Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter by Barbara Leaming

tension of the moment, the British government having been engaged in days of discussion and debate about Hitler’s demands at the Fuehrer’s meeting with Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden.
    Unlike Joe Kennedy, who, to the horror of certain of his Harvard classmates, had managed to evade military service in the last war, Joe Airlie had fought bravely in the trenches. He bore the scar of a wound to his leg, and he had been awarded the high honor of a Military Cross. Joe Kennedy wanted Britain to come to terms with Hitler because, among other reasons, he feared another war might wipe out his personal fortune and impede his plans for assuring the political futures of his eldest sons, particularly of young Joe. In any case, Ambassador Kennedy did not think the decadent, depleted British capable of fighting, let alone winning, a new military conflict with the Germans. As always with Joe Kennedy, matters of honor and principle were simply not factors in his calculations.
    Joe Airlie, though he too supported the policy of appeasement, was another matter altogether. He was acutely sensitive to the questions of honor and duty raised by the Czech crisis. He had met Hitler and—unlike some aristocrats who professed to admire the Fuehrer—he found the German’s policies and politics abhorrent. Nonetheless, as one who had personally endured the agony of the last war, he could not bear the prospect of that agony being visited upon the next generation. Lord Airlie’s fit of temper when Billy and David arrived late expressed his monumental upset at the prospect that these two childishly undisciplined young men, as he viewed them, might soon be leaving a Scottish shooting party, where grouse were the targets, for the fields of death where they themselves would provide targets for the Germans.
    While Jean’s father reacted to the prevailing anxiety with irascibility, Kick responded by striving to concentrate on the pleasures of the moment now that she and Billy had been reunited at last. To watch them together that week—as Kick sat directly behind Billy while he shot grouse each afternoon; as she and he enjoyed noontime picnics and moonlight walks on the moors; as, dressed in evening clothes, they danced to records played on Jean’s old windup gramophone—was to observe a young couple who were unmistakably in love.
    To Kick’s dismay, however, it was impossible to shut out the dramatic international developments that were threatening to snatch Billy away from her at the very moment when she and he were really just discovering each other. She who had previously enchanted the boys of the aristocratic cousinhood by her readiness to listen to their animated talk of politics and world affairs was suddenly and conspicuously a good deal less than enthusiastic about those topics.
    On Friday, the twenty-third of September, Kick wrote to Jack’s friend Lem Billings in America: “All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come. Am so darn sick of it.” At the time she voiced that sentiment, Chamberlain had returned for a second round of discussions with Hitler, this time in the Rhineland town of Bad Godesberg. Again, the Fuehrer drastically augmented his demands. He stipulated that if the Czechs failed to vacate the Sudetenland by September 28, German troops would march into the disputed territories on the first of the month. Though in Bad Godesberg he had objected to Hitler’s terms, Chamberlain, when he returned to London, urged his cabinet to accept them.
    Lord Airlie, meanwhile, persisted in going out every morning with the boys to shoot, a voluminous plaid wrapped round his broad shoulders against the chill. On one occasion during this nerve-jangling period, the older man snapped when the fellows began to pepper one another with shotgun pellets. Immediately he ordered all of them into the cars and back to the castle. “You are all dangerous and you are coming home!” Lord Airlie shouted, saddened, as