He then pressed on to the Continent, at the invitation of Navy secretary James Forrestal, a former New York banker who knew Joseph Kennedy well. Short and trim and intensely driven, with a penchant for intellectual sparring, Forrestal had risen from humble roots in upstate New York to make a fortune on Wall Street, then had used his connections to gain a high position in Washington, first as special assistant to FDR, then as undersecretary of the Navy, then, starting in May 1944, as secretary.45 Long impressed by Jack, he hoped to recruit the younger Kennedy to a position in the Navy Department, and imagined that some travel together to the Berlin suburb of Potsdam (where an Allied leaders’ conference was under way) and through war-torn Germany might strengthen the bond between them and seal the deal. They met in Paris in late July and flew from there to the German capital, the utter destructiveness of the war easy to see from the air.
It looked still worse from the ground. Hotel Excelsior, Jack’s home on his previous visit to Berlin, in the days just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was literally a shell of its former grand self, on account of the bombing damage. But elsewhere, too, the devastation seemed complete.