LITMIR.BIZ

       THREE

      It 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 judgement. 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 himself upon 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 misjudgements.

      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, while Brendan 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 evening and disappear into his glass. A Swedish businessman named Svensson was courteous but cautious, preferring to listen and prod rather than to preach himself, almost as if he was a little overawed by the company. Meanwhile the Duke of Gloucester at the far end of the table was on his usual form, anaesthetizing guests on every side. This was not the effect Kennedy required. He enjoyed confrontation, the clash of words and wills. The English were so bad at it, but the Irish of East Boston – ah, they were a different breed entirely.

      ‘Mr Ambassador, where are the little ones?’ Churchill’s head rose from his plate. Kennedy noticed he had dribbled gravy down his waistcoat, but the politician seemed either not to have noticed or not to care.

      ‘Sent most of them to Ireland last week. A chance to search for their roots.’

      ‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘I see.’ So the hostages to fortune had fled. Churchill returned his attentions to his plate, indicating a lack of desire to pursue the line of conversation.

      ‘You don’t approve, Winston?’

      ‘What? Of sending the little birds abroad at a time of crisis?’ He considered. ‘For men in public positions there are no easy choices.’

      ‘But you wouldn’t.’

      ‘There is a danger of sending out the wrong sort of signal.’

      ‘You’d keep your kids here, beneath the threat of bombs?’

      ‘There is another way of looking at it. The presence of our loved ones serves as a constant reminder of what we are fighting for. And perhaps a signal to the aggressor that we are confident of victory.’

      ‘But we Americans have no intention of fighting. And as for victory …’

      ‘You doubt our cause?’

      ‘I doubt your goddamned air defences.’ He attacked his pudding as though he were redrawing frontiers. ‘You know what I hear, Winston? Last week as you were all digging in around London and waiting for the Luftwaffe, you guys had less than a hundred anti-aircraft guns for the entire city.’

      Churchill winced, which served only to encourage the other man.

      ‘Hey, but that’s only the headline. Of those hundred guns, less than half of ’em worked. Had the wrong size ammo, or the batteries were dead. And you know what I found when I chatted to the air-raid guys in the park?’

      ‘Why bother with conjecture when surely you are going to tell me?’

      ‘They didn’t have any steel helmets. After all these years of jawing about the bloody war, you think the guys in command might just’ve figured out that the troops needed some steel helmets? Just in case Hitler decided to start dropping things?’

      Churchill seemed, like his city, to be all but defenceless. ‘I have long warned about

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