Winston’s War (7 page)

I
t was business as normal at the residence of the American Ambassador in Princes Gate. Not, of course, that business in the household of Joseph P. Kennedy resembled anything that in diplomatic circles would customarily be described as normal, but Kennedy was barely a diplomat. A man who had
only just finished celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he was more at home in the clapboard tenements of Boston's tough East Side where he was born than this gracious stucco-fronted mansion overlooking London's Hyde Park, but although Kennedy was intensely protective of his Irish-American roots, they were never going to tie him down.

Kennedy was a man of passion and action, if, at times, remarkably little judgment. His approach to diplomacy in the stuffy Court of St. James's was often very similar to his approach to sex—he didn't bother with the niceties of foreplay. He was a man always impatient, pushing and grasping. During an earlier life as a movie tycoon he had bedded Gloria Swanson, the most famous sex symbol in the world during the 1920s. She retained a vivid recollection of their encounter. Afterwards she told friends that Kennedy had appeared at her door and simply stared for a while, before letting forth a moan and throwing himself
upon her. He was characteristically direct. She compared him to a roped horse, rough, arduous—and ultimately inadequate. “After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair,” she recalled. “Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing coherent.”

It was an approach the British Foreign Office would have recognized. Yet for all his lack of orthodoxy he had taken London by storm since his arrival earlier in the year. In a world of quiet fears and ever-lengthening shadows, an old world coming to its long drawn-out end, his brashness was a joy and his lack of respect for social cobwebs a source of endless entertainment. He called the Queen “a cute trick” and dashed across the floor to dance with her, scattering courtiers and convention in his wake. His language was borrowed from the Boston stevedores of his youth. He had a natural flair for publicity but perhaps the strongest basis of his appeal was his nine children—"my nine hostages to fortune,” as he called them, ranging in age from Joe Junior and Jack in their twenties to the infant Edward. It was like 1917 all over again; the Americans had sent an entire army to the rescue. So the corridors at 9 Princes Gate were turned into a touch-football field, the marbled patio was transformed into a cycle track while the elevator became an integral part of a vast imaginary department store run by young Teddy. And if observers believed Kennedy was using his self-claimed status as “the Father of the Nation” as a platform to challenge for the presidency in 1940, no one seemed to mind—except, perhaps, for President Franklin Roosevelt, who had sent him to London hoping never to hear of him again. It was one of the President's classic misjudgments.

Yet, four days after the declaration of peace in our time, the residence was unusually quiet. There was no sound of children echoing around the hallways, no clatter of dropped bicycles bouncing off the marble, and even the Ambassador's dinner guests were restrained. Churchill seemed burdened, while
Brendan Bracken, seated next to Kennedy's niece, appeared uncharacteristically tongue-tied. On the opposite side of the table to Churchill sat the aggressively isolationist correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune
, who was proving something of a disappointment since his mastery of the arts of aggression appeared to be entirely confined to his pen; he had done nothing more than mumble all evening and disappear into his glass. A Swedish businessman named Svensson was courteous but cautious, preferring to listen and prod rather than to preach himself, almost as if he was a little overawed by the company. Meanwhile the Duke of Gloucester at the far end of the table was on his usual form, anesthetizing guests on every side. This was not the effect Kennedy required. He enjoyed confrontation, the clash of words and wills. The English were so bad at it, but the Irish of East Boston—ah, they were a different breed entirely.

“Mr. Ambassador, where are the little ones?” Churchill's head rose from his plate. Kennedy noticed he had dribbled gravy down his waistcoat, but the politician seemed either not to have noticed or not to care.

“Sent most of them to Ireland last week. A chance to search for their roots.”

“Ah.” A pause. “I see.” So the hostages to fortune had fled. Churchill returned his attentions to his plate, indicating a lack of desire to pursue the line of conversation.

“You don't approve, Winston?”

“What? Of sending the little birds abroad at a time of crisis?” He considered. “For men in public positions there are no easy choices.”

“But you wouldn't.”

“There is a danger of sending out the wrong sort of signal.”

“You'd keep your kids here, beneath the threat of bombs?”

“There is another way of looking at it. The presence of our loved ones serves as a constant reminder of what we are
fighting for. And perhaps a signal to the aggressor that we are confident of victory.”

“But we Americans have no intention of fighting. And as for victory…”

“You doubt our cause?”

“I doubt your goddamned air defenses.” He attacked his pudding as though he were redrawing frontiers. “You know what I hear, Winston? Last week as you were all digging in around London and waiting for the Luftwaffe, you guys had less than a hundred anti-aircraft guns for the entire city.”

Churchill winced, which served only to encourage the other man.

“Hey, but that's only the headline. Of those hundred guns, less than half of 'em worked. Had the wrong size ammo, or the batteries were dead. And you know what I found when I chatted to the air-raid guys in the park?”

“Why bother with conjecture when surely you are going to tell me?”

“They didn't have any steel helmets. After all these years of jawing about the bloody war, you think the guys in command might just've figured out that the troops needed some steel helmets? Just in case Hitler decided to start dropping things?”

Churchill seemed, like his city, to be all but defenseless. “I have long warned about the deficiencies of our ARP,” was all he could muster.

On the other side of the table Kennedy's niece whispered in her companion's ear. “What's ARP?”

The question caused Brendan Bracken to chew his lip, and not for the first time that evening. He was a man of extraordinary features, his vivid red hair cascading down his forehead like lava from an exploding volcano. He had a temperament to match, conducting his outpourings with a wild swinging of his arms. Yet this evening, in the presence of the Ambassador's niece, he had become unusually subdued. Women—apart from his
mother—had never played much of a role in his life, his singular energies having been devoted to making money and climbing the political ladder. And what did women matter in an English Establishment where rumors of homosexuality circulated as freely as the port? Yet Anna Maria Fitzgerald was different. Most other young women he found frivolous and teasing, viewing him either as a potential wealthy match or an object of sexual curiosity, or both, at which point he would hide behind his bottle-end spectacles and invent a new story about himself to suit the situation. But American girls—and Anna in particular—seemed so much more straightforward. He didn't feel the need to put on an act, but since role-playing had been the habit of his adult life he found it difficult to know what to put in its place. So he grew tongue-tied. Now she was whispering in his ear, smelling fresh, not like a tart, with her fingers brushing the back of his hand.

“ARP?” she whispered again.

“Um, Air-Raid Precautions,” he explained. “You know, ducking bombs.”

“Horrid!” Her fingers remained briefly on the back of his hand. “I've only just arrived in London, to be a sort of assistant to Uncle Joe, and already they're threatening to destroy it.”

“I hope you'll allow me to show you around. I know all the best air-raid shelters.” It was a clumsy and unintended joke, reflecting his unease, but she laughed it off.

From the end of the table, her uncle finished off his apple pie and slice of American cheese, and decided it was time for the after-dinner entertainment. He had wanted to invite the German Ambassador, Dirksen, but he was engaged elsewhere, so had had to make do with his Spanish Fascist counterpart, the Duke of Alba, instead.

“Tell me, Duke, some people argue democracy's finished in Europe. What do you think?”

Instantly Churchill's head came up. “Finished?” he growled, cutting across the Spaniard.

Kennedy was already in his shirtsleeves; now he slipped off his braces. Time for a scrap. “What I mean is, the Brits and the French tried it after the last war, imposing democracy all across Europe, but look around you. It's been shot to hell—or disappeared completely. Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria—now Czechoslovakia. It never even got started in Russia. And what's left is so pathetically weak.”

“Is that the language of the New Diplomacy?”

“Come on, you've been saying yourself you should've picked Hitler's pecker years ago.”

“Democracy is like a great play. It lasts more than one act. You must be patient, Mr. Ambassador.”

“You mean, like those ARP guys still waiting for their helmets?”

A cheap debating point, or an intended slur? Churchill ignored it.

Kennedy prodded again. “But democracy can be a hard mistress, too, you know that, Winston, as well as anyone. And the Germans elected Herr Hitler. You can't dismiss that fact.”

“At which point he promptly dispensed with elections.”

“He's offered a referendum in the Sudetenland.”

“Hah! A referendum simply to confirm that which has already been resolved. Thrust upon the poor Czechs. A peculiarly twisted notion of democracy.”

“But I think you're forgetting, Winston. British politicians like you and Mr. Chamberlain got elected with a few thousand votes. Hitler got elected with millions. Makes Herr Hitler more legit than you, don't it?”

“Power is not seized through the ballot box, Mr. Ambassador, it is shared. It comes from the people. It is a remarkably infested form of democracy which takes that power in order to enslave its own people.”

“Aw, come on. You telling me it's slavery? Slavery don't get millions of people out on the streets waving banners and
torches to give thanks that their country's no longer starving. German governments used to be chaotic, criminally incompetent. You might have called that democracy, Winston, but to the Germans it was a dung heap. They were dying in the gutter. So Hitler's replaced the bread lines with armies of workers building autobahns. Where the devil's the harm in all that?”

“One day, in a very few years, perhaps in a few months, we shall be confronted with demands that we should become part of a German-dominated Europe. There will be some who will say that would be efficient. Others already say it is…
inevitable
—a word I do not care for, one that has no place in the dictionaries of a democracy. They argue it will make us all the stronger, that we cannot remain an off-shore satellite of a strong and growing Europe. We shall be invited to surrender a little of our independence and liberty in order that we may enjoy the benefits of this stronger Europe. In a word, we shall be required to
submit
.”

Churchill was into his stride now. He had pushed his plate away from him, making room on the tablecloth as though preparing to draw out a plan of battle. “Soon we shall no longer be ruled from our Parliament but from abroad. Our rights will be restricted. Our economy will be controlled by others. We shall be told what we may produce, and what we may not. Then, a short step thereafter, we shall be told what we may say, and what we may not say. Already there are some who say that we cannot allow the system of government in Berlin to be criticized by ordinary, common English politicians. They claim we are Little Englanders, xenophobic, backward-looking. Already we are censored, sometimes directly by refusing to allow us access to the BBC, at other times indirectly through the influence of the Government's friends in the press. Every organ of public opinion is being systematically doped or chloroformed into acquiescence and—step by step—we shall be conducted
further along our journey until we find, like silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia, that it is too late! And we can no longer turn back.”

“Hell, that's democracy for you. The people want to do a deal with Europe, so that's what they get,” Kennedy goaded. “You said it yourself, Winston, it's the people who get to decide. And you saw how they greeted the Prime Minister. The man of the moment. Cheered him all night outside Downing Street.”

“There was a crowd to cheer him in Munich, too.”

“Doesn't that make you think for one moment you may be wrong? There'll also be a crowd in the House of Commons tomorrow, voting on his policy. You can't deny he's gonna win, and win big.”

“He may win tomorrow. But I shall warn them! And perhaps the day will come when they will remember. Soon we shall discover that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without firing a single shot in our defense.” He swept crumbs from the table in front of him like imaginary tank divisions.