National Affairs: World Without Friends

The voice of the isolationist—give up one’s allies, draw back into the Western Hemisphere, spend mainly to make the U.S. strong—was heard again in the land last week. It was neither “the main tide . . . running” nor the intuitive common sense of “the great mass of the people,” as Pundit Walter Lippmann implied. But there was indeed “subterranean muttering,” as the Alsop Brothers reported. And in a speech by Joseph Patrick Kennedy, millionaire financier and onetime U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the mutterings surfaced and were clearly heard. If Kennedy’s words seemed vaguely familiar, it was because Joe Kennedy had been talking the same way just before World War II.

“Today it is idle to talk of being able to hold the line of the Elbe or the line of the Rhine,” he told a group of University of Virginia students.* “Why should we waste valuable resources in making such an attempt? . . . We have never wanted a part of other people’s scrapes . . . We can do well to mind our own business and interfere only where somebody threatens our business and our homes.”

Korea, said he, was a “costly and staggering extravaganza.” Postwar handouts to Western Europe had netted the U.S. not one “foul-weather friend.” And the United Nations was a “hopeless instrumentality for world peace.” Joe Kennedy, though as fervently anti-Communist as anyone could wish, favored abandoning Asia and Europe in the face of “massed manpower and military strength of a type that the world has never seen.” He would concentrate U.S. troops and arms strictly in the Western Hemisphere.

It was a pattern of thought of which the U.S. was going to hear more. Essentially, in the world’s great crisis, the U.S. was faced with two alternatives: 1) keeping and cherishing the allies with whom it had stood before, or 2) going into the type of hemisphere isolation advocated by Joe Kennedy and many others still to be heard from. Alternative One called for all the powers that diplomacy, hard work and decision could muster. It had to be pursued as a task in operations, just as rearmament is a task in operations, and it had to be carried out without concessions on vital points, e.g.: abandonment of Asia to the Communists. Only if it failed would the second alternative be a choice, and it would be a Hobson’s choice. The isolationists heard by the country last week were men who were ready to give up just as the great test was beginning.

*Including son Robert, third youngest of nine children. Son Joseph Jr., naval aviator, was killed in World War II. Son John is a Massachusetts Congressman who has voted for Marshall Plan funds and military aid to Europe.