The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [104]
Joe was a fierce and powerful force who gave no quarter. “When I hear these mental midgets [in the United States] talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils,” Joe wrote Jack in September, as if to say that if his son veered from Joe’s truth he too would shrink to nothing in his father’s estimation. “What is this war going to prove?”
Jack was at an age when most men have resolved their feelings about their parents, but he talked to Harriet endlessly about Joe. “He talked about his father’s infidelities,” she recalled. “I think his father was a tremendous influence. I don’t think there’s any question about that, but not all to the good! It seemed to me that his father’s obvious rather low opinion of his wife and the way he treated her, that some of that rubbed off on Jack. He wasn’t mean or anything about his mother, but I think that denigration, that came from the father rubbed off on the son. And that’s where all the womanizing and everything came from!”
Jack’s relationship with his father was changing, evolving into a far more complicated bond than what Joe had with his other sons. Jack no longer simply mimicked his father’s behavior and ideas. After Joe’s selfdestructive
candor with the Boston Globe, Jack began work on a document suggesting how his father should reply to his critics. Joe pressured him as he would any subordinate. WHEN WILL OUTLINE ON THAT APPEASEMENT ARTICLE BE READY REGARDS JOSEPH KENNEDY, he cabled Jack from Palm Beach early in December.
The nine-page, single-spaced letter was the first truly political document Jack ever wrote. His father considered the British a weak, shuffling, defeatist people who would be stomped into the earth by the Nazi jackboots. Jack wanted Joe to say: “I have seen the English stand with their backs to the wall and not whimper. I have seen the grim determination.”
Jack told his father that he would have to temper his candor and camouflage his bitter truth. “I don’t mean that you should change your ideas or be all things to all men,” he told Joe, “but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser unless they indict themselves as war mongers.”
For the first time Joe treated Jack as an intellectual equal, and his son responded with an astutely calculated defense of the ambassador’s tenure. In Jack’s memo there is nothing of deference; the document simply reflects two men dealing with a problem. Jack had some sound ideas for his father, but truth was no more than an occasional visitor to these pages, welcome only when it would burnish Joe’s image. Jack had articulately presented his father’s case, but in the end Joe decided not to defend himself in such a dramatic manner.
When Jack flew out of San Francisco after his semester at Stanford, he sat in the United Airlines plane to Los Angeles writing a note to his father, further elucidating his views. A good politician learns to treat policies the way a good doctor prescribes medicine, always aware that its side effects may outweigh its benefits. Jack was opposed to American entry into the war, though he sensed that it would come. He feared that the isolationist movement had led to the diminution of the aid America was giving to a beleaguered Britain. “The danger of our not giving Britain enough aid, of not getting Congress and the country stirred up sufficiently to give England the aid she needs now—is to me just as great as the danger of our getting into war now—as it is much more likely.”
Jack sensed what might happen if Germany defeated Britain. He envisioned America “alone in a strained and hostile world,” spending “enormous sums for defense yearly” with the electorate asking “why we were so stupid as not to have given Britain all possible aid.”
As Jack flew away, Harriet missed her beau enormously. Who else among her acquaintances could change in the space of a few minutes from a cheerful, witty young man whose greatest attribute was his charm to an adult