Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [15]
Despite the increasingly alarmed warnings of Winston Churchill, the Chamberlain government had been hugging the belief that a second major war could be avoided. It knew that neither the British public’s memory of the human devastation of the trenches of WWI nor the traumas of the returning survivors had lessened; a generation had been lost, with the country, overall, remaining shell-shocked.
For the first time in his life—as he learned the ways of a country not his own but mattering greatly to him—Jack Kennedy found himself seeing men and women wrestling with national principles. Quickly pegged as a highly desirable bachelor and invited everywhere, he grew increasingly sensitive to the atmosphere around him—and soon began to feel the disharmony unbalancing it.
On the one hand, his father continued to support Chamberlain, in direct opposition to the position fiercely held by Churchill. Churchill’s assessments of German capabilities, Jack was aware, had proved—and continued to prove—startlingly accurate. He couldn’t help but respect Churchill’s arguments, despite knowing that his own father and the ruling-class parents of his new friends openly dismissed the former cabinet minister as a warmonger. And while Jack was intellectually open, he was still a son with a powerful father.
Jack was also convinced, as he grew to be at home in the continual round of parties and pleasures, that something vital was missing in the character of those privileged young English whose company he was so enjoying. Charming they were, and always delightful hosts, yet he found himself doubting the current state of their mettle—their fighting spirit. Even in front of them he didn’t hesitate to share his observation that the once-valiant English elite seemed to have turned “decadent” over the two decades since the last war. How could they ever rally themselves and prevail against such a threat as the Third Reich?
In short, they were no Raymond Asquiths.
Mulling over what he was hearing and seeing, he began to form for himself a notion of where Britain’s elected leaders had failed. He began to work out his ideas on the subject of leadership, the ones he would continue to consider for the rest of his life.
When the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Jack was still in Europe, having been touring again that summer, this time with Torby. Three days later, he sat with his parents and sister Kathleen in the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Commons and witnessed Prime Minister Chamberlain declare war against Germany. Returning to college at the end of September, by which time the Luftwaffe had begun dropping its bombs, he seemed a different person.
Certainly, in the opinion of Torby—who was there—his friend “had definitely changed. I don’t think he really got interested in the intellectual side of academic life until perhaps his junior year when war seemed to bring a lot of us, especially Jack, a recognition that it wasn’t all fun and games and that life was about to get very real and earnest.”
But what was happening to Jack continued as an evolution. Then, in early June of 1940, he took a visible stand, writing a signed letter to the Harvard Crimson, implicitly renouncing his father’s position. Even in 1940, once the war was under way, Joe had hoped the British would soon find a way to make peace with Hitler. He spoke disparagingly of Britain’s and France’s prospects, in a letter to Roosevelt, giving them hardly “a Chinaman’s chance” of prevailing.
In his letter to the Crimson, Jack noted sharply: “The failure to build up her armaments has not saved England from a war, and may cost her one. Are we in America to let that lesson go unlearned?”
He’d chosen this for his Harvard senior thesis. “Appeasement in Munich” was its title, and it shows how Jack’s thinking was diverging from that of his