Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [16]
The two years between 1938 and 1940, then, were critical, he contends, because, had the war begun at the earlier date, Britain would have been naked to its enemies. The beauty of this argument is that it mitigates the moral failure of giving away a country and its people to Adolf Hitler. Joe Kennedy, one assumes, wouldn’t have forsworn appeasement based simply on a shift in the balance of weaponry. He didn’t believe in fighting Hitler under any circumstances. But, while Jack makes the case that Chamberlain had no choice but to parlay and retreat, the real issue now, for him, is that the United States, his own country, must take the lesson and do better.
“I do not believe necessarily,” he wrote, “that if Hitler wins the present war he will continue on his course to world domination. . . . But, in the light of what has happened in the last five years, we cannot depend on it.”
In other words, America needed to get its act together and stop blaming Chamberlain, and therefore his own father, for not doing what it still needed to do. It was a masterful exercise in intergenerational politics. Here was the son, taking on, without condemning, the father’s indefensible position on what would soon be revealed as the worst horror of the century. He was doing so with such a deft touch that his father took no apparent offense. In truth, he was saying that Britain should have been morally prepared to fight, and his father was saying Britain should still avoid the fight.
What Jack now proposed was that America be prepared to fight, not repeating Britain’s error. “England made many mistakes; she is paying heavily for them now. In studying the reasons why England slept, let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish.” Why England Slept quickly became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and Jack donated the royalties from the British edition to the fund to rebuild war-scarred Plymouth.
It is yet another manifestation of the two Jacks: the young American drawn to Churchill’s mind and fearlessness on the one hand, and the son whose father was equally fearless but to a different purpose. To reconcile the lessons of these two figures was a task for which he had needed to make the effort.
Again, it was masterful politics. If Joe Kennedy had been paying strict attention, he would have spotted the end run his son was making around him here. Jack was arguing that Britain didn’t fight because it hadn’t rearmed. But wasn’t that tantamount to saying Britain should have been ready to fight? And wasn’t that a subversion of his father’s own position? Jack had done more than find a middle ground with his father; he’d subtly taken that ground right out from under him.
That fall, the senior Kennedy would be forced from his job in London, a victim of his poor judgment. He had been quoted in a Boston Globe column saying, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” Jack’s career would go on to be a continual balancing act between the nobility of valiant death on the battlefield, so admired by Churchill, and the horror of war itself, so understood by Chamberlain and backed by the hardnosed Joe Kennedy.
Jack felt deeply the emotional weight of the valor, commitment, and sacrifice demanded by war. Nothing makes this clearer than his beloved Pilgrim’s Way, the autobiography of John Buchan, famous for writing The Thirty-Nine Steps. Published in 1940, it immediately became a favorite and would remain the best-loved book of his life. Most significant, in its pages he again encountered