An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (11 page)

Jack spent August traveling among England, France, Germany, and Italy in pursuit of more information for his senior thesis. He and Torbert MacDonald, his Harvard roommate who had come to England for a track meet, met fierce hostility in Munich from storm troopers who spotted the English license plates on their car. Against the advice of the U.S. embassy in Prague, Joe Kennedy arranged a visit by Jack to Czechoslovakia. The diplomat George F. Kennan, who was serving as a secretary of the legation, remembered how “furious” members of the embassy were at the demand. Joe Kennedy’s “son had no official status and was, in our eyes, obviously an upstart and an ignoramus. The idea that there was anything he could learn or report about conditions in Europe which we . . . had not already reported seemed . . . wholly absurd. That busy people should have their time taken up arranging his tour struck us as outrageous.” Jack saw matters differently, believing a firsthand look at Prague, now under Nazi control, would be invaluable, and his sense of entitlement left him indifferent to the complaints of the embassy.

In keeping with the peculiar way in which he moved between the serious and the frivolous at this time of his life, Jack spent part of August on the French Riviera, where his family had again rented a villa for the summer at Antibes. There he socialized with the famous movie actress Marlene Dietrich and her family, swimming with her daughter during the day and dancing with Marlene herself at night.

But the good times came to an abrupt end in September when Hitler invaded Poland and the British and the French declared war. Jack joined his parents and his brother Joe and sister Kathleen in the visitor’s gallery to watch Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and members of Parliament, including Winston Churchill, explain Britain’s decision to fight. Churchill’s speech, giving evidence of the powerful oratory that would later inspire the nation in the darkest hours of the war, left an indelible impression on Jack. To Joe, the onset of war was an unprecedented disaster. He became tearful when Chamberlain declared that “everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins.” In a telephone call to FDR, the inconsolable Joe Kennedy moaned, “It’s the end of the world . . . the end of everything.”

Jack now also got his first experience of hands-on diplomacy. His father sent him to Glasgow to attend to more than two hundred American citizens rescued by a British destroyer after their British liner carrying 1,400 passengers from Liverpool to New York had been sunk by a German submarine. More than a hundred people had lost their lives, including twenty-eight U.S. citizens. The surviving Americans were terrified at the suggestion that they board a U.S. ship without a military escort to ensure their safety, and Jack’s assurances that President Roosevelt and the embassy were confident that Germany would not attack a U.S. ship did not convince them. Although Jack recommended to his father that he try to meet the passengers’ demand, Joe believed it superfluous, and an unescorted U.S. freighter returned the citizens to the United States. Meanwhile, Jack flew on a Pan Am Clipper to Boston in time for his senior fall term.

More than anything, Jack’s travels encouraged an intellectual’s skepticism about the limits of human understanding and beliefs. When he returned to America in September, he asked a Catholic priest: “I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to Heaven on a white horse, and Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe Christ any more than Mohammed?” The priest urged Joe to get Jack some “instruction immediately, or else he would turn into a[n] . . . atheist if he didn’t get some of his problems straightened out.” When a friend at Harvard who thought Jack less than pious about his religion asked why he was going to church on a holy day, Jack “got this odd, hard look on his face” and replied, “This is one of the things I do for my father. The rest I do for myself.”

It was all part of Jack’s affinity for skepticism, which Payson S. Wild, one of his instructors in the fall of 1939, helped foster in a tutorial on political theory. Wild urged him to consider the question of why, given that there are a few people at the top and masses below, the masses obey. “He seemed really intrigued by that,” Wild recalled.

Jack gave expression to his independence—to his developing impulse to question prevailing wisdom—in an October 1939 editorial in the Harvard
Crimson
. Responding to the impression that “everyone here is ready to fight to the last Englishman,” Jack published a counterargument in the campus newspaper that essentially reflected the case his father was then making privately to President Roosevelt and the State Department. As much an expression of loyalty to Joe as of pleasure in running against majority opinion and presenting himself as someone with special understanding of international conditions, Jack urged a quick, negotiated end to the fighting through the good offices of President Roosevelt. Because it would require a third party to mediate a settlement, Jack thought that the “President is almost under an obligation to exert every office he possesses to bring about such a peace.”

Jack believed that both Germany and England were eager for an agreement. And though such a settlement would mean sacrificing Poland, it would likely save Britain and France from probable defeat. But it would have to be a “peace based on solid reality,” Jack asserted, which meant giving Germany a “free economic hand” in eastern Europe and a share of overseas colonies. Hitler would have to disarm in return for these conditions, but Jack did not think this was out of reach.

Jack’s misplaced hopes seem to have been more a case of taking issue with current assumptions than an expression of realism about European affairs developed in his recent travels. Nevertheless, his interest in exploring political questions—in honing his skills as a student of government—is striking. “He seemed to blossom once Joe was gone [to law school] and to feel more secure himself and to be more confident as his grades improved,” Wild said. As another token of Jack’s interest and vocational aspirations in 1939, he tried to become a member of the
Crimson
’s editorial board; but it already had a full complement of editors and he had to settle for a spot on the paper’s business board. He also occasionally wrote for the paper. An editorial in the
Crimson
and a speech before the YMCA and YWCA on how to restore peace made him feel like “quite a seer around here.” He also joked with his father that being an ambassador’s son who had spent time in Europe with prominent officials gave him added cachet with the girls. “I seem to be doing better with the girls so I guess you are doing your duty over there,“ he wrote his father, “so before resigning give my social career a bit of consideration.”

In the fall of 1939, Jack’s interest in public affairs reflected itself in his course work. In four government classes, he focused on contemporary international politics. “The war clinched my thinking on international relations,” he said later. “The world had to get along together.” In addition to a course with Wild on elements of international law, he took Modern Imperialism, Principles of Politics, and Comparative Politics: Bureaucracy, Constitutional Government, and Dictatorship. Some papers Jack wrote for Wild’s course on neutral rights in wartime on the high seas made Wild think that Jack might become an attorney, but Jack displayed a greater interest in questions about power and the comparative workings and appeal of fascism, Nazism, capitalism, communism, and democracy. The challenge of distinguishing between rhetoric and realism in world affairs, between the ideals of international law and the hard actualities of why nations acted as they did, particularly engaged him.

THE PRINCIPAL OUTCOME
of Jack’s travels and course work was a senior honor’s thesis on the origins of Britain’s appeasement policy. The history of how Jack wrote and published the thesis provides a microcosm of his privileged world. During Christmas vacation 1939 at Palm Beach, he spoke with British ambassador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father’s Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British embassy in Washington for a conversation with Lothian that, as Jack later wrote him, “started me out on the job.” Taking advantage of his father’s continued presence in London, Jack received invaluable help from James Seymour, the U.S. embassy press secretary, who sent him printed political pamphlets and other Conservative, Labour, and Liberal publications Jack could not obtain in the United States. His financial means also allowed him to use typists and stenographers to meet university deadlines.

Although the papers Jack wrote for his senior-year courses show an impressive capacity for academic study and analysis, it was the contemporary scene that above all interested him—in particular, the puzzle of how a power like Great Britain found itself in another potentially devastating war only twenty years after escaping from the most destructive conflict in history. Was it something peculiar to a democracy that accounted for this failure, or were forces at work here beyond any government’s control?

With only three months to complete the project, Jack committed himself with the same determination he had shown in fighting for a place on the Harvard football and swimming teams. Some of his Harvard friends remembered how he haunted the library of the Spee Club, where he worked on the thesis. They teased him about his “book,” poking fun at his seriousness and pretension at trying to write a groundbreaking work. “We used to tease him about it all the time,” one of them said, “because it was sort of his King Charles head that he was carrying around all the time: his famous thesis. We got so sick of hearing about it that I think he finally shut up.”

Seymour proved a fastidious research assistant who not only persuaded the English political parties to provide the publications Jack requested but also chased down books and articles on the subject at Chatham House, the Oxford University Press, and the British Museum Reading Room. Seymour’s efforts initially produced six large packages sent by diplomatic pouch to the State Department and then to Joe’s New York office. But Jack was not content with Seymour’s initial offering and pressed him for more: “Rush pacifist literature Oxford Cambridge Union report, etc.,” he cabled Seymour on February 9, “all parties business trade reports bearing on foreign policy[,] anything else.” “Dear Jack, your cables get tougher,” Seymour replied, but by the end of the month Jack had an additional twenty-two volumes of pamphlets and books.

The thesis of 148 pages, titled “Appeasement at Munich” and cumbersomely subtitled (“The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy to Change from a Disarmament Policy to a Rearmament Policy”), was written in about two months with predictable writing and organizational problems and an inconsistent focus. The thesis was read by four faculty members. Although Professor Henry A. Yeomans saw it as “badly written,” he also described it as “a laborious, interesting and intelligent discussion of a difficult question” and rated it magna cum laude, the second-highest possible grade. Professor Carl J. Friedrich was more critical. He complained: “Fundamental premise never analyzed. Much too long, wordy, repetitious. Bibliography showy, but spotty. Title should be British armament policy up to Munich. Reasoning re: Munich inconclusive. . . . Many typographical errors. English diction defective.” On a more positive note, Friedrich said, “Yet, thesis shows real interest and reasonable amount of work, though labor of condensation would have helped.” He scored the work a cut below Yeomans as cum laude plus.

Bruce C. Hopper and Payson Wild, Jack’s thesis advisers, were more enthusiastic about the quality of his work. In retrospective assessments, Wild remembered Jack as “a deep thinker and a genuine intellectual” whose thesis had “normal problems” but not “great” ones; Hopper recalled Jack’s “imagination and diligence in preparedness as outstanding as of that time.” On rereading the thesis twenty-four years later, Hopper was “again elated by the maturity of judgment, beyond his years in 1939/1940, by his felicity of phrase, and graceful presentation.”

Yeomans and Friedrich were closer to the mark in their assessments. So was political scientist James MacGregor Burns, whose campaign biography of JFK in 1960 described the thesis as “a typical undergraduate effort—solemn and pedantic in tone, bristling with statistics and footnotes, a little weak in spelling and sentence structure.” Yet it was an impressive effort for so young a man who had never written anything more than a term paper.

Had John Kennedy never become a prominent world figure, his thesis would be little remembered. But because it gives clues to the development of his interest and understanding of foreign affairs, it has become a much discussed text. Two things seem most striking about the work: First, Jack’s unsuccessful effort at a scientific or objective history, and second, his attempt to draw a contemporary lesson for America from Britain’s failure to keep pace with German military might.

His objective, he states throughout the thesis, was to neither condemn nor excuse Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, but rather to get beyond assertions of blame and defense in order to understand what had happened. Yet Jack’s reach for objectivity is too facile. Though his thesis is indeed an interesting analysis of what caused Britain to act as it did at Munich, it is also quite clearly a defense of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the appeasers. Jack argues that Britain’s failure to arm itself in the thirties forced it into the appeasement policy at Munich but that this failure was principally the consequence not of weak leadership on the part of the two prime ministers but of popular resistance led by the pacifists, advocates of collective security through the League of Nations, opponents of greater government spending, and shortsighted domestic politicians stressing narrow self-interest over larger national needs. No one who knew anything about Joe Kennedy’s pro-Chamberlain, pro-Munich views could miss the fact that the thesis could be read partly as a defense of Joe’s controversial position. Carl Friedrich privately said that the thesis should have been titled “While Daddy Slept.”