On Tuesday the people by an alarmingly narrow margin in the popular vote chose John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts as the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
IV
Kennedy on the Eve
MY FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF John F. Kennedy went back to undergraduate days at Harvard twenty-five years before. His older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was one of my classmates, a confident, gregarious young man with a rollicking personality that swept all before it. He seemed destined to be a man of power, though one did not feel in him the inward and reflective quality one later found in his brothers John and Robert. But I never knew him well. He was a brave man and died in the war.
His younger brother John arrived in Cambridge as a freshman when Joe and I were in our third year. In those days the freshman class put on a smoker each spring; and the Freshman Smoker of 1937 shamed the older classes with its prodigies of talent imported from Broadway and Hollywood. One learned that young Jack Kennedy was responsible for this triumph. Even upper-classmen were impressed. I saw him from time to time in the Yard but do not recall that I ever exchanged a word with him. Joe and I finished Harvard in 1938, Jack two years later.
My next memory of Jack Kennedy goes back to London in the summer of 1944 when, as buzz-bombs roared overhead, I read one day in The New Yorker John Hersey’s quiet account of his adventures in the Pacific. In 1946 I heard that he had returned to Boston to run for Congress. In due course he won the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives in the 11th district, which included Cambridge, and was elected to the seat vacated by James M. Curley, who had once again become mayor of Boston. Kennedy and I renewed, or began, our acquaintance the following winter in Washington. I saw him from time to time in these years before the Presidency, with increasing frequency toward the end of the fifties, though I was not one of his intimates, if indeed he had real intimates outside his family.
In these years I began to understand better the complexity of mind and emotion which underlay that contained and ironic exterior, but only a little better. Kennedy had to an exceptional degree the gift of friendship and, in consequence, a great diversity of friends; part of his gift was to give each the sense that he alone had a clue to the mystery. The friends came in layers—the Choate and Harvard friends, the friends from the Navy, the social friends from Palm Beach and Newport, the Irish friends, the senatorial friends, the intellectual friends—and each layer considered itself closest to the center. But Kennedy kept the layers apart and included and baffled them all. The ultimate reserve was a source of his fascination and his power.
1. THE KENNEDY FAMILY
How had it all come about? Part of the answer, of course, lay in his upbringing. He was born into a family that was large, warm and spirited. There is no point in idealizing the Kennedys. Like any family, it had its share of tensions. Young Joe Kennedy, the oldest son, was bigger and stronger than the others; he was the leader of the children and occasionally, in discharging his role, something of a bully. No doubt Jack Kennedy was shoved around a good deal by his older brother. But, more than most families, the Kennedys were bound together by a love which gave all the children a fundamental confidence. With its subtle and disparate solidarity, the family nourished a capacity for competition, for individuality and for loyalty.
Moreover, it was an Irish family. Little is more dangerous than to try to explain a man in terms of supposed ethnic traits. In most respects, Kennedy departed considerably from the Irish-American stereotype. He was reticent, patrician, bookish, urbane—much closer, indeed, to a young Lord Salisbury than to a young Al Smith or, for that matter, to a young John F. Fitzgerald. Yet the Irishness remained a vital element in his constitution. It came out in so many ways—in the quizzical wit, the eruptions of boisterous humor, the relish for politics, the love of language, the romantic sense of history, the admiration for physical daring, the toughness, the joy in living, the view of life as comedy and as tragedy.
And it gave him a particular slant on American society. Though the Kennedy family was well established politically and financially—Jack’s grandfather had twice been mayor of Boston; his father was a Harvard graduate and a successful businessman—it was still marginal socially in Brahmin Boston; and its folk memories were those of a time, not too far distant, when to be Irish was to be poor and have gates slammed in one’s face. Joseph P. Kennedy, a man of driving ambition, was determined to reverse all that. His passion was to break down the barriers and win full acceptance for himself and his family. Business success helped; he soon discovered that money encouraged people to forgive an Irish name, though this was less true in Boston than elsewhere. Money also enabled him to offer his sons the protective coloration of schooling at places like Choate, Milton and Harvard; it enabled him to open doors for them all their lives. But what was more important than money was the training he gave his children—a regimen of discipline tempered and transformed by affection.
Regarding money as a means and not as an end, Joe Kennedy forbade its discussion at the dinner table. Conversation turned, not on business, but on public affairs; no child could doubt the order of priority. “I can hardly remember a mealtime,” Robert Kennedy said later, “when the conversation was not dominated by what Franklin D. Roosevelt was doing or what was happening around the world. . . . Since public affairs had dominated so much of our actions and discussions, public life seemed really an extension of family life.” The father confronted the children with large questions, encouraged them to have opinions of their own, demanded that their opinions make sense, wrote them endless letters when he was away (which was often), told them they had an obligation to take part in public life and instilled convictions of purpose and possibility. As John Kennedy put it one night at the White House: “My father wasn’t around as much as some fathers when I was young; but, whether he was there or not, he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him. He was so terribly interested in everything we were doing. He held up standards for us, and he was very tough when we failed to meet those standards. The toughness was important. If it hadn’t been for that, Teddy might be just a playboy today. But my father cracked down on him at a crucial time in his life, and this brought out in Teddy the discipline and seriousness which will make him an important political figure.”
Young Jack kept up his side in the competitive world of the Kennedys. But for all his vitality he had both a frailness and a sensitivity which set him somewhat apart from the extroverted and gregarious family. He may even have been a little lonely at times. He passed a surprising amount of his childhood sick in bed—with diphtheria, scarlet fever, acute appendicitis and chronic stomach trouble. He was the only one in the family who liked to read; loneliness and sickness made him read all the more. He spent hours in his room at Riverdale or Hyannis Port absorbed in history and biography—King Arthur, Scottish Chiefs, The White Company, Cooper, and later Churchill’s Marlborough when he was in his teens. History was full of heroes for him, and he reveled in the stately cadences of historical prose. His memory of what he read was photographic. Situations, scenes and quotations stuck in his mind for the rest of his life.
The interior life was a source of identity and of power. Already he was moving beyond his brother Joe, moving beyond his father, and developing distinctive standards and goals. The Kennedys were supposed never to finish second; but Jack could present a favorite quotation from Alan Seeger: “Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me. It is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters.” (He still, however, preferred to win.) Professor William G. Carleton of the University of Florida recalls an evening of discussion with the Kennedys at Palm Beach in April 1941: “It was clear to me that John had a far better historical and political mind than his father or his elder brother; indeed, that John’s capacity for seeing current events in historical perspective and for projecting historical trends into the future was unusual.”* It used to be said that the older Kennedy ‘ma
de’ his son Jack President and, if Joe, Jr., had only lived, would have ‘made’ him President first. I do not believe either of these things for a moment. I doubt whether young Joe, for all his charms and gifts, would have been President. And it was Jack Kennedy who, in the existential sense, first made himself and then made himself President. Out of some fierce, cool inner passion, he became a man in his own right who grew from but beyond the family in which he was born, which loved him so much and which he loved so much.
It is hard to judge how much his formal education mattered. He spent only one year at a Catholic school, Canterbury in Connecticut. He then went on to Choate, which he disliked heartily. During his Presidency his old school unveiled his portrait as Choate’s most distinguished alumnus. He observed of the ceremony, “This is the most ironic celebration of which I have ever heard.” He asked what use schools like Choate were and answered his own question in a message to his fellow alumni. “Those of us who have gone to Choate and comparable schools,” he began, “represent really a very tiny minority.” Private preparatory schools, he went on, would merit a place in American education only as they took in people of all classes and races; and those fortunate enough to go to such schools had to justify their special opportunities, preferably by entering the service of the nation. He named the Roosevelts, Harriman, Acheson, Douglas Dillon, Charles Bohlen and, among Choate alumni, Stevenson and Bowles, and suggested a trifle acidly that the careers of such men had done more than anything else to persuade the American democracy to accept the preparatory school “even when, or perhaps because, the men themselves do things which appear on occasion to disappoint a good many of their classmates.”
Choate provided no intellectual excitement, and he finished only slightly above the middle of his class. His father sent him that summer to the London School of Economics, hoping to expose him to Harold Laski. Instead Kennedy exposed himself to jaundice and had to delay his entry into Princeton in the fall. Then a recurrence of jaundice knocked out the rest of his freshman year. With his Princeton friends advancing into the sophomore class, he yielded to his father’s preference and shifted the next autumn to Harvard.
2. THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE
For a time Kennedy continued in his prep-school mood. He organized the Freshman Smoker, ruptured a disk in his back playing football, made the swimming squad and the Crimson, kept apart from the greaseballs in the Harvard Student Union and concentrated desultorily in the field of government.
In the meantime, a summer in Europe between his first and second Harvard years exposed him to wider horizons. With Lemoyne Billings, who had been his roommate at Choate and was now at Princeton, he spent a carefree two months wandering around the continent. His diary of the summer records a growing interest in public affairs. “The general impression,’’ he noted after a few days in France, “seems to be that while they all like Roosevelt, his type of government would not succeed in a country like France which seems to lack the ability of seeing a problem as a whole. They don’t like Blum as he takes away their money and gives it to someone else. That to a Frenchman is tres mauvais.” He concluded the entry: “Looked around and finally got a fairly cheap room for the night (35 francs).”
A visit to St.-Jean-de-Luz on the Spanish border led him to reflect on the Spanish Civil War. He registered his own view as “rather governmental after reading Gunther [Inside Europe] even though St. Jean is rebel stronghold.” However, a day of rebel atrocity stories, as he noted the next evening, “turns me a bit from government,” and an afternoon at a bullfight “made me believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners . . . are happiest at scenes of cruelty. They thought funniest sight was when horse ran out of the ring with his guts trailing.”
On to Lourdes—“very interesting but things seemed to become reversed as Billings became quite ill after leaving.” Carcassonne two days later: “an old medieval town in perfect condition—which is more than can be said for Billings.” Then Milan: “Finished Gunther and have come to the decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England.” In Rome he set down a list of questions:
If the belligerent foreign troops were withdrawn, how much chance would Franco have?
If Franco wins, what will be the extent of Mussolini’s control. Hitler’s? . . .
Isn’t the chance of war less as Britain gets stronger—or is a country like Italy liable to go to war when economic discontent is rife? . . .
Gunther says “Facism, momentarily powerful, may be the convulsive last agonies of the capitalist cycle, in which case Facism will have been merely the prelude of Communism.” Is this true?
These were still the thoughts of a sophomore; but later in the year his father became ambassador to Britain and Jack began spending his holidays whenever possible in London. This speeded his intellectual awakening. He was fascinated by English political society, with its casual combination of wit, knowledge and unconcern. The intelligent young Englishmen of his own age, like David Ormsby Gore, seemed more confident and sophisticated than his Harvard friends. He enjoyed the leisured weekends in the great country houses. It was history come alive for him, and it had a careless elegance he had not previously encountered.
This love of England found its expression later in the delight with which he read books like David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne. It was especially a love for the Whig England of the early nineteenth century, rational and urbane. But it is too simple to suggest that Kennedy was no more than an American Melbourne. The manner captivated him a good deal more than the matter. Kennedy was enchanted by the Whig zest, versatility and nonchalance; he liked the idea of a society where politics invigorated but did not monopolize life. But Whiggism was a posture, not a purpose. It was too passive for a Kennedy. Where Melbourne was willing to yield to the popular voice, Kennedy hoped to guide and anticipate it. Melbourne was an accommodator; Kennedy wanted to be a leader. He infused the Whig style with Rooseveltian activism. He was socially a Whig but politically something else—probably, if a British analogue is required, a Tory Democrat. He liked the notion of aristocrats and commoners united against the selfishness of laissez faire. His mood in later years was often that of Coningsby: “I would make these slum-landlords skip.” He had read Winston Churchill’s life of his father and found as much historical sustenance, I believe, in Lord Randolph Churchill as in Lord Melbourne. (He did not meet Winston Churchill for another twenty years. He and Jacqueline had a house at Cannes in the late fifties with William Douglas-Home, the playwright, and his wife. One evening they dined with Churchill on the Onassis yacht. It was not altogether a success; Churchill, now an old man, had a little difficulty in distinguishing which of the group that came aboard the yacht was Jack Kennedy, and, when this was finally sorted out, the conversation was hard going. He had met his hero too late. But Churchill remained his greatest admiration.)
All this was still an inchoate stirring in between afternoons at Lady Cunard’s, balls in Belgravia and weekends in the country. But London did give him a sense of the tone in which politics might be approached. It also gave him a rather appalling look at the way democracy responded to crisis. Kennedy was in and out of England in the months when Churchill was calling on his fellow countrymen with such slight effect to rouse themselves against the menace of Nazism. Harvard allowed him to spend the second term of the academic year of 1938–39 abroad, and he traveled through Eastern Europe to Russia, the Middle East and the Balkans, stopping in Berlin and Paris on his way back to Grosvenor Square. When he returned to Harvard in the fall of 1939, the question of British somnambulism before Hitler perplexed him more than ever. Professor Arthur Holcombe of the government department had already aroused an interest in the study of politics; and now, under the guidance of Professors Payson Wild and Bruce Hopper, he set to work on an honors essay analyzing British rearmament policy. After his graduation in 1940, the thesis was published.
Remembering that Churchill had called his collec
tion of speeches While England Slept, Kennedy brashly called his own book Why England Slept. In retrospect, Why England Slept presents several points of interest. One is its tone—so aloof and clinical, so different from the Churchillian history he loved, so skeptical of the notion that the individual could affect events (“personalities,” he wrote with regret about the American attitude toward history, “have always been more interesting to us than facts”). This detachment was all the more remarkable midst the flaring emotions of 1940. Though ostensibly writing to prepare America for its own crisis (“in studying the reasons why England slept, let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish”), he remained agnostic about the choices confronting the American President. Kennedy did make the quiet suggestion that “a defeat of the Allies may simply be one more step towards the ultimate achievement—Germany over the world”; but, beyond this, and doubtless out of deference to his father’s and older brother’s isolationism, he stood aside in the book from the great debate between the isolationists and the interventionists. (At Harvard, however, he wrote to the Crimson criticizing the isolationist views of his fellow editors.)
His purpose was to discover how much British unpreparedness could be attributed to the personal defects of British politicians and how much to “the more general weakness of democracy and capitalism”; and he found his answer not with the leaders, but with the system. He declined to pursue guilty men: “Leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the nation as a whole. . . . I believe it is one of democracy’s failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses.” As long as Britain was a democracy, the people could have turned the leaders out if they disagreed with them. Nor did he put much stock in the notion that a leader could change the mind of the nation; after all, he remarked, Roosevelt had been trying to awaken America since 1937 but Congress was still cutting naval appropriations. The basic causes of the British paralysis in his view were impersonal and institutional. “In regard to capitalism, we observe first that it was obedience to its principles that contributed so largely to England’s failure.” Democracy, moreover, was “essentially peace-loving” and therefore hostile to rearmament. Both capitalism and democracy were geared for a world at peace; totalitarianism was geared for a world at war. A strong sense of the competition between democracy and totalitarianism pervaded the book—a competition in which, Kennedy believed, totalitarianism had significant short-run advantages, even though democracy was superior “for the long run.”
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