In the grey spring of 1940, when most of Europe had fallen to Hitler's legions, Arthur Krock, then the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, read and was deeply impressed by the college thesis of a 23-year-old Harvard senior. Krock urged that the paper be published in book form—and with the title Why England Slept, it sold some 40,000 copies on both sides of the Atlantic. As a study of the mistakes that took Britain into war, and as a warning to the U.S. against such errors, Why England Slept was a considerable achievement. Reprinted this week, it points to principles of national policy even more meaningful in 1961 than in 1940. The burden of implementing those principles now weighs heavily on the book's author—U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Unbelieving Boxer. In Why England Slept, it is Kennedy's argument that a democracy challenged by an aggressive dictatorship must prepare for war as if it really means to fight. In a still pertinent analogy Kennedy wrote: "A boxer cannot work himself into proper psychological and physical condition for a fight that he seriously believes will never come off." Kennedy unemotionally traced the misconceptions and the soporifics that lulled England during the prewar years. There was too much reliance upon the moribund League of Nations and the attenuated Disarmament Conference; too little attention was paid to the avowed long-range aims of the fascist governments.
"Democracy is the superior form of government," Kennedy wrote, "because it is based on a respect for man as a reasonable being. For the long run, then, democracy is superior. But for the short run, democracy has great weaknesses. When it competes with a system of government which cares nothing for permanency, a system built primarily for war, democracy, which is built primarily for peace, is at a disadvantage. And democracy must recognize its weaknesses; it must learn to safeguard its institutions if it hopes to survive."
In assessing Britain's failure to prepare for war with Germany, Kennedy blamed such national leaders as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. But the British public, said Kennedy, was equally at fault: "I believe, as I have stated frequently, that leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the failure of a nation as a whole ... In 1930 and 1931 we blamed all the evils that this country was then suffering, from the drought to the World Depression, on Herbert Hoover. If we had continued to hold those beliefs, we would never have learned anything from that experience. We would have dismissed it as being a question of leadership, and would have done nothing to prevent such an experience from happening again . . . Democracy and capitalism are institutions which are geared for a world at peace. It is our problem to find a method of protecting them in a world at war."