V

History was on Jack Kennedy’s mind that summer as Europe’s crisis deepened. From Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis and from course readings at Harvard, he understood how easily miscalculation and stubborn pride could lead to a rupture among nations and a resort to arms. The current situation was not a replay of July 1914, he determined, not yet anyway, but certainly there were worrisome signs. In the final half of August, he hustled between German cities—Munich, Hamburg, Berlin—seeing in each place ample evidence of the fearsome Nazi disinformation machine at work, stoking tensions with the Poles over Danzig and the corridor. In Berlin he rendezvoused briefly with Joe Junior, who was on his own inspection tour of the Reich. Joe was now less enamored of the Nazi German state than he had been on previous visits, even as he held staunchly to his father’s worldview. “The anti-Polish campaign is beyond description,” Joe wrote. “Every edition of the newspapers has a more gruesome tale to tell of Polish outrages against the Germans, of planes being attacked and of German soldiers tortured.” The intent was obvious: when war came, “the Poles will be shown to be the aggressors, and it will be the duty of every German to stop them.” Newsreels showed the same thing, he added, with even young children brought forth to testify to the terrible deeds of the dastardly Poles.40

War might be close after all, Jack now sensed, a notion given credence by the secret message Alexander Kirk of the U.S. embassy in Berlin asked him to bring back to his father in London: Germany, the message read, would likely attack Poland within a week.41 But still Jack wondered: Would Hitler actually go through with it if it meant hostilities with Britain and France? This was indeed the question on all Germany watchers’ minds. Already months before, in early April 1939, Hitler had authorized a secret military directive for the destruction of Poland anytime after September 1 (but before the fall rains began in mid-September). The German leader doubted Western resolve, and he was not deterred when, over the early summer, Paris and London leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Poles and the Poles themselves refused to yield on Danzig and the corridor. Britain and France, he still believed, would in the end refuse to fight. On August 19, the very day Jack arrived in Berlin, the first German formations began moving toward the Polish frontier; within four days, they were in place. Other units followed, leading ultimately to a massive attacking force of 1.5 million men. Meanwhile, weapons and soldiers were smuggled into Danzig so that the city, already Nazi-dominated, could be taken immediately upon the beginning of operations.42

Hitler wanted war in the summer of 1939, but he hoped it would be a local affair, involving only Germany and Poland. The obstinacy of Chamberlain and Daladier, and of Polish foreign minister Józef Beck, the key player in Warsaw, surprised and annoyed him and complicated his plans. With his generals warning him that Poland should not be attacked unless Germany could be assured of Russia’s neutrality, the Führer now launched one of the most astonishing about-face gambits in modern history (albeit one that took shape over several weeks), the news of which sent shockwaves around the world. In opposition to everything he had preached about the evils of Soviet Communism, he sent his obsequious foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow on August 23 to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin—who himself did a volte-face, having hammered for years on the absolute heinousness of fascism.43 In the early hours of the twenty-fourth the deal was signed, with a secret protocol splitting Poland and northeastern Europe between them. “All the isms,” a British midlevel official remarked, “are now wasms.” Hitler, overjoyed at what he saw as a triumph of colossal consequence, expected to hear of the swift collapse of the French and British governments, and he felt more certain that the Western powers would not fight for Poland. “Our enemies,” he had told his commanders the day before he dispatched Ribbentrop to Moscow, “are tiny little worms. I saw them at Munich. I’ll cook them a stew they’ll choke on.”44

Britain and France had made their own approaches to Stalin in the weeks prior, hoping that an entente between the three powers would be sufficient to constrain Germany once and for all. Had the effort succeeded, it might well have had the desired effect. But the plan was never as close to realization as some later observers claimed. On the Western side, the effort was desultory and late in coming—Chamberlain in particular could not shake his visceral suspicion of Communists in general and Stalin in particular, and, like most British officials, he held a low opinion of Soviet military effectiveness—while for Stalin there was logic, however ultimately misplaced, in casting his lot with the Germans, especially in view of his bottomless mistrust of British and French intentions. A ruthless practitioner of realpolitik (even if forced to justify his decisions with reference to Marxist-Leninist ideology, which, lucky for him, was an infinitely malleable doctrine), Stalin played with a Western alliance mostly, it seems, in order to pressure Berlin into making a deal that would bring concessions to his side. Specifically, he sought and received territory in eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states. In addition, the deal bought him time to build up the Red Army, which had been crippled by his recent paranoia-induced purges of senior officers, and to consolidate his defenses against the attack from the west that he had always feared.45

In London and Paris, officials had to pick themselves up off the floor after learning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Even now, they hoped against hope that some means could be found to avoid the catastrophe and that Hitler would agree to negotiate.46 His willingness to meet on successive days with British ambassador Nevile Henderson, an arch-appeaser inclined to grasp at any straw, seemingly gave substance to this possibility. But not much substance. Neither Chamberlain nor Daladier was under any illusion about the fate that would soon befall Poland. When Joseph Kennedy encouraged Chamberlain to make more concessions to Berlin, the despondent prime minister shook his head. “I’ve done everything I can think of, Joe,” he said, “but it looks as if all my work is of no avail.”47

Kennedy, resigned to an imminent German attack, still hoped Britain would wriggle free of its commitment to the Poles. France would then assuredly follow suit, and a wider war would be averted. Certainly, the ambassador told American journalists on August 23, from a U.S. point of view one should hope for Chamberlain to abandon Poland and revert to the policy of appeasement. “I don’t see what we’ve got to gain if Britain goes to war,” he said. “I don’t care if Germany carves up Poland with British support. I’m for appeasement one hundred percent, and if one thousand percent is more than one hundred percent, I’m for it one thousand percent.” To which Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune responded, “Have you been telling this to Mr. Chamberlain?” Kennedy answered, “I’ve been telling him that every chance I had every day for more than a year.”48

VI

War came the following week. In the predawn hours of Friday, September 1, waves of Stukas, Messerschmitts, and Heinkels began bombing targets deep within Poland, and German armored columns crossed the frontier in overwhelming strength from the north, west, and (through Slovakia) south. Even now Chamberlain dithered, announcing to the House of Commons (with Joe Kennedy in the visitors’ box) that he would work with the French to get mediation through the good offices of Italy’s Mussolini. The chamber responded with stunned silence, then fury. Facing a revolt also within the Cabinet over the absence of a declaration of war, the prime minister at last agreed to issue an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw; when, on the late morning of September 3, the appointed hour passed without a withdrawal, Chamberlain told the British people in a mournful, eloquent radio broadcast from 10 Downing Street that “this country is at war with Germany.” Even Chamberlain’s detractors found it a moving, resolute declaration. All over the nation, people gathered anxiously around their radio sets to hear the announcement, then stood up when the national anthem was played at the end, whereupon in London the first prolonged air-raid alarm sounded, causing widespread chaos.49

In the House of Commons early that afternoon, with Jack, Kick, and Joe Junior present in the visitors’ gallery along with their mother, Chamberlain spoke in sepulchral tones: “Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: that is devote what strength and power I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have sacrificed so much.”50

Mrs. Kennedy was deeply stirred, as her husband had been by the earlier radio address. After the speech, the ambassador called 10 Downing Street. “Neville, I have just listened to the broadcast. It was terrifically moving….I feel deeply our failure to save a world war.” Chamberlain thanked Kennedy for reaching out and for his unfaltering support. “We did the best we could have done but it looks as though we have failed….Thanks, Joe, my best to you always and my deep gratitude for your constant help—Goodbye—Goodbye.”51

In his diary that day, Joe stayed on the theme, writing that the broadcast was so touching it almost made him cry. “I had participated very closely in this struggle and I saw my hopes crash too.” But the British leader could hold his head high: “It is a terrible thing to contemplate, but the war will prove to the world what a great service Chamberlain did to the world and especially for England.” By rejecting war at the time of Munich, eleven months earlier, Joe wrote, Chamberlain had given British officialdom a precious year to rearm and to line up popular support.52

Jack, however, found greater power in another speech on that extraordinary September day. Winston Churchill, now joining the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, rose slowly from the backbenches after Chamberlain had spoken. His remarks ran a mere four minutes, but they left the young American—and many others in the hall—spellbound. No one should underestimate the size of the challenge ahead, Churchill declared gravely, or fault the prime minister for his sadness at the failure to avert war, but a generation of Britons stood ready to prove themselves equal to the task.

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man….We are sure that these liberties will be in hands which will not abuse them, which will use them for no class or party interests, which will cherish and guard them, and we look forward to the day, surely and confidently we look forward to the day, when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.53

The drama played out differently in Berlin. The world war that Hitler had insisted would not materialize suddenly seemed a reality. Early that morning of September 3, Hitler’s chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, had arrived at the Reich Chancellery with the text of the British ultimatum. Ushered into the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop, Schmidt read it to them slowly, taking care to enunciate each word. “When I finished,” he wrote in his memoirs, “there was complete silence. Hitler sat immobilized, gazing before him.” Some moments passed, the quietude deafening, whereupon the Führer turned to Ribbentrop and said sharply, “What now?” Other subordinates, including press chief Otto Dietrich, likewise would recall Hitler’s stunned reaction to the ultimatum. When propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels arrived at the chancellery later in the day, he found Hitler furious with the British yet determined to fight. There would be no thought of pulling troops back from Poland. That evening, after the French had followed Britain’s lead and declared war, the German leader reiterated his belief that the threats by the two Western powers were empty; neither would wage a real military campaign.54

In Washington, the Roosevelt administration followed developments closely through near-constant communication with embassy staff in Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, and London. In the early morning of September 3, Washington time, soon after Britain’s declaration of war, President Roosevelt took a call from Joe Kennedy, who had given in to hopelessness and said a new dark age had descended on Europe, which meant “it’s the end of the world…the end of everything.” The president replied with soothing words.55 That night, FDR delivered a fireside chat in which he told the nation that while the United States would remain neutral in the new European struggle, he could not ask that every American remain neutral in judgment as well—a deliberate revision of Woodrow Wilson’s plea in 1914 that Americans be impartial in both thought and deed.

In London that evening, nerves were on edge as residents expected German bombers to arrive in the skies at any moment. A nightly blackout had been imposed, and a haunting quiet fell over the city. Most residents stayed inside their homes, listening to the BBC on the radio behind blackout blinds. “It is an eerie experience walking through a darkened London,” Kick Kennedy wrote of the blackout’s effects. “You literally feel your way, and with groping finger make sudden contact with a lamppost against which leans a steel helmeted figure with his gas mask slung at his side. You cross the road in obedience to little green crosses winking in the murk above your head. You pause to watch the few cars, which with blackened lamps, move through the streets….Gone are the gaily-lit hotels and nightclubs; now in their place are somber buildings surrounded by sandbags.”56

At 2:30 A.M., an aide called Ambassador Kennedy with stunning news: The British liner SS Athenia, bound for Canada and carrying thirteen hundred passengers, including three hundred Americans, had been torpedoed by a German submarine, seventeen hours after Britain’s declaration of war. The unarmed ship, ripped by explosions, was sinking somewhere west of the Hebrides. Jolted awake, Kennedy ordered that a list of the passengers be produced as quickly as possible. (Due to incomplete manifests, it would take weeks to get the final numbers and to determine that 112 passengers had perished, including twenty-eight Americans.) Before dawn, he walked down the hall and woke up Jack. In short order the youth hurried off to Scotland, accompanied by Eddie Moore. Many of the rescued passengers were being brought to Glasgow, and the ambassador wanted Jack to be present as his representative. With the regular embassy staff now overloaded with work, he had no one else to send.

The crowd that greeted Jack Kennedy at the Beresford Hotel demanded answers about what had occurred, as well as protection once they resumed their transatlantic voyage. “We want a convoy!” they hollered at him as soon as he arrived. “We refuse to go without a convoy!” Some shook their fists. According to the London Evening News, the young American showed a “boyish charm and natural kindliness,” as well as the “wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age,” as he did his best to field questions and express understanding. Citing Roosevelt’s claim that convoys were unnecessary because Germany would not attack an American vessel, Jack told the passengers they should not expect protection on their homeward journey, which prompted shouts of “What about the submarines? You can’t trust the German Navy! You can’t trust the German Government!” Jack held his ground and kept his composure as he strove to be heard above the din. “You will be safe on a ship flying the American flag under international law,” he insisted. “A neutral ship is safe.”^*2 The most he could do, he went on, was to pass on their concerns to his father. This seemed to defuse the tension and calm the room. While in Glasgow, Jack also visited injured Americans in area hospitals, garnering respect for his calmly authoritative, courteous, and accessible demeanor. An “Ambassador of Mercy,” one journalist dubbed him.57

He was touched by what he saw. “The natural shock of the people would make the trip to America alone unbearable…because of the feeling that they will have that the United States exposed them to this unnecessarily,” he wrote to his father in arguing for a convoy to accompany whatever ship or ships brought the Athenia survivors back to U.S. shores.58

Once back in London, Jack was put in charge of the repatriation of the survivors. The work kept him in England longer than planned—the USS Orizaba left Glasgow on September 19, bound for New York, with some four hundred Athenia survivors on board—and he wrote to Harvard for permission to enroll for the fall semester late. The permission was granted. Jack expected to return to the university on September 29, but to his surprise he found a last-minute seat aboard a Pan American Dixie Clipper, the four-engine “flying boat” that had just commenced transatlantic passenger service that summer. He flew from Foynes, Ireland, on September 20, via Newfoundland, the aircraft swooping down, like an enormous metallic duck, at Port Washington, New York, the following day. According to The Boston Globe, Jack was “the general favorite with all on the Dixie, not because he was Ambassador Kennedy’s son but because he was himself, bright and helpful and interesting.”59

It had been an astonishing seven months overseas, more consequential than he ever could have anticipated, more eventful, surely, than the experience of any Harvard junior that year—or perhaps any year. He had received communion from the pope and taken tea with Princess Elizabeth; had read high-level diplomatic dispatches in London and Paris; had been accosted by Nazi toughs in Munich; had flipped his car south of Paris and survived; had paid visits to Poland and Russia; had darted south to Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East; had traveled behind German lines in occupied Czechoslovakia and crisscrossed Germany in the immediate lead-up to war, before carrying a top-secret message back to London; had been present in the House of Commons for the historic session on September 3; and, to top it off, had made his debut as a public figure in response to the sinking of an ocean liner on the first day of Britain’s war.

It was the kind of exposure and training that no future president since John Quincy Adams had enjoyed at so young an age. And the experience left its mark, cultivating in him an intensified passion for foreign policy and world affairs that he never abandoned, and completing his transition to adulthood.60

Now he was back at Winthrop House, a college student once more, twenty-two years old and focused on the principal task ahead: taking all he had experienced and learned on his grand overseas adventure and turning it into a worthy senior thesis. No one yet knew it, but here, too, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with a generous assist from his father, would do something extraordinary and put his name before the public once again.