In the fall of 1939, Jack’s interest in public affairs reflected itself in his course work. In four government classes, he focused on contemporary international politics. “The war clinched my thinking on international relations,” he said later. “The world had to get along together.” In addition to a course with Wild on elements of international law, he took Modern Imperialism, Principles of Politics, and Comparative Politics: Bureaucracy, Constitutional Government, and Dictatorship. Some papers Jack wrote for Wild’s course on neutral rights in wartime on the high seas made Wild think that Jack might become an attorney, but Jack displayed a greater interest in questions about power and the comparative workings and appeal of fascism, Nazism, capitalism, communism, and democracy. The challenge of distinguishing between rhetoric and realism in world affairs, between the ideals of international law and the hard actualities of why nations acted as they did, particularly engaged him.
THE PRINCIPAL OUTCOME of Jack’s travels and course work was a senior honor’s thesis on the origins of Britain’s appeasement policy. The history of how Jack wrote and published the thesis provides a microcosm of his privileged world. During Christmas vacation 1939 at Palm Beach, he spoke with British ambassador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father’s Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British embassy in Washington for a conversation with Lothian that, as Jack later wrote him, “started me out on the job.” Taking advantage of his father’s continued presence in London, Jack received invaluable help from James Seymour, the U.S. embassy press secretary, who sent him printed political pamphlets and other Conservative, Labour, and Liberal publications Jack could not obtain in the United States. His financial means also allowed him to use typists and stenographers to meet university deadlines.
Although the papers Jack wrote for his senior-year courses show an impressive capacity for academic study and analysis, it was the contemporary scene that above all interested him—in particular, the puzzle of how a power like Great Britain found itself in another potentially devastating war only twenty years after escaping from the most destructive conflict in history. Was it something peculiar to a democracy that accounted for this failure, or were forces at work here beyond any government’s control?
With only three months to complete the project, Jack committed himself with the same determination he had shown in fighting for a place on the Harvard football and swimming teams. Some of his Harvard friends remembered how he haunted the library of the Spee Club, where he worked on the thesis. They teased him about his “book,” poking fun at his seriousness and pretension at trying to write a groundbreaking work. “We used to tease him about it all the time,” one of them said, “because it was sort of his King Charles head that he was carrying around all the time: his famous thesis. We got so sick of hearing about it that I think he finally shut up.”
Seymour proved a fastidious research assistant who not only persuaded the English political parties to provide the publications Jack requested but also chased down books and articles on the subject at Chatham House, the Oxford University Press, and the British Museum Reading Room. Seymour’s efforts initially produced six large packages sent by diplomatic pouch to the State Department and then to Joe’s New York office. But Jack was not content with Seymour’s initial offering and pressed him for more: “Rush pacifist literature Oxford Cambridge Union report, etc.,” he cabled Seymour on February 9, “all parties business trade reports bearing on foreign policy[,] anything else.” “Dear Jack, your cables get tougher,” Seymour replied, but by the end of the month Jack had an additional twenty-two volumes of pamphlets and books.
The thesis of 148 pages, titled “Appeasement at Munich” and cumbersomely subtitled (“The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy to Change from a Disarmament Policy to a Rearmament Policy”), was written in about two months with predictable writing and organizational problems and an inconsistent focus. The thesis was read by four faculty members. Although Professor Henry A. Yeomans saw it as “badly written,” he also described it as “a laborious, interesting and intelligent discussion of a difficult question” and rated it magna cum laude, the second-highest possible grade. Professor Carl J. Friedrich was more critical. He complained: “Fundamental premise never analyzed. Much too long, wordy, repetitious. Bibliography showy, but spotty. Title should be British armament policy up to Munich. Reasoning re: Munich inconclusive. . . . Many typographical errors. English diction defective.” On a more positive note, Friedrich said, “Yet, thesis shows real interest and reasonable amount of work, though labor of condensation would have helped.” He scored the work a cut below Yeomans as cum laude plus.
Bruce C. Hopper and Payson Wild, Jack’s thesis advisers, were more enthusiastic about the quality of his work. In retrospective assessments, Wild remembered Jack as “a deep thinker and a genuine intellectual” whose thesis had “normal problems” but not “great” ones; Hopper recalled Jack’s “imagination and diligence in preparedness as outstanding as of that time.” On rereading the thesis twenty-four years later, Hopper was “again elated by the maturity of judgment, beyond his years in 1939/1940, by his felicity of phrase, and graceful presentation.”
Yeomans and Friedrich were closer to the mark in their assessments. So was political scientist James MacGregor Burns, whose campaign biography of JFK in 1960 described the thesis as “a typical undergraduate effort—solemn and pedantic in tone, bristling with statistics and footnotes, a little weak in spelling and sentence structure.” Yet it was an impressive effort for so young a man who had never written anything more than a term paper.
Had John Kennedy never become a prominent world figure, his thesis would be little remembered. But because it gives clues to the development of his interest and understanding of foreign affairs, it has become a much discussed text. Two things seem most striking about the work: First, Jack’s unsuccessful effort at a scientific or objective history, and second, his attempt to draw a contemporary lesson for America from Britain’s failure to keep pace with German military might.
His objective, he states throughout the thesis, was to neither condemn nor excuse Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, but rather to get beyond assertions of blame and defense in order to understand what had happened. Yet Jack’s reach for objectivity is too facile. Though his thesis is indeed an interesting analysis of what caused Britain to act as it did at Munich, it is also quite clearly a defense of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the appeasers. Jack argues that Britain’s failure to arm itself in the thirties forced it into the appeasement policy at Munich but that this failure was principally the consequence not of weak leadership on the part of the two prime ministers but of popular resistance led by the pacifists, advocates of collective security through the League of Nations, opponents of greater government spending, and shortsighted domestic politicians stressing narrow self-interest over larger national needs. No one who knew anything about Joe Kennedy’s pro-Chamberlain, pro-Munich views could miss the fact that the thesis could be read partly as a defense of Joe’s controversial position. Carl Friedrich privately said that the thesis should have been titled “While Daddy Slept.”
Yet dismissing the thesis as simply an answer to Joe’s critics is to miss Jack’s compelling central argument—one originally made by Alexis de Tocqueville over a hundred years before: Popular rule does not readily lend itself to the making of effective foreign policy. Democracies, Jack asserts, have a more difficult time than dictatorships in mobilizing resources for their defense. Only when a pervasive fear of losing national survival takes hold can a democracy like Britain or the United States persuade its citizens “to give up their personal interests, for the greater purpose. In other words, every group [in Britain] wanted rearmament but no group felt that there was any need for it to sacrifice its privileged position. This feeling in 1936 was to have a fatal influence in 1938” at Munich.
Jack saw his thesis as a cautionary message to Americans, who needed to learn from Britain’s mista
kes. “In this calm acceptance of the theory that the democratic way is the best . . . lies the danger,” Jack wrote. “Why, exactly, is the democratic system better? . . . It is better because it allows for the full development of man as an individual. But . . . this only indicates that democracy is a ‘pleasanter’ form of government—not that it is the best form of government for meeting the present world problem. It may be a great system of government to live in internally but it’s [sic] weaknesses are great. We wish to preserve it here. If we are to do so, we must look at situations much more realistically than we do now.”
What seems most important now about Kennedy’s thesis is the extent to which he emphasizes the need for unsentimental realism about world affairs. Making judgments about international dangers by ignoring them or wishing them away is as dangerous as unthinking hostility to foreign rivals who may be useful temporary allies. Personal, self-serving convictions are as unconstructive as outdated ideologies in deciding what best serves a nation’s interests. Although he would not always be faithful to these propositions, they became mainstays of most of his later responses to foreign challenges.
The exploding world crisis encouraged Jack to turn his thesis into a book. It was not common for a Harvard undergraduate to instantly convert his honor’s paper into a major publication. As Harold Laski told Joe, “While it is the book of a lad with brains, it is very immature, it has no structure, and dwells almost wholly on the surface of things. In a good university, half a hundred seniors do books like this as part of their normal work in their final year. But they don’t publish them for the good reason that their importance lies solely in what they get out of doing them and not out of what they have to say. I don’t honestly think any publisher would have looked at that book of Jack’s if he had not been your son, and if you had not been ambassador. And those are not the right grounds for publication.”
However accurate Laski’s assessment of the thesis, he missed something others in America saw—namely, that international developments made Jack’s analysis a timely appeal to millions of Americans eager to consider a wise response to the European war. The collapse of France had made Americans feel more vulnerable to external attacks than at any time since the Franco-British abuse of neutral rights during the Napoleonic Wars.
New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, to whom Jack showed the thesis, thought “it was amateurish in many respects but not, certainly not, as much so as most writings in that category are.” “I told him,” Krock said, “I thought it would make a very welcome and very useful book.” And so Krock helped Jack with stylistic revisions and suggested a title, Why England Slept, mirroring Churchill’s While England Slept. Krock also gave Jack the name of an agent, who arranged a contract with Wilfred Funk, a small publishing house, after Harper & Brothers and Harcourt Brace both turned it down. Harpers thought the manuscript already eclipsed by current events, and Harcourt thought “sales possibilities too dim” and “things moving too fast” for a book on the British failure at Munich to command much interest in the United States.
They were wrong, but partly because Jack made revisions to the manuscript that gave it more balance and greater timeliness than the original. In deciding to try for publication, Jack understood that he needed to do it “as soon as possible, as I should get it out before . . . the issue becomes too dead.” He also accepted the recommendation of several English readers that he not place so much more blame on the public than on Baldwin and Chamberlain for Munich. Most important, he saw the need to say less about the shortcomings of democracy and more about its defense in present circumstances. Hitler’s victories in Europe and the feeling that Britain might succumb to Nazi aggression made it more appealing for Jack to emphasize not democracy’s weakness in meeting a foreign crisis but what America could do to ensure its national security in a dangerous world.
The book, which received almost uniformly glowing reviews and substantial sales in the United States and Britain, demonstrated that Jack had the wherewithal for a public career. No one, including Jack, was then thinking in terms of any run for office. But his success suggested that he was an astute observer of public mood and problems, especially as they related to international affairs. Neither Jack nor Joe foresaw the precise direction Jack’s life would now take, but Joe saw the book as a valuable first step for a young man reaching for public influence. “I read Jack’s book through and I think it is a swell job,” he wrote Rose. “There is no question that regardless of whether he makes any money out of it or not, he will have built himself a foundation for his reputation that will be of lasting value to him.” And to Jack he wrote: “The book will do you an amazing amount of good. . . . You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.”
For his part, Jack had few, if any, illusions about the book. He understood that circumstances more than his skill as a writer and analyst had given the book its resonance. But he also understood that seizing the main chance when it presented itself was not to be despised; he was more than happy, then, to devote his summer to publicizing and selling Why England Slept.
Kennedy friend Charles Spalding remembers visiting Jack at the Cape shortly after the book had appeared. “Jack was downstairs with a whole pile of these books. . . . It was just a wonderful disarray of papers, letters from Prime Ministers and congressmen and people you’ve heard about, some under wet bathing suits and some under the bed.” When Spalding asked how the book was selling, “[Jack’s] eyes lit up and he said, ‘Oh, very well. I’m seeing to that.’ He was seeing that the books were handed out and he was really moving the books. . . . It was just a sort of amusing pragmatism that he hadn’t just written the book and then he was going to just disappear. He was going to see that it got sold. He was just laughing at his own success. . . . He was doing everything he could to promote it. And he was good at that. . . . The interviews, radio programs, answering letters, autographing copies, sending them out, checking bookstores.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, aside from promoting his book, Jack was at loss for what to do next. He had thoughts of attending Yale Law School, but health problems persuaded him to temporarily abandon such plans. In addition, he had doubts about a law career. It would mean not only competing with brother Joe, who was enrolled at Harvard, but also abandoning what Lem Billings called his intellectual interests. “I don’t think there was any question but that he was thinking he would go into journalism and teaching.” But like millions of other young Americans in 1940, the state of world affairs made private decisions hostage to public developments. “There was an awful vacuum there in 1940,” Lem remembered, “a very uncomfortable period for a guy who was graduating from school. I mean, what to do? We were so damn close to going to war. . . . You didn’t know what you were going to do[,] so what was the point of getting into any lifelong thing?” Everybody “was just sort of marking time.” The passage of a bill in September 1940 authorizing the first peacetime draft had put the country’s young men on notice that military service might take precedence over personal plans.
And so Jack went to Stanford in September to nurse himself back to health in the warm California sun. His graduate work, which lasted only one quarter, to December 1940, was supposed to focus on business studies, but his courses and interests remained in political science and international relations. A young woman he dated while in California remembered his attentiveness to contemporary events. “He was fascinated with the news. He always turned it on in the car, on the radio. . . . He was intrigued by what was going on in the world.” Another Stanford contemporary recalled Jack’s conversations with Stanford’s student body president about the nature of effective government leadership—he pointed to FDR as a model of how to make big changes without overturning traditional institutions. This student also remembered Jack’s telling him and other “remote westerners . . . that there was a war on, that it had been on for a year, and that we were going to get into it.” In December, he attend
ed an Institute of World Affairs conference in Riverside, California, on current international problems, where he acted as a “rapporteur” for four of the sessions: “War and the Future World Economy,” “The Americas: Problems of Hemispheric Defense & Security,” “War and the Preservation of European Civilization,” and “Proposed Plans for Peace.”
His interest in overseas affairs was more than academic. When Joe resigned his ambassadorship in December 1940, Jack counseled him on what to say to insulate him from charges of appeasement and identification with Chamberlain’s failed policies. More important, he now convinced his father not to take issue with the Lend- Lease bill FDR proposed as a means to help Britain defeat Germany. If we failed to give this aid now and Britain were defeated, Jack argued, it would cost the United States much more later and might force us into a war with Hitler, which Joe, above all, wished to avoid. Under pressure from Roosevelt as well, Joe publicly accepted his son’s reasoning.