The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [92]
At its highest level, the level at which Churchill and Roosevelt operated, politics is not the art of the possible, but an alchemy that transforms the impossible into the possible. That is the political alchemy that the two leaders were practicing, alchemy that cynical, sullen Joe could not possibly grasp.
In March 1940, Joe led Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of State, to Churchill’s office at the Admiralty for an afternoon meeting. Churchill sat in a large chair in front of the fireplace, reading a paper and smoking one of his famous cigars with a drink at his side. Joe noted these details in his unpublished memoirs as if they were proof of the man’s decadence.
During Welles’s visit, Joe stopped the British officials cold when they started spouting what he considered sentimental garbage about their noble purpose. “For Christ’s sakes,” he exclaimed, “stop trying to make this a holy war, because no one will believe you; you’re fighting for your life as an Empire, and that’s good enough.” Joe, however, had not reckoned with Churchill, who rose up and spoke in words charged with passion. He described the Nazis as a “monster born of hatred and of fear,” but to Joe such eloquence was at best little more than gaudy gift-wrapping. That Churchill used it on his two auditors suggested his further chicanery; he did not see the two American diplomats as worthy of simpler words. Joe did not see that eloquence was one of Churchill’s strongest weapons, one he used wherever and whenever he thought it might forward his cause.
“What we have lost on balance is not significant,” Churchill said, looking at a chart of naval losses. Welles suggested the obvious, that the war had not truly begun and that when it did the losses would be enormous and the world economy would suffer horrendously.
“I am not sure of that,” Churchill said. “The last war did not bring about conditions of that type. In fact, the standard of living all over the world has been bettered since then.”
Joe had had quite enough of this dissembling British politician who masqueraded as a statesman. “That is taking a short view of it,” he interrupted, giving Churchill a dose of what he considered unvarnished, ineloquent truth. “The well that the water has been taken out of has become drier and drier. This war is the climax of your process of ‘raising standards.’ To keep on doing it, even to maintain the standards that have been reached, seems to have made it necessary now to go out and tap other people’s wells. That kind of an economic structure is nothing to brag about.”
Churchill went on as if Joe had never spoken, rising again to eloquent heights as he declared that Nazi Germany had to be destroyed once and forever. The gulf between the two men was as wide as the ocean that separated their countries. If Joe listened, he did not hear, and if he heard, he did not believe.
Later, when Churchill had heard more tales of Joe’s defeatist diatribes, he said: “Supposing, as I do not for one moment suppose, that Mr. Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men.” Joe, for his part, had the cowardice of his lack of conviction. He was unwilling to have himself or his sons die in what he considered a foolish, futile fight.
Back at Harvard in the fall, Jack worked diligently on his honors’ thesis. His whole intellectual life these last two years had prepared him for analyzing why England