Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (57 page)

In dying, Kennedy handed Johnson a poisoned chalice. The coup leaders had proved themselves more inept than Diem; on 29 January a second coup, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, deposed the initial rebels. Taylor prodded McNamara to ‘put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts and undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks’.
⁵²
Aware at every juncture of the possible downside of increased American efforts, Johnson nevertheless found himself sucked into the expansion of the war that he dreaded. The fear of an American domestic backlash if the war were lost combined with a fervent belief in the domino theory led him inexorably towards escalation: in 1964 the President obtained from Congress the Tonkin Gulf Resolution granting unlimited war-making powers; in 1965 the first American combat troops arrived; by 1967 American forces exceeded half a million.

Yet, had he lived, Jack Kennedy would have found himself drinking from exactly the same poisoned chalice. He was the one who had made the two decisions which Americanised the war. In 1961 he had increased drastically the American men and material flowing to South Vietnam, thereby turning an advisory relationship into a partnership. His determination two years later actively to encourage the overthrow of the Diem government had signified the depth of the American involvement and ensured its extension. The crime for which Diem paid with his life was his failure to follow the US prescription for winning the war - a war which Kennedy could not afford to lose. Diem’s death over-determined the American commitment to South Vietnam: with blood on his hands, Kennedy could not have walked away from the conflict, and a decision to stay in 1963 implied inevitable escalation. As a marginal president determined to secure his own and his brother’s political future, Kennedy would never have dared take the step that even Richard Nixon - who made a volte-face on every other decision - could not take.

This brings us to an important counterfactual question which proponents of the Kennedy myth seldom ask: would Kennedy have won the 1964 presidential election if he had lived to fight it? The answer is probably yes (albeit with a smaller majority than Johnson won) - but only if he had maintained his commitment to Vietnam. For anti-Communism was a pervasive fact of domestic politics in the 1960s: it was in the air politicians breathed. It is easily forgotten that, as late as 1968, with 36,000 Americans dead and anti-war demonstrations raging on and off university campuses, half of Americans polled still thought that the United States should increase its effort in Vietnam. Four years earlier, Kennedy would almost certainly have faced Barry Goldwater, the standard-bearer of the right wing of the Republican party. (Nixon had ruled himself out by the tantrum he threw following his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race; and the leading Eastern establishment candidate Nelson Rockefeller had become politically unacceptable to the Republican rank and file after his divorce and hasty remarriage.) With Goldwater watching eagerly for any sign of softness on Communism, Kennedy would have been obliged to reaffirm his commitment whether he liked it or not.

Even after a 1964 election victory, it seems unlikely that Kennedy would have lessened American support for South Vietnam. Having made the same decisions as Johnson actually did in that election year (decisions made on the advice of Kennedy’s men), he would have faced the identical pressures his successor did in 1965. Inevitably, like Johnson, he would have taken the middle road at every juncture. He would have refused to escalate to the extent the military men requested, but would not have sought a negotiated peace treaty. Under his leadership, combat troops would have followed as surely as they did in the Johnson presidency. If anything, his commitment would have been even greater. For Kennedy’s personal inclination was to be a foreign policy president: compared with Johnson, his lack of success in realising a domestic agenda made international success indispensable. For the sake of his place in history (not to mention his brother’s political career), he could never have risked the political ramifications of a decision to withdraw from Vietnam.

That Kennedy occasionally pondered the arguments against the idea of sending US combat troops to Vietnam is poor evidence for the proposition that he would have never taken such a step. Like many high-ranking officials, the President used the stream of people in and out of his office as sounding-boards for different strategies. As a result, Kennedy statements can be found supporting the entire spectrum of possible American decisions. But the fact is that, once the Vietnam conflict had intensified, he too would have seen no easy way out. He of all people could not have renounced the prevailing American belief that the United States had to wage the Cold War - as it was a belief which he himself had nurtured. In short, it would have been All the Way with JFK too.

As the poem says, John F. Kennedy’s term in office was certainly brief; but shining it was not. Nor would it have been otherwise had he lived to serve a second term. There would have been no early withdrawal from Vietnam. There might well have been no Great Society.

The former Communist world has lost its idols. It is now time for Americans to relinquish one of theirs.

Mark Almond

The great of this world are often blamed
for not doing what they could have done.
They can reply: Just think of all the evil
that we could have done and have not done.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

 

 

The collapse of Communism is now history. Already it seems inevitable. But it is worth remembering that no major event in modern history was less predicted by the experts than the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the hauling down of the red flag for the last time from the Kremlin in 1991. The rubble left behind by great revolutions and the collapse of great empires is always impressive and its very scale makes it tempting to look for fundamental, long-term causes. However, looking for the deep roots of historical change is the
déformation professionelle
of historians. Sometimes what happened did not have to be; or, to put it another way, it only became inevitable very late in the day.

The dramatic events of the autumn of 1989 are still too close for us to have a proper perspective, but it is already becoming clear that the Western myth of its inevitable victory over a monolithic, inefficient and oppressive Communism is untenable. Ironically, the very structural and economic determinist arguments which were pooh-poohed by Western advocates when Marxists tried to prove the inexorable logic of the rise of their system are now trotted out to demonstrate that the triumph of the West was preprogrammed. Would that it were so, and that all future rivals were equally doomed by internal contradictions to humiliating failure; but this notion is too self-serving to be convincing. In any case, since the ‘End of History’ was confidently announced by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, that capricious goddess has given our self-satisfaction a few well-placed digs in the ribs. Who is now so confident that democracy has won after all? To many observers at the time, the suddenness, the apparent completeness of the collapse of the East European regimes in 1989 seemed to confirm that some widespread canker had eaten away at the vital organs of the Communist system, leaving it moribund. A popular eye-witness account asks, ‘For what, after all, happened ?’ And gives the answer:

Yet much the same had already happened several times before: in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and then in Poland in 1980. An all-powerful Communist apparatus lost its authority overnight. But, each time the tanks rolled, the crowds were dispersed and Humpty-Dumpty was put back together again. Even in June 1989, in China, Deng Xiaoping was able to show that ‘a million is not a large number’ when his forces shot down mass demonstrations in Peking and a few other cities.

Popular discontent does not explain the collapse of Communism. It had always been there, only bottled up. The question is why the cork was released and why it was not promptly reinserted in the bottle when public protest began. The People may make sympathetic characters in history, but in practice in 1989 (as so often, not least in revolutions) they were merely charming stageextras, whose antics distracted historians and other observers from the real action. After all, if the events in Central Europe in 1989 often reminded observers of the short-lived ‘springtime of the peoples’ in 1848, why was 1849 so completely unimaginable? In many ways, the return to power of the former Communist parties in the second set of free elections across Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s suggests that a slow-motion - and largely non-violent - 1849 has been taking place in any case. The People weary of political involvement very quickly. The absence of organisation in the revolutions of 1989 is striking - only Solidarity in Poland was an exception to the rule that local dissidents had no levers to move society. Most dissidents were better known to readers of the
New York Review of Books
than to the man on the Prague metro or the Leipzig tram.

The real question about 1989 is why did the Communist regimes’ battalions of secret policemen, soldiers and workers’ militias fail to fire a shot? What went wrong with the party’s ‘sword and shield’ this time? More important still, why did the Kremlin renounce its empire so passively and open the way for its rival of decades, NATO, to advance its socio-economic system and probably its military power into the region? Why did the Soviet elite let Central Europe go? Even in 1989, the force required to stifle popular protest would not have been so great. After all, General Jaruzelski’s most potent weapon in 1981 against Solidarity had been water-cannon. Eight years later the disgruntled in East Germany lacked weapons to reply to any assault on the demonstrations which spread across the country.

This leads us back to a more basic question: Was the process of reform started by Gorbachev in 1985 really necessary? Could an alternative Soviet leadership have adopted fundamentally different policies in the mid-1980s, or was there no way out? Only a very crude determinism would insist that Gorbachev happened because Gorbachev had to happen. Even a different approach by Gorbachev himself could have had significantly different results. More than a decade after the start of
glasnost
and
perestroika
it is very difficult to recall how different the academic and establishment consensus was about the Soviet system before Gorbachev’s lifting of the veil of censorship confronted Western scholars and analysts with their own delusions and self-censorship about the Soviet Union’s social problems and incapacity to meet consumer demands. Yet if Gorbachev had been the cynical manipulator of public opinion that some Westerners at first feared - before meeting Gorbachev, Chancellor Kohl compared his skills as a propagandist with those of Goebbels - those local problems could well have remained disguised from most policy- and opinion-makers in the West. The very fact that ardent Reaganite Cold Warriors drew attention to them disqualified their importance in the eyes of ‘reasonable’ scholars and statesmen. By contrast, experts like Severyn Bialer had assured a mass readership in
Time
magazine in 1980 that the Soviet Union was the first state to be able to supply ‘guns and butter’ simultaneously, elevating the standard of living and achieving military parity with the West.
²
In 1984, with all his authority as an economist, J. Kenneth Galbraith assured the West that labour productivity per person was higher in the USSR than in America. A year later, the sociologist David Lane argued:

As late as 1990, the distinguished US Sovietologist Jerry Hough could dismiss the notion of ‘the Soviet Union becoming ungovernable’. This was, he argued, merely:

The point of quoting such sentiments is not that they were insightful - they were not - but that they represented a common operating code of those supposedly in the know in the West.

One answer to the question why the Communists failed to crack down is that the party had lost its own sense of legitimacy. This is indeed true, but who had disillusioned the party members? Certainly not the few cowed dissidents. Nor was it novel for the bulk of the party’s millions of members to be careerists and sunshine Communists: they were always that way, in Central Europe at least. No, it was the high priest of Communism who was to blame (or praise) for paralysing the Communists’ will to assert their power. Gorbachev’s
glasnost
and
perestroika
caused the collapse of Communism. As is evident elsewhere around the world where other Communist leaders were not naive enough to try to reinvigorate the revolution like Gorbachev, the
nomenklatura
state survives. Of course, in Cuba or North Korea, the people are impoverished and not a few are desperate enough to risk fleeing abroad despite trigger-happy border-guards and sharks; but that has not shaken the system. For poverty and immobility are its secrets of survival, not the causes of its downfall. The real mystery is why Gorbachev threw away a patent on power tried and tested in so many different states across the globe.