John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush are the two US presidents who have been the most bullish about India. Yet they couldn’t be further apart as people. One was a latter-day Boston Brahmin. The other a Texas oilman. One is still rated among 20th century’s greatest orators. The other has his father’s gift for garbled syntax. Kennedy revelled in his being cosmopolitan. Bush hates leaving the shores of America.
But their comments regarding India were remarkable in their similarity. “Whatever battles may be in the headlines, no struggle in the world deserves more time and attention from this administration… [than] the struggle between India and China for the economic leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia, for the opportunity to demonstrate whose way of life is the better.” That was Kennedy in 1959, well before he became president. But it mimics Bush’s view that, as he tells everyone, a one-party China cannot be the only economic success story in Asia if the 21st century is to be stable.
It helped both of them that their predecessors to the Oval Office had overseen a thawing of bilateral ties. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bill Clinton made historic state visits to India. But neither was prepared to go beyond the limits set by their own State Department bureaucracies. This was part of a 50-year-long pattern of behaviour. Namely, whatever you do with India, make sure it doesn’t infuriate Pakistan and whatever leverage you get over India, use it to pry out a Kashmir solution.
Kennedy twice tried to break out of Foggy Bottom’s confines during his presidency. The first attempt floundered after a dismal visit to Washington by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961, though Kennedy tried to go beyond the State Department briefing book.The second time occurred soon after the Sino-Indian war in 1962. New Delhi wanted the US to help India to dramatically increase its military capability. When Kennedy’s cabinet met in April 1963 to discuss the proposal, everyone threw cold water on it. The new ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, argued otherwise. His only backer, as Bowles later wrote, “was the president himself”. A few months later, Nehru told Bowles that India was prepared to help the US in Kennedy’s number one headache, Vietnam, in return for a five-year $ 500 million military package. The president was enthusiastic. Scheduling a national security council meeting on November 26, he indicated to Bowles that he was prepared to override his ministers. He was assassinated four days before the meeting.
{{/usCountry}}Kennedy twice tried to break out of Foggy Bottom’s confines during his presidency. The first attempt floundered after a dismal visit to Washington by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961, though Kennedy tried to go beyond the State Department briefing book.The second time occurred soon after the Sino-Indian war in 1962. New Delhi wanted the US to help India to dramatically increase its military capability. When Kennedy’s cabinet met in April 1963 to discuss the proposal, everyone threw cold water on it. The new ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, argued otherwise. His only backer, as Bowles later wrote, “was the president himself”. A few months later, Nehru told Bowles that India was prepared to help the US in Kennedy’s number one headache, Vietnam, in return for a five-year $ 500 million military package. The president was enthusiastic. Scheduling a national security council meeting on November 26, he indicated to Bowles that he was prepared to override his ministers. He was assassinated four days before the meeting.
{{/usCountry}}Bush has faced similar resistance from his own bureaucracy. Like Kennedy he initially sent a member of his inner circle to be the ambassador in New Delhi — Robert Blackwill for Bush, John K. Galbraith for Kennedy — to ensure cables didn’t pass through the State Department. Both waged guerrilla warfare with their ministry superiors. Blackwill used to say he read Galbraith’s ambassadorial journal for inspiration.
Blackwill was probably more successful than Galbraith in pushing forward the relationship. This was partly because the India of the Nineties was a lot more confident and capable. But it was clear to New Delhi that a key obstacle in the first Bush administration was the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wore Cold War blinkers when it came to the potential of an Indo-US relationship. In other words, say various diplomatic sources, he accepted the standard formula that anything new on the India front was okay so long as it had no negative impact on US relations with Pakistan or China. It was no accident that when Condoleezza Rice took over his mantle that Bush’s personal views on India began to manifest themselves in actual policy.
Why were these two presidents prepared to buck the system for India?
It is not obvious as it may seem from India. Both administrations are and were brilliant in image manipulation. Kennedy’s aides successfully hid the fact he spent much of his time on crutches. Bush’s have obscured their ward’s disinterest in detail or debate. India is an issue that earned them little in symbolic value. As Kennedy noted, “There is no visible political glory for either party in coming to the aid of India.” Bush has largely got grief from the US media for the nuclear deal. They did see some hope in India bailing them out of some immediate crises. Kennedy had an eye on Vietnam. Bush, in his first term, looked for help in Afghanistan and Iraq. But their respective Indophilism clearly predated these problems. What seems to have been the common fount of their views on India was a larger geopolitical vision.
Kennedy and Bush shared a view that the US lived in a tough world and that open societies took on their opponents with a built-in handicap. The US could not be seen to shy away from the use of force. A line of thought that was easy to adopt because they ruled at a time the US enjoyed overwhelming military preponderance.Another fallout was that they did not shrink from the idea of arming and building up a fellow ‘fighting democracy’ like India. Bush is taking on the nuclear non-proliferation regime on behalf of India.
The Kennedy administration debated helping India develop a nuclear weapon because it knew the then fledgling non-proliferation regime would leave India at a disadvantage. They both believed that the long-term survival of democracy meant that such nations had to enjoy a balance of power advantage. Kennedy said in 1963, “The interest of the US is best served by preserving and protecting a world of diversity in which no one power or no one combination of powers can threaten the security of the US.” Or more explicitly: “If neither Russia nor China could control Europe and Asia… our security was assured.”
Rice repeatedly talks about the need to ensure ‘a balance of power for freedom’. The threat of Islamic terror has only made the democracy imperative stronger for the Bush administration. As Rice says, “The fundamental character of regimes matter more today than the international distribution of power.”
Along with all this was a common belief that between taking huge risks and doing nothing, the latter was the greater foreign policy sin. Kennedy and Bush were both driven by the need to do, often to the detriment of debate. Bob Woodward’s books on George W. Bush speak of the president’s desire to not leave the world unchanged, to not shy from big picture decisions. Kennedy aides wrote of the need for a ‘grand design’. As one wrote, “The key objective is not that the grand objective be exactly right, it is that we have one and that we start moving toward it.”
India has been a beneficiary of these two apposite US leaders who defied their own establishment for a vision. Kennedy never had the chance to finish the job. Though politically ailing, Bush is determined to do so.