscience of the nation.

This assumption of leadership by the poor and the persecuted stood in sharp contrast to the nation’s policy making during previous decades. Franklin Roosevelt had come into office with little mandate from the people for programs except to “do something, anything” about the depression. New Deal policies were responses far less to local or regional initiatives than to proposals of Washington politicians and intellectuals who in turn drew from a bank of ideas built by liberal and left leaders of the progressive and Wilson eras. Truman’s initiatives such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were responses to urgent appeals from abroad and to war experience, in an atmosphere of rising cold war hostility, and they led and shaped, rather than followed, public opinion. The Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954 was a result more of the justices’ collective conscience and practical wisdom than of nascent popular pressure; indeed, that decision in
Brown
would doubtless have failed of passage if it had been offered to the American electorate in the form of a national referendum.

A renowned political economist, Joseph Schumpeter, wrote in the early 1940s that the people do not rule in democracies. The democratic method, he said, was “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a
competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” People did not autonomously take initiatives, organize themselves, and direct policy. This was a provoking contradiction to the great American faith in Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Schumpeter’s observation was in fact only a half-truth. Historians could point to countless examples of spontaneous leadership by community or group activists in labor conflicts, populist upheavals, revolutionary situations. On a national scale Gandhi was showing, even as Schumpeter wrote, that a leader’s deep involvement with his followers could give them, in Erik Erikson’s words, a sense of participation that would raise them to power.

But that was India. Had Americans become so manipulated from above, so enervated politically—had the national and state and even city governments become so distant and the presidency so powerful and all-encompassing—that people in their neighborhoods and communities could no longer take their futures into their own hands? Had the vaunted old frontier spirit, the populist rebelliousness, the famous community “get up and go” disappeared from American life? If collective action was necessary, how broad—reaching out to which groups and movements and regions and parties and national leaderships—must that collective action be? Or would heroic individual action be enough to get results?

The protesters of the 1960s responded with actions as well as words.

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled.

When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough.

“The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know
once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt.