The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [79]
The president knew that Joe was one of those who liked to make trouble, but he preferred having him an ocean away rather than committing political mischief at home, rallying the forces of isolationism around his banner. As for Joe, he returned to London in February 1939 a member of isolationist ranks that had once been full of many honorable, if misguided, men and women. Now, after Hitler’s troops had marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, even Chamberlain himself, the personification of isolationism, realized his policy had failed. In reluctantly signing a pact to come to the aid of an invaded Poland, he drew a line in the parched earth of Central Europe from which he could not withdraw.
Out of the debacle of the failed policy came a new opening for Joe. He knew what Roosevelt was thinking, and he had unique credibility as Chamberlain’s friend. He could have subtly insinuated to Chamberlain that his island nation would not be alone in fighting Hitler. Aid might not come in the quantities sought, and the soldiers might not arrive as soon as they were needed, but in due course they would probably come.
Joe could not have said such things boldly, for the repercussions for Roosevelt and his race for a third term would have been devastating. But he could have gently pressed his president’s agenda. He could have listened to the voices of Britain, truly listened, and gauged the moral fiber of a people and passed on that word to Washington.
The only voices that Joe listened to, however, were the upper-class accents that entered his salon at 15 Prince’s Gate. He was disdainful of the privileged young men who came to the ambassadorial residence as his daughters’ escorts and his sons’ friends, and he took them as an honest measure of British strength. They listened to his loud contempt for them and their nation, and they put the old man on, telling him that they would never fight. And Joe took them at their word.
On the evening Joe Jr. arrived in London after graduating from Harvard in June 1938, he headed out to a favorite haunt of the sophisticated upper class, the 400 Club. He was the ambassador’s son, and he sat that evening at a table with a Turkish pasha, an Argentine polo player, a Dutch baron and his beauteous wife, and the daughter of American humorist Will Rogers. Night after night during those summer months Joe Jr. was either there at ringside or off with some of the most attractive women in the kingdom.
Joe Jr. could have gone on for months spending his evenings as one of the playboys of the city, putting in a few desultory hours during the day as his father’s aide. He was, however, a young man who would have grown bored measuring out his days in champagne bottles. He had always been a child of fortune, and he looked out on the troubled seas of Europe like a sailor who takes his craft out only in high seas.
Joe Jr. set out for Paris, where for two months he worked as an attaché to William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador. From there he traveled with a diplomatic passport to Prague, Warsaw, Leningrad, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Like his father, he believed that strength created, if not its own morality, then its own imperative. “Germany is still bustling,” he wrote a Harvard classmate. “They are really a marvelous people and it is going to be an awful tough time to keep them from getting what they want.”
After his journey across Europe, Joe Jr. arrived in Saint Moritz for a Christmas vacation with his family. His father was in the United States, but if Joe had been there he would have seen a son who was the exquisite perfection of what he thought a man should be.
Joe Jr. had hardly arrived when he was arm in arm with Megan Taylor, the beautiful eighteen-year-old world figure-skating champion. They made the most stunning of couples as they skated together across the rink. Despite his romance, Joe Jr. cherished his time with his younger siblings. Unlike his mother, he