Yet for all his ongoing bitterness, Kennedy knew he had to follow the line he had long preached to his brood: that life is for the living. Resigned to the reality that his own career in public life was in all likelihood over, he fastened his attention ever more firmly on his children. That meant, above all, Jack. It would be Jack, the father hoped, who would restore the Kennedy name to prominence, Jack who would live out the life plan Joe had imagined for Joe Junior. In April, accordingly, the Ambassador got the Hearst-owned Chicago Herald-American to hire Jack to cover the upcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco for the paper as well as for Hearst’s New York Journal-American. Jack jumped at the opportunity—the work would test his suitability for a journalistic career, and might also be a useful prelude to running for office. His beau ideal Churchill, after all, had at one point been a young correspondent in the Sudan and in the Second Boer War, before standing for Parliament.
III
By this time Jack had completed his period of rest and recovery in Arizona’s Bradshaw Mountains and had also paid a visit to Hollywood, in the company of Pat Lannan and Chuck Spalding. There they roomed at the fashionable Beverly Hills Hotel and sampled the nightlife, hobnobbing with film celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, Olivia de Havilland, and the ice skater Sonja Henie. Jack had a blast, even if Cooper’s lack of depth and conversational skill during dinner stunned him—“That’s about a three-word dinner we had,” Jack remarked to Spalding, who had penned a bestselling book, Love at First Flight, that Cooper was interested in adapting for the screen. “Nobody said anything, and if we did, Gary said zero!” An afternoon at de Havilland’s home ended in comical fashion as Jack, his eyes fixed firmly on the movie star, turned the wrong doorknob and opened a tightly packed hall closet, sending tennis rackets, balls, and shoes crashing down on him.15
The trio also met with Inga Arvad, and Spalding could immediately see why Jack had fallen for her, quite apart from her looks—she was warm and witty and enchantingly cosmopolitan. But the relationship was by now purely platonic, whatever faint hopes Jack may have had for more. (Some weeks earlier, he had told Billings that he planned to visit Southern California and “tangle tonsils with Inga Binga.”) Inga’s relationship with William Cahan held steady, and she liked her West Coast life. She feared (wrongly) that she was still under FBI surveillance, moreover, and had no interest in restarting the difficulties she and Jack had experienced in 1942, particularly given his possible pursuit of a political career.16
On April 25, 1945, after a brief stop at the Mayo Clinic for medical tests, Jack headed back west to cover the founding conference of the United Nations, in San Francisco, the greatest gathering of world statesmen since the Versailles Conference of 1919.17 Though the suggestion would subsequently be made that Hearst executives were doing the Kennedys a favor by employing him, it was really shrewd self-interest that drove them—for a modest fee of $750, they got sixteen informative and lucid articles from a war hero who had written a respected book on international affairs and had important family connections to senior U.S. and British officials. He might have still been shy of twenty-eight, but he had credibility.18
The young correspondent’s first story, filed on April 28, reflected his realist outlook, as he cautioned readers that the conference had been given too much of a buildup, with exaggerated hopes for what it could accomplish in a world still driven by core national interests. “There is an impression that this is the conference to end wars and introduce peace on earth and good-will toward nations—excluding of course, Germany and Japan. Well it’s not going to do that.” The leading powers would wish to preserve considerable latitude for themselves—one of them, the Soviet Union, seemed intent on raising a ruckus at the meeting and getting its way on several important issues. Jack then noted that the average GI on San Francisco’s streets had little inkling of the purpose of the conference. He quoted a decorated Marine: “I don’t know much about what’s going on—but if they just fix it so that we don’t have to fight anymore—they can count me in.” Jack added, “Me, too, Sarge.”19
A marked feature of the conference and a constant theme in Kennedy’s dispatches was the growing friction between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. The schism had been evident for months. Already the previous year, the Soviet leadership had distanced itself from the new World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), created at the Bretton Woods Conference, in New Hampshire, in July 1944 in order to stabilize finance and trade. The former was designed to provide developing nations with needed capital, the latter to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with trade deficits. Stalin and his lieutenants held, correctly, that the United States dominated both institutions, and they anticipated that Washington would use them to promote private investment and open international commerce, which to Moscow smacked of capitalist exploitation. More to the point in Stalin’s eyes, it bespoke America’s hegemonic ambition, as did the fact that the conferees at Bretton Woods agreed to make the U.S. dollar the standard currency of world trade, replacing Britain’s pound sterling.20
“Winston Churchill once said that Russian policy was an enigma wrapped in a mystery,” Jack reported on April 30. “I’d like to report to Mr. Churchill that the Russians haven’t changed.” A quarter century of mutual distrust between Russia and the rest of the world could not be overcome easily or quickly, he went on, and history would place a heavy burden on all negotiations. And on May 2: “This conference from a distance may have appeared so far like an international football game with [Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav] Molotov carrying the ball while [the Western representatives] tried to tackle him all over the field.”21
To a degree, Kennedy suggested, the Soviets’ go-it-alone style in the proceedings was understandable, rooted as it was in genuine security concerns, and an absolute conviction that Mother Russia, having endured colossal hardship over the previous four years, must never be invaded again. The Red Army, moreover, had borne the brunt of the fighting against the German war machine, suffering huge casualties, while the Americans and the British dithered over launching the second front; why should the West be trusted now?22 Yet Kennedy cautioned American and British leaders against simply acquiescing to Moscow’s demands, and he anticipated the Cold War that was to come. “There is growing discouragement among people concerning our chances of winning any lasting peace from this war,” he wrote in the third week of the conference. “There is talk of fighting the Russians in the next ten or fifteen years. We have indeed gone a long way since those hopeful days early in the war when we talked of union now and one world.” The following day he was gloomier still, predicting that, in the absence of a meaningful settlement, Soviet-American relations would rapidly worsen. The political battle would go on in Europe and spread to Asia at the conclusion of the war with Japan.23
On May 7, the day of Germany’s surrender and a week after Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their Berlin bunker as the Soviets closed in, Jack articulated the American servicemen’s assessment of the conference. “It is natural that they should be most concerned for its result, because any man who has risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important, what good will it all do,” he wrote. “In their concern, and as a result of their interest, and because they wish above all else to spare their children and their brothers from going through the same hard times, it is perhaps natural that they should be disappointed with what they have seen in San Francisco. I suppose that this is inevitable. Youth is a time for direct action and simplification. To come from battlefields where sacrifice is the order of the day—to come from there to here—it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”24
A private letter to a wartime friend expanded the point, and spoke powerfully to Jack Kennedy’s overall worldvie
w in that spring of 1945:
It would have been very easy to write a letter to you that was angry. When I think of how much this war has cost us, of the deaths of Cy and Peter and Orv and Gil and Demi and Joe and Billy and all those thousands and millions who have died with them—when I think of all those gallant acts that I have seen or anyone has seen who has been to war—it would be a very easy thing for me to feel disappointed and somewhat betrayed….
You have seen the battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning….
Things cannot be forced from the top. The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it….We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war….War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.25
At the midpoint of the conference, Jack gloomily predicted that “the world organization that will come out of San Francisco will be the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” The larger countries in particular were not about to cede their sovereignty to any supranational organization. And later, on May 23, he criticized the veto power being granted to the five major powers on the Security Council: “Thus, any of the Big Five can effectively veto assistance for an attacked nation. With this grave weakness in the new world organization, it is little wonder that the smaller countries have attempted to make treaties with the neighbors for protection against aggressors.”26
He jotted in his notebook, with respect to the UN:
Danger of too great a build-up.
Mustn’t expect too much.
A truly just solution will leave every nation somewhat disappointed.
There is no cure all.27
The young reporter worked diligently by day, but, true to form, he shifted gears in the evenings, taking full advantage of the social opportunities at the conference. On at least one occasion, the fun interfered with the job. Arthur Krock described the scene one evening at the Palace Hotel, with Jack propped up on his bed in his tuxedo, ready for the evening’s festivities, “a highball in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other. To the operator he said, ‘I want to speak to the Managing Editor of the Chicago Herald American.’ (After a long pause) ‘Not in? Well, put someone on to take a message.’ (Another pause) ‘Good. Will you see that the boss gets this message as soon as you can reach him? Thank you. Here’s the message: Kennedy will not be filing tonight.’ ”28
IV
Jack had secured a room at the hotel for Chuck Spalding and his wife, Betty, and saw them most every day. The Spaldings noted his bad back and overall lack of robustness, and his need to spend many mornings resting. “We used to go in and talk to him in the morning before he got out of bed,” Betty recalled. “He was his usual wry kind of humorous self, but not full of energy, not jumping around.” Jack also reconnected with another old acquaintance, Mary Meyer, née Pinchot (her father, Amos Pinchot, was a Progressive Era ally of Theodore Roosevelt), whom he had dated on occasion when he was at Harvard and she was a free-spirited Vassar student of extraordinary beauty. Immediately before the conference she had married Cord Meyer Jr., an intense, brainy veteran of the Pacific war who was in San Francisco as an aide to Commander Harold Stassen, former “boy governor” of Minnesota and now a member of the U.S. delegation. Cord Meyer and Jack sparred early and often at the conference, perhaps on account of their differing temperaments and world outlooks, or perhaps because Jack showed excessive interest in Meyer’s wife. (And indeed, Mary would in time come back into Jack’s life, shortly before his premature death—and her own.)29
Anita Marcus, later to become Red Fay’s wife, remembered meeting Jack at an evening party at the Presidio. “I went to the powder room. All the girls there were talking about Jack Kennedy.” When Marcus came out and sat down at a table, Jack joined her and introduced himself. She was bowled over. “I think the main thing was that when he talked to you, he looked you straight in the eye and his attention never wandered. He was interested in finding out what I was doing there—why I was there. It was a drawing-me-out thing. It was undivided attention. I was the most envied girl in the room. He had a way with women. There was no question about it.”30
In late May, with the conference still going (on June 26, fifty nations would sign the UN charter at the San Francisco Opera House), Jack Kennedy returned to the East Coast, spending a few days in New York and Boston and celebrating his birthday. He then continued eastward to England, in order to cover the British elections for Hearst. It was his first European visit since 1939, when he was in Germany immediately before the Polish invasion and then in the House of Commons when a grim-faced Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war. Now the struggle in Europe was over, and Europe’s leaders faced the task of responding to their restive populations.31 While still in San Francisco, Jack had speculated presciently that Winston Churchill and his Conservatives were vulnerable, even in the afterglow of victory, as many Britons struggled with privation—food rationing, fuel and housing shortages, and bombed-out public buildings. Few American observers then shared this view, and most in Britain likewise predicted a Tory win, but as the election neared it seemed increasingly likely that the great man would be removed.32 Jack followed him on the campaign trail, as full of admiration as ever, and told his readers that the Conservatives might eke out a narrow win. Still, “Churchill is fighting a tide that is surging through Europe, washing away monarchies and conservative governments everywhere, and that tide flows powerfully in England. England is moving towards some form of socialism—if not in this election, then surely at the next.”33 It would be this one: in July voters rejected Churchill and gave Labour, under Clement Attlee, a sweeping victory.
Kennedy had seen it coming, but even so, he was stunned. He’d always understood, in a way his father never did, that Churchill, whatever his flaws, whatever his strategic and tactical errors, was the wartime leader Britain needed, the one who’d assumed power in the darkest of hours in May 1940, and, through his extraordinary speechmaking, had brought out in his people qualities they had forgotten they possessed: resilience, steadfastness, unflappable determination. Thenceforth, observers everywhere understood, only defeat following a direct invasion would take Britain out of the struggle. In the grueling years thereafter, Churchill made his share of miscalculations and saw his influence within the Grand Alliance eclipsed by Roosevelt and Stalin, but he hung tight, firm in purpose and unhesitating in action, his fearless tenacity ultimately vindicated. Yet now he was ousted, just like that.
Pat Lannan, who had secured his own reporting gig and was with Jack in London, marveled at the number of Brits who now flocked to see his friend, often for late-afternoon drinks and political talk in the suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel that the two Americans shared. David Ormsby-Gore came, as did William Douglas-Home and Hugh Fraser, whom Jack had met through Kick. “Oftentimes in this little sitting room which wasn’t very large there could have been seven or eight of us at one time, and they would all have been his friends,” Lannan remembered. “I think Jack was very seriously excited about the election, about what was going to happen to Europe, what sort of Europe was going to emerge from the war.” Fraser agreed. It impressed him that Jack drove for much of the night in sister Kick’s cramped Austin to accompany him as he campaigned (successfully) as the Tory candidate in Stone, 130 miles northwest of London.34
Jack also covered the campaign of Alastair Forbes, a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt who was running (unsuccessfully) as the Liberal candidate in Hendon, north London. Kick had
introduced the two men, and they hit it off immediately.35 Like Fraser, Forbes was struck by Kennedy’s interest in coming to routine campaign appearances and listening to the speeches, absorbing how it was done in Britain, taking mental notes, asking the right questions. He seemed to Forbes to be the most intellectual member of the Kennedy family, even if not an intellectual per se—that is, someone interested in ideas for ideas’ sake. “He had a fantastically good instinct,” Forbes recalled, “once his attention was aroused in a problem, for getting the gist of it and coming to a mature judgment about it.” But there was also in Jack a detachment of a type Forbes saw as well in Churchill, one he suspected grew out of both men’s privileged backgrounds: “Money was the great insulator. If you don’t sort of make your bed and get your own breakfast and have a certain amount of conversation with people who are doing all sorts of ordinary, simple jobs, it does rob you of a great deal of empathy. I mean, whole areas in which empathy should naturally play a part are closed to you.”36
The economist Barbara Ward, another friend of Kick’s, recalled meeting Jack on that same visit and finding him insatiably fascinated by the electoral process, down to the narrow particulars. “You could see already that this young lieutenant was political to his fingertips. So my chief memory is of a very young man, still hardly with the eggshell off his back, he seemed so young, but with an extraordinarily, I would say, well-informed interest in the political situation he was seeing.”37
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