Clarke Thurston - JFKs last hundred days the transformation of a man and the emergence of a great president

WASHINGTON

a letter formally announcing his support for the treaty.

Minutes after arriving at the White House, Kennedy met with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the former political rival he had appointed ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodges decision to accept the post struck many as just as inexplicable as Kennedys decision to offer it to him. It was not a first-rank embassy, certainly not for a distinguished sixty-one-year-old former U.S. senator, ambassador to the United Nations, and vice presidential candidate. Soon after the inauguration, Lodge had told Secretary of State Rusk that he had one more tour of public duty in his system and would accept a challenging position in the administration. Two years later, Kennedy ran into Lodge at a dinner and afterward instructed his military attach, Major General Chester Clifton, to ask him if he was interested in an embassy. that although he was not looking for a job, he would consider something challenging and difficult. Clifton relayed this to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who recommended Saigon.

After Lodge accepted the post, from a totally unpartisan viewpoint, without regard to party politics, important though party politics are. South Vietnam was vital to U.S. security, the commander in chief had asked him to serve, and under these circumstances, service is a patriotic duty as well as an honora stirring defense all the more impressive for being voiced in a private communication.

Kennedys motives for sending Lodge to Saigon were less estimable. His first choice had been Edmund Gullion, the current ambassador to Ghana and a friend and usher at his wedding who had frequently advised him about foreign affairs. Rusk argued that the post called for someone with more experience and seniority and pushed for Lodge. Kennedys other advisers opposed sending a Republican of his stature to Saigon on the grounds that he might resist taking orders from a Democratic administration and prove difficult to fire. in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible, and Jackie remarking later that he believed sending a Republican to Saigon might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless.

Kennedy certainly had reason to be magnanimous. His victories over Lodge in the Massachusetts Senate race in 1952 and in the 1960 general election, when Lodge had run for vice president, had capped a family rivalry spanning generations. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., had introduced a bill in Congress in 1895 aimed at curbing immigration from southern and eastern Europe by requiring immigrants to be literate in their national languages. When his bill reached the House, Kennedys maternal grandfather, who was then a congressman, had fiercely opposed it. According to a story that Fitzgerald told for years and his grandson surely knew by heart, when he and Lodge met in the Senate chamber, Lodge had called him an impudent young man and asked, Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country? Fitzgerald had shot back, As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships. Fitzgerald ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1916 and lost. In 1952, his grandson challenged Lodges grandson for the same seat and won. Lodge served as Eisenhowers ambassador to the United Nations until he resigned to run for vice president in 1960, and lost to Kennedy again. Two years later, Ted Kennedy beat Lodges son in an election to fill the presidents former Senate seat.

The reporter Joe McCarthy had interviewed Kennedy and his father as they cruised off Hyannis Port in 1959. As Jack listened, his father thundered that he had moved his family out of Boston because the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice of the Yankee elite made it no place to raise Irish-Catholic children. their worst fears are being realized, he told his friends, the invasion by the Irish-Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of Americas socially elite.

The presidency did not knock the chip off his shoulder.. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone elses exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.

How, then, could he look at Lodge and not see the kind of Brahmin who had driven his father from Boston, and would have blackballed an Irish American president from the Somerset Club? Ken ODonnell, an expert on the dimensions of the Kennedy chip, believed that he .

T HE OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF the August 15 meeting between Kennedy and Lodge shows Kennedy leaning back in his rocking chair while Lodge sits perched on the edge of a couch, hands clasped between his knees like a schoolboy summoned to the principals office. Here they were, then, inches apart, the last Yankee Brahmin to have a distinguished political career, and the first Irish Brahmin to become president. Ignore for a moment that when Kennedy was a boy his family had moved to New York to escape the snobbery of Brahmins like the Lodges, and that when Lodge was of a similar age he moved with his widowed mother to Paris, where the novelist Edith Wharton ( that man again as long as I live. Ignore all the differences of religion, class, and upbringing, and you have two men with more in common than either suspected or cared to acknowledge.

Lodge had lost his father when he was seven, an event leaving him absorbed with his health and, like Kennedy, a careful eater, devotee of bland soups, and afternoon napper. Both had followed mediocre prep school careers with success at Harvard. Lodge had been thirty-four when he won his Senate seat, Kennedy thirty-five, and both were criticized for being young men in a hurry. Both won medals for valor and ran on their war recordsKennedy for the House, and Lodge to regain the Senate seat he had resigned to fight in the war. Kennedy had dabbled in journalism and considered making it a career; Lodge had spent nine years at newspapers in Boston and New York. Both were appalled by baby-kissing, arms-in-the-air politics. When David Halberstam of the New York Times wrote about Lodge, , hoist a beer, hurt his back and hug his kids like millions of other Americans.

The button activating the secret Oval Office microphone was concealed somewhere on the round mahogany coffee table. The August 15 photograph shows wires running from the base of this table into the floor. One led from the microphone to the basement tape recorder, although a visitor would assume that they were all telephone wires. In fact, Kennedy was concealing more than a hidden microphone from Lodge. Had Lodge known that he doubted that the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem could defeat the Communist insurgency, and was considering how and when to extricate the more than sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers currently serving in South Vietnam, he might have paid more attention to Congresswoman Boltons warning.

K ENNEDY AND HIS BROTHER B OBBY had stopped in Vietnam in 1951 during a private fact-finding tour of the Middle East and Asia. They arrived at a violent juncture in the struggle between the French colonial authorities and Viet Minh guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh. A suicide bomber had killed a French general, antigrenade nets covered government ministries, and artillery flashes lit the horizon as they dined at a rooftop restaurant in Saigon with Edmund Gullion, then serving as the political counselor at the embassy. Kennedy asked Gullion what he had learned. there will be no more colonies, Gullion said. Were going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. Theres no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us. Gullion believed that the only way to defeat the Viet Minh was by encouraging a strong and countervailing nationalism among the South Vietnamese, an impossible strategy for a colonial power.