The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [147]
At the end of July, Jack traveled with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to war-ravaged Germany. As he flew above the once-great cities, he wrote in his diary: “All the centers of the big cities are of the same ash gray color from the air—the color of churned up and powdered stone and brick.” He scribbled down no unique insights about the ravaged land, but he had a journalist’s realization that the gritty facts came first, no matter how unpleasant.
Jack recorded that the Russian soldiers, on entering Berlin, had spent their first seventy-two-hour passes largely “raping and looting” and were now stripping the land of everything of value, from factories to manpower. He also recorded that in the allied-occupied port of Bremen, the American and British troops “have been very guilty of looting,” and that navy personnel said that a congressional fact-finding committee had been interested only in “lugers and cameras.” It was as if much of the selfishness, greed, lust, and pettiness that had been dammed up during the war had broken loose, washing over the desolated landscape of Europe.
On the last stop of his German tour, Jack traveled to Hiker’s legendary mountain redoubt, high above Berchtesgaden. Allied bombs had gutted Hitler’s chalet, and the allies had stripped his “eagle’s nest” of rugs and paintings, but the aura of the Führer remained. Jack stood there in the immense round living room from which he looked down on all sides on endless expanses of forest. He saw no pockmarked landscape, no smoking ruins, no haunted faces, only pristine forest. Jack had just been in Potsdam, where he had seen President Harry S Truman, a matter so inconsequential to him that he did not even mention it in his diary. He noted that General Dwight D. Eisenhower “easily won the hearts of those with whom he worked,” but no one impressed him as did Hitler.
“You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived,” he noted in the final page of his diary. “He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”
Jack was arguing that if a leader is judged simply by how much he changed the world, then Hitler was the great man of his age, a political artist who transformed the world through his evil. Although Jack’s comment displayed an appalling insensitivity to the ravages of Nazism, he was no apologist for Hitler. He was studying politics and politicians, picking up bits and pieces of people and ideas that he might find useful in his own career, even if they came from Hitler.
Since researching Why England Slept, Jack had been dissecting the nature of leaders in a democratic society. Could a democratic leader transform the world for good as much as Hitler transformed it for evil? He observed Englishmen voting their bellies, not their souls. He watched German girls selling themselves for a lipstick. A month before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he mused about “the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it.” In such a world, was greatness possible?
When, in April 1946, twenty-eight-year-old Jack declared that he would seek the Democratic nomination for Congress from his grandfather’s old eleventh congressional district, he was doing more than putting on clothes his father had laid out for him. Inga Arvad probably understood Jack more deeply than anyone. Even before the war she had prophesied that Jack would enter politics. During the war, he had joked to Red Fay that he could feel “Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,