In a way, JFK's first two years at Harvard echoed his
experience at Choate. Again, he felt himself to be in the shadow
of his older brother Joe Jr., who was two years ahead of him and
pegged as the most intelligent and driven of the Kennedy boys.
JFK continued to make only lackluster grades–"gentleman's C's,"
as the expression went. He wrote occasionally for the Harvard
Crimson, the campus newspaper, but had little involvement
with campus politics, preferring to concentrate on athletics and
his social life. He played football, and was on the JV squad during
his sophomore year, but a bad fall led to a rupture of his spinal
disc. The injury forced him off the team, and left him with back
troubles that would plague him for the rest of his life. Off
the field, in Harvard's social scene, he was more successful.
He won membership in the Hasty Pudding Society and the Spee Club,
one of Harvard's elite "final clubs," where bluebloods mingled
and made the connections that kept America's aristocracy running.
A contemporary called him "one of the most popular men in our
class."
In 1937, while JFK was still in his sophomore year, Joseph Kennedy,
Sr. was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain. This prestigious
post opened new social avenues to the Kennedy family, and gave
them front-row seats for the drama of World War II's approach.
In the European theater, Adolf Hitler was preparing to occupy
Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the British government was pursuing
a policy of appeasement, designed to stave off war at all costs.
As ambassador, Joseph Kennedy would staunchly support appeasing
Hitler, and would be fiercely critical of Winston Churchill's
calls for a stronger policy against the Nazi threat. History would
not regard this impulse of Joseph Kennedy's to placate Germany
any more kindly than future events would treat his strident anti-Semitism.
"Never do business with Jews," he once told his sons, this bigotry
ironic for a man who had himself been the victim of so much anti-religious
sentiment, since he was Catholic.
In 1938, though, these concerns lay in the future, and
JFK used his father's position to arrange a grand tour of sorts
that would take him from France to Poland, down through Russia
into the Mediterranean, and finally back up through Berlin and
Paris, before bringing him home. He had made an earlier journey
in the summer of 1937, and had returned very impressed with the
organization and efficiency of the fascist states of Italy and
Germany. This time, he arranged for his tour to count as a Harvard
semester, and sailed for Europe in the winter of 1939, as Nazi
tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Using his father's connections,
JFK was able to stay in ambassadors' homes for the majority of
his trip, and he sent detailed reports to Joe Sr. from every stop.
JFK's most prescient observation came in Poland, where he noted
that "rightly or wrongly the Poles will fight over the
Question of Danzig," referring to the controversy over a Polish
seaport that led to Hitler's invasion of Poland.
The tour lasted seven months, and ended with JFK back
in London for the summer of 1939. He was still there when war
broke out–over Danzig, as he had predicted–in September 1939.
Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France immediately declared
war on Hitler's Reich. (America, as it had at the beginning of World War
I, remained neutral.) Hitler's armies quickly crushed the
Poles, and tensions at the French-German border immediately settled
into a quiet stalemate–the so-called "phony war," which would last
well into 1940.
JFK began his senior year at Harvard in the spring of
1940, with the campus buzzing over the events happening across
the Atlantic. JFK showed more of an interest in politics now,
joining the Crimson editorial board and penning
a thesis on England's foreign policy before the war. The thesis
was critical of Neville Chamberlain's lenient dealings with Hitler,
but echoed Joe Sr.'s attitude in suggesting that the British people
would not have accepted war before 1939, in any event. Entitled
"Appeasement at Munich," it was well-received and helped JFK graduate magna
cum laude, the second-highest possible ranking. More
importantly, Joe Sr. seized upon the thesis as a way of making
his JFK a public figure. Joe Sr. pulled strings in the publishing
industry, hired a newspaper reporter to edit and polish the prose,
and eventually had the thesis–retitled Why England Slept–published
as a book in July of 1940. It was a modest best-seller, and gave
JFK his first taste of celebrity.
With Harvard behind him, JFK briefly attended Stanford
Business School, and, along with most Americans of his age, registered for
the draft, in October 1940. His number was called, but he used his
status as a student to defer entry into the military until summer 1941.
Meanwhile, he left Stanford and took a rather aimless trip through
South America in the spring of 1941. At this time, he was dating
a number of women, a pattern that would continue throughout his
life, even during his marriage. His health problems persisted,
as well. He had stomach trouble, was far too thin, and failed
physicals for both the army and the navy. But again, his father's connections
prevailed, and a friendly doctor gave JFK a clean bill of health.
JFK was sworn in as a naval ensign on September 25, 1941, less
than two months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor would drag America
into World War II.
