JFK
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Simultaneously, Roosevelt made one of the most critical decisions of his presidency: he would run for an unprecedented third term—out of duty, he insisted, not personal ambition. Aware that the move would be controversial in some quarters, he proceeded with care, working behind the scenes and quietly allowing political lieutenants to fashion a “spontaneous” show of support for him at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The tactic worked to perfection, and he coasted to the nomination. At the same time, Roosevelt shrewdly built bipartisan support for his leadership by appointing two prominent Republicans, former secretary of state Henry Stimson and 1936 vice presidential candidate and newspaper publisher Frank Knox, to head the War and Navy departments. In a speech at the University of Virginia on June 10, the president pledged to build up U.S. defenses and to provide those fighting the Axis powers with “the material resources of this nation,” even as he continued to downplay the notion that the United States might become a belligerent. “We will not slow down or detour,” he declared. “Signs and signals call for speed—full speed ahead.”4
John Wheeler-Bennett, the British historian and propagandist who had assisted young John F. Kennedy on his thesis (enough so that he got a mention in the acknowledgments), was in the audience for the speech. He recalled the “shock of excitement which passed through me….This was what we had been praying for—not only sympathy but pledges of support. If Britain could only hold on until these vast resources could be made available to her, we could yet survive and even win the war. It was the first gleam of hope.” As Wheeler-Bennett understood, it would take time for the tangible support to materialize, but he saw the moment as crucial regardless. So did Time—with the president’s address, the magazine declared, American neutrality was effectively over. “The U.S. has taken sides….Ended is the utopian hope that [it] could remain an island of democracy in a totalitarian world.”5
Not so fast, Roosevelt would have replied. Always fearful of isolationist strength—too much so, in the minds of some aides and more than a few historians—he was acutely averse to getting ahead of public opinion. And Americans, he knew, remained divided. If the fall of France propelled interventionist organizations such as William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (which by August 1, three months after its founding, had nearly seven hundred chapters in forty-seven states), it also energized the opposition. In July, a group headed by Yale students and midwestern businessmen formed the America First Committee, which drew adherents from across the political spectrum and declared itself unalterably opposed to intervention—and to assistance to Great Britain, since this would ultimately lead to intervention. Membership would rise to 800,000 and would include figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walt Disney, Lillian Gish, Gerald Ford, and Chester Bowles. Not all America Firsters were isolationist in the strict sense; most supported foreign trade, for example, and many backed maintaining cultural links with other nations. Few were pacifists or conscientious objectors. What drove them, rather, was the conviction, voiced consistently by people such as Joseph P. Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh (neither a member of the group, though Lindbergh would in time join), that the United States should steer clear of the European power struggle and, more broadly, should retain its freedom of action and stay unencumbered by commitments to other countries.6
Joe Kennedy’s conviction on this score had not lessened one bit as a result of the French collapse. His oldest son, too, thought it more important than ever that Washington remain aloof from the European maelstrom; to the extent that the administration involved itself, father and son maintained, it should be to try to encourage an accommodation of Hitler through diplomacy. Now entering his second year at Harvard Law School, Joe Junior became one of the leaders of the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention, which saw as its purpose “making vocal the opinion of that overwhelming majority of Harvard students who want America to stay out of the wars in Europe and Asia.” Soon Joe Junior found himself speaking before student and civic groups around Cambridge. He gave no quarter, insisting at every turn that the White House seemed poised to take the nation down the slippery road to war, and that the result would be calamitous. Far better, he argued, for the United States to steer clear of the fighting and seek trade deals with Nazi Germany.7
More than principle was at stake for Young Joe—the debates and the talks were also useful practice for him in his budding political career. He liked public speaking but had a tendency to become tense and trip over his words, so he enrolled in evening classes at Staley School of the Spoken Word. He also got involved in the state Democratic Party, even supporting James Farley as the party’s candidate for president over FDR. As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Joe Junior shook off the pleadings of party officials to switch his allegiance and, despite knowing Farley could not win, voted for him on the first ballot, one of seventy-two delegates to do so (against 946 who went with Roosevelt). When Roosevelt’s men called Joe Senior in London and asked him to intervene with his son, the ambassador refused. “No, I wouldn’t think of telling him what to do.” Though Joe Junior never revealed the exact motivation for his vote, one factor was surely his desire to stick it to a president and an administration that, as he saw it, had humiliated and marginalized his father.8
Jack was home in Hyannis Port with friends when he learned of his brother’s convention controversy. He immediately questioned Joe’s action. Why stick it to a sitting president when it risked alienating powerful party members, whose support Joe would need when he himself ran for office—as everyone, not least Joe himself, knew he intended to do? And all for a Farley candidacy that never had a prayer to begin with? To Jack’s pragmatic mind it seemed a foolish, unnecessary move, one that was also dubious on the merits—did it really make sense to change horses in midstream, to reject an experienced, popular chief executive at a time of acute international tension?9
II
History has little to say on how the hypercompetitive Joe Junior felt about another development that summer of 1940: his brother’s sudden literary success. To his father he offered gracious words about Jack’s book, but to a friend’s father in California he was reportedly more measured, noting that Jack had benefited from professionals’ help.10 If indeed Joe struggled with being outshone in this way, one can see why. After all, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. All his life he had been the golden child, the one who had barely emerged from the womb when his grandfather predicted he would grow up to be president. He had always been the more diligent student, the stronger athlete, whereas Jack had been content to coast along, to goof off—when, that is, he wasn’t laid up in the infirmary. For years Joe had heard his father’s voice in his ear, urging him to write a book. He had tried his damnedest to make it happen, even risking life and limb to file lengthy reports from the Spanish Civil War with the thought that these might then be gathered into a volume. No book resulted, yet now here was his brother, snapping up a contract for a senior thesis that he’d dashed off in a few months from the comfort and safety of Cambridge, then spent a few days revising for publication. Maybe Jack had the better and timelier topic, but the whole thing still seemed unfair.
Jack’s book hit store shelves on July 24. The timing was sublime, coming one month after the fall of France, three weeks after the first German daytime aerial attacks against British land targets (the communities of Wick and Hull), and two weeks after the Luftwaffe started hitting convoy ships in the Channel. The American reading public suddenly clamored for information about the war and its origins, and Why England Slept was one of the first books to offer it. Shrewdly—and brazenly, given that he had been carrying on a long-term love affair with the man’s wife—Joe Kennedy had asked Henry Luce to pen a brief foreword, and the famed publisher agreed. (First Arthur Krock of The New York Times had assisted with revisions and now the legendary head of Time Inc. contributed an introductory essay: Jack did not lack for high-powered help.)11
“When the manuscript, or rather the proofs, arrived, I was very impressed by it,” Luce remembered. “At this time, of course, it was after Munich and the hot war was on. England, as they said, stood alone and the popular tendency was to put all the blame on the so-called appeasers, namely, Mr. Chamberlain and the Tory appeasers, the Cliveden Set.” Why England Slept, however, showed that blame had to be spread across nearly all levels of British society. “What impressed me was, first, that he had done such a careful job of actually reviewing the facts, the facts such as attitudes and voting records, with regard to the crisis in Europe. And I was impressed by his careful scholarship, research, and also by his sense of personal involvement, responsibility in the great crisis that was at that time in flames. And that’s what made me very optimistic about the qualities of mind and of involvement in public affairs that was displayed in this book.”14
In his foreword, Luce lauded the young author’s penetrating analysis and his crucially important concluding message: that Americans must expend every effort to prepare for the likelihood of war. “I cannot recall a single man of my college generation who could have written such an adult book on such a vitally important subject during his Senior year at college,” he enthused.15 Though the essay excoriated the pro-appeasement position of observers such as his father, Jack responded with fulsome gratitude: “The foreword is wonderful, and makes the book far more timely. Especially is this true of the point about the similarity of Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in Our Time,’ and our ‘We Will Never Fight in Foreign Wars,’ and the parallel effect that they have had on our war efforts. I missed this and it was very vital. Also, I am very glad that you gave the background regarding the American responsibility for the present situation, as it is really vitally necessary for any understanding of the problem.”16
Luce’s endorsement no doubt helped sales, although they would have been healthy regardless. Within two days, the first allotment of thirty-five hundred copies had been snapped up, and Wilfred Funk quickly arranged for a second, larger printing. By year’s end Funk could claim sales in the United States and Britain totaling well into five figures—a remarkable result for what was after all a revised undergraduate thesis. The book made the New York Times’s “bestsellers of the week” list for Boston and was a Washington Post “Reader’s Choice” selection.17 The later claim that Joe Kennedy boosted sales by buying cartons of copies that he stored in his Cape Cod basement, though plausible enough in theory (it’s the kind of thing one would expect from him), lacks evidence; even if true, it would not have made much of a difference to a book that rode a wave of highly favorable reviews, in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, the Minneapolis Tribune, and Time, among other publications. A few discordant notes aside—some critics felt Jack was too easy on Baldwin and Chamberlain, and that he left fuzzy what exactly should be the lesson for Americans—the young author won praise for the power and nuance of his argument and the wealth of evidence he marshaled in support of it.
Some reviewers noted the titular allusion to Churchill’s earlier collection of essays, While England Slept, but for the most part they missed the key philosophical difference between the two works: whereas Churchill stressed the role of individuals in shaping history, Kennedy was clinical, impersonal, placing heavy emphasis on structural determinants. (“Personalities,” he lamented in his introduction, “have always been more interesting to us than facts.”18)
No less a figure than the president of the United States offered his congratulations. In a letter addressed to “My dear Jack,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote that he found the book lucid and perceptive, “a great argument for acting and speaking from a position of strength at all times.” Former teachers also reached out, including one from the early years. “I wish now to congratulate little ‘Jackie’ Kennedy of the Devotion School, Brookline,” wrote Mrs. Roberts. “I must confess I am very proud of your success. You are indeed a splendid example of American youth, and your success so early, I am sure, warms your mother and daddy’s heart with pride.” The old Choate headmaster himself, George St. John, lauded Jack’s book for its “restrained, scholarly, and convincing” nature. “That could have been said of the book if it had been written ten or twenty years later in light of History. Coming to the people of America now, it is the work of a patriot, a prophet, and a missionary.”19
Inevitably, the favorable publicity and heavy sales figures rubbed some people the wrong way. One detects more than a little professional envy in the pompous response of famed British economist and professor Harold Laski, onetime teacher of Joe Junior and, briefly, Jack. It would have been easy “to repeat the eulogies Krock and Harry Luce have showered on your boy’s work,” Laski wrote Joe Kennedy, but “I choose the more difficult way of regretting deeply that you let him publish it.” Labeling the work “very immature,” Laski said it lacked any semblance of structure and dwelled “almost wholly on the surface of things.”20
The sounder British judgment was that by the distinguished military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, who praised Why England Slept for the “outstanding way it combines insight with balanced judgment—in a way that nothing that has yet been written here [in Britain] approaches. It is all the more impressive by comparison with other recent books which I have read, by both English and American writers, who were apt to get led astray by superficial appearances, so that they too often miss the wood for the trees, even if they do not go astray down some by-path.” Liddell Hart, whose own book The Defence of Britain had appeared the previous year and covered some of the same ground, did identify several errors of fact or interpretation Jack had committed, but his overall assessment was praiseful—and this from a scholar infinitely more expert on the topic than was Laski.21
The British reviewers were as a group highly complimentary, a fact that gave Jack special satisfaction—he was, after all, writing about their country. John Wheeler-Bennett (who, given his association with the book, should have turned down the assignment) was effusive, commending Jack in The New York Sun for writing not as “the ambassador’s son” but “forming his opinions for himself, sifting his evidence and finally evolving a political and psychological analysis of rare penetration, with an immensely appealing quality of freshness and breadth of understanding.” A tad overheated, maybe, but basically right. Another Eng
lishman, Nigel Dennis, writing in The New Republic, was likewise impressed: “Mr. Kennedy’s is probably the first book that tries to distribute the blame for Britain’s inefficiency in diplomacy and military preparedness among the British people generally. This is a bold departure from the common rule, and the author believes that writers who refuse to take it are fooling their countrymen as well as themselves.” Dennis acknowledged that “a more exact distribution of blame” must await a larger study, but he found it hard to deny either the book’s general thesis or the import of the topic.22
And the contribution would endure. The British historian Hugh Brogan, writing near the end of the century, conceded some shortcomings—Jack drove home some assertions too repetitiously; the assessment of the Munich Crisis did not hold up all that well—but ringingly proclaimed that Why England Slept “will always have an honourable place in the small library which the controversy about British policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain has called into being.” Like the other books on Brogan’s select list—among them Churchill’s The Gathering Storm—Kennedy’s effort was not merely a contribution to historical understanding; it was also, Brogan maintained, a political intervention, in the way it roused its American readers to the great and vital task before them: to confront the reality of the Nazi threat and prepare to meet it, with eyes wide open.23
Of course, it is in biographical terms that Why England Slept really matters to us. We care about it because of what it tells us about John F. Kennedy, age twenty-three and just out of college. And because the book is substantially the same as the thesis, we can again recall Nigel Hamilton’s assessment of the latter: “Nothing else Jack would write in his life would so speak the man.” Two things in particular stand out. First, the book marked a significant early step by Jack toward a public career. To read the book is to see that its young author was clearly fascinated by the problems of democratic leadership in foreign affairs, and the dilemmas that confront policymakers who seek to do what is required of them while not alienating their temperamental constituents. It’s a theme Kennedy would return to in a later book, Profiles in Courage, and a conundrum he would confront to the end of his days. In 1940 he was not a candidate for political office, and the book could certainly have foreshadowed a career in, say, journalism, or academia, or the law. But no contemporaneous reader of the thesis or the book could doubt that here was a potential future politician—especially if that reader also happened to be aware of his lengthy earlier course paper on Congressman Bertrand Snell. Even less can a reader of a subsequent generation fail to see the author’s future implicit in line after line—in the need for an energetic leadership that will awaken and educate the people (the 1960 campaign), for example, and in the importance of “keep[ing] our armaments equal to our commitments” (the Berlin Crisis). The theme of the 1961 inaugural seems, in Brogan’s words, “to be foreshadowed in the observation about Britain in the 1930s, that ‘there was a great lack of young progressive and able leaders. Those who should have been taking over were members of the war generation, so large a portion of whom rested in Flanders Fields.’ ”24