In his diary entry for that day, Lindbergh summarized what he had told Kennedy. “The English are in no shape for war. They do not realize what they are confronted with. They have always before had a fleet between themselves and their enemy, and they can’t realize the change aviation has made. I am afraid this is the beginning of the end of England as a great power. She may be a ‘hornet’s nest’ but she is no longer a ‘lion’s den.’ ” Another entry continued the theme: “I cannot see the future for this country….Aviation has largely destroyed the security of the channel, and [Britain’s] superiority of manufacture is a thing of the past.”23
Lindbergh’s analysis, we now know, was grievously off. The Luftwaffe in late 1938 was far less formidable than he claimed, its capacity limited to supporting German ground forces in continental European operations. It had not yet developed a fleet of long-range four-engine bombers capable of doing real damage to more distant targets such as London. In late 1937, subordinates had informed Göring that no German bombers could “operate meaningfully” over England; at most, they could have a “nuisance effect.” The situation was little different ten months later.24
How much Lindbergh’s misapprehension influenced Chamberlain’s approach is hard to say. At most, it seems, it reinforced a strong inclination the prime minister already had.25 Yet so swiftly were events moving that it seemed war might result after all. On Friday, September 23, the Czech government ordered general mobilization; Hitler mocked the action and again demanded the handover of Sudeten territory. Hostilities seemed imminent as all over London people were being fitted for gas masks. (On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Joe Kennedy heard a van cruising slowly through Grosvenor Square with a loudspeaker, urging people not to delay in getting their masks.) If the Führer launched an invasion and France declared war in response, His Majesty’s Government would have to follow suit. British officialdom threatened to fracture, with Alfred Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Conservative MP Winston Churchill urging a stiffening of the policy. As described by Joe Kennedy in a phone conversation with Cordell Hull, the split was between those in the Cabinet who advocated “peace at any price” and those who did not “want to take any more back talk from Hitler,” as they “would have to fight anyhow.”26
Chamberlain, firmly in the first group, on the twenty-ninth flew for a third meeting with Hitler, this one in Munich and with France’s Daladier and Italy’s Mussolini also present. In the early hours of the following day came the news: an agreement had been reached whereby Hitler would get the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise to stop there and respect the sovereignty of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain returned home to a hero’s welcome, announcing that he had achieved “peace for our time.” Because of the prime minister, editorial writers gushed, peace had been preserved, and thousands of young men would live. The Spectator nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. In Paris, Daladier was likewise greeted by cheering crowds. The Czechs had not been consulted.27
Only later would another effect become known: Hitler’s foes within his own military, believing him to be a deranged warmonger dragging the nation into a conflagration for which it was not prepared, had planned to move against him if Paris and London stood firm and the Führer launched an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Now they were rendered immobile by another easy and bloodless victory. The plot might well have come to nothing anyway, but a chance was lost. Not for five years would Hitler face another serious internal challenge to his rule.28
III
Jack Kennedy missed the denouement of the Czech crisis, having returned in early September for his junior year at Harvard.* But he followed events closely from afar, devouring press accounts and radio reports whenever he could. (When Hitler delivered his Nuremberg address on September 12—the first one that Americans could follow live—Jack tuned in from the family home in Hyannis Port.) Though he didn’t yet know it, he would devote his senior thesis to these very developments, with particular focus on British decision-making in the years leading up to the Munich agreement.
A nattily attired Jack on board the liner Bremen, returning to the United States for the start of junior year at Harvard.
Harvard friends indeed noticed a more serious-minded and diligent Jack Kennedy that autumn as he upped his game in the classroom, despite a heavy course load (he took six classes), and raised his average to a B. In Government 9a, with A. Chester Hanford, Jack impressed with his active and discerning participation in class and his capacity for independent thought, though Hanford found it curious that the grandson of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald showed so little interest in state and local politics as compared with national affairs and foreign relations.
Arthur Holcombe, an erudite senior member of the faculty who had been around long enough to teach both Joe Senior and Joe Junior and now had Jack as well, came away impressed by the young man. “He stood out among the group he lived with,” Holcombe later said. All of them saw a college education as “much more than studying things. They were interested in life. But Jack was more interested in ideas than most men who have the means of doing whatever they wish when they’re in college. He had a genuine interest in ideas, there’s no question about that.” In Holcombe’s Government 7 class, which focused on Congress, each student had to produce a research paper on an individual member of the House of Representatives, studying that lawmaker’s methods and assessing accomplishments and failures as objectively as possible. Holcombe assigned Jack the upstate New York Republican Bertrand Snell, known chiefly for representing the electric power interests in his district. The result, Holcombe found, was a “masterpiece,” based on “a very superior job of investigating,” though admittedly the young man had certain advantages: during Christmas vacation, “he goes down to Washington, meets some of his father’s friends, gets a further line on his congressman and on Congress.”29
Jack’s rooming arrangement at Winthrop House, meanwhile, had changed: he and Torby moved into a larger quad unit together with two football players, Charlie Houghton and Benjamin Smith (who would later fill Jack’s seat in the U.S. Senate when he was elected president), who were dismayed by Jack’s astonishing untidiness but otherwise found him to be a congenial and engaging roommate. “Jack was a very stimulating person to live with,” Houghton recalled. “Very argumentative in a nice way. He questioned everything. I think the depth of his curiosity was shown in that he’d challenge anything you said. He had the best sense of humor of all the Kennedys.”30
Donald Thurber, a fellow government major, likewise saw in Kennedy someone who was not content with the pat answer, who was willing to challenge assumptions and to ask, “What makes you think so?” “You got the impression that here was a mind that was learning from other people, and that longed to learn from other people—he would regard them as sources of information and knowledge to fill out his own.” Nor could Kennedy be considered a mere lothario intent on having a good time, Thurber continued. “I knew plenty of playboys. I could spot a playboy on the other side of the room. Jack didn’t fit into that mold at all—he was someone who played hard when he played, but his motivation was a serious one—you got the idea that he’d already decided life was a pretty serious proposition, even though it wouldn’t have to be, with lots of money and so on. But it was going to be a serious proposition.”31
To be sure, the desire for extracurricular fun had not dissipated. Kennedy wrote to Billings that fall about parties and sexual conquests, and about Harvard’s superiority over Princeton in football. “Dear Billings: Yours of the 19th received and horseshit noted. Numerous Harvard varsity men have been quoted as saying, ‘Four tough games in a row—Thank God we’re playing Princeton.’ ” He instructed Billings to get a date for the Harvard-Yale game on November 19, “as we’re going to have a party in Bronxville.” With the rest of the Kennedys overseas, the three family homes could be—and not infrequently were—perfect settings for myriad undergrad debaucheries.3
2
In personal appearance he remained as casual as ever, often showing up to class with wrinkled pants and mismatched socks, his tie askew. And he gave few outward signs of personal wealth, despite the fact that he had become, on his twenty-first birthday the previous spring, a millionaire, gaining access to a trust fund established for him by his father a decade before. (He also received on his birthday two $1,000 checks from his father, for meeting a challenge to refrain from picking up smoking or drinking; even afterwards, indeed to the end of his life, Jack seldom touched tobacco or alcohol, apart from the occasional cigar or daiquiri.) Jack showed limited interest in luxury goods, or in material possessions generally; with respect to those belongings he did have he was, like many children of privilege, nonchalant, losing golf clubs and tennis rackets and suitcases with abandon, much to his mother’s annoyance.33
He also fell in love, in a way he never had before. Her name was Frances Ann Cannon, a ravishingly beautiful North Carolina textile heiress and former Sarah Lawrence student who turned the heads of all the men in Winthrop House. Charlie Houghton took her out first and then Kennedy moved in, entranced by her looks, her sense of humor, her southern drawl, and her inquisitive mind and interest in politics. Soon her name started popping up in Kennedy’s letters to Billings, and friends wondered if she might be the one, especially after he followed her to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There, at the Comus Ball, Cannon’s friend Jane Suydam (née Gaither Eustis) laid eyes on Jack for the first time. “He was standing there in the call-out section, very tanned, wearing white tie and tails,” she remembered. “He was unbelievably handsome. He had this remarkable animal pull. The impact on me was overwhelming.” Jack’s friends had somewhat the same reaction upon meeting Frances Ann. Rip Horton, for one, thought her the most beautiful girl Jack had ever dated and recalled thinking after one double date, “My God, why doesn’t Jack marry this girl?”34
Later Kennedy would contemplate that very thought, even though he surely knew the chances of a union were slim—his Catholicism was unacceptable to Ann’s family, as was her Protestantism to his. For the moment, though, his priorities were directed elsewhere—namely, to getting himself back to Europe as soon as possible. His family was there, and so was the geopolitical action, notwithstanding the lull following the Munich agreement. The summer of motoring around the Continent with Lem had fired Jack’s imagination, had made him hungry for more, so he asked his Harvard dean for permission to take a semester’s leave in the spring of 1939 in order to spend it in Europe. He pledged to take along a stack of books on political philosophy and to do groundwork—in consultation with his Winthrop House tutor, Bruce Hopper—on a senior thesis dealing with some aspect of diplomatic history and international law. The dean, impressed by Jack’s apparent seriousness of purpose, approved the request.
IV
Jack Kennedy had additional motivation for wanting to return to Europe: his father was in political trouble. In the immediate aftermath of the Munich Conference, with popular euphoria surging in Britain, Ambassador Kennedy had taken every opportunity to hail the bargain. He felt vindicated, all the more so when Franklin Roosevelt expressed satisfaction with the outcome. Upon learning that there would be a Munich meeting, FDR had sent Prime Minister Chamberlain a two-word telegram: GOOD MAN. When the deal was subsequently struck, the president pronounced himself pleased that war had been averted. Privately, however, he brooded about the rising Nazi threat and the inherent dangers in trying to appease an untrustworthy dictator. Munich could come to take on new and unwelcome connotations, the president suspected.35
Sure enough, before long the wave of relief in Britain began to ebb, and uncomfortable questions came to the fore: Had peace been purchased at a shameful price? Why had Czechoslovakia, the one democratic state in Central Europe, been left high and dry? And wouldn’t Adolf Hitler soon resume his blackmail, demanding ever more from his Western adversaries? In the British Cabinet, long-simmering tensions erupted full bore, with Duff Cooper resigning in protest over the prime minister’s openness to “the language of the mailed fist,” while in Parliament scattered voices rose up in support of Winston Churchill’s indictment of the Munich pact. “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat,” the great orator, then an ordinary MP, declared in a remarkable speech in the House of Commons on October 5.
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness….We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that….What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure….[The British people] should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.36
The key point for Churchill was Hitler’s fundamental unappeasability. Everything flowed from this reality. He called instead for a strategy of deterrence, to be achieved substantially through a “Grand Alliance” with the Soviet Union. How realistic this notion was in the context of 1938 is debatable, especially given the profound mistrust of Soviet Communism and of Stalin’s leadership within British and French officialdom. Moreover, Stalin could have intervened substantially on Czechoslovakia’s behalf only if his troops were permitted to cross Romanian or Polish soil—both unlikely to happen. (Churchill’s ideas, it bears noting, sometimes look better in hindsight than they did in their time.) Quite possibly, the Western powers had already missed their best chance for deterrence through their acquiescence to Hitler’s wholesale violations of the Versailles Treaty over the previous five years. They had done nothing to keep Nazi Germany from becoming militarily powerful, and now they found themselves with few cards left to play.
Then again, their hand may not have been as bad in the early autumn of 1938 as Neville Chamberlain (and his later defenders) insisted. For one thing, in Czechoslovakia they had a willing and capable partner, one possessing a well-equipped army of forty-two divisions as well as robust border fortifications defending against a German onslaught of up to forty-four divisions.37 For another, in both Britain and France, military authorities exaggerated their vulnerability to air power (“The bomber will always get through,” former prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously said), though they failed to see that if their own military preparedness would benefit from a delay in the onset of hostilities, so would Germany’s. If Britain in 1938 did not yet possess the aircraft and radar system necessary to defend against a German aerial war, neither did the Nazis have the Channel airfields or the planes to wage such action. A year hence, it could in fact be said—though it was not clear then—that Britain would be relatively weaker vis-à-vis Germany than it was when Chamberlain boarded his plane for Bavaria. As historian Ian Kershaw puts it, “The balance of forces had, in fact, in some respects by 1939 tipped somewhat towards Germany.”38
Whatever the case, Chamberlain held his ground, insisting to all comers that Munich had been a shining example of statesmanship. “I sincerely believe that we have at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos,” he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury. To his mostly docile Cabinet, Chamberlain said he believed Hitler would now be willing to enter into disarmament deals, which in turn would lift Britain’s tremendous economic burden. True, he acknowledged to Joe Kennedy, Hitler might not keep his word, but to date there was no compelling reason to doubt that he would. Sec
retary Halifax, tall, spare, courteous, and with a reputation for intellectual brilliance—to this day his long, saturnine face stares down quizzically from the wall of the Great Hall at All Souls College, Oxford—was characteristically conflicted, his ability to see every question from every angle inducing a kind of analytical paralysis. He sensed that the Munich deal would prove humiliating and horrible yet deemed it preferable to a potentially unwinnable war on behalf of a Czech state to which Britain had no formal treaty obligation. Most of his colleagues agreed with him.39
Kennedy, for his part, dismissed the carping of critics and remained steadfast in his support of the prime minister. In a carefully prepared Trafalgar Day speech before the Navy League on October 19, drafted over two weeks by Harold Hinton and Harvey Klemmer, he hailed the Munich accord and told his audience that it made no sense to emphasize the differences between dictatorships and democracies, since, “after all, we have to live together in the same world whether we like it or not.”40
An uproar ensued. Get along with dictators? Did he really mean that? In London, the foes of appeasement took offense, since the address summarized succinctly the position of Chamberlain and his Cabinet. In other world capitals analysts wondered if Kennedy’s remarks signaled a major change in U.S. policy, since they went directly against Roosevelt’s assertion in Chicago the previous year that bandit nations should be “quarantined.” American journalists wondered the same thing and further asked why the State Department would approve so provocative a speech. (The answer given: Kennedy had prefaced his claims by stating that his call for coexistence between dictatorships and democracies was merely an expression of his own view.) Influential columnist Walter Lippmann faulted Kennedy for his lack of ambassadorial discretion and for airing his private views publicly, and The Washington Post said he was dragging American diplomacy into an appeasement position. To quell the firestorm, the White House had FDR give his own perspective on the matter: “There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the threat of war.”41
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