Most interesting of all, in that it seemed to disavow entirely the thrust of his Crimson editorial and to anticipate arguments in his senior thesis, was a thirty-five-page investigation of British policy toward the League of Nations in the two decades that had passed since the organization’s founding, in 1919. From the start, Jack asserted, collective security foundered on the unwillingness of the great powers to surrender national sovereignty to the decisions of the League. Even so, Britain “could have made herself the champion of small nations by standing for international law and a League policy” but refused to do so, on account of her fear of Soviet Communism and her lack of support from a standoffish United States. The Nazi threat, meanwhile, was consistently and grievously minimized as British policymakers somehow assumed that once Hitler’s territorial grievances were addressed, his power would collapse or at least be contained. “They seem to entertain the notion that when there are four Caesars in power at the same time, not one of them will ultimately succeed in conquering the world,” he wrote. “The danger lies in having one Caesar who stops only when defeated by a world coalition.”
A throwaway aside in the paper’s conclusion revealed a starkly different take on U.S. participation in the First World War than either his father’s or his older brother’s take—or, for that matter, those of most members of the class of 1940. “This is not the place to speak of America’s entry into the World War except to remark that American participation did not fail to save democracy. Had she not joined, democratic England and France would be powerless and the United States would in no way claim isolation for herself today. There is reason to believe that continued American participation in international efforts for peace and the establishment of law and order would have borne much fruit.”39
IV
By this point in the school year, with the days growing shorter and the gray clouds rolling low and moist above the buildings, the familiar image of Jack around the Yard was of him with a stack of books under his arm, collar turned up against the cold and wind, too hurried to stop and talk.40 Much of the time, the books were not for his courses but for his senior thesis. Bruce Hopper had urged him to use the ringside experience he had gained during his European sojourn to good effect, and the English historian John Wheeler-Bennett, too, had nudged him in this direction, but the final choice for the topic—an in-depth examination of the origins of Britain’s appeasement policy and the concomitant failure to rearm—was Jack’s own.41 It reflected his lifelong interest in British history and statecraft, and his deepening affinity for the country and its ways. Not least, it took advantage of his extraordinary personal circumstances: the American ambassador in London was his own father, whom he accompanied to various high-society functions and who introduced him to some of the British leaders he would now be writing about.
How was it, Jack wanted to know, that Britain found itself on the cusp of another destructive war so soon after escaping the most devastating conflagration in history?
He hit Widener hard in the late fall, reading parliamentary debates and newspaper reports on British attitudes—official and popular—in the 1930s, and checking out pertinent books as he found them.42 A hypothesis took hold: Chamberlain’s accommodation of Hitler was a logical outcome of Britain’s lackluster rearmament efforts earlier in the thirties, and of the entrenched opposition among the public to another war. Jack consulted regularly with Hopper, meeting once a week in the tutor’s handsome, oak-walled room, with its majestic fireplace and its framed Latin plaque, which read in translation, “It will give you pleasure to look back on the scenes of this suffering.” In addition, Jack took other steps unavailable to his less privileged, less connected Harvard peers. In Palm Beach over the Christmas holidays, he sought insights from the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, who happened to be visiting the Kennedy home. Lothian pledged to help the thesis project in whatever way he could, and he encouraged the young man to pay a visit to the British embassy in Washington on his way back to Harvard, which Jack duly did.43
Still more helpful was James Seymour, the press attaché at the U.S. embassy in London, whom Jack recognized could be hugely beneficial to him in procuring source material. On January 11, 1940, Jack sent Seymour an urgent cable:
SEND IMMEDIATELY PAMPHLETS, ETC, CONSERVATIVE, LABOR, LIBERAL, PACIFIST ORGANIZATIONS FOR APPEASEMENT THESIS DISCUSSING FACTORS DISCUSSING PRO CON 1932 TO 1939 STOP SUGGEST LASKEY [sic] AS REFERENCE ALREADY HAVE TIMES, MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, HANSARD, THANKS, JACK KENNEDY.44
Seymour, a Harvard alumnus (class of 1917) who earned the French Croix de Guerre in World War I and later wrote scripts for Hollywood, set right to work by calling a range of organizations and securing their ready agreement to provide materials. He gathered these together in shipments to be sent to Jack, often by way of Paul Murphy. Speeches by Conservative, Labour, and Liberal party leaders; pamphlets from trade unions, pacifist organizations, isolationist movements, and appeasement groups; magazine articles of various kinds—mounds of items soon found their way to Jack in Cambridge, thanks to Seymour, who also took time to pen elegant personal notes to his young acquaintance. “We have had our share of cold and fog which has not improved our lovely black-out,” he wrote on one occasion. “London is a different and almost incredibly beautiful place in these conditions. I get a rare kick out of walking the empty streets—moonlight especially makes it lovely….The spirit of the people is marvelous—firm, serious and courageous, ready I feel to face any sacrifice or privation to achieve the one and only end they are willing to accept.” Then the sign-off: “You probably know more about world affairs than I—but you may not know one thing, that your cheery presence is really greatly missed here. I mean it. Good luck to you—and here’s hoping to hear from you before I see you. Ever, Jim.”45
How much Ambassador Kennedy knew of his son’s ideological shift over the late fall and winter of 1939–40 is not clear, and in a sense it doesn’t really matter—neither he nor Bruce Hopper nor anyone else had significant influence on Jack’s emerging interpretive stance. For that matter, it had never been Joe Kennedy’s style to insist that his children adhere to his positions on policy issues. He could be domineering and overbearing in any number of ways, but not here, as he urged Joe Junior and Jack and their siblings to come to their own judgments on things. It was and would remain one of his most appealing personal qualities.
Of course, the flip side of that characteristic was that he himself could be remarkably resistant to outside persuasion. On December 8, 1939, shortly after returning to the United States for an extended restorative vacation—the stress in London had caused his stomach troubles to flare up, and he was down fifteen pounds—the ambassador spoke extemporaneously at Boston’s Our Lady of the Assumption Church, where as a youngster he had been an altar boy. “As you love America,” he exhorted the Irish American parishioners, many of whom felt scant love for England, “don’t let anything that comes out of any country in the world make you believe you can make a situation one whit better by getting into war. There is no place in this fight for us. It is going to be bad enough as it is.” Kennedy could see no reason for America to enter the struggle, and he warned against being seduced by a “sporting spirit,” by an aversion to seeing “an unfair or immoral thing done.” This was no time for such sentimentality.46
In Washington, the ambassador told a group of Army and Navy officers—in direct opposition to what Jim Seymour had suggested to Jack—that morale in France and England was low and going lower. Economic conditions in both countries were terrible, and people longed for peace. Nazi submarines were being launched faster than the Royal Navy could sink them. Could England hold out beyond another year? Kennedy doubted it. By the end of 1940, if not sooner, he told the officers, the people of England and France, and perhaps all of Europe, might well be ready to embrace Communism. At the White House, he struck similarly downbeat tones. “Joe is usually a bear,” one nameless aide remarked, “but
this time he is a whole den.”47
Kennedy’s problem was not so much what he said; it was how he said it. A great many people in that gloomy winter of 1939–40 shared his low confidence in the prospects for the Western democracies and his fervent belief that the United States should stand apart from the fighting. This was indeed still the majority view among Americans. For that matter, Kennedy’s views were somewhat more nuanced than his words often suggested: he did not mind the November 1939 revision to the neutrality laws, for example, and he supported providing aid to Britain and France. But he lacked a certain filter, lacked a true sense of empathy, and seemed almost to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in his public prognostications of ruin. The concept of honor in international affairs, always mysterious to him, remained elusive and left him immune to the dazzling eloquence of a Winston Churchill or the impassioned advocacy of a Dorothy Thompson.
For British officials, the worry was not that his defeatism would infect their own people, but that it would undermine morale among neutral nations and in particular in the United States.48 In January 1940, Robert Vansittart, the government’s chief diplomatic adviser, scrawled a comment that reflected a broadly held view within British officialdom: “Mr. Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope this war will at least see the elimination of his type.” A few weeks later, while the ambassador was still in America, the British Ministry of Information intercepted a telegram destined for Jim Seymour at the U.S. embassy that read “Rush Pacifist Literature” and was signed, simply, “Kennedy.” The ministry analysts, suspecting the worst, saw it as one more sign of Joe Kennedy’s treacherous behavior. (“Becoming a Pacifist!” wrote one alarmed officer in the margin.) The cable, of course, was Jack’s.49
That same month, rumors flew anew of a possible Kennedy dark-horse candidacy for the upcoming presidential election. Kennedy allowed the story to percolate for a few days—he may indeed have stoked it to begin with—before shutting it down after a conference with Roosevelt at the White House. Though he endorsed FDR for another term, he could be harshly critical when the mood struck him. On one occasion in February, for example, he joined a conversation in progress at the State Department between William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, and two reporters. Bullitt, never known for his discretion and now also a confirmed Kennedy foe, related the conversation to Harold Ickes (himself hardly the most discreet of men), who wrote in his diary:
He [Kennedy] cheerfully entered into the conversation and before long he was saying that Germany would win, that everything in France and England would go to hell, and that his one interest was in saving his money for his children. He began to criticize the president very sharply, whereupon Bill took issue with him….Bill told him he was abysmally ignorant on foreign affairs and hadn’t any basis for expressing an opinion. He emphasized that as long as Joe was a member of the Administration he ought to be loyal—or at least keep his mouth shut. They parted in anger.50
Kennedy had no desire to return to London to resume his duties, but return he did, arriving on February 28, 1940. His four-day ocean voyage, aboard the SS Manhattan, had been made more pleasant by the opportunity to spend each night in the company of Clare Boothe Luce, journalist and playwright and the wife of Time and Life media mogul Henry Luce. The Luces had been guests at the London embassy in the spring of 1938; sometime after that, Joe and Clare began secretly seeing each other when circumstances permitted, usually in London, occasionally in New York. (“Golly that was nice,” she cabled him after a fall 1938 visit to England; in May 1939, another cable read, “Sailing Normandie Tuesday. Save me lunch and/or dinner. Chat. Alone. Love, Clare.” He did better than that: he offered to meet the ship at Southampton and drive her to London.) Kennedy loved her good looks, her indefatigable energy and ambition, her keen intelligence; she relished the same things about him. Somehow in their pillow talk they looked past their sharply divergent views on world politics—Clare was an interventionist through and through.51
Nothing and no one could alter Kennedy’s view. “I haven’t changed one idea of mine in the past year,” he told Arthur Krock. “I always believed that if England stayed out of war it would be better for the United States and for that reason I was a great believer in appeasement. I felt that if war came, that was the beginning of the end for everybody, provided it lasted for two or three years. I see no reason yet for changing my mind one bit.”52
The war was entering its seventh month as Kennedy returned to his post, but so far little had occurred. In the opinion of Life magazine, it was “a queer sort of world war—unreal and unconvincing.” Following Poland’s surrender, in early October 1939, no real fighting between Germany and the Western powers had occurred. There were no German aerial raids over Paris or London, no Allied thrusts on the Ruhr. The Germans did launch a submarine campaign against Allied shipping, but only on a modest scale, as Hitler did not wish to agitate the Western powers, hoping for a peace that would leave him with a free hand in the east. The Phony War, it came to be called, or the Bore War, or Sitzkrieg (the sitting war), or, in France, La Drôle de Guerre.
British and French leaders breathed a sigh of relief, as did their populations. “The pause suits us well,” Foreign Secretary Halifax remarked.53 An air of complacency set in, born of the fact that the Allies had prevailed in 1918 and were, on paper, numerically superior. They could claim 3,500 tanks, for example, against Germany’s 2,500. In theory, their strengths were complementary, with the Royal Navy ruling the seas and the French boasting huge and well-equipped land forces. The Maginot Line, the vast string of fortified positions along the Franco-German border designed to keep out the Wehrmacht, added a sense of security.
In the United States, President Roosevelt felt certain that the quietude of the Phony War would not last, and he warned Americans against being complacent. (“It is not good for the ultimate health of ostriches to bury their heads in the sand.”)54 But he didn’t exactly practice what he preached. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in November 1939, he issued a strongly worded condemnation but did nothing more, such as send assistance to the intrepid Finns. Over the winter he allowed America’s defense buildup to lag and did little to mobilize support for the Allies. Roosevelt had expended great effort and political capital to win the battle of revising the neutrality laws in the fall, but it was as though he decided that was enough; he would go no further.55 Even his plan to produce ten thousand aircraft per year was soon slashed by almost 70 percent. Congressional leaders, focused on the upcoming elections and seeing no real fighting in Europe, were in no mood to spend big on defense; FDR, his own standing on Capitol Hill still diminished, was reluctant to press them, even as he railed privately against the isolationists. His distrust of Joe Kennedy greater than ever, he remained determined to keep him in London, where he could do the least damage to the administration’s political fortunes.
Kennedy felt further undermined when Roosevelt dispatched Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on a fact-finding mission to Germany, Italy, France, and Britain in the late winter of 1940. Publicly, the urbane and stylish diplomat’s only task was to listen and observe—“the visit is solely for the purpose of advising the President and the Secretary of State as to present conditions in Europe,” Roosevelt told the press on February 9. Privately, however, the president authorized Welles to actively explore whether some means could be found to end the war before it escalated further. The chances were next to nil, Roosevelt believed, but it was worth one final shot. Kennedy, though he had agitated for months for a presidential peace initiative, was livid upon learning of the mission. “Now just where does that put me?” he thundered, just prior to his departure from the United States. “You would think I had just been pouring tea over there instead of working my head off. If they think they need a special ambassador over there to get all the British secrets I failed to get, they can count me out.” But
when Welles landed in London on March 10, Kennedy dutifully accompanied him to meetings with the British leadership.56
Nothing came of the Welles effort. He returned to Washington at the end of March with a sense of foreboding. “The leaders he talked to,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull recorded in his memoirs, “offered no real hope for peace.”57
V
More and more that winter and spring, the Kennedy brothers at Harvard saw the European war in contrasting ways. Joe Junior kept on trumpeting an unvarnished isolationism, more stark even than his father’s. Jack, on the other hand, came back to school after the Christmas break more convinced than ever that isolationism was untenable, its adherents guilty of underestimating the Nazi threat. “He was very much disturbed by Nazism,” Payson Wild observed of Jack in this period. “He was somewhat embarrassed by his father’s position, but he didn’t get on any stands or pulpits to declare his difference of opinion. He was a very loyal son.”58
One reason for his discretion may have been that he had a more pressing matter at hand: writing his thesis. The work was all-consuming that winter, and friends recalled the long hours he spent in the Spee Club library, toiling away, surrounded by stacks of books and documents, his Underwood typewriter in front of him, as the fireplace burned orange and red and the snow fell outside. “How’s your book coming?” they would ask him—in jest, as no one really believed it would become a published work. He would respond with a disquisition on whatever section he was working on. “We used to tease him about it all the time,” one of them remembered, “because it was sort of his King Charles head that he was carrying around all the time: his famous thesis. We got so sick of hearing about it that I think he finally shut up.”59
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