The Making of a Cold War President

Abstract

Editor's Introduction: Many thousands of books—more than 40,000 by most estimates—and countless articles have appeared over the past 60 years about the short life and interrupted presidency of John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected as U.S. president. During his presidency he had to contend with two of the most severe Cold War crises—the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, both of which came perilously close to provoking war between the Soviet Union and the United States—and he also significantly escalated U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Fidel Castro's Communist regime in Cuba. Kennedy had an ambitious domestic agenda, but, except for an important tax cut, he accomplished almost none of his domestic priorities, unlike his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who accomplished a great deal, especially on civil rights. Nonetheless, when polling organizations ask the public about their assessments of U.S. presidents, Kennedy invariably is rated well above Johnson. This has less to do with Kennedy's meager achievements as president than with his handsome appearance, his charisma, and the way his life ended. The assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on 22 November 1963 preserved the image of the glamorous young president in public memory, largely omitting his egregious flaws and the paucity of his achievements in office.Fredrik Logevall, a distinguished historian of U.S. foreign policy and long-time member of the JCWS Editorial Board (and a colleague and friend of mine at Harvard), is completing an authoritative, two-volume biography of Kennedy for Random House. Because of the Kennedy administration's crucial role in the Cold War, we are publishing a special forum about the Logevall biography. We have asked four experts to write commentaries on the first volume (they will also write about the second volume once it is out), and we are pleased to include Logevall's reply to the commentaries.In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Jill Abramson complained in The New York Times Book Review that despite the publication of some 40,000 books (and counting) devoted to the slain president since his death, there were “surprisingly few good ones, and not one really outstanding one.” Unlike Thomas Jefferson (Dumas Malone), Abraham Lincoln (David Herbert Donald, among others), Dwight D. Eisenhower (Stephen Ambrose), Lyndon B. Johnson (Robert Caro), and Richard M. Nixon (Garry Wills et al.), Kennedy the man and his presidency had yet to inspire a truly classic study. She acknowledged that many fine works had appeared, although some were hagiographic, or appeared too soon to exploit vital sources released later, or both (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, and Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy, portraits by White House aides, rushed out less than two years after Dallas, fall into this last category). Conversely, other authors aimed to rip the gauze off Kennedy's memory (think Gary Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, or Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot). Perhaps the most ambitious prober, Nigel Hamilton, ran into stiff resistance from the Kennedy family after the publication in 1992 of the first of three projected volumes, JFK: Reckless Youth, with its scathing portraits of Kennedy's parents and vivid libidinous adventures. The Kennedy family's decision to withhold further access to crucial sources caused Hamilton to drop the project. The best biography, Abramson thought, was Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, which crammed the whole story (including fresh medical revelations) into one volume. Mystified that so many “highly accomplished writers” seemed “unable to fix [Kennedy] on the page,” Abramson concluded, “Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.”1Well, the wait may be ending. For readers seeking to understand Kennedy's personal story and his part in, evolving understanding of, and impact on the tumultuous 20th-century world and country he grew up in, studied, experienced, and tried to shape, Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century offers a prime contender. (Full disclosure: I am a longtime friend of Logevall and read the book in manuscript.) Incorporating a wealth of new sources, particularly recently released materials from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (JFKPL) in Boston, Logevall blends a nuanced, updated account of Kennedy's life up to 1956—when he sought but failed to obtain the Democratic nomination for vice president on Adlai E. Stevenson's doomed ticket against Dwight D. Eisenhower, yet put himself into position for his own successful bid for the top spot four years later—with a superb contextual analysis of U.S. and international history from the interwar years through World War II to the first decade of the Cold War. Seeing how Kennedy as a young man perceived and intersected with these events—how his evolving political views increasingly diverged from the pro-appeasement isolationism of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy (and older brother, Joe Jr., until his death during World War II)—deepens our understanding of the president he later became, even if crucial mysteries remain for volume two.Inevitably, when examining an obsessively studied figure, a new biography will overlap with earlier appraisals, and Logevall's Kennedy volume is no exception. Having encountered scores of posthumous JFK incarnations for decades myself (starting in my teenage years in the 1970s), I found many of the same episodes, dramas, issues, and controversies handled by others—though often breezed over in the rush to reach Kennedy's presidency. Yet Logevall's craft stands out in several respects. He tells a riveting tale with depth, eloquence, and pace. He interweaves fresh sources that have emerged in recent years, especially previously closed papers and oral history interviews of family members and friends at the JFKPL, as well as recent key secondary accounts of major figures in Kennedy's life, from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy; to one of his best friends, LeMoyne (“Lem”) Billings; to the anointed “Lost Prince,” Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.; to his sister, Kathleen (“Kick”), the sibling to whom JFK was in some ways closest (“unlike the rest of the family, she thought Jack, not Joe Junior, was the Kennedy destined for greatness”—p. 295), who died in a plane crash four years after their oldest brother's wartime death.2Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, Logevall's study evokes an exceedingly active, crowded life intersecting with momentous events and themes preceding, during, and after World War II. Logevall probes aspects of Kennedy's early years that have aroused scrutiny, controversy, criticism, even sensationalism, including his relations with his parents, for better and ill, and avid womanizing (and philandering and “general disregard for women's feelings,” p. 241). Yet Logevall examines all of this judiciously, dispensing trenchant criticism where merited (and not shying away from sensitive topics), but also describing an exceptional individual who was far more than simply the “next in line” for his father to promote for the White House after the death of Joe Jr., who had volunteered to pilot a dangerous, “almost . . . suicidal” air mission in 1944 (though Logevall doubts Joe Jr. did so out of jealousy to match his younger brother's publicized heroism as the skipper of PT-109—see pp. 375–377)Perhaps most importantly, Logevall's comfort with 20th-century international affairs—he has authored two books on the U.S. war in Vietnam, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (1999) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (2012), coauthored a textbook on the Cold War, and produced many articles on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy—enhances his account of the emergence and evolution of the young Kennedy's worldview. This includes, above all, JFK's increasing distance from his father's nativism and isolationist support for British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany in the run-up to World War II—to the point that the young Kennedy became a “full-fledged interventionist” by late 1941, before Pearl Harbor (p. 298).After the war began in 1939, JFK briefly and, fortunately for him, anonymously (in an unsigned Harvard Crimson editorial; see pp. 231–232) parroted the isolationism of his father, who at the time was serving awkwardly as President Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to the Court of St. James. Several months later, however, the young Kennedy effectively moved away from the pro-appeasement stance with his Harvard College undergraduate thesis, which was published shortly after the German blitzkrieg as Why England Slept, turning its author into a young celebrity. Although “Jack” refrained from explicitly criticizing his father (who facilitated publication of the short book, securing Time magazine publisher Henry Luce's introduction), the idea that England had complacently dozed through Adolf Hitler's mounting peril echoed Winston Churchill's urgent alarms (and the title of Churchill's own book, While England Slept) and underlined (as Logevall points out) JFK's emphasis on realism in international affairs, in contrast to reliance on paper promises, as Chamberlain had belatedly discovered to his (and the world's) regret. A timely sojourn to Berlin and then London just as World War II broke out, which Logevall vividly describes, had enhanced Kennedy's admiration for Churchill, whose speech to the House of Commons left the young visitor “spellbound” (pp. 223–224). Kennedy's sympathy for waging war against the Axis, and for U.S. internationalism more broadly, set him apart from the isolationism of his father and Joe Jr. (who opposed Roosevelt's reelection in 1940, pp. 268–269). Logevall's rendering of the political gap between JFK and Joe Jr. evokes the counterfactual query of what Jack would have done if Joe Jr. had survived the war and embarked on the political career his father had laid out for him. Family loyalty undoubtedly would have induced him to support Joe Jr., but he is unlikely to have done so as fervently as his younger brother Robert (Bobby) later did for him. Whether JFK in these circumstances would have pursued his own political career or veered elsewhere, perhaps toward journalism, is impossible to say.Logevall also traces Kennedy's early intellectual growth. As a teenager, especially at Choate prep school, he developed an unusual combination of qualities: rambunctious irreverence and rascality, which sometimes landed him in trouble, and a sharp intellectual acuity that included an enthusiasm for reading that distinguished him from both siblings and parents. His poor health, which left him bedridden for long stretches (and caused him to take medical leave from Princeton, where he started college before transferring to Harvard a year later), reinforced this precocious bibliophilia. He used these stretches to consume volumes on history (including Churchill's World Crisis), world affairs, and politics, supplementing and enriching his variegated travel experiences, exposure to high-level diplomacy (through his father's ambassadorial stint in London), and intimate encounters with history (as in 1939 in Berlin and London and again in 1945, covering the Potsdam Conference as a reporter), all of which influenced his future foreign policy thinking.Of course, World War II looms large in the narrative. Early in the war, Kennedy had what emerges as the most serious of his myriad flings—with columnist Inga Arvad, a former Miss Denmark, mostly remembered for her cozy association with Hitler, which led to suspicion that she might be a German spy. Drawing on surveillance records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), racy and otherwise, Logevall contends that, despite her “Inga Binga” nickname, Kennedy took their affair seriously (he felt “strong feelings. . . . She had awakened something in him he didn't know he had,” p. 352). The affair might have gone further in the absence of strong opposition from Joe Sr., who feared that marriage “would scuttle any hopes Jack might have for elected office.” (p. 307) As for the oft-recounted naval misadventure in the South Pacific with PT-109—immortalized in The New Yorker by John Hersey (who had, coincidentally, captured JFK's college “infatuation,” p. 247)—Logevall carefully reviews the evidence, granting Kennedy's blunders in commanding the boat and subsequent heroism in helping to rescue his men. The book aptly notes that the episode contributed to Kennedy's doubt that military brass fully grasped reality, a skepticism that resurfaced during the Cuban missile crisis.Logevall carefully shows how, after the war, with Joe Jr. gone and Joe Sr. discredited, JFK advanced rapidly in electoral politics and became ever firmer in his belief that U.S. global leadership was needed to supplant the British and oppose Soviet Communism as the Cold War began. That internationalist orientation contradicted his father's enduring nativism and isolationism, but the two remained close and did not diverge in all respects. As Logevall observes, it did not take long for Jacqueline Bouvier (“Jackie”) to learn, after marrying Jack in 1953 and then suffering repeated indignities, that “however different his worldview from his father's, however different his politics, when it came to marital relations he was Joseph Kennedy's true heir” (p. 645).As others have suggested, a challenge for Logevall in volume 2 will be to explain why Kennedy, as president, intensified the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, given his early disdain for European imperialism. As a university student, he visited Palestine in 1939, and his letters contain “hints [of] emerging anticolonialism” (pp. 212–213). Touring French Indochina (with his brother Bobby) in 1951, he sensed that France could not cling to its colony and that victory required “get[ting] the Asians themselves to assume the burden of the struggle. As long as it's a conflict between native communists and western imperialists, success will be impossible” (p. 494). Six years later, as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, he denounced France's war to retain Algeria. Yet, in the White House, driven by Cold War calculations, he brushed aside Charles de Gaulle's wise advice to let Saigon go neutral rather than deepen the U.S. role and risk repeating France's own disaster.3 A specialist in “counterfactual history,” Logevall will then inevitably confront the unanswerable, yet fascinating, mystery of whether Kennedy, had he survived Dallas, would have sharply escalated the U.S. military role in Vietnam in his second term as Lyndon Johnson did, or would have allowed South Vietnam to veer toward neutrality even at the risk of Communist subversion.4John F. Kennedy was a precocious political talent and a popular president. His assassination in 1963 at the age of 46, cutting short his presidency, elevated him into a secular saint. A half century later, Kennedy's star power has scarcely dimmed. Many Americans still name him as one of their favorite presidents, politicians still invoke and emulate him, and his story and family generate endless interest, gossip, and new books.One ironic consequence of the Kennedy mystique is that for decades now it has become fashionable for historians to brandish their expert credentials and insider savvy by trying to take Kennedy down a peg. After all, with perhaps a few exceptions (Abraham Lincoln, Citizen Kane, the Beatles), no legend can live up to its own reputation. Historians seem to enjoy reminding their students and the public that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, was the one who achieved many of the goals that Kennedy claimed to pursue, including the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and the War on Poverty. They also emphasize JFK's pragmatic, sometimes overly cautious impulses, which seem to undermine the memory of a youthful idealist and an inspiration to the youth. Puncturing myths is not hard.But historians have often gone too far in sneering at Kennedy, shortchanging both the sophistication of his Cold War diplomacy and the sincerity of his liberal reformism. No matter how one evaluates his leadership skills or the wisdom of his policies, there is no denying that he superintended the United States during a crucial period of its history, as it emerged from a very chilly spell of the Cold War into a peaceable state of coexistence with the Soviet Union—and also as the winds of change began to bring liberal, egalitarian ideas into every corner of society. Kennedy helped drive both of those historic developments, and the beliefs and impulses that animated both his foreign and his domestic policies have largely stood the test of time.Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956, the first of a projected two-volume biography, does not cover the Kennedy presidency. That task will wait for volume 2. But the case for Kennedy's importance must be made here in order to justify a two-volume study some sixty years after the president's tragic death. Logevall accomplishes this task convincingly, with reference not only to the man but also to his times. As the book's subtitle indicates, with its allusion to Henry Luce's classic 1941 essay, Kennedy's years in the House and Senate (and White House) coincided with the ascendance of the United States as a world-historical power, indeed its arrival as the custodian of the free world, as the phrase has it.Which is to say, the Cold War shaped Kennedy, just as he shaped the Cold War. In Logevall's first volume, we see the former process at work: Kennedy coming of age as a man and a politician against the backdrop of dire global (and a few domestic) conflicts. Logevall's JFK is a product of not only the striving, calculating Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and the intelligent, judicious Rose, but also of the historical events unfolding around him.A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian now teaching at Harvard University and a prominent public intellectual, Logevall is ideally suited to write this book, having made his name with two acclaimed studies of the Vietnam War. To be sure, several worthy Kennedy biographies have already appeared: Herbert Parmet wrote a good two-volume life in the 1980s, and Robert Dallek gave us the closest thing we have to a definitive one-volume account in 2003. Richard Reeves wrote an excellent study of the Kennedy presidency, and dozens of scholars have written notable works on selected topics from the Cuban missile crisis to the early space program. But as Logevall correctly points out, “few serious biographies of [Kennedy] have been attempted, and there exists virtually no full-scale biography, one that considers the full life and times and makes abundant use of the massive archival record now available” (p. xvi). Logevall's argument for his book, however, is not simply that there is a gap to be filled. His research has shown him that the paradoxical combination of mythmaking and denigration of Kennedy has left us with murky, distorted, and incomplete pictures of the man. For a fuller, clearer picture, a return to Kennedy's formative years is essential. Logevall provides this in his account of JFK's early life, with a portrait that will no doubt remain unsurpassed for the foreseeable future.For a first-time biographer, Logevall does a remarkable job of recounting almost everything notable about Kennedy's early life and career while also situating the man firmly in his historical milieu. Skillfully drawing on multiple archives, dozens of oral histories, a large periodical source base, and an extensive secondary literature, Logevall renders young Jack Kennedy in a way that is intimate enough to make us feel the man's personality—by turns ambitious and carefree, earnest and ironic—and analytical enough for us to grasp his dilemmas, motivations, and maturation. With this magisterial life, Logevall must now be counted in the first rank of U.S. presidential biographers, academic or otherwise.Yet JFK is also very much a historian's book. Logevall is ready, where necessary, to leave his protagonist in the wings for pages at a time, something many biographers are loath to do. When Logevall does digress into historical context, however, the narrative never flags. The departures briskly educate readers about contemporaneous events necessary for fully appreciating JFK's coming of age—whether the European politics surrounding Adolf Hitler's war-making or the domestic strife around McCarthyism and the Red Scare. More often, he deftly embeds the international or national story within Kennedy's own, using the young man's trip to Germany as a vehicle for discussing Nazism's rise or making JFK's first congressional campaign the occasion to recount the candidate's dawning awareness of civil rights.The international circumstances loom largest. Starting in 1938, Jack's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was the U.S. ambassador to England (technically to “the Court of St. James”), and even before that he was a businessman concerned with European affairs who took the family abroad. Thus, unlike many Americans, Jack from an early age was oriented toward the wider world. His prewar European travels were not just youthful jaunts in search of kicks but were accompanied by serious study and learning about the crisis on the continent. Logevall's account of Kennedy's service in the U.S. Navy manages to make his celebrated 1943 rescue of a fellow crewman after the sinking of their PT boat into a dramatic page-turner without embellishment or gratuitous praise, letting the gripping details themselves convey Kennedy's heroism. Logevall also shows, without heavy-handed psychologizing, how Joe Kennedy's grave errors of ideology and judgment—he was a notorious isolationist and proponent of appeasement—steered young Jack away from his father's reactionary instincts in foreign affairs and instead led him to adopt a considered liberal internationalism that would govern his politics for the rest of his life.The focus on the global picture and on Kennedy as a student of the world does not preclude the examination of family, friendships, or romance. Logevall engagingly recounts JFK's love affairs, notably with the Danish journalist Inga Arvad, four years his senior, without descending into sensationalism. What comes across is not titillation but the importance of these relationships to Kennedy. Most revealing is the portrait of his courtship of Jackie, to whom he was drawn as much by her intellect as by her beauty. Logevall marshals and assesses the relevant evidence to show that, despite the many infidelities for which he is widely known, the 34-year-old congressman was genuinely and deeply enamored of Jackie and that she was a substantive person and an essential part of his story.Such sober verdicts may disappoint anyone hoping for more lurid anecdotes or for depictions of JFK as a well-born playboy dabbling in politics and marriage. But they are of a piece with Logevall's overall judgment, also persuasive, that “JFK was always his own master” (p. xvi). What will most surprise the casual consumers of television documentaries and gossipy tell-alls about Kennedy (though not those who have read more deeply about him) is that JFK emerges from this thoroughly researched biography as a reader and intellect, a serious politician, and an eager leader, always interested in world affairs, always drawn to politics as a vocation that would allow for an engaged life.The length and depth of Logevall's account of the formation of Kennedy's personal and political character means that his legislative service gets somewhat brisker treatment. Logevall also chooses to end the volume in 1956, after Kennedy's failed bid to be nominated as Adlai Stevenson's vice-presidential running-mate on the Democratic ticket, foreshortening his Senate years further still. But the result is that when Kennedy pivots, as he did almost immediately after that 1956 disappointment, to considering a presidential run, he is, at 39, possessed of a mature worldview and established character. When readers dive into volume 2, they will feel they have come to know how that worldview and character were formed.Even the most ardent John F. Kennedy aficionados could not be blamed for exclaiming, “Really? Another biography of JFK?” At last count, more than 40,000 books have been published about the 35th U.S. president. Even if the literature on Kennedy never reaches the staggering quantity of scholarship on Abraham Lincoln (who is outranked only by Jesus Christ as the subject of biographical studies), no one can hope to read the full body of work on the assassinated president.For now, and for some time to come, the new tome, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956, elegantly written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall, will constitute the definitive work on Kennedy. It is a two-volume enterprise, so the first volume ends before the young Massachusetts senator begins his improbable race for the White House. Stay tuned for the riveting narrative of how the great-grandson of Irish potato-famine refugees became the first Roman Catholic U.S. president (Joe Biden is only the second) and how he governed in a turbulent presidency that lasted barely 1,000 days but ended so tragically and shockingly that it seems forever burned into the American psyche.Despite that emotive justification for writing additional books on Kennedy, is there anything new to explore? In the 20 years since the last scholarly biography (Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963) appeared in 2003, an archival treasure trove has come to light, including the voluminous papers of JFK's parents, Joseph, Sr., and Rose Kennedy; Jacqueline Kennedy's compelling eight-hour oral history, conducted by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., just a few months after the assassination; the Miller Center's release of the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project; a portion of Robert Kennedy's papers; and the lifting of redactions in other family members’ interviews.5 Authors have mined these resources for initial takes on their subjects, but no one has revisited them with Logevall's intent to tell Kennedy's complete life story. In addition, previously classified documents have been released and will particularly enlighten volume 2.As my Miller Center colleague Marc Selverstone observes, the JFK literature covers an arc that began shortly after his death with memoirs from the knights of Camelot's round table, nostalgia-infused stories on the golden age of a fallen president. Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, David Powers, Kenneth O'Donnell, Paul Fay, and Benjamin Bradlee all produced paeans to their hero, as did the president's long-time secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and even the Kennedys’ British nanny, Maud Shaw. Inevitably, revisionism followed, starting in the 1970s and revealing the “dark side of Camelot.” A third wave of scholarship, including Logevall's new book and his award-winning 2012 study of the Vietnam War, constitutes a balanced approach to the 35th president—examining his successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies, heroic traits and profound character flaws.6Yet even if readers are familiar with the wealth of information that has circulated on the most potent political dynasty in U.S. history, they will find much that is enlightening in the latest biography. No author has taken a deeper, more detailed, or more thoroughly nuanced approach to the document trail and other resources available in the Kennedy Presidential Library. Logevall provides meticulous analysis of young John Kennedy's copious letters, student essays and Harvard senior thesis, diary entries as JFK traveled in pre-World War II Europe, missives from the South Pacific combat zone, and journalistic articles drafted as a military veteran for Hearst newspapers on the founding United Nations conference and Britain's 1945 parliamentary election. The formation of Kennedy's character, intellect, powers of observation, and Weltanschauung, as Logevall weaves the threads of archival material, produces a rich tapestry.Kennedy in his Harvard years, journeying through Europe just prior to World War II, was no Alexis de Tocqueville incisively observing American democracy in the 1830s. Yet Logevall discovers the bases for Kennedy's crucial divergence from his father's petty personality, isolationist worldview, and appeasement policies—a departure absolutely necessary for the son's successful political career. This book's overarching addition to the Kennedy canon results from the discerning eye of a renowned foreign policy historian, originally from Sweden, which allows Logevall to avoid the American-centric hagiography of the Camelot legend. A “life and times” approach to writing biography is frequently revealing, but it is most fruitful when the subject's life corresponds directly with clear demarcations in history that the biographer thoroughly comprehends.Kennedy, born just as the United States entered World War I, encouraged by his mother to sate his curiosity by reading and traveling widely, coming of age when his father's “America First” ambassadorial policies in the United Kingdom utterly failed, hardened by Solomon Islands combat for which he volunteered despite his frail health, and tempered by the Cold War's bitter peace, emerged as an “idealist without illusions.”By the time the book concludes, Kennedy is a staunch Cold Warrior, convinced that only an internationalist foreign policy can save the world from Communism. But his pursuit of this belief is strikingly different from the approaches commonly seen with today's polarization. Although Kennedy was a tough politician in the mold of his materna