Part 2 (1/2)

Holcombe a.s.signed Jack to study Bertram Snell, an upstate New York Republican whose princ.i.p.al 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 appeas.e.m.e.nt of n.a.z.i Germany at Munich, Jack felt no discomfort with his father's political p.r.o.nouncements or his family ident.i.ty. 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 ma.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle of n.o.bility.) 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 emba.s.sy, where he had lunch with Carmel Offie, Amba.s.sador William Bullitt's princ.i.p.al 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 emba.s.sy, where Offie and he had become ”the greatest of pals” and Bullitt had been very nice to him. He had lunch at the emba.s.sy 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 d.a.m.n 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 emba.s.sy, 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 a.r.s.e.”

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 d.a.m.n interesting,” he told Billings. He found himself in the eye of the storm, traveling to Danzig and Warsaw in May, where he spoke to n.a.z.i 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 emba.s.sies along the way and talking with senior diplomats, including Amba.s.sador 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. emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy 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 n.a.z.i control, would be invaluable, and his sense of ent.i.tlement left him indifferent to the complaints of the emba.s.sy.

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 pa.s.sengers 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. s.h.i.+p without a military escort to ensure their safety, and Jack's a.s.surances that President Roosevelt and the emba.s.sy were confident that Germany would not attack a U.S. s.h.i.+p did not convince them. Although Jack recommended to his father that he try to meet the pa.s.sengers' 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 ma.s.ses below, the ma.s.ses obey. ”He seemed really 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 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 a.s.serted, 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 a.s.sumptions 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 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 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 amba.s.sador'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.” 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 amba.s.sador'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.”

In the fall of 1939, Jack's interest in public affairs reflected itself in his course work. In four government cla.s.ses, 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, Const.i.tutional Government, and Dictators.h.i.+p. 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, n.a.z.ism, capitalism, communism, and democracy. The challenge of distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 PRINc.i.p.aL OUTCOME of Jack's travels and course work was a senior honor's thesis on the origins of Britain's appeas.e.m.e.nt 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 amba.s.sador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father's Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton 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. emba.s.sy 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. of Jack's travels and course work was a senior honor's thesis on the origins of Britain's appeas.e.m.e.nt 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 amba.s.sador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father's Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton 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. emba.s.sy 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 a.s.sistant 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, t.i.tled ”Appeas.e.m.e.nt at Munich” and c.u.mbersomely subt.i.tled (”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 c.u.m laude, the second-highest possible grade. Professor Carl J. Friedrich was more critical. He complained: ”Fundamental premise never a.n.a.lyzed. Much too long, wordy, repet.i.tious. Bibliography showy, but spotty. t.i.tle 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 c.u.m laude plus.

Bruce C. Hopper and Payson Wild, Jack's thesis advisers, were more enthusiastic about the quality of his work. In retrospective a.s.sessments, 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 a.s.sessments. 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 a.s.sertions 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 appeas.e.m.e.nt policy at Munich but that this failure was princ.i.p.ally the consequence not of weak leaders.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tled ”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 a.s.serts, have a more difficult time than dictators.h.i.+ps 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 mistakes. ”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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 amba.s.sador. And those are not the right grounds for publication.”

However accurate Laski's a.s.sessment of the thesis, he missed something others in America saw-namely, that international developments made Jack's a.n.a.lysis 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 t.i.tle, 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 t.i.tle, Why England Slept, Why England Slept, mirroring Churchill's mirroring Churchill's While England Slept While England Slept. Krock also gave Jack the name of an agent, who arranged a contract with Wilfred Funk, a small publis.h.i.+ng house, after Harper & Brothers and Harcourt Brace both turned it down. Harpers thought the ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script 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 circ.u.mstances. Hitler's victories in Europe and the feeling that Britain might succ.u.mb to n.a.z.i 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-cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances more than his skill as a writer and a.n.a.lyst 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 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sage 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. 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sage 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.