The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm by Will Swift

Author:Will Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

IN A NOTE, Kick eloquently captured the wartime British capital, with its nightly blackouts: “It is an eerie experience walking through a darkened London. You literally feel your way, and with groping finger make sudden contact with a lamppost against which leans a steel helmeted figure with his gas mask slung at his side. You cross the road in obedience to little green crosses winking in the murk above your head…Gone are the gaily-lit hotels and nightclubs; now in their place are somber buildings surrounded by sandbags. It is a new London…now one hears tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns, but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward, for it is a perilous task…more have been killed in the darkness than in battle—during the first month of the war.” One night, Kick was awakened by the “piercing blasts” of an air-raid siren. “Offering my soul to the Lord,” she ran downstairs amid family members “ordering one another about, and trying at the same time to put on gas masks.” They raced across the road into an air-raid shelter, where the “ladies looked most unlovely with their creamed faces and their paper curled hair.”

Jack sympathized with the plight of the three-quarter million children and teachers being evacuated from London. After watching the heartrending good-byes between parents and children at Euston Station, he wrote his friend Claiborne Pell, “The big men of Berlin and London sit and confidently give their orders, and it is these kids—so far as I can see—who are the first casualties.” The ambassador wrote FDR a thoughtful report detailing the successful evacuation and outlining the possible long-term social and economic consequences of moving citizens out of crowded population centers—a vigorous decentralization and reorganization of the social structure.

Feeling gloomy about Britain’s future, Joe went to the palace for tea on September 9. The king attempted to reassure him, an effort that left the monarch depressed—and enraged. Passionate about the British Empire’s role as protector of smaller countries, the king was infuriated by Joe’s point of view: “He looked at the war very much from the financial and material viewpoint,” he wrote in his diary. “He wondered why we did not let Hitler have SE Europe, as it was no good to us from a monetary standpoint. He did not seem to realize that this country was part of Europe, that it was essential for us to act as policemen, & to uphold the rights of small nations & that the Balkan countries had a national spirit.” King George went on to write Joe an angry letter—what his private secretary Alan Lascelles called “a stinker”—but both Chamberlain and Churchill cautioned him to send a more temperate upbraiding. “As I see it, the USA, France, and the British Empire,” the king wrote, “are the three really free peoples in the World, and two of these great democracies are now fighting against all that we three countries hate and detest.”

Understanding he had strayed into hazardous territory, Joe wrote

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