'The challenge of imperialism'

Fifty years ago, Senator John F. Kennedy shook the foreign policy establishment with a speech that questioned Cold War verities -- and anticipated America's problems in the Middle East today

By Ted Widmer | July 15, 2007

FIFTY YEARS AGO this month, a young senator from Massachusetts with his eye on the White House took a big gamble. On the Senate floor, before his astonished colleagues, John F. Kennedy gave a controversial speech that questioned nearly all of the assumptions of American foreign policy and delved deeply into a hot-button topic that no one wanted to talk about. He was instantly denounced by the White House, the State Department, American allies, and the press. But the speech eventually won him admirers around the world, and brought him that much closer to his party's nomination for president.

The immediate subject of Kennedy's speech was the war that France had been fighting for three years against insurgents in Algeria -- a war that was revealing a pattern of entrenched guerrilla conflict that would become all too familiar. But he went beyond that topic to address the larger question of how America could effectively promote change in the Middle East.

Most politicians, then as now, preferred to stick close to safe and popular utterances. Kennedy went straight into the hornet's nest of Arab discontent with the West in a speech that anticipated many of the problems faced today. It rejected the tired "us vs. them" structure of Cold War thinking; it criticized the military option as a clumsy tool of foreign policy, and it suggested that real advocates of "freedom" were just as likely to be opposed to Western intervention as they were to Communist takeovers.

At first glance, Algeria was not even an American problem. France had been fighting its ugly war to keep Algeria within what was left of the French empire, committing more than 400,000 soldiers to subdue a restive Islamic population. Both sides were capable of great violence, including torture, assassination, and roadside bombs -- which the French routinely denounced as terrorism. (Pentagon strategists recently rediscovered the harrowing 1966 film "The Battle of Algiers," which recalls that conflict's uncomfortable similarities to Iraq.)

But Kennedy had traveled widely, taking trips to Indochina, to the Middle East, and behind the Iron Curtain. And to a surprising degree, this child of privilege was growing concerned about the huge economic disparities in the world and the particular quandary of former colonial peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Arab countries. That was not an issue most Cold Warriors concerned themselves with. But it was a growing problem all the same, and Kennedy was disenchanted with the complacent answers coming from the Eisenhower Administration and its high priest of platitudes, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

When Kennedy rose to deliver the speech, on July 2, 1957, he began with a ringing statement. "The most powerful single force in the world today," he said, "is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent." Hardly anyone would disagree with that. But he continued with a provocative thought -- that "imperialism" was the chief foe of freedom, and that the Western form of imperialism was very nearly as bad as the Soviet version. By emphasizing America's desire to spread freedom in the Middle East, he couldn't have sounded more like today's neoconservative architects of the Iraq war. By stressing the impossibility of spreading freedom through force, he couldn't have sounded more different.

From the moment he spoke on Algeria, it was no longer possible to dismiss Kennedy as a callow young man whose office had been bought for him by his father -- a canard that was widely circulating at the time. With the Algeria speech, he proved himself a serious foreign-policy thinker, and a most viable candidate for the highest office in the land.

In 1957, John F. Kennedy was hardly a household name. While his profile was rising -- he had just missed the nomination to be Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1956 -- he was still a relative newcomer, and, thanks to Leverett Saltonstall, very much the junior senator from Massachusetts. Few of his early speeches had brought distinction. In general, he hewed closely to the issues that concerned his constituents, including a strong Cold Warrior stance in the early 1950s and a reluctance to denounce Joseph McCarthy (more popular in blue-collar Massachusetts than we care to remember).

But clearly, Kennedy was evolving, and that fact alone distanced him from a lot of the competition. His restless intellect was beginning to express itself through both a voracious appetite for books and a steady output of magazine articles. His book "Profiles in Courage" won the Pulitzer for biography in 1957, and may have had a great deal to do with the Algeria speech by giving him the confidence to express his deepest convictions, though he was fully aware of the possible consequences.

Kennedy had laid the groundwork for his critique at the beginning of 1957. In January, he was selected to the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, and throughout the spring, he spoke with anyone who could enlighten him on Algeria, from Africa experts in the State Department to academics to Algerians themselves. Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen called it "one of the most carefully researched speeches he ever gave." It was also the longest speech of his Senate career.

Expectations were high on July 2, thanks to drafts of the speech mailed strategically to Senate colleagues just before it was delivered, and from the opening salvos on imperialism, Kennedy did not disappoint.

Many of his attacks on France, in fact, appeared to be attacks on US policy as well. Not only was France suppressing the natural desire of a people to become free, but it was also diverting NATO resources to a distant theater. By providing military hardware and preventing the issue from being fully discussed in the UN, the United States was in effect complicit in France's behavior.

The result, Kennedy argued, was a rapidly rising anger in the Islamic world at the hypocrisy of Western nations that claim to admire freedom but interfere when other peoples try to claim it for themselves. By ignoring this anger, and indeed perpetuating it, the United States was losing its standing "in the eyes of the free world."

Kennedy was exasperated by France's tired assertions that victory was coming any day now, and its refusal to listen to criticism or negotiate. He was also troubled by the way the Eisenhower administration talked about the conflict, with tedious moralizations and assertions that they knew what they were doing better than anyone else -- a "head in the sands policy," he called it. Some of his criticism was directed at Vice President Richard Nixon, the nominal US emissary to the region -- and, not incidentally, the expected GOP candidate for president in the race to come.

America's own history had provided a clear example to the world of how to achieve independence, Kennedy proclaimed, and we should therefore be sympathetic to the legitimate aspirations of peoples to govern themselves, even if they were very different from us. He loathed the idea of dismissing as terrorists or Communists those who were fighting for their sovereignty, and added that "most political revolutions -- including our own -- have been buoyed by outside aid in men, weapons and ideas."

The key to US foreign policy, he added, must be "freedom and independence for all peoples everywhere" -- even those who would disagree with us. And if we helped Algeria to win its sovereignty, as he urged, we might see that "a new nation, with an Arab heritage, can establish itself in the Western tradition and successfully withstand both the pull toward Arab feudalism and fanaticism and the pull toward Communist authoritarianism."

Kennedy-bashers -- and there is no shortage of them -- would argue that he showed none of these insights during his own presidency, approving an invasion of Cuba and deepening the US presence in Indochina. (It is a curiosity of Kennedy-bashing that he is portrayed as both too weak and too tough on Communism.) Each situation was unique, but a close reading of the Algeria speech shows how deep Kennedy's skepticism of a protracted ground war against insurgents had become, and supports the argument of aides like Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger who felt that he never would have escalated the conflict in Vietnam.

The furor erupted nearly as soon as Kennedy left the Senate floor. Throughout the foreign-policy world, the reaction was immediate and negative. Irritation was acute in the State Department and the Quai d'Orsay (the French foreign ministry), but it also resonated in unexpected quarters like the senior Democratic establishment, normally sympathetic to one of their own, and The New York Times.

Some felt that Kennedy had weakened NATO by criticizing France; others were worried that he had broken the taboo against partisan criticism of US foreign policy. Adlai Stevenson, the erstwhile Democratic candidate for president, criticized the speech, and Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, dismissed it as a juvenile's "impatient snapping of the fingers." Acheson felt that a French retreat from Algeria would lead to "chaos" -- not the last time that argument would be used. The speech was widely covered, and brought more mail to Kennedy's office than any Senate speech he ever gave.

But after the foreign-policy establishment had passed around the smelling salts, a second reaction became evident. To a surprising degree, independent French thinkers had praised the speech, and it was published in full in the independent newspaper L'Express. Africans and Middle Easterners were ebullient that someone had finally listened to their side of the story, and an American journalist working in remote Algeria began hearing insurgents ask him about Kennedy's chance for the nomination. Surprisingly, the chief target of the speech, John Foster Dulles, later told Kennedy that he used it to good effect in putting pressure on the French to find an Algerian solution.

Kennedy went on to assume a new role as one of his party's most interesting foreign-policy thinkers. He elaborated on the speech with an article in the October 1957 issue of Foreign Affairs, and he became chair of the Africa Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee. Amazingly, he mentioned Africa 479 times in speeches during the 1960 campaign.

There were other ramifications. One of the most interesting features of the speech -- its contention that Cold War polarities were detrimental in dealing with some of the world's problems -- would flower again with his speech at American University in June 1963, surely one of the best speeches on foreign policy ever given by an American president. In that address, he again spoke his mind, rejecting the polarities of the Cold War to articulate a national security interest even higher than victory: keeping the world's people alive. And Kennedy's aversion to sentimental statements of "liberty" versus "tyranny" would stand out among presidential speeches that spent a great deal of time inside that rhetorical prison.

Many politicians hate to change course, for fear they will appear inconsistent. But change is growth, and the courage to think anew, as Lincoln once put it, will never go out of fashion. Having finished "Profiles in Courage," Kennedy lived up to the spirit of his book by sailing against the prevailing winds of 1957. His real candidacy may have begun at precisely that moment.

Another Massachusetts native, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, "A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." For many Americans, that day came 50 years ago.

Ted Widmer is the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and recently edited the Library of America's two-volume "American Speeches."