The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [96]
“It is always difficult for an ambassador to get below the surface of London politics and London society,” Harold Nicolson wrote in The Spectator on March 8, 1940, as Joe returned to London. “If he could go, heavily disguised, to Leicester sometimes, and sometimes to Glasgow, he would realize that Great Britain, although a difficult proposition, is also extremely tough.”
Even in the salons of Mayfair and the country homes of lords and ladies that he still did frequent, Joe heard passionate, determined voices. But he considered mere determination a fool’s capital. Morale did not matter, only materiel. After meeting with Joe, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wrote that, “as he [the American ambassador] saw it, the winning of the war had little to do with changes of Government, or accusations or complacency or lack of drive, it was simply a question of whether one had enough aeroplanes.”
Everywhere Joe looked he saw evidence of the truth of his views. The seemingly invincible armies of the Third Reich moved inexorably forward into Denmark and across Belgium and Holland, through France, to the English Channel. And now the sound of the German planes droned high above London as they dropped their bombs. Spreading death and destruction below, the German pilots looked down on what they called “an ocean of flame.”
The British intercepted a number of triple-priority letters from Joe to the secretary of State, missives that were devoid of even a hint of awareness that the British were fighting implacable evil. As Joe saw it, the British could not possibly hold out alone; unless the United States intervened, they were finished. Joe believed that although the Conservative government, headed by the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, might have been the putative leaders, the Socialists were “running the government.” On the surface, the British may have been standing up to the Nazi air raids, but there was an “undercurrent of ill-will.”
If Roosevelt had depended on Joe for his knowledge of Britain, he would never have proposed “lend-lease”—essentially lending American ships and planes to a hostage island on the verge of defeat or starvation. It was true, as Joe wrote Washington, that there were poor people bemoaning their fate, grumbling, “How can we be worse off than we are today? After all Hitler gives his people security.” But for every bloke in a factory bitching about his fate, there were ten stalwarts working double shifts, cleaning up rubble, shaking their fists at the steel that rained from the sky.
It was true, as Joe told the secretary of State, that if things got tougher some members of the upper class might decide they had had quite enough of Mr. Churchill’s war. But for every blue-blooded defeatist there were ten young men flying their Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes against the Nazis in the skies above England.
Joe had not listened to the voices of Britain. Nor had he looked deeply into English faces. Joe observed the worst in men, and he considered it their true value. He heard doubts, and he thought it was defeatism. He sensed fear and mistook it for cowardice. He called himself a realist, but he mocked what was heroic and noble and selfless.
Joe’s emotional state tainted everything he said and did. He told a story of a little church in the town of Horta, which was holding a vesper service. Across the street stood a crowd of British men. The men said that there was no point going across the street to church. A man could no longer believe in God. They were disillusioned. They were without hope.
Those men may have stood there that evening, but it was Joe who had no faith. In his world of endless grays, Joe could not see evil, and thus he could not see good either. “I am depressed beyond words,” he wrote Krock. Joe was a man who might well have been diagnosed as clinically depressed. On Joe Jr.’s twenty-fifth