The square, majestic and graceful in the morning light, with its four-deep colonnades and its Egyptian obelisk rising in the center, was already packed with people at seven thirty when the four limousines pulled up, their American and papal flags flapping gently in the chilly breeze. The Kennedy contingent were ushered through the throng to their seats, in a prime location reserved for dignitaries in the outside portico of the basilica, near the equestrian statue of Charlemagne. Originally the Kennedys had been assigned two seats, for the ambassador and his wife, but hasty arrangements were made to expand the number to fourteen. Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law, was livid upon learning that his assigned seat had been taken by a Kennedy child. He threatened to leave the basilica at once. More shuffling occurred, and Ciano ended up next to Joe, on the far end of the family.
The next morning, the pope held a private meeting with the Kennedy entourage in the anteroom of his papal apartment, and two days after that, on the morning of March 15, he celebrated his first papal Mass, a private one in a small red-walled chapel. The Kennedys were there, minus Rose, who had left for a long-scheduled appointment with, of all people, her dressmaker in Paris. While the rest of the family watched, seven-year-old Teddy, smartly turned out in a blue suit with a white rosette on his left arm, received, from the pope, his first Communion.2
It all made a profound impression on Ambassador Kennedy, whose dispatch to the State Department praised this “most saintly man” and his “extensive knowledge of world conditions. He is not pro-one country or anti-another. He is just pro-Christian. If the world hasn’t gone too far to be influenced by a great and good man, this is the man.”3 Jack Kennedy likewise came away impressed, not least by the experience of receiving Communion from the pope. He, too, had met the man previously, during his summer 1937 European tour with Billings. He had liked Pacelli then, and he liked him now. At the same time, Jack couldn’t resist making gentle fun of the unctuous undertones of the encounter. “Pacelli is now riding high,” he wrote to Lem Billings a few days later, “so it’s good you bowed and groveled like you did when you first met him….They want to give dad the title of duke which will be hereditary and go to all his family which will make me Duke John of Bronxville and perhaps if you suck around sufficiently I might knight you.”4
The Kennedys, minus Joe Junior, at the Vatican, March 13, 1939. From left: Kick, Pat, Bobby, Jack, Rose, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, and Rosemary.
Neither Jack nor his father failed to pick up on the palpable unease among the foreign dignitaries in Rome—the coronation occurred at an uncertain moment in history, under the shadow of war, and with the Mussolini government playing a significant role. And indeed, hardly had little Teddy received his Communion and the March 15 Mass ended when there came shocking news from the north: at six o’clock that morning, the German army had crossed the Czech border. By 9:00 A.M., forward units had entered Prague, and by day’s end the rump of Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. Adolf Hitler had now gotten what he wanted from the start: the conquest of not just the Sudetenland but Moravia and Bohemia as well. (Slovakia would become a German puppet state.) Immediately after the Munich agreement, the previous fall, he had expressed regrets about signing, claiming to subordinates that he had allowed himself to be hemmed in by “that senile old rascal” Chamberlain and had thereby squandered the chance to crush the Czechs in one fell swoop. (“If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of photographers,” he had fumed.) Now the deed was done, and that very evening the Führer entered a sullen Prague in triumph.5
News of the conquest sent Neville Chamberlain into despair. Initially he tried to hold together the elements of his grand design, but within forty-eight hours he had shifted course. Appeasement was dead, the prime minister understood, at least as it had been practiced until now, and the Munich agreement was in tatters. (Hitler, he said privately, was “the blackest devil he had ever met.”6) Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, agreed. Both men grasped that by taking for the first time territory where the majority of the inhabitants were not German, Hitler had made resoundingly clear that he intended to do more than simply revise the provisions of the 1919 Versailles settlement. No longer could he be considered a conventional statesman out to right past injustices, especially with reports flowing in that he had designs on Poland next. In a speech in Birmingham, his home turf, on March 17, Chamberlain came off like a principled businessman who had been wronged—“I am convinced that after Munich the great majority of the British people shared my honest desire that the policy should be carried further, but today I share their disappointment, their indignation, that these hopes have been so wantonly shattered”—even as he also hinted at a new policy: “Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”7
Across the Channel in Paris, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier could only nod knowingly when he learned of the invasion. Always more suspicious of Hitler’s ambitions than was his British counterpart, Daladier had long believed the Führer would never be content with the Sudetenland and intended to devour Czechoslovakia, and moreover that his word could never be counted on. “Within six months,” the dapper and diminutive Frenchman had predicted five and a half months earlier, right after the Munich agreement, “France and England would be face to face with new German demands.”8
On March 31, soon after Hitler seized Memel (Klaipeda), a Lithuanian port on the Baltic that the League of Nations had declared an autonomous territory, Chamberlain announced a decision that would have hugely important ramifications: in the event that Germany threatened Poland’s independence, he told Parliament, Britain and France would “feel bound to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.” It marked the shift from appeasement to deterrence, though with the ultimate objective unchanged: to head off war. Tellingly, however, neither British nor French policymakers seriously considered making the Soviet Union a component of the deterrence strategy and thereby confronting Hitler with the prospect of a two-front war. Given only a few hours’ advance notice of Chamberlain’s declaration, angry Kremlin officials took it as further evidence that their Western counterparts were not to be trusted and perhaps hoped ultimately to see Germany and the USSR come to blows and bleed each other white.9
Ambassador Kennedy, upon learning of the prime minister’s startling announcement, called FDR, who was at his presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. The president was asleep but called back ninety minutes later. Chamberlain’s plan was a good one, he told Kennedy, but it probably meant war. Would this be an opportune time to call for a world peace conference? Roosevelt asked. Probably not, Kennedy replied—better to wait until official, as well as popular, responses in Germany and Italy to the Anglo-French move could be better gauged.10
II
By this point Jack Kennedy had arrived in Paris, where he hoped to serve a monthlong stint working at the U.S. embassy under Ambassador William C. Bullitt. Since departing the United States five weeks before, he had spent his time—apart from the excursion to Rome—in London, accompanying his father to lunches and dinners and other functions, all the while pining for Frances Ann Cannon.11 He met with the king and took tea with the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth. He also worked part-time in the embassy, handling correspondence and occasionally representing his father at minor local events. (Here he followed in his brother’s path, and also in that of John Quincy Adams, an aide during the ambassadorship of his father, John Adams, in the 1780s.) His letters show little evidence of father-son separation on the preferred strategy vis-à-vis Germany. If anything, Jack was the more sanguine, telling Lem Billings in late March, “Everyone thinks war is inevitable before the year is out. I personally don’t, though Dad does.”12
Now in Paris, spring had sprung, the
daffodils and irises in the Jardin du Luxembourg bursting forth and the magnolias on the Champ de Mars in radiant bloom. The cafés were full. Jack thrilled at being there, and he took a liking to Bullitt, a wealthy Philadelphian and bon vivant who had been a cheerleader for the Bolshevik Revolution before turning rabidly anti-Communist during a stint as the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Stylish and self-important, Bullitt was voted “most brilliant” in his Yale class of 1912, spoke fluent French and German, and made an immediate winning impression upon arriving in Paris in 1936—his hosts loved his flair and his linguistic prowess and considered him a man of superior judgment and taste. In short order he developed close ties to top French policymakers, even attending cabinet meetings, and—like Joe Kennedy in London—he kept the White House informed of the goings-on in the government. “Bullitt practically sleeps with the French cabinet,” the cantankerous interior secretary, Harold Ickes, noted in his diary.13 Initially supportive of appeasement—like Kennedy, he had been deeply influenced by Charles Lindbergh’s depiction of an invincible Luftwaffe—Bullitt did a one-eighty in the winter of 1939; by the time Jack arrived in Paris in late March, the ambassador was espousing a hard-line anti-German position. Hitler, he told Roosevelt, was a madman with boundless ambition.14
Whereas his father had developed a chilly relationship with Bullitt, largely on account of a deep mutual competitive jealousy, Jack was charmed by his host and delighted in his company. “Bullitt has turned out to be a hell of a guy,” he wrote to Billings. “Live like a king up there as Offie [Carmel Offie, Bullitt’s private secretary] + I are the only ones there + about 30 lackies.” The ambassador had “about 10 barrels of Munich beer in the cellar + and is always trying, unsuccessfully, to pour Champagne down my gullett.” By day, Jack helped modestly with basic clerical work but mostly spent his time reading incoming cables and memoranda, even though Offie considered some of them “none of his business.” Ever inquisitive, the young man asked questions about the functioning of the diplomatic process and about the meaning behind this or that missive, and he impressed both Bullitt and Offie with what would be a lifelong fascination with raw documentation. With his ready smile and insouciant manner, Jack masked how much knowledge he absorbed, and how swiftly.15
“Was at lunch today with the Lindberghs and they are the most attractive couple I’ve ever seen,” he confided to Billings in early April, without giving away what he thought of Charles Lindbergh’s pro-German sympathies or his gloomy analysis of the Anglo-French readiness for war (if he even knew about them). Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in particular, charmed him: “She takes a rotten picture and is really as pretty as hell and terribly nice.” Her husband didn’t return the compliment, writing in his diary of the luncheon that there were “probably forty people there, including some of society’s greatest bores.”16
On April 28, Jack and the rest of the embassy staff tuned in to Hitler’s two-hour, twenty-minute speech to the Reichstag, which was occasioned by Franklin Roosevelt’s message two weeks before in which he asked for Hitler’s assurance that he would desist for the next twenty-five years from attacking a list of thirty nations. In exchange, FDR said, Washington would play its part on behalf of disarmament and equal access to world markets and raw materials. Hitler rejected the offer, his voice dripping with sarcasm, to the delight of his roaring audience, and he also took the opportunity to renounce Germany’s nonaggression pact with Poland and to renew German claims to the seaport of Danzig.*1 “Just listened to Hitler’s speech which they consider bad,” Jack wrote to Billings right afterwards. He himself was less concerned, he went on, for if the German leader hoped to go after Danzig or all of Poland, “the time would have been a month ago before Poland and England signed up. That he didn’t shows a reluctance on his part so I still think it will be OK. The whole thing is damn interesting and if this letter wasn’t going on a German boat and if they weren’t opening mail could tell you some interesting stuff.”17
This was Jack’s pattern during that spring of 1939: he tended in his correspondence to underestimate both the German dictator’s bellicosity and, more generally, the seriousness of European tensions and the likelihood of war. He also seems to have misjudged the shift in the popular mood that had occurred in France and especially Britain during the seven months he had been back in the United States. The Munich agreement had created a split in British opinion that persisted into the new year, but little by little the appeasers found themselves losing the battle for public support. The fall of Prague on March 15 effectively killed the debate, giving the lie to Chamberlain’s twin claims, upon returning from Bavaria, that he had brought “peace for our time,” as well as “peace with honor.” Together with the final defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, culminating in the fall of Madrid in late March, it created in a great many Britons the conviction that the fascists could be stopped only by military force. Sooner or later, the battle would come. Moreover, many felt, Britain was now more ready to fight than it had been the previous fall, its rearmament program having made significant strides in the interval. To some observers, war might even be something to look forward to, if it helped wash away the malaise they felt had permeated British and European society since the decade began.18
All this is no doubt more clear in hindsight than it was at the time, but even so, Jack’s failure to detect the transformation in popular attitudes is striking, especially given his own Anglophilia, evident from a young age but now given more opportunities for full expression. The upper-class British credo “Work hard, play hard, socialize hard” came naturally to him, he realized, and he admired the qualities often associated with “posh” Englishmen: cleverness, wit, irony, understatement, detachment, indirection, coolness under fire, self-possession. The actor David Niven was a modern archetype, while an earlier one was Queen Victoria’s Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne—at least as rendered by David Cecil in his absorbing, gossipy biography The Young Melbourne, which appeared in Britain in early 1939 and which Jack devoured that spring. In Cecil’s hands, Melbourne becomes for the young Kennedy a fascinating, altogether charming figure, indeed a kind of model for life: sophisticated and wittily idiosyncratic, poised and nonchalant, curious about people and what made them tick, skeptical of received wisdom and hostile to ideologues, susceptible to the pleasures of the flesh yet at the same time appealingly devoted to queen and country.19
“Life had taught him…always to relate thought to experience, to estimate theory in terms of its practical working,” Cecil wrote of Melbourne, a description that fit Jack’s vision of himself. And though more egalitarian than Melbourne, and more committed to an activist, democratic politics that would use established institutions and principles to benefit the common people (in British terms, a Tory position more than a Whig one), Jack certainly would have identified with Cecil’s description of the broader upper-class milieu: “The ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer.” Melbourne’s own assertion that “things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life” would likewise have appealed to Jack for its skeptical urbanity.20
Of Melbourne’s carnal pursuits Cecil wrote, “His animal nature and his taste for women’s society united to make him amorous, and natural tendency had been encouraged by the tradition of his home. Already, we gather, he had sown some wild oats. Like the other young men of his circle he thought chastity a dangerous state, and he seems early to have taken practical steps to avoid incurring the risks attendant to it.” Jack, of course, knew all about this “tradition” from his own home.21
Cecil’s succinct summation of the young Melbourne worked equally well for the young Kennedy: “He was a skeptic in thought; in practice a hedonist.”22
Rose Kennedy, in explaining to a later interviewer the reasons for her second son’s (and, palpably, her own) a
ffinity for things English, spoke of his “Boston accent which is very much akin to the British, and then he responded to the British love of culture and literature and all that sort of thing.”
Most of the people in government circles and most of the people who had big houses and who entertained over there, were people whose families had been in government, and they had not only interest in government, in history and in politics, but they had had them for generations and so they were probably more cultured than the people were here, where most, or many, had started in very humble beginnings. And I think Jack responded to all that because he did like literature, and he did appreciate it, and then he was interested in government, and of course, he did enjoy seeing all the beautiful homes, because they were connected more or less to history. If you went away for the weekend, you’d see a house that had been there for hundreds of years….There were different souvenirs of the years they had spent in government in those houses, and all those things Jack responded to, and so he did enjoy himself [there] as did we all, I think. And then of course it was more or less akin to Boston, because Boston is in a great part British, the people there are of British-Irish heritage, much more than they are in New York, for instance.23
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