II

History has little to say on how the hypercompetitive Joe Junior felt about another development that summer of 1940: his brother’s sudden literary success. To his father he offered gracious words about Jack’s book, but to a friend’s father in California he was reportedly more measured, noting that Jack had benefited from professionals’ help.10 If indeed Joe struggled with being outshone in this way, one can see why. After all, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. All his life he had been the golden child, the one who had barely emerged from the womb when his grandfather predicted he would grow up to be president. He had always been the more diligent student, the stronger athlete, whereas Jack had been content to coast along, to goof off—when, that is, he wasn’t laid up in the infirmary. For years Joe had heard his father’s voice in his ear, urging him to write a book. He had tried his damnedest to make it happen, even risking life and limb to file lengthy reports from the Spanish Civil War with the thought that these might then be gathered into a volume. No book resulted, yet now here was his brother, snapping up a contract for a senior thesis that he’d dashed off in a few months from the comfort and safety of Cambridge, then spent a few days revising for publication. Maybe Jack had the better and timelier topic, but the whole thing still seemed unfair.

Jack’s book hit store shelves on July 24. The timing was sublime, coming one month after the fall of France, three weeks after the first German daytime aerial attacks against British land targets (the communities of Wick and Hull), and two weeks after the Luftwaffe started hitting convoy ships in the Channel. The American reading public suddenly clamored for information about the war and its origins, and Why England Slept was one of the first books to offer it. Shrewdly—and brazenly, given that he had been carrying on a long-term love affair with the man’s wife—Joe Kennedy had asked Henry Luce to pen a brief foreword, and the famed publisher agreed. (First Arthur Krock of The New York Times had assisted with revisions and now the legendary head of Time Inc. contributed an introductory essay: Jack did not lack for high-powered help.)11

More and more, Henry Luce was emerging as a leading exponent of American internationalism. Isolationism, as he saw it, might have been an acceptable strategy when the nation was weak; now that it had become a full-fledged member of the great-power club—and seemed destined, by dint of geography and demography, to become the most powerful of all—such a stance would no longer do. Instead, he believed, leaders in Washington must grab the mantle of world leadership. They must defend U.S. territory, to be sure, but they must also defend and promote democratic values far beyond America’s shores, indeed to all four corners of the globe. The nation’s security depended on it.12 A few months later, in early 1941, Luce would articulate his vision in what would become one of the most influential articles in the history of U.S. statecraft. “The American Century,” it would be titled, and it would be a kind of blueprint of grand strategy for a succession of administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, John F. Kennedy’s among them. Americans, Luce would write, must “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Even now, in the middle months of 1940, as he sat down with Jack’s book, Luce was coming to this expansive assessment of the nation’s role in the world. At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in late June, he helped engineer the stunning victory of Wendell Willkie, a corporate executive and an avowed internationalist, to be the party’s standard-bearer in that fall’s presidential election.13

“When the manuscript, or rather the proofs, arrived, I was very impressed by it,” Luce remembered. “At this time, of course, it was after Munich and the hot war was on. England, as they said, stood alone and the popular tendency was to put all the blame on the so-called appeasers, namely, Mr. Chamberlain and the Tory appeasers, the Cliveden Set.” Why England Slept, however, showed that blame had to be spread across nearly all levels of British society. “What impressed me was, first, that he had done such a careful job of actually reviewing the facts, the facts such as attitudes and voting records, with regard to the crisis in Europe. And I was impressed by his careful scholarship, research, and also by his sense of personal involvement, responsibility in the great crisis that was at that time in flames. And that’s what made me very optimistic about the qualities of mind and of involvement in public affairs that was displayed in this book.”14

In his foreword, Luce lauded the young author’s penetrating analysis and his crucially important concluding message: that Americans must expend every effort to prepare for the likelihood of war. “I cannot recall a single man of my college generation who could have written such an adult book on such a vitally important subject during his Senior year at college,” he enthused.15 Though the essay excoriated the pro-appeasement position of observers such as his father, Jack responded with fulsome gratitude: “The foreword is wonderful, and makes the book far more timely. Especially is this true of the point about the similarity of Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in Our Time,’ and our ‘We Will Never Fight in Foreign Wars,’ and the parallel effect that they have had on our war efforts. I missed this and it was very vital. Also, I am very glad that you gave the background regarding the American responsibility for the present situation, as it is really vitally necessary for any understanding of the problem.”16

Luce’s endorsement no doubt helped sales, although they would have been healthy regardless. Within two days, the first allotment of thirty-five hundred copies had been snapped up, and Wilfred Funk quickly arranged for a second, larger printing. By year’s end Funk could claim sales in the United States and Britain totaling well into five figures—a remarkable result for what was after all a revised undergraduate thesis. The book made the New York Times’s “bestsellers of the week” list for Boston and was a Washington Post “Reader’s Choice” selection.17 The later claim that Joe Kennedy boosted sales by buying cartons of copies that he stored in his Cape Cod basement, though plausible enough in theory (it’s the kind of thing one would expect from him), lacks evidence; even if true, it would not have made much of a difference to a book that rode a wave of highly favorable reviews, in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, the Minneapolis Tribune, and Time, among other publications. A few discordant notes aside—some critics felt Jack was too easy on Baldwin and Chamberlain, and that he left fuzzy what exactly should be the lesson for Americans—the young author won praise for the power and nuance of his argument and the wealth of evidence he marshaled in support of it.

Some reviewers noted the titular allusion to Churchill’s earlier collection of essays, While England Slept, but for the most part they missed the key philosophical difference between the two works: whereas Churchill stressed the role of individuals in shaping history, Kennedy was clinical, impersonal, placing heavy emphasis on structural determinants. (“Personalities,” he lamented in his introduction, “have always been more interesting to us than facts.”18)

No less a figure than the president of the United States offered his congratulations. In a letter addressed to “My dear Jack,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote that he found the book lucid and perceptive, “a great argument for acting and speaking from a position of strength at all times.” Former teachers also reached out, including one from the early years. “I wish now to congratulate little ‘Jackie’ Kennedy of the Devotion School, Brookline,” wrote Mrs. Roberts. “I must confess I am very proud of your success. You are indeed a splendid example of American youth, and your success so early, I am sure, warms your mother and daddy’s heart with pride.” The old Choate headmaster himself, George St. John, lauded Jack’s book for its “restrained, scholarly, and convincing” nature. “That could have been said of the book if it had been written ten or twenty years later in light of History. Coming to the people of America now, it is the work of a patriot, a prophet, and a missionary.”19

Inevitably, the favorable publicity and heavy sales figures rubbed some people the wrong way. One detects more than a little professional envy in the pompous response of famed British economist and professor Harold Laski, onetime teacher of Joe Junior and, briefly, Jack. It would have been easy “to repeat the eulogies Krock and Harry Luce have showered on your boy’s work,” Laski wrote Joe Kennedy, but “I choose the more difficult way of regretting deeply that you let him publish it.” Labeling the work “very immature,” Laski said it lacked any semblance of structure and dwelled “almost wholly on the surface of things.”20

The sounder British judgment was that by the distinguished military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, who praised Why England Slept for the “outstanding way it combines insight with balanced judgment—in a way that nothing that has yet been written here [in Britain] approaches. It is all the more impressive by comparison with other recent books which I have read, by both English and American writers, who were apt to get led astray by superficial appearances, so that they too often miss the wood for the trees, even if they do not go astray down some by-path.” Liddell Hart, whose own book The Defence of Britain had appeared the previous year and covered some of the same ground, did identify several errors of fact or interpretation Jack had committed, but his overall assessment was praiseful—and this from a scholar infinitely more expert on the topic than was Laski.21

The British reviewers were as a group highly complimentary, a fact that gave Jack special satisfaction—he was, after all, writing about their country. John Wheeler-Bennett (who, given his association with the book, should have turned down the assignment) was effusive, commending Jack in The New York Sun for writing not as “the ambassador’s son” but “forming his opinions for himself, sifting his evidence and finally evolving a political and psychological analysis of rare penetration, with an immensely appealing quality of freshness and breadth of understanding.” A tad overheated, maybe, but basically right. Another Englishman, Nigel Dennis, writing in The New Republic, was likewise impressed: “Mr. Kennedy’s is probably the first book that tries to distribute the blame for Britain’s inefficiency in diplomacy and military preparedness among the British people generally. This is a bold departure from the common rule, and the author believes that writers who refuse to take it are fooling their countrymen as well as themselves.” Dennis acknowledged that “a more exact distribution of blame” must await a larger study, but he found it hard to deny either the book’s general thesis or the import of the topic.22

And the contribution would endure. The British historian Hugh Brogan, writing near the end of the century, conceded some shortcomings—Jack drove home some assertions too repetitiously; the assessment of the Munich Crisis did not hold up all that well—but ringingly proclaimed that Why England Slept “will always have an honourable place in the small library which the controversy about British policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain has called into being.” Like the other books on Brogan’s select list—among them Churchill’s The Gathering Storm—Kennedy’s effort was not merely a contribution to historical understanding; it was also, Brogan maintained, a political intervention, in the way it roused its American readers to the great and vital task before them: to confront the reality of the Nazi threat and prepare to meet it, with eyes wide open.23

Of course, it is in biographical terms that Why England Slept really matters to us. We care about it because of what it tells us about John F. Kennedy, age twenty-three and just out of college. And because the book is substantially the same as the thesis, we can again recall Nigel Hamilton’s assessment of the latter: “Nothing else Jack would write in his life would so speak the man.” Two things in particular stand out. First, the book marked a significant early step by Jack toward a public career. To read the book is to see that its young author was clearly fascinated by the problems of democratic leadership in foreign affairs, and the dilemmas that confront policymakers who seek to do what is required of them while not alienating their temperamental constituents. It’s a theme Kennedy would return to in a later book, Profiles in Courage, and a conundrum he would confront to the end of his days. In 1940 he was not a candidate for political office, and the book could certainly have foreshadowed a career in, say, journalism, or academia, or the law. But no contemporaneous reader of the thesis or the book could doubt that here was a potential future politician—especially if that reader also happened to be aware of his lengthy earlier course paper on Congressman Bertrand Snell. Even less can a reader of a subsequent generation fail to see the author’s future implicit in line after line—in the need for an energetic leadership that will awaken and educate the people (the 1960 campaign), for example, and in the importance of “keep[ing] our armaments equal to our commitments” (the Berlin Crisis). The theme of the 1961 inaugural seems, in Brogan’s words, “to be foreshadowed in the observation about Britain in the 1930s, that ‘there was a great lack of young progressive and able leaders. Those who should have been taking over were members of the war generation, so large a portion of whom rested in Flanders Fields.’ ”24

Second, the book represented for Jack Kennedy a political emancipation from his father. He remained the devoted son, and would stay under his father’s influence in important respects (though not as much as many later authors and documentary filmmakers would have us believe), but he showed here a capacity for independent thought that is notable—and that the father, to his credit, did not discourage. As Stephen C. Schlesinger notes in the foreword to a recent reissue of the book, Why England Slept constituted “a studied rebuke to the whole idea of appeasement—and so, in part, to his own father’s views.” (That a young man who saw Hitler’s Europe up close would abandon the pro-appeasement position isn’t surprising; indeed, the oddity is that Joe Junior, who also traversed the Continent in the lead-up to war, stayed doggedly true to Joe Senior’s outlook.) When, in August, a reporter from the Boston Herald had the temerity to ask Jack if he was a “mouthpiece” for his famous father, he offered a biting reply: “I haven’t seen my father in six months, nor are we of the same opinion concerning certain British statesmen.” Six months was about how much time had elapsed since he started serious work on the thesis that became the book. With his book, Jack had staked out his own independent position on the most pressing international issue of the day: how to respond to the menace of German power. And his audience was no longer just his father or his thesis committee, but readers everywhere.25