ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS - JFK REMEMBERED
The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was marked on Friday 22 November. Flags were lowered and wreaths were laid in places as diverse as Dublin and Dallas. Dubliners and Dallasites have good reason to remember JFK because the former reside in the capital of his ancestors’ homeland while the latter inhabit the state capital where he was slain.
The official ceremony in Britain was solemn, but it was never going to match the reverence of the occasion at the American Embassy in Ireland as a dozen retired Irish army officers who, as teenage cadets, had formed an honour guard at Kennedy’s Arlington graveside, gathered to remember the first Irish-American president. Nor was it going to equal the rhetoric of the speaker in Dealey Plaza since the historian David McCullough read excerpts, after all, from speeches given by JFK.
Or at least that’s what you’d think. And yet JFK’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, spoke – on actual American soil since the of land upon which the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede is situated was bequeathed by the British people in 1965 – pithily about a man who came of age reading the great histories of the day and who himself would go down as one of the greats in the annals of history. There’s only so much that the twenty-three-year-old could include in her two-minutes-and-thirty-seconds-speech, though, so – given it was during the Kennedy Years that the Anglo-American flame arguably burned brightest – context is provided below. There are two quotes worthy of further discussion and the first, given my deference to chronology, concerns his formative years. After thanking those in attendance, Schlossberg said that, "Of all the memorials to my grandfather, which pay tribute to his life and work all around the world, this one is very special to our family because it was during his time in England as a young man that my grandfather decided to study political leadership and pursue a life in public service".
John’s decision to serve the public after returning from the “mother of democracy” would have surprised few; his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. What surprised many, however, was the fact that JPK’s ambassadorship – infamous for its Anglophobic and appeasing strands – moulded JFK into the fervent Anglophile, Cold War warrior that he was. The thesis he penned on the Munich Agreement kick-started his journey from college to Congress, to be sure, since the subsequent book – Why England Slept – became a best-seller and brought the author, not yet twenty-five, minor celebrity status. Yet it also, says Barbara Leaming, author of Jack Kennedy: The Making of a President, helped start JFK’s ‘“twenty-five-year conversation” with British friends’. This leads us nicely into the second quote from Schlossberg worth contextualising:
It was in Britain that he made friends with David Harlech, the founder of the Kennedy Memorial Trust, who worked closely with him during the most difficult times of his presidency.
A leader’s decision-making process can, more often than not, be traced back to their intellectual development. And this is no more the case than with JFK. A voracious reader of the works of Winston Churchill, it only takes a cursory glance to detect the hand of the 39th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the Inaugural Address of the 35th President of the United States. Yet it was a best-selling biography of Lord Melbourne, written by Lord David Cecil, John D. Fair informs readers of Diplomatic History journal (volume 30, number 1, 2006), which was to have an even greater impact on his presidency.
The Anglo-American bond that formed, in part, around Melbourne, with the author’s nephew, David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech), enabled the British Ambassador to provide ‘aid’, if not as an official aide, to the ‘beleaguered’ Commander-in-Chief at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. By providing ‘moral support’, JFK could ‘sustain the courage of his convictions’ and implement a quasi-blockade (and subsequently re-draw the quarantine line of interception) against the wishes of hawks in his Administration.
Ormsby-Gore retired from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office soon after the Labour Party triumphed at the polls in 1964. As disappointing as the ambassadorial-changing-of-the-guard would appear to be in the history of Anglo-American relations, it pales into relative insignificance when compared with the relationship Harold Wilson could have potentially struck-up with JFK: one between youthful leaders who inspired an electorate disillusioned after years of conservative/republican rule.
As a student of history, I ask Schlossberg to think counterfactually and imagine an alternative history and to reflect upon the words George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, uttered after hearing the news of her grandfather’s assassination: “Had this man remained in office until we arrived, there would have been a tremendous breakthrough in the problems that face the world.”
Article by Lee Ruddin, Student at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge. Email Lee at leepruddin@yahoo.co.uk
Image: President John F. Kennedy Meets with the Ambassador of Great Britain, Sir David Ormsby-Gore.
Credit: Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston