Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “Foscarello’s a skunk,” Hoover said dispassionately. “He’s got—”

  “—a gambling habit that would beggar Howard Hughes,” Roosevelt agreed. “And you took advantage of it, didn’t you? To commit a crime? You threatened to get Vincent fired. To trumpet his sins to the Treasury department, to his boss, even to me . . . unless he did you a favor. A small thing. A device hidden in the base of my telephone.”

  Hoover’s grin faded. “Foscarello may have installed that bug. Sure. But you have only his word he did it for me. The word of a skunk, against mine.”

  “Very true,” Roosevelt agreed. “I suppose a court of law would settle the question, however, were I to have you arrested. A court of law could establish the manufacture of the device and its probable origin. And I could have you arrested, Edgar—I most certainly could. For breaking the surveillance laws and possibly, even, for treason. Sam Schwartz is standing by now, with a warrant.”

  Hoover looked at him shrewdly. He was unfazed. “I wouldn’t advise you to do that, Mr. President. The consequences might be . . . unfortunate.”

  There was a slight pause. A slight humming, as of a distant aeroplane, in the background. Hoover’s eyes strayed to the sitting-room door, but it remained firmly closed.

  “You refer, of course, to your files. And everything in them,” Roosevelt said wisely. “The secret files you keep on innocent citizens, for your own edification and pleasure.”

  “No one in power is innocent,” Hoover replied.

  “Not even yourself,” the President agreed. “I’m willing to concede the point. Which is why I would propose a bargain, Edgar. One that may prove of equal value to us both.”

  Hoover’s neck emerged slightly from his collar. His pink mouth pursed.

  “You keep your job and your professional reputation. In return, you hand over the files you’ve amassed on my family, my cabinet, and my guests in my private Pullman. You hand over the file on Miss LeHand.”

  “I can certainly ascertain whether such files exist,” Hoover said slowly, “and if they do—and were compiled in violation of federal surveillance laws—I would certainly ensure that they were destroyed . . .”

  Roosevelt shook his head. “Not good enough. I shall have to summon Sam. He can search the entire Bureau with impunity once he takes you into custody.”

  He wheeled his chair around.

  “Wait!”

  Roosevelt glanced back.

  “All right.” Hoover swallowed. “All right. You get the files.”

  “Excellent,” the President said softly. He reached for some papers on his desk. “I took the liberty of compiling a list of the ones I expect to find on my desk by this afternoon.”

  The FBI chief glanced over it. The faintest expression of pain suffused his features.

  Like parting with his children, Roosevelt thought. I have taken hostages from J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Oh, and Edgar,” he continued, “—there’s one other thing you could do for me, if you’d be so good.”

  “Yes, Mr. President?” Hoover said woodenly.

  “This second list.” Roosevelt handed him a compilation of names culled from Daisy Corcoran’s account book. “I’d like you to start watching these people, if you please. Wiretaps, surveillance, whatever quasi-legal methods you deem necessary. They’re dangerous Fascist subversives in the pay of the Nazis. I believe the FBI claims the right to monitor subversives?”

  “Ever since you gave it to us, sir,” Hoover replied. “After the affair of the American Liberty League. May I ask where you got these names?”

  Roosevelt ignored the question. He flashed his dangerous smile. “No secret files this time, Edgar. I expect detailed reports on my desk each week. That will be all.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE BUREAU CHIEF had left, the President rolled over to his desk and reached beneath it. Schwartz had obliged him recently by consulting with Wild Bill on a technical matter—and had installed a recording machine that could be operated from the President’s desk. From now on, Roosevelt would capture his private conversations himself. He flipped off a switch, and the faint sound of a distant aeroplane abruptly fell silent.

  One name he had not included on the Subversives List was that of J. P. Kennedy. This was not because he regarded the man with compassion, or cared about his public reputation, or hoped to shield his son. Jack had made it quite clear, in the letter he’d included with the account book, that he understood the depth of his father’s perfidy.

  Roosevelt would keep Kennedy’s name, and all the evidence that damned him, like a pilfered jewel in a private safe. He now possessed the power to control the man for the rest of his life. And he refused to share that with Hoover—or anybody.

  EPILOGUE

  September 1939

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  BRUCE HOPPER WAS READING a newspaper, a pipe gently smoking in his hand, when the light was blotted out by a figure in the doorway. He tossed the paper aside.

  “Well met, mon brave. We’d almost given up on you.”

  “Better late than never,” Jack said.

  He’d flown across the Atlantic on the Pan Am Clipper, several weeks late for the start of term; it was nearly October, his senior year at Harvard, and he was already behind.

  “Take a seat,” Hopper suggested. “You look tired.”

  “If I had ten bucks for every time I’ve heard that, Professor . . .”

  He waited until Jack threw himself into an armchair, then got up and closed the door.

  “I read about the Athenia. You did good work there.”

  Jack laughed abruptly. The Germans had torpedoed the ship two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland on September third—the day England declared war. The Athenia had been filled with people fleeing to New York, some three hundred Americans among them.

  Hitler accused Churchill of deliberately sinking the ship, to make the Nazis look bad.

  Joe Kennedy sent Jack to Glasgow in the middle of the night to meet the American survivors. It was good to put some distance between himself and Jack. They weren’t speaking, and Rose was beginning to ask inconvenient questions. The Athenia was the reason he was late for school.

  “You got those survivors home on an American vessel,” Hopper persisted. “Even if it was without a military convoy. I read it in the paper. Schoolboy Diplomat Urges American Transport for Athenia Heroes.”

  “They were terrified of being on another British ship.” His eyes slid over to meet Hopper’s. “Schoolboy, huh? The London papers said I was eighteen.”

  “You look that young sometimes.” And sometimes, Hopper thought, you look a thousand years old.

  Jack shrugged. He seemed curiously indifferent, and very far away. “The Athenia was as much my dad’s job as mine. He paid for hundreds of transatlantic telegrams to the survivors’ families, did you know that? The State department wouldn’t authorize the expense. They didn’t get it—that these people were feeling abandoned by their government, in a war zone. They’d been torpedoed in the North Atlantic, for chrissake. But Dad understood.” There was a short silence. “He knows what it means to worry about your family.”

  “He should. His own means the world to him,” Hopper said mildly. He tapped the ashes from his pipe bowl and settled back in his chair. “You don’t want to be here, do you?”

  “It’s just hard to see the point.” Jack thrust himself from the chair and began to pace restlessly between the bookshelves, his fingers running lightly over the volumes bound in dark leather. That quickly, the impression of malaise was gone and the crackling energy Hopper remembered filled the room. “Dad sent us all home. No choice and no argument. Joe’s in law school. Kick’s been bundled off to college. Her boyfriend’s British, so he’s already enlisted, and God knows if they’ll ever see each other again. Which would
suit my mother just fine. But Kick hated being sent back. She says we look like cowards. Running at the first sign of danger.”

  “Which is how you feel.”

  Jack shot him a glance. “Nobody’s safe anymore, Professor. Nobody will ever be safe again.”

  “You never thought you were.”

  “I know I’m always on the edge of dying. But I want to be doing something.”

  “Then write your thesis.”

  “What the hell good would that do?”

  “It might rouse American opinion,” Hopper suggested. “Most people still think this is a European war, Jack. That it’ll never touch us. You know better. You know it’s coming. Whether we like it or not.”

  “Even the Brits tried to deny it was really happening,” he mused. “It took Chamberlain two days after the tanks rolled into Poland to declare war! You know how many Poles died during those two days? Churchill said—”

  He broke off, and looked at his shoes.

  “So you met him.”

  “We met. Yes.”

  “And he said?” Hopper prompted.

  “—That Neville refused to bomb Berlin while the Nazis were fighting in Poland. It wasn’t cricket, apparently, to attack from the west, while the Germans were fighting in the east. Like shooting a man in the back, Chamberlain said. Not the act of a gentleman.”

  “—And Winston?”

  Jack grinned. “Nearly broke Neville’s pencil neck.”

  Hopper didn’t laugh. “But the Poles are still dying.”

  “While the rest of us stand around and watch.”

  Hopper rose, and grasped Jack’s shoulder. “Write your thesis. An analysis of the months leading up to war. Have you got a title?”

  He shrugged. “Why England Slept. That should make most Americans yawn.”

  “People will listen to you. You’ve been there. You’ve done your homework. And you’re Joe Kennedy’s son.”

  “A lot of people hate my father,” Jack said.

  “But they know his name. You can use that,” Hopper insisted.

  Jack hesitated, then lounged over to the door. “I don’t really have a choice, do I? I’ve got to get out of here somehow. See you later, Professor.”

  Hopper stared after him, a frown between his eyes.

  Patience, mon brave, he thought.

  This war will find each of us, soon enough.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Jack 1939 is a work of fiction—a speculative recasting of Jack Kennedy’s twenty-second year. It was inspired by a photograph I happened to glimpse a few years ago: Jack on a street in Germany during the summer of 1937, wearing clothes he’d probably slept in for a week, hair tousled, head thrown back, mouth open in a grin. He was juggling fruit for the camera. He looked like a wild and free street busker without a care in the world; he was also rail thin, the bones of his face dangerously prominent. I had forgotten completely that he had ever been so young. The image haunted me for weeks. I wanted to know more about that boy.

  I began to read everything I could regarding Jack Kennedy’s childhood and experiences during World War II. For those readers whose interest in the period has been sparked by this story, I would recommend, in no particular order, Michael Beschloss’s Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (New York: Norton, 1981); Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992); Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), which is particularly valuable for its survey of medical records and issues; Will Swift’s The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938–1940 (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2008); Laurence Leamer’s The Kennedy Men: 1901–1963: The Laws of the Father (New York: William Morrow, 2001); Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Richard J. Whalen’s The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: New American Library, 1964); Amanda Smith’s edition of her grandfather’s correspondence, Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Viking, 2001); and, of course, John F. Kennedy’s Why England Slept (New York: Wilfred Funk, 1940). There are myriad books on the subject, as there are on related topics—J. Edgar Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Mitford Sisters. Colonel Colin McVean Gubbins surfaces in numerous histories of the British Special Operations Executive, and his Partisan Leader’s Handbook is (remarkably) available through Amazon.com. The GÖring to buy the 1940 election is discussed in Joseph E. Persico’s Roosevelt’s Secret War (New York: Random House, 2011).

  Throughout the months of researching his senior thesis in 1939, Jack wrote letters—many to his friend Lem Billings, others to his father that have been subsequently stolen, lost, or destroyed. Jack 1939 is roughly faithful to his actual itinerary: he was in Val d’Isère when I suggest, and in Moscow, Danzig, and Prague at about the times I send him there. George Kennan’s memoirs mention Jack, whom at the time he viewed as “an upstart and an ignoramus,” at the Czech border in August 1939; it was particularly fun to imagine those two in a room together. I chose not to mention Jack’s trip to Palestine in May 1939, although his letter to his father from Jerusalem is one of the few from the period that survive. The location didn’t fit with the fictional world I’d invented—and this book is, after all, fiction.

  The picture of Jack juggling is part of the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where one can also find such things as Jack’s stained and much-stamped passport from 1935; his beloved Wianno Senior yacht, Victura; and the telegram Frances Ann Cannon sent to the Queen Mary on February 25, 1939. The fact that the telegram exists is wondrous to me—Jack must have kept it in his pocket or wallet throughout the crossing and for the rest of his life. A testament to love and loss, if ever there was one. Many of the Kennedy Library’s collections are open to the public; others, such as the Billings correspondence, are closed collections requiring permission for access. I am grateful to Maryrose Grossman of the Audiovisual Archives, and to Stacey Chandler of the Reference Staff, for their assistance. Open items (including the Cannon telegram) may be viewed online, for those who cannot travel to Boston.

  Throughout the process of writing this book, I was unflaggingly supported by my agent of nearly twenty years, Raphael Sagalyn, who read numerous drafts and offered—along with his staff—invaluable suggestions. He placed the resulting manuscript in the care of Jake Morrissey at Riverhead Books, whose editing was masterful and whose enthusiasm for both Jack and this author are sustaining. I’m also grateful to Mr. Morrissey’s assistant, Alexandra Cardia; to copy editor Diane Aronson, who fact-checked the entire manuscript with verve and tact; and to publicist Glory Plata, who helped shepherd the story to the public. It goes without saying that any fault in the resulting novel is entirely mine.

  Francine Mathews

  Denver, Colorado

  December 2011