The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [76]
These aristocratic ladies were at what the British upper class considered the age of dalliance—old enough to have successfully bred an heir or two, young enough to have their looks and desire fully intact, bored enough to welcome occasional diversions. As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Joe was a powerful, virile man who quickly adapted to the more subtle forms of sexual conquest practiced in London.
Occasionally Joe took his aide Harvey Klemmer aside and bragged to the younger man of his latest conquests. This at first startled Klemmer. After all, Joe insisted that Klemmer always include in the speeches he wrote for the ambassador a few paragraphs about the ambassador’s wonderful family, his loyal, loving wife, and their nine precocious children. But Klemmer found himself mesmerized by Joe’s detailed accounts, especially when he started dropping one famous name after another. “His name was connected to various women all the way up to the top,” Klemmer recalled. “Once he said the queen was one of the greatest women in the world. He wanted even that left to speculation, when there was absolutely nothing.”
Early in their stay Rose and Joe spent one wondrously memorable weekend at Windsor Castle as the guests of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Rose recalled later in her autobiography that after the master of the household had shown them to their rooms in the tower of the castle and the servant bearing crystal glasses of sherry had left, Joe turned to his wife and said: “Rose, this is a helluva long way from East Boston.” As full of momentary awe as he may have been, Joe was not the kind of man ever to admit to being impressed by mere surroundings or acquaintances. He did not spend this weekend in fawning obeisance but over dinner expressed his isolationist views to Queen Elizabeth in a blunt American idiom. Joe was nothing if not bold in word and manners. When the queen lost her napkin and said that it was gone, he noted in his diary that he had spied it “sticking up and retrieved it.”
That weekend Joe met sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for the first time. The dour, cryptic, uncommunicative Chamberlain was in some ways as curious a choice as prime minister as Joe was as ambassador. Both had achieved success in business. In their lifestyles however, Chamberlain, the ascetic, had little in common with Joe Kennedy, the libertine.
The two men did hold the same pessimistic vision of the world situation and had the same dark foreboding about the cost of confronting the growing menace of Nazi Germany. From their first meeting they had a special relationship. The State Department had deep doubts about Joe, but it was a major coup for the ambassador to strike up such an immediate and deep rapport with the prime minister.
All during the summer of 1938 the Nazi propaganda machine blared out its tales of the poor Sudetenland Germans cut off from their beloved fatherland in a Czechoslovakia that repressed them. Czechoslovakia was a polyglot affair, an artificial construct, but it was a democracy whose sovereignty France had pledged to support. Hitler screamed that he would wait no longer before moving into Czechoslovakia, and the timid democracies of the West shivered in fear that they would be driven into a war they did not want and might not win.
In August, Joe prepared a speech to be given in Aberdeen, Scotland. He intended to say that “for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which would be remotely considered worth shedding blood for.” There was Joe’s entire political philosophy laid out in a single sentence. He couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go to war to save anybody