by Sam Kean
During a family holiday after this tour, Joe took up the new sport of bobsledding, and almost set a world speed record on a precarious course where several others had died. He then broke his arm skiing down a ridiculously steep trail and went back to London to recuperate. He soon grew restless there, however, and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to go to Spain, then in its third year of civil war. Despite speaking no Spanish, Joe desperately wanted to augment his thesis and actually see the conflict, which pitted a popularly elected but volatile group of communists and anarchists against a right-wing junta of royalists and military honchos led by Francisco Franco. Joe’s father vetoed the idea, in part because Joe held a diplomatic passport: this meant that if he got into trouble, the U.S. State Department would get tangled up in the affair. Moreover, the war was messy and dangerous, with massacres aplenty.
Undeterred, Joe secretly secured a regular passport. And a few weeks later, when Kennedy Senior returned to Boston for a spell, Joe snuck off to Spain. When his father received a telegram from Valencia, he feigned anger, but in truth his son’s bravery pleased him. He even convinced a few newspapers to cover the boy’s adventures; one dubbed him “Don José.”
By the time Joe arrived in Spain, Franco’s forces had bombed parts of Valencia flat. Packs of dogs ran wild, and although he supported Franco overall, Joe was troubled to find elderly women cowering in pathetic shelters, little more than dirt tunnels beneath fallen buildings. Other people had grown fatalistic. During one air raid Joe watched in disbelief as a bootblack sat unmoving in the town square, placidly polishing shoes while craters opened up around him.
After scouting Valencia, Joe persuaded a military bus to take him to Madrid, the white-hot center of the conflict; the trip took almost twelve hours, and the bus caught fire at one point when a soldier carelessly tossed a cigarette onto the floor. Upon arriving, Joe camped out in the American embassy, which the U.S. staff had abandoned but which enterprising Spaniards had taken over, barricading themselves inside and raising chickens, pigs, and cows on the lawn.
Madrid was in desperate straits. Franco had been laying siege to the city for some time, and with no food coming in, many people were subsisting on a few ounces of lentils or rice per day. One former American diplomat, Joe learned, had starved to death in the streets. His body was so infested with lice and other vermin that no one had the stomach to go through his pockets.
Given this suffering, Joe was surprised to find the theaters packed every evening, partly because people needed diversion and partly because there was nothing else to spend money on. He particularly admired a performance by a young “Spanish Shirley Temple,” who hoofed right through an aerial bombardment without missing a step. As he always did, Joe attended church each Sunday, where the priest celebrated Mass in civilian clothes; otherwise he risked being shot by communists, who hated the Catholic Church. (Leftists there used churches as ammunition depots, and had recently vandalized a nativity scene by dressing Baby Jesus in fatigues and jamming a pistol into his hand, a sight that outraged many.) Joe recorded all these impressions in lively dispatches to his father. “To contradict the customary postcard message,” he joked in one, “I don’t wish any of you were here.” The ambassador was so proud that he took the letters to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and read them aloud at 10 Downing Street.
Indeed, Don José was having a hell of a good time in Spain, right up until he almost got executed. In early 1939 the fragile coalition between the communists and anarchists finally crumbled, and a sort of meta–civil war broke out between them in Madrid, making life there even more dangerous. “It was regular trench warfare,” Joe noted, “with hand grenades, tanks, and machine guns in the streets. This went on for five days.” Despite the gunfire (and dead bodies) in the streets, Joe joined a team of right-wing resistance fighters carrying out clandestine missions (e.g., springing prisoners who’d likely be butchered if Franco took the city). They secured an American car and began motoring around with several sets of fake credentials. At each roadblock they had to guess the sympathies of the soldiers guarding it in order to show the right ones.
One afternoon Joe and a companion guessed wrong. They’d been driving down a walled road with no outlet, and at the checkpoint they handed over fake Red Cross papers. The soldiers rejected them and forced the duo out of the car. “Against the wall! Come on, quick!” They lined them up as if to shoot them.
Joe’s companion, convinced that “everything ends here,” thought of his wife and daughter and began whispering his final prayers. Not Joe. When the militants began taunting them, asking, “Where are you from, sweeties?,” Joe took the opportunity to explain, in broken Spanish, that he was an American and that he was very important. The soldiers, confused, lowered their guns. Un yanqui? They demanded Joe’s passport, looking it over from every angle. They couldn’t believe it. But after a few tense minutes, the militants waved the duo on. “Está bien. Scram!”
Without a word, the pair got into the car and sped off. As soon as they turned the corner, Joe glanced at his companion and burst out laughing. That was a close one, eh? All in all, Joe treated it like some prank gone awry in Harvard Yard. But life was just like that for Joe. He was young and invincible, and nothing could touch him. When Franco finally marched into Madrid, effectively ending the war, Joe said adiós and returned to London for his next adventure.
Life in London had changed, however, and not for the better as far as the Kennedys were concerned. The problem lay with Ambassador Kennedy, who found himself increasingly marginalized in government circles.
After making a pile of money in the 1920s, partly through (then legal) insider trading, the hardworking and conniving Kennedy Senior had set his ambitions on politics. When Franklin Roosevelt got elected president in 1932, he became the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hoping to parlay that post into something better, he made a play for secretary of the treasury a few years later, but was denied. As a consolation prize, he asked Roosevelt for the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom in 1938. In a way, the appointment made sense, but Roosevelt hesitated. The United Kingdom was culturally British, mostly Protestant, and quite reserved. Kennedy was proudly Irish, fiercely Catholic, and both argumentative and foul-mouthed; no one ever described him as diplomatic. Sensing Roosevelt’s reluctance, Kennedy forced his hand by leaking word of his imminent appointment to a newspaper. The gambit worked—Kennedy got the post—but it made Roosevelt suspicious. FDR finally concluded that sending Kennedy abroad might be the best move after all: the man, he said, was “too dangerous to have around.”
To be frank, Kennedy was a terrible ambassador—stubborn, opinionated, prone to spouting off. He proved especially disastrous on the topic of the Third Reich. Although he didn’t endorse Nazism per se, he thought that fascism had a lot going for it: he once offered to introduce Joe Junior to Mussolini, and regularly said, in public, that America needed to adopt fascism to survive in the modern world. Worse, perhaps influenced by Joe’s reports on German military prowess, he argued that Germany would rout France and England in any war, a decidedly defeatist attitude. In private, Kennedy opposed a war for more selfish reasons. He considered war bad for business and worried about the family fortune taking a hit. More important, he had two sons of military age who would surely have to fight in any conflict. Joe Junior’s hijinks in Spain were one thing. Facing the mighty Wehrmacht was another.
Given this tumult of emotions, Ambassador Kennedy began preaching two ideas. First, appeasement: that European countries should give Hitler whatever he wanted, to avoid a conflict at all costs. Second, isolation: that the United States had no business getting dragged into a European war. Isolationism was actually popular back home, but Roosevelt loathed the idea and told his ambassador to zip it. Kennedy refused, and at times even blamed Jewish groups—who wanted to fight the Nazis—for antagonizing Hitler and putting his sons’ lives in danger. It didn’t take long for the ambassador to earn a reputatio
n in the press as a defeatist and a coward, and Roosevelt began cutting him out of dealings with British officials, a humiliating development. FDR felt he had no choice, though: Kennedy Senior was volatile to the point of being dangerous. In the words of one historian, “he moved from neutrality, to appeasement, to defeatism, to surrender, to the exchange of democracy for fascism—and all before a single shot had been fired.”
Those shots were not long in coming, however. On September 1, 1939—not long after Kennedy Senior had brought all nine of his children to London to live with him—Nazi Germany invaded Poland and ignited World War II. By the third, Great Britain had resolved to fight Germany, and that morning, Joe, Jack, Kick, and their mother, Rose, met the ambassador outside the American embassy to accompany him to the House of Commons; at noon, Prime Minister Chamberlain would ask for a formal declaration of war. Joe was wearing a baggy black pinstriped suit with a striped tie and a handkerchief in his pocket. Jack looked svelte in a subtler, lighter-colored suit. Kick was wearing a dress and hat and white gloves; she looked ready for Easter.
Suddenly an air-raid siren sounded. In the street people stared at each other, then turned to run. The dreaded Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe, was coming for London already! A year earlier, Kennedy Senior had quietly ordered a thousand gas masks for the embassy in preparation for just such an attack. But with his children’s lives at stake he abandoned the embassy entirely, since it lacked a sturdy basement and might collapse if struck by bombs. Instead he herded Joe, Jack, Kick, and Rose into the basement of a nearby building, where they huddled in a dressmaker’s shop. Half an hour later the all-clear sounded and they hustled off to Parliament, arriving just before noon.
Only to hear another siren at 12:05, which sent them scrambling into the building’s basement. Both “raids” turned out to be false alarms; the Luftwaffe would not bomb London for another year. But the experience, as well as Chamberlain’s speech—“Everything that I have worked for,” he said, “everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins”—left Kennedy Senior shaken. Over the next week he began shipping his children back to America, booking passage on different ocean liners and airplanes to mitigate the risk of losing them all in a single attack. Whatever his faults, Kennedy Senior adored his children.
He was right to worry about their lives, but wrong about the threat. Whereas he feared Panzers and Messerschmitts, the real danger to the Kennedys turned out to be Werner Heisenberg and an obscure element called uranium.
PART II
1940–1941
CHAPTER 9
The Uranium Club
Two weeks after World War II started, the German military summoned eight physicists and chemists, including Otto Hahn, to a secret conference in Berlin. Most of them arrived nervous, fearful that the Wehrmacht would dispatch them to the front for some ghastly project. They’d packed their bags and said goodbye to their families that morning with heavy hearts.
You can imagine their relief, then, when physicist Kurt Diebner was waiting to greet them. To be sure, most of them despised Diebner personally. The man was not a properly credentialed professor, and he worked in the lowbrow field of military ordnance—two strikes against him in the snobbish world of German science. Plus, there was just something pathetic about him. His clothes fit poorly, his glasses were always slipping off his nose, and he sucked up shamelessly to elites: he’d once joined a fencing club simply to make social contacts, and persisted in the sport despite picking up several scars on his face—visible reminders of his unseemly striving. Yet however much they sneered at Diebner, the scientists shook his hand warmly that day. The man was no soldier, no fanatic, and whatever this conference entailed, they wouldn’t be headed to the front. They had no idea he’d be proposing something far more lethal.
In keeping with their distrust of intellectuals, the Nazis provided few draft deferments for scientists in 1939. (Of the roughly thousand people exempted from military service then, most were actors, painters, dancers, and singers whom Hitler admired.) This handful of chemists and physicists were an exception. Why? Because Diebner had convinced his bosses to gamble on an ambitious project: building a nuclear fission bomb. They would call themselves the Uranverein, the Uranium Club.
Eyebrows shot up around the room at the mention of fission bombs, and several scientists voiced objections. The project seemed a boondoggle, likely to divert money and resources away from more pressing needs. There was no proof nuclear bombs would work, either. But Diebner didn’t share this pessimism, and over the course of the meeting, this awkward, striving man changed the course of history by persuading his colleagues to at least try. Physicists in the United States and Great Britain would be doing their own fission research, he reminded them, and no good German could stand to let the Yanks or Limeys beat them. If nothing else, their draft deferments depended on their cooperation. Faced with this choice, the scientists signed on.
Although he’d achieved his main objective, the meeting ended sourly for Diebner. In filling out the club’s roster, he’d left off one obvious name: Werner Heisenberg. When asked about this, he explained that Heisenberg worked in theoretical physics, whereas building an atomic bomb would require engineering skills and applied science. In truth, Diebner simply loathed Heisenberg and had omitted him as a snub. Heisenberg’s clique of theoretical smartypants looked down on military scientists like Diebner as second-rate, and Heisenberg had once dismissed his work as “amateur.” Diebner also worried that the charming, brilliant Heisenberg would outshine him and take over the project. So when another scientist at the meeting suggested inviting Heisenberg to join the Uranium Club, Diebner refused. The majority supported Heisenberg’s inclusion, however, and rather than jeopardize the whole project, Diebner gave in. He would soon come to rue this decision.
Heisenberg received orders to join the Uranium Club on September 25, and traveled from Leipzig to Berlin the next day. However reluctant to work with Diebner, he was mighty glad to secure a deferment. And there was one member of the club he was dying to see, his estranged friend Carl Weizsäcker.
Michelangelo himself, if asked to sculpt an allegory of haughtiness, could not have improved upon the visage of Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker—the arched nostrils, the raised chin, the tightly drawn mouth. Heisenberg had first met him in Copenhagen in 1926, when he was twenty-five and working with Niels Bohr there. Weizsäcker was fourteen, the descendent of a long line of lords and the son of a top German diplomat in Denmark. But he had a scientific bent as well, and when his mother came home one evening from a gala and began raving about some nice young physicist playing the piano there, Weizsäcker was floored: he’d read about Heisenberg in magazines, and he quickly secured an introduction.
Despite their age difference they got on well, perhaps because Heisenberg was laddish and Weizsäcker overly mature. They began to see more of each other, and an encounter a few months later cemented their friendship. Heisenberg was swinging through Berlin one day, where the Weizsäcker family had moved. He had to switch train stations, and he asked his young pal to join him on the taxi ride across town. There, crammed into the backseat, Heisenberg revealed a revolutionary idea he’d just developed, the Uncertainty Principle. Like many teenagers, Weizsäcker had a romantic streak, and this sneak peek at one of the greatest and most confounding discoveries of twentieth-century science left him intoxicated. He soon vowed to dedicate his life to theoretical physics.
After that, the two became inseparable. They both loved the outdoors and began taking long hikes and ski trips together, discussing the latest developments in physics as they tramped around Europe. Frankly, Weizsäcker wasn’t in the same class as Heisenberg intellectually. Few were. But the young man was sharp and insightful, and proved a valuable junior partner. Moreover, he offered his mentor something important—political savvy. Heisenberg could be obtuse, even idiotic, on matters beyond physics. The diplomat’s son was more worldly and could help his frien
d navigate the ruthless world of German science. Weizsäcker sometimes referred to politics as an “unclean medium,” but he willingly played the game, and played it well.
The friends’ estrangement began in 1932. After spending more and more time with the Weizsäcker family, the thirty-year-old Heisenberg developed an unseemly crush on Weizsäcker’s sixteen-year-old sister, Adelheid. One day he declared his love for her, shocking the entire Weizsäcker clan. Frau Weizsäcker visited Heisenberg’s apartment afterward to chew him out and forbade him from visiting her household. Not even the Nobel Prize he won a few months later improved their opinion of him.
Although disturbed by this, Carl Weizsäcker continued to see Heisenberg and take trips with him. (Like Moe Berg, they happened to visit Berlin together in late January 1933, where hordes of Nazis were celebrating the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of Germany.) But Heisenberg kept stupidly, stubbornly pursuing Adelheid, even traveling to other countries to call on her when the family moved. The elder Weizsäcker finally ordered Heisenberg to desist, then married off his daughter to a German military officer. Heisenberg was devastated. The flip side of laddishness is childishness, and he all but cut the Weizsäckers, including Carl, out of his life.
Over the next few years, both men suffered personal crises. After quickly marrying a young woman named Elisabeth (whom he met while playing piano at a dinner party), Heisenberg was dragged into the Aryan physics debacle, enduring several rounds of interrogation. Weizsäcker’s political advice would have been especially welcome during this period. Weizsäcker, meanwhile, watched his father move up the ranks of the Nazi Party; he eventually became the number two man in its foreign service department and helped lay the groundwork for Hitler’s war. The family paid the price for this when Weizsäcker’s younger brother Heinrich was killed in Poland on the second day of the war, one of the very first of the fifty million casualties to come.