The Uses and Abuses of Power
GEWEN, BARRY
Waiters & Writing USES AND ABUSES OF FOWER BY BARRY GEWEN A READER doesn't have to be a wholehearted admirer of the Kennedys to dislike Garry Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on...
...And as long as it does, we are unlikely to see statesmen emerging from the Old World who can approach the stature of Churchill and de Gaulle...
...The problem with this playlet of high-level blackmail is that the Kennedy brothers did cross Hoover, insisting that the dilatory FBI involve itself in civil rights issues, pressuring the racist Director to hire more black agents...
...Well, yes sometimes...
...Ostensibly, the topic of the book is Edward Kennedy's entrapment within the family mystique...
...Against the claim that Kennedy demonstrated restraint here, he draws himself up to his full height as attorney for the prosecution...
...As Wills pounds away with his half-truths, unsupported assertions and spurious deductions, the gorge rises, the thought intrudes—if only a referee could intervene and disqualify him for unsportsmanlike conduct...
...Richard Nixon said he would have leaped at any excuse to get rid of Castro...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, lamenting the outcome of the affair, stated in 1977: "The Cuban Missile Crisis was actually a defeat — When anybody puts missiles into a situation like that, he should expect to have a lot of trouble with the United States, and real trouble—and all that happened was the agreement: 'OK, you can have your man down there permanently.'" By neglecting to provide the full range of strategic and tactical choices the President was selecting from, Wills fails one of the historian's fundamental tests...
...The former CIA head reported that Kennedy was uneasy with the Bay of Pigs plan from the outset, going along with it so as not to appear softer on Communism than Eisenhower...
...Although they both disliked the prospect of a world dominated by the Soviets and Americans, they could never sufficiently overcome their suspicions to build a third force of "Europe...
...Each was forever getting under the other's skin, yet by the end, in their waning years, they granted one another the kind of detached respect that great men reserve only for their equals...
...In a volume that is an assault from top to bottom, Wills scores his most telling points down at the lower levels...
...When all else failed, he could throw a tantrum, threatening to fire on British forces or move Free France to Russia...
...Never can he be entirely his own man, always will he be "Teddy," the kid brother, obliged to live up to expectations not of his own engendering...
...Kersaudy's book is a blow-by-blow account of the two leaders' remarkable love-hate relationship, concentrating primarily on the years when they were uneasy allies, but spilling over into the postwar period, in many ways the most interesting for the contemporary reader...
...Waiters & Writing USES AND ABUSES OF FOWER BY BARRY GEWEN A READER doesn't have to be a wholehearted admirer of the Kennedys to dislike Garry Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Atlantic-Little Brown, 310 pp., $14.95...
...His real subject is John, whom he wants to expose as a shabby, power-hungry politician whose harmful legacy as President continues to damage us...
...The tale is one of pushes and pulls...
...The President was forced to keep Hoover in office, even acquiesce to a wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr...
...He was a genius of wily maneuvering and psychological warfare, a bold gambler, a master at manipulating public opinion...
...Wills' account of the Missile Crisis a year later is equally lopsided...
...Meanwhile, "Europe" languishes still...
...Despite the fame, wealth, position, privilege, and power, there is a heavy and unique price to being Edward Moore Kennedy...
...Despite Wills' malicious surmise, the most reasonable explanation for why Hoover was kept on remains the obvious one: He was a national icon whose dismissal would have set off a political firestorm Kennedy could ill afford...
...In the name of accuracy, of simple fairness, one wishes to defend where otherwise one might question or criticize...
...But were an American President to attempt to put into practice Wills' concept of power as "surrender in order to rule," he would never get beyond the first word of that phrase...
...Wills' evidence is one-sided and conjectural...
...Dean Acheson wanted to go in and remove the missiles...
...Not to his credit, Roosevelt persisted in a distrust of the imperious, autocratic French general, which in turn influenced the behavior of Churchill, who was committed to maintaining the Anglo-American alliance at all costs...
...Adding to the tensions between them was the impact of that other giant across the Atlantic...
...We have not moved very far...
...But to describe the blockade as reckless at a time when influential voices from both parties were calling for air strikes and invasions is to lose all sense of context...
...in peace it became an obstacle...
...The President pushed the Bay of Pigs plan with arrogant zeal, he declares, in contrast to Eisenhower, who would have known better...
...Starting with nothing, not even a country, he became through sheer will and steadfastness the leader of 400,000 Fighting French, the inspiration of the Resistance and the embodiment of his country to millions of anti-Fascist British and Americans...
...The impetus for the invasion, it seems sensible to believe, came from Cold Warriors, not New Frontiersmen...
...He is doomed, Wills says, by his heritage...
...Because J. Edgar Hoover maintained files that could be highly embarrassing if not destructive, Kennedy, according to Wills, could not afford to cross him...
...Kennedy was the warmonger...
...The CIA based its actions on the White House's inflammatory Cold War rhetoric...
...They didn't have time for meditations on the potency of nonviolence...
...This old-fashioned faith was the source of their strength during the War...
...Its hero, by dint of circumstance, is de Gaulle...
...it is rather "yielding one's will in the persuasion of others...
...Macho appearance, not true security, was the motive for Kennedy's act—surely the most reckless American act since the end of World War II...
...In the showdown, Nikita Khrushchev was the moderate because he backed down to avoid risking nuclear disaster...
...Each was a 19th-century man, an upholder of Nation and Empire...
...IF WILLS COULD HAVE presented his views on power to the subjects of Francois Kersaudy's detailed study, Churchill and De Gaulle (Atheneum, 476 pp., $19.95), they would have laughed him out of the court of public opinion...
...Today, antinuclearism may be the passion stirring European masses, but it is no less irrelevant to the 20th century than a belief in empire...
...His subtitle is A Meditation on Power, and in the book's epilogue he meditates...
...The most vexatious foreign policy issue of those years was Castro's Cuba, and no subject so evokes Wills' indignation...
...It is a commonplace to observe that Churchill and de Gaulle presided over the dissolution of the regimes they loved, but there is more to their postwar policies than that...
...It is the kind of tendentious, mean-spirited, superficial polemic that makes friends out of enemies...
...The stories of the philandering are retold...
...To be sure, the two groups overlapped but, contrary to Wills, they were not synonymous...
...There was a war to be fought—sometimes, it seemed, against each other...
...This is as grave a charge as can be levelled against a chief executive, and the support for such an accusation should be solid, incontrovertible...
...If the President and Attorney General were so fearful of Hoover, they would not have risked offending him on the matter of his employment policies...
...It had not happened before...
...In another age these men would have been titanic antagonists...
...It did not happen again...
...The invasion was "the very definition of the New Frontier...
...during the struggle against Hitler, they were a pair of stubborn oxen forcibly yoked together...
...Altogether a prodigious performance that Roosevelt and Churchill, try as they might, could never contain...
...Genuine power, he extrudes, is not forcing others to do one's will...
...At the critical moment, Kennedy refused U.S...
...He walks with ghosts...
...Quietism may have been appropriate for a Gandhi, whose adversary was the civilized British, or for Wills' hero Martin Luther King, who was able to look beyond the Bull Connors and George Wallaces to the might of the Federal government...
...The relationship was not symmetrical...
...De Gaulle was an Anglophobe, Churchill a Francophile, even when he was a ranting Gaullophobe...
...The final chapters make fascinating, as well as frustrating, reading...
...Not so trivial is Wills' picture of JFK as an aggressive, immoderate President who allowed his obsession with machismo to determine national policy...
...Every effort at cooperation became bogged down in nationalistic squabbles...
...The theme is a resonant one, and could have been developed into a poignant psychological study...
...He contends that the President provoked the confrontation by his anti-Castro campaign, and then dangerously forced the Soviets into a corner with his ultimatums...
...All of this is trivial stuff, irrelevant to Kennedy's political record, although Wills argues that the sexual liaisons had a significance beyond the bedroom...
...This was not the decision of a man intent on flexing his muscles...
...Legitimate questions are raised about the authorship of Kennedy's two books, Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage: The first, John's senior paper at Harvard, judged "repetitious" and "spotty" by the political scientist Carl Friedrich, was turned into a publishable work with the considerable help of journalist Arthur Krock...
...What, then, of the testimony of Allen Dulles (which Wills does not mention...
...The PT109 incident is rehearsed so that Wills can challenge not Kennedy's heroism but his competence as a skipper: "How did a light plywood boat made for speed and maneuverability manage to get itself cut in two by a more ponderous destroyer...
...air support, despite severe criticism from the hardliners...
...similarly, his Pulitzer Prize-winning history went through the typewriter of the talented Theodore Sorensen before hitting the presses (Kennedy himself, states Wills, "was never able to sustain a long passage of prose...
...Yet Wills is not genuinely interested in the senior Senator from Massachusetts...
...And as between Kennedy, with all of his peccadilloes, and Wills, prattling about peace and brotherhood, most people, I hope and suspect, will opt for the sinner over the choirboy...
Vol. 65 • April 1982 • No. 8
