Then it was on to Italy, with stops in Toulouse, Carcassonne, Marseilles, Cannes, and Monte Carlo en route. Jack, reading Gunther, kept pondering the Spanish situation. “Not quite as positive about Franco victory,” he recorded from Toulouse. “Shows that you can easily be influenced by people around you if you know nothing, and how easy it is to believe what you want to believe.” But the ultimate outcome in Spain, he went on, depended in large part on what the outside powers, in particular Germany, Italy, and Russia, chose to do.78
Lem took notice of his friend’s ponderings and saw in them something new: while Jack on the trip was the same witty, fun-loving, and girl-crazy millionaire’s son he had always been, Billings told a later interviewer, he now showed a new seriousness of purpose and “more of an interest and more of a desire to think out the problems of the world and to record his ideas than he did two years before at Choate.” Harvard had had an effect, as had seeing the Old World up close. “What I’m trying to say,” Billings observed, “is that there was a noticeable change in Jack Kennedy in the summer of 1937.”79
The powers of observation were on display also in Mussolini’s Italy. Jack had no affinity for fascism, but he was struck by the lively atmosphere on the country’s streets and by the attractiveness of its people. “Fascism seems to treat them well,” he remarked after two days. In Milan, the two stayed in an inn owned by a Fascist veteran of the Abyssinian campaign, “which he said was easy to conquer but uncomfortable.” Pictures of Mussolini were everywhere, but Jack wondered, “How long can he last without money and is he liable to fight when he goes broke?” They took in Milan’s vast cathedral, and saw Da Vinci’s crumbling Last Supper at the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie. Soon thereafter, Jack completed Inside Europe, observing that “Gunther seems to be more partial to Socialism and Communism and a bitter enemy of Fascism.” But the question remained: “What are the evils of Fascism as compared to Communism?”80
On August 5, the Americans and their convertible arrived in Rome. The first night, they snuck into the Colosseum, only to find a big crowd already there. “Very impressive by moonlight,” Jack noted, though he would soon decide that “the Italians are the noisiest race in existence. They have to be in on everything, even if it’s only Billings blowing his nose.” While in the Italian capital, the two boys attended a “fantastic” Mussolini rally, witnessing firsthand Il Duce’s strutting style, and visited the Vatican, where through Joe Kennedy’s connections they met senior Church leaders, including Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, whom they had earlier heard preach at Notre-Dame, in Paris.81
Jack also talked his way into a meeting with Arnaldo Cortesi, the New York Times correspondent in the city, in order to learn more about European geopolitical developments. Cortesi told him war was unlikely, given that “if anyone had really wanted war there had been plenty of excuses for it….Said Europe was too well prepared for war now—in contrast to 1914.” Jack came away energized by the encounter and scribbled notes about the nature of fascism, the relationship to socialism, and the possibility of a major military clash. “Would Fascism be possible in a country with the economic distribution of wealth as in the US? Could there be any permanence in an alliance of Germany and Italy—or are their interests too much in conflict?”82
There followed the obligatory visits to Florence, which disappointed Jack (though he was awed by Michelangelo’s David), and Venice, where they met up with American friends, including Al Lerner, from Choate days, who was now also in Jack’s year at Harvard. Photos survive of the suntanned Jack and Lem with the pigeons in Piazza San Marco, and there’s also this cryptic entry in Jack’s diary for August 15, concerning a date he had with a girl on which his pal tagged along for a ride on a gondola: “Billings managed to make a gay threesome. Billings objects to this most unjust statement.”83
VII
Only one significant destination remained on the great summer odyssey of 1937: Hitler’s Germany. In hindsight, with our knowledge of the ghastly conflagration that was to come, it looms as the most important part of the trip, but even at the time, Jack Kennedy gave it pride of place on the itinerary. He understood, as perhaps did Lem, that Europe’s future as well as the world’s rested in large measure on the German leader’s ambitions. The previous March, Hitler had unabashedly flouted the Versailles Treaty by sending troops into the Rhineland, which had been designated a demilitarized zone. The Western powers stood by. In August 1936 he ordered compulsory two-year military service, and that November he intervened with German air power on the side of fellow fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Again the Western governments did little. All the while, Hitler engaged in intimidation of his country’s neighbors, especially those with German-speaking populations along the borders of the Reich, and set his sights on bringing Austria, the land of his birth, into the German fold.
Departing Italy on August 16, the boys motored their way north, through the Brenner Pass and thence to Germany by way of Austria and a youth hostel in Innsbruck. Upon arrival in Munich, the cradle of National Socialism, where Hitler had gotten his start with his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and where the buildings were now festooned with Nazi flags and pictures of the Führer, Jack recorded his view that the German dictator “seems as popular here as Mussolini was in Italy, although propaganda seems to be his strongest weapon.”84
The vibe in Bavaria felt wrong from the start, ominously so, in the boys’ minds. Both experienced a sense of foreboding as the days passed. “We had a terrible feeling about Germany and all the ‘Heil Hitler’ stuff,” Lem remembered. He and Jack found the Germans arrogant beyond measure, eager to show these Americans how superior they were. “Got up late and none too spry,” Jack scribbled in his diary early on. “Had a talk with the proprietor who is quite the Hitler fan. There is no doubt about it that these dictators are more popular in the country than outside due to their effective propaganda.” To Jack, it seemed doubtful that the Nazi regime had any real answer for the country’s core problems: too few resources for too large a population, and too many rival powers working—singly and in coordination—to keep German ambitions in check.85
Jack’s skepticism stood in contrast with the assessment offered by his brother Joe three years before, in 1934, when he visited Germany during his LSE year and was swept up in the Nazi mania. Hitler’s murderous intentions were then less obvious to outsiders, and one could make allowances as well for Joe’s tender age (he had yet to turn nineteen), but his words are nonetheless jarring, especially given that he had already then decided on a political career. He wrote to his father:
Hitler came in [to power]. He saw the need of a common enemy. Someone of whom to make the goat. Someone, by whose riddance the Germans would feel they had cast out the cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. This dislike of the Jews, however, was well-founded. They were at the heads of all big business, in law, etc. It’s all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous….As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some, to secure the wholehearted support of the people, which was necessary to put through this present program.
“As you know,” Joe Junior continued, “[Hitler] has passed the sterilization law which I think is a great thing. I don’t know how the Church feels about it, but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men which inhabit this earth.” Overall, he summarized, the Nazi program had created “a remarkable spirit which can do tremendous good or harm, whose fate rests with one man alone.”*2, 86
Having had their fill of Munich, Jack and Lem drove on to Nuremberg. The quality of the German roads awed them—especially the new autobahns, the world’s first interstate highways—and Jack insisted on picking up hitchhikers and quizzing them on the state of affairs and their views of the Nazi regime. In Nuremberg they learned that Hitler would be holding a
rally in the city three days hence; they contemplated staying around for it (and later regretted not doing so) but once again found the haughtiness of the people hard to take. They hit the road again—“Started out as usual except this time we had the added attraction of being spitten on,” as Jack laconically put it in his diary, without further details—and made their way for England via Holland, Belgium, and finally the port of Calais.87
Time was now of the essence, as Jack wanted desperately to get to London to see Joe Junior and Kick before they returned to America. He made it in time, shopping with Kick rather than joining his brother on a visit with Harold Laski. He also met with his mother in Southampton, dutifully complimenting her on her latest Parisian fashion purchases and helping himself to what Lem in his diary referred to as a “mix of tomato juice & plenty of chocolate.”88 Back in London, he developed a bad case of hives, perhaps from the chocolates, prompting a frantic search by Billings for a doctor who would pinpoint the problem. One physician after another was stumped, until suddenly one morning the hives disappeared as fast as they had arrived. Soon after, the two young men embarked on the journey home to the United States, with a stop in Scotland on the way.
Jack with Dunker, the dachshund he and Lem bought for $8 at a stop on the road to Nuremberg, and which Jack intended as a gift for Olive Cawley. Soon after this photo was taken, Jack started wheezing and sneezing; a German doctor determined he was allergic to dogs. In Utrecht, someone agreed to buy Dunker for $3.
It’s tempting in hindsight to attach weighty importance to lengthy jaunts like the one Jack Kennedy and Lem Billings had in the summer of 1937. To do so isn’t always wise. The two were in most respects the same young men after the two-and-a-half-month trip that they had been before. Still, the adventure left an impression. In Jack’s case, his international sensibility, encouraged by his mother from the time he was a young boy, deepened, and one is struck as well by the increasingly sophisticated nature of his queries as the journey progressed, until by the end they were as serious-minded, if not yet as well developed, as those of professional journalists and diplomats. His determination to form independent judgments rather than simply echo his father’s assessments or give in to lazy isolationist clichés about “foreigners” grew stronger. Most portentously, one sees in the young Kennedy that summer an emerging capacity and willingness to view world affairs in contextual, dispassionate terms—a contrast with his father, who tended always to view the outside world mostly in terms of what it meant for himself and his family.89
As it happened, this tendency on the part of Joseph P. Kennedy to personalize all public policy issues would soon land him in a heap of trouble, and in time cause a further separation in the worldviews of father and son.
*1 It is not clear whether, prior to departure, Jack joined his parents for their visit to Winston Churchill’s country home, Chartwell, in Kent. “[He is] almost seventy—a pleasant, talkative, country gentleman, probably the most versatile whom I have ever met,” Rose jotted in her diary of the future prime minister, who would become a bitter antagonist of her husband. “Has a studio in his garden where he often goes + paints for recreation whatever interests him.” (U.d., box 1, RK Personal Papers.) (In actuality, Churchill was just turning sixty-one.) Churchill, upon learning of Jack’s illness, wrote to Joe, “I am deeply grieved at your anxiety about your son, and earnestly trust it will soon be relieved.” (Maier, When Lions Roar, 13.)
*2 Joe Senior responded that he was “very pleased and gratified at your observations of the German situation. I think they show a very keen sense of perception, and I think your conclusions are very sound.” (JPK to JPK Jr., May 4, 1934, box 21, JPK Papers.)
PART
II
WARTIME
The flag from PT 109, replaced in July 1943, the month before the boat was sunk.
SIX
OUR MAN IN LONDON
On March 1, 1938, six months after John F. Kennedy left England in total anonymity to return for his sophomore year at Harvard, his father arrived on British shores to great fanfare. Newsreel cameras were there to record the event, just as they had been there for his departure from New York aboard the SS Manhattan six days before. “All of the children, except Jack [sick in Cambridge], were there to see me off, but I couldn’t get to them,” the father recalled. “Newspaper men, casual well-wishers, old friends and strangers by the thousand, it seemed to me, pressed into my cabin until we all nearly suffocated.” Only with extreme effort did he make it to the deck to bid farewell to his brood.1
The reason for the hoopla: Joseph P. Kennedy had been named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and was there to take up his post. He would present his credentials to King George VI at Buckingham Palace in a few days, and would hold early meetings with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. His family would follow him to London in short order. For journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, it was an irresistible story: the dynamic Irish Catholic Wall Street tycoon with the huge and handsome family taking the helm in London—the headlines practically wrote themselves. The New York Times society page even published the travel times for the remaining Kennedys—Rose and most of the children would sail on March 9, readers were informed, and Joe Junior and John would follow in June, at the conclusion of Harvard’s spring term.2
It was a moment of triumph for the forty-nine-year-old Kennedy, the pinnacle of his public career to that point, and the climax of his five-year quest to land a prominent position in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government. Time and again during those years, Kennedy had believed that a senior cabinet appointment was in the offing, only to see his hopes dashed. Instead he had made do with second-tier positions, first as director of the SEC and then, in 1937, as the first head of the U.S. Maritime Commission. In both positions, he earned high marks with the public and the press alike—in September 1937, Fortune magazine made him the subject of a flattering cover story. But it was not enough. Kennedy wanted more, felt he deserved more after all he had done for this president and this White House. He had brought in $150,000 in donations for FDR’s 1932 campaign, including $25,000 of his own money, and had published a gushing campaign book, I’m for Roosevelt, in time for Roosevelt’s reelection effort in 1936. He’d helped FDR’s son Jimmy build a successful insurance company in Boston and brought Jimmy and his wife along on a European vacation. When, in 1933, Father Coughlin, a Detroit-based Catholic priest and radio personality, built up a mass following with his fiery weekly sermons bashing capitalism and New Deal social programs alike (later he veered into anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism), Kennedy used his influence within the Catholic hierarchy to shackle him, joining with prominent bishops to isolate Coughlin and prevent him from gaining Vatican support.3
Beyond that, Joseph Kennedy had been a close associate of the president, advising him on finance-related policy issues and socializing with him—with regularity, Roosevelt would slip away from the White House for an evening at Marwood, Kennedy’s twenty-five-room rented mansion in the Maryland countryside, in order to sip martinis and watch the latest Hollywood movies in the basement theater. Sometimes the president stayed overnight.4
It bears underscoring just how unusual it was for a Wall Street chieftain, a member of the nation’s economic super elite, to be in the administration’s corner. But Kennedy fit the bill. Though he occasionally expressed private concerns about Roosevelt’s leftward turn in domestic policy in mid-decade, he refrained from expressing his misgivings publicly. Wall Street bigwigs called him a traitor to his class (a charge they also leveled against FDR); he ignored them. The president had gotten the economy going again in his first term, Joe believed, and for that he deserved steadfast backing. He offered no dissent to FDR’s powerful summation of his New Deal philosophy in his second inaugural, in January 1937: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for tho
se who have too little.”5
“We’ve got to do something for old Joe, but I don’t know what,” Roosevelt told Jimmy not long after the 1936 election.6 The president knew that Kennedy longed to be Treasury secretary, but that was a nonstarter: Roosevelt had no interest in moving his trusted ally and Dutchess County neighbor Henry Morgenthau Jr. from the post, and moreover he considered Kennedy too temperamental and thin-skinned, too filled with brooding resentments, too inclined to go his own way on policy, for such a prominent cabinet job. (A skeptic could reply that others in the cabinet had precisely those attributes.) As much as he valued Kennedy’s camaraderie and often shrewd policy advice, and admired his managerial talents, he also mistrusted him as an implacable and power-hungry schemer out for his own interests. Yet the president understood at the same time that an unhappy Kennedy was a vocal and vengeful Kennedy, a Kennedy prone to running his mouth in a detrimental way to everyone within earshot, not least journalists. The Maritime Commission posting bought some breathing space, but Roosevelt knew it was just a matter of time before Kennedy resumed his efforts. Sure enough, in mid-1937 Kennedy began spreading the word around Washington that he had a new position in mind for himself: ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
The idea had been building in his mind for some time. The ambassadorial post in London was the most important overseas political posting in the American government, and the growing possibility of war in Europe only added to its cachet. In glamour terms, too, the job had no peer among U.S. positions abroad—it was the top of the social ladder. Through this appointment Kennedy would show those Boston Brahmins that he could get there without their help, that he would indeed be their social superior, and would secure tremendous societal preferment for himself and his children. On top of that, he would be the first Irish Catholic ambassador to Great Britain, a delicious irony in its own right. Most enticingly of all, the posting had long been a stepping-stone to greater things—the list of past ambassadors to London included five presidents, four vice presidents, and ten secretaries of state. Perhaps if he performed creditably in London, the Treasury posting, if not something still greater, could yet be his. When, in the fall of 1937, it became clear that Robert Bingham, the current ambassador, would have to resign on account of illness, Joe stepped up his campaigning. If he could not have the Treasury, he told Jimmy Roosevelt, he wanted London.7
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