IV

By June 1939 Jack was back in London, working by day in the embassy and hitting the parties and clubs by night, often in the company of sister Kick and a small entourage of British friends. He now saw in a way he had not before that Britain was girding for war. Some weeks earlier, the Chamberlain government had introduced conscription, and Anglo-French military staff talks had commenced to consider how best to wage a three-year war with Germany. The Oxford Union debating society’s famous King and Country resolution from 1933 (“This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”) was overturned and expunged from the union’s minute book. Ordinary Britons dug air-raid shelters in their back gardens. Chamberlain and Halifax still hoped Hitler would back down, or at least agree to negotiate without threats. The signing by Germany and Italy, in May, of the bombastically named Pact of Steel undermined the Englishmen’s hopes of detaching Italy from Hitler’s clutches, and they saw no option but to reaffirm publicly that if Germany attacked Poland, the British government would honor the guarantee to come to Poland’s support. The French vowed likewise.

The irony was rich: after refusing the previous summer to make a guarantee to Czechoslovakia, a country ready to fight and holding alliances with France and the Soviet Union, Chamberlain and Daladier were now issuing one to a country that, as their own military leaders made clear to them, was geographically exposed and militarily ill-equipped and could not be effectively assisted in the event of a German invasion, with the result that she would likely hold out only a few weeks. Why would Hitler be deterred in such a situation?31

Joseph Kennedy thought the Anglo-French guarantee would do little except increase the likelihood of war—a war, moreover, that Germany would win, and that the United States should have no part of. He was adamant on this point, if anything more so than he had been the previous year. Increasingly, however, as spring turned into summer, Kennedy’s pessimism rubbed Britons—including many leading political figures—the wrong way. In June, at a dinner in London in honor of the visiting Walter Lippmann (whose book The Good Society Jack Kennedy was reading that summer, at the urging of Bruce Hopper), Winston Churchill heard the columnist recount a meeting he had had with Kennedy earlier that day. The Western powers stood no chance against the mighty German war machine, the ambassador had insisted, which meant that Britain had no option but to concede to Hitler control over Eastern and Central Europe. “All Englishmen in their hearts know this to be true,” Kennedy had declared, “but a small group of brilliant people has created a public feeling which makes it impossible for the government to take a sensible course.”

Churchill, who had sat glumly brooding through the meal up to that point, exploded in fury. Kennedy was a timorous and naive man, he charged, an Anglophobe on account of his Irish heritage, whom Roosevelt, in a lapse of judgment, had foolishly selected for this vitally important post, and who was an impediment to British-U.S. cooperation. The author and diplomat Harold Nicolson, also at the table that evening, marveled at the scene as Churchill sat hunched, “waving his whiskey and soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand,” as he insisted that Britain would stoically endure whatever the Germans threw their way and repay the destruction with interest. Even should Germany prevail in the encounter, he went on, it would still have to tangle, sooner or later, with the most powerful nation of them all, the United States. “It will then be for you, for the Americans,” he told Lippmann, “to preserve and to maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples.” Churchill then urged him to use his influential column to get his compatriots to “think imperially” and maintain their time-honored commitment to holding high “the torch of liberty.” Lippmann, who prided himself on not being swept off his feet easily, came away mesmerized by the Englishman’s colossal gift for language and oration and by his obvious leadership qualities, which Lippmann decided exceeded even those of the great and charismatic Theodore Roosevelt.32

What Joseph Kennedy never understood—it’s a key explanation for his failure as ambassador—was that for many Britons, fighting had become a matter of dignity, even as they were under no illusions as to the heavy price it would extract. The concept of honor in international affairs was foreign to Kennedy; all that mattered was survival. Because Munich had been about such self-preservation, he saw no reason for Chamberlain or anyone else to be ashamed of it, and he continued in mid-1939 to regard Hitler as a responsible statesman with whom one could do business. War would be catastrophic, which meant that realism consisted of doing whatever was necessary to keep the peace. Jack, on the other hand, though pragmatically inclined like his father, had a greater feel for the things of the spirit, for the intangibles that often moved people. He understood, from his avid childhood reading about the deeds and misdeeds of past leaders, that respect and credibility mattered greatly in human affairs; they always had and they always would. His professors Bruce Hopper and Payson Wild had further impressed this notion on him. More directly, Jack, upon his return to London, could see the change in the young Englishmen he and Joe Junior and Kick met with socially: many of them now spoke of going after the Germans with guns blazing, come what may.33

One of these friends was David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech, whom he met through Kick and who would be Britain’s ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy administration, remaining a close confidant until the end. Like Jack a second son who found sanctuary in books as a youngster, the slim and sharp-nosed Ormsby-Gore, who often wore a silk scarf tied insouciantly around his neck, was independent-minded and fun-loving, and blessed with a formidable intelligence. He was also extremely well connected, his father having been a member of Parliament for twenty-eight years and his mother being the granddaughter of Lord Salisbury, a prime minister under Queen Victoria and towering figure in the Conservative Party. In their early encounters, Jack seemed to Ormsby-Gore to be cut from the same cloth as him: fascinated by politics and statecraft, more an observer than a pontificator, and more a social animal than a sober student of world affairs. They soon developed a deep mutual affection. “He was very thin, wiry-thin with, I don’t know how to describe it, this energy exuding from him,” Ormsby-Gore remembered of his friend. Underneath the party persona, however, the young Englishman detected a more serious dimension, “because of course he was preparing his thesis—it was a longer than normal thesis.”34

It was true: Jack had indeed decided on a topic for his upcoming Harvard thesis project. Bruce Hopper had reminded him in their spring correspondence that, with his travels and his father’s position, he had an unmatched chance to study history in the making. Jack agreed. Partly on account of his intense discussions with his British friends the previous summer, he had developed a fascination with Great Britain’s policies, and in particular with how it had gotten itself into such a predicament. How had it squandered the advantages it held after the Great War, when the empire stood supreme and the Royal Navy patrolled the world’s seas? Where had the Chamberlain appeasement policy come from, and how would one assess its soundness? Shouldn’t the British have been more prepared for the rise of Hitler’s Germany?35

Jack had the thesis very much in mind when, in July, he left London and crossed the Channel again. He wanted to see Germany up close and to gauge the likelihood of war. This time he traveled with his Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald, who had come over to Europe with the Harvard track team. Torby would have preferred to linger in London, for he was in love with Kick Kennedy and hoped to spend time with her. But at Jack’s insistence they made their way for Munich, where they met up with Byron “Whizzer” White, a former all-American halfback from Colorado and now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. (Much later, under President Kennedy, White would be appointed to the Supreme Court.) Before their departure, Jack and Torby had been warned by Ambassador Kennedy to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, but at the tomb of the Nazi hoodlum-martyr Horst Wessel the three Americans were accosted by local storm troopers who heckled them and threw rocks at their car (presumably because it bore British license plates). “Our first thought was to lay into them,” Macdonald recalled, “but Jack, even though he was as sore as the rest of us, led us in a diplomatic retreat.” The incident left the three Americans shaken. “If this is the way these people feel,” Jack said, maybe war was inevitable.36

Some days later, having parted ways with White, Jack and Torby rented a car in Paris, intending to drive to the Riviera, where the Kennedy family had again rented a vacation villa near Cannes. Traveling at high speed south of Paris, Jack lost control of the vehicle—a jalopy that seemed to have a mind of its own and continually bucked to the right—and flipped it over. The car skidded on its roof for thirty feet, and the luggage was strewn about the pavement. Upside down in the compartment, Jack turned to his friend and calmly remarked, “Well, pal, we didn’t make it, did we?”37

But eventually they did, meeting up with numerous Kennedys in the South. Kick was there, fueling Macdonald’s hopes, but she soon crushed them by making clear she was not interested in a romance. (She had fallen hard for William “Billy” Cavendish, the Protestant Marquess of Hartington and heir to the dukedom of Devonshire, and brother of Jack’s friend Andrew Cavendish.) That revelation sent the young men venturing north again, on August 12, bound once more for Germany. Rose noted in her diary that “they would like to go to Prague, but we are told no one is allowed to go there.”38 Undaunted, Jack headed for Vienna, while Torby split off to go to Budapest. Jack got into Prague with an assist from the U.S. embassy, but the diplomat responsible, George F. Kennan, was none too pleased to have to do it, recalling some years later:

In those days, as the German forces advanced like encroaching waves over all the borders of Bohemia, no trains were running, no planes were flying, no frontier stations existed. Yet in the midst of this confusion we received a telegram from the embassy in London, the sense of which was that our ambassador there, Mr. Joseph Kennedy, had chosen this time to send one of his young sons on a fact-finding tour around Europe, and it was up to us to find means of getting him across the border and through the German lines so that he could include in his itinerary a visit to Prague.