For Jack, the lifestyle of these British aristocrats was not so removed from that of his father. From July 1934 to September 1935, when he served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joe had lived in a sumptuous 125-acre Maryland estate half an hour’s drive from Washington. The thirty-three-room rented mansion had been built by a multimillionaire Chicago businessman, Samuel Klump Martin III, and rivaled the great homes of English aristocrats. The living room was the size of a hotel lobby, and the dining room was modeled after one built for King James I of England. Twelve master bedrooms, a recreation room with several billiard tables and three Ping-Pong tables, a hundred-seat movie theater, and a large outdoor swimming pool surrounded by guest bath houses provided all the modern amenities.
In 1937-38, at the age of twenty, Jack saw himself and his family as a kind of American nobility. On returning home in September, Jack learned that Fortune magazine had published a cover article about his father, who since March had been serving as the chairman of a newly created U.S. Maritime Commission. Then, during the fall term, Jack had a personal victory when he received an invitation to the Spee, one of Harvard’s eight elite clubs that included only about a hundred out of the thousand students in the class of 1940. It was an honor neither his father nor Joe Jr. had managed to win. “It was a status symbol for him,” one of Jack’s classmates believed, “that at last the Kennedys were good enough.”
And then, in December 1937, President Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy ambassador to Great Britain, America’s most prestigious diplomatic post. By choosing a self-made Irish American as his envoy, Roosevelt assumed that he would not become a captive of England’s conservative government and its appeasement policy toward Hitler’s Germany.
Whatever the president’s political purposes, the appointment gave Joe and his family an uncommon degree of social prominence. “The moment the appointment was proposed,” Rose said, “Joe accepted. It was the kind of appointment he had been waiting for all along.” Indeed, he had lobbied Roosevelt for it. When the president tried to get him to become secretary of commerce instead, Joe told Roosevelt’s son James: “London is where I want to go and it is the only place I intend to go.” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes asked White House insider Thomas Corcoran why Kennedy was so eager for the London post. “You don’t understand the Irish,” Corcoran answered. “London has always been a closed door to him. As Ambassador of the United States, Kennedy will have all doors open to him.” Joe, who was not sure how long the assignment would last, told an aide who accompanied him, “Don’t go buying a lot of luggage. We’re only going to get the family in the Social Register. When that’s done we come on back.”
Joe’s appointment also gave Jack an uncommon opportunity to be, however temporarily, a part of English high society. In July 1938, at the end of his sophomore year, he traveled to London to spend the summer working at the U.S. embassy. The work itself was less memorable than the social whirl Jack enjoyed. He found a warm welcome from England’s aristocracy and had ready access to the teas, balls, dances, regattas, and races that were part of their summer ritual. Although Jack looked “incredibly young for his age at 21,” he engaged his English friends with his bright, quick mind, highly developed sense of humor, and vitality about everything. In August, the family fled London for a villa in the south of France near Cannes, where they socialized with members of the English royal family. A final few days in London at the end of August gave Jack a close-up view of an evolving European crisis over Czechoslovakia, which Hitler had provoked by demanding that Prague give up its Sudetenland territory. In August, with the crisis unresolved, Jack returned to the States for his junior year at Harvard.
His summer in Europe had fired Jack’s imagination, and he was determined to return to the Continent. He asked and received permission from his advisers to take six courses in the fall term of 1938 and a semester’s leave in the spring of 1939, which he planned to spend in Europe working on an honor’s thesis about contemporary affairs. He promised his Harvard adviser that during his time abroad, he would read several assigned books on political philosophy, including Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society. He also pledged to gather material for a senior thesis on some aspect of international law and diplomacy or the history of international relations, which were listed as his special fields of interest. As impressive, he turned from a C into a B student and excelled in his government classes during the fall term.
A. Chester Hanford, the dean of Harvard College and Jack’s instructor in Government 9a, a course on American state government, remembered “a rather thin, somewhat reserved but pleasant young man with an open countenance which often wore an inquisitive look. He . . . took an active part in classroom discussion in which he made pertinent remarks.” But much to Hanford’s surprise, the grandson of Honey Fitz showed little interest in state politics. He “was more interested in the changing position of the American state, in federal-state relations and state constitutional development.” Jack’s examination papers gave evidence of independent thought and made Hanford “wonder if he [Jack] might not become a newspaper man.”
Jack made an even stronger impression on Professor Arthur Holcombe, whose Government 7 focused on national politics and the workings of Congress in particular. Holcombe “tried to teach . . . government as if it were a science.” Each student was required to study a congressman and assess his method of operation and his performance. Holcombe urged the class to substitute objective analysis for personal opinions, and this “scientific method” greatly appealed to Jack, who believed that politics should rest less on opinion than on facts.
Holcombe assigned Jack to study Bertram Snell, an upstate New York Republican whose principal distinction was his representation of the electric power interests in his region. Holcombe said that Jack “did a very superior job of investigating, and his final report was a masterpiece.” Of course, Jack had some advantages. As Holcombe noted, “When Christmas vacation came, he goes down to Washington, meets some of his father’s friends, gets a further line on his congressman and on Congress.”
When he finished the fall term, Jack made plans to sail for Europe at the end of February. First, however, he flew to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where he was met at the airport by a girl he was dating and a Princeton friend, who was impressed that Jack had come by plane: “Not many people flew in those days,” the friend recalled. But Jack did, and then flew back to New York before boarding a luxury liner for Europe.
Although his father’s public image had taken a downturn in the fall of 1938, when he publicly expressed favor for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany at Munich, Jack felt no discomfort with his father’s political pronouncements or his family identity. Although his father’s pro-Chamberlain speech “seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc.,” he wrote his parents, “[it] was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-Fascist.” A new play, which he saw in New York and included several references to the Kennedys, greatly amused Jack. “It’s pretty funny,” he reported in the same letter, “and jokes about us get the biggest laughs whatever that signifies.”
As soon as he arrived in London, Jack resumed “having a great time,” he wrote Billings. He was working every day and “feeling very important as I go to work in my new cutaway.” He met the king “at a Court Levee. It takes place in the morning and you wear tails. The King stands & you go up and bow. Met Queen Mary and was at tea with the Princess Elizabeth with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night—am going to Court in my new silk breeches, which are cut to my crotch tightly and in which I look mighty attractive. Friday I leave for Rome as J.P. has been appointed to represent Roosevelt at the Pope’s coronation.”
When he returned from Rome in late March, Jack reported to Billings that they had had “a great time.” His youngest brother, Teddy, had received Communion from the new pope, Pius XII, “the first time that a Pope has ever done this in the last couple of hundred years.” The pope then
gave the Sacrament to Joe, Jack, and his sister Eunice “at a private mass and all in all it was very impressive.” For all the sense of importance Jack gained from his father’s prominence and influence, he kept an irreverent sense of perspective that allowed him to see the comical side of his family’s social climbing. He wrote Billings: “They want to give Dad the title of Duke which will be hereditary and go to all of his family which will make me Duke John of Bronxville and perhaps if you suck around sufficiently I might knight you.” (In fact, Joe had a sense of limits about what an American public official could do and had no intention of asking the required permission of Congress to accept a title of nobility.)
Jack’s letters to Billings over the next several months describe a young man enjoying his privileged life. On the way back from Rome, he had stopped at the Paris embassy, where he had lunch with Carmel Offie, Ambassador William Bullitt’s principal aide, and was invited by them to stay at Bullitt’s residence. He “graciously declined,” as he wanted to get back to London for the Grand National steeplechase before returning to Paris for a month and then traveling to “Poland, Russia, etc.” As of this writing in March, he was not doing “much work but have been sporting around in my morning coat, my ‘Anthony Eden’ black Homburg and white gardenia.”
Two weeks later, he told Billings that he was “living like a king” at the Paris embassy, where Offie and he had become “the greatest of pals” and Bullitt had been very nice to him. He had lunch at the embassy with the famed aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, “the most attractive couple I’ve ever seen.” He was “going skiing for a week in Switzerland which should be damn good fun.” Apparently, it was: “Plenty of action here, both on and off the skis,” he told Billings in a postcard. “Things have been humming since I got back from skiing,” he next wrote Lem. “Met a gal who used to live with the Duke of Kent and who is as she says ‘a member of the British Royal family by injections.’ She has terrific diamond bracelet that he gave her and a big ruby that the Marajah [sic] of Nepal gave her. I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but will see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life.” And he was still living “like a king” at the embassy, where Bullitt “really fixes me up,” and Offie and he were served by “about 30 lackies.” Bullitt, Jack wrote, was always “trying, unsuccessfully, to pour champagne down my gullett [sic].”
But however welcoming Bullitt and Offie were, Jack did not like feeling dependent on their hospitality. He must have also sensed some hostility from Offie, who remembered “Jack sitting in my office and listening to telegrams being read or even reading various things which actually were none of his business but since he was who he was we didn’t throw him out.” Jack privately reciprocated the irritation: “Offie has just rung for me,” he wrote Lem, “so I guess I have to get the old paper ready and go in and wipe his arse.”
For all the fun, Jack had a keen sense of responsibility about using his uncommon opportunity to gather information for a senior thesis. Besides, the highly charged European political atmosphere, which many predicted would soon erupt in another war, fascinated him. However much he kept Lem Billings posted on his social triumphs, his letters to Lem and to his father in London were filled with details about German intentions toward Poland and the likely reactions of Britain, France, Russia, Romania, and Turkey. “The whole thing is damn interesting,” he told Billings. He found himself in the eye of the storm, traveling to Danzig and Warsaw in May, where he spoke to Nazi and Polish officials, and then on to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, Turkey, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, and Athens. He received VIP treatment from the U.S. diplomatic missions everywhere he went, staying at a number of embassies along the way and talking with senior diplomats, including Ambassador Anthony Biddle in Warsaw and Charles E. Bohlen, the second secretary in Moscow.
Jack spent August traveling among England, France, Germany, and Italy in pursuit of more information for his senior thesis. He and Torbert MacDonald, his Harvard roommate who had come to England for a track meet, met fierce hostility in Munich from storm troopers who spotted the English license plates on their car. Against the advice of the U.S. embassy in Prague, Joe Kennedy arranged a visit by Jack to Czechoslovakia. The diplomat George F. Kennan, who was serving as a secretary of the legation, remembered how “furious” members of the embassy were at the demand. Joe Kennedy’s “son had no official status and was, in our eyes, obviously an upstart and an ignoramus. The idea that there was anything he could learn or report about conditions in Europe which we . . . had not already reported seemed . . . wholly absurd. That busy people should have their time taken up arranging his tour struck us as outrageous.” Jack saw matters differently, believing a firsthand look at Prague, now under Nazi control, would be invaluable, and his sense of entitlement left him indifferent to the complaints of the embassy.
In keeping with the peculiar way in which he moved between the serious and the frivolous at this time of his life, Jack spent part of August on the French Riviera, where his family had again rented a villa for the summer at Antibes. There he socialized with the famous movie actress Marlene Dietrich and her family, swimming with her daughter during the day and dancing with Marlene herself at night.
But the good times came to an abrupt end in September when Hitler invaded Poland and the British and the French declared war. Jack joined his parents and his brother Joe and sister Kathleen in the visitor’s gallery to watch Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and members of Parliament, including Winston Churchill, explain Britain’s decision to fight. Churchill’s speech, giving evidence of the powerful oratory that would later inspire the nation in the darkest hours of the war, left an indelible impression on Jack. To Joe, the onset of war was an unprecedented disaster. He became tearful when Chamberlain declared that “everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins.” In a telephone call to FDR, the inconsolable Joe Kennedy moaned, “It’s the end of the world . . . the end of everything.”
Jack now also got his first experience of hands-on diplomacy. His father sent him to Glasgow to attend to more than two hundred American citizens rescued by a British destroyer after their British liner carrying 1,400 passengers from Liverpool to New York had been sunk by a German submarine. More than a hundred people had lost their lives, including twenty-eight U.S. citizens. The surviving Americans were terrified at the suggestion that they board a U.S. ship without a military escort to ensure their safety, and Jack’s assurances that President Roosevelt and the embassy were confident that Germany would not attack a U.S. ship did not convince them. Although Jack recommended to his father that he try to meet the passengers’ demand, Joe believed it superfluous, and an unescorted U.S. freighter returned the citizens to the United States. Meanwhile, Jack flew on a Pan Am Clipper to Boston in time for his senior fall term.
More than anything, Jack’s travels encouraged an intellectual’s skepticism about the limits of human understanding and beliefs. When he returned to America in September, he asked a Catholic priest: “I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to Heaven on a white horse, and Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe Christ any more than Mohammed?” The priest urged Joe to get Jack some “instruction immediately, or else he would turn into a[n] . . . atheist if he didn’t get some of his problems straightened out.” When a friend at Harvard who thought Jack less than pious about his religion asked why he was going to church on a holy day, Jack “got this odd, hard look on his face” and replied, “This is one of the things I do for my father. The rest I do for myself.”
It was all part of Jack’s affinity for skepticism, which Payson S. Wild, one of his instructors in the fall of 1939, helped foster in a tutorial on political theory. Wild urged him to consider the question of why, given that there are a few people at the top and masses below, the masses obey. “He seemed rea
lly intrigued by that,” Wild recalled.
Jack gave expression to his independence—to his developing impulse to question prevailing wisdom—in an October 1939 editorial in the Harvard Crimson. Responding to the impression that “everyone here is ready to fight to the last Englishman,” Jack published a counterargument in the campus newspaper that essentially reflected the case his father was then making privately to President Roosevelt and the State Department. As much an expression of loyalty to Joe as of pleasure in running against majority opinion and presenting himself as someone with special understanding of international conditions, Jack urged a quick, negotiated end to the fighting through the good offices of President Roosevelt. Because it would require a third party to mediate a settlement, Jack thought that the “President is almost under an obligation to exert every office he possesses to bring about such a peace.”
Jack believed that both Germany and England were eager for an agreement. And though such a settlement would mean sacrificing Poland, it would likely save Britain and France from probable defeat. But it would have to be a “peace based on solid reality,” Jack asserted, which meant giving Germany a “free economic hand” in eastern Europe and a share of overseas colonies. Hitler would have to disarm in return for these conditions, but Jack did not think this was out of reach.
Jack’s misplaced hopes seem to have been more a case of taking issue with current assumptions than an expression of realism about European affairs developed in his recent travels. Nevertheless, his interest in exploring political questions—in honing his skills as a student of government—is striking. “He seemed to blossom once Joe was gone [to law school] and to feel more secure himself and to be more confident as his grades improved,” Wild said. As another token of Jack’s interest and vocational aspirations in 1939, he tried to become a member of the Crimson’s editorial board; but it already had a full complement of editors and he had to settle for a spot on the paper’s business board. He also occasionally wrote for the paper. An editorial in the Crimson and a speech before the YMCA and YWCA on how to restore peace made him feel like “quite a seer around here.” He also joked with his father that being an ambassador’s son who had spent time in Europe with prominent officials gave him added cachet with the girls. “I seem to be doing better with the girls so I guess you are doing your duty over there,“ he wrote his father, “so before resigning give my social career a bit of consideration.”