Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  With his credentials ready to present at the Court of St. James, Joe arrived in London in early 1938, just eleven days 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 ha
d failed. He began to work out his ideas on the subject of leadership, the ones he would continue to consider 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.

  The two years between 1938 and 1940, then, were critical, he contends, because, had the war begun at the earlier date, Britain would have been naked to its enemies. The beauty of this argument is that it mitigates the moral failure of giving away a country and its people to Adolf Hitler. Joe Kennedy, one assumes, wouldn’t have forsworn appeasement based simply on a shift in the balance of weaponry. He didn’t believe in fighting Hitler under any circumstances. But, while Jack makes the case that Chamberlain had no choice but to parlay and retreat, the real issue now, for him, is that the United States, his own country, must take the lesson and do better.

  “I do not believe necessarily,” he wrote, “that if Hitler wins the present war he will continue on his course to world domination. . . . But, in the light of what has happened in the last five years, we cannot depend on it.”

  In other words, America needed to get its act together and stop blaming Chamberlain, and therefore his own father, for not doing what it still needed to do. It was a masterful exercise in intergenerational politics. Here was the son, taking on, without condemning, the father’s indefensible position on what would soon be revealed as the worst horror of the century. He was doing so with such a deft touch that his father took no apparent offense. In truth, he was saying that Britain should have been morally prepared to fight, and his father was saying Britain should still avoid the fight.

  What Jack now proposed was that America be prepared to fight, not repeating Britain’s error. “England made many mistakes; she is paying heavily for them now. In studying the reasons why England slept, let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish.” Why England Slept quickly became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and Jack donated the royalties from the British edition to the fund to rebuild war-scarred Plymouth.

  It is yet another manifestation of the two Jacks: the young American drawn to Churchill’s mind and fearlessness on the one hand, and the son whose father was equally fearless but to a different purpose. To reconcile the lessons of these two figures was a task for which he had needed to make the effort.

  Again, it was masterful politics. If Joe Kennedy had been paying strict attention, he would have spotted the end run his son was making around him here. Jack was arguing that Britain didn’t fight because it hadn’t rearmed. But wasn’t that tantamount to saying Britain should have been ready to fight? And wasn’t that a subversion of his father’s own position? Jack had done more than find a middle ground with his father; he’d subtly taken that ground right out from under him.

  That fall, the senior Kennedy would be forced from his job in London, a victim of his poor judgment. He had been quoted in a Boston Globe column saying, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” Jack’s career would go on to be a continual balancing act between the nobility of valiant death on the battlefield, so admired by Churchill, and the horror of war itself, so understood by Chamberlain and backed by the hardnosed Joe Kennedy.

  Jack felt deeply the emotional weight of the valor, commitment, and sacrifice demanded by war. Nothing makes this clearer than his beloved Pilgrim’s Way, the autobiography of John Buchan, famous for writing The Thirty-Nine Steps. Published in 1940, it immediately became a favorite and would remain the best-loved book of his life. Most significant, in its pages he again encountered the widely mourned figure of Raymond Asquith, about whom Churchill had written so movingly.

  “He loved his youth,” Buchan wrote of Asquith. “And his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”

  Jack loved courage, hated war. That conflict would define his view of history’s leaders. As we will see very soon, it will define how he viewed himself.

  8

  Inga Marie Arvad

  9

  Raymond Asquith

  10

  Red Fay

  11

  Chuck Spalding saluting

  12

  PT 109

  CHAPTER THREE

  SKIPPER

  He had never found a circle where he was so much at home and his popularity was immediate and complete. He was an excellent battalion officer.

  —John Buchan on Raymond Asquith,

  from Pilgrim’s Way

  Up until he went to war, Jack Kennedy had the luxury of living two lives. There was the often bedridden young man, who, loving books and loving heroes, greatly admired Winston Churchill. Twinned with him was the popular bon vivant son of the wealthy Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. One lived in the quiet world where history looks back and looms forward, where tales of majesty mingle with dreams of glory. The other lived in the divine, fortunate present of Mayfair addresses and country estates, of titled hosts and society hostesses.

  War, for a time, joined the two Jacks as one. Called upon in 1943 to be a leader of men, he shouldered willingly the burden that comes with taking others into harm’s way and then getting them back alive and whole. His experience in the waters of the South Pacific was to be the most searing event of his life, the one that transformed him into a figure like those who previously consumed his imagination.

  It would make of him a hero like those he’d read about. There is nowhere to hide any part of yourself when you face death. What’s more, Jack Kennedy now would be what he’d never been before: a regular guy. He was about to enter a world where he’d be accepted for the man he was. It didn’t matter where he’d come from, or what he’d done before. Finally, for the first time in his life, he was moving on to a level playing field. He proved more than up to the challenge, and the confidence that came of it would stay with him.

  Look back at Raymond Asquith. Comparing the pair at this moment—two men poised on the brink of different wars—offers clear parallels. Both had been born to privilege and attende
d the most elite of schools. Both were tall and handsome. Both seemed, effortlessly, to gain the loyalty and devotion of friends. Both volunteered at the outset of world war. Both were assigned cushy, safe postings in intelligence—and, in each case, in locations far from the front. Both, on their own, rejected that safety and sought aggressively to get to the action, wanting to be in the thick of things, in front-line combat units. And the fact that Jack identified with Asquith—who lost his life after being shot by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme, where the British casualties were 420,000 men—was never any secret from his friends.

  Jack and Lem Billings were playing touch football on the Washington Mall the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. It was December 7, 1941. They heard the news on the car radio as they were heading back to Jack’s apartment on Sixteenth Street. Jack had managed to join the navy earlier that fall after being rejected by the army for obvious health reasons.

  In fact, the navy had turned him down, too, but he stubbornly went all out for five months, exercising to overcome the bad back problems that had caused him to flunk. Strengthened by the training regimen, he passed the physical on his second try, but he also benefited from the support of a naval captain who’d been attaché at the London embassy and was now the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the outfit to which Jack was immediately assigned in Washington. It was a no-sweat job that had him knocking out routine bulletins and briefing memos. While Jack considered the paper-pushing a waste of his time, it left him enough leisure to enjoy the distractions of the city’s buzzing social life, to which the threat of imminent war added an extra charge of intensity.

  His specific distraction at that moment was a Danish beauty he’d met through his sister Kathleen and was dazzled by. Inga Marie Arvad, or “Inga Binga,” as Jack liked to call her, was working as a columnist at the Washington Times-Herald, where Kick was a research assistant to the executive editor. Four years older than he and European, she had just enough experience on him to be exciting. She’d acted in a couple of Danish films, and had married the director of one of them; in fact, she was still legally married to him when she was living in Washington.