The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [52]
Joe Jr. was not an intellectual, and his wit, while genuine, was narrow. To some, Joe Jr. seemed narrowly and ignorantly conservative. At the London School of Economics he was dim-witted compared to some of the other students, notably three brilliant Jewish Socialists from London’s East End. In one third-year seminar that he sat in on, the three students and Professor Harold Laski batted ideas back and forth so quickly that poor Joe Jr. could not even follow.
Afterward, instead of leaving sheepishly with his head down, or arrogantly dismissing the discussions as pedantic foolishness, Joe Jr. showed up at Laski’s office and asked the professor to explain to him what he had not understood. It would have seemed preordained that Laski, an acerbic, deeply opinionated man of the Left, would see in young Joe Kennedy prima facie evidence for why capitalism was doomed. Laski realized, however, that Joe Jr. had the stuff in him to realize that his classmates knew much that he did not know and were worthy men with whom one day he hoped he might be able to argue on a more equal level.
Laski saw that young Joe had character and an incomparable zest for life, qualities that were not a matter of right or left, brilliance or dullness. “He had set his heart on a political career,” Laski recalled. “He has often sat in my study and submitted with that smile that was pure magic to relentless teasing about his determination to be nothing less than President of the United States.”
Following his year in London, Joe Jr. set off that summer with his friend Aubrey Whitelaw for a trip around Europe. Joe Jr. had a blessed quality of joyful self-assurance that drew people to him. Before they left England, Joe Jr. purchased auto insurance in London even though he was too young. Not every youth on his first European sojourn wandered the Continent behind the wheel of a Chrysler convertible. Joe Jr. was a young man that summer who, as Whitelaw recalled, laughed with detached amusement at a dubious Italian guide who had stolen his wristwatch, made caustic remarks at each sighting of Mussolini’s public portraits, and came close to fisticuffs in Munich with a Nazi who wanted Joe Jr. and Aubrey to “Heil Hitler.”
Although Joe Jr. might not have wanted to salute Hitler himself, he was impressed by aspects of Nazism. After all, he had been brought up to believe in power, order, and discipline, and to Joe Jr.’s way of thinking, Hitler was carrying out those principles on a national scale. In a letter to his father, he expressed what he clearly intended as a sophisticated, detached view of the situation, but in fact his observations were primitive, passionately engaged, and dangerously naive. He thought that the Germans had good reasons to dislike the Jews. He accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews dominated the Weimar Republic as “the heads of all big business, in law, etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous.” Joe Jr. felt sorry that “noted professors, scientists, artists, etc. so should have to suffer,” but he was sympathetic to the Nazis’ dilemma. He concluded that it was impossible to sort the good Jews from the bad, and that the only reasonable answer was to throw them all out of Germany. He did not favor excessive private violence, but as he lectured his approving father, “in every revolution you have to expect some bloodshed.”
Once the blood had been washed from the streets, Hitler could begin wholeheartedly with such progressive measures as his eugenics campaign, carrying out his new law that would sterilize those so richly deserving of the measure. “I don’t know how the Church feels about it,” Joe Jr. wrote, though he surely could have guessed, “but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men who inhabit this earth.” If Joe Jr. had thought a bit more about the matter, he might