“From one point of view,” the article enthused, “Joe Kennedy is a common denominator of the U. S. businessman—‘safe,’ ‘middle-of-the-road,’ a horse-trader at heart, with one sharp eye on the market and one fond eye on his children. But he is a super common denominator, uncommonly common-sensible, stiletto-shrewd, practical as only a former president of a small bank can be. As Ambassador Kennedy his attitude is the same as that of Businessman Kennedy: Where do we get off?”17
That month, Roosevelt called for revising the Neutrality Acts on the grounds that they were too inflexible. Specifically, he wanted authority to decide who the aggressors were in a war, and who the victims, and to withhold or provide aid accordingly, which in this case would allow the selling of arms to France and Britain if they carried them away in their own ships. But the isolationists rose up in force, determined to block him. Their stronghold was in the U.S. Senate, and especially in the delegations from the West and the Midwest. William Borah, Republican of Idaho, a stalwart of the opposition and a man widely admired for his oratorical skills, took to the airwaves to warn against any revision of the neutrality legislation, as did Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat of Montana, Hiram Johnson, Republican of California, and Gerald Nye, Republican of North Dakota. Charles Lindbergh did the same on all three national radio networks. Germany was no threat to American democracy, the aviator declared in his spindly, high-pitched voice, and moreover it was entitled to certain revisions of the Versailles Treaty. Sending arms and munitions to the Western powers, meanwhile, would not bring victory but only ensnare America in Europe’s eternal feuding, and this would threaten the very survival of American democracy. Sounding exactly like Joe Kennedy, Lindbergh advised his huge radio audience to view the global crisis clinically, never allowing “our sentiment, our pity, our personal feelings of sympathy, to obscure the issue [or] to affect our children’s lives. We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife.”18
Above all, Lindbergh added, Americans should be under no illusions about the cost of intervention. Merely providing munitions to the Allies would never be enough; U.S. ground forces would inevitably follow. “We are likely to lose a million men, possibly several million….And our children will be fortunate if they see the end in their lives.”19
In a subsequent radio address, Lindbergh made a Nazi-like appeal to racial solidarity. America’s ties to Europe, he declared, were “a bond of race and not of political ideology.” He explained: “It is the European race we must preserve; political progress will follow. Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury. If the white race is ever seriously threatened, it may then be time for us to take part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans, but not one against the other for our mutual destruction.”20
Here the aviator went too far for many, and he encountered sharp criticism from elements in the press. Still, his identification with the isolationist campaign generated deep concern among White House analysts, who understood all too well the breadth of his appeal among grassroots voters. In response, the administration called on its own band of heavy hitters, among them Henry Stimson, secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, and Frank Knox, Alf Landon’s running mate on the GOP ticket in the 1936 presidential election. Conant, too, contributed speeches to the effort, and the White House got backing as well from syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson, whose column ran in more than 150 newspapers nationwide and who had a weekly radio program on NBC, and from William Allen White, the revered editor of The Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, whose homespun and no-nonsense analysis made him a prominent voice in the nation’s heartland. Thompson in particular was relentless: she had observed Hitler’s rise up close as a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria early in the decade and had developed a deep loathing for the man and his regime. In column after column she railed against the Führer and against the fecklessness of the Western powers’ response, and she often continued the diatribe at dinner parties and other social gatherings. “If I ever divorce Dorothy,” her husband, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, quipped, “I’ll name Adolf Hitler as co-respondent.”21
The battle for the hearts and minds of the American people was on. For a time it seemed the isolationists had all the momentum—of eighteen hundred pieces of mail received by one Republican senator, only seventy-six were in favor of repealing the arms embargo contained in the Neutrality Acts. But White House officials saw reason for hope in other numbers. Although most Americans were insistent about the need to keep out of the war, a large majority (85 percent in one survey) hoped to see Britain and France win. Other surveys showed roughly even splits between those who wanted to give aid to the Allies, those who did not, and those who would approve the selling of arms to belligerents on cash-and-carry terms. This was the opening FDR needed, and he could argue as well that the new policy would create American jobs. In early November the White House got what it sought: a repeal of the arms embargo and a new law authorizing the sale of arms to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis, meaning they would carry the goods from U.S. ports in their own ships.22
As if all this were not enough to distress Joe Kennedy, he found himself further eclipsed by the rise—in both London and Washington—of Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty and a possible successor to Chamberlain as prime minister. Unbeknownst to Kennedy, FDR in September bypassed his ambassador and opened a secret direct channel of communication with Churchill, with the messages sent by diplomatic pouch but sealed so that no one could read them at the respective embassies.23 Upon learning of the scheme three weeks later, Kennedy was furious: the clandestine correspondence, he wrote in his diary, was yet “another instance of Roosevelt’s conniving mind which never indicates he knows how to handle any organization. It’s a rotten way to treat his ambassador and I think shows him up to the other people. I am disgusted.” It galled Kennedy that the president put any faith at all in Churchill, a man he considered grandstanding and slippery, and consumed by his desire to draw America into the war. “He is just an actor and a politician. He always impressed me that he’d blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would get the U.S. in. Maybe I do him an injustice but I don’t trust him.”24
It annoyed Kennedy that Churchill never bothered to learn the little things about him. Whenever they met, the Briton would invariably offer him a drink, forgetting that Kennedy seldom touched alcohol. Meanwhile, Churchill himself refused to be put off by the ambassador’s abstinence. When Kennedy on one occasion pointedly remarked that he had sworn off drinking and smoking for the duration of the war, Churchill muttered, “My God, you make me feel as if I should go around in sack cloth and ashes,” and poured himself another brandy.25
Ever more marginalized, Kennedy turned to family for support. He treasured his communications with Joe Junior, now a student at Harvard Law School, who told him that “everyone at home is unanimous in wanting to stay out of the war,” as well as with Jack, at Harvard College, and with Rose, back in Bronxville, who counseled him to mind his spiritual health. (“I’m praying that I shall see you soon. Do pray, and go to church, as it is very important in my life that you do just that.”) On Sundays Rose lined up the children still living at home to speak to their father on the one weekly transatlantic call the security precautions allowed him. From daughter Kick he learned that she had been denied admission to Sarah Lawrence College and would attend Finch women’s college, in Manhattan, and that her heart was still with Billy Cavendish, not with any of her innumerable American suitors. Of her readjustment to U.S. soil, Kick wrote her father, “That’s the amazing thing when one’s been away: one expected things to have changed & they haven’t.”26
Kennedy also arranged for regular visits to Rosemary, in Hertfordshire, by himself and—when work kept him away—by Mr. and Mrs. Moore.27 She seemed to be thriving at her school, with its Montessori method of hands-on, individualized instruction. On her twenty-first birt
hday, in September, she remarked that “it is the most wonderfulest place I’ve been to.” The school’s staff, aware of her disabilities, assigned to her an extra aide, paid for by Joe, and reported to him and Rose that she seemed content, apart from periodic eruptions when she would lose her temper and lash out at everyone around her, including younger classmates. Joe, encouraged by what he heard, also provided a telephone for the school, as well as a fire-extinguishing system for use in the event of a bombing. The measures gave him peace of mind, and the school authorities expressed their fulsome gratitude. To provide Rosemary with a change of scenery, Joe would occasionally arrange for her to spend Saturday and Sunday at the embassy, accompanied by a caretaker.28
In wartime England, of all places, the Kennedys seemed to have found the right placement for their eldest daughter—a convent school in a lovely, bucolic setting whose devoted staff followed a method of instruction that suited her well. “It becomes definitely apparent now that this is the ideal life for Rose[mary],” Joe exulted in a letter to his wife on October 11. “She is happy, looks better than she ever did in her life, is not the slightest bit lonesome, and loves to get letters from the children telling her how lucky she is to be over here (tell them to keep writing that way).” It was even possible, the letter went on, taking a troubling turn, that Rosemary should remain in Hertfordshire “indefinitely, with all of us making our regular trips, as we will be doing, and seeing her then. I have given her a lot of time and thought and I’m convinced that’s the answer. She must never be at home for her sake as well as everyone else’s.”29
Rosemary, for her part, clamored for her parents’ love and support. “She thinks of you very specially and loves you heaps,” the mother superior of the school reminded Rose in December. “[She] loves to hear from you, [and] to get your approval [and] her father’s too.” Nothing pleased Rosemary more, the staff noticed, than spending time with her father. “Many, many thanks for coming to see me on Friday,” she wrote to him after one visit in early 1940. “You were a darling. I hope you liked everything here….Mother says I am such a comfort to you. Never to leave you. Well Daddy, I feel honor because you chose me to stay.”
She added a postscript: “I am so fond of you. And. Love you very much. Sorry, to think that I am fat you. think—”30
III
In Cambridge, Jack was beginning to second-guess his “Peace in Our Time” editorial. The national debate over the neutrality legislation influenced his thinking, as did his discussions with his fellow undergraduates in the classroom, as well as his one-on-one conversations with professors. (He took four courses, all in government: Elements of International Law, Modern Imperialism, Principles of Politics, and Comparative Politics.) Though he was not ready to renounce the editorial—not yet—and he remained partial to his father’s overarching philosophy, Jack backed off his certitude and acknowledged the merits in the interventionist arguments by President Conant and others. He foreswore penning more Crimson pieces.31
It marked a reversion, in a way, to the old Jack, clinical and observant rather than mixing it up in the arena. The editorial was out of character for him, something to expect from his more strident and doctrinaire older brother. Looking back decades afterwards, Arthur Holcombe remarked of Jack that “the style of the man was formed while he was quite young….He was never a crusader, as some men are. You can pick some crusaders out of a class, while they’re still undergraduates; they have that commitment to act upon an idea, which to them is decisive of their behavior. That wasn’t the challenge to which [Jack] responded.” The issue was not lack of talent, the professor went on, for Jack had it in abundance; rather, it was a lack of direction, hardly unusual even among upperclassmen at Harvard. “Everybody knew that he was going to make a great success of whatever he turned his attention to,” Holcombe said, no doubt with the benefit of hindsight.32
For now, however, Jack kept his focus on his courses, on laying the groundwork for his thesis, and on his pursuit of women—not necessarily in that order. Frances Ann Cannon, his infatuation of junior year, remained the chief object of his affections. To his sister Kick he had revealed that he intended to ask Cannon to marry him. “Jack is taking out Frances Ann this weekend so we can all hardly wait,” Kick wrote to her father. How much his parents knew of his plan is not clear; in her memoirs, forty years later, Rose would say merely that Frances Ann was “an attractive girl in whom Jack seemed to be quite interested at that time and evidently she was interested in him, too. At least Kick seemed to be implying that some ‘announcement’ was in the offing.” Jack’s former roommate Charlie Houghton also had his eye on Miss Cannon, and he had the advantage of being a Protestant. In any event, neither suitor won his prize: when Jack and Charlie showed up together on the doorstep of Frances Ann’s apartment one evening, she introduced them to her new fiancé, an aspiring writer named John Hersey. The two Harvard men beat a hasty retreat.33
The rejection stung Jack deeply. To friends he would claim it was he who broke off the relationship, but his closest confidants—Kick, Torby Macdonald, Lem Billings—knew better.*1 As if to compensate, he resumed playing the field more energetically than ever, and with his usual knack, astounding his Winthrop House mates with the ease with which he seemed to score date after date with woman after woman. One frequent companion was Charlotte McDonnell, a friend of Kick’s from her Catholic girls’ school; on other occasions it would be models and actresses, few of whom would get a second call and none of whom he introduced to his family. “I went to N.Y. last weekend for Thanksgiving,” he reported to Billings in late November, “—and had quite a time. Met that model Georgia Carrol[l] who is really something—and met some other good stuff.”34
McDonnell was under no illusions about her prospects. “I went out with Jack lots of times,” she remembered, “but he was never in love with me. He liked to think he was, when things were going bad and he didn’t have anyone else, but he really wasn’t. He’d come down and talk to his friends. He’d talk to Lem and he’d talk to Torby and he’d say, ‘Hey, what would you think if I married Charlotte?’ And they’d have a big pow-wow. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, did he ever ask me to marry him? No, he did not….We just had a good time together.”35
Just as Jack’s general disregard for women’s feelings stayed the same, his cavalier attitude toward material possessions also had not changed. Suits would be left behind on trips, driver’s licenses would disappear, library books would go missing. When another in a long line of wristwatches somehow vanished, Paul Murphy, who oversaw Joe Senior’s New York office and often paid the family’s bills, intervened on Mrs. Kennedy’s behalf:
She is very much disturbed about the loss of your wristwatch as she feels that you have lost altogether too many watches. She wants you to know she has had her gold wristwatch since she was twenty-one. She would like to have you buy an inexpensive but reliable watch to replace the one you have lost. If you can keep the new watch for about five years, she will then buy you a better one with the money received from the insurance company. Your mother has talked with your father about the above suggestion and he has agreed to it. And he has asked me to advise you that he does not want your mother annoyed with any arguments.36
In the classroom, Jack stayed on the upward trajectory he had started in his junior year. His travels overseas, often solo, had deepened both his knowledge and his engagement with global politics in all its dimensions, and he also brought to bear his broad understanding of contemporary international history, cultivated during a lifetime of serious reading. He had grown more mature, more focused, a point noted by his closest professorial contacts, Payson Wild and Bruce Hopper, who now directed him in what was assuredly the most intensive period of academic study he would ever undertake. Jack’s notes from his classes in the fall of 1939 support this notion, as he delved deeply into the twentieth-century “isms”—communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism, nationalism,
totalitarianism, imperialism, militarism.
Fascism, Jack recorded, was largely pragmatic in nature, “a system built up by trial & error, by experiment and practice. Whatever survives the test of experience is valid, the rest is discarded.” Thus, both Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany felt free to reverse themselves as situations warranted, whereas Stalin in Russia felt obliged to pay “at least lip service to the doctrines of Marx.” Yet the similarities between Marxism (as practiced in the Soviet Union) and fascism were obvious, not least in their brutally anti-democratic nature and their de facto one-party rule. “The [Communist] may insist that he is truely Dem. in wishing the collective rule of the people to triumph but in practice his [state] is as totalitarian & intolerant to opposition as the Fascist [state].” In practice, Jack’s notes read, “both the Soviet and Fascism system are coming closer and closer together upon the assault upon priv. capitalism. Both represent an attack on individualism, on the sense of personal dignity & freedom which is the heritage of the 19th century in the West. Both subordinate the individual to the collectivity.”37
In a case study for Wild’s international law class, Jack examined the rights and responsibilities of neutrals in wartime, through an analysis of four different scenarios. Drawing upon a range of published sources as well as a close reading of the Hague Convention of 1907, he offered nuanced and tightly argued analyses of each situation, in clear and succinct prose. With respect to neutral pilots guiding ships of belligerent nations through neutral waters, for example, he concluded that existing international law was not altogether clear but that the best interpretation nevertheless presented itself: “If they are employees of the state, it is a breach of state A’s neutrality to allow its licensed pilots to pilot the vessels of state Y to a point ten miles beyond in the high seas unless there are conditions of distress. If they are merely private individuals licensed by the state, it is not a breach of state A’s neutrality.”38
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