JFK
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His sons, though, were a different story. They still had the future open to them, even if their father’s troubles added a layer of uncertainty. Franklin Roosevelt shrewdly played to this notion at a White House dinner on the evening of October 27, nine days before the election. Since Kennedy’s return earlier that day, the speculation had been intense: would he endorse Wendell Willkie, come out for the president, or stay quietly neutral? Henry and Clare Boothe Luce and top GOP leaders urged him to declare for the internationalist Republican; Rose Kennedy argued with equal fervor that he would be condemned as an ingrate if he turned against the president now. Joe suspected she was right, and moreover he saw Willkie as barely distinguishable from Roosevelt on the pressing issues of world affairs. (To frustrated isolationists, the two candidates were the “Willkievelt twins,” whose repeated proclamations that they would keep America’s boys out of foreign wars were not to be trusted.) That evening, with Mrs. Kennedy and several others present, Roosevelt mixed charm and not-so-veiled threats. “I stand in awe of your relationship with your children,” he said, after nodding in sympathetic support as Kennedy went through his list of grievances. “For a busy man as you are, it’s a rare achievement. And I for one will do all I can to help you if your boys should ever run for political office.” According to FDR’s son James, the president then pivoted, warning that if Kennedy endorsed Willkie, he would become an outcast, his sons’ prospective political careers scuttled before they could even begin. Two days later, in an evening address on CBS Radio, Kennedy endorsed Roosevelt for another term. One week after that, Roosevelt won a decisive victory, though with lower margins than in 1932 or 1936.46
The story of Joseph Kennedy as diplomat still had one more sorry chapter. Three days after the election, he sat for a ninety-minute interview in Boston with Louis Lyons of The Boston Globe and two reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Accustomed to the British system, where journalists typically took care to shape an interviewee’s remarks to fit within the strict borders of acceptable discourse, and assuming—he subsequently said—that his most provocative comments were off the record, Joe launched in. “Democracy is all finished in England,” he declared, and “it may be here,” too. If the United States entered the war, “everything we hold dear would be gone.” Warming up, he said he supported FDR because he was the only man who could control the “have-nots” who “haven’t any stake of ownership.” He tossed in inappropriate remarks about the queen (she had “more brains than the Cabinet” and would be the one to salvage a deal with Hitler in the end) and reminded the reporters that Charles Lindbergh’s views had a lot to commend them. To the question of whether America would refuse to trade with the Nazis if Hitler won the war, Kennedy shot back, “That’s nonsensical.”47
The story ran in the Globe on November 10, 1940, right beside the announcement of Neville Chamberlain’s death. The uproar was instantaneous, in Europe as well as in the United States. Only the Berlin Börsen-Zeitung editorialized in support. Kennedy pressured the Globe’s executives to repudiate Lyons’s story, but the damage was done.48 Kennedy officially resigned his post and retreated to Palm Beach, as convinced as ever of the correctness of his geopolitical views and resentful of the ostracism he had suffered. As he often did when feeling aggrieved, he pointed the finger at American Jews for what he saw as their outsize power in Washington and their nefarious schemes to get America into the war. He longed for some means of hitting back at his critics, and asked Jack to outline an article for him; the resulting pair of documents, belatedly and rapidly produced, one of them nine pages in length, are remarkable for what they show of Jack’s sharpening political skills and his changing relationship with his father—it was now a more complex and dynamic bond than the one Joe had with Joe Junior. Jack was his own man in a way his brother would never be.49
Jack urged his father to avoid going nasty—the high road was the only road worth traveling in this instance, not least because journalists had endless opportunities to strike back. This meant being calm and judicious and avoiding any hint of defensiveness. “I don’t mean you should change your ideas or be all things to all men, but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser unless they indict themselves as war mongers.” Here Jack hit upon one of his main themes: the “appeaser” label was an albatross from which his father needed to free himself. And he needed also to disabuse critics of the notion that he saw little to worry about in Hitler and the other dictators of the world:
I would think that your best angle would be that of course you do not believe this, you with your background cannot stand the idea personally of dictatorships—you hate them—you have achieved the abundant life under a democratic capitalist system—you wish to preserve it. But you believe that you can preserve it by keeping out of Europe’s wars etc. It’s not that you hate dictatorships less [than the interventionists do]—but that you love America more….The point that I am trying to get at is that it is important that you stress how much you dislike the idea of dealing with dictatorships, how you wouldn’t trust their word a minute—how you have no confidence in them.50
The accompanying draft article, sketched out by the son on the father’s behalf, flowed from these judgments. “On November 6, the day after the election, I resigned from a post that I have held for nearly three years,” Jack began, before laying out the older man’s explanation for his belief in appeasement and his grim analysis of the geopolitical situation: “My views are not pleasant. I am gloomy and I have been gloomy since September, 1938. It may be unpleasant for Americans to hear my views but let me note that Winston Churchill was considered distinctly unpleasant to have around during the years from 1935 to 1939. It was felt he was a gloom monger,” Jack wrote, neatly attempting to tie his father to the Briton’s coattails. And so on the piece went, for several pages and in clear and economical prose, stressing Joe Kennedy’s faith in open diplomacy and his determination to do his level best to aid President Roosevelt in keeping the United States out of the war.51
A striking feature of the cover memo is the almost complete lack of deference. Twenty-three-year-old Jack is writing as an equal, as though addressing a colleague or friend trapped in a fraught situation. Upon mailing the items, he evidently felt the urge to say more, and so, on board a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he penned a nine-page “supplementary note,” this one hammering a simple point: the United States had no choice but to come to Britain’s aid. The isolationists in America had done grievous damage, Jack argued, for they failed to see that “if England is forced to give in by summer [1941] due to our failure to give her adequate supplies, we will have failed to meet our emergency, as England did before us. As England failed from September 1938 to September 1939 to take advantage of her year of respite due to her feeling that there would be no war in 1939, we will have failed just as greatly.” The simple reality, he went on, was that a British defeat would leave the United States “alone in a strained and hostile world,” spending huge amounts on defense and leaving voters to wonder “why we were so stupid as to not have given Britain all possible aid.”
Having thus admonished his father, Jack added a plea: “Of course, I do not mean you should advocate war, but you might explain with some vigour your ideas on how vital it is for us to supply England. You might work in how hard it is for a democracy to get things done unless it is scared and how difficult it is to get scared when there is no immediate menace—We should see that our immediate menace is not invasion, but that England may fall—through lack of our support.” History would not look kindly upon an America that followed Chamberlain’s lead, and in the future, “as we look back, we may be shocked at our present lack of vigour.” Jack loyally acknowledged that the picture of his father in the popular imagination was wrong—the older man did not oppose all assistance to Britain. But he warned that perception was reality: in the common view “you are
[an] appeaser + against aid—This you have to nip.”52
Soon thereafter, following some hobnobbing in Hollywood (at one party he chatted up Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and he roomed for a few days with aspiring actor Robert Stack) and an academic conference in Riverside at which he served as rapporteur, Jack Kennedy left California behind.*2 He missed his East Coast social life, missed his family. For a time he exchanged love letters with Harriet Price; as the weeks passed the letters grew more infrequent, then they ceased altogether. In one of her last notes, Harriet referred to Jack’s fatalistic view of life when she informed him that she’d almost been killed in a car accident—she was thrown out of the car yet somehow emerged unscathed. “But as you say, ‘That’s the way it goes.’ ”53
A young author in Hollywood signs his book for actor Spencer Tracy.
V
Dr. Sara Jordan of the Lahey Clinic, in Boston, took one look at Jack Kennedy and was aghast. It was the morning of December 9, 1940, and he had arrived in her office for an examination. The sojourn in the California sunshine, she could see, far from restoring the young man to robust good health, seemed to have had the opposite effect, as he now weighed less than before he went. He looked emaciated and drawn. Jordan insisted that Jack return to Boston after Christmas for further tests at New England Baptist Hospital and urged him to avoid any further full-time studies until fall 1941. He did as instructed, spending part of January 1941 in confinement in the hospital. From his bed there he penned a short article—his first publication since his book appeared—for the New York Journal-American, under the headline “Irish Bases Are Vital to Britain.”
Much to Jack’s satisfaction, his father had taken the advice in his December letters to heart, at least partially. When, in December, the Roosevelt administration called on Congress to pass a “Lend-Lease” bill—the United States would lend or lease military goods to the British, much as one lends a garden hose to a neighbor to fight a fire, out of compassion as well as enlightened self-interest—Joe Kennedy expressed opposition. It would be a giant step toward war, he declared. Some in the administration worried that Kennedy might go further, deploying his bottomless resources to try to thwart the plan. As the days passed, however, he shifted ground until, in a highly anticipated address on NBC Radio on January 18, he dropped his opposition. On the twenty-first, one day after Franklin Roosevelt’s third inauguration, Kennedy crushed the hopes of Capitol Hill isolationists by offering not a peep of dissent to Lend-Lease when he appeared before a congressional committee considering the bill.54
Admittedly, more than Jack’s advocacy was at work. For one thing, the elder Kennedy hoped against hope to be appointed to another high-level post in the administration, and thought it prudent to go along with the president’s wishes. For another, now that he was back on American soil, he better understood that his isolationist cause was faltering. The weight of public opinion strongly backed Lend-Lease, backed aid for Britain. Against his predictions, the British were holding on, but they were desperate for more help, and Kennedy could see that most Americans wanted to give it. They were buying the administration’s arguments, he perceived, and he saw as well the growing influence of radio correspondents such as Edward R. Murrow, whose rich, low-key, nicotine-scorched reports from wartime London kept Americans spellbound. (“This…is London,” he would begin each broadcast, a distinctive hesitation suggested by his old high school teacher.) Murrow was resolutely pro-British, and there is no doubt his broadcasts bolstered the interventionist side in the U.S. debate by stressing Winston Churchill’s greatness and England’s bravery. More than that, though, correspondents like Murrow, speaking through the blaring of sirens, the whine of aircraft, and the roar of bomb bursts, brought the war home to Americans in a uniquely powerful way, one that made them feel closely connected to sufferers an ocean away. As the writer Archibald MacLeish said of Murrow’s reports, “Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be, you destroyed the superstition of distance and of time.”55
Joe Junior, meanwhile, argued the isolationist position more strongly than ever. Intensely stubborn by nature, he could also be tone-deaf in framing his arguments, and combative to the point of recklessness. Through the winter of 1941 he railed against the Lend-Lease measure, and he didn’t let up even after Congress approved the bill by comfortable margins, in early March, thereby granting the executive branch extraordinary new powers. (The president alone would decide what to lend and to whom.) In a Ford Hall Forum in Boston on January 6, Joe insisted that the United States could not afford to bolster a doomed Britain and should instead prepare to implement a bartering system with Germany. Better to accede to Nazi domination of Europe, he went on, than to leap into a war that would strain the American economy beyond the breaking point and let loose the forces of radicalism. Late that month, Joe told another Boston audience that America should even resist sending food convoys if doing so risked pulling the nation into the war. He stuck to that position in the weeks thereafter.56
Jack thought his pugnacious brother foolhardy to speak so dogmatically on the issue, not to mention wrong on the merits. But Joe was also his sibling, so there could be no question of denouncing him. Jack contented himself during these weeks with quietly endorsing the administration’s policy and thinking about what he should do next. Planning too far ahead was pointless, he believed, as war clouds threatened both in the west and in the east. In March, he again asked Harvard to send his transcript to Yale Law School, but he seemed no more committed to the prospect of legal studies than he had been the year before, and apparently did not submit a new application. His health stabilized, he indulged his interest in travel, visiting first Bermuda and then South America, where his mother and Eunice were already touring. Jack flew from Miami to join them in Rio de Janeiro, then moved on without them to Argentina. The pro-Nazi mood in Buenos Aires stunned him, as did the palpable undercurrent of anti-Americanism. From there it was on to Uruguay and Chile by plane, then, on June 10, by cruise ship from Valparaíso back to the States, with stops in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, followed by passage through the Panama Canal.57
Throughout the trip there had been ominous signs that world tensions were ratcheting up still further. In the Far East, the Japanese were pushing deeper into China and strengthening their hold on Southeast Asia. In the Atlantic, meanwhile, British shipping losses to the German U-boats rose to perilous heights that spring, prompting pleas from Churchill and top White House aides for U.S. convoys. In a major speech on May 27, FDR did not call for convoys—he feared moving too far ahead of public opinion—but he left little doubt that he thought developments in the Atlantic could bring the United States into the war at almost any moment. Announcing an unlimited state of emergency, the president warned of Hitler’s global ambitions and pointed to the threats to island outposts such as Iceland, Greenland, and the Azores, from which the Nazis could launch aerial attacks on North and South America. Behind the scenes, U.S. negotiators worked to bring Iceland under American protection, and in June Roosevelt extended the U.S. defense perimeter well out into the North Atlantic.58
Then, on June 22, Hitler launched his boldest move of the war. Tossing out his August 1939 pact with Stalin, he ordered a massive assault on the Soviet Union, involving 3.2 million men, 3,600 tanks, and 600,000 motorized vehicles along a front that stretched for two thousand miles. Supporting aircraft numbered 2,500, and there was a throwback to the battles of old: 625,000 horses used for transport.59 It was the largest land operation in history. For the Western Allies the invasion, code-named Operation Barbarossa, had one salutary effect in the short term: it eased the pressure on Great Britain. It also served to draw London and Washington officials closer together and to bring the United States nearer to active participation in the Battle of the Atlantic. Roosevelt, convinced that Soviet survival was crucial to Nazi Germany’s defeat, pledged to provide Lend-Lease assistance to Stalin’s government, despite deep
aversion among many in Washington to helping the Kremlin leader—who had systematically and ruthlessly purged dissidents, signed a pact with Hitler, and brutalized eastern Poland.
It was a stunning development, changing the whole complexion of the war. Earth-shattering events had passed in a blur. Jack, still on his cruise ship en route home, was pondering the implications when there arrived news of a more personal nature: his brother had volunteered for military service! It seemed unthinkable: through April and into May, Joe Junior had continued his strident anti-war and anti-administration rhetoric, insisting in an address at Temple Ohabei Shalom, in Brookline, on April 29 that it would be “perfectly feasible for the United States to exist as a nation, regardless of who wins the war.”60 American escorts for ships carrying Lend-Lease aid would be a terrible mistake, he had added, as it would inevitably lead to the sending of men. Yet mere weeks later, this co-founder of the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention, this frequent admirer of Hitler’s Germany, this fervent proponent of America First principles, opted to forgo the final year of law school and sign up for the Naval Aviation Cadet Program of the U.S. Navy Reserve.
Joe Senior was dumbfounded. His firstborn not only had volunteered but had chosen the most dangerous branch of service, naval aviation. The Ambassador (as he was now often called, even as a private citizen) offered to pull strings and get Joe assigned to a desk job in the Office of Naval Intelligence, in Washington, but his son refused. For months it had infuriated him that people were questioning the Kennedys’ courage, were leveling snide accusations against his father. How dare they? What did they know about bravery? He would prove them wrong by becoming a Navy flier. Joe Senior, knowing better than to stand in his proud son’s way, gave his blessing. “My father, especially, approves of what I’m doing,” Joe told the press, in a revealing exaggeration. “He thinks I’m doing what I should be doing, and he’s glad for it.” In late June, Young Joe was inducted, along with FDR’s youngest child, John, and several other would-be aviators from Harvard. They became seamen second class, at a pay rate of $21 per month. Joe’s physical examination at Chelsea Naval Hospital, in Boston, showed him to be in sterling physical shape—he stood five feet eleven and weighed a robust 175 pounds, and without a single blemish on his health record.61