The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Despite these and other differences, there are remarkable similarities between the two clans—some, of course, just accidental. There is no deep significance to the fact that James Buckley succeeded in time to the Senate seat Robert Kennedy had held, or that both ran as “carpetbaggers.” The size of the families is not a matter for surprise, given the religious upbringing of both mothers. Rose Kennedy began her family of nine children before Aloise Buckley (a New Orleans belle) began hers of ten—the oldest Kennedy son was born in 1915, the oldest Buckley in 1920. During the twenties, the two women were more or less continuously pregnant (William Jr. was born in 1925, the same year as Robert Kennedy). The last Kennedy child (Edward) was born in 1936, the last Buckley (Carol) in 1940.

  More profound similarities lie in the relation of the children to their parents. The mother was, in both cases, pretty, cultured, and retiring; clearly not the major force in the family. Kenneth O’Donnell, stressing the importance of the women’s vote in Boston, said: “In an Irish home, the mother’s word is law.” If that is the case, then neither the Buckley nor the Kennedy home was Irish. One daughter of Aloise Buckley told me that her first memories of her mother’s room—where she retired as Rose Kennedy did to her “hut” on the beach—were of holy water and perfume.

  In both families the father was dominant, though he traveled much away from home. Both men combined the discipline of an executive driving his underlings with a paternal affection that showed best in memos. Each man was rootless, restless, going where the action took him, living in a variety of homes simultaneously—south in winter, north in summer, Europe often. The children were tutored and sent to secular schools that would advance their careers—eventually Yale became for the Buckleys what Harvard was for Kennedys. To some degree the Buckleys freed their daughters from convent backgrounds—while Kennedy girls were at Manhattanville, the Buckleys were at Smith. But neither father liked to see his daughters aim at anything but homemaking.

  Though Buckley’s cultural aspirations were deeper than Kennedy’s, they were no less anglophile, in defiance of Irish memories. John Kennedy grew up admiring Lords Tweedsmuir and Cecil, at an age when William Buckley’s hero was Albert Jay Nock, who modeled his Freeman on the English Spectator, the better to mock American vulgarity. As Joseph Kennedy exchanged his “low Boston” accent for brahmin, the Buckleys acquired a “mid-Atlantic” mode of speech partly modeled, in William Jr.’s case, on the Oxford diction of Willmore Kendall. It is no wonder this same Buckley told an interviewer: “I simply wasn’t aware that we were somewhere along the line taxonomized as Irish Catholics until somebody told me, and that was fifteen years after I graduated from college.” That was not a thing his own family would have impressed on him.

  Buckleys, no more than Kennedys, rebelled against their strong father. The children gradually rid themselves of their parents’ anti-Semitism and prejudice against blacks, but this was seen as a forgivable generation lag in the admired rulers of the clans. There were no open breaks. Buckley, having less financial power, had to welcome his sons into the family business—something unthinkable for Kennedy. But even Buckley seems to have been happier at the thought that some of his boys would become writers or scholars than that they would keep poking at the largely dry holes he left them. Buckleys, though less fused in a single system than the Kennedys, do have special antennae for each other, making it hard sometimes for in-laws fully to belong.

  The main difference between the families is that the Kennedy father pushed farther out, aspired higher, and fueled more ambitious flights than did the Buckley father. This means the Buckleys are only semi-semi-Irish, when compared with the Kennedys’ full semi-Irishness (the condition of John’s rise to the presidency). But if that differentiates them, the thing that makes them similar is the fact that each man did push off from his point of origin, to create a private world for his children, a rootless aristocracy of merit. Though no one is entirely free of ancestral influence, these men’s families do not exemplify their ethnic heritage so much as the American escape from origins toward opportunity.

  6

  Semi-English

  Irish-Americans, particularly those who live in the Boston area, are almost to a man staunchly anti-British.

  —DAVID NUNNERLY, President Kennedy and Britain

  When John Kennedy went to Washington for his work in naval intelligence (and his trysts with Inga Arvad), he met John White, a journalist who was dating his sister Kathleen. White, who thought Kennedy a shallow playboy, was surprised by one sign of depth: “He said his favorite book was Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. That was extraordinary taste. Genuine taste.”

  Perhaps. In 1941 Kennedy was enthusiastic about John Buchan’s memoir, Pilgrim’s Way, in which Buchan praised his friend “Lawrence of Arabia” and said, “I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world.” Lawrence lived the kind of adventure story Buchan wrote—he served, in fact, as model for “Sandy” in Greenmantle. Lawrence could write, in Seven Pillars: “Blood was always on our hands; we were licensed to it.” James Bond’s agent number, remember, is his license to kill. Lawrence presented his qualifications as a translator of Homer this way: “I have hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.” It is the code of Norman Mailer’s neo-Renaissance man: “kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.”

  It did not hurt that Buchan was made Lord Tweedsmuir for his services to the British government. Kathleen Kennedy married an English lord, which was not possible for John Kennedy; but the two books he always referred to as his favorites were by British lords—Pilgrim’s Way by Tweedsmuir, and The Young Melbourne by Lord David Cecil. Both books came out within a year of his own Why England Slept, at a time when Kennedy was a defender of England’s imperialist politicians. Both books gave him a wildly romantic view of aristocrats. From Cecil’s Melbourne he seems to have derived his impression that English aristocrats have naked women emerge from silver dishes at their banquets (the moral Time magazine drew from the book). The Melbourne described by Cecil, a doting descendant, was all the things Kennedy wanted to be—secular, combining the bookish and the active life, supported by a family that defied outsiders. The Arthur Schlesinger line on Kennedys as “slow maturers” was laid down by Cecil: “He was the sort of character that, in any circumstances, does not come of age till middle life. His nature was composed of such diverse elements that it took a long time to fuse them into a stable whole.”

  The family loyalty of the Kennedys is presented by Cecil as a Melbourne trait. Melbourne House must have seemed to Kennedy a remarkable anticipation of Hyannis Port:

  Children brought up in gay and patrician surroundings seldom react against them with the violence common in more circumscribed lives. If their tastes differ from those of the people round them, they have the leisure and money to follow them up in some degree; and anyway, their ordinary mode of living is too agreeable for them to conceive any strong aversion to it. Further, the Milbanke half of William’s nature was perfectly suited by his home. He loved the parties and the sport and the gossip; he felt at home in the great world. Nor was his other side starved at Melbourne House. He had all the books he liked, he could listen enthralled to the clever men cleverly disputing, while his native tenderness bloomed in the steady sunshine of the family affection. His brothers and sisters were as fond of him as of one another. And, in the half-laughing, unsentimental way approved by Lamb standards, they showed their feelings. He returned them. His brothers were always his closest men friends, his favourite boon companions. What could be better fun than acting with George, arguing with Frederick, racing with Peniston? He was equally attached to his sisters, especially “that little devil, Emily.”

  The Melbourne set described in such a dreamy glow is the fulfillment of Joseph Kennedy’s dream for his
own children, aristocratically free of the need to climb, to do business, to court others: “Born in the centre of its most entertaining circle, he found himself, without any effort on his part, elected to its best clubs, invited to its most brilliant parties. And he had the talents to make the most of his advantages.” Some resemblances were almost eerie—Melbourne, for instance, had a retarded son he cared for with great affection. Other resemblances John Kennedy could arrange—both Melbourne’s wife and one of his lovers were named Caroline.

  Cecil was sentimental in describing Melbourne as an eighteenth-century man whose circle and class kept wit alive into Queen Victoria’s time. But John Kennedy must have felt that Cecil was a contemporary reporter on the English ruling class when he took six months off from Harvard studies to be a “courier” for his father in London. David Nunnerly, in President Kennedy and Britain (1972), describes the undergraduate’s initiation into English country life:

  Englishmen of his own generation, like David Ormsby-Gore and “Billy” Hartington, he found altogether more sophisticated and confident than his American contemporaries. They were hardly the angry young men of the 1930s: in fact politics was for them rather light-hearted, certainly no obsession, though this very idea of politics invigorating rather than dominating society much appealed to Kennedy. But the other aspects of the British way of life equally appealed to him. He immensely enjoyed his leisured week-ends in the country homes of the great aristocratic families. At first through his father’s position, he found himself regularly invited for weekends at the Chatsworths and Lismores, respectively the English and Irish ancestral homes of the Devonshires, with whom he later strengthened his ties through his sister Kathleen’s marriage to the Marquis of Hartington. The presence of other house guests, many of whom were public figures, like the Edens and the Randolph Churchills, was in a sense history come alive for him. It had, as Arthur Schlesinger put it, “a careless elegance he had not previously encountered.” The new perspective on life to which he was exposed was of special importance since it was acquired in his formative and impressionable years, during which period he might otherwise have been content to have remained a shy and somewhat introverted personality. Instead, and as one of his intimate friends later recalled, somewhat to his own surprise, “He found his British friends very agreeable and he got on very well with them; and gradually what I would call the anti-British elements he grew out of and by the end you couldn’t have found a more British person.”

  Nunnerly properly stresses the confidence of the class Kennedy was meeting. The Harvard undergraduate naively extended that trait to every single Englishman in his first published book, Why England Slept: “No discussion of Britain’s psychology would be complete unless some mention were made of the natural feeling of confidence, even of superiority, that every Englishman feels.” It was a heady vision to take back with him into classrooms where even Boston brahmins looked provincial now.

  John Buchan, in Pilgrim’s Way, takes a view of English aristocrats at least as rosy as Lord Cecil’s. Here, for instance, is his Lord Asquith: “The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, had in his character every traditional virtue—dignity, honour, courage, and a fine selflessness.” If Lytton Strachey was less dazzled by Asquith, his view would not alter Kennedy’s admiration for these aristocrats:

  Who would guess from this book [of Asquith’s] which has just come out (Occasional Addresses) with its high-minded orotundities and cultivated respectabilities, that the writer of it would take a lady’s hand, as she sat behind him on the sofa, and make her feel his erected instrument under his trousers? (this I had very directly from Brett, to whose sister it happened at Garsington, and who told me as much of it as her maiden modesty allowed—egged on by Otto-line—and all of it to Carrington).

  But Buchan, an imperialist admirer of Cecil Rhodes who served as a colonial official in several countries, had more to tell Kennedy about aristocratic politics. He presents himself as a defender of democracy “properly understood,” but says this must not amount to a denigration of the “great men” England needs to survive. He thought the people of England had gone soft, and hoped his adventure tales would brace them for new risks. His ideal was T. E. Lawrence, worshipped as a superman on the James Bond scale:

  Physically he looked slight, but, as boxers say, he stripped well, and he was as strong as many people twice his size, while he had a bodily toughness and endurance far beyond anything I have ever met. In 1920 his whole being was in grave disequilibrium. You cannot in any case be nine times wounded, four times in an air crash, have many bouts of fever and dysentery, and finally at the age of twenty-nine take Damascus at the head of an Arab army, without living pretty near the edge of your strength.

  For Kennedy, who lived at the edge of his slight strength—defying illness, risking dangerous sports, driving recklessly—Buchan’s “crush” on his hero proved contagious, as we learn from John White. Kennedy’s statistics-laden senior paper, published as Why England Slept, should be read in conjunction with Buchan’s memoir. The latter supplies the romantic ideology partly covered over by the scholastic pose of the former. Both books appeared in the same year (1940), and their attitudes came from the same class, one that Ambassador Kennedy was cultivating as he supplied his son with evaluations of the British leaders, journals, and problems.

  Since Joseph Kennedy opposed America’s entry into England’s war, and was harshly criticized by the British after Roosevelt recalled him, there has been a tendency to treat him as just another “isolationist” like Senator Borah or Colonel McCormick. But Kennedy considered Borah a pacificist, and his son’s book castigates him for trying to disarm America. No Kennedy shared McCormick’s anglophobia. In fact, Joseph Kennedy dearly loved a lord, and did not throw his strong will—the only one that mattered—against his daughter’s decision to marry one. Rose Kennedy remembers how her husband glowed with pride in their suite at Windsor Castle: “Well, Rose, this is a helluva long way from East Boston, isn’t it?” Arrived in England, Kennedy quickly joined the fashionable Cliveden Set, and imbibed its antiwar position. Franklin Roosevelt was soon wondering to Henry Morgenthau: “Who would have thought that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman?” To James Farley he said: “Joe has been taken in by the British government people and the royal family.” The wonder of it, according to Heywood Broun, was that this American cultivating lords and ladies came from an Irish background “where the kids are taught to twist the lion’s tail even before they learn to roll their hoops.”

  The distinctive mark of Joseph Kennedy’s “isolationism” was its paradoxical nourishment from foreign sources. This circumstance set Kennedy at some distance from other Americans who opposed the war. Since British “appeasers” claimed their policy was meant to buy time for rearming, Kennedy was not opposed to war preparation as such, like Borah. Nor was he optimistic about America’s avoiding “entanglement.” He wanted the country armed to the teeth, for any emergency. It was England’s failure to do this that trapped her in a position where rapid mobilization could only be accomplished by adopting totalitarian disciplines herself. This was the background of Kennedy’s disastrous later press conference in Boston—the one that ended all his presidential hopes when he said that “democracy is finished in England.”

  Because Kennedy’s views fit imperfectly with those of other American isolationists, his son’s book Why England Slept—which reflects those views—has regularly been misread. It is customary for authors to tell us the book departed from the elder Kennedy’s position. Arthur Schlesinger makes an even stranger claim: “Why England Slept was a singularly dispassionate statement to be flung into America’s most passionate foreign policy debate of the century—so dispassionate, indeed, that it was impossible to conclude from the text whether the author was an interventionist or isolationist.”

  No one who reads the book’s original foreword can think it rose above foreign policy debates. Henry Luce cut all but a few paragraphs of that foreword in the book’s 19
61 reprint, the version familiar to most readers now. But in 1940, a campaign year, Why England Slept was recommended between its own covers as an attack on Roosevelt for not alerting the public to impending war dangers. Luce, of course, was backing Wendell Willkie’s candidacy in 1940, as was Arthur Krock, who gave the book what little style it possesses. In arranging for these two sponsors, Joseph Kennedy was easing away from what he thought would be the disaster of Roosevelt’s policies—he hoped to inherit the Democratic party for himself if Roosevelt fell. He was playing for big stakes at this period, but without Roosevelt’s cold nerve. Having set up a confrontation with his leader, Kennedy shied off at the last minute. By that time, his son’s book was out.

  In the 1940 foreword, Luce argued that Roosevelt was unrealistic in his dismissal of the war threat. He denied that this was just a campaign ploy: “Surely Mr. Roosevelt couldn’t just be playing politics if he really thought we might be in for a war.” Luce had to admit that Willkie, too, had presented himself to the Republicans as a peace candidate. But this was understandable in the first stage of an outsider’s campaign. “Since his opponents (in both parties) have had eight years to play politics, Mr. Willkie may reasonably be given eight days.” But this newcomer was not frozen in the antiwar stance Luce attributed to Roosevelt: “Very soon Mr. Willkie must meet the psychological test which Mr. Kennedy has so ably staged. Perhaps he will have met it magnificently before this book is off the press.”

  The “test” proposed by the book was this: How can a modern democracy be brought to arm itself in peacetime sufficiently to deter war, or to win it, without having to adopt totalitarian ways? England failed that test, according to Kennedy, for two reasons, one structural, one specific to the thirties. The structural problem arises from the very nature of democracy, which caters to people’s present wants instead of addressing future threats. The more transitory problem was England’s pacifism of the thirties, fed on unrealistic hopes raised by the League of Nations. America, necessarily, suffers from the first problem; but it might still bring itself to arm, because it had not been fatally infected with the League’s pacifism.