(See Cover)
On a clear cool afternoon, Tuesday, August 4, 1914, a grave, spare, rather homely North Carolinian entered the courtyard before the massive grey British Foreign Office on Downing Street. He turned to the right, passed the guards, walked down a broad ornate corridor, passed through a large oak door into a spacious room. Its windows looked out on the tranquil lake and lawn and trees of St. James's Park. The clocks of London struck three.
Walter Hines Page, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, turned unsmiling to a tall, worn, pale man who leaned against the mantlepiece, Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary. They sat down, like old friends, and Grey, grim chin propped on folded knuckles, talked:
". . . It is upon . . . solemn compacts . . . that civilization rests. England would be forever contemptible if it should sit by. ... I have therefore asked you to come to tell you that this morning we sent an ultimatum to Germany. . . . There will be war."
That week there were three days when Ambassador Page had no time to take a bath.
On August 21, 1939, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, returned by plane to London, fresh from a month's vacation with his wife and nine children spent at an estate famous for its roses, Domain de Ranguin, five miles from Cannes, on the French Riviera. In the two weeks that followed, the red-faced, red-haired Boston Irishman went many times in the footsteps if not in the mood of Walter Page to the red-draped oak-and-leather office in Downing Street. There he saw a man like him only in that both are deeply religious, an extremely tall, gaunt, bony-faced man, with a sensitive mouth and a talent for gentleness, the Rt. Hon. Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax. The end came on Sunday morning, September 3 when Kennedy sent a triple priority cable to Secretary Hull reporting that the British had moved up their ultimatum deadline to Hitler one hour. There would be war at n a.m.
The St. James's Beat. An Ambassador is a glorified reporter, a legman in a tailcoat. His main job is to interview people, get news, report accurately. To do this he must 1) have the confidence of the people he represents, 2) win the confidence of the people he is assigned to.
Walter Hines Page was an Anglophile, literary, philosophic. No Anglophile is grinning, cussing Joe Kennedy, known and loved by millions of English-speaking men.
From one point of view, Joe Kennedy is a common denominator of the U. S. businessman — "safe," "middle-of-the-road," a horse-trader at heart, with one sharp eye on the market and one fond eye on his children. But he is a super common denominator, uncommonly commonsensible, stiletto-shrewd, practical as only a former president of a small bank can be. As Ambassador Kennedy his attitude is the same as that of Businessman Kennedy: Where do we get off?