Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [14]
Repugnant as appeasement strikes us today, Joe Kennedy wasn’t that out of sync with the prevailing temper of the British Establishment. Events were moving swiftly to force the democracies to make a stand, but the reluctance of the ruling class to engage with the Third Reich died hard. Four years earlier the Oxford Union, the legendary university debating society, after hearing arguments pro and con, had notoriously resolved not to fight “for King and Country,” and that remained still a popular, if increasingly indefensible, position in London’s drawing rooms.
Only the politician and ardent historian Winston Churchill—who was a hero, through his writings, to Jack Kennedy—had steadily been speaking out, from his backbench in Parliament, against the pacifist temper of the times. And people were beginning to listen to him.
It’s very hard, looking at this now, to accept that Jack’s father never seemed to feel any shame about backing appeasement. Joe’s detachment from the sentiments of the times had always been his strength in business, as he invested or divested against the popular current. However, after Kristallnacht, when it was starkly evident that there could be no accommodation with Nazism, Ambassador Kennedy was out there on his own.
For a twenty-one-year-old American, the thought of war carried personal meaning. It brought with it both excitement and dread. Young men of Jack Kennedy’s age had died by the hundreds of thousands in the century’s first great European war. Now the daily press clamored the drumbeat of a second. Young Jack Kennedy was about to enter the very theater in which the question would be decided: Would Britain stand another Nazi demand for territory?
He had come to visit his family that summer of 1938, joining them on vacation in the South of France. It was decided that he’d figure out a way to spend the coming spring semester of his junior year working as his father’s secretary in London; it meant he’d have to get permission to double up his classes at school in the fall term, but this was an opportunity to witness history.
Jack knew the valor Britain had shown in the Great War. He was powerfully affected by Winston Churchill’s description of the willing courage of an upper-class Englishman, Raymond Asquith. Son of Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister under whose leadership the British entered the Great War, Raymond was four years younger than Churchill and a much-admired, much-loved role model for his generation. His brave death on a French battlefield stood for all that was fine, and the tribute Churchill had written to him struck for Jack a resonant chord: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him, and when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” In later years he would quote this passage from memory.
However, the poignancy of young death for a noble cause seemed far removed from the moral climate Jack began to sense around him as he spent more time in England beginning in February 1939, when he took up his post at the embassy. Arriving primed to enjoy the perks of the ambassador’s family, he found himself distracted not just by the predictable flood of society invitations but also by the debate being waged.
By March, it was clear Hitler was looking to take more land beyond the chunk of Czechoslovakia ceded to