The reason for the hoopla: Joseph P. Kennedy had been named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and was there to take up his post. He would present his credentials to King George VI at Buckingham Palace in a few days, and would hold early meetings with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. His family would follow him to London in short order. For journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, it was an irresistible story: the dynamic Irish Catholic Wall Street tycoon with the huge and handsome family taking the helm in London—the headlines practically wrote themselves. The New York Times society page even published the travel times for the remaining Kennedys—Rose and most of the children would sail on March 9, readers were informed, and Joe Junior and John would follow in June, at the conclusion of Harvard’s spring term.2
It was a moment of triumph for the forty-nine-year-old Kennedy, the pinnacle of his public career to that point, and the climax of his five-year quest to land a prominent position in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government. Time and again during those years, Kennedy had believed that a senior cabinet appointment was in the offing, only to see his hopes dashed. Instead he had made do with second-tier positions, first as director of the SEC and then, in 1937, as the first head of the U.S. Maritime Commission. In both positions, he earned high marks with the public and the press alike—in September 1937, Fortune magazine made him the subject of a flattering cover story. But it was not enough. Kennedy wanted more, felt he deserved more after all he had done for this president and this White House. He had brought in $150,000 in donations for FDR’s 1932 campaign, including $25,000 of his own money, and had published a gushing campaign book, I’m for Roosevelt, in time for Roosevelt’s reelection effort in 1936. He’d helped FDR’s son Jimmy build a successful insurance company in Boston and brought Jimmy and his wife along on a European vacation. When, in 1933, Father Coughlin, a Detroit-based Catholic priest and radio personality, built up a mass following with his fiery weekly sermons bashing capitalism and New Deal social programs alike (later he veered into anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism), Kennedy used his influence within the Catholic hierarchy to shackle him, joining with prominent bishops to isolate Coughlin and prevent him from gaining Vatican support.3
Beyond that, Joseph Kennedy had been a close associate of the president, advising him on finance-related policy issues and socializing with him—with regularity, Roosevelt would slip away from the White House for an evening at Marwood, Kennedy’s twenty-five-room rented mansion in the Maryland countryside, in order to sip martinis and watch the latest Hollywood movies in the basement theater. Sometimes the president stayed overnight.4
It bears underscoring just how unusual it was for a Wall Street chieftain, a member of the nation’s economic super elite, to be in the administration’s corner. But Kennedy fit the bill. Though he occasionally expressed private concerns about Roosevelt’s leftward turn in domestic policy in mid-decade, he refrained from expressing his misgivings publicly. Wall Street bigwigs called him a traitor to his class (a charge they also leveled against FDR); he ignored them. The president had gotten the economy going again in his first term, Joe believed, and for that he deserved steadfast backing. He offered no dissent to FDR’s powerful summation of his New Deal philosophy in his second inaugural, in January 1937: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”5
“We’ve got to do something for old Joe, but I don’t know what,” Roosevelt told Jimmy not long after the 1936 election.6 The president knew that Kennedy longed to be Treasury secretary, but that was a nonstarter: Roosevelt had no interest in moving his trusted ally and Dutchess County neighbor Henry Morgenthau Jr. from the post, and moreover he considered Kennedy too temperamental and thin-skinned, too filled with brooding resentments, too inclined to go his own way on policy, for such a prominent cabinet job. (A skeptic could reply that others in the cabinet had precisely those attributes.) As much as he valued Kennedy’s camaraderie and often shrewd policy advice, and admired his managerial talents, he also mistrusted him as an implacable and power-hungry schemer out for his own interests. Yet the president understood at the same time that an unhappy Kennedy was a vocal and vengeful Kennedy, a Kennedy prone to running his mouth in a detrimental way to everyone within earshot, not least journalists. The Maritime Commission posting bought some breathing space, but Roosevelt knew it was just a matter of time before Kennedy resumed his efforts. Sure enough, in mid-1937 Kennedy began spreading the word around Washington that he had a new position in mind for himself: ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
The idea had been building in his mind for some time. The ambassadorial post in London was the most important overseas political posting in the American government, and the growing possibility of war in Europe only added to its cachet. In glamour terms, too, the job had no peer among U.S. positions abroad—it was the top of the social ladder. Through this appointment Kennedy would show those Boston Brahmins that he could get there without their help, that he would indeed be their social superior, and would secure tremendous societal preferment for himself and his children. On top of that, he would be the first Irish Catholic ambassador to Great Britain, a delicious irony in its own right. Most enticingly of all, the posting had long been a stepping-stone to greater things—the list of past ambassadors to London included five presidents, four vice presidents, and ten secretaries of state. Perhaps if he performed creditably in London, the Treasury posting, if not something still greater, could yet be his. When, in the fall of 1937, it became clear that Robert Bingham, the current ambassador, would have to resign on account of illness, Joe stepped up his campaigning. If he could not have the Treasury, he told Jimmy Roosevelt, he wanted London.7
Jimmy duly reported the exchange to his father, who on first hearing it threw his head back and “laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” Surely Kennedy must be joking. The man had never shown much interest in, or knowledge of, international affairs, and he seemed by temperament spectacularly unsuited for the byzantine world of great-power diplomacy. Frank and profane, he did not “do nuance,” yet he would be entering a world in which nuance was everything, in which people moved discreetly, meticulously, speaking in terms that concealed as much as they revealed, for the words would be written down by notetakers during or immediately after the meeting. Impatient with ceremonial events and rituals, Kennedy would have his calendar filled with them. His supreme self-confidence and conviction that he always knew best would count for little in a job in which he was only the spokesman for those in Washington who had the real power. He would have to practice consummate discretion, would have to submerge his ego for the greater good, would have to surrender his right to express personal opinions except in total privacy—could anyone possibly think Joe Kennedy would or could do so?8
The more he thought about it, however, the more Roosevelt saw advantages in the appointment. To begin with, Kennedy fulfilled a principal requisite for the job: he was rich. The ambassador to London would be expected to entertain on a grand scale while on a meager annual salary of $17,500 and an even more pitiful annual allowance of $4,800. Most entertainment costs would have to be paid out of pocket, which the mega-wealthy Kennedy could easily do. In addition, Kennedy already maintained personal relationships with leading British financiers, several of whom had hosted him on a visit to London in 1935; by all accounts he got on well with them. A shrewd negotiator and a skilled analyst who would not be swayed easily by ideology or fervor, he could also be counted on to be a trustworthy eavesdropper on the mounting rumors of war, a straightforward reporter of what he heard—and in the best listening post in Europe. Finally, there was the enchanting image of an Irishman at the Court of St. James’s, which appealed to FDR’s penchant for the whimsical gesture and which also had a more strategic element, in that it could score points for FDR with Irish Catholic voters, an important bloc in several states. As an Irish American, moreover, Kennedy would be less likely than his Anglophile predecessors to fall under the sway of the urbane and smooth-talking English. Roosevelt harbored a simmering dislike of what he saw as the imperiousness of British officials toward their American cousins, and he wanted an emissary who would deal unsentimentally and clearheadedly with his hosts. Kennedy could be that man.9
Top White House advisers were of two minds when they learned that Roosevelt might actually nominate Joe Kennedy to the post. Many of them resented Kennedy for his outspoken ways and for his habit of criticizing the president behind his back. They disliked his air of superiority, his certainty that he knew more than they did about the economy and business, and they suspected that his professed loyalty to the administration was skin-deep—his only allegiances were to his family and to his own advancement. “Don’t you think,” Morgenthau asked the president, “you are taking considerable risks by sending Kennedy who has talked so freely and so critically against your Administration?” FDR didn’t disagree, but for this very reason he and some aides saw the attraction of getting the man away from the domestic press and shipping him overseas. “Kennedy is too dangerous to have around here,” Roosevelt told Morgenthau, even as he assured his Treasury secretary that he had “made arrangements to have Joe Kennedy watched hourly and the first time he opens his mouth and criticizes me, I will fire him.”10
On December 9, 1937, The New York Times broke the news that Kennedy would succeed Bingham. It was still unofficial, but friends expressed their enthusiasm and the Boston press churned out adulatory spreads detailing his life story and rise to prominence. Rose Kennedy voiced her appreciation privately in a letter: “My dear Mr. President, I do want to thank you for the wonderful appointment you have given to Joe. The children and I feel deeply honored, delighted, and thrilled, and we want you to know we do appreciate the fact that you have made possible this great rejoicing.” Her husband, meanwhile, began assembling the publicity team he would take with him to London—Eddie Moore, of course, plus longtime aides Jim Seymour and Harvey Klemmer and, as press liaison, Harold Hinton, a reporter on leave from The New York Times. He also called his sister Loretta and asked her to locate all the old Boston Irish friends of their father’s and urge them to be on the dock in New York to see him off.11
Only one discordant note could be heard within Kennedy’s circle. Boake Carter, one of the nation’s leading radio commentators and a fierce New Deal critic, wondered if his friend was really suited for a diplomatic position in which he would be taking orders from Washington and mostly conveying information back and forth from the State Department to the British Foreign Office. Kennedy assured him he was, but Carter remained skeptical. With uncanny foresight, as it would turn out, he predicted that if Kennedy took the post, he would return to the United States a defeated man, his reputation in tatters, with any hope of higher office forever dashed.12
Kennedy waved aside Carter’s concern, but he felt at least a twinge of foreboding, joking with journalists after arriving in London that he hoped they would be “down to see me off when I’m recalled.” To Jimmy Roosevelt he wrote, “I may not last long over here, but it is going to be fast and furious while it’s on.” These doubting prognostications had a theatrical quality to them—Kennedy would never have accepted the posting if he really believed his chances of success were so low—but there was honesty in them, too.13 A Cassandra by nature, Kennedy had long since operated on the principle that disaster was just around the corner. Add in the ominous state of world politics in early 1938 and his own lack of diplomatic experience and it’s easy to understand his trepidation. Within days of Kennedy’s arrival in England, Hitler completed his annexation of Austria, in explicit violation of the Versailles Treaty but in keeping with Hitler’s blueprint for a new Greater Germany. Immediately he began targeting Czechoslovakia, locked between the upper jaw of Silesia and the lower jaw of Austria and with an ethnic German population in the Sudeten borderlands that he had long cultivated.* German-Italian relations were growing ever warmer, meanwhile, as Hitler and Mussolini prepared to meet at the Brenner Pass to discuss collaboration in the event of war. And in Asia the forces of imperial Japan, having moved southward from Manchuria (which the Japanese had seized in 1931–32), captured key portions of China, including the cities of Beijing and Shanghai. In Spain, the civil war raged on, with Italian troops as well as German weapons and aircraft bolstering Franco’s rebels.14
It all placed tremendous pressure on the year-old British government of Neville Chamberlain, and meant a baptism by fire for the new American ambassador. Still, Kennedy got off to a strong start. “The U.S.A.’s Nine-Child Envoy,” one British tabloid dubbed him as he rode a wave of favorable early press coverage—facilitated, without doubt, by his energetic publicity operation in the embassy. Journalists seemingly could not get enough of this candid, unconventional diplomat with the blazing blue eyes, athletic build, and handsome family. “Jolly Joe,” they called him, and “the Father of America.” Everything he did made news. A number of articles lauded Kennedy’s unpretentiousness in declining to wear knee breeches in presenting his credentials to the king (his secret reason: he was bowlegged and thought the attire would accentuate the fact) and in ending the practice of presenting socially ambitious American debutantes at court.15 Others marveled at his chummy banter and his habit of putting his feet up on his desk during meetings with reporters. In a special stroke of luck, Kennedy, on his first round of golf in England, hit a hole-in-one on the 128-yard second hole at the Stoke Poges course, in Buckinghamshire. Within hours, the accomplishment was front-page news all over Britain—the Sunday Observer even announced a competition for the best poem about the feat—and Kennedy conjured up a quip he would use repeatedly in the early months: “I am much happier being the father of nine children and making a hole in one than I would be as the father of one child and making a hole in nine.” His older sons, though, sent a deflating wire: DUBIOUS ABOUT THE HOLE IN ONE.16
The wire came from Harvard, where the spring semester was now in full swing. Joe Junior, having failed in his final attempt to win a letter in football, was hard at work on a senior thesis on American organizations and the Spanish Civil War, and he looked forward to graduating in May. Jack was halfway through sophomore year. His Old World sojourn with Lem Billings the previous summer had matured him and deepened his interest in European politics and history, but that fall Jack, like many Harvard sophomores then and since, had attached primary importance to two nonacademic rituals of second year: the move into the college “house” where he would live for the next three years, and the attempt to gain admission into one of Harvard’s elite final clubs.
The house system was in fact quite new, the result of philanthropist Edward Harkness’s vision of creating at Harvard something akin to the residential colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. President A. Lawrence Lowell liked the idea and persuaded Harkness to part with $13 million to make it happen. Under the resulting plan, undergraduates spent their final three years at the university living not in traditional dormitories but in houses, seven of which were newly built neo-Georgian “river houses” overlooking Boston from the banks of the Charles, with masters, resident tutors, common rooms, libraries, and dining halls (which had table service and printed menus, and to which students wore jackets and neckties). Their names evoked Harvard’s history—Dunster, Eliot, Kirkland, and Leverett honored former presidents, while Adams, Lowell, and Winthrop recognized families long involved with the college.17
At Winthrop House, Jack roomed with Torby Macdonald, his good friend from freshman year. For their valet they hired, on a part-time basis, George Taylor, a cheerful, cigar-chomping African American whose calling card read “The Gentlemen’s Gentleman” and who also worked in the same capacity for Joe Junior. Taylor soon found himself picking up after Jack, who maintained his sloppy ways and left clothes strewn all over the floor. “One time he was changing his clothes to go out,” Macdonald remembered, “heaving his things into a heap in the middle of the floor. I told him to watch the way he was throwing things around our room because it was getting to look like a rummage sale. ‘Don’t get too sanctimonious,’ Jack countered. ‘Whose stuff do you think I’m throwing mine on top of?’ ”18
Torby soon figured out Jack’s system of dressing: he would simply put on whatever articles of clothing he spotted first upon getting up in the morning. More often than not it would be a baggy tweed jacket, wrinkled khakis, unmatched socks, and scuffed shoes. This disheveled manner of dress would remain a hallmark well into adulthood.19
Macdonald would in short order become, in historian Herbert Parmet’s words, “Harvard’s counterpart to Lem Billings”—or, more accurately, the number-two man behind Lem in Jack’s pantheon of friendships. Like Jack a second son who had to fight for recognition within his Irish Catholic family, Torby hailed from Malden, Massachusetts, where his parents were schoolteachers and his father also coached the high school football team. A stellar athlete who excelled in football, baseball, and hockey during his school days at Andover, Torby found success on the playing fields of Harvard as well. (He showed his talent early, posting fourth-quarter runs of sixty and twenty yards in the freshman game against Yale, and would find an honored place in the school’s football hall of fame.) What drew him and Jack together, however, was their shared sense of humor and their irreverence. They showed a proclivity for matching wits in a rapid-fire and wickedly humorous way that their Winthrop mates found irresistible. “Torby Macdonald was [Jack’s] foil,” one of these friends recalled, “because Torby was a very brilliant person, and Torby and he would have a dialogue with a laugh a second for four or five minutes at a time, and the rest of us would just sit there and enjoy it.”20
Most of all, Jack and Torby shared a similar outlook on life and a sense of trust. Born a mere eight days apart, they simply clicked. Friends could see it, as could family members—including Kick, with whom Torby promptly fell head over heels in love. Torby appreciated Jack’s unpretentiousness and his disinclination to flaunt his family name, while Jack valued Torby’s steadfastness and good cheer—and his status as an emerging Crimson football star. Yet any friendship with Jack Kennedy had limits, as Lem Billings had long since learned. When Macdonald, on one occasion, overheard Joe Junior lambasting his brother, he intervened on Jack’s side, only to learn that, among the Kennedys, family always came first: “Jack whirled on me and told me off in no uncertain terms for butting into a family affair. I never did it again.”21
Jack and Torby’s Catholicism greatly lengthened the odds that either of them would be chosen for a final club. Long the center of Harvard social life, final clubs had changed little since Joe Senior’s day—they were places where gentlemen took their meals, drank, and socialized. As before, clubmen were invited to the leading debutante parties on Beacon Hill and in Brookline; as before, they defined the social hierarchy of the college. Despite intense and continuous effort, Joe Senior had failed in his quest to get membership, as had Joe Junior, who had had to content himself with admission into the Hasty Pudding Institute, the university’s famed theatrical society (to which Jack was also accepted). Joe Senior and Joe Junior had both been stung by their failure, and it looked likely that Jack would suffer the same fate. Classmate Jimmy Rousmanière later said:
There are eight final clubs at Harvard. Each of them elects ten to fifteen in a class, so there’s only a hundred members accepted out of a class of a thousand….All of October of the sophomore year is sort of rushing season, and you get invited around every night for three weeks. They would invite perhaps a hundred people and finally find 15 that probably would like to join a particular club, and be acceptable—and I don’t think Jack Kennedy’s name ever got on that 15 list! The power of the Boston alumni was still so great—and they didn’t like Joe Kennedy or Honey Fitzgerald.22
But Jack had a couple of things going for him. To begin with, he had won kudos and a measure of renown for his chairmanship of the Freshman Smoker the previous spring. A rousing success, the event was still being talked about six months afterwards. In addition, Jack possessed a subtle social intelligence that his father and brother lacked, and he used his likability to excellent effect. Though no less determined than Joe Junior to win admission into a final club, he wore his ambition more lightly, and exuded more charm. He was also politically shrewder, and showed it by focusing his effort on the Spee Club, whose president, Ralph Pope, had expressed opposition to the anti-Catholic bias prevalent within Harvard institutions.23
Two years earlier, the Spee leaders had taken a pass on Joe Junior, whom they considered too pushy, and they now said no to Torby Macdonald, who, with his fondness for drink, seemed likely to solidify rather than weaken Irish Catholic stereotypes, and whose family was poor to boot. They might have rejected Jack as well had not two eminently viable friends, the blue-blooded Rousmanière and William C. Coleman Jr., the Episcopalian son of a Republican judge in Baltimore, made a pact that they would join only as a package with Jack. Pope took notice, and he liked what he saw in the younger Kennedy. “By the time you could say something,” Pope remembered, “he had a question or a remark about it, which went right to the heart. You never had to fool around or wonder, ‘What the hell does he mean?’ ” Pope signed off, “just for that reason—that we needed somebody with some sense in the place. We were a bunch of lightweights.” He said to the delighted trio, “O.K., if you guys want this three-man deal, we want it too. We’ll take you all.”24
Jack had achieved what was previously unachievable for a Kennedy: admission into the inner sanctum of establishment power, a Harvard final club.