Eighteen-year-old Kick in particular took London society by storm, her vibrancy and exuberance obvious to all concerned, not least journalists. “The whole family is taking to London life with the ease of the proverbial ducks to the pond,” said the London Times. “But it is Kathleen especially who is about everywhere, at all the parties, alert, observant, a merry girl who when she talks to you makes you feel as if you were seeing it all for the first time too.” Interested in seemingly everything and everyone, and highly skilled in the art of conversation, Kick would talk with all comers, regardless of station, cheerfully expounding on any manner of topics, never boastfully but in a genial and charming way that her English hosts found enchanting. “It was,” her mother said, “as if everything that made Kathleen what she was came together in London.”3
Rosemary, on the other hand, now nineteen, remained a subject of parental concern. Years of effort to find an educational environment that would enable her to advance intellectually had yielded sparse results—she remained at a fourth-grade level, despite attending five schools in six years. No less than before, she struggled to retain information and to read social cues. “You could talk to Rosemary,” said one family acquaintance, “but you could never have a conversation. She talked like a ten-year-old—just chattering all the time.” A letter she wrote to her parents in 1936, while attending a school in Brookline, the town of her birth, indicated her communication level: “Jack is taken me to the next dance. He is going to take me in his new car….I gave Jack $1 he didn’t ask for it either. 2 cents I paid for his papper….Lots of love kisses your darling daughter.”4
Kick, Rose, and Rosemary, in formal gowns, before their presentation at the Court of St. James’s, May 11, 1938.
In Eunice’s recollection, “Mother was worried about Rosemary in London. Would she accidentally do something dangerous while Mother was occupied with some unavoidable official function? Would she get confused taking a bus and get lost among London’s intricate streets? Would someone attack her? Could she protect herself if she were out of the eye of the governess? No one could watch out for Rose all the time.”5 Nonetheless, her mother determined that Rosemary and Kick would both be presented at court, which they were on May 11. Although the actual presentation took mere seconds, it required elaborate preparation—the selection of the dresses and the fittings, the practice walks and curtsies—and adherence to strict rules. Presented in pairs before the seated King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, each woman performed a slow, sweeping curtsy to the king, then slid three steps to the right and did the same thing to the queen, then glided farther to the right and exited out a side door. With her parents watching anxiously, Rosemary carried it off, though not before losing her balance momentarily. Mrs. Kennedy, who traveled to Paris to buy her own dress for the occasion, found the whole experience “glamorous beyond belief.”6
Rose loved London, loved being the wife of the ambassador, loved the garden parties, the formal dinners, the tennis at Wimbledon, the weekends at Blenheim Palace, the lavish balls given by Lady Astor for, among others, the king and queen. Diary entries show Rose’s admiration for the upper-class English and their ways, for their “perfect manners” and “more exact enunciation,” and her gratitude for the embrace they offered her and her family. “We became practically public property,” she enthused decades afterwards. “I almost began to feel that we had been adopted as a family, by the whole British people.”7 She worried incessantly about whether she truly fit in—it horrified her to realize that she was the only one wearing tweeds during a Sunday lunch with the royals—but relished her sudden rise to the highest ranks of British society. A weekend at Windsor Castle was “one of the most fabulous events” of her life, she later wrote. Her husband agreed: as the two of them lounged in their suite in the castle tower, glasses of sherry in hand, he is said to have remarked, “Well, Rose, it’s a hell of a long way from East Boston!”8
If Joe’s wandering eye during these excursions pained her, she did her best not to show it; she had long since made her peace with his flings. It seems they had a kind of arrangement: she would look the other way, and he would avoid embarrassing her. Certainly his modus operandi in London had not changed. Work hard and play hard, Kennedy told his sons, and he led by example. Discretion proved somewhat easier here than in the United States, however, as his lovers now were not actresses and showgirls but aristocratic British women who had their own incentive for secrecy. Aide Harvey Klemmer marveled at the ambassador’s detailed accounts of his conquests, especially given the individuals involved. “His name was connected to various women all the way to the top,” Klemmer recalled. “Once he said the queen was one of the greatest women in the world. He wanted even that left to speculation, when there was absolutely nothing.”9
Jack, too, seized on the chance to acquaint himself with British society. Soon after their arrival, he and Joe Junior attended a magnificent embassy dinner in honor of the Duke and Duchess of Kent; other guests included Winston Churchill and Interior Secretary Ickes. With Kick’s debutante season still going strong, the brothers had no end of opportunities for evening fun, and they took full advantage. Jack in particular made a winning impression on his hosts, whereas Joe Junior could come off as caustic and hard-edged, his humor lacking the finesse and sense of irony prized by the English. He didn’t wear well. At evening balls, Joe would cut in on dance partners just a tad too aggressively and thereby raise eyebrows. William Douglas-Home, the thirteenth Earl of Home and one of Kick’s myriad British suitors, got to know both brothers that summer. He later said of Jack, “He was age 21, very young, and very interested in everything. I mean, not only in politics, but the thing that struck you about him was that he was so vital about everything….He was interested, always interested. He would never have a deep political discussion without jokes at the same time. He had a very highly developed sense of humor. Joe was probably more serious than he was.”10
Deborah “Debo” Mitford, the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters and a friend of Kick’s, concurred: Jack and Kick were “very generous in outlook and very funny. That was what was so marvelous about Jack—he was able to laugh at himself. No politician I’ve ever known was like that….Like Kick, he was an absolute fount of energy, enthusiasm, fun, and intelligence, all the things that make people want to become them.”11
On July 11, Jack and some of his elite British pals went to the House of Commons for the chance to hear Winston Churchill in action. Since his early teenage years Jack had been fascinated by Churchill’s books and speeches, astounded by his oratorical brilliance, his mastery of the written word, his deep sense of history; now, for the first time, Jack would be on hand as the hunched, gruff figure rose slowly from his seat to give what everyone expected would be another bravura performance. It always was when Churchill spoke—such was the power of his language and his delivery that even his detractors were keen to hear him; often, the signal that he was about to speak caused a minor commotion in the lobbies as members rushed into the chamber. Yet Jack was conflicted as he took in the scene in the visitors’ gallery that midsummer day.12 Drawn though he was to Churchill’s charisma and eloquence, Jack felt ambivalent toward him, for Churchill represented a worldview distinctly at odds with his father’s, not least with respect to how to handle the fascist powers.
Jack Kennedy’s friends, too, felt that hesitation. They admired Churchill for all the reasons Jack did, but they had learned from their parents to distrust his supposedly reckless and unprincipled character and his seeming glorification of war. That summer the young men, including Jack, debated Churchill’s newest book, Arms and the Covenant, a collection of his speeches since 1932 that would be published in the United States under the title While England Slept: A Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938.
In particular, remembered Andrew Cavendish, who was two years Jack’s junior and would go on to marry Debo Mitford, the friends sparred over one pointed exchange in the book: Ch
urchill’s accusation, in his speech “The Locust Years” (November 12, 1936), that British leaders had allowed the nation to “drift” while the Germans steadily rearmed, and the riposte by Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister at the time, that the electorate would not have countenanced a major rearmament effort at the time, and that any such effort would have brought the left to power, with disastrous consequences for Britain. This Churchill-Baldwin flap posed large questions for the young men about the role of leadership in a democracy. Should a leader pursue a course of action that, however meritorious on strategic or ethical grounds, might cause his political downfall? How much should public opinion matter in policymaking? Should a leader take care not to get too far ahead of the electorate, as Baldwin seemed to argue, or was Churchill right to insist that he must speak his mind, must educate the public, whatever the consequences to his own political standing?13 Jack’s thesis at Harvard would center on these questions, as would his 1956 book, Profiles in Courage.
At the end of July, the Kennedys decamped for the South of France, where Rose had rented a villa in Cap d’Antibes, near Cannes. She and eight of the kids arrived first, and Joe Senior and Kick joined a few days later. There followed numerous lazy days at the house or at the nearby Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc—whose guests that season included Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and tennis star Bill Tilden—and evenings that harked back to the Hyannis Port ritual: everyone seated around a long rectangular dining table, with Mr. Kennedy directing the discussion like a “master conductor” (in the words of Dietrich’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Maria).14
Louella Hennessy, the family’s ebullient longtime nanny, remembered one particularly stormy afternoon at the villa during which Jack gave an impromptu history lesson to his younger siblings, all of them seated in a row in front of the fireplace. With references to Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon, he lectured to them about the rise and fall of nations—how they gained stature and wealth, how they maintained and expanded their might, how they eventually squandered it all. The United States had joined the ranks of the great powers, Jack went on, but it differed from the rest, for it was a republic and a democracy. The task for America would be to maintain its high position, learn from the mistakes of other great nations, and at the same time preserve its way of life, its freedoms. “As I listened to Jack,” Hennessy said, “I thought with amazement, ‘Why, he’s only 21. Imagine him caring about these things.’ ”15
II
If Ambassador Kennedy had hoped to be able to ride out the European crisis in the Mediterranean idyll, it was not to be. By mid-August 1938 Adolf Hitler seemed poised to plunge the Continent into war by marching on Czechoslovakia. Whereas the Austrians (or at least the dominant Nazi Party) had acquiesced to the German takeover, the Czechs resisted. They had a security treaty with France and another with the Soviet Union, and they were determined to make a stand. Already the previous spring, Hitler and his generals had discussed plans for an attack; now he ordered the army to prepare for an October invasion. All the while, German propaganda trumpeted the complaints of Sudeten Germans and the urgent need to bring them into the fatherland. Under pressure from the State Department, Kennedy cut short his holiday and returned to London on August 29. Jack flew with him and thereby got a front-row seat as the Chamberlain government hemmed and hawed in fashioning a response.
All around him Jack could see signs of mounting British trepidation—and attempts at preparation. How things had changed, he thought, since the family’s departure for the French Riviera just a month before. Air-raid shelters had been hastily dug in Hyde Park, anti-aircraft guns were going into place along the Embankment, and there were sandbags ringing crucial London buildings to protect basement windows. Office windows above were crisscrossed with white tape. The first evacuees from British cities were gathered up and transported to the countryside. The Royal Air Force was put on full alert, and the Royal Navy mobilized. It seemed impressive on initial glance, but to Jack it amounted to a sad pretense of readiness. Sandbags and white tape—was that really what Britain had to offer?16
In a draft of a speech intended for an audience in Aberdeen, Scotland, Ambassador Kennedy asked whether his listeners could conceive of “any dispute or controversy existing in the world which is worth the life of your son, or of anyone else’s son? Perhaps I am not well informed of the terrifically vital force underlying all the unrest in the world, but for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which could remotely be considered worth shedding life for.” It was a perfect encapsulation of Kennedy’s political philosophy, and it brought a swift reply from Cordell Hull’s State Department: the section must be expunged. No American representative could issue such an open invitation to Nazi aggression. “The young man needs his wrists slapped rather hard,” a dismayed FDR muttered upon seeing the draft, an odd wording, since Kennedy was only six years his junior. The president privately parodied Joe by remarking, “I can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go to war to save the Czechs.” But Roosevelt would do no more than grouse, and indeed hoped himself that some means could be found to preserve the peace.17
Neville Chamberlain desperately sought the same thing. His mistrust of Hitler had grown over the summer, but he stubbornly clung to the belief that the Führer had limited objectives and would be open to compromise. To believe otherwise was to believe that the German leader actually wanted war, and this seemed to the prime minister’s rational mind impossible, given especially the epic catastrophe that was the First World War. In this sense the prime minister was not merely “buying time,” as some historians have claimed, not merely putting off the day of reckoning until British capabilities had improved—he aimed to avoid war altogether. And certainly, he insisted, Czechoslovakia was not worth the price of a major military conflict. In a radio address to the British people, Chamberlain uttered words that tracked closely with Kennedy’s prohibited Aberdeen remarks: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”18
The Paris government, under Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, a former history teacher from Provence who led the Radical Party (a centrist party despite its name), felt the same, even if it could not claim that Czechoslovakia was “far away.” In the French view, Czechoslovakia’s boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn up after World War I and lacked historical validity, and in any event France did not have the military capacity to defend the Czechs against German assault. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signaled that if the French and the British defended the Czechs he would help them, the response came quickly: Thanks, but no thanks.19
The solution, devised in London and enthusiastically backed by Joseph Kennedy—who was a fixture at 10 Downing Street and in the Foreign Office through much of September—was to appeal to Hitler’s civilized judgment by agreeing to the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, thereby depriving him of the motive for additional revision of the Versailles peace settlement. Or so the argument went. On September 15, three days after Hitler denounced the Czechs in a fiery, semi-hysterical speech at Nuremberg, Chamberlain met with the German leader at Berchtesgaden to talk terms. (Much to Hitler’s surprise, the Englishman had not insisted on a neutral site, or even a location on the Rhine, which would have cut the travel time in half.) He received a frosty reception but in effect affirmed his government’s unwillingness to oppose the breakup of Czechoslovakia. A second meeting, at Bad Godesberg on the twenty-second, yielded no agreement, whereupon Chamberlain returned to London and impressed upon the Cabinet his view that Hitler “would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected with whom he had been in negotiation.” He also stressed the vital necessity of compelling the Czechs to submit, lest German bombers fill the skies over Britain, raining down their death and destruction.20
Kennedy encouraged the prime minister in this notion, his view infl
uenced by a supposed expert he had befriended, the famed aviator and avowed isolationist Charles Lindbergh. More than a decade had passed since Lucky Lindy’s epic solo transatlantic flight, but he retained a hero status among many Americans—in name recognition, he ranked second only to Roosevelt. Germans, too, admired him deeply, and beginning in 1936 Lindbergh paid several visits to Germany to inspect the fledgling Luftwaffe up close, touring factories and military bases, including some that had never been seen by an American. His hosts carefully screened where he could go and what he could see, and he came away awed, both by the military buildup and by what he saw as the vitality and orderliness of the country. Subsequently, Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe’s commander in chief, decorated Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, “by the order of the Führer.” When Lindbergh met Kennedy at the Astors’ home in May 1938, the two immediately hit it off, the normally reclusive flier finding in Kennedy someone witty and straightforward who shared his general take on things.21
Now he was back in London at Kennedy’s urgent request, landing on September 20. The next day at the U.S. embassy, he delivered a relentlessly alarmist oral report on the state of British and French air power vis-à-vis Germany’s. Kennedy asked him to commit his assessment to paper, which Lindbergh duly did the following day, a copy going also to 10 Downing Street at Kennedy’s directive. The Luftwaffe’s strength now exceeded that of the other European powers combined, the memo read; if unleashed over Britain, it could inflict sixty thousand casualties in a single day. French and British leaders must therefore resist war and “permit Germany’s eastward expansion,” lest they, too, be attacked: “For the first time in history, a nation has the power either to save or to ruin the great cities of Europe. Germany has such a preponderance of war planes that she can bomb any city in Europe with comparatively little resistance. England and France are too weak in the air to protect themselves.”22
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