SEVEN

THE AMBASSADOR’S SON

Later, after everything went wrong, after his public career lay in ruins and it seemed he might have destroyed his sons’ political prospects, too, people would look back on this moment, in early July 1938, as the high point of Joseph P. Kennedy’s storied life. On the brilliant summer day when the ship carrying the three Kennedy men docked at Plymouth, anything seemed possible for the American tycoon-turned-diplomat and his two beaming sons. Kennedy faced troubles in the Roosevelt White House, true, and there were looming dangers in European power politics that were sure to test his mettle and his judgment, but both challenges were in their way testimony to his success: he had earned the wrath of some in the administration, and the irritation of the president himself, in large part because serious journalists now spoke of him as a legitimate, if long-shot, Democratic candidate for president in 1940, should FDR decline to run for a tradition-shattering third term; and he had established himself, in his short time as ambassador, as a close outside associate of Neville Chamberlain’s government.

Now, moreover, with his eldest sons at last on British soil, the ambassadorship was fully and gloriously a family affair, as all eleven members were together in one place for the first time (excepting major holidays) since Joe Junior left for Choate nine years before, in 1929. Joe, freshly minted Harvard graduate, planned to work for a spell at the embassy and then embark on a year-long tour of Europe before entering law school; Jack would stay until the start of fall semester at Harvard. As the handsome trio rode the train up to London, they knew what awaited them: a joyous reunion of father and mother, ages forty-nine and forty-seven, and their nine children, from Joe at twenty-two to little Teddy at six.

The family’s residence—the imposing six-story, thirty-six-room ambassadorial mansion at 14 Prince’s Gate, which J. P. Morgan had donated to the U.S. government soon after the Great War—certainly made a winning impression. Located in fashionable Knightsbridge, just off Hyde Park and within easy walking distance of the embassy at Grosvenor Square, the home had been dilapidated when Joe Kennedy first arrived, in March. He quickly ordered a major renovation, to be paid for with his own funds. The final bill ran to $250,000 ($4.5 million in today’s dollars). In advance of his family’s arrival, he also purchased plentiful amounts of Maxwell House coffee, sweets, canned clam chowder, Jergens lotion, and Nivea cream. Through the Paris embassy he arranged for cigars, fresh produce, and fine wines to be sent from France. In May, five hundred bottles of Pommery & Greno champagne arrived from Rheims, to be served at official functions. Though Kennedy himself seldom drank, he knew many of his dinner guests would; he did not wish to be unprepared.1

Rose Kennedy, meanwhile, directed a permanent staff of twenty-three house servants and three chauffeurs, and an additional reserve of twenty part-timers for official functions. She was a subject of endless fascination in the British press, as were the children, who for the first time in their lives found themselves in the glare of publicity. The morning papers would regularly post pictures of one or another Kennedy child out and about in London: Teddy and Jean watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; Kick bringing home-baked cookies to a children’s hospital; Bobby and Teddy on their first day of school. The American press, too, got in on the act. President Roosevelt, Henry Luce’s Life magazine enthused, “got eleven ambassadors for the price of one. Amazed and delighted at the spectacle of an Ambassadorial family big enough to man a full-sized cricket team, England has taken them all, including extremely pretty and young-looking Mrs. Kennedy, to its heart.”2

Eighteen-year-old Kick in particular took London society by storm, her vibrancy and exuberance obvious to all concerned, not least journalists. “The whole family is taking to London life with the ease of the proverbial ducks to the pond,” said the London Times. “But it is Kathleen especially who is about everywhere, at all the parties, alert, observant, a merry girl who when she talks to you makes you feel as if you were seeing it all for the first time too.” Interested in seemingly everything and everyone, and highly skilled in the art of conversation, Kick would talk with all comers, regardless of station, cheerfully expounding on any manner of topics, never boastfully but in a genial and charming way that her English hosts found enchanting. “It was,” her mother said, “as if everything that made Kathleen what she was came together in London.”3

Rosemary, on the other hand, now nineteen, remained a subject of parental concern. Years of effort to find an educational environment that would enable her to advance intellectually had yielded sparse results—she remained at a fourth-grade level, despite attending five schools in six years. No less than before, she struggled to retain information and to read social cues. “You could talk to Rosemary,” said one family acquaintance, “but you could never have a conversation. She talked like a ten-year-old—just chattering all the time.” A letter she wrote to her parents in 1936, while attending a school in Brookline, the town of her birth, indicated her communication level: “Jack is taken me to the next dance. He is going to take me in his new car….I gave Jack $1 he didn’t ask for it either. 2 cents I paid for his papper….Lots of love kisses your darling daughter.”4

In Eunice’s recollection, “Mother was worried about Rosemary in London. Would she accidentally do something dangerous while Mother was occupied with some unavoidable official function? Would she get confused taking a bus and get lost among London’s intricate streets? Would someone attack her? Could she protect herself if she were out of the eye of the governess? No one could watch out for Rose all the time.”5 Nonetheless, her mother determined that Rosemary and Kick would both be presented at court, which they were on May 11. Although the actual presentation took mere seconds, it required elaborate preparation—the selection of the dresses and the fittings, the practice walks and curtsies—and adherence to strict rules. Presented in pairs before the seated King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, each woman performed a slow, sweeping curtsy to the king, then slid three steps to the right and did the same thing to the queen, then glided farther to the right and exited out a side door. With her parents watching anxiously, Rosemary carried it off, though not before losing her balance momentarily. Mrs. Kennedy, who traveled to Paris to buy her own dress for the occasion, found the whole experience “glamorous beyond belief.”6

Rose loved London, loved being the wife of the ambassador, loved the garden parties, the formal dinners, the tennis at Wimbledon, the weekends at Blenheim Palace, the lavish balls given by Lady Astor for, among others, the king and queen. Diary entries show Rose’s admiration for the upper-class English and their ways, for their “perfect manners” and “more exact enunciation,” and her gratitude for the embrace they offered her and her family. “We became practically public property,” she enthused decades afterwards. “I almost began to feel that we had been adopted as a family, by the whole British people.”7 She worried incessantly about whether she truly fit in—it horrified her to realize that she was the only one wearing tweeds during a Sunday lunch with the royals—but relished her sudden rise to the highest ranks of British society. A weekend at Windsor Castle was “one of the most fabulous events” of her life, she later wrote. Her husband agreed: as the two of them lounged in their suite in the castle tower, glasses of sherry in hand, he is said to have remarked, “Well, Rose, it’s a hell of a long way from East Boston!”8

If Joe’s wandering eye during these excursions pained her, she did her best not to show it; she had long since made her peace with his flings. It seems they had a kind of arrangement: she would look the other way, and he would avoid embarrassing her. Certainly his modus operandi in London had not changed. Work hard and play hard, Kennedy told his sons, and he led by example. Discretion proved somewhat easier here than in the United States, however, as his lovers now were not actresses and showgirls but aristocratic British women who had their own incentive for secrecy. Aide Harvey Klemmer marveled at the ambassador’s detailed accounts of his conquests, especially given the individuals involved. “His name was connected to various women all the way to the top,” Klemmer recalled. “Once he said the queen was one of the greatest women in the world. He wanted even that left to speculation, when there was absolutely nothing.”9

Jack, too, seized on the chance to acquaint himself with British society. Soon after their arrival, he and Joe Junior attended a magnificent embassy dinner in honor of the Duke and Duchess of Kent; other guests included Winston Churchill and Interior Secretary Ickes. With Kick’s debutante season still going strong, the brothers had no end of opportunities for evening fun, and they took full advantage. Jack in particular made a winning impression on his hosts, whereas Joe Junior could come off as caustic and hard-edged, his humor lacking the finesse and sense of irony prized by the English. He didn’t wear well. At evening balls, Joe would cut in on dance partners just a tad too aggressively and thereby raise eyebrows. William Douglas-Home, the thirteenth Earl of Home and one of Kick’s myriad British suitors, got to know both brothers that summer. He later said of Jack, “He was age 21, very young, and very interested in everything. I mean, not only in politics, but the thing that struck you about him was that he was so vital about everything….He was interested, always interested. He would never have a deep political discussion without jokes at the same time. He had a very highly developed sense of humor. Joe was probably more serious than he was.”10

Deborah “Debo” Mitford, the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters and a friend of Kick’s, concurred: Jack and Kick were “very generous in outlook and very funny. That was what was so marvelous about Jack—he was able to laugh at himself. No politician I’ve ever known was like that….Like Kick, he was an absolute fount of energy, enthusiasm, fun, and intelligence, all the things that make people want to become them.”11

On July 11, Jack and some of his elite British pals went to the House of Commons for the chance to hear Winston Churchill in action. Since his early teenage years Jack had been fascinated by Churchill’s books and speeches, astounded by his oratorical brilliance, his mastery of the written word, his deep sense of history; now, for the first time, Jack would be on hand as the hunched, gruff figure rose slowly from his seat to give what everyone expected would be another bravura performance. It always was when Churchill spoke—such was the power of his language and his delivery that even his detractors were keen to hear him; often, the signal that he was about to speak caused a minor commotion in the lobbies as members rushed into the chamber. Yet Jack was conflicted as he took in the scene in the visitors’ gallery that midsummer day.12 Drawn though he was to Churchill’s charisma and eloquence, Jack felt ambivalent toward him, for Churchill represented a worldview distinctly at odds with his father’s, not least with respect to how to handle the fascist powers.

Jack Kennedy’s friends, too, felt that hesitation. They admired Churchill for all the reasons Jack did, but they had learned from their parents to distrust his supposedly reckless and unprincipled character and his seeming glorification of war. That summer the young men, including Jack, debated Churchill’s newest book, Arms and the Covenant, a collection of his speeches since 1932 that would be published in the United States under the title While England Slept: A Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938.

In particular, remembered Andrew Cavendish, who was two years Jack’s junior and would go on to marry Debo Mitford, the friends sparred over one pointed exchange in the book: Churchill’s accusation, in his speech “The Locust Years” (November 12, 1936), that British leaders had allowed the nation to “drift” while the Germans steadily rearmed, and the riposte by Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister at the time, that the electorate would not have countenanced a major rearmament effort at the time, and that any such effort would have brought the left to power, with disastrous consequences for Britain. This Churchill-Baldwin flap posed large questions for the young men about the role of leadership in a democracy. Should a leader pursue a course of action that, however meritorious on strategic or ethical grounds, might cause his political downfall? How much should public opinion matter in policymaking? Should a leader take care not to get too far ahead of the electorate, as Baldwin seemed to argue, or was Churchill right to insist that he must speak his mind, must educate the public, whatever the consequences to his own political standing?13 Jack’s thesis at Harvard would center on these questions, as would his 1956 book, Profiles in Courage.

At the end of July, the Kennedys decamped for the South of France, where Rose had rented a villa in Cap d’Antibes, near Cannes. She and eight of the kids arrived first, and Joe Senior and Kick joined a few days later. There followed numerous lazy days at the house or at the nearby Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc—whose guests that season included Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and tennis star Bill Tilden—and evenings that harked back to the Hyannis Port ritual: everyone seated around a long rectangular dining table, with Mr. Kennedy directing the discussion like a “master conductor” (in the words of Dietrich’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Maria).14

Louella Hennessy, the family’s ebullient longtime nanny, remembered one particularly stormy afternoon at the villa during which Jack gave an impromptu history lesson to his younger siblings, all of them seated in a row in front of the fireplace. With references to Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon, he lectured to them about the rise and fall of nations—how they gained stature and wealth, how they maintained and expanded their might, how they eventually squandered it all. The United States had joined the ranks of the great powers, Jack went on, but it differed from the rest, for it was a republic and a democracy. The task for America would be to maintain its high position, learn from the mistakes of other great nations, and at the same time preserve its way of life, its freedoms. “As I listened to Jack,” Hennessy said, “I thought with amazement, ‘Why, he’s only 21. Imagine him caring about these things.’ ”15