In Israel, Jack was the same detached yet empathetic observer he had been on his visit in 1939. He was impressed by David Ben-Gurion’s leadership of the three-year-old nation, but also expressed understanding of the plight suffered by Arab refugees whom Israel refused to take back. Back in his hotel after the dinner, Jack—who had a love of poetry that he kept mostly hidden, perhaps for fear that it seemed unmanly—jotted down four lines from a poem by Shelley penned in 1819, after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester that year, in which government forces fired on a gathering of unarmed protesters seeking Parliament reforms. The poem, harshly critical of government ministers Sidmouth and Castlereagh, has been called an early statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance, and one wonders why Jack excerpted it. Whatever his reason, one reads the lines today with foreboding:

 

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh—

Very smooth he look’d, yet grim;

Seven bloodhounds followed him.52

The Israel stay established the basic pattern that Jack followed throughout the trip: he would meet with high leaders of the country in question as well as top U.S. and foreign representatives, then some journalists or intellectuals. Sometimes Bobby joined him, and, more rarely, also Pat; often he went solo.53 And whereas a different politician might have been content with a handshake, a few minutes of desultory chitchat, and a photograph, Jack sought serious dialogues with his interlocutors. Thus, in Tehran, scene of the great Allied wartime conference eight years before, he met at length with U.S. ambassador Loy Henderson to discuss President Mohammad Mossadegh’s decision, only days before, to seize British-controlled oil fields. “The British have been extremely shortsighted here,” Henderson told him, in failing to give Iranians a large share of the spoils. “Almost stupid.” Yet the British officials Jack encountered seemed unfazed, assuring him that Mossadegh was a clown who wouldn’t last long. Jack doubted this assessment, and he sensed trouble ahead for the British in Iran—and, by extension, for the United States.

The tensions were no less great in Pakistan—four days after Jack and Bobby held a lengthy session with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, one of the nation’s founders, he was gunned down by an assassin. In his diary, Jack noted that “assassinations have taken a heavy toll of leaders in the Middle and Far East,” and then listed some of the killings of the previous four years. The Khan murder reinforced the congressman’s sense of the precariousness of political power in newly emerging nations, and his belief that Asia would become an increasingly vital concern for U.S. foreign policy. Khan had stressed the importance of Kashmir, which both Pakistan and India claimed as theirs, and gave his guest no sense that the issue could be resolved peacefully anytime soon.

Next it was on to India, where Jawaharlal Nehru offered no more assurances on Kashmir and proved an indifferent yet inspiring host. Over a lunch at the presidential palace, attended also by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, he mostly ignored Jack and Bobby and focused his charm on Pat, but after the meal he and Jack met for an extended discussion. Suave and self-assured, the British-educated Nehru, who would soon turn sixty-two, eschewed specifics in favor of the big picture (he breezily professed to have no clue when Jack asked him how many divisions the Indian army could field), and he defended forcefully his nation’s neutrality in the Cold War. Aware that the Kennedy trio would soon be visiting Indochina, Nehru called the French war against Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist forces there an example of doomed colonialism. Communism, he stressed to Jack during a dinner conversation, offered the masses “something to die for,” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War of the type the French were attempting against Ho would never stop Communism; it would only strengthen it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.”

Jack found power in this argument; indeed, he had argued similarly in his speech to the taxpayers’ group in Boston in April. And he could see the force of the Indian leader’s personality. Normally scornful of people who didn’t know their topics down to the specific details, Jack in this case gave the older man a pass, so taken was he with Nehru’s quiet eloquence. “He is interested only in subtler and higher questions,” Jack jotted approvingly in the diary. “Generally agreed Nehru is everything in India—the works. Tremendously popular with the masses.”54

In Thailand, the Kennedys toured the sites, including the Grand Palace and its Temple of the Emerald Buddha, and Jack got an audience with the prime minister. From there the Americans pressed on to Indonesia and Singapore and then Malaya and French Indochina. The Malaya stop was brief but gave the Kennedys a snapshot of the country’s protracted guerrilla struggle against British rule: on October 6, just days prior to their arrival, revolutionary forces had ambushed and assassinated the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney. Tensions, already on the rise that fall, ratcheted up further, and British officials insisted on giving Jack heavy police protection as he traveled without his siblings to see a mining operation just a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur.55

But it was the ten days in Indochina that would be the most momentous stop of all during John F. Kennedy’s globe-trotting adventures of 1951. (“The most interesting place by far,” he wrote his father.56) Even before the aircraft touched down at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat airport on a sunny day in mid-October, Jack felt a special sense of anticipation, for he knew that the war had become a major skirmish in the broader East-West struggle, transformed from its initial status as a straightforward Franco-Vietnamese affair into something broader, something that took it into the epicenter of Asian Cold War politics. Over the previous year and a half, Washington had steadily stepped up U.S. aid to France and its Indochinese allies, while on the other side Mao Zedong’s Communist Chinese government provided growing (if still comparatively modest) assistance to the Ho Chi Minh–led Viet Minh. As such, Jack understood, the Indochina war could have major ramifications for American foreign relations and, by extension, for his own political future.^*3, 57

The next afternoon, keen to gain a deeper understanding of developments, Jack headed off alone to the apartment of Associated Press bureau chief Seymour Topping. The two talked for hours, and Topping laid out why the war was going badly for the French and likely wouldn’t get better: Ho Chi Minh’s support was too broad and too deep, plus he had the backing of Mao’s China, immediately to the north. Jack was struck by what he heard, and he got a similar downbeat assessment from Edmund Gullion, the young counselor at the U.S. legation, who told him American officials in Saigon were split in their views on French prospects in the war.60 In the days to come, Jack asked tough questions during briefings with the U.S. minister, Donald Heath, and the charismatic French military commander and high commissioner, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. De Lattre, who impressed Jack with his dynamism and self-assurance, insisted that France and its allies would see the challenge through and would prevail, but Jack was dubious. His doubts didn’t fade when de Lattre, after complaining to Heath about the congressman’s frank and questioning attitude, hosted the Kennedy siblings for a fancy dinner and arranged for them to travel north to see the fortifications guarding the Red River Delta approaches to Hanoi.61

“We flew over the paddies of the Delta where the French and the guerrillas were locked in a deadly struggle, and through which the Chinese must come if they seize Southeast Asia,” Jack related in a speech a few weeks later, when back on U.S. soil. “Marshal de Lattre pointed from the window of the plane with the cane he had carried since his only son’s death in the fighting of last summer. ‘As long as the Delta can be held,’ he said, ‘Indo China can be held, but if the Delta is lost, Indo China and all of Southeast Asia will be lost with all of its resources and all of its manpower.’ ” All well and good, Jack thought, but how could such an outcome be prevented? The key to victory, he told his audience, “is to get 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. This then must be the pattern for all of our future actions in the Far East. The support of the legitimate aspirations of the people of this area against all who seek to dominate them—from whatever quarter they may come.”62

In a diary entry from Vietnam, he spoke in similar terms: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want.” U.S. officials, he said, must avoid the path trodden by the declining European empires and instead demonstrate that the enemy is not just Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which were a feature of life for millions of Asians and Arabs.

Bobby saw things in much the same way. “It is generally agreed,” he wrote his father from Saigon, “that if a plebiscite were held now throughout the former Indochina the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would receive at least 70% of the vote. Because of the great U.S. war aid to the French we are being closely identified with the French the result being that we have also become quite unpopular. Our mistake has been not to insist on definite political reforms by the French toward the natives as prerequisites to any aid. As it stands now we are becoming more & more involved in the war to a point where we can’t back out….It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a very bright future.”63