Forrestal and Kennedy drove the short distance to Potsdam, “through miles of Russian soldiers. They were stationed on both sides of the road at about 40 yard intervals—green-hatted and green-epauleted—Stalin’s personal and picked guard. They looked rugged and tough, unsmiling but with perfect discipline.”47 The following day, July 30, the two embarked on a three-day tour of war-ravaged German ports and cities, among them Bremen, Bremerhaven, and Frankfurt. They flew to Salzburg and visited the Führer’s bombed-out mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden and his mountaintop aerie, the Eagle’s Nest.

About the future, the diary was at times prescient. “One opinion here is that the Russians are never going to pull out of their zone of occupation but plan to make their part of Germany a Soviet Socialist Republic….If we [Americans] don’t withdraw and allow [the Germans] to administer their own affairs, we will be confronted with an extremely difficult administrative problem. Yet, if we pull out, we may leave a political vacuum that the Russians will be only too glad to fill.” Regarding the United Nations, Kennedy anticipated the common later view that, with “its elaborate mechanics,” the organization would prove ineffectual in resolving the great issues of war and peace, especially given that the larger countries would refuse to entrust it with sufficient decision-making power.48

At other times the diarist’s anticipatory powers fell short. He missed how strong a leader France’s Charles de Gaulle would prove to be, and was plainly wrong—if understandably, at the time—in thinking a divided Berlin would be a “ruined and unproductive city.” His prediction about Hitler’s posthumous reputation, jotted after seeing Berchtesgaden and the Eagle’s Nest, was perplexing: “After visiting these two places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived.”49 (The argument seemed to be that if a leader were evaluated merely by how much he or she transformed the world, whether for good or ill, Hitler must be judged a colossal figure in history. But the phrasing was, to say the least, insensitive to the murderous ravages of the Third Reich.)

As with his six-month overseas sojourn in 1939, Jack Kennedy’s 1945 visit to Germany offered the young man some uncanny brushes with history as he suddenly found himself—thanks to his family connections—visiting the inner sanctums of Nazi power and rubbing elbows at Potsdam with top U.S. officials. (He and Forrestal even got to inspect the interior of Hitler’s bombed-out office in the Reich Chancellery.) Though not permitted into the Potsdam sessions, he met or saw up close the new president, Harry Truman, supreme Allied commander and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, and a slew of senior State Department figures: Secretary of State James Byrnes as well as W. Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, John McCloy, Robert Murphy, and William Clayton, among others.

It was heady stuff for a twenty-eight-year-old, and the experience showed that he belonged, or was on his way to belonging, and that in due course he, too, might take his place on the international stage. Even now, Kennedy could legitimately claim to be as well versed on the issues as were many of the journalists who crowded into Potsdam, and arguably more informed than Truman, who had been in office only three months and before that had been kept out of almost all war-related planning during his brief time as vice president. Roosevelt had barely known Truman and—shockingly—had not even informed him of the atomic bomb project that was nearing completion in the New Mexico desert. (Stalin, on the other hand, through spies, knew a great deal about the Manhattan Project.^*) To Secretary of State Byrnes and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the two key cabinet members on foreign policy, the new president was a figure of mystery; they didn’t know him more than to say hello. Though Truman prided himself on being a well-read student of history, he had no background in foreign policy, and little international experience—this was his first visit to Europe since being an artilleryman in France in World War I.50

No one knew it, but present in Potsdam at the same time that summer was not only the thirty-third president of the United States, but the thirty-fourth and the thirty-fifth as well. About number 33 Jack has little to say in his diary, noting merely and without context or elaboration that “Truman is deader than Kelsey’s nuts.” (He would later come to see Truman as a courageous and decent man.) But number 34 is another matter. “Eisenhower talked with Forrestal for a few minutes,” reads an entry from August 1, “and it was obvious why he is an outstanding figure. He has an easy personality, immense self-assurance, and gave an excellent presentation of the situation in Germany.” An earlier entry, from June 30, remarks on Eisenhower’s hold over the British people: “He was heard to say after the Eighth [Army] had marched past, ‘To think that I, a boy from Abilene, Kansas, am the Commander of troops like those!’ He never lost that humble way and therefore easily won the hearts of those with whom he worked.”51

On at least one occasion in Germany, Jack got to meet the man, if only in passing. The scene was Frankfurt, and the witness was Seymour St. John, who in two years would take over from his father as headmaster at Choate. When Forrestal’s plane arrived on the tarmac, St. John, then a Navy lieutenant assisting with the logistics of the visit, recalled, “the plane doors opened, and out came Forrestal. Then, to my amazement, Jack Kennedy. Ike was meeting Forrestal, so Jack met Ike.” A surviving photograph shows Eisenhower greeting Forrestal on the tarmac, with Kennedy and St. John in the background.52

Truman was less patient with Stalin at this Big Three conference than Franklin Roosevelt had been at the previous ones, in part because he had learned, as the conference opened, that a test in New Mexico of the new atomic weapon had been successful, and in part because Japan now seemed an utterly spent force. At home, its cities were gutted by massive U.S. aerial attacks (with the loss of several hundred thousand Japanese lives), and its sea power, on which protection from invasion had rested, had been destroyed. The United States no longer needed the Soviet Union’s help in fighting the Pacific war. Even so, Potsdam was important in setting the details of the postwar occupation and treaty arrangements, in a sense finalizing the basic agreements reached at Tehran and Yalta. Stalin also gained a more formal acceptance by the Americans and the British of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The specifics concerning the occupation of Germany—and, within it, Berlin—were hashed out, and Stalin (anxious to get his share of the spoils in the east) reaffirmed his vow to join the war against Japan as soon as possible.53

Of the broader geopolitical reality there could be no dispute: this was now effectively a two-power world, whatever the fictions expressed in the makeup of the UN Security Council. Britain was drastically weakened and badly overstretched; France, struggling to emerge from the living death of Nazi occupation, was prostrate. Germany had been demolished. Japan, on the brink of defeat, faced the humiliation of occupation, while China, which had yet to emerge as the world power its population suggested it should be, was rent by divisions so deep it would soon spiral back into civil war. Only the United States and the Soviet Union were emerging stronger from the long and bitter struggle.

Yet they were not coequal, and the differences in their wartime experiences were profound. The Soviets had turned back the mighty Nazi war machine and secured the strategic power position in Eastern and Central Europe. Their battle-tested Red Army was by far the largest in the world. But the successes on the Eastern Front had come at unimaginable cost: in addition to twenty-five million dead—in a prewar population of 170 million, one out of seven people—the USSR had suffered the destruction of seventeen hundred cities and towns, seventy thousand villages and hamlets, six million buildings, forty thousand miles of railroad, and ninety thousand bridges. The Germans ransacked the countryside and stole and slaughtered seventeen million heads of cattle, twenty million hogs, and seven million horses. U.S. losses, meanwhile, at the start of the Potsdam Conference stood at roughly 400,000 men. In three and a half years of fighting, its homeland had never been seriously threatened; its citizens’ standard of living had actually grown. Overseas, the tentacles of American economic and military power now reached almost every corner of the globe, as exemplified by the creation of a gargantuan network of U.S. military installations and bases—in South America, throughout the Pacific, across the Middle East, in South Asia, even in Africa. By the middle of 1945, American bases were being built at the mind-boggling rate of more than one hundred per month; by year’s end, the total would be more than two thousand bases and thirty thousand military installations.54

It all made a deep impression on the young lieutenant turned reporter, as Ted Sorensen, an admitted partisan, would later write of Kennedy’s 1945 experiences in San Francisco and Europe: “All this had sharpened his interest in public affairs and public service….Jack Kennedy knew he wanted to be a participant, not an observer. He was, in many ways, an old-fashioned patriot—not in the narrow nationalistic sense but in his deep devotion to the national interest. He had compared firsthand the political and economic systems of many countries on several continents and he greatly preferred our own. He shared [John] Buchan’s belief that ‘democracy was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament’ and that ‘politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure.’ ”55

This seems right. The journalistic stint in the spring and summer of 1945, however much pushed by the father, honed Kennedy’s already established interest in the pressing issues of international and domestic affairs, and sharpened his sense that politics might be a more stimulating career choice than either journalism or academia, the other options he was considering. He’d rather be in the inner sanctuary of power, in other words, than writing about it in the pressroom or in the ivory tower.

A letter to his former Choate teacher Harold Tinker early in the year hinted at his thinking. His experience in the South Pacific, he wrote, had made him disillusioned by the savagery of war. “I should really like—as my life’s goal—in some way and at some point to do something to help prevent another.”56

As Jack’s political persona began to take shape, his fallen brother’s life was commemorated. On July 26, a new 2,200-ton Gearing-class destroyer, the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was launched from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, Massachusetts—the same shipyard where Joe Senior had worked during World War I. The invitation list to the launch included countless political power players and media luminaries, and Jack’s friends, too, were out in force—Torby Macdonald, Lem Billings, Charlie Houghton, John Hersey and Frances Ann Cannon, Chuck Spalding, Red Fay, and Charlotte McDonnell Harris. Representing the family were Joe, Rose, Eunice, Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy, as well as grandparents Honey Fitz and Mary. Young Jean, as the designated sponsor, swung the bottle of champagne to christen the vessel.

Jack’s return to America in early August coincided with the dawn of the atomic era and the end of World War II—on August 6 and 9, the United States dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, and on the eighth the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 14, the government in Tokyo, under Emperor Hirohito, surrendered. An era had ended and a new one begun—for Jack Kennedy and for the world.

He had anticipated this moment. Already at the start of 1945, in his unpublished “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace” article, he’d speculated that science would soon create weapons capable of delivering unimaginable destruction over vast distances. Later, he reiterated the point in his diary. Now, with two Japanese cities instantaneously laid to waste, Jack grasped the bomb’s transformative effect, understood how the splitting of the atom had split the century, creating a before and an after. In a little-noticed speech to the United War Fund on October 8, he mused aloud on the topic, articulating sentiments he would refine and espouse to the end of his days. “We have gone a long way from those trying days of ’42, ’43, and ’44 when victory lay in the balance,” he told his modest-size audience. “Now the guns have cooled, the men are returning home, the catastrophic days of war are over, the grueling days of peace are ahead—one chapter has ended, another has begun.” Atomic weapons would be central to this new era, he went on, and the Western democracies, with their righteous reluctance to wage war, could be at a colossal disadvantage in a military conflict that could be over in an hour.

Yet all was not lost. Perhaps the very destructiveness of the new weapon would compel nations to preserve the peace. “In the past years, we have heard much about the horrors of war, but we have always felt that war was preferable to certain alternatives. There are certain things for which we have always fought. War has never been the ultimate evil. Now, however, that may be changed.” Consequently, humanity “may be forced to make the sacrifices that will insure peace. We can only pray that man’s political skill can keep abreast of his scientific skill; if not, we may yet live to see Armageddon.”57

Would he himself contribute to that urgent work, and if so, how? A new international order was coming into being, one with his own country in a position of supreme power, in a kind of Pax Americana; perhaps he could find a place in the arena. Within a few weeks of his return from Europe, Jack heard from Forrestal. “Do you want to do any work here?” the Navy secretary wrote from Washington. “If so, why don’t you come down and see what there is at hand?”58 Jack, thankful for the offer, had other ideas. Opportunities loomed for him to experience that “greatest and most honorable adventure,” and he dared not miss them.

Politics, that is to say, beckoned.