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This folder consists of materials maintained by President John F. Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, prior to and during his presidency. Materials include reviews and correspondence for the book," Why England Slept," by John F. Kennedy.
America was still at peace when John F. Kennedy was a senior at Harvard writing WHY ENGLAND SLEPT. Within its pages, JFK outlined the varying factors that led to England's ill-preparedness in the years that led up to the Second World War.
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After serving in the military, the future 35th president worked as a foreign correspondent.
It was 1945, and Berlin lay in ruins. The bombed-out houses and destroyed streets left a deep impression on a 28-year-old reporter who had come to Germany on assignment with a Hearst newspaper. He had been tasked with covering the Potsdam Conference, in which the “Big Three”—the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States—would determine the final fate of Germany and how Europe would begin to recover from World War II.
The reporter attended to his assignment. But when he wasn’t at the conference, he walked around the former Nazi capital, recording his impressions in his diary. “The devastation is complete,” he wrote. “There is not a single building which is not gutted. On some of the streets the stench—sweet and sickish from dead bodies—is overwhelming. The people all have completely colorless faces…Where they are going, no one seems to know. I wonder if they do.”
John F. Kennedy
No one knew it, but this cub reporter would one day be in a position to put his own mark on global affairs. He was John F. Kennedy, and during the summer of 1945, he was a journalist.
As a foreign correspondent for the Hearst Newspapers, JFK attended the first meeting of the United Nations, the Potsdam Conference and other noteworthy moments that marked the end of World War II. The future president's time as a reporter was brief, but his experiences in journalism and observation of world leaders like Winston Churchill would shape his views of politics and foreign policy for the rest of his life.
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The son of the recently resigned American Ambassador to England seeks to show that the responsibility for the policies which have led Britain to its present parlous state -- appeasement, pacifism, undue optimism and general muddleheadedness -- rests on the British people as a whole, not on any one class or group.
Oct 28, 2013 · They set out to write the story of Kennedy’s early years up to his becoming Senator in 1953. They became convinced that the standard biographies of Kennedy slighted or distorted these years, but they were stymied by the refusal of the Kennedy Library to release relevant documents.
Why England Slept front cover. Logevall believed that Kennedy's Senior thesis at Harvard, which was later titled Why England Slept, demonstrated his awareness that carefully studied, yet timely actions were the key to making effective foreign policy decisions, and that cool objectivity and pragmatism should be the guiding rule. As Logevall ...
Kennedy's first literary effort, based on his 1940 Harvard thesis, Appeasement at Munich (The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy from a Disarmament to a Rearmament Policy). Octavo (206 x 140mm). (Pages lightly toned at fore edge.)
