Category Archives: History

Arts, Government, History, Politics, Society, United States

John F. Kennedy and his legacy 50-years on…

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

The reputations of presidents’ are based on a number of factors, but luck plays a significant part – not just in terms of what happens while they are in office, but also the luck of who writes their biographies once they have gone. Wars, for example, give presidents a boost, whilst, conversely, any financial crises will have the reverse effect.

The pre-eminent political biographer, Robert Caro, delivered a monumental multivolume labour of love that has, in many respects, redeemed the reputation of Lyndon B. Johnson. Some may deduce that LBJ emerges as the luckiest president of the past century.

Robert Caro’s LBJ depicts and portrays an ultimate fixer, a politician who knew better than anyone how to get his way in the challenging and demanding burrow and nest of Washington. Because of how Caro has written, it’s Johnson’s guile that people look to when they ask how President Obama could do better in his dealings with Congress.

But, as the established stock of LBJ has risen, John F. Kennedy has become the man who merely talked about the transformative legislative programme that Johnson himself turned into reality. In the long shadow cast by LBJ, Kennedy is perceived as a glamorous but slight figure, a crowd-pleasing president who was brave, attractive and ambitious, yet ultimately ineffectual. On the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, many of his admirers are trying to reverse this image. For example, Caro focuses on foreign policy, which was Kennedy’s strength and Johnson’s weakness. LBJ’s achievements were undoubtedly domestic; Caro, as yet, has failed to explain the terrible mess Johnson made of Vietnam. Caro’s ‘unfinished’ biography will surely have to tell in some future volume the tragic coda of this calamitous episode.

The presidency of John F. Kennedy ended just as he was finding ways to move beyond the stagnant and terrifying philosophical logic of cold war confrontation that had taken the world to the brink of catastrophe in the Cuban missile crisis. In 1963, it looked as though Kennedy had stumbled on the path to a more peaceful future. Johnson was the man who departed from it.

During the last year of his life Kennedy’s quest for safer relations with the Russians is evidenced from the speeches Kennedy gave in the summer of 1963 about war, peace and the means of moving from one to the other. The Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), a nuclear arms control agreement that Kennedy signed into law in October 1963, was probably his proudest achievement of his presidency up to that point.

Some commentators may suggest this was a sure indicator of things to come, the first step towards a stable and secure coexistence between the superpowers. Others, like economists, may treat Kennedy as a moral visionary, but economists are not historians. A man, they say, who possessed the gifts of oratory and character that was able to change to change the course of history at this perilous juncture is based on two questionable assumptions.

The first is that treaties matters. The LTBT was only what it said it was: limited. It specifically prohibited further nuclear testing in space or underwater but clearly permitted it underground. The treaty had been watered down from something more comprehensive, first by Russian qualms about international oversight and then by the misgivings of the US joint chiefs about the government of Nikita Khrushchev. Charles de Gaulle refused to sign it.

Arguing, though, that it was a landmark moment (as opposed to changing the course of history) is probably better placed. The treaty certainly signalled that the US and the Soviets could agree on something substantial. It also showed that a US president could get such an agreement passed the Senate, which had a tendency of shooting down plans for peace. We should look no further than from all of that which followed-on from the failure of Woodrow Wilson to get the Senate to ratify the League of Nations in 1919, a deficiency that continually haunted Kennedy. Kennedy did, however, secure ratification of the LTBT by an impressive margin of 80 votes to 19. This subsequently opened the door to the creation and ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was approved by the Senate in 1969 and has been vital in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons around the world.

The contention that speeches actually matter is highly dubious. In his book, ‘To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace’, by Jeffrey Sachs, the author believes that Kennedy’s oratory in 1963 – above all the ‘peace speech’ he delivered in Washington, DC, on 10 June that year – was crucial in persuading Russia’s leaders, US politicians and people all over the world that the time was right for a sea change in international affairs. Whilst Sachs talks up Kennedy’s logic with beauty and how it had the power to move, he provides no evidence that such rhetoric made the vital difference. Are we to conclude that just because Kennedy said it was time for peace the Soviets quickly signed a peace treaty? Sachs does infer that such a treaty came into being because they had been persuaded by what Kennedy had said.

The near calamity of the Cuban missile crisis is recognised as persuading both sides to look for alternatives. However, we should not take for granted that this took the form of turning away from war to peace. It wasn’t so much the risk of Armageddon, but the temporary loss of control that terrorised both sides. The LTBT and NPT were ways of reasserting control as the two superpowers had struggled for something to cling onto as they moved wearily about in the dark without direction. The treaties may have limited the ability of others to get nuclear weapons but it didn’t stop the superpowers from ramping up their own arsenals or persistently pursuing proxy wars around the globe.

Kennedy’s decision to focus on foreign affairs in 1963 was not without cost. It came at the expense of doing other, equally urgent things. The last 100 days in office encompassed both sides of Kennedy; the statesman and chancer on the one hand, the moralist and opportunist on the other.

Other commentators like Thurston Clarke in his book, ‘An Intimate Portrait of a Great President’, also celebrate Kennedy’s great achievement in getting the LTBT passed the Senate but suggests it was done by calling in political favours that could not then get cashed in elsewhere. Forcing the treaty through, for example, came at the expense of a concerted push on civil rights legislation. Clarke says that was a choice between ‘ethics and history’ with Kennedy, a vain, and when he needed to be, a cold-hearted man, choosing history. He was known to weigh himself after every swim, terrified that he was turning into a jowly, middle-aged man. Kennedy’s charm could be turned on and off like a light switch.

Nevertheless, like most commentators Clarke is convinced that this was a great man cut down at the moment of his greatest potential. He insists that Kennedy would have enacted his own comprehensive civil rights legislation in his second term, and argues that Kennedy had seen the folly of his Vietnam escapade and was determined to get out. He was just waiting for the right moment, which would come with his re-election.

The plausibility of this must be questioned. Presidents invariably think they will achieve in their second term what they failed to do in their first but it rarely happens like that. Kennedy’s mantra in 1963 was talked up as being what he was going to do ‘after 1964’ but he was also a well-established ditherer who made sure there was always a get-out clause. There is no evidence, for instance, that he knew how to get round the openly racist Southern bloc in the Senate. In 1963, he sounded more like someone who had parked comprehensive civil rights legislation than a politician who knew how to accomplish it. The day after his peace speech, he gave a powerful talk on civil rights – but he also told black civil rights leaders that they should learn to be more like the Jews and focus on education as the path to improvement.

Clarke cites as evidence of how much Kennedy meant to people and how much his passing mattered. In an unsentimental age, when it was unusual to shed tears in public (and unthinkable for many men), so many cried when they heard of the president’s assassination. According to a Gallup survey 53 per cent of Americans had wept in the days following his death. They shed tears because ordinary people felt a connection and shared a feeling that his death represented the loss of some unspoken promise.

Standard
Arts, Culture, History, Society

Nobel Peace, at what price?

PERPLEXED

Despite being shortlisted five times, Dame Beryl Bainbridge never won the Booker Prize, a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe. Mahatma Gandhi, neither, despite his pre-eminence, won the Nobel Peace Prize, though he had been nominated on five separate occasions between 1937 and 1948. In 1948 Gandhi was assassinated and no prize was awarded, a decree given that there was ‘no suitable living candidate’. It is, of course, up to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to ultimately choose whoever it sees fit to hold the prestigious award. The Norwegian parliament appoints the committee because, when Alfred Nobel died, Norway had been ruled by the same king as its Scandinavian neighbour, Sweden, since the war between the two nations in 1814. It is becoming increasingly difficult, though, to ignore the committee’s aberrant selections.

Two weeks into his first term as President, Barack Obama was nominated for the prize, simply on the basis that the committee had heard his speech in Cairo in which he delivered, at times, perplexing and enigmatic statements. Conjecture such as… ‘Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance’ [as seen] in ‘Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition’ was a presumptuous viewpoint based on little evidence.

The first U.S. presidential laureate had been Theodore Roosevelt, an award that surprised many because Roosevelt had led his own irregular cavalry in an invasion of Cuba. Other implausible laureates followed: Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Al Gore among them.

And what of this year’s award? Those in favour of chemical weapons are likely to be displeased with the choice of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Yet, of more concern, is the smoke-screen that has thickened in search of those chemical weapons that has created unabated slaughter in Syria’s ruthless and bloody civil war.

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: Birdsong…

Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks, is an epic novel of World War I courage and turmoil.

Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks, is an epic novel of World War I courage and turmoil.

IN 1910, Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. Whilst in France he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and attractive matron who abandons her abusive husband, a wealthy textile baron, who sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of World War I.

Six years on, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death and embittered by isolation of war, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing enemy tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this masterly written novel is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally broken-down, narrative, to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Birdsong is enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose. Sebastian Faulk’s narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to forceful and dynamic life.

Birdsong derives much of its incredible power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Stephen Wrayford’s attempt to retain sanity and a scrap of humanity while surrounded by the Nazi onslaught. What becomes highly enthusing as the story progresses is the simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter’s quest to read his diaries, though incomplete and difficult to read, is designed to give some sense of perspective and proportion. Birdsong is an unflinching, articulate fictional war story that rewards the reader with beautifully flowing use of the English language. Faulks deserves every accolade that has been heaped on him to date.

 

THE writing is impressive throughout. The writer’s prose is always exact and elegant and, on occasions, rises to real lyricism, without (cleverly) ever sounding forced. What makes Faulk’s style come to life is the authentic nature of the dialogue, a discourse that is well placed without the irritating linguistic anachronisms that so often blight historical novels set from the recent past. The experience of trench warfare, for instance, is made so vivid and clear that sometimes the reader may well be tempted to put Birdsong aside. But, it’s worth going on if such thoughts cross the mind because events are seen through the eyes of very well developed characters. The author is able to connect the central character, Stephen, with the reader in an extraordinarily adept way; one feels emotionally involved. A link exists with the modern era, through Wrayford’s granddaughter, who goes to great lengths in finding out more about her grandfather, whom she never knew, and who is stridently seeking to establish her own identity more definitively in the process. This establishes a sense of continuity with the past.

 

THE book starts before the war in Amiens, in 1910, when Wraysford has an intense love affair with a married woman that comes to an unsatisfactory end. Sexual passion is, no-doubt, a notoriously difficult subject to portray in a novel, but Faulks manages it with good demeanour and disposition.

The prose then shifts in time to 1916, when we encounter Stephen, already an officer promoted from the ranks, becomes trapped in the travails of the troglodytic netherworld of the Great War’s western front. The horrors of such experiences are depicted objectively; the facts are allowed to speak for themselves on countless occasions, and are all the more telling for that. But in Stephen Wraysford’s military character and being – despite the bestial filth of trenches, narrow underground tunnels, and random death – an ember of self-preservation resists annihilation. Faulks does exceptionally well in describing with clarity, and bracingly dramatises survival against all the odds.

Though fictional, Faulks has, undoubtedly, done his homework. The reader is left to feel that his descriptions of events are based on clearly documented facts and research. Some of the central scenes in the novel are set in a relatively unfamiliar context: that of the mining tunnels, for instance, that both sides constructed between their respective trench networks. The Allies and the Germans both dug these mines and countermines – sometimes, as Faulks illustrates, one side would succeed in detonating explosions that destroyed the enemy tunnels, killing the sappers or burying them alive. To describe the technicalities of this in fiction is no easy task, but Faulks manages it well by allowing his reader to see it through the eyes of one of the sappers.

From conveying the heart-rending anxieties of leading men over the top, Faulks moves to soften Wraysford’s increasingly cold fatalism with memories of his torrid pre-war liaison and love affair with Isabelle, a Frenchwoman. The affair ruined her life but produced a child whose daughter furnishes a vehicle for flash-forwards to the 1970s, when that granddaughter becomes curious about who Wraysford was. As typical of the “lost generation” of Britain, the Wraysford antihero realistically conveys what a waste, in terms of lives and psyches, the trench experience was.

 

DESPITE the masterfulness offered by Faulk’s, the book isn’t an unqualified success. There are distinctive aspects of Stephen’s character that are not wholly or satisfactorily resolved. This claim is laid bare when we consider that Wraysford didn’t know his parents. He was brought up, first by his grandparents, then in an institution, before being taken away by a man he didn’t know who became his legal guardian, but for whom he doesn’t care for. Here the novel becomes unclear. Stephen Wraysford’s level of education is left vague, though it appears higher than might otherwise be expected from his background. His religious views are also left somewhat nebulous and indefinable; he occasionally prays when under stress and, once, before an assault, he receives Holy Communion. For the most part, however, the reader may well come to the view that the central figure is an agnostic. On leave in England he has an experience of nature mysticism that has no connection with Christianity.

 

BIRDSONG ends on an affirmative note, when Elizabeth, Stephen’s granddaughter, gives birth to a baby whom she names after a boy, the son of one of the sappers, who died near Stephen after an attempt to extricate themselves from an underground tunnel enemy explosion. This could easily have been interpreted as being sentimental or over-symbolic but, whilst highly charged and very emotive, paid off because the theme fitted in with Elizabeth’s determination to discover her family history.

Sebastian Faulk’ Birdsong is an impressive and well-crafted achievement. The story, one that is based on the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, will likely stay in your mind long after you close the book.

Standard