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“How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here?” Jack asked as he toyed with his food.

“Twenty-six years,” the detail-minded Sutton answered after an instant’s calculation. “Well,” Jack replied, still eating his eggs, “don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”

Most twenty-nine-year-old congressmen would have attempted to appear older by dressing with funereal seriousness and speaking ponderously. Jack was so nonchalantly boyish that he was sometimes stopped when he attempted to walk out on the House floor and harshly warned that a page had no place there. This happened enough times to Jack and two of his colleagues that the House instituted a new rule that pages had to dress uniformly in blue blazers and white shirts.

Jack may not have affected the gravitas of his political elders, but he knew that he was entering a Congress in which the problems were as large as they were intractable. Cold winds blew across Europe, which was experiencing its worst winter in memory, a spate of blizzards and frigid days that cursed the efforts to clear away the rubble of the war and build new lives.

In Britain alone, unemployment stood at six million. Across the expanses of Europe, the last echo of the bells of victory had died out, and uncertainty was the most positive characterization of the prevailing sentiment. Winston Churchill had given a prophetic speech in Missouri the previous March that helped define the new era. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” he thundered ominously.

In March, as Jack sat in the House chambers, President Truman addressed a nervous, querulous Congress and asked for a $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey. His historic speech set forth the themes that would be developed later in the Marshall Plan, an unprecedented package of aid to a beleaguered Europe.

The Marshall Plan stands now as one of the strongest achievements of American diplomacy. At the time, however, politicians and publications of both the Right and the Left challenged the president’s initial proposal. What was most ominous to those who thought that they had warehoused their weapons for good was Truman’s proposal “to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel” as supervisors and advisers.

Time asked what would happen to the glorious ideals of international cooperation if the United States bypassed the nascent United Nations. “Was it politically wise to support the government of Greece, which was hardly a model of democracy?” the weekly asked. “Wouldn’t this program lead to the same kind of imperialism which Great Britain had followed so long and which Americans had so sternly criticized in the past?”

The Kennedy who spoke out loudest on these issues was not the young congressman from Massachusetts but his father. Joe remained as isolationist as he had ever been, and he considered the pathetic state of the once-great Britain ample evidence of his prescience. He was a man who took pleasure in bad news as long as it justified his own prophetic fears. Now an impoverished Britain had to dismantle its empire and pull back from its involvements in Europe, just as he had said it would in what the island nation had dared to call victory.

As Joe saw it, America had stepped in before to rescue Europe from itself, and he did not want his nation to step in again. He opposed the Marshall Plan as a massive giveaway of American wealth. Joe was all for letting the tired peoples of Europe have their desperate fling with communism if they chose. America would stand back from it all, its gold still in its vaults, growing rich and happy away from the dark dreams of the rest of the world.

At the same time as his father was beating his drum of isolationism, Jack was making a different sound. Congressman Kennedy was a lowly freshman, and he did not have the platform his father still could occasionally command. But that spring, in a speech at the University of North Carolina, Jack