The file, which remained classified for the next several decades, contains various explanations for the ambassador’s gloom: his Irish American heritage, which made him delight in “seeing the lion’s tail twisted”; his innately pessimistic worldview; his acceptance, thanks to the reports of Charles Lindbergh and Joe Junior, of the notion of German air superiority; and his laser-like focus on “the financial side of things,” which rendered him unable, “poor man, [to] see the imponderabilia which, in a war like this, will be decisive.” William Hillman, a U.S. journalist and friend of Kennedy’s, told a Foreign Office contact that Kennedy was “a professing Catholic who loathed Hitler and Hitlerism almost, though perhaps not quite, as much as he loathed Bolshevism, but he was also a self-made man who had known poverty and who did not want to know it again.” Hillman got the poverty bit wrong, but on the whole his assessment rang true. The prospect of “bankruptcy and defeat” had become obsessions in the ambassador’s mind, he said, which had the effect of making him immune to reason.12