It was the kind of exposure and training that no future president since John Quincy Adams had enjoyed at so young an age. And the experience left its mark, cultivating in him an intensified passion for foreign policy and world affairs that he never abandoned, and completing his transition to adulthood.60
Now he was back at Winthrop House, a college student once more, twenty-two years old and focused on the principal task ahead: taking all he had experienced and learned on his grand overseas adventure and turning it into a worthy senior thesis. No one yet knew it, but here, too, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with a generous assist from his father, would do something extraordinary and put his name before the public once again.
*1 Danzig (later Gdansk), located at the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic Sea, was an ethnically German port city that had been taken from German control after World War I and made a League of Nations “free city,” one that would be represented abroad by the newly reconstituted nation of Poland. Danzig and the so-called Polish Corridor along the Vistula ensured Poland’s access to the Baltic but also divided East Prussia from the rest of Germany.
*2 After the war it would be determined that the Athenia sinking was a mistake; an overeager German submarine commander had mistaken the civilian vessel for a Royal Navy auxiliary cruiser.
NINE
A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
The Harvard to which Jack Kennedy returned in September 1939, following his grand overseas adventure, seemed on first glance the same as it ever was. Newly arrived freshmen wandered about the Yard, feigning nonchalance and trying not to look lost, while returning students sat under the trees and on the steps of Widener Library in little knots or alone, smoking cigarettes. Others lounged down by the river with the Radcliffe girls, stretching out on its grassy banks as the crew teams glided by, their oars moving in metronomic rhythm.
Yet everyone knew that all was not the same. Germany had invaded Poland, and the British and French empires had responded by declaring war on the aggressor. It meant the end, effectively, of the international system established at the conclusion of the Great War, twenty years before, and the return to global conflict. The European order, and therefore the world order, had been torn apart in the span of a few days. If some of Jack’s Harvard classmates failed to understand the full implications of Hitler’s extraordinary gambit, all sensed that a historic moment had come. World politics had been rocked off course, its new destination unknown.
Down the road in New York, “in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street,” W. H. Auden captured the moment in “September 1, 1939”:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.1
Jack, though he had witnessed the prewar drama up close, got no special recognition for the fact, either at the Spee Club or at Winthrop House, where he and Torby Macdonald had moved into a two-person suite. “Everyone here is very much excited about the war situation and have been busy telling exactly what the situation is,” he deadpanned to his father in his first week back. “So I guess I shouldn’t have gone over there, as I could have learned a lot more right here.”2
The German blitzkrieg in Poland dominated the headlines as the semester began. The Poles battled bravely, surprising the Wehrmacht with the strength of their rearguard actions and with their dogged defense of Warsaw. The German High Command announced on September 15 that the Polish capital had fallen, but the news was premature: the surrounded city resisted tenaciously until September 27 and inflicted significant casualties on the Germans. But any hope of the Poles holding out for long was lost when the Russians invaded from the east on the seventeenth, as per the secret agreement with Berlin, and when the Western Allies made devastatingly clear that they would not honor their stated obligations to Poland’s defense. (Polish leaders had gone to war in the expectation that if they held out for fifteen days, the French would launch a major attack on western Germany.) The last Polish unit capitulated on October 5, and on the same day Hitler entered Warsaw for his victory parade.
Harvard’s president, James B. Conant, was vacationing in New Hampshire on September 1 when he learned that German tanks were rolling across the Polish frontier. For the past several years Conant had felt alienated from the powerful tide of American isolationism, and was increasingly convinced that Hitler wanted to do much more than revise the Versailles settlement—he sought to dominate all of Europe. The enlightened, culturally rich Germany that Conant had known as a young researcher and scientist had changed fundamentally as the Nazis crushed free expression and persecuted Jews. Yet he had moved cautiously, aware that, as Harvard’s president, his every utterance could generate reaction. “Being the head of an institution with eight thousand young men under my direction who may get shot if we go into the war, while I shan’t, I am a bit estopped from saying much,” he wrote to Archibald MacLeish on September 7. “I don’t like the moral dilemma I find myself in, but my personal emotions are a small matter in these times of world grief.” But as the days passed and the Germans pressed the attack, Conant could stay silent no longer. “Every ounce of our sympathies,” he told Harvard students from the pulpit in Memorial Church in late September, must be with those fighting the Nazis. The United States could not set itself apart; quite the contrary, on its response rested “not only the fate of humanity’s experiment with free institutions, but the potency of man’s belief in a life of reason—in short, what we now venture to designate as modern civilization.”3
There were nods of approval in the pews, but also considerable skepticism. Many students were more inclined to follow Joseph P. Kennedy’s line of argument than Conant’s—to believe, in other words, that this was a European quarrel from which the United States should stand aloof, if not in thought then certainly in deed. In their eyes, America’s intervention in World War I had not yielded the promised results—it hadn’t made the world “safe for democracy,” let alone “ended all wars”—and they were suspicious of being bamboozled into another bloody war by grizzled old men who could remain safely detached from the blood-red battlefields. A poll of eighteen hundred Harvard students a few weeks later found that 95 percent were “against immediate American entry” into the conflict, and 78 percent opposed intervention “even if England and France were defeated.” A narrow majority favored “an immediate peace conference” with Nazi Germany.4 The Crimson student newspaper, under Jack’s classmate and fellow Spee member Blair Clark, followed this line, arguing vociferously against American intervention even as it predicted a German victory. (“We are frankly determined to have peace at any price. We intend to resist to the utmost any suggestions that American intervention is necessary to ‘save civilization’ or even to ‘save democracy and freedom.’ ”)5
Within the faculty, too, opinions ranged widely, though as a group they were more interventionist than were the students; many, including several of Jack’s professors, saw things as Conant did and favored robust American aid to Britain and France. According to the Crimson, Professor Payson Wild denounced the Neutrality Acts as dangerously outmoded—only if European democracies were given the means to hold their own would America be able to stay out, in Wild’s view. Arthur Holcombe, in a lecture to the Harvard Student Union, said it was foolish to believe the United States could remain neutral, and that Washington “would have to decide on which side to throw its influence.” Jack’s tutor Bruce Hopper, meanwhile, warned of the rise of an aggressively expansionist Japan in the Far East, as did Professor William Y. Elliott, who also cautioned that “a truce at present would consolidate the Italian and German position in Europe,” which “would be disastrous for this country.”6
Jack himself now joined the fray, penning an editorial for the Crimson, under the title “Peace in Our Ti
me,” that in large measure parroted his father’s positions. The defeat of Poland, however regrettable, should be ignored, the piece read, and President Roosevelt should “exert every office he possesses to bring about…peace.” France and Britain were both eager to end the fight, yet neither was in a position to make a direct overture to Berlin; only FDR stood well placed to do so. The alternative might well be disastrous, especially for Britain: “There is every possibility—almost a probability—of English defeat. At the best, Britain can expect destruction of all her industrial concentrations and the loss of the tremendous store of invested wealth….At the worst she can expect extreme political and economic humiliation.” The editorial did not deny that a peace deal would entail “considerable concessions to Hitlerdom”—control over Poland, a free economic hand in the rest of Eastern Europe, and a redistribution of colonies—but, Jack asked, what choice was there? Moreover, if, in exchange for these concessions, “Hitler could be made to disarm, the victory would be likewise great for the democracies. Hitlerism—gangsterism as a diplomatic weapon—would be gone, and Europe could once more breathe easy. The British and French Empires would be reasonably intact. And there would be peace for our time.”7
It was a strikingly naive claim, especially coming from a young man who had just seen the European crisis up close, and who had a subtler grasp of world politics than Joe Senior did. He wrote as though Chamberlain’s appeasement policy had not suffered a mortal blow, as though Hitler’s actions had not obliterated the prospect that he could be persuaded to disarm. The editorial dismissed would-be critics of the proposal as acting on sentiment instead of “solid reality,” but the same charge could be made against the author himself.
Just what possessed Jack to argue along these lines is not altogether clear. Loyalty to his father was certainly a factor, and moreover he bought into the current defeatism characterizing not merely the ambassador’s assessment but those of many other observers who saw Britain and France facing long odds against the German war machine. (It’s hard to recall today how widespread this view was in 1939–40.) The United States, Jack believed, should take major preparedness measures but should avoid entangling itself militarily in the European struggle. Some later authors also see in the editorial Jack’s penchant for going against the grain, for staking out an independent position, especially in pushing for an American diplomatic intervention.8 But this seems far-fetched in view of the Crimson’s editorial position that fall, and the prevailing attitude among Harvard students, both of which were broadly in line with Jack’s perspective; at most, it can be said that he stood in opposition to some of his professors, and to President Conant.
Whatever the case, Jack could consider himself lucky that editorials in the Crimson were unsigned. His first foray into published political commentary was one he would come to regret making.
II
That would come later. At the time of publication, Jack was pleased with his effort, and said so to his father.9 Joe, in turn, felt paternal pride at seeing his second son writing for The Harvard Crimson and personal satisfaction that the line of argument so closely matched his own. It was a tonic that, frankly, he needed, for the fall of 1939 was in other respects a miserable time for him. He toiled alone in London, having sent most of his family back to America at the outbreak of hostilities. (Rosemary stayed behind at her Assumption Convent School, reestablished at Belmont House, in Hertfordshire, thirty miles northwest of London, after the start of the war.) The dinner invitations that had come thick and fast during his and Rose’s first year in England now were few and far between; many evenings he spent by himself. The solitude weighed on him, made him morose, rendered his charcoal worldview darker still.
“I haven’t changed my opinion at all about this situation,” he wrote his two eldest sons on October 13. “I think that it will be a catastrophe financially, economically, and socially for every nation in the world if the war continues and the longer it goes on, the more difficult it will be to make any decent rearrangement.” To Arthur Krock he expressed even deeper distress: “One couldn’t be more pessimistic than I am as to the future outlook for the world if this war continues any length of time.”10
All around him Kennedy could see preparations for a war he hated: parks bristling with anti-aircraft guns and big black arrows pointing in the direction of air-raid shelters. His formerly close relationship with Neville Chamberlain’s government was fast fraying, on account of the changed circumstances: Britain was at war and ruling out early negotiations with Hitler, while Kennedy remained steadfast that Germany would win and that America must not intervene. Britain’s glory days had long since passed, he felt certain, and he told Roosevelt he saw “signs of decay, if not decadence, here, both in men and institutions….Democracy as we now conceive it in the United States will not exist in France and England after the war, regardless of which side wins or loses.” Consequently, “we [in America] should curb our sentiments and our sentimentality and look to our own vital interests.”11 Invariably, these assessments got back to 10 Downing Street and to the Foreign Office, which in September began keeping a “Kennedy dossier” on him.
The file, which remained classified for the next several decades, contains various explanations for the ambassador’s gloom: his Irish American heritage, which made him delight in “seeing the lion’s tail twisted”; his innately pessimistic worldview; his acceptance, thanks to the reports of Charles Lindbergh and Joe Junior, of the notion of German air superiority; and his laser-like focus on “the financial side of things,” which rendered him unable, “poor man, [to] see the imponderabilia which, in a war like this, will be decisive.” William Hillman, a U.S. journalist and friend of Kennedy’s, told a Foreign Office contact that Kennedy was “a professing Catholic who loathed Hitler and Hitlerism almost, though perhaps not quite, as much as he loathed Bolshevism, but he was also a self-made man who had known poverty and who did not want to know it again.” Hillman got the poverty bit wrong, but on the whole his assessment rang true. The prospect of “bankruptcy and defeat” had become obsessions in the ambassador’s mind, he said, which had the effect of making him immune to reason.12
The Foreign Office, in a cable to Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, the newly appointed British ambassador in Washington, summarized the emerging analysis:
Kennedy has been adopting a most defeatist attitude in his talk with a number of private individuals. The general line which he takes in these conversations as reported to us is that Great Britain is certain to be defeated in the war, particularly on account of her financial weakness….While it is very regrettable that Kennedy should be adopting this attitude, we do not propose, for the time being at any rate, to pursue the matter further. We have thought it well, however, to let you know about his indiscreet utterances in case it should later become necessary for us to ask you to drop a hint in the proper quarter, and because in the meantime you may perhaps hear echoes of his talk and be able to trace them to their proper source.13
England’s monarch expressed his own frustration with Kennedy’s narrowness of vision. “He looked at the war very much from the financial and material viewpoint,” King George wrote in his diary after the two men met on September 9. “He wondered why we did not let Hitler have SE Europe, as it was no good to us from a monetary standpoint. He did not seem to realise that this country was part of Europe, that it was essential for us to act as policemen, & to uphold the rights of small nations & that the Balkan countries had a national spirit.”14
In Washington, too, Kennedy found his influence, such as it was, further reduced. In September he urged Roosevelt to initiate negotiations involving the Allies and Nazi Germany (“It appears to me that this situation may resolve itself to a point where the President may play the role of savior of the world”), only to be rebuked in no uncertain terms by Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “This government, so long as present European conditions continue, sees no opportunity nor occasion fo
r any peace move to be introduced by the President of the United States.” Roosevelt privately called Kennedy’s plea “the silliest message to me I have ever received.”15
This was a curious claim, given that FDR himself had pondered a diplomatic intervention, but it spoke to the vast gulf now separating the two men. Kennedy’s unrelieved bleakness and fears for the future exasperated the president. “Joe has been an appeaser and will always be an appeaser,” he complained to Henry Morgenthau. In contrast to the ambassador’s staunch opposition to any form of military intervention, Roosevelt was more and more of the opposing view, that only war could bring about the end of an intolerable and wicked regime. The United States might yet be able to avoid belligerent status, but the president felt certain that his country needed to provide abundant assistance to France and Britain. The American people, Roosevelt declared, could not “draw a line of defense around this country and live completely and solely to ourselves.” It hadn’t worked when Thomas Jefferson and Congress tried it with the 1807 embargo against Britain and France, Roosevelt said, and it wouldn’t work now. America could not insulate itself from world war.16
FDR’s problem was that a great many Americans shared Joe Kennedy’s perspective: they did believe the nation could—and should—isolate itself from overseas conflict. The more informed among these observers in many cases seconded the ambassador’s claim that Britain did not have a prayer of prevailing militarily. Germany was simply too strong, which meant that America needed to accommodate itself to the new reality. A Time cover article on the ambassador in September lauded him for his wary analysis of England’s war and his insistence on coldly preserving U.S. freedom of action.
JFK Page 29