The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [146]
The Soviets, the Americans, and the British, however, were playing different games with different rules, and Jack struggled to understand. During these three weeks he was chronicling not the inspiring beginning of a world organization but some of the first mistrustful bickering of the cold war. He tried at first to comprehend the world from the Russian position. “Americans can now see that we have a long way to go before Russia will entrust her safety to any organization other than the Red Army,” Jack wrote. “The Russians may have forgiven, but they haven’t forgotten…. This being true, it means any organization drawn up here will be merely a skeleton.”
Jack understood that it was inevitable that veterans would be disillusioned. They were men of dual simplicities, those of youth and those of war. Now was the time for the old men to make the peace, building a world organization that was “the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” Jack discovered “one ray of shining bright light. That is the realization, felt by all the delegates, that humanity cannot afford another war.”
As the days went by, even that ray of hope dimmed. He saw the spectacle of the Russians dickering to win admittance for White Russia and Ukraine as separate states, while the United States backed the admittance of pro-Fascist Argentina. He saw Britain struggling to maintain its empire. And he saw a Russia whose armies sat ensconced in Eastern Europe, imposing their own new tyranny on subject peoples.
Jack had arrived in San Francisco sharing most of the affinities and aspirations of his generation, but as he left he sounded more like the old men who had made the peace than the young men who fought the war.
“Our preoccupation with the war and our desire to remain on good terms with our Red allies has prevented us from taking a strong stand against Russian infiltration through Europe,” he wrote shortly before leaving. “That time is over and it is becoming evident that the Big Three relationship is at the crossroads.”
Jack’s fling as a journalist was not over. From California he traveled to London, where he covered the British election for Hearst. Churchill was one of Jack’s authentic heroes, the personification of his nation’s noble struggle against Hitler. It was almost unthinkable, then, that Churchill’s victorious compatriots would turn him out of office. It pained Jack to hear the great man booed by a surly, ungrateful populace. Yet when Labor won, he saw that the British people were tired of nothing but “toil and sweat.” He saw the profound class nature of British society and how it had created, in Disraeli’s words, two nations.
Jack spent his time with the nation of wealth and privilege and observed a society in which at times the nobility and purpose of the battlefield seemed just another casualty of war. One weekend he was at one of the great houses of England. Some of the other guests had driven over to the races at Ascot, where the upper class was resurrecting its prewar social rituals, but Jack preferred to sit at the country estate talking about war and peace. Up on the third floor, beneath a harsh light, he observed a group of young men playing poker. A year before, the lights had been out in London, and many of them had been risking their lives. Now the lights had come on, and these gentlemen turned their risks to the gaming table. They played with abandon, and that afternoon one of them lost a fortune, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 pounds.
When Jack was not musing with his male friends, he was squiring beautiful women around London’s nightspots. His thin face had a wan, poetic cast, suggesting sensitivity to the will and desires of women that his conquests soon learned did not exist. One of the women he saw in London, the tennis champion