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In London, Joe had become used to calling the press into his office and spewing out his most intemperate attack on his enemies, knowing that the scribes would cut his remarks down to fit into the narrow confines of acceptable discourse.

Joe believed his remarks this morning were not to be printed, but it was a mad gamble to talk as he did to journalists whom he did not know intimately, betraying all the glorious rhetoric of the radio speech he had just given. He said nothing that he had not said a hundred times before, that “democracy is all finished in England” and “it may be here” as well. He prophesied that if America entered the war, “everything we hold dear would be gone.”

Joe had learned little in London about the necessary parameters of diplomacy, and he took unseemly pleasure in speaking the unspeakable. He laced his diatribe with wildly inappropriate comments on everyone from Queen Elizabeth (“more brains than the Cabinet”) to Eleanor Roosevelt (“She bothered us more on our jobs in Washington to take care of the poor little nobodies who hadn’t any influence than all the rest of the people down there altogether”).

The story that appeared the next day, November 10, 1940, in the Boston Globe finished off whatever effectiveness Joe still had in London and destroyed whatever residue of trust Roosevelt might still have had in his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe submitted a letter of resignation and retreated to Palm Beach.

He did not sit in Florida playing and replaying the scenes of his life in London, trying to pick out where he had gone wrong. Devoid of self-criticism, Joe was even more convinced of the correctness of his views, and more determined to struggle against what he considered his and the nation’s implacable enemy, the internationalists who were wooing America toward the crimson fields of war.

10

Child of Fortune, Child of Fate

Joe had tied his two eldest sons to himself so tightly and with so many entanglements that to be men they had to sever the bonds to break free. Yet in doing so they risked falling into an abyss. Success was the tightest knot that bound them. Few fathers did as much for their sons as Joe did for his, and few fathers demanded more of his children.

Joe inscribed their names on a contract that they had not seen. He gave them privilege, opportunity, and wealth. In return, they would have to be among the great men of their time. They could not have inheritors’ pale lives, measuring out their days in games and chitchat at their clubs, envied for their lives of pleasure and revered for nothing except their good fortune.

Joe had marked off the high road to manhood that his sons must travel. Joe Jr. marched proudly up the middle, far ahead of his younger brother. When Joe Jr. looked back and saw Jack coming up behind him, it irritated him. Jack’s thesis “seemed to represent a lot of work but did not prove anything,” Joe Jr. jealously wrote his father when he first read it. Despite what his brother might say, Jack kept walking ahead, occasionally wandering off onto strange byways, but always returning to continue up the same arduous pathway.

Jack, not Joe Jr., had written Why England Slept, winning the first major laurels of adult life. Yet he did not have the imposing dignity and presence that Joe Jr. could don like evening clothes and shuck just as easily. Jack was twenty-three years old, though he looked far younger. He had the same sloppy nonchalance about his wardrobe that he had about the world. His boyish insouciance may have been irresistible to women but hardly marked him as a future leader.

At times Jack talked about becoming a journalist. He could have parlayed his book and its stellar reviews into a position that would have been the envy of his friends at the Harvard Crimson. He thought about law, but that was a tedious regimen at best, and he could not face the prospect, especially with his star-crossed health. Instead, after graduating from Harvard, he decided in the fall to go out to northern California