John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  The family was increasingly dispersed geographically, but not psychologically. Some of the older children at their own request were godfather and godmother to the younger. The clan still gathered when it could on the Cape or in Palm Beach, playing parlor games and sports as fiercely as ever, and when the parents moved to London, Joe and Jack visited the embassy at Grosvenor Square as often as possible. About this time the father settled separate trust funds on each of his children amounting to well over a million dollars each. “I fixed it,” he later told a reporter with a grin, “so that any of my children, financially speaking, could look me in the eye and tell me to go to hell.” But he was mainly anxious, as a speculator, to give them security against the vicissitudes of the future.

  So, by the late 1930’s, the Kennedys seemed to have everything—money, looks, education, brains, high standing in society, in their church, and in the nation. They were something new in America—the immigrants’ final surpassing of the blue bloods. Yet, something seemed missing. Perhaps it was that the family lacked roots. They seemed to live everywhere and nowhere. When the new Ambassador went to London, he simply added one more mansion to his homes in Florida and Massachusetts and his apartments and hotel suites in Boston and New York and Chicago and other way stations. The family had left Boston and the tenements far behind without identifying with any new locale or group. They were part of the New Deal upsurge but no longer emotionally kin to it, part of the highest income group but politically separated from it, moving in high social circles but not wholly accepted in them, worshipers in the Catholic Church but not willing, at least on the part of the men, to submerge themselves in her.

  It was this detachment, perhaps, that explains one of the most curious of Joseph Kennedy’s actions—sending his beloved eldest boys to study in London under Harold Laski, who, as a Jew, a Socialist, an agnostic, a dogmatist, was at polar opposites from him. Only a man with absolute confidence that his sons would not fall for “political nostrums” would take such a chance. The father knew what he was doing. By the late ’30’s his son Joe held views that were almost a carbon copy of his father’s—Democratic, but not New Deal, conservative socially, tending toward isolationism.

  But Jack? He was even less committed than his father or Joe. He seemed even more detached than the rest of the family. Alert, inquisitive, receptive, but somewhat remote, he looked at the world with quizzical gray eyes.

  3WAR AND PEACE

  Jack Kennedy’s last two years at Harvard fell in the shadow of tumultuous world affairs. About the time he began his junior year, in September 1938, Neville Chamberlain yielded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich. While Jack studied international relations during the fall months, the Führer planned the military and economic isolation and domination of the Danube and the Balkans. While Americans concentrated on their internal problem, Europeans prepared to make the final commitments to war. Thousands of young men of his age were leaving school and work; millions more would soon follow.

  The coming war years would try the detachment and neutrality with which Jack had viewed the passionate causes of the New Deal era. Those years would be fateful ones for other members of the family. The father, opposed both to Nazism and to an absolute American commitment against it, would eventually end up on the sidelines during the great conflict. Kathleen would be drawn by marriage into the tumult and tragedy of Britain’s battle for survival. And Joe, Jr. would make the ultimate commitment—life itself.

  In London, Ambassador Kennedy watched the growing crisis with open alarm. He told Britain’s Navy League a few weeks after Munich that the democracies and dictatorships, instead of emphasizing their differences, should solve their common problems by trying to re-establish good relations on a world basis. “After all, we have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not.” From Cambridge, Jack wrote that this speech, “while it seemed to be unpopular with the Jews etc. was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-fascist, although it is true that everyone is deadly set against collective security and don’t seem to have a very accurate conception of England’s position, due to the type of articles that have been written.”

  In the same letter, Jack squeezed in some news about the Kennedy family. He had just seen Victor Moore and Sophie Tucker in “Leave It to Me.” In the play, Sophie, wife of the Ambassador to Russia and mother of five daughters, claimed that with four more she “would have had London.” She was making plans, she said, and after five years, at the rate of one child a year, she wouldn’t give that for the Kennedys. “It’s pretty funny and the jokes about us got by far the biggest laughs whatever that signifies,” Jack wrote. He noted also, “Tonight is a big night in Boston politics as the Honorable John F. Fitzgerald is making a speech for his good friend James Michael [Curley]. Politics makes strange bedfellows.…”

  But Boston politics and political satire seemed pretty small potatoes in the winter of 1938–39. Jack watched restlessly while Europe girded for war. Eager to see the tension points at first hand, he won permission from Harvard to spend the second semester in Europe, and crossed the Atlantic late in the winter of 1939 just before the Nazis swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia. After spring in Paris, he went to Poland, stayed two or three weeks, then went on to Riga, Russia, Turkey, Palestine, and back to the Balkans, Berlin, and Paris. During his grand tour of Europe on the eve of the war, he used the American embassies as stopping-off places and observation posts. He stayed with Ambassador William Bullitt in Paris—the embassy was so large it was like living in an apartment house, Jack thought—with Ambassador Anthony Biddle in Warsaw, with Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, then Second Secretary, in Moscow.

  His father, whose position made these contacts possible, asked of his son only one thing—that he send him detailed reports from each capital. After each stop, young Kennedy mailed to London his summation of the situation. The literary quality of his reports was not the highest, and the spelling was still atrocious, but they showed a cool detachment. He deliberately talked with representatives of all parties to get a balanced point of view. In Warsaw, for example, he saw newspapermen, embassy people, “plenty of Poles, rich and poor”; in Danzig he saw a leading Danzig senator and the German, British, Norwegian, and American consuls. In a 2,500-word letter, he carefully summarized the German and Polish arguments about Danzig.

  “Probably the strongest impression I have goten is that rightly or wrongly the Poles will fight over the Question of Danzig,” he concluded.

  Russia struck Jack as a “crude, backward, hopelessly bureaucratic country,” he later remembered. His Russian plane had a broken window, which seemed to bother no one, and he had to sit on the floor. The wide streets in the big grim cities were swept by dusty winds. He saw Leningrad, Moscow, and the Crimea before taking a ship for Istanbul. Upon leaving Jerusalem, he sent his father another long report, part of it a historical survey of British-Arab-Jewish relations, and concluded that British policy sounded just and fair but that what was needed was not a just and fair solution “but a solution that will work.” He admitted, though, that he had become “more pro-British down there than I have been in my other visits to England.…”

  The long-gathering storm burst over Europe soon after Jack had concluded his tour and had reached his father’s embassy. Rejecting any compromise over Danzig, the Nazis on September 1 suddenly overran the Polish border and lunged toward Warsaw. Britain and France honored their commitments to Poland and declared war. Russia stayed neutral; the “backward” nations had outwitted the Western democracies in the game of power politics—at least for a time.

  Jack was shortly pulled into a tiny backwash of the storm. Early in September, the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by the Germans and the American survivors taken to Glasgow. Dispatched by his father to a Glasgow hotel to help the Americans, Jack got a noisy reception. As he assured them that an American ship would take them home, they shouted, “We want a convoy—you can’t trust the Goddamned German Navy!” Ja
ck could do nothing but return to London and advise his father that a convoy should be sent.

  It was a brief moment of action, but he was still a college student and classes were beginning at Harvard. Later in the month Jack sailed for home.

  “Why England Slept”

  “Am getting along fine here,” Kennedy wrote his father from Harvard late in the fall of 1939. His term in Europe had boosted his prestige; “I am quite a seer around here.” He was taking an interesting course from a political-science professor. “I am still incognito,” he added playfully, “but expect to go up and shake his palm and start discussing what a big impression he made on you when those papers start getting marked.” He was not neglecting his social life. He was “doing better with the gals,” and was taking a friend of Kick’s to the Princeton game, “which will be my first taste of a Catholic [school?] girl so will be interested to see how it goes.”

  Now a lordly senior, Kennedy cut a bigger figure on the Harvard campus. He took an active part in the social life of Winthrop House, on one occasion leading the “Big Apple” at a house dance. He had not risen very far on the Crimson, but wrote a few editorials for the undergraduate daily. He was devoting some time to the stock market and earned a couple of hundred dollars after some cautious speculation in aviation stocks. He was drawn at the same time more to intellectual activity than he had ever been. To make up for the semester in Europe, he took extra courses his senior year, all either in government or economics, and he won B grades in all of them. He was now a candidate for a degree with honors in political science.

  To gain such honors he needed to submit an undergraduate thesis, and this was Kennedy’s main intellectual effort during his senior year. His subject was “Appeasement at Munich.” He had been struck by the criticism of Chamberlain he had encountered during his travels abroad. In America, also, the Prime Minister was viewed with contempt. Was Chamberlain, Kennedy wondered, simply a scapegoat for deeper, more impersonal forces of defeat? Under the supervision of Bruce Hopper and Payson Wild, political-science professors, Kennedy toiled in Harvard’s Widener Library during the winter months of 1939–40, studying parliamentary debates, Foreign Office minutes, issues of the Times of London and the Economist.

  On the face of it, the thesis that Kennedy submitted in the spring was a typical undergraduate effort—solemn and pedantic in tone, bristling with statistics and footnotes, a little weak in spelling and sentence structure. Starting out with London’s disarmament policies of 1933–35, the dissertation treated of the reasons for Britain’s slow response to Hitler’s rearmament, with particular stress on the influence of the pacifists, the economizers, the all-out League of Nations supporters, business and labor concern with immediate self-interest, and petty party politics. The second half of the thesis dealt with the slowness and inadequacy of Britain’s rearmament of the late ’30’s.

  The thesis had two arresting qualities. One was Kennedy’s emotional detachment from the crisis he described. The urgency in his paragraphs was purely intellectual. He criticized people for being too emotional over Munich. He was no alarmist, he insisted, as though being an alarmist in the spring of 1940 were a sin. The other arresting aspect was closely related to this—his emphasis on the point that men like Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin were not mainly responsible for Munich, but, rather, that Munich was caused by deeper forces inherent in democracy and capitalism, by general apathy, concern with profits and security, pacifism, fear of regimentation, and so on. In this sense the thesis was mature and judicious in tone.

  “… Most of the critics have been firing at the wrong target,” he concluded. “The Munich Pact itself should not be the object of criticism but rather the underlying factors, such as the state of British opinion and the condition of Britain’s armaments which made ‘surrender’ inevitable.

  “To blame one man, such as Baldwin, for the unpreparedness of British armaments is illogical and unfair, given the conditions of Democratic government.”

  But perhaps the most significant aspect of his work lay in its agreement with his father’s position on the European war. During late 1939 and early 1940, while the son was working out his conclusions in Widener Library, the father, in his reports from London to President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, “was sympathetic,” says an authoritative study, “to the Chamberlain Government and its policies and tended to project his isolationism to the European problem. For the United States he prescribed complete abstention from the conflict brewing in Europe and urged that every effort be made to arm in self-defense against all eventualities.”

  Kennedy, Sr. did not conceal his pessimism about the future of Britain and France. Poland was gone for good, and even if Hitler fell, chaos and communism would follow in Germany, he wrote Roosevelt at the end of September 1939. England didn’t have a “Chinaman’s chance” against Germany and Russia but would go down fighting. Then much later he returned home and told a group of Army and Navy officers that another year of war would leave all Europe ready for communism. The collapse of France in the spring of 1940 deepened his fears and sharpened his isolationism. “It seems to me,” he wired home, “that if we had to protect our lives, we would do better fighting in our own backyard.”

  Like his father, Kennedy showed, in his thesis, that he was worried that a democracy could not long bear a huge defensive force without becoming totalitarian. “She is forced to pay for everything out of her budget, and she is limited by the laws of capitalism—supply and demand.” Like his father, Kennedy excused Munich as inevitable because of Britain’s delay in rearming and even as desirable, as a way of buying time. Like his father, Kennedy wanted America to build up its own armaments as quickly as possible, even if it meant jettisoning some democratic luxuries. But while events forced the father eventually to take a position on aid to the Allies—chiefly against it—the son in his Harvard paper could avoid this burning question of 1940. “I of course don’t want to take sides too much,” he wrote his father.

  As Kennedy handed his dissertation in to Professor Hopper in the spring of 1940, events in Europe dramatized his thesis of democracy’s weakness. Germany smashed through Dutch and Belgian defenses, cut to pieces French infantry corps, and pinned British troops against the sea at Dunkirk. France was gone; Britain was in grave danger. To Kennedy, the great consolation was that Churchill, whose efforts to arouse Britain he had often cited in his thesis, was now leading the British. But would America wake in time?

  In June, Kennedy was graduated from Harvard amid the traditional pomp and pageantry—the parade in the Stadium, the ivy oration, the final singing of “Fair Harvard” as an undergraduate, the concert at the House triangle, the baseball game with Yale, dancing in Winthrop House, the confetti battle, and next day the solemn Commencement in Harvard Yard. But all the bands and songs could not drown out the roar from abroad. The class poet told of lying lazily on the banks of the Charles during the past four years, but—

  And now the war, and—rolling over on our bellies—we say,

  “We must fight.”

  “We must not fight.”

  Kennedy’s mother and sisters came up for Commencement, but the Ambassador had to stay in London. When he told his father that he was graduating cum laude in political science and had got magna cum laude on his thesis, a cable of congratulations flashed back, ending: TWO THINGS I ALWAYS KNEW ABOUT YOU ONE THAT YOU ARE SMART TWO THAT YOU ARE A SWELL GUY LOVE DAD.

  His thesis had been so well received at Harvard that Kennedy decided to try to get it published. He showed a detached attitude toward his work in a letter to his father: “I thought I could work on rewriting it and making it somewhat more complete and maybe more interesting for the average reader—as it stands now—it is not anywhere polished enough although the ideas etc. are O.K.” His father heartily concurred and sent him from London a stream of advice on rewriting, editing, and publishing contacts. In a long letter of May 20, 1940, he contended that his son had gone too far in absolving Baldwin and
Chamberlain from responsibility for Britain’s weakness at the time of Munich. The Ambassador granted that ultimately the blame must be placed on the people as a whole, but a politician should do more than keep his ear to the ground, “he is also supposed to look after the national welfare, and to attempt to educate the people.…” He suggested that Jack blame both the people and their leaders. His son agreed. “Will stop white washing Baldwin,” he replied.

  The facts and views in the book were little changed from the thesis, except for a surprisingly rhetorical ending: “To say that democracy has been awakened by the events of the last few weeks is not enough. Any person will awaken when the house is burning down. What we need is an armed guard that will wake up when the fire first starts or, better yet, one that will not permit a fire to start at all.

  “We should profit by the lesson of England and make our democracy work. We must make it work right now. Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It is the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” Actually, these and a few other sentences of exhortation he had taken almost verbatim from a letter from his father.

  At the Ambassador’s request, his good friend Arthur Krock, of the New York Times, recommended an agent and a title, Why England Slept, intended as a follow-up of the earlier Churchill title While England Slept. Jack told his father he hoped Churchill, then prime minister, would not mind. Another friend of the Ambassador, Henry Luce, of Time, Inc., agreed to do a foreword. Kennedy scrubbed up the spelling, took out the footnotes, vastly improved the style, and added chapters that brought the book up to date and made it more relevant to America. After being turned down by Harper & Brothers on the grounds that it had been outdated by the fall of France, the manuscript was accepted by Wilfred Funk, Inc., which got the book out under forced draft during July.