An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (12 page)

Yet dismissing the thesis as simply an answer to Joe’s critics is to miss Jack’s compelling central argument—one originally made by Alexis de Tocqueville over a hundred years before: Popular rule does not readily lend itself to the making of effective foreign policy. Democracies, Jack asserts, have a more difficult time than dictatorships in mobilizing resources for their defense. Only when a pervasive fear of losing national survival takes hold can a democracy like Britain or the United States persuade its citizens “to give up their personal interests, for the greater purpose. In other words, every group [in Britain] wanted rearmament but no group felt that there was any need for it to sacrifice its privileged position. This feeling in 1936 was to have a fatal influence in 1938” at Munich.

Jack saw his thesis as a cautionary message to Americans, who needed to learn from Britain’s mistakes. “In this calm acceptance of the theory that the democratic way is the best . . . lies the danger,” Jack wrote. “Why, exactly, is the democratic system better? . . . It is better because it allows for the full development of man as an individual. But . . . this only indicates that democracy is a ‘pleasanter’ form of government—not that it is the best form of government for meeting the present world problem. It may be a great system of government to live in internally but it’s [sic] weaknesses are great. We wish to preserve it here. If we are to do so, we must look at situations much more realistically than we do now.”

What seems most important now about Kennedy’s thesis is the extent to which he emphasizes the need for unsentimental realism about world affairs. Making judgments about international dangers by ignoring them or wishing them away is as dangerous as unthinking hostility to foreign rivals who may be useful temporary allies. Personal, self-serving convictions are as unconstructive as outdated ideologies in deciding what best serves a nation’s interests. Although he would not always be faithful to these propositions, they became mainstays of most of his later responses to foreign challenges.

The exploding world crisis encouraged Jack to turn his thesis into a book. It was not common for a Harvard undergraduate to instantly convert his honor’s paper into a major publication. As Harold Laski told Joe, “While it is the book of a lad with brains, it is very immature, it has no structure, and dwells almost wholly on the surface of things. In a good university, half a hundred seniors do books like this as part of their normal work in their final year. But they don’t publish them for the good reason that their importance lies solely in what they get out of doing them and not out of what they have to say. I don’t honestly think any publisher would have looked at that book of Jack’s if he had not been your son, and if you had not been ambassador. And those are not the right grounds for publication.”

However accurate Laski’s assessment of the thesis, he missed something others in America saw—namely, that international developments made Jack’s analysis a timely appeal to millions of Americans eager to consider a wise response to the European war. The collapse of France had made Americans feel more vulnerable to external attacks than at any time since the Franco-British abuse of neutral rights during the Napoleonic Wars.

New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock, to whom Jack showed the thesis, thought “it was amateurish in many respects but not, certainly not, as much so as most writings in that category are.” “I told him,” Krock said, “I thought it would make a very welcome and very useful book.” And so Krock helped Jack with stylistic revisions and suggested a title,
Why England Slept,
mirroring Churchill’s
While England Slept
. Krock also gave Jack the name of an agent, who arranged a contract with Wilfred Funk, a small publishing house, after Harper & Brothers and Harcourt Brace both turned it down. Harpers thought the manuscript already eclipsed by current events, and Harcourt thought “sales possibilities too dim” and “things moving too fast” for a book on the British failure at Munich to command much interest in the United States.

They were wrong, but partly because Jack made revisions to the manuscript that gave it more balance and greater timeliness than the original. In deciding to try for publication, Jack understood that he needed to do it “as soon as possible, as I should get it out before . . . the issue becomes too dead.” He also accepted the recommendation of several English readers that he not place so much more blame on the public than on Baldwin and Chamberlain for Munich. Most important, he saw the need to say less about the shortcomings of democracy and more about its defense in present circumstances. Hitler’s victories in Europe and the feeling that Britain might succumb to Nazi aggression made it more appealing for Jack to emphasize not democracy’s weakness in meeting a foreign crisis but what America could do to ensure its national security in a dangerous world.

The book, which received almost uniformly glowing reviews and substantial sales in the United States and Britain, demonstrated that Jack had the wherewithal for a public career. No one, including Jack, was then thinking in terms of any run for office. But his success suggested that he was an astute observer of public mood and problems, especially as they related to international affairs. Neither Jack nor Joe foresaw the precise direction Jack’s life would now take, but Joe saw the book as a valuable first step for a young man reaching for public influence. “I read Jack’s book through and I think it is a swell job,” he wrote Rose. “There is no question that regardless of whether he makes any money out of it or not, he will have built himself a foundation for his reputation that will be of lasting value to him.” And to Jack he wrote: “The book will do you an amazing amount of good. . . . You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.”

For his part, Jack had few, if any, illusions about the book. He understood that circumstances more than his skill as a writer and analyst had given the book its resonance. But he also understood that seizing the main chance when it presented itself was not to be despised; he was more than happy, then, to devote his summer to publicizing and selling
Why England Slept
.

Kennedy friend Charles Spalding remembers visiting Jack at the Cape shortly after the book had appeared. “Jack was downstairs with a whole pile of these books. . . . It was just a wonderful disarray of papers, letters from Prime Ministers and congressmen and people you’ve heard about, some under wet bathing suits and some under the bed.” When Spalding asked how the book was selling, “[Jack’s] eyes lit up and he said, ‘Oh, very well. I’m seeing to that.’ He was seeing that the books were handed out and he was really moving the books. . . . It was just a sort of amusing pragmatism that he hadn’t just written the book and then he was going to just disappear. He was going to see that it got sold. He was just laughing at his own success. . . . He was doing everything he could to promote it. And he was good at that. . . . The interviews, radio programs, answering letters, autographing copies, sending them out, checking bookstores.”

IN THE SUMMER OF
1940, aside from promoting his book, Jack was at loss for what to do next. He had thoughts of attending Yale Law School, but health problems persuaded him to temporarily abandon such plans. In addition, he had doubts about a law career. It would mean not only competing with brother Joe, who was enrolled at Harvard, but also abandoning what Lem Billings called his intellectual interests. “I don’t think there was any question but that he was thinking he would go into journalism and teaching.” But like millions of other young Americans in 1940, the state of world affairs made private decisions hostage to public developments. “There was an awful vacuum there in 1940,” Lem remembered, “a very uncomfortable period for a guy who was graduating from school. I mean, what to do? We were so damn close to going to war. . . . You didn’t know what you were going to do[,] so what was the point of getting into any lifelong thing?” Everybody “was just sort of marking time.” The passage of a bill in September 1940 authorizing the first peacetime draft had put the country’s young men on notice that military service might take precedence over personal plans.

And so Jack went to Stanford in September to nurse himself back to health in the warm California sun. His graduate work, which lasted only one quarter, to December 1940, was supposed to focus on business studies, but his courses and interests remained in political science and international relations. A young woman he dated while in California remembered his attentiveness to contemporary events. “He was fascinated with the news. He always turned it on in the car, on the radio. . . . He was intrigued by what was going on in the world.” Another Stanford contemporary recalled Jack’s conversations with Stanford’s student body president about the nature of effective government leadership—he pointed to FDR as a model of how to make big changes without overturning traditional institutions. This student also remembered Jack’s telling him and other “remote westerners . . . that there was a war on, that it had been on for a year, and that we were going to get into it.” In December, he attended an Institute of World Affairs conference in Riverside, California, on current international problems, where he acted as a “rapporteur” for four of the sessions: “War and the Future World Economy,” “The Americas: Problems of Hemispheric Defense & Security,” “War and the Preservation of European Civilization,” and “Proposed Plans for Peace.”

His interest in overseas affairs was more than academic. When Joe resigned his ambassadorship in December 1940, Jack counseled him on what to say to insulate him from charges of appeasement and identification with Chamberlain’s failed policies. More important, he now convinced his father not to take issue with the Lend- Lease bill FDR proposed as a means to help Britain defeat Germany. If we failed to give this aid now and Britain were defeated, Jack argued, it would cost the United States much more later and might force us into a war with Hitler, which Joe, above all, wished to avoid. Under pressure from Roosevelt as well, Joe publicly accepted his son’s reasoning.

Jack’s term at Stanford was an interlude of no lasting consequence. His unresolved health difficulties drew him back to the East Coast at the start of 1941, where he busied himself for the first three months of the year with finding a ghostwriter for his father’s memoirs and thinking about renewing his application to Yale Law School. But when his mother and sister Eunice went to Latin America in the spring, Jack decided to join them and then travel on his own. He visited Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, with brief stops in Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama.

Although the trip was valuable, upon his return the direction of Jack’s life still remained unclear. There was, however, little question that it would sooner or later take a serious turn. However self-indulgent, Jack had no intention of becoming a career playboy trading on his father’s fame and influence. And Joe and Rose believed it inconceivable for any of their children to settle for a sybaritic life. The material benefits of their wealth were all too obvious, from the opulent houses to the cars, clothing, jewelry, foreign travel, lavish vacations, and parties at home and abroad with all the social lions of their time. But a life without ambition, without some larger purpose than one’s own needs and satisfaction, was never part of the Kennedy ethos. It is one of the great ironies of this family’s saga that however frivolous any of its members might be at one time or another, it was impermissible to make frivolity a way of life.

At the age of twenty-three, Jack understood that he needed a lifework; just as important, he had considerable confidence that he would succeed. His background and experience had created a belief in himself as someone special, as standing apart from the many other talented, promising young men he had met at home and abroad. His privileged life had opened the way for his success, but it was hardly the full measure of what would make for an uncommon life.

CHAPTER 3

The Terrors of Life

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

DESPITE THE FAMILY’S WEALTH
and palatial houses, Jack had never seemed to feel as if he had a home, or at least a special place in one of the houses that was exclusively his. A young woman who went with Jack to Hyannis Port when the rest of the family was in Palm Beach “was surprised to see him go through the empty house like an intruder, peeking into his father’s room and looking in his dresser draw[er]s, and picking up objects on all the surfaces as if he hadn’t seen them before.”

Part of the reason had to do with his mother. Rose’s absences had always made Jack unhappy. In 1923, when he was almost six and Rose was about to depart on a six-week trip to California, Jack exclaimed, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.” Jack, who had been apart from his parents earlier for an extended hospital stay, saw any separation as a return of that unhappy experience. And while he seemed able to tolerate his father’s business trips, with his mother it was different. He told LeMoyne Billings that whenever Rose announced another trip, he openly cried, which greatly irritated her and made her more distant than ever from her anxious son. Jack learned, as he told Billings, to act stoically in the face of her departures. “Better to take it in stride,” he said.

That said, her presence wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Rose’s insistence on rigid rules of behavior upset and angered Jack. One commentator has said: “[She] organized and supervised the large family with the institutional efficiency she had learned from the Ursuline nuns of Sacred Heart Academy. She insisted on strict adherence to domestic routines and an idealistic dedication to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.” Lem Billings remembered her as “a tough, constant, minute disciplinarian with a fetish for neatness and order and decorum.” She discouraged any excessive emotional display. Touching, personal warmth, sensuality of any kind, was frowned on. “She was terribly religious. She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”