The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [87]
Again and again Jack told Lem that it was all “very interesting,” and so it was. He traveled to the open city of Danzig, where swastikas were in full array and he “talked with the Nazi heads and all the counsels up there.” He realized that Poland would never give up Danzig to Hitler. Nor was Germany about to back off. “What Germany will do if she decides to go to war,” he wrote Lem on May 1, 1939, “will try and put Poland in the position of being aggressor—and then go to work.”
Jack’s diplomatic reportage was perfectly prescient, but he had no interest in talking to the unwashed, the unlearned, and the unstylish. “All of the young people own estates of around 1,000,000 acres with 10,000 or so peasants,” he wrote Lem, as if young peasants were some degraded form of humankind unworthy of being called “young people.” If Lem came to visit, he promised that they would visit an estate rented by the Biddies “with around 12,000 on it who tip their hats with one hand and push forward their daughter with the other.”
While twenty-year-old Jack was in London, he read The Young Melbourne, a new book by David Cecil. Jack was at an age when a young man of a literate bent reads books not as abstract fodder but as a guide to conduct. Young men of Jack’s generation were reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and learning of love and courage, or John Steinbeck’s despairing Of Mice and Men. Their favorite book would never have been a literary biography of a Whig aristocrat who at a young age “envince[d] that capacity for compromising genially with circumstances,” a capacity that the young rarely consider a virtue.
In this Whig world that Jack so admired, daring was for the battlefield, not for the art that hung on one’s walls, the literature that one admired, or the politics that one espoused. It was a life of appreciation, not creation, and perfunctory religiosity, not deep spirituality. It was above all a man’s world of conventional excess—drinking and gambling and wenching. “The ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer,” the author wrote in what could have been an adage for Jack’s own life.
Jack was a young man of intellectual precociousness. Many of the ideas in the book resonated within him and passed as wisdom. Young Melbourne was “a skeptic in thought, in practice a hedonist,” a description that fit Jack’s own vision of himself. This Whig hedonism was not vulgar sexual indulgence, but a life in which pleasures, sensual and otherwise, were aesthetic treats. Passion was in the pursuit. Loyalty was for friends, not for spouses or lovers. Moral perfection was left where it belonged, in heaven.
“Nature had meant for him that rare phenomenon, a philosophical observer of mankind,” Cecil wrote. That sentence too would surely have resonated with Jack. He was in ways a spectator to his own life. There seemed nothing, no romance deep enough, no danger intense enough, no thought profound enough, to pull him fully outside the circle of himself.
There was the conundrum, not only for young Melbourne but also for young Jack Kennedy. Is a man who sees the world as it is—with all its compromises, dishonesty, self-interest, and impediments to change—less able to make a deep mark than another man who is blithely unaware of his own limitations and those of the world? Was it the lot of a man who understood the sheer futility of most human effort—the illusions and vanity that drove men to seek fame and power—to stand on the sidelines, his head tilted ironically, merely observing the life that ran before him?
9
“It’s the End of the World, the End of Everything”
Joe believed that England would lose in a war with Germany. Everything he did and said followed from that conviction. If he was correct, he was not a treacherous defeatist whose sentiments prolonged the period before America would begin