Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  Quickly moving in with them, he began attending classes. Then, once more, illness overtook him; standing six feet tall, Jack now weighed a puny 135 pounds. The blood-count roulette he was forced to play started up again, and, as his complexion went sallow, he resembled nothing so much as a scarecrow.

  Back he went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston for two months, and then, suffering also from asthma, he spent the remainder of the school year trying to recover under the dry desert sun of Arizona. Finally, facing the inevitable, he arrived in Cambridge that September to take his room in Weld Hall. He was a Harvard man.

  Scrawny as he was, he quickly went out for freshman football. Whatever illnesses dogged him, he was doing his best not to let them define him. You couldn’t be the “sick kid” and still be popular the way he wanted to be. Interestingly, he followed his older brother’s lead in making a football star his best pal; three years ahead of him, Joe Jr. quickly had bonded with the quarterback, Timothy “Ted” Reardon. Jack’s new friend was Torbert Macdonald, his own class’s football hero, and Torby, like Lem before him, would come to know both Jacks. By sophomore year they were roommates.

  One thing had changed. At Choate, he’d operated outside the system. Now at Harvard, his father’s and brother’s school, he seemed to be looking to succeed from within it. He ran for student office in both his freshman and sophomore years, falling short of success both times. Yet he continued to emphasize his quest for campus leadership over academic excellence.

  “Exam today,” he wrote Lem at the end of his first semester, “so have to open my book & see what the fucking course is about.” But then he chalked up a social victory when he managed to get named chairman of the freshman “Smoker,” just as Joe earlier had been. Traditionally the class’s most elaborate party, the Smoker was considered a hot ticket, and expectations for it ran high.

  Taking his responsibilities to heart, Jack didn’t disappoint, producing not one but two jazz bands for the occasion. “No matter who you were or what you did as a freshman . . . everybody went to the Smoker,” one of his classmates recalled. “It was a leadership activity at Harvard . . . a big deal. It was his first political success. So by this, Jack Kennedy had made his mark.”

  Still, he had yet to outdo his brother. When he did, it would be a matter of beating Joe at his own game. During his sophomore year he was asked to join Spee, one of Harvard’s top final clubs. With that coveted invitation, the second son now possessed entrance into circles closed to both Joes. Demonstrating what we might call his “crossover appeal,” Jack, with his easy charm, had moved beyond the self-circumscribed orbit of the equally ambitious but unimaginative Joe Jr., who seemed unwilling to stride beyond the local Irish comfort zone. According to Joe’s tutor, John Kenneth Galbraith, the older brother was “slightly humorless, and . . . introduced all his thoughts with the words ‘Father says.’ ”

  Quickly becoming both well known and popular, Jack didn’t give off the impression that he was trying too hard, and he made good use of what his older brother never seemed to have, namely a light touch. And more than that, his conversation, friends said, ranged more widely than that of anyone else their age.

  As Jack started to make a name for himself on campus, his energies at first were directed to such pursuits as arranging to meet Lem at the Stork Club in New York. Only in his “Gov,” or political science courses, in which he would eventually major, was the unexpectedly serious side to him glimpsed. Before an injury sidelined him—his congenital back troubles made worse by one leg’s being shorter than the other—Torby patiently threw passes for hours to help improve Jack’s skills as a receiver. Undaunted, Jack, who’d competed in backstroke at Choate, transferred his hopes for varsity success to the Harvard swim team.

  Just as Lem would always be, Torby turned into a Kennedy constant, there when his friend needed support. Lem and Torby were the first recruits of what would one day grow to be an unofficial reserve corps of steadfast compadres always game for the next adventure. What Jack required from any of his new best sidekicks was one thing above all else, and that was rescue: from being alone, from being bored, from being stuck.

  After spending Jack’s freshman year apart, in the summer of 1937 he and Lem crossed the Atlantic to embark on a traditional grand tour. Such an exciting trip was a way to try to erase the memories of Jack’s hospital stays that February and March. Sickness continued to be one specter he couldn’t charm his way past.

  For two months they hit the road, having fun but also making sure they saw the best cathedrals and historic buildings. Jack showed himself willing to stay in the cheapest pensions to help keep down expenses for his friend. Being two high-spirited young Americans, they couldn’t help having a terrific time. It was nonetheless a moment when Europe’s dark political realities were visible even to the most fun-loving of tourists.

  In France, where they stopped first, Jack wrote in his diary: “The general impression also seems to be that there will not be a war in the future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany.” Later, Lem would recall that his friend “was beginning to show more interest and more of a desire to think out the problems of the world. . . . He insisted, for instance, that we pick up every German hitchhiker. This worked out very well because a high percentage of them were students and could speak English. In that way, we learned a great deal about Germany.” Jack and Lem couldn’t resist making fun of the Nazis they saw: “Hi yah, Hitler!” they’d cheerfully call out.

  The threat of war, in fact, was now less rumor than fact. The Third Reich had been rapidly rearming, and possessed an army and air corps that couldn’t help but cast a pall over Europe. When Hitler first showed his true colors and remilitarized the Rhineland, in total violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I, neither Britain nor France rose up to challenge him. Thoughts of war, to most Europeans, too vividly brought back the devastation wrought by World War I, when masses of young soldiers were thrown against one another in a conflict that left the continent in carnage.

  Returning to Cambridge for his sophomore year, Jack soon faced an array of familiar, disturbing physical setbacks. As always, he fought against them in his own way. To remain on the swim team—as freshmen, they’d gained glory by being undefeated—was one of his goals. Thus, when he found himself in Stillman Infirmary, he relied on Torby, who brought him steaks and ice cream to tempt his appetite and build up his strength. His friend even snuck Jack out to the indoor swimming pool to get the practice time he needed. Swimming for Harvard was serious business, after all, and team members were expected to sandwich in four hours a day between classes.

  Then, just before the year drew to a close, Franklin Roosevelt, now in the first year of his second White House term, threw a joker into the U.S. international diplomacy game: he named Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., ambassador to Great Britain. It’s impossible to figure out exactly what mix of motives inspired this maladroit appointment. Certainly domestic politics played a major role, for Irish-American voters made up a huge faction of the Democratic constituency. Also, given his background and connections, Joe Kennedy’s presence in London might help resolve the tricky situation between Ireland and Britain. However, if Roosevelt imagined that his new envoy would act as his surrogate in trying to stiffen the spine of the British when it came to facing down Nazi aggression, he was, sadly, wrong.

  The choice of Kennedy, who’d been an early, generous FDR supporter, for this ultimate plum offered the wily Roosevelt the satisfaction of making him into a retainer—a well-rewarded one, but a retainer nevertheless. Both men were well aware the job had to be entrusted to someone able to foot the extravagant costs its social traditions demanded. Ever the bold striver, Joe wanted badly to go there and was ready to spend whatever it took. Until the consequences of sending him to London would prove too large, FDR, too, was ready to weather them.

  With his credentials ready to present at the Court of St. James, Joe arrived in London in early 1938, just eleven da
ys before Hitler demanded acceptance of Anschluss—in effect, annexation—from the government of his native Austria. Such a relationship between the two countries had been forbidden by the allies at the end of World War I, but the Führer ignored it. Bent on expanding the borders of the great German-speaking state he envisioned, he signaled ever louder his disdain for those who considered themselves Germany’s masters.

  The Treaty of Versailles for him was no longer worth the paper it had been written on, and so the next territory he looked to grab was the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, taken from Germany by the allies in 1919.

  He had only a simple goal, Hitler told the world—acting the perfect wolf in sheep’s clothing—and that was to see all Germans united into one country. Hearing this, Germany’s old European and British antagonists managed, hiding their faces in the sand, to justify tolerating it as a means to preventing the continent from again morphing into a bloody battlefield. Meanwhile, to the newly arrived American ambassador to Great Britain, a new war was out of the question. In late September 1938, British, French, and Italian diplomats fatefully met in Munich and there gave in to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland. The British delegation was led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose reputation would ultimately be destroyed by this concession to the Germans.

  Returning to Britain, he announced, “We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.” Later that day, he stood outside 10 Downing Street and this time said, “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”

  Events would swiftly prove him wrong.

  Ambassador Kennedy, as soon as he’d arrived in London, formed a close relationship with Chamberlain, and it wasn’t long before they were in almost daily contact. After the Munich capitulation, Joe made widely known his approval, and gave in October a Trafalgar Day speech that spoke of the need for “democratic and dictator countries” to focus on their similarities and not their differences. “After all, we have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not,” he declared. It could hardly have been worse timing. Only three weeks later came Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when across Germany and Austria state-sanctioned violence against Jews and Jewish property raged for two days, shocking the world.

  Repugnant as appeasement strikes us today, Joe Kennedy wasn’t that out of sync with the prevailing temper of the British Establishment. Events were moving swiftly to force the democracies to make a stand, but the reluctance of the ruling class to engage with the Third Reich died hard. Four years earlier the Oxford Union, the legendary university debating society, after hearing arguments pro and con, had notoriously resolved not to fight “for King and Country,” and that remained still a popular, if increasingly indefensible, position in London’s drawing rooms.

  Only the politician and ardent historian Winston Churchill—who was a hero, through his writings, to Jack Kennedy—had steadily been speaking out, from his backbench in Parliament, against the pacifist temper of the times. And people were beginning to listen to him.

  It’s very hard, looking at this now, to accept that Jack’s father never seemed to feel any shame about backing appeasement. Joe’s detachment from the sentiments of the times had always been his strength in business, as he invested or divested against the popular current. However, after Kristallnacht, when it was starkly evident that there could be no accommodation with Nazism, Ambassador Kennedy was out there on his own.

  • • •

  For a twenty-one-year-old American, the thought of war carried personal meaning. It brought with it both excitement and dread. Young men of Jack Kennedy’s age had died by the hundreds of thousands in the century’s first great European war. Now the daily press clamored the drumbeat of a second. Young Jack Kennedy was about to enter the very theater in which the question would be decided: Would Britain stand another Nazi demand for territory?

  He had come to visit his family that summer of 1938, joining them on vacation in the South of France. It was decided that he’d figure out a way to spend the coming spring semester of his junior year working as his father’s secretary in London; it meant he’d have to get permission to double up his classes at school in the fall term, but this was an opportunity to witness history.

  Jack knew the valor Britain had shown in the Great War. He was powerfully affected by Winston Churchill’s description of the willing courage of an upper-class Englishman, Raymond Asquith. Son of Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister under whose leadership the British entered the Great War, Raymond was four years younger than Churchill and a much-admired, much-loved role model for his generation. His brave death on a French battlefield stood for all that was fine, and the tribute Churchill had written to him struck for Jack a resonant chord: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him, and when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” In later years he would quote this passage from memory.

  However, the poignancy of young death for a noble cause seemed far removed from the moral climate Jack began to sense around him as he spent more time in England beginning in February 1939, when he took up his post at the embassy. Arriving primed to enjoy the perks of the ambassador’s family, he found himself distracted not just by the predictable flood of society invitations but also by the debate being waged.

  By March, it was clear Hitler was looking to take more land beyond the chunk of Czechoslovakia ceded to him at Munich. All at once, with no warning, Hitler fulfilled the watching world’s worst fears and defiantly laid claim to all of Czechoslovakia. Immediately, the issue turned to neighboring Poland’s sovereignty. Would the British take their stand now?

  Despite the increasingly alarmed warnings of Winston Churchill, the Chamberlain government had been hugging the belief that a second major war could be avoided. It knew that neither the British public’s memory of the human devastation of the trenches of WWI nor the traumas of the returning survivors had lessened; a generation had been lost, with the country, overall, remaining shell-shocked.

  For the first time in his life—as he learned the ways of a country not his own but mattering greatly to him—Jack Kennedy found himself seeing men and women wrestling with national principles. Quickly pegged as a highly desirable bachelor and invited everywhere, he grew increasingly sensitive to the atmosphere around him—and soon began to feel the disharmony unbalancing it.

  On the one hand, his father continued to support Chamberlain, in direct opposition to the position fiercely held by Churchill. Churchill’s assessments of German capabilities, Jack was aware, had proved—and continued to prove—startlingly accurate. He couldn’t help but respect Churchill’s arguments, despite knowing that his own father and the ruling-class parents of his new friends openly dismissed the former cabinet minister as a warmonger. And while Jack was intellectually open, he was still a son with a powerful father.

  Jack was also convinced, as he grew to be at home in the continual round of parties and pleasures, that something vital was missing in the character of those privileged young English whose company he was so enjoying. Charming they were, and always delightful hosts, yet he found himself doubting the current state of their mettle—their fighting spirit. Even in front of them he didn’t hesitate to share his observation that the once-valiant English elite seemed to have turned “decadent” over the two decades since the last war. How could they ever rally themselves and prevail against such a threat as the Third Reich?

  In short, they were no Raymond Asquiths.

  Mulling over what he was hearing and seeing, he began to form for himself a notion of where Britain’s elected leaders had failed. He began to work out his ideas on the subject of leadership, the ones he would continue to cons
ider for the rest of his life.

  When the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Jack was still in Europe, having been touring again that summer, this time with Torby. Three days later, he sat with his parents and sister Kathleen in the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Commons and witnessed Prime Minister Chamberlain declare war against Germany. Returning to college at the end of September, by which time the Luftwaffe had begun dropping its bombs, he seemed a different person.

  Certainly, in the opinion of Torby—who was there—his friend “had definitely changed. I don’t think he really got interested in the intellectual side of academic life until perhaps his junior year when war seemed to bring a lot of us, especially Jack, a recognition that it wasn’t all fun and games and that life was about to get very real and earnest.”

  But what was happening to Jack continued as an evolution. Then, in early June of 1940, he took a visible stand, writing a signed letter to the Harvard Crimson, implicitly renouncing his father’s position. Even in 1940, once the war was under way, Joe had hoped the British would soon find a way to make peace with Hitler. He spoke disparagingly of Britain’s and France’s prospects, in a letter to Roosevelt, giving them hardly “a Chinaman’s chance” of prevailing.

  In his letter to the Crimson, Jack noted sharply: “The failure to build up her armaments has not saved England from a war, and may cost her one. Are we in America to let that lesson go unlearned?”

  He’d chosen this for his Harvard senior thesis. “Appeasement in Munich” was its title, and it shows how Jack’s thinking was diverging from that of his father. Reading it today, what you recognize is that it’s actually a masterful political compromise, reconciling the views of his dad with the growing American consensus. Soon to be retitled Why England Slept and commercially published that same year, what Jack’s analysis argues, to begin with, is that Britain simply had been unprepared in 1938. Had the British gone to war then, they would have lost badly. Most crucially, their defense capability was short the trained fighter pilots needed to keep at bay the Luftwaffe, the fearsome German air force.