Second, the book represented for Jack Kennedy a political emancipation from his father. He remained the devoted son, and would stay under his father’s influence in important respects (though not as much as many later authors and documentary filmmakers would have us believe), but he showed here a capacity for independent thought that is notable—and that the father, to his credit, did not discourage. As Stephen C. Schlesinger notes in the foreword to a recent reissue of the book, Why England Slept constituted “a studied rebuke to the whole idea of appeasement—and so, in part, to his own father’s views.” (That a young man who saw Hitler’s Europe up close would abandon the pro-appeasement position isn’t surprising; indeed, the oddity is that Joe Junior, who also traversed the Continent in the lead-up to war, stayed doggedly true to Joe Senior’s outlook.) When, in August, a reporter from the Boston Herald had the temerity to ask Jack if he was a “mouthpiece” for his famous father, he offered a biting reply: “I haven’t seen my father in six months, nor are we of the same opinion concerning certain British statesmen.” Six months was about how much time had elapsed since he started serious work on the thesis that became the book. With his book, Jack had staked out his own independent position on the most pressing international issue of the day: how to respond to the menace of German power. And his audience was no longer just his father or his thesis committee, but readers everywhere.25
III
Solicitations of all kinds now flowed thick and fast into his mailbox. Some correspondents urged him to write a follow-up volume, others that he pen a series of magazine articles, still others that he take his show on the road with a major lecture tour. A New York University professor of history, Geoffrey Brown, offered his help in getting Jack connected to a big-name publisher. But Bruce Hopper, Jack’s Harvard mentor, urged caution. “Because of your years, you will be the object of all kinds of offers,” Hopper wrote him in late summer. “Beware them all.”
Of course, there are some of your readers who will assume that you got your material from your father. I know you got your material by yourself, and wrote your thesis by yourself. In the end it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. What does matter is that you protect yourself from the pressure to lend your name to this or that cause. The public is fickle, and, in the end, ungrateful. And the public ruins its idols, yes?
I can’t imagine you getting excited over public acclaim, so this word is really unnecessary. It is just that I know your mailbox must be full of laudatory reviews, letters of appreciation, and offers (maybe even from Hollywood!). Take them all in perspective, as reward for a job well done, and then try to forget them.26
Jack took Hopper’s advice to heart, more or less. He flirted with writing a second book, this one focused on America’s role in the collapse of peace between the wars, but soon shelved the idea. He rejected requests for shorter articles and turned down myriad speaking invitations, contenting himself with granting interviews, many conducted on the phone from the family home in Hyannis Port, in between touch football games and sailing outings. Charles “Chuck” Spalding, a tall and gangly new acquaintance who in time would become one of his closest friends, recalled, on his first visit to the home, seeing Jack seated in the living room, signing copies of the book, a stack of admiring letters strewn about—one of them, from the prime minister of some country or other, was on the floor under a damp bathing suit. (Like countless other visitors, Spalding marveled at the extraordinary energy in the home as family members buzzed all around, everyone “vitally involved” in everything. It was infectious. “Right then it seemed to me this was something special,” Spalding remembered. “It is a very startling thing to run into. You can go your whole life without finding that kind of excitement.”)27
Sooner or later, the interviewers got to the question of What next? Jack had a ready answer: he would enroll in Yale Law School. Some months before, he had asked Harvard to send his transcript to the admissions office in New Haven, and Yale responded promptly to say he was in.28 But though he had made noises to Hopper and others about being interested in international law, the idea of pursuing a legal education was half-formed at best, more a postgraduate plan that sounded good and sensible than something he had thought through. To friends like Lem Billings, Jack seemed much more inclined—whether he fully admitted it to himself or not—to a career in journalism or academia or politics. For that matter, for Jack as for many college graduates that summer, the darkening world situation made all plans fluid. Was war in the offing? Would there be conscription, as the Washington bigwigs seemed to hint? (The answer would be yes: a congressional bill that September authorized the first peacetime draft.) In Billings’s recollection, he and Jack Kennedy and their peers, regardless of their immediate employment status, were merely marking time, playing the waiting game.29
Health problems also reared up to complicate Jack’s planning. In addition to experiencing the ill-diagnosed gastrointestinal issues of old, he suffered from back pain. The cause was uncertain, but he speculated it was his college football injury flaring up. He also appears to have had a malady that his doctors at the Lahey Clinic, in Boston, and the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota (to which he returned for tests in early September), kept carefully hidden—namely, venereal disease. The urologist at Lahey, whose report said the infection occurred in the spring of 1940, effectively treated the gonorrhea but could do little with the accompanying symptoms. Jack soon complained to his older brother about the painful urination and repeated the doctors’ grim word that the urethritis would be his occasional companion for the rest of his days. For the combination of ailments, the physicians at Lahey and Mayo recommended against the stress of full-time legal studies and in favor of quiet convalescence.30
And so, in the late summer of 1940, Jack scrapped his law school plans, at least for the time being, and set out for California.31 He wanted to get his health in order in the sunshine, he told friends and family, and vowed to keep productive by auditing classes at Stanford University. Joe Junior’s friend Tom Killefer had waxed lyrical about the country-club quality of Stanford, nestled among rolling hills thirty miles south of San Francisco, and had reminded Jack that, unlike most of the Ivy League, the school was coeducational, which meant the presence of some two thousand female students (who were forbidden from walking on the quad unless they wore silk stockings). Jack had all the information he needed and headed west. It was a lark more than anything else. He intended to study business but soon found that the topic bored him, and he drifted instead into classes on politics and international relations. Even more, he drifted into student hangouts on and around campus, often pulling up in his slick new Buick convertible coupe with red leather seats, purchased with earnings from Why England Slept.32
A minor celebrity on account of his book and being the son of Ambassador Kennedy, Jack made few male friends on the overwhelmingly Republican campus (it didn’t help that he insisted on wearing an FDR button everywhere he went, or that he didn’t smoke and seldom touched alcohol), but he was popular among the coeds, who were drawn by his casual appearance and tousled hair, and by—several later said—his undeniable magnetism and sex appeal. He fell especially hard for Harriet Price, a witty and strikingly beautiful member of the Pi Phi sorority who went by the nickname of Flip and was considered a campus queen. The two drove to Carmel and San Francisco together (taking breaks en route so that Jack could get out and stretch his sore back), attended Stanford football games, went to movies, and dined at L’Omelette and Dinah’s Shack. What they did not do was have sex: Flip rebuffed his every attempt, insisting that she would not exchange her virginity for anything but marriage. “I was wildly in love with him,” she recalled. “I think Jack was in love with me…but no, he wasn’t ready for marriage.”33
Ambassador Kennedy was a frequent topic of conversation. “He talked of his father’s infidelities,” Price remembered, and clearly “knew everything that was going on in the marriage….I think his father ha
d a tremendous influence, I don’t think there’s any question about that, but not all to the good! It seemed to me that his father’s obvious rather low opinion of his wife and the way he treated her, that some of that rubbed off on Jack. He wasn’t mean or anything about his mother, but I think that denigration, that came from the father, rubbed off on the son. And that’s where all the womanizing and everything came from!”34
Price would have felt confirmed in her view if she’d seen some of the correspondence between father and son. The letters from this period (and later) make amply clear that the ambassador expected Joe and Jack to carry on sexually in the same way he did, and to view women as little more than objects to be conquered. “It strikes me that you and Joe must have done some great work over there when I wasn’t looking,” he says in one missive, a reference to a “beautiful blonde” from England who’d contacted him to express her gratitude for Jack’s help in getting her a residence permit in the United States. Jack, for his part, after a trip to the American South earlier in 1940, reports to his father that “an awful lot of people were down—three girls to every man—so I did better than usual—the girls—having a bit of a battle at first but finished up the week in a blaze of glory.”35
The West Coast interlude is notable for one additional reason. On October 29, three thousand miles away, a blindfolded secretary of war, Henry Stimson, facing a phalanx of news cameras, reached into a large glass bowl shortly after noon to select the first draft lottery slips. He handed each slip to President Roosevelt. The eighteenth one bore the serial number 2748. “The holder of 2748 for the Palo Alto area,” reported The Stanford Daily on its first page, “is Jack Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, and student at Stanford Business School. Young Kennedy is the author of a recent best-seller on the conditions of England before the outbreak of World War II.”36
Jack Kennedy, too sick for law school, had been drafted.
To his embarrassment, the news spread far beyond the campus newspaper. Jack’s close friend Rip Horton recalled being in a movie theater in New Jersey “just at the time the draft was being put into effect—drafting men into the Army….[Jack’s] picture was flashed on the screen and I remember getting quite a kick out of it, thinking of him being drafted into the service.” There followed teasing cables and letters to Jack from various friends, all of whom could see the incongruities: not merely that their sickly friend faced a call-up, but that his father was a vociferous opponent of U.S. intervention in foreign wars.37
IV
Though Jack didn’t mention it in his correspondence with friends, one other element factored into his thinking: the association of his surname with cowardice, courtesy of his father’s ostensible routine in wartime London. In recent months, some British observers had accused the ambassador of lacking grace under fire because of his habit of retreating most every evening from the city to his sixty-room rented mansion in Windsor rather than face the German air raids in central London: the Blitz had begun on September 7 and would last until May 10, 1941. (By October the Luftwaffe had ceased daytime operations in favor of night attacks alone.)38 “Jittery Joe,” the critics called him, and soon the accusation made its way into the press. “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy,” one Foreign Office wit sneered, and even some Americans took notice: “Once the Blitz started,” Kennedy’s aide Harvey Klemmer recalled, “he went to the country almost every night. He kept saying he had nine kids to look after, this big family he was responsible for. He took off every night before it got dark.”39
The “Jittery Joe” charge was largely bogus. By all accounts, Kennedy showed scant fear when the German bombs fell close to him, including at least once near his country home. Henry Luce remembered speaking with him on the transatlantic phone on one occasion when aerial attacks could be heard in the background; Kennedy spoke calmly and conveyed no special concern.40 What really lay behind the cowardice claim, one suspects, was British annoyance at the ambassador’s unyielding bearishness. He still believed—as did, it should be noted, a great many other informed observers on both sides of the Atlantic—that Britain faced ultimate, inevitable defeat against the Germans and should therefore seek to make peace with them.41 He failed to realize that this defeatism, and in particular his willingness to express it so openly, only served to reduce his already plummeting influence with policymakers. Winston Churchill didn’t trust him, and neither did the Foreign Office. His own government in Washington kept him out of all high-stakes bilateral negotiations, including the destroyers-for-bases agreement, sealed in early September, in which fifty aging U.S. destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy in exchange for access to air and naval bases in British colonies. The isolation left Kennedy angry and humiliated in equal measure.*1
“The people here keep saying their chin is up and that they can’t be beaten,” he vented in a letter to Jack in September, “but the people who have had any experience with these bombings don’t like it at all….The only thing I am afraid of is that I won’t be able to live long enough to tell all that I see and feel about this crisis. When I hear these mental midgets (USA) talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils. What is this war going to prove? And what is it going to do to civilization? The answer to the first question is nothing; and to the second I shudder even to think about it.”42
Having long since grasped that he remained in London only because Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep him from inserting himself into the hotly contested presidential campaign back home (FDR and Willkie were neck and neck in the polls), Kennedy in October took the risky step of demanding to be recalled. If the State Department did not do so, he added, aide Eddie Moore would release to the press a document containing a full and frank expression of Kennedy’s views. The ensuing hoopla, the ambassador implied, could be enough to swing the election to Willkie. It was naked blackmail, and it worked: Kennedy was summoned to Washington in late October, with instructions to make no public comment of any kind until he had met with the president. Before departure he called on the king and queen and visited Neville Chamberlain, dying of throat cancer, who whispered to him, “This is goodbye. We will never see each other again.”43
No love lost: Joe Kennedy and Winston Churchill outside 10 Downing Street, in the final days of Kennedy’s ambassadorship.
Thus came to an end, for all practical purposes, the great adventure known as “Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador.” He was, it must be said, miscast for the role, as some had suspected from the start. He lacked the successful diplomat’s skill at discretion, lacked a sense of history, lacked a subtle understanding of people and their motivations, lacked a feel for the abstractions of world politics. Cynical and pessimistic by nature, he tended to view political matters, including foreign affairs, mostly according to what they meant for him personally and for his family; if the same could be said for many people in this world, with Kennedy it was more extreme, more unfiltered, and left him without a broad sense of responsibility to a shared cause. Though no champion of Nazi Germany, he tolerated Hitler far longer than did most other appeasers, including Chamberlain—through the invasion of Poland, through the fall of France, through even the Blitz and the end of his ambassadorship. Some part of him even lamented the stoic fortitude of his British hosts, since the longer they endured, the greater the likelihood of a U.S. military intervention.44
For all that, Kennedy’s tenure in London was not without successes. He won deserved praise, for example, for reorganizing embassy operations to make them more efficient and productive. He was affable, vigorous, and hardworking, and his early dispatches to Washington showed that he could be an insightful observer of the British political scene. (Even seasoned State Department experts appreciated his missives, which drew on his close contacts with Chamberlain and Halifax in particular.) In bilateral trade talks he was in his element, and he proved adept at negotiating
trade issues with skill and finesse. If Europe had remained in a state of peace during his ambassadorship, Kennedy might have departed triumphantly, his political future still rosy at age fifty-two; instead he left under the darkest of clouds, his prospects for high elected office shattered forever.45
JFK Page 35