Jack Kennedy: The making of a president

Although John F Kennedy is perhaps the best-known American president of the 20th century, the many previous biographies ignore the importance of his formative years, just before WWII, when his friends were the heirs to some of the most important British aristocratic families. 'There was a time' writes Barbara Leaming, 'when the British PM was not the American president's poodle; when they had real influence on American policy'. In the case of John F Kennedy, the most charismatic of American presidents in the second half of the twentieth century, that influence stemmed from his friendship with, among others, the scions of the Dukes of Devonshire and a future British ambassador to Washington, David Ormesby-Gore (Lord Harlech). Whereas some see JFK as noble idealist, others as self-serving deceiver, to Leaming he is neither: 'Time and time again,' she writes, 'I have been astonished to discover a man in crisis, a leader desperately and profoundly at odds with himself.' She sees the formative years starting with his immersion in his teens in British politics and the beliefs of Churchill and Stanley Baldwin; then more practically on the eve of the Munich crisis in 1938 in London where his father had just become US ambassador. Leaming spotlights the friendship between the Kennedy and Cavendish families made formal when Billy, heir to the Devonshire dukedom, married Kennedy's sister 'Kick', the member of the family to whom he was closest. But Billy did not survive the war and Kick died in a plane crash. Twelve years later, Kennedy, now the 35th US president, found himself dealing with another friend from those formative years, the British PM, Harold Macmillan, whose wife was a Cavendish.