Domestically in the United States, Korea had large-scale consequences. The failure to win a swift victory and the public’s impatience with a stalemated struggle undoubtedly helped Eisenhower and hurt Stevenson in the 1952 campaign. The war also enhanced presidential power vis-à-vis Congress as lawmakers repeatedly deferred to the White House. (Truman never asked Congress for a declaration of war, believing that, as commander in chief, he had broad authority to commit troops wherever he wished. His successors would follow this precedent.)47 In addition, the war, which began in the throes of the “Who lost China?” controversy, inflamed American party politics. Republican legislators, including the party leadership, accused Truman and his aides of being “soft on communism” in failing first to head off the struggle and then to go full bore to win it; their rhetorical assault strengthened the Truman team’s determination to take an unyielding position in the talks.
The impact on foreign policy was greater still. The Sino-American hostility fueled by the fighting ensured that there would be no rapprochement between Beijing and Washington, and that South Korea and Taiwan would become recipients of large-scale U.S. assistance. The alliance with Japan strengthened, and Washington signed a mutual defense deal with Australia and New Zealand. The U.S. Army, which grew from a postwar low of 591,000 troops to more than 1.5 million troops, dispatched four divisions to Europe, and the Truman administration launched plans to rearm West Germany. Finally, the Korean War convinced the president to do what he had refused to do before the outbreak of hostilities: approve a vast increase in military spending. Indeed, the military budget shot up from $14 billion in 1949 to $52.8 billion in 1953; it went down after the Korean armistice, but never to its prewar levels; it stayed between $42 billion and $49 billion per year through the 1950s.48 Soviet leaders vowed to match this military buildup, and the result was a major arms race between the two nations. By the time John F. Kennedy entered the Senate, therefore, American foreign policy had been globalized and militarized in a way scarcely imaginable half a dozen years before, when he took his seat in the House.
Kennedy had no qualms with Eisenhower’s resolute Cold War policy. He had long since grasped what every savvy, enterprising politician in midcentury America understood: that staunch anti-Communism was the only viable posture in domestic political terms. Preaching the need for accommodation with Moscow or Beijing might make intellectual sense, might be shrewd geopolitics, but it posed grave risks for one’s career—why take the chance? Much better to vow eternal vigilance, to condemn any hint of compromise.49 What’s more, Kennedy genuinely believed in the existence of a Soviet threat, even after Stalin’s death; he needed no convincing that the Western powers must remain united and resolute, with Washington in the lead role. “We are in truth the last hope on earth,” he told the Boston College Varsity Club. “If we do not stand firm in the midst of the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation, and indifference, then all will be lost.” Yet Kennedy was no fire-breathing Cold Warrior—in the sense of seeing the struggle against the Soviets as primarily a military one—and he continued in 1953 to question, as he had over the previous two years, America’s approach to the burgeoning anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. Already now, in the early 1950s, he intuited the central importance of what would later be called “soft power”—the ability to attract and persuade, without force or coercion.50
The war in Indochina, which had made such an impression on him during his visit there in 1951, was of special interest. Kennedy followed press accounts of the fighting closely, and consulted occasionally with people such as Edmund Gullion, the former U.S. consular officer in Saigon whose dismal analysis had resonated with him during the visit. He even had Jackie translate some French-language reports for him.51 Since his visit, the war had continued to go badly for the French, even as the United States steadily raised the level of its material support, with bombers, cargo planes, tanks, naval craft, trucks, automatic weapons, small arms and ammunition, radios, and hospital and engineering equipment, as well as financial aid, which flowed heavily. (Graham Greene, who wintered in Saigon in the early 1950s and could see the growing U.S. presence with his own eyes, opens his classic novel The Quiet American, set in Indochina in 1952, with the narrator, Fowler, seeing “the lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes.”) By early 1953, with popular disenchantment rising at home, leaders in Paris began quietly considering a negotiated settlement to the war, only to be told by the Americans, in so many words: You must stay in.52
Kennedy saw little or no chance that the war effort as currently constituted would succeed, a view encouraged by Gullion. Outside of the main cities, Ho Chi Minh’s forces were gaining in strength; even in the urban areas, support for the French and their Vietnamese allies was soft. Unless and until the French turned over real power—financial, military, political—to the Vietnamese, there could be no lasting victory. Even that might not be enough, Kennedy conceded, but it represented an essential first step. In April he asked Priscilla Johnson (later Priscilla Johnson McMillan), a research assistant, to look into French spending in Indochina (he suspected, correctly, it turned out, that it was directed overwhelmingly to the military campaign) and to examine whether the French were any closer to giving over meaningful governmental control to the non-Communist Vietnamese. (They were not, Johnson determined.) Armed with her report, the senator, in early May, privately told John Foster Dulles that the United States should take a firm line with the French, insisting that the further granting of U.S. aid be dependent on changes that would give “the native populations…the feeling that they have not been given the shadow of independence but its substance.”53
There was power in this argument, as Dulles knew. That spring, the administration leaned hard on the French to press the war effort and promise “full independence” to the “Associated States” of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, only to encounter the inevitable French response: Why should France continue to fight a bloody military struggle if the ultimate result would be the abandonment of French interests in Southeast Asia? The Americans had no good answer to this question, either then or in the year that followed, and therefore backed off, accepting vague French assurances that independence would come only at some unspecified point in the future. The logical conclusion might be that no satisfactory military solution therefore existed and that Washington should instead urge a negotiated settlement on whatever terms possible, but Jack Kennedy did not go there, at least not yet. In the spring of 1953, when the anti-Communist Vietnamese nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem visited Washington, Kennedy met with him and came away impressed—maybe, just maybe, Diem could be the figure around whom a democratic nation could be built. Through the summer and into fall, the senator continued to advocate coupling American assistance with French efforts at genuine democratic reforms, but he stopped short of urging a firm ultimatum: no aid without concrete evidence of real reform. He suggested instead that U.S. assistance “be administered in such a way as to encourage through all available means the freedom and independence desired by the peoples of the Associated States.”54
The irony was hard to miss: although the United States had placed its credibility behind the French war effort, providing an ever-growing amount of military assistance, victory for colonial forces seemed further away than ever. Therefore, the senator stressed, all future American assistance should be tied to granting independence and thereby generating support among the Indochinese people, who presently were deeply apathetic vis-à-vis the war effort—and for good reason. Without broad popular support, no effort at defeating Ho’s revolution could ever have a chance of succeeding.55
V
The courtship of Jack and Jackie, meanwhile, continued apace, and early that same summer of 1953 he proposed. Details are murky, but it seems he popped the question over the transatlantic telephone, while Jackie was in England covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and after he had received permission from Jack Bouvier. (Earlier he had sent her a telegram: ARTICLES EXCELLENT, BUT YOU ARE MISSED. LOVE, JACK.) She coyly replied that she would give him her answer soon. Upon her return, Jack met her plane and presented her with a 2.88-carat diamond engagement ring, set with a 2.84-carat emerald, from Van Cleef & Arpels. She said yes, but there are hints that she had hesitated, at least briefly. After the initial phone call, it seems she darted off to Paris from London to see John Marquand and to renew their dalliance for a few days. She wondered whether she could ever truly fit in with the Kennedy family, wondered what life as a politician’s wife would be like, with the exhausting campaigns, the intrusive press attention, the endless stream of dinners not with artists or writers or musicians or other interesting people but with politicians and their spouses.56
No doubt, too, she wondered about her man’s reputation as a womanizer. Already the previous year, soon after they began dating, she’d speculated in a letter, “He’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.”57 Then, in January 1953, Lem Billings had taken her aside one evening to tell her what it seems she already knew. “I told her that night that I thought she ought to realize that Jack was thirty-five years old,” Lem later said, “had been around an awful lot all his life, had known many, many girls—this sounds like an awfully disloyal friend saying these things—that she was going to have to be very understanding at the beginning, that he had really never settled down with one girl before, and that a man of thirty-five is very difficult to live with. She was very understanding about it and accepted everything I said.” (One wonders: did the still-closeted Billings, who treasured his friendship with Jack above all else, who had been in love with him twenty years before and perhaps still was, see her as a rival for Jack’s time and affection?)58
Chuck Spalding went further. As he saw it, Jackie was not merely understanding about Jack’s ways; his peccadilloes “made her more interested in him,” made him more captivating, more like her father. “Dangerous men excited her. There was that element of danger in Jack Kennedy, without doubt.” In another interview, Spalding said Jackie “wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack. It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations. We all talked about it—even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud but said that Jackie had a ‘father crush.’ What was surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.”59 For her, a recent biographer echoes, those attributes that some women would regard as deal breakers only made Jack more appealing: “She thought him excitingly unconventional and unpredictable, full of angles and surprises, in the way that her father had been. And if, like Black Jack Bouvier, Jack Kennedy was also a little dangerous, so much the better; at least he was not bland and boring like the fellow she had almost married.” Moreover, after enduring years of criticism from her mother about every aspect of her appearance, it was to Jackie only a plus that she was now being wooed by one of America’s most eligible bachelors, a reputed playboy who had been linked to screen stars, heiresses, and a host of other desirable women.60
If this seems overstated—is it really plausible that Jackie welcomed her suitor’s rakish ways?—it may at least be said that she accepted what lay in store. The chronic womanizing of the father she adored had conditioned her expectations of men, had led her to believe they were congenitally inclined to infidelity. They weren’t being consciously cruel in this cheating, to her mind; it was merely one of the fixed laws of nature. When, during her London visit, a male acquaintance cautioned her to beware of Jack Kennedy’s roving eye, she shrugged him off. “All men are like that,” she told him. “Just look at my father.” Or, she might have added, just look at Jack’s father, hardly a shining example of virtue. In her essay for the Vogue Prix de Paris competition, Jackie had quoted Oscar Wilde: “The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”61 Perhaps, too, some part of her thought she could change Jack, or that the mere fact of being betrothed would change him. Whatever the case, she expressed delight at her engagement, soon telling friends and relatives she couldn’t wait to wed her man.62
An early call was to her father’s sister. “Aunt Maudie, I just want you to know that I’m engaged to Jack Kennedy,” Jackie said. “But you can’t tell anyone for a while because it wouldn’t be fair to the Saturday Evening Post.” A puzzled Aunt Maudie asked why. “The Post is coming out tomorrow with an article on Jack,” she explained, “and the title is on the cover. It’s ‘Jack Kennedy—the Senate’s Gay Young Bachelor.’ ” Jack had known for weeks of the impending publication, but he was unhappy when he saw the piece, by Paul F. Healy, with its description of a swashbuckling lawmaker with a “bumper crop of lightly combed brown hair that shoots over his right eyebrow and always makes him look as though he just stepped out of the shower,” and who liked nothing more than to dash around Washington in “his long convertible, hatless and with the car’s top down,” a glamorous woman by his side. This was not exactly the statesmanlike image Jack wanted to convey, and it troubled him that Healy gave scant indication that his subject had another side—serious-minded, reflective, knowledgeable about policy matters, especially relating to international affairs. The article irritated Jack, and confirmed in him the wisdom of getting married without delay.63
Jackie, notwithstanding her guarded relations with her mother-in-law-to-be, penned a touching letter to Rose in her distinctive, stylish handwriting. “It seems to me that very few people have been able to create what you have—a family built on love and loyalty and gaiety. If I can even come close to that with Jack I will be very happy. If you ever see me going wrong I hope you will tell me—because I know you would never find fault unless fault was there.”64
The young couple being interviewed by mass-circulation Life magazine in Hyannis Port at the time of their June 1953 engagement. The accompanying article, which included a major photo spread, appeared in July under the title “Life Goes Courting with a U.S. Senator.”
The engagement was announced on June 24, 1953, and trumpeted in newspapers all across the country. SENATOR LOSES BACHELORHOOD TO CAMERA GAL, read the headline in the New York Daily News. “Come September, the Senate’s gay young bachelor will be no more,” began the accompanying article. “Hopeful debutantes from Washington to Boston, from Palm Beach to Hollywood, can begin unpacking their hope chests.” EXIT PRINCE CHARMING, echoed the Boston Herald. “Yesterday was a difficult time for American women…” The New York Times published photos of the couple to accompany its story, while in Time’s formulation, Senator Kennedy had become “engaged to sultry Socialite Jacqueline Bouvier, 23, onetime Washington Times-Herald Inquiring Photographer.”65 Engagement parties followed in Hyannis Port and at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchinclosses’ magnificent waterfront estate in Newport, with its vast gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and a main house boasting a dozen full baths and an equal number of fireplaces.*3 The wedding, to take place in Newport, was set for September 12.
Jack remarked perceptively to his friend Red Fay that he was both “too young and too old” to marry. He was too young because he did not yet feel ready to fully quit his bachelor ways. He was too old in that, at thirty-six, he was stuck in his ways, a creature of habit whose practices could not be fully altered merely because of a ceremony in a chapel. He knew, moreover, as he acknowledged to Fay, the degree to which his electoral successes depended on his appeal to women. “This means the end of a promising political career as it has been based up to now almost entirely on the old sex appeal.”66
Throughout the courtship, he kept on seeing other women. Often Evelyn Lincoln assisted with the arrangements. “He was a playboy, all right,” she remembered. “I never saw anything like it. Women were calling all the time, day and night. I more or less organized the ones he wanted to deal with. I’d call them up, tell them where they were to meet him for dinner, that sort of thing.” But Jack never asked her to call Jackie. “When he didn’t ask me to call her, I knew she had to be someone special.”67
When Jack and Torbert Macdonald headed to the French Riviera for a brief jaunt a few weeks before the wedding, his father—of all people—worried that Jack might get “restless” about his marriage and thereby land himself in trouble. “I am hoping that he will…be especially mindful of whom he sees,” Joe Kennedy wrote to Macdonald, who was married and had his own reasons to tread carefully. “Certainly one can’t take anything for granted since he became a United States Senator. That is a price he should be willing to pay and gladly.”68 Whether Macdonald passed on the message is not known, but the two men clearly partied hard on their rented yacht and on shore. In Cap d’Antibes one day, Jack ran into a British friend who introduced him to a pair of Swedish women in their early twenties. They double-dated that evening, Jack being paired with Gunilla von Post, a strikingly pretty, petite blonde from a moneyed family, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his former Nordic love Inga Arvad. They danced and talked, learning about each other’s families, whereupon Jack offered to drive von Post to Cap-Eden-Roc, where he had spent memorable time in his youth. In her own telling, there they sat together until deep into the night, looking out into the Mediterranean as a warm breeze blew. At one point they kissed and “my breath was taken away,” she said later. And it was easy to talk with him: “When he asked questions, he really seemed interested in the answers.”69
“I’m going back to the United States next week to get married,” Gunilla recalled Jack suddenly saying. In her memory, he then told her that if he had met her even a week earlier, he would have “canceled the whole thing.” If indeed he said this, it seems impossible to believe he truly meant it, given what scrapping the wedding could have meant for his life and career. But perhaps he was swept up in the moment, entranced by the woman next to him and acutely conscious that his bachelor days, his days of freedom in the pursuit of pleasure, were coming to an end. When he dropped her off, he asked if he could come in for a nightcap. She refused (“No, my dear Jack, I only want to wish you good luck, and that everything works out for you”), and he drove off.70