The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  The doctors most likely would have made a different notation in Jack’s medical record if the condition had derived from something other than sex. It was, after all, an age of sexual euphemism. Harvard’s course on general hygiene, mandatory until 1935 and known by the cognoscenti as “Smut I,” covered the hygiene primarily of what many called “the dirty parts.” Men who ventured downtown to indulge with prostitutes were “resort[ing] to less polite alternatives.”

  Jack had good reason to cover up his disease. It was widely rumored—inaccurately, it turned out—that anyone so daring as to apply for a Wassermann syphilis test was abruptly segregated from the rest of his college mates. The Harvard Hygiene Department estimated that far less than 1 percent of the student body was infected with venereal disease each year, suggesting that, in his sexual conduct, Jack was an aberration.

  Jack’s illness did not prevent him from finishing his senior thesis. His essay had all the markings of a student term paper, from its twisted syntax to its pages peppered with typos, but it was a provocative analysis, and it won him a cum laude citation, the lowest of the three honor grades. When Arthur Krock read the manuscript, he pronounced that it could be published as a book and offered to help. Jack’s father not only concurred but sent his son a thoughtful seven-page letter suggesting that he might have “gone too far in absolving the leaders of the National Government [Chamberlain and his cabinet] from responsibility for the state in which England found herself at Munich.”

  Although Joe did not say it so directly, if Jack criticized Chamberlain he would in effect be criticizing his own father. Joe didn’t care. It was a mark of Joe’s love for Jack that he wanted his son to have his own ideas even if they conflicted with his father’s, as long as those ideas would lead him to a powerful, privileged position in American life. As it stood, however, Jack was hardly suggesting that Chamberlain and men like him had helped create a mentality in which the British people were comatose from fear or apprehension at the awesome power of the Nazi war machine.

  Jack had the kind of help in preparing his book manuscript that few authors receive. His Harvard friend Blair Clark, whose journalistic skills were such that he was the editor of the Harvard Crimson, says that he and Jack worked together rewriting two of the chapters. Arthur Krock applied his skilled editorial hand to the manuscript. Joe bought hundreds of copies of his son’s book and was largely responsible for creating the impression that Why England Slept was a popular success. He wrote Churchill that “it is already a best-seller in the nonfiction group,” though in fact it made no best-seller lists. In the end the book sold about twelve thousand copies, a worthy total for a serious, often turgid political book by a twenty-three-year-old first-time author, but hardly the best-seller of legend. As Joe saw the world, image was everything, and he had created this idea that his son was an immensely successful young author.

  At Harvard in the spring of his senior year, Jack learned that one of his oldest friends, Bill Sweatt, had died of a mysterious ailment while on a trip to South America. Jack and Bill had been boys together in the winter in Palm Beach. Both had gone off to Choate. Bill was the kind of stellar youth admired not only by the headmaster and his toadies but even by self-conscious miscreants like Jack and his friends in the notorious Muckers Club.

  Jack had known nothing of death except what he read about it in books and poems. He was stunned by the arbitrariness and randomness of his friend’s demise. Why Bill? Why now? Unlike Jack, who sorted out human beings like a barrel of mainly rotten fruit, Bill had seemed to get along with everyone. On one occasion, when Bill had spoken negatively of a fellow student, Jack’s father had commented: “Well, if Bill Sweatt doesn’t like him, there is something wrong with him.”

  On his Spee Club stationery Jack wrote a letter unlike anything he had written before. In seeking to comfort his friend’s mother, his words were gracious, restrained, deep, and truthful. All his life Jack had disdained what he considered the silly rituals of a gentleman’s life, but now he heralded young Bill as a model of what a gentleman should be.

  Jack’s attitude toward the rituals of upper-class manhood may have changed during his time in London, after reading about Melbourne, or simply because he had grown more comfortable with himself. Jack expressed his ideals of how a man of his class should behave, an ideal very far from how he had lived most of his two decades of life.

  At Choate, I remember he came in 2nd in the class votes as the most gentlemanly and those who knew him voted for him with the feeling that the word “gentleman” in its fullest and broadest sense—in the sense of having great consideration for other people and what they felt—that that best described Bill. I think we all gained something from knowing him and for that reason, I think he probably gave and got far more out of his life than many others who lived to a greater age.

  The house at Prince’s Gate was shrouded in blackout curtains no darker than Joe’s own mood. Much of the time he spent at St. Leonard’s, the huge estate in the countryside that he had taken in the event of the anticipated German bombing of London. He was losing weight. His hair was turning gray. His stomach was so sensitive that he had a special diet at the Mayfair restaurants where he often supped alone. For a while he was taking belladonna to get to sleep. He was no longer an honored guest at the great houses of London. He was alone and he was depressed, and that bleak mood fell over everything he thought and said and wrote.

  Joe believed that those who had so recently wooed him ostracized him now because he continued to shout the truth. This banishment was severe not simply for what he said but how he said it.

  In March of 1940, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, a socially prominent Austrian writer, sent a memo to Clare Boothe Luce titled “Joseph Kennedy and Diplomatic Corps.” The Luce publications portrayed the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s as a dedicated, accomplished public servant, but in private memos a different Joseph P. Kennedy emerged. Von Hofmannsthal pointed out that Joe was far from the only neutralist ambassador in London. The writer suggested that it was not Joe’s views but the way he lived that so offended the British. He spent so long away in the United States, sent his family home, and lived in the British countryside proving “that he lacks the solidarity towards English which is expected of an ambassador.”

  “People particularly resent the fact that he has been a popular figure in London and court life, that they did overlook his childish Prairie County, Ohio, mannerisms and now feel that if they had been more severe with him from the beginning, he would not have let them down,” Von Hofmannsthal wrote. “When he had the king and queen to dinner, he had had the awesome nerve to have photographers there so that the evening would be well publicized, a rudeness to the extreme.” Joe’s worst faux pas, as von Hofmannsthal related it, was at the last Court Ball, where Joe, the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, had walked blithely up to Queen Elizabeth and asked her to dance. “Actually the incident was only known to a few people and to this day has not got into the press,” von Hofmannsthal noted.

  “His behavior as ambassador was outrageous,” said Henry Luce, the Time publisher. “It was outrageous because he said that England was bound to get beaten. Oh, he had a lot of courage. But there he was sitting there in the middle of the blitz phoning to me on the open transatlantic phone saying the jig was up for England. You just don’t do that kind of thing. The British never forgave him for that.”

  Joe was roundly detested not because of his views, which were not that unknown in Britain and not uncommon in America, but because of the way he professed them. He seemed to take pleasure in his proclamations of doom. His defeatism was dangerous to the British because it was like an infectious disease that he was attempting to spread. They saw him as peppering the air with germs of despair that could become a plague. London was a city of spies, and the British Foreign Office was deluged with reports of Joe’s comments on the weakness of British manhood and the impossibility that the island nation could stand up to the onslaught of German steel and m
ight.

  Some observers attributed Joe’s stream of comments to ineptness, cowardice, or sheer bullheaded Americanism. Victor Perowne of the British Foreign Office astutely concluded “that Mr. Kennedy’s perpetual ‘spilling’ of these views is not out of naivete, but very much on purpose and the effect on … our interests is regrettable.” The fear was not that Joe’s words would affect British morale. Instead, the British Foreign Office worried that Joe’s words would do the most damage in the smaller neutral countries in Europe and in the United States.

  In February 1940, while he was in America, Joe sent a telegram to the American embassy in London asking staff to RUSH PACIFIST LITERATURE. To the British, who intercepted the message, it was a further example of what seemed treacherous behavior. In reality, Joe was only trying to help Jack research his Harvard thesis, but the climate of duplicity was such that the British suspected the worst.

  The Foreign Office had information that Joe was “quite unpopular with his own staff and the American press correspondents here,” whose distaste for him was so immense that “they wax indignant at the mere mention of his name.” Joe’s belief that the war would radically diminish Britain’s place in the world and bring an end to the British Empire was prophetic. It was nonetheless a businessman’s view of the world, in which nothing mattered but the tallies of economic power. He was, as T. North Whitehead wrote in a Foreign Office note, “playing off his own lot in his stupid private conversations and uncalled for remarks to the press.”

  Joe’s obsession with economics as the fundamental bedrock of foreign policy was, if anything, accentuated by the onslaught of war. America’s greatest problem with the British, he told Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the European bureau chief at the State Department, was that they might liquidate their American securities by dumping them on the market. So that they would not “treat us rough,” Joe said, America had to “keep them dangling.”

  “It is always difficult for an ambassador to get below the surface of London politics and London society,” Harold Nicolson wrote in The Spectator on March 8, 1940, as Joe returned to London. “If he could go, heavily disguised, to Leicester sometimes, and sometimes to Glasgow, he would realize that Great Britain, although a difficult proposition, is also extremely tough.”

  Even in the salons of Mayfair and the country homes of lords and ladies that he still did frequent, Joe heard passionate, determined voices. But he considered mere determination a fool’s capital. Morale did not matter, only materiel. After meeting with Joe, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wrote that, “as he [the American ambassador] saw it, the winning of the war had little to do with changes of Government, or accusations or complacency or lack of drive, it was simply a question of whether one had enough aeroplanes.”

  Everywhere Joe looked he saw evidence of the truth of his views. The seemingly invincible armies of the Third Reich moved inexorably forward into Denmark and across Belgium and Holland, through France, to the English Channel. And now the sound of the German planes droned high above London as they dropped their bombs. Spreading death and destruction below, the German pilots looked down on what they called “an ocean of flame.”

  The British intercepted a number of triple-priority letters from Joe to the secretary of State, missives that were devoid of even a hint of awareness that the British were fighting implacable evil. As Joe saw it, the British could not possibly hold out alone; unless the United States intervened, they were finished. Joe believed that although the Conservative government, headed by the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, might have been the putative leaders, the Socialists were “running the government.” On the surface, the British may have been standing up to the Nazi air raids, but there was an “undercurrent of ill-will.”

  If Roosevelt had depended on Joe for his knowledge of Britain, he would never have proposed “lend-lease”—essentially lending American ships and planes to a hostage island on the verge of defeat or starvation. It was true, as Joe wrote Washington, that there were poor people bemoaning their fate, grumbling, “How can we be worse off than we are today? After all Hitler gives his people security.” But for every bloke in a factory bitching about his fate, there were ten stalwarts working double shifts, cleaning up rubble, shaking their fists at the steel that rained from the sky.

  It was true, as Joe told the secretary of State, that if things got tougher some members of the upper class might decide they had had quite enough of Mr. Churchill’s war. But for every blue-blooded defeatist there were ten young men flying their Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes against the Nazis in the skies above England.

  Joe had not listened to the voices of Britain. Nor had he looked deeply into English faces. Joe observed the worst in men, and he considered it their true value. He heard doubts, and he thought it was defeatism. He sensed fear and mistook it for cowardice. He called himself a realist, but he mocked what was heroic and noble and selfless.

  Joe’s emotional state tainted everything he said and did. He told a story of a little church in the town of Horta, which was holding a vesper service. Across the street stood a crowd of British men. The men said that there was no point going across the street to church. A man could no longer believe in God. They were disillusioned. They were without hope.

  Those men may have stood there that evening, but it was Joe who had no faith. In his world of endless grays, Joe could not see evil, and thus he could not see good either. “I am depressed beyond words,” he wrote Krock. Joe was a man who might well have been diagnosed as clinically depressed. On Joe Jr.’s twenty-fifth birthday, he wrote his son a sad letter saying that, though he felt he would survive, he had confidence that if necessary, Joe Jr. could “run the show.”

  On August 1, Roosevelt called his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Afterward Joe dictated his recollection of the conversation. “I wanted to ring you up about the situation that has arisen here so that you could get the dope straight from me and not from somebody else,” Joe remembered the president saying. “The sub-committee of the Democratic Committee desire you to come home and run the Democratic campaign this year, but the State Department is very much against your leaving England.”

  “Well, that’s all very good,” Joe remembered replying, “but nevertheless I am not at all satisfied with what I am doing and I will look at it for another month and then see what my plans are. I am damn sorry for your sake that you had to be a candidate, but I am glad for the country.”

  Nary an honest word had passed between the two men. The president preferred to keep his troublemaker away from America until after the election, while Joe feared what a third term for FDR would mean. Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon. He had begun to press his case not only with words but also with what could only be perceived as threats.

  “For the United States to come in and sign a blank check for all the difficulties that are faced here is a responsibility that only God could shoulder unless the American public knows what the real conditions of this battle are,” he wrote Welles on September 11, 1940, leaving unsaid who he considered the best-qualified person to inform the Americans. “I can quite appreciate their desire to help this country fight this battle but they should have a very clear notion for what the responsibility will entail for the American people to take up a struggle that looks rather hopeful on the surface but is definitely bad underneath.”

  Joe found ample time to write his children from London. He took special care in his letters to little Teddy. Joe was aware of the petty dissembling of his youngest son. He was not going to confront his son, but told him, “I certainly don’t get all of those letters you keep telling me you write to me.”

  Little Teddy had been shuttled around from school to school, and from home to home. He did not have the strong hand of his father pointing him down the pathway that all the Kennedy sons must tread. Instead, he had these letters from Joe in which his father placed himself at the epicenter
of danger.

  “I am sure, of course, you wouldn’t be scared, but if you heard all those guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety,” Joe wrote. “It is really terrible to think about, and all those poor women and children and homeless people down in the East End of London all seeing their places destroyed.”

  All eight-year-olds are literalists. Poor Teddy couldn’t know how much his father was exaggerating, and that Joe was safely in the country, belittled by Londoners as a coward. He must surely have feared that his father might never return. “I know you will be glad to hear that all these little English boys your age are standing up to this bombing in great great shape. They are all training to be great sports.”

  Life was a merciless competition, and even here Teddy was being compared to others; he too was supposed to be a “great sport.” His father concluded: “Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know that I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren’t you?” Teddy wasn’t his pal at all, for Joe was never a pal to his sons, never a comrade.

  In his time alone, Joe had apparently sought solace in the arms of Clare Boothe Luce, the brilliantly acerbic playwright and journalist. Clare combined the coquettish skills of a courtesan with an ambition for power and influence the equal of any man’s. That she and Henry, her husband, no longer had a sex life together hardly appeared to shake their marriage, for the games of power that the couple enjoyed playing took place outside the boudoir.

  When Joe met her in Paris in April 1940, using the excuse that he had traveled across the Channel to visit a sick Eddie Moore, he spent much of his time with Clare at the Ritz Hotel. Clare was a bold writer who rarely employed euphemisms, but this time she noted coyly in her diary that Joe had been “in bedroom all morning.”