In the Time of the Americans Read online

  Not merely the photo but the same picture in words was there the following morning on page one of The New York Times: “At 43 years of age, the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency, Mr. Kennedy took over the power vested for eight years in Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, at 70, was the oldest White House occupant.” The youngest took over from the oldest; it was to be the refrain for decades to come whenever memories returned to that moment.

  But in his inaugural address, delivered as American flags whipped in that day’s now-storied stiff winds, the new President underscored the more important truth: he proclaimed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century.…” Power had been taken away from those old enough to serve in the First World War; had passed over those (such as Adlai Stevenson, Estes Kefauver, and Stuart Symington) too young to fight in the first war but too old to fight in the second; and had passed directly into the hands of those who had been young officers in the Second World War, men like John F. Kennedy himself and those who were to become his successors, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

  With its promise of youthful renewal, the new President’s brief address brought the inauguration to a successful climax; but parades, ceremonies, and revelries were still to come. And for the Kennedys, the day in the public eye had only just begun.

  For the Eisenhowers, however, it had ended; and as soon as the inaugural ceremony was concluded, they sneaked off the platform by a side exit and slipped away to a private luncheon with friends and members of the outgoing cabinet at the 1925 F Street Club. There, out of the limelight, they relaxed as cocktails and champagne flowed; and after lunch, they drove away to their retirement farm in Pennsylvania.

  NEVER BEFORE IN AMERICAN HISTORY had an incoming administration dismissed a generation as such from the corridors of power. For a century Democrats had been replacing Republicans, and Republicans, Democrats; for two centuries liberals had been replacing conservatives, and conservatives, liberals; and the young had been replacing the old since the beginning of time. But in January 1961, for the first time, one generation deliberately excluded another, arguing that the life experience of Eisenhower’s contemporaries was such as to inculcate beliefs that were outmoded.

  President Kennedy’s articulate speechwriter and intellectual alter ego, Theodore C. Sorensen, later wrote of the inaugural that “grouped behind Kennedy as he removed his overcoat to speak were the young men of his new administration … men who were, with few exceptions, unschooled in the old pre–World War I dogmas and pre-depression doctrines.…” In other words, they had been educated during or after the 1930s—not before.

  In making appointments to the most important positions, the new President did not ask of candidates who otherwise were qualified whether those under consideration had voted for him or not, so long as, like himself, they belonged to the combat generation of the Second World War. Of course, there were exceptions—Robert Lovett (who declined) was offered high office—but they were rare. As national security assistant—his chief White House adviser on foreign policy—the new President chose McGeorge Bundy, a Republican, but a man almost exactly his own age, a junior officer in the army in the Second World War who had landed on a Normandy beach the day after D day. To help him formulate world strategy, the President chose another Republican, Robert McNamara, who had emerged from the Second World War an air force lieutenant colonel. McNamara was only a year older than Kennedy.

  Searching for a secretary of state who would execute rather than formulate policy, Kennedy was willing to consider somebody a bit older, but not very much so. At one point at the end, the leading candidate was David Bruce, a Democrat who was one of the country’s most experienced and distinguished diplomats; but he was rejected by Kennedy and his team because (in the words of one adviser) “he was sixty-two years old” and, like so many of the older men, “his orientation was European.” Another Kennedy adviser commented that Bruce “seemed to be very much of the old school, with Europe the touchstone of his thinking.”

  Kennedy and his advisers were right to see that they were different from the men of Eisenhower’s and Truman’s and Roosevelt’s generation—and not in tastes and style alone. It was not just that the outgoing President relaxed by reading cowboy novels of the Old West while the incoming President read Ian Fleming’s James Bond fantasies: tales of fast living, sports cars, recreational sex, and space-age weapons. There were differences of substance as well.

  The generation of Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt, born in a century when all the world outside our hemisphere was dominated by Europe, brought with it a sense of Europe’s central importance in world affairs. It had lived throughout the great war of the twentieth century from its very beginnings in 1914 until the cease-fire in 1945—a war that directly or indirectly took between 50 and 150 million lives—and had accepted an unsatisfying temporary partition of Europe at the end of it for the indefinite future rather than go to war with the Soviet Union to impose a final peace settlement.

  Eisenhower, the last of his generation to win the presidency, was expected by some to change this “containment” policy of merely holding the line and waiting through the decades or centuries for the Soviet empire to collapse from within. But he did not do so, and was criticized for not doing so. James Reston, of The New York Times, writing at the end of the Eisenhower years, admitted that “nothing vital to the free world has been lost,” but summed up the failures of the outgoing administration by complaining that “nothing has been settled.”

  This was not good enough for the young men who flocked to the banner of President Kennedy. They pictured the Third World, not Europe, as the theater of combat; and many of them were eager to engage the communists in the field to defeat them militarily. Elite counterinsurgency forces—paratroops and rangers—were their chosen agents, supported by electronic gadgetry and helicopter-gunships. Cuba and Indochina, trouble spots inherited from the outgoing administration, were the battlefields they selected.

  These were genuine departures from the outlook and world strategy of the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower generation, and the young men of the Kennedy administration were right to see them as such. Indeed, by defining themselves and their approach to world politics so clearly, Kennedy and his associates helped to throw into relief the essential unity of the earlier generation. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall, Acheson, Dulles, Taft, and Vandenberg were different from one another, and some of them were adversaries, but they had a political life-experience in common; and it was a bond between them. Many generations of Americans had questioned what role the United States should play in world affairs, but theirs was the generation forced to give the answer.

  Kennedy’s young men took it for granted that the United States was a superpower with global interests and responsibilities, but Eisenhower’s generation had not started from any such assumption; they had been obliged to question and search for themselves, often changing their minds, sometimes learning by trial and error as they groped for a definition of the world role their country should play, pursuing the exceptional mission that they believed history had ordained for the United States, while pursued by doubts that they had got it right.

  Growing to manhood, they had been challenged by Theodore Roosevelt to make their country a great power. With President Wilson, they had agonized over whether they should allow America to be drawn into Europe’s global wars. For them, this was personal experience: they had lived it, not learned it from books. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Christian Herter, had served on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Germany during Woodrow Wilson’s first administration; had seen the unfolding European war from that vantage point; had watched as Germany and America drifted into conflict; and was one of the last Americans to leave German-held territory in the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the First World War.

  Herter and Eisenhower, like Harry Truman, who was in Washington the day Eisenhower left office, and Dean Acheson, who still was in Washi
ngton every day, and Douglas MacArthur, who was fading away in the seclusion of New York’s Waldorf Towers, were among the survivors of the long march through America’s twentieth century. As Eisenhower retired to his Pennsylvania farm, the youngest and last of his generation to have held the highest office, he brought to a close the story of a remarkable quest: his generation’s search for an answer to the questions of what the United States ought to be and ought to do.

  The story began in an earlier, less experienced America, fresh from the conquest of the western frontier and seeking new worlds, if not to conquer, then at least to explore. And for most of Eisenhower’s and Truman’s and MacArthur’s contemporaries, the highlight of their story was not the time of public acclaim and great achievement at the climax of their professional lives, but those earlier days especially in and around the First World War, when they were just beginning their education in life and all seemed possible; so that what marked them even more than what they did was what they might have done but did not.

  It was in that earlier war, and in the peace that followed it, that they had invested their youthful hopes and dreams. It was that experience that formed the core of their lifelong schooling in politics. Those who encountered them only in the middle decades of the century, when they had become masters of half the world, missed knowing how they had become who they were. To understand them fully, one had to have known them when they were young.

  PART ONE

  GROWING UP

  1

  THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY

  AT THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER 1901, as young people all over America prepared to start a new school year, an educational and entertaining world’s fair opened its gates in the city of Buffalo, a port of entry to the United States in northwestern New York State. Located on grounds about a mile long and a half-mile wide, the fair occupied roughly 350 acres and its total cost came to more than $10 million. Tens of thousands thronged to see it, and 116,000 paid admission on a single day. It was called the Pan-American Exposition, and its theme was the achievements of the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenth century.

  A guidebook to Buffalo and the world’s fair, written by a team that included Mark Twain, explained that in order to focus on its theme, the Exposition limited its pavilions to countries located in the Western Hemisphere or in the outlying dependencies of the United States in the Pacific: the Sandwich Islands (later known as Hawaii), Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines, taken by America from Spain in the war of 1898. Mark Twain and his fellow authors emphasized how the fair’s architecture was in keeping with the cultures of the Pacific and of the Latin south: “The buildings are low, with red-tiled roofs; are brilliant with color; are rich with ornament, with domes and towers and turrets, with balconies and loggias, and, above all, with pergolas, or arbors, covered with thickly-growing vines.”

  To the public swarming through its gates, attending the Buffalo fair, with its wonderful water and electrical displays, offered an opportunity to contemplate the thrilling achievements that might be expected of the new century. For, as recently reelected President William McKinley remarked to his secretary earlier that summer, “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.” The President had accepted an invitation to speak at the Buffalo fair on September 5, and a theme of his address was to be the new, expanded role the United States should expect to play in world affairs.

  The exposition summed up and celebrated the achievements of the nineteenth century; it therefore was an appropriate venue—and 1901 the appropriate year—in which to consider the challenges of the dawning twentieth. It focused on the Western Hemisphere only years after the war of 1898 had raised the question of whether the United States should involve itself in the politics of the world outside the hemisphere. So the Pan-American Exposition was the right place and 1901 was the right time to deliver a speech of the sort that McKinley had in mind; but the President perhaps was not the very best person to deliver it. The very best would have been the newly elected Vice President and former governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, the disturbing public figure most responsible for raising the issue of expanding America’s power overseas.

  AS THE CENTURY TURNED, the restlessly energetic Roosevelt challenged Americans to play a major role on the world stage. His views were changeable and not always consistent, but at times he seemed to want the United States to acquire an empire and become a great power like Britain or Germany. To play that role meant risking war, but he was prepared to pay that price.

  He knew that his was a minority view. Americans were both isolationist and pacifist. They were opposed to fighting wars—at any rate, against European powers. They claimed to be against imperialism. In inspiring the 1898 war against Spain, which was followed by the annexation of the Philippines, the sensationalist press mogul William Randolph Hearst and his rival Joseph Pulitzer showed that American public opinion could be turned around on these issues for a time. But not for long. The fever of imperialism had died down after the Spanish war almost as quickly as it had come.

  It was, in a sense, too soon for America to choose a new role in world affairs. The country was not ready for it. Like teenagers, Americans still were too much absorbed in the question of who they were going to be to address the question of what they were going to do. The United States was fully occupied in trying to deal with its own growth, and with the qualitative as well as quantitative changes that growth was bringing with it.

  In the final decades of the last century, when George Marshall (1880), Douglas MacArthur (1880), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882), Harry S Truman (1884), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890), and others who would lead the United States in the Second World War were born, and in the first dozen or so years of the twentieth century, when they became adults, America was in the middle of a journey. The United States was not what it had been when it began life in the eighteenth century as an independent republic: a rural, mostly agricultural society of a few million largely British-born colonists along the Atlantic seaboard. Nor was it still the pioneering, frontier society of hunters, farmers, and cattlemen toward which the Louisiana Purchase (1803) had pointed in the early nineteenth century. But it had gone only part of the way toward becoming something else.

  The Civil War (1861–65) had visibly transformed the country, as had the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, opening up the West for settlement; but the movement away from the antebellum world, instead of exhausting itself in these efforts, seemed to pick up speed. Henry Adams, a chronicler of American history and also a witness to it, was inspired to believe that the wave of change was a manifestation of a universal law of acceleration: that history was speeding up.

  Of course, Americans had always been on the move, multiplying their territory and population in every generation since the birth of the Republic; and as the nineteenth century moved toward, and then into, the twentieth, they went on doing so. But these movements and multiplications had become involved with other changes that were something else again, and that were altering the country’s fundamental character.

  America was caught up in powerful movements that were transforming her. There was the continuing push westward, propelling Americans ever farther from their European origins. There were the industrial, technological, and urban revolutions, moving Americans ever further from their origins in less literal but more important ways, by changing the nature of their work and of where and how they lived. The landscape of the continent was undergoing metamorphosis: the frontier was closed officially in 1890, forests and wilderness were fast disappearing, industrial cities were springing up, and farmers were moving into towns and becoming factory workers.

  At the turn of the century it was possible to glimpse the outlines of the urban mass industrial society that might emerge when these movements were completed; but Americans were only en route toward that kind of society, not already there. So when the twentieth century dawned, which, it was widely predicted, would become the American century, the United States was ado
lescent rather than adult: it was not yet fully formed. It even looked incomplete: its country roads and city thoroughfares were unpaved, and western towns like Tulsa, in the Oklahoma Territory, consisted of only one street, as though the builders had started by throwing up a saloon and a few general stores, had gone off, and would be back to work later.

  The old continued to function alongside the new: a look typical of an era of transition. The country, especially in the West, was dotted with one-story frame houses, while in the cities of the new age—New York and Chicago—builders were throwing up skyscrapers. In the streets of American cities, horse-drawn carriages still plied their trade alongside trolley cars and elevated railways; and gaslights still glowed at night, on the verge of being replaced by electricity.

  The making of America was still in process, as was the making of Americans. The Statue of Liberty, with its Emma Lazarus sonnet (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free …”), was only about fifteen years old at the turn of the century, and never had the United States provided refuge for more foreigners. In 1900 almost 40 percent of the country’s white population was born in Europe or of a European parent; and another 8 million immigrants—more than 10 percent of the population of the United States—landed on American shores in the first ten years of the twentieth century alone.

  Franklin Roosevelt’s ancestors arrived in America in 1650, and were therefore among the original settlers of the country; but in terms of numbers of immigrants, the real settlement of the United States took place not in the seventeenth century but largely in Franklin Roosevelt’s own lifetime.

  Unlike the original settlers, many of these more recent immigrants were not from Great Britain. English was not their native language, and to forge an American nationality from the tens of millions of Europeans who flooded into the country was a challenge that the country had not yet finished meeting.