The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [83]
For one so young, Bobby had a deeply offensive arrogance, much like his father’s. He lectured Jews that they had better accept the realities of making accommodations with Hitler. “I know this is extremely hard for the Jewish community in the US to sto mach, [sic],” he wrote with all the wisdom of his years, “nbut [sic] they should see by now that the fcourse [sic] which they have followed the last few years has brought them nothing but additional hard ship [sic].”
In April 1939, thirteen-year-old Bobby was invited to be one of a group of children laying a stone at the Clubland Temple of Youth in Camberwell. Joe, the subtle mastermind of his sons’ journeys into manhood, had the event scripted with all the detail of a major diplomatic meeting. As ambassador, Joe had been asked to preside, but this was his son’s first important public appearance, and he wanted the spotlight to shine unabashedly only on Bobby.
The press attaché notified news organizations that the ambassador’s son would be making a short speech. James Seymour, the ambassador’s aide, prepared elaborate notes for the event, including Bobby’s little speech (“All the temples I’ve read about in history books are very old … but this ‘Temple of Youth’ is awfully young”). On the appointed evening, Bobby pulled a crumpled, penciled note out of his pocket and read what appears to have been his own remarks, not Seymour’s version of what a boy scarcely a teenager should say (“Many years from now, when we are very old, this Temple of Youth will still be standing to bring happiness to many English children”).
Young Bobby already understood that part of his role in life was to take the work of others and by his own subtle infusions make it his own. He was a boyish mixture of shyness and confidence. When the seventeen-year-old Japanese representative found herself next to the eleven-year-old daughter of the Chinese ambassador, there was deadly quiet, and the event risked becoming not a celebration of the commonality of children but a minor diplomatic incident between children of the two warring Asian nations. “I wonder shall we all be here to see Her Majesty perform the opening on May 20?” Bobby asked, his innocent query giving the two young women a neutral matter to discuss.
Even six-year-old Teddy realized that he was not just a boy. His parents told him that wherever he went he had to remember that he was the son of the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. That was a burden his older brothers had not had. The little boy was living two lives, his own and his father’s glorified idea of him. He came home from school one day and asked his mother for permission to punch a classmate. “Why?” Rose asked, believing that in the pantheon of virtues, civility stood below only godliness. “Well, he’s been hitting me every day, and you tell me I can’t get into fights because Dad is the ambassador.” After a family discussion, Ted was told that this once he could strike back at his tormentor.
In what would prove to be the last summer of peace, Joe Jr. headed out once again across Europe, a footloose, privileged witness to his times. He was frequently an insightful, prophetic observer. In Germany he saw that the people were largely united behind Hitler and that “there is only one thing that the Germans understand and that is force. All attempts at conciliation are taken as signs of weakness, and furthermore are used as propaganda by the Germans to convince the smaller countries that the English won’t fight.”
Joe Jr. may have been his father’s son, but in these dispatches he did not simply parrot his father’s isolationist views. He had a young man’s rage at the hypocrisies of the world, and he pointed them out in passionate detail.