excessively busy foreign banker who's asked me for a few lessons in patriotism.”
“The nobility of sacrifice. For the cause.”
“But not in my own constituency. You know my rules.”
“Thank the Lord, Dickie. Everything back in its place.”
I t was business as normal at the residence of the American Ambassador in Princes Gate. Not, of course, that business in the household of Joseph P. Kennedy resembled anything that in diplomatic circles would customarily be described as normal, but Kennedy was barely a diplomat. A man who had
only just finished celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he was more at home in the clapboard tenements of Boston's tough East Side where he was born than this gracious stucco-fronted mansion overlooking London's Hyde Park, but although Kennedy was intensely protective of his Irish-American roots, they were never going to tie him down.
Kennedy was a man of passion and action, if, at times, remarkably little judgment. His approach to diplomacy in the stuffy Court of St. James's was often very similar to his approach to sex—he didn't bother with the niceties of foreplay. He was a man always impatient, pushing and grasping. During an earlier life as a movie tycoon he had bedded Gloria Swanson, the most famous sex symbol in the world during the 1920s. She retained a vivid recollection of their encounter. Afterwards she told friends that Kennedy had appeared at her door and simply stared for a while, before letting forth a moan and throwing himselfupon her. He was characteristically direct. She compared him to a roped horse, rough, arduous—and ultimately inadequate. “After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair,” she recalled. “Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing coherent.”
It was an approach the British Foreign Office would have recognized. Yet for all his lack of orthodoxy he had taken London by storm since his arrival earlier in the year. In a world of quiet fears and ever-lengthening shadows, an old world coming to its long drawn-out end, his brashness was a joy and his lack of respect for social cobwebs a source of endless entertainment. He called the Queen “a cute trick” and dashed across the floor to dance with her, scattering courtiers and convention in his wake. His language was borrowed from the Boston stevedores of his youth. He had a natural flair for publicity but perhaps the strongest basis of his appeal was his nine children—"my nine hostages to fortune,” as he called them, ranging in age from Joe Junior and Jack in their twenties to the infant Edward. It was like 1917 all over again; the Americans had sent an entire army to the rescue. So the corridors at 9 Princes Gate were turned into a touch-football field, the marbled patio was transformed into a cycle track while the elevator became an integral part of a vast imaginary department store run by young Teddy. And if observers believed Kennedy was using his self-claimed status as “the Father of the Nation” as a platform to challenge for the presidency in 1940, no one seemed to mind—except, perhaps, for President Franklin Roosevelt, who had sent him to London hoping never to hear of him again. It was one of the President's classic misjudgments.
Yet, four days after the declaration of peace in our time, the residence was unusually quiet. There was no sound of children echoing around the hallways, no clatter of dropped bicycles bouncing off the marble, and even the Ambassador's dinner guests were restrained. Churchill seemed burdened, whileBrendan Bracken, seated next to Kennedy's niece, appeared uncharacteristically tongue-tied. On the opposite side of the table to Churchill sat the aggressively isolationist correspondent of the Chicago Tribune , who was proving something of a disappointment since his mastery of the arts of aggression appeared to be entirely confined to his pen; he had done nothing more than mumble all
“The nobility of sacrifice. For the cause.”
“But not in my own constituency. You know my rules.”
“Thank the Lord, Dickie. Everything back in its place.”
I t was business as normal at the residence of the American Ambassador in Princes Gate. Not, of course, that business in the household of Joseph P. Kennedy resembled anything that in diplomatic circles would customarily be described as normal, but Kennedy was barely a diplomat. A man who had
only just finished celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he was more at home in the clapboard tenements of Boston's tough East Side where he was born than this gracious stucco-fronted mansion overlooking London's Hyde Park, but although Kennedy was intensely protective of his Irish-American roots, they were never going to tie him down.
Kennedy was a man of passion and action, if, at times, remarkably little judgment. His approach to diplomacy in the stuffy Court of St. James's was often very similar to his approach to sex—he didn't bother with the niceties of foreplay. He was a man always impatient, pushing and grasping. During an earlier life as a movie tycoon he had bedded Gloria Swanson, the most famous sex symbol in the world during the 1920s. She retained a vivid recollection of their encounter. Afterwards she told friends that Kennedy had appeared at her door and simply stared for a while, before letting forth a moan and throwing himselfupon her. He was characteristically direct. She compared him to a roped horse, rough, arduous—and ultimately inadequate. “After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair,” she recalled. “Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing coherent.”
It was an approach the British Foreign Office would have recognized. Yet for all his lack of orthodoxy he had taken London by storm since his arrival earlier in the year. In a world of quiet fears and ever-lengthening shadows, an old world coming to its long drawn-out end, his brashness was a joy and his lack of respect for social cobwebs a source of endless entertainment. He called the Queen “a cute trick” and dashed across the floor to dance with her, scattering courtiers and convention in his wake. His language was borrowed from the Boston stevedores of his youth. He had a natural flair for publicity but perhaps the strongest basis of his appeal was his nine children—"my nine hostages to fortune,” as he called them, ranging in age from Joe Junior and Jack in their twenties to the infant Edward. It was like 1917 all over again; the Americans had sent an entire army to the rescue. So the corridors at 9 Princes Gate were turned into a touch-football field, the marbled patio was transformed into a cycle track while the elevator became an integral part of a vast imaginary department store run by young Teddy. And if observers believed Kennedy was using his self-claimed status as “the Father of the Nation” as a platform to challenge for the presidency in 1940, no one seemed to mind—except, perhaps, for President Franklin Roosevelt, who had sent him to London hoping never to hear of him again. It was one of the President's classic misjudgments.
Yet, four days after the declaration of peace in our time, the residence was unusually quiet. There was no sound of children echoing around the hallways, no clatter of dropped bicycles bouncing off the marble, and even the Ambassador's dinner guests were restrained. Churchill seemed burdened, whileBrendan Bracken, seated next to Kennedy's niece, appeared uncharacteristically tongue-tied. On the opposite side of the table to Churchill sat the aggressively isolationist correspondent of the Chicago Tribune , who was proving something of a disappointment since his mastery of the arts of aggression appeared to be entirely confined to his pen; he had done nothing more than mumble all