Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

In strange symmetry with his enemy Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy became an icon, film attached. He had been — at least given the infuriating late-fifties cult of Youth — the best-looking President ever, and, like Che, he had had a tragic, mysterious fate. When he was assassinated in 1963, the date — 22 November — became one of the very few that have sunk into the mass memory. The funeral was a very solemn and tragic affair, as the widow, herself a strikingly good-looking woman, veiled in black, held her three-year-old boy’s hand, as with his slightly older sister she walked towards the funeral service in the cathedral. The little boy touched the world as he saluted his father’s coffin. It is, again, an image that has never quite left the world’s retina.

It was a most extraordinary murder, in its way a descant upon the American dream, in the sense that a ‘loner’, Lee Harvey Oswald, product of a (very) broken home, failed volunteer for the military and the CIA and the KGB, acquired a gun, thanks to America’s lawlessness in that regard (he got it by mail order), and, his brain full of confusion, thought of murder. Kennedy rode in an open car through Dallas, Texas. Oswald fired, and killed. He was then himself caught, and was shot by a man with Mafia connections who himself was dying of cancer. There was easily stuff here for an Oliver Stone film, and for contorted conspiracy theories: even the considerable British historian Hugh Trevor Roper set himself up as an expert in ballistics to endorse one of these, as, towards the end of his life, he endorsed a preposterous forgery, ‘The Hitler Diaries’ (he had an addiction to betting on horses, generally unsuccessfully, perpetually needed money, and, in an otherwise distinguished career, made absurd blunders). Few people in the commentating classes could see, as did I. F. Stone, that Kennedy had been ‘an optical illusion’, and the outpouring of histrionic grief that followed upon his death was not equalled until the death of Princess Diana, grasping and manipulative, a third of a century later. But the neon enlightenment cast shadows. The strangest concerned his own family. The corrupt old father, Joseph, had a stroke in 1961 which confined him, fully conscious, to a wheelchair, and he lived for another twenty years. One daughter with depression had a lobotomy that went wrong and made her a vegetable (she too lived on and on). His oldest son had been killed in the war, two others were murdered, and another daughter, Marchioness of Hartington, was killed in a plane crash with her lover, Earl Fitzwilliam. The last son, Edward Kennedy, was lucky to avoid a charge of manslaughter; and the generation further on has also suffered. John F. Kennedy’s own son, the poor little boy of 1963, was killed while semi-trainedly flying an aircraft, carrying his wife (whose family then sued the Kennedys). It was the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge who as ever spoke for common sense with an inspired essay in the New York Review of Books , when he mocked the obituary literature as ‘plaster pyramids’ and showed Kennedy to have been a creation of the new media. Later biographies — Victor Lasky, Nigel Hamilton — left nothing standing of the legend. Besides, Kennedy’s legacy led to disaster.

Johnson was a politician from Texas who, like the fabled Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, understood how to play Democratic Party games: between them, they had concocted Kennedy’s sliver of a majority in 1960. But Johnson was Texas-machine, on a vast scale, and he had been Roosevelt’s manager; he wanted to go into history as a new version of the great man. Kennedy had already referred to the ‘New Frontier’. What this would mean in practice was a sixties version of the Roosevelt New Deal in the thirties. The federal government would override the separate states and use the Supreme Court to bypass Congress in pursuit of general emancipation; it would spend money, even if that meant bending the constitutional rules, as Roosevelt had done. As things turned out, the deficits that then came up put a huge strain on the world’s financial system, which collapsed in August 1971. This led first to a fourfold and then an eightfold rise in oil prices, with baleful consequences all round. Kennedy began this.

The background was a great shift in American politics. The parties began — in part — to reverse their natures without changing their names. The Republicans were generally speaking Protestant in origin, their leadership East Coast and well off; now, some Republican parts of America, the north-east and its counterparts — migrant territory, such as Illinois — in the Midwest were gradually turning Democrat. The Democratic Party, historically, was a very odd alliance of Northern Catholics and Southern Baptists, whose chief concern was the rights of their generally backward states. Now, the Democrats of the South tended, more and more, to ally with Republicans on many vital matters such as states’ rights — meaning, in this case, racial segregation, and a general fear of the overriding power of the Supreme Court to change states’ ways. The Democrats, though still formally holding southern fiefdoms for some time to come, thus tended towards left-liberalism, and they adopted the Kennedy image, whereas the Republicans, though also divided, acquired what would later be called a conservative wing. In 1964 its candidate was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, who was made to seem almost ridiculously right-wing though he was no stupid bigot, and was personally a kinder and more upright man than Johnson (in Phoenix, Arizona, he had been good at stamping out corruption and had had a brave career in the air force, over the Himalayas, for instance). Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater manoeuvred himself into what appeared to be grotesquely reactionary positions — the abolition of graduated income tax, the bombing of North Vietnam, a denunciation of Eisenhower’s administration as a ‘dime store New Deal’. His electoral ship sank with all hands, though Ronald Reagan found a lifebelt.

The mood was now for political change, though, looking back, it is difficult to see quite where the urgency for this lay. The racial problem in the USA was indeed a great blot, and had been seen as such even in the days when the Constitution proclaimed equality. But there was much to be said for taking things carefully, even just applying the existing laws that protected individuals in the Anglo-Saxon manner. Health care was another great problem, and everyone had a horror story, though again there were not really any instant solutions that did not produce further problems of their own. That was not, in the sixties, a fashionable approach. In the first place there was a very powerful emerging weapon, television, which simplified everything, and the ‘conservatives’ did not shine there. Besides, the modern economy, and the American way of easy divorce, had resulted in a growth of what were later to be derided as the ‘soft professions’. The typewriter was already known as an instrument of female emancipation: secretarial jobs. The computer, though in its early adolescence, was even more to be such an instrument, and women were about to abandon the wife-and-mother role in millions. However the sea-change is to be explained, it happened, and Lyndon Johnson was very agile in riding it. He spent, and did so with the blessing of the fashionable economists. Politics was going to be polarized, in a battle between those who depended on public money, and those who paid it.

Johnson was a master at knowing when to cajole, when to bully, when to threaten. His energy was gigantic — working from 6.30 a.m. until 2 p.m. and again after 4 p.m. — and so was his Jupiterian temper. By Kennedy’s standards he was an exceedingly crude man, given to receiving bureaucrats and politicians for interviews on the lavatory, and there were gruesome anecdotes about his behaviour — urinating on his own grave plot while drunk and the like. He announced in Michigan University that ‘In your time we have the opportunity to move not only towards the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.’ This was a response to Khrushchev’s ambitious claims, and it became the chief theme of his presidential campaign of 1964. Johnson pushed through a whole set of measures that remade the United States. To Congress in March 1964 he had said that ‘for the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty’, as his wife, Lady Bird, urged him to become a sort of Truman and Lincoln and Roosevelt rolled into one. Money was then used almost as a sort of internal Marshall Plan, with 2 per cent of the GDP to be spent, or $2bn per annum. The analogy was with the various New Deal agencies, and the men appointed were almost classic second-generation New Dealers — McGeorge Bundy (from an old Boston family), Robert McNamara from the Harvard Business School, and Walt Rostow from MIT: each one of them versatile and from the very top of academe. Harvard had an enlightened system, by which such brains were supposed (as, at the time, with Research Fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge) not to have to bother with the drudgery of a Ph.D. thesis, a chore for lesser talents (‘Mr’ was the honourable title) and Bundy was not only firmly ‘Mr’, but the youngest Harvard Dean in history. Rostow was an extremely interesting man who wrote a characteristic book of the age, now seeming rather naïve: Stages of Economic Growth (1960). It identified a moment of industrial take-off, when countries saved enough of their GDP to foster investment and thence an industrial revolution, and development economics went ahead, with an assumption that squeezing peasants would mean investment for big industry. This was a period when academics were supposed to have answers, and not just to be an interest group like others; university education was vastly promoted as an engine for progress. It was all rather good politics, in the sense that it made the Republicans appear to be in favour of poverty, which, said Johnson’s rival, Hubert Humphrey, would, if allowed to go on, become hereditary. It turned out, despite his efforts, that that indeed happened, the inheritance being from the lone-maternal side: a later book, by Allen Matusow, had the title How Not to Fight Poverty (1985). As Ronald Reagan later put it, ‘We declared war on poverty, and we lost.’ But such discoveries were a good decade in the future.