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By Root 1352 0

His Harvard friend Blair Clark, whose journalistic skills were such that he was the editor of the Harvard Crimson, says that he and Jack worked together rewriting two of the chapters. Arthur Krock applied his skilled editorial hand to the manuscript. Joe bought hundreds of copies of his son’s book and was largely responsible for creating the impression that Why England Slept was a popular success. He wrote Churchill that “it is already a best-seller in the nonfiction group,” though in fact it made no best-seller lists. In the end the book sold about twelve thousand copies, a worthy total for a serious, often turgid political book by a twenty-three-year-old first-time author, but hardly the best-seller of legend. As Joe saw the world, image was everything, and he had created this idea that his son was an immensely successful young author.

At Harvard in the spring of his senior year, Jack learned that one of his oldest friends, Bill Sweatt, had died of a mysterious ailment while on a trip to South America. Jack and Bill had been boys together in the winter in Palm Beach. Both had gone off to Choate. Bill was the kind of stellar youth admired not only by the headmaster and his toadies but even by self-conscious miscreants like Jack and his friends in the notorious Muckers Club.

Jack had known nothing of death except what he read about it in books and poems. He was stunned by the arbitrariness and randomness of his friend’s demise. Why Bill? Why now? Unlike Jack, who sorted out human beings like a barrel of mainly rotten fruit, Bill had seemed to get along with everyone. On one occasion, when Bill had spoken negatively of a fellow student, Jack’s father had commented: “Well, if Bill Sweatt doesn’t like him, there is something wrong with him.”

On his Spee Club stationery Jack wrote a letter unlike anything he had written before. In seeking to comfort his friend’s mother, his words were gracious, restrained, deep, and truthful. All his life Jack had disdained what he considered the silly rituals of a gentleman’s life, but now he heralded young Bill as a model of what a gentleman should be.

Jack’s attitude toward the rituals of upper-class manhood may have changed during his time in London, after reading about Melbourne, or simply because he had grown more comfortable with himself. Jack expressed his ideals of how a man of his class should behave, an ideal very far from how he had lived most of his two decades of life.

At Choate, I remember he came in 2nd in the class votes as the most gentlemanly and those who knew him voted for him with the feeling that the word “gentleman” in its fullest and broadest sense—in the sense of having great consideration for other people and what they felt—that that best described Bill. I think we all gained something from knowing him and for that reason, I think he probably gave and got far more out of his life than many others who lived to a greater age.

The house at Prince’s Gate was shrouded in blackout curtains no darker than Joe’s own mood. Much of the time he spent at St. Leonard’s, the huge estate in the countryside that he had taken in the event of the anticipated German bombing of London. He was losing weight. His hair was turning gray. His stomach was so sensitive that he had a special diet at the Mayfair restaurants where he often supped alone. For a while he was taking belladonna to get to sleep. He was no longer an honored guest at the great houses of London. He was alone and he was depressed, and that bleak mood fell over everything he thought and said and wrote.

Joe believed that those who had so recently wooed him ostracized him now because he continued to shout the truth. This banishment was severe not simply for what he said but how he said it.

In March of 1940, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, a socially prominent Austrian writer, sent a memo to Clare Boothe Luce titled “Joseph Kennedy and Diplomatic Corps.” The Luce publications portrayed the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s as a dedicated, accomplished public servant, but in private memos a different Joseph P. Kennedy