“Was at lunch today with the Lindberghs and they are the most attractive couple I’ve ever seen,” he confided to Billings in early April, without giving away what he thought of Charles Lindbergh’s pro-German sympathies or his gloomy analysis of the Anglo-French readiness for war (if he even knew about them). Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in particular, charmed him: “She takes a rotten picture and is really as pretty as hell and terribly nice.” Her husband didn’t return the compliment, writing in his diary of the luncheon that there were “probably forty people there, including some of society’s greatest bores.”16

On April 28, Jack and the rest of the embassy staff tuned in to Hitler’s two-hour, twenty-minute speech to the Reichstag, which was occasioned by Franklin Roosevelt’s message two weeks before in which he asked for Hitler’s assurance that he would desist for the next twenty-five years from attacking a list of thirty nations. In exchange, FDR said, Washington would play its part on behalf of disarmament and equal access to world markets and raw materials. Hitler rejected the offer, his voice dripping with sarcasm, to the delight of his roaring audience, and he also took the opportunity to renounce Germany’s nonaggression pact with Poland and to renew German claims to the seaport of Danzig.^*1 “Just listened to Hitler’s speech which they consider bad,” Jack wrote to Billings right afterwards. He himself was less concerned, he went on, for if the German leader hoped to go after Danzig or all of Poland, “the time would have been a month ago before Poland and England signed up. That he didn’t shows a reluctance on his part so I still think it will be OK. The whole thing is damn interesting and if this letter wasn’t going on a German boat and if they weren’t opening mail could tell you some interesting stuff.”17

This was Jack’s pattern during that spring of 1939: he tended in his correspondence to underestimate both the German dictator’s bellicosity and, more generally, the seriousness of European tensions and the likelihood of war. He also seems to have misjudged the shift in the popular mood that had occurred in France and especially Britain during the seven months he had been back in the United States. The Munich agreement had created a split in British opinion that persisted into the new year, but little by little the appeasers found themselves losing the battle for public support. The fall of Prague on March 15 effectively killed the debate, giving the lie to Chamberlain’s twin claims, upon returning from Bavaria, that he had brought “peace for our time,” as well as “peace with honor.” Together with the final defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, culminating in the fall of Madrid in late March, it created in a great many Britons the conviction that the fascists could be stopped only by military force. Sooner or later, the battle would come. Moreover, many felt, Britain was now more ready to fight than it had been the previous fall, its rearmament program having made significant strides in the interval. To some observers, war might even be something to look forward to, if it helped wash away the malaise they felt had permeated British and European society since the decade began.18

All this is no doubt more clear in hindsight than it was at the time, but even so, Jack’s failure to detect the transformation in popular attitudes is striking, especially given his own Anglophilia, evident from a young age but now given more opportunities for full expression. The upper-class British credo “Work hard, play hard, socialize hard” came naturally to him, he realized, and he admired the qualities often associated with “posh” Englishmen: cleverness, wit, irony, understatement, detachment, indirection, coolness under fire, self-possession. The actor David Niven was a modern archetype, while an earlier one was Queen Victoria’s Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne—at least as rendered by David Cecil in his absorbing, gossipy biography The Young Melbourne, which appeared in Britain in early 1939 and which Jack devoured that spring. In Cecil’s hands, Melbourne becomes for the young Kennedy a fascinating, altogether charming figure, indeed a kind of model for life: sophisticated and wittily idiosyncratic, poised and nonchalant, curious about people and what made them tick, skeptical of received wisdom and hostile to ideologues, susceptible to the pleasures of the flesh yet at the same time appealingly devoted to queen and country.19

“Life had taught him…always to relate thought to experience, to estimate theory in terms of its practical working,” Cecil wrote of Melbourne, a description that fit Jack’s vision of himself. And though more egalitarian than Melbourne, and more committed to an activist, democratic politics that would use established institutions and principles to benefit the common people (in British terms, a Tory position more than a Whig one), Jack certainly would have identified with Cecil’s description of the broader upper-class milieu: “The ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer.” Melbourne’s own assertion that “things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life” would likewise have appealed to Jack for its skeptical urbanity.20

Of Melbourne’s carnal pursuits Cecil wrote, “His animal nature and his taste for women’s society united to make him amorous, and natural tendency had been encouraged by the tradition of his home. Already, we gather, he had sown some wild oats. Like the other young men of his circle he thought chastity a dangerous state, and he seems early to have taken practical steps to avoid incurring the risks attendant to it.” Jack, of course, knew all about this “tradition” from his own home.21

Cecil’s succinct summation of the young Melbourne worked equally well for the young Kennedy: “He was a skeptic in thought; in practice a hedonist.”22

Rose Kennedy, in explaining to a later interviewer the reasons for her second son’s (and, palpably, her own) affinity for things English, spoke of his “Boston accent which is very much akin to the British, and then he responded to the British love of culture and literature and all that sort of thing.”

Most of the people in government circles and most of the people who had big houses and who entertained over there, were people whose families had been in government, and they had not only interest in government, in history and in politics, but they had had them for generations and so they were probably more cultured than the people were here, where most, or many, had started in very humble beginnings. And I think Jack responded to all that because he did like literature, and he did appreciate it, and then he was interested in government, and of course, he did enjoy seeing all the beautiful homes, because they were connected more or less to history. If you went away for the weekend, you’d see a house that had been there for hundreds of years….There were different souvenirs of the years they had spent in government in those houses, and all those things Jack responded to, and so he did enjoy himself [there] as did we all, I think. And then of course it was more or less akin to Boston, because Boston is in a great part British, the people there are of British-Irish heritage, much more than they are in New York, for instance.23