The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (25 page)

In these letters to Lem there is a curious dichotomy between the fledgling public man and the spoiled, petulant, narcissistic youth. To that latter Jack Kennedy, life was a dress parade. Jack wrote Lem how he “went to court in my knee breeches and made my gracious bow before the king and queen and was really quite a figure,” while he was not “sporting around in my morning coat, my ‘Anthony Eden’ black homburg and white gardenia.” He was, as always, deeply sensitive to anything that smelled of the effete. He read in the
Choate News
that a lone bat had terrified students, zooming around Mem House, hiding until an intrepid housemaid attacked the animal with a mop. “My God, they all sound like fairies, both faculty and student body,” he wrote Lem.

To Jack, sex remained the preferred avenue of manly adventure, his sexual safaris taking him from the brothels of West Palm Beach to the refined enclaves of the demimonde, where at times the behavior did not differ that much from that of the whores of South Florida, only the price.

No small part of the adventure was the imminent possibility of carrying home an unwanted souvenir. In London he saw a woman who had lived with the Duke of Kent and had among her baubles of romance “terrific diamond bracelets” from the duke, a “big ruby” given to her by a Nepalese prince, and a cigarette case “engraved with Snow White lying down with spread legs, and the seven dwarfs cocks in hands waiting to screw her—very charming.” Jack wrote Lem: “I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but we’ll see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life.”

Jack was seeing life too on what he called “the serious side.” His father got him introductions to ambassadors and other high officials. But it was his self-confident manner and astuteness that led them to spend time with him that they probably would not have granted to a less politically sophisticated young man. “The whole thing is damn interesting,” he wrote Lem, “and if this letter wasn’t going on a German boat and if they weren’t opening mail—could tell you some interesting stuff.”

Some politicians, even in their youth, live their lives as if they are biographies, measuring each word for posterity, writing letters with their ideas and feelings self-censored, all sanitized. Jack, however, wrote in an emotive stream, going in a few sentences from a rude put-down of his contemporaries to a telling insight into the world in which he lived, and then back to more gossip.

Again and again Jack told Lem that it was all “very interesting,” and so it was. He traveled to the open city of Danzig, where swastikas were in full array and he “talked with the Nazi heads and all the counsels up there.” He realized that Poland would never give up Danzig to Hitler. Nor was Germany about to back off. “What Germany will do if she decides to go to war,” he wrote Lem on May 1, 1939, “will try and put Poland in the position of being aggressor—and then go to work.”

Jack’s diplomatic reportage was perfectly prescient, but he had no interest in talking to the unwashed, the unlearned, and the unstylish. “All of the young people own estates of around 1,000,000 acres with 10,000 or so peasants,” he wrote Lem, as if young peasants were some degraded form of humankind unworthy of being called “young people.” If Lem came to visit, he promised that they would visit an estate rented by the Biddies “with around 12,000 on it who tip their hats with one hand and push forward their daughter with the other.”

While twenty-year-old Jack was in London, he read
The Young Melbourne,
a new book by David Cecil. Jack was at an age when a young man of a literate bent reads books not as abstract fodder but as a guide to conduct. Young men of Jack’s generation were reading Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and learning of love and courage, or John Steinbeck’s despairing
Of Mice and Men.
Their favorite book would never have been a literary biography of a Whig aristocrat who at a young age “envince[d] that capacity for compromising genially with circumstances,” a capacity that the young rarely consider a virtue.

In this Whig world that Jack so admired, daring was for the battlefield, not for the art that hung on one’s walls, the literature that one admired, or the politics that one espoused. It was a life of appreciation, not creation, and perfunctory religiosity, not deep spirituality. It was above all a man’s world of conventional excess—drinking and gambling and wenching. “The ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer,” the author wrote in what could have been an adage for Jack’s own life.

Jack was a young man of intellectual precociousness. Many of the ideas in the book resonated within him and passed as wisdom. Young Melbourne was “a skeptic in thought, in practice a hedonist,” a description that fit Jack’s own vision of himself. This Whig hedonism was not vulgar sexual indulgence, but a life in which pleasures, sensual and otherwise, were aesthetic treats. Passion was in the pursuit. Loyalty was for friends, not for spouses or lovers. Moral perfection was left where it belonged, in heaven.

“Nature had meant for him that rare phenomenon, a philosophical observer of mankind,” Cecil wrote. That sentence too would surely have resonated with Jack. He was in ways a spectator to his own life. There seemed nothing, no romance deep enough, no danger intense enough, no thought profound enough, to pull him fully outside the circle of himself.

There was the conundrum, not only for young Melbourne but also for young Jack Kennedy. Is a man who sees the world as it is—with all its compromises, dishonesty, self-interest, and impediments to change—less able to make a deep mark than another man who is blithely unaware of his own limitations and those of the world? Was it the lot of a man who understood the sheer futility of most human effort—the illusions and vanity that drove men to seek fame and power—to stand on the sidelines, his head tilted ironically, merely observing the life that ran before him?

9
“It’s the End of the World, the End of Everything”

J
oe believed that England would lose in a war with Germany. Everything he did and said followed from that conviction. If he was correct, he was not a treacherous defeatist whose sentiments prolonged the period before America would begin to support its greatest ally with its immense military arsenal.

No, he was a daring prophet and patriot who, once war seemed imminent, sought to extract whatever he could from the dying island empire, holding the British up to repatriate hard currency for Hollywood films, hanging tough in barter deals with the British, and promoting those British leaders who sought peace at almost any price. He had gone into politics to save his own fortune, or a good part of it. If his liquor business benefited from the diminished tariffs he was now helping to negotiate, that was only a fitting compensation for his many contributions as a public servant.

As for the Jews, it pained Joe that they mocked him so when he considered himself practically their best friend in government. He believed that he shared with Chamberlain the attitude that if the world exploded in war, the troublesome Jews would share a good deal of the blame. In his thinking, he had nonetheless worked on several fronts to get some of them out of Germany and accepted in one of the many countries that shunned them. One of the new ambassador’s first tasks was to deal with the Evian conference in France. It was called a “refugee” conference, but that was a euphemism that hid the fact that 90 percent of the refugees were Jewish. The delegates focused on what to do with German “refugees,” but the problem was far broader. The Poles and the Romanians wanted to be rid of their “refugees” too. The British feared that too liberal a solution in Germany would inspire several other European nations to deport their “refugees.”

Joe tried to work out a solution to allow Jews to buy their way out of Germany and into other countries. Joe’s proposal pleased his eldest son. “The baby is tossed right into the laps of the people themselves for the real concern now is money,” Joe Jr. wrote in his diary on November 21, 1938. “If the Jews come through and especially the other people this problem can be cleared up. Dad doesn’t think they will put up the necessary money, but he thinks he has done his part, and the rest is up to the others.”

London was full of rumors that Joe was making a new fortune selling out the British by trading on inside information. There is no evidence of such dealings in the British Foreign Office’s extensive files, and Joe may well not have been taking advantage of his position. But he was a man of such monumental cynicism, who glorified the rudest reaches of self-interest, that those around him often thought the worst of him.

Joe was not cynical, however, about his children. No father cared more for the future of his sons than he did, and when he spoke out of that feeling, he touched what was deep and true. In May 1939, he traveled to Liverpool University to receive an honorary degree. There, as young British faces looked up at him, he spoke of his own children and their futures. “I have a couple of boys, and two or three daughters, who think that they know what’s wrong with the world,” he told his British audience. “They are quite outspoken in their opinion of the way we old folks have been doing things. I shouldn’t want them to know it but I must admit, just between us, that I can’t blame them…. The important thing to remember is that the majority of our difficulties are man-made…. They are the result of human carelessness, human short-sightedness, human greed.”

Joe’s relationship with Roosevelt was by now so full of duplicity that endless scrubbing would not have washed away all the lies. In July, Joe’s friend and journalistic promoter Arthur Krock wrote a column titled “Why Ambassador Kennedy Is Not Coming Home,” in which he said that the president’s militant young New Dealers had set out to destroy the ambassador with a series of lies. It was whispered that he had gone to bed with the British appeasers and was badmouthing the president. “None of these statements was true,” Krock said. “But they were sedulously circulated for quite a while.”

Roosevelt knew the source of this missile, but he was too shrewd to signal that he had spotted his attacker. Instead, in a letter to Joe he unloosed his venom on Krock. “He is, after all, only a social parasite whose surface support can be won by entertainment and flattery, but who in his heart is a cynic who has never felt warm affection for anybody—man or woman.” Although he supposedly was attacking Krock, the president clearly had another target in mind.

In August 1939, the Soviets and Nazis signed a pact, making allies of the two great totalitarian powers. While Nazi troops surreptitiously massed at the Polish border, the American ambassador was off in southern France on what he considered a much-needed vacation. From Cannes, Joe wrote a letter to the president, replying in part to Roosevelt’s letter. If ever there was a time for the ambassador to step back from all the tedious minutiae of the diplomatic life and impart all the precious insight he had gained during his tenure in London, that time was here. But he had no deep thoughts, no telling perspicacity, and no warning call of the events to follow.

Joe wrote from Cannes that “the chief thing I have noticed in the South of France, on the part of caddies, waiters and residents, is a very strong anti-Semitic feeling. Beyond that … I can contribute nothing to an understanding of the international state of affairs.”

Caddies and waiters did not pop off with anti-Semitic cracks unless they felt the remarks would be well received. That aside, it was a curious state of affairs indeed when the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s believed that his sole insight into European affairs was the mindless gossip that he picked up around the golf course and the dinner table.

As he swam at Hotel du Cap Eden Roc and dined on the Riviera, Joe was full of pathetic self-pity. “About my position in England my only thought was to wonder whether my experience and knowledge were not being completely wasted,” he continued in his letter to the president. He nonetheless assured FDR that he would stay where he was asked to stay. He told Roosevelt that as a boy his father had “taught me two principles: gratitude and loyalty. He said 90% of people seem to forget favors and kindnesses done them. Of the second principle, he said, no matter how you may fail in ability you can make it up by being unfailingly loyal to your friends. I have tried to live up to those two principles and, to you personally, I owe a debt on both counts.”

Joe’s father had indeed acted on those principles, and he was a revered soul. Joe had honored his father’s ideals by mouthing the words and acting the opposite. He had no deep gratitude toward the president, but a mounting anger at the man’s refusal to heed his despairing messages. As for loyalty, he had talked so loudly behind the president’s back that Roosevelt had long since heard his rude imprecations and taken his subordinate’s measure. Roosevelt knew, however, that at this crucial time he had to keep Joe at his post; back home in the United States he would be an articulate critic and a natural leader of American isolationists.

During those long August days, Joe had opportunity to spend hours with his family, who had all convened at the villa Domaine de Ranguin near Cannes. His sons were the measure of the man, and he took pleasure in
twenty-four-year-old Joe Jr., with his stories of the fall of Spain, and twenty-two-year-old Jack, a Harvard senior. At thirteen, Bobby was still too young to join in the spirited discussions on war and peace, and little Teddy was still little more than a family mascot.

During the day Rose took the family to Hotel du Cap Eden Roc to swim. High above the water stood a cliff that only the most daring made their diving platform. Joe Jr. and Jack dove off again and again while the rest of the Kennedys watched in awed admiration.

Then the brothers called upon seven-year-old Teddy to join them in diving thirty feet into the water. If Joe Jr. and Jack believed that Teddy would rush fearlessly up to that high perch, willing to do anything to impress them, they did not know their little brother. He walked up the stone steps, but he did it leaden of feet and spirit, heavy with fear. Most mothers would have risen and scolded their grown sons for putting their little brother up to such a foolhardy dare, but Rose sat quietly, believing this exercise a part of manly education.