That evening, after a hasty breakup of the gathering, Kennedy went upstairs and, with Rose, checked on the sleeping Joseph Junior, who was just shy of his first birthday. “This is the only happiness that lasts,” he said softly, then walked away.12
The remark gets at a core aspect of Kennedy’s worldview, one that would condition his approach to not only this world war but the one still to come. Cynical about human nature, he tended to see international problems not in moral or geopolitical terms but on the basis of economics; even more, he judged such matters according to what they meant for him personally and for his family. This mindset inclined him toward isolationism in foreign policy, and it opened him to charges of myopia and selfishness.
But there was also power in Joe Kennedy’s analysis that summer day in Winthrop. He might have been a minority of one at this particular gathering, but many thoughtful and informed Americans in 1916 shared his deep skepticism about the supposed “grandeur of the struggle” and his opposition to the United States’ becoming directly engaged in the fighting. However much the war correspondents might romanticize the “terrible beauty” and “glorious purpose” of the Somme fighting, Kennedy grasped the sordid truth: it was wretchedness. On the first day alone, the British lost almost twenty thousand soldiers, some 30 percent of them behind their own lines on account of artillery fire. By the time the battle ended, Britain and France had suffered 600,000 dead or wounded to earn only 125 square miles; the Germans had lost 400,000 men. At Verdun that same year, 336,000 Germans perished, and at Passchendaele, in 1917, more than 370,000 British men died to gain about forty miles of mud and barbed wire. Ambassador Page grew sickened by what Europe had become—“a bankrupt slaughter-house inhabited by unmated women.”13
In the presidential election of 1916, Kennedy cast a heartfelt vote for Woodrow Wilson, whose campaign slogan was both a boast and a promise: “He kept us out of war!” The rallying cry worked, and Wilson was narrowly reelected. But the promise proved short-lived. Long convinced that the United States could no longer isolate itself from international power politics, Wilson believed that he alone occupied the best position to mediate a fair settlement and stop the bloodshed. At the same time, he feared that only if the United States became a belligerent could he be assured of a seat at the negotiating table.14 He was still grappling with this dilemma when Germany, in a desperate bid to upset the military balance, commenced total submarine warfare on February 17, 1917. All ships in war zones were now fair game. Two days later, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Berlin.
When war came two months later, Kennedy expressed no enthusiasm. The surge of patriotic fervor that even many former opponents of intervention experienced eluded him. Unlike most of his Harvard friends, Kennedy did not enlist, but on June 5, one week after John’s birth, he reported to his local polling place and completed his registration card. It soon became clear that he would get no exemption for marriage or fatherhood, but an “industrial exemption” might be possible, provided he had a job that qualified. In September 1917, Joe jumped at the offer to become assistant general manager of the Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, ten miles south of Boston, which had been contracted to produce destroyers for the war effort.15
A happy Jack at approximately six months, in fall 1917.
Kennedy knew little about shipbuilding, but he was a quick study and nothing if not industrious, frequently putting in seventy-hour workweeks and often sleeping in his office. Colleagues marveled at his stamina, and Rose and the family seldom saw him except on Sundays. When, to his astonishment, his draft board in February 1918 informed him he had been classified Class 1 and might be called for military service, Kennedy appealed immediately for a deferment “on industrial grounds” and included with his appeal a lengthy letter in which he laid out his responsibilities at Fore River.16 His superiors vouched for him, and the effort worked. He never received a deferment, but neither was he called for the draft, and he remained at Fore River till the end of the war.
That end came sooner than many anticipated, and the American contribution was considerable. Allied victory in the Second Battle of the Marne, northeast of Paris, in July 1918 stopped all German advances, and in the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive that followed, more than a million American soldiers joined French and British units in six weeks of ferocious combat along much of the Western Front, beginning with a U.S. strike northward toward Sedan on September 26. More than 26,000 Americans died in the ensuing struggle, and another hundred thousand were wounded—making it the bloodiest campaign in American history to this day—before the Allies gained the upper hand. For Germany, there was no escape. Its submarine war and ground operations had been stymied, its exhausted troops and cities were mutinous, and the kaiser had abdicated. Allied Austria and Turkey were giving up the fight. The Entente powers, meanwhile, had the luxury of endless American troop reinforcements and arms shipments. Peace became essential, and the Germans accepted an exacting armistice. It went into effect on the morning of November 11, 1918, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.17
No one can fully calculate the costs of the war, but the magnitude is clear enough: the belligerents counted some ten million soldiers and a roughly equal number of civilians dead and twenty million people wounded, eight million of them permanently disabled. Fifty-three thousand U.S. soldiers perished in battle. The economic damage was immense as well, which helps to explain the pervasive starvation Europe endured in the winter of 1918–19. Economic activity on much of the Continent withered, and transport over meaningful distances was in some countries almost impossible. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires disappeared, and for a time it seemed the Bolshevik Revolution would spread westward into the heart of a weak and weary Europe. “We are at the dead season of our fortunes,” wrote one young British observer, the economist John Maynard Keynes. “Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”18