An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek Page B

the embassy with the famed aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, “the most attractive couple I’ve ever seen.” He was “going skiing for a week in Switzerland which should be damn good fun.” Apparently, it was: “Plenty of action here, both on and off the skis,” he told Billings in a postcard. “Things have been humming since I got back from skiing,” he next wrote Lem. “Met a gal who used to live with the Duke of Kent and who is as she says ‘a member of the British Royal family by injections.’ She has terrific diamond bracelet that he gave her and a big ruby that the Marajah [sic] of Nepal gave her. I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but will see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life.” And he was still living “like a king” at the embassy, where Bullitt “really fixes me up,” and Offie and he were served by “about 30 lackies.” Bullitt, Jack wrote, was always “trying, unsuccessfully, to pour champagne down my gullett [sic].”
    But however welcoming Bullitt and Offie were, Jack did not like feeling dependent on their hospitality. He must have also sensed some hostility from Offie, who remembered “Jack sitting in my office and listening to telegrams being read or even reading various things which actually were none of his business but since he was who he was we didn’t throw him out.” Jack privately reciprocated the irritation: “Offie has just rung for me,” he wrote Lem, “so I guess I have to get the old paper ready and go in and wipe his arse.”
    For all the fun, Jack had a keen sense of responsibility about using his uncommon opportunity to gather information for a senior thesis. Besides, the highly charged European political atmosphere, which many predicted would soon erupt in another war, fascinated him. However much he kept Lem Billings posted on his social triumphs, his letters to Lem and to his father in London were filled with details about German intentions toward Poland and the likely reactions of Britain, France, Russia, Romania, and Turkey. “The whole thing is damn interesting,” he told Billings. He found himself in the eye of the storm, traveling to Danzig and Warsaw in May, where he spoke to Nazi and Polish officials, and then on to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, Turkey, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, and Athens. He received VIP treatment from the U.S. diplomatic missions everywhere he went, staying at a number of embassies along the way and talking with senior diplomats, including Ambassador Anthony Biddle in Warsaw and Charles E. Bohlen, the second secretary in Moscow.
    Jack spent August traveling among England, France, Germany, and Italy in pursuit of more information for his senior thesis. He and Torbert MacDonald, his Harvard roommate who had come to England for a track meet, met fierce hostility in Munich from storm troopers who spotted the English license plates on their car. Against the advice of the U.S. embassy in Prague, Joe Kennedy arranged a visit by Jack to Czechoslovakia. The diplomat George F. Kennan, who was serving as a secretary of the legation, remembered how “furious” members of the embassy were at the demand. Joe Kennedy’s “son had no official status and was, in our eyes, obviously an upstart and an ignoramus. The idea that there was anything he could learn or report about conditions in Europe which we . . . had not already reported seemed . . . wholly absurd. That busy people should have their time taken up arranging his tour struck us as outrageous.” Jack saw matters differently, believing a firsthand look at Prague, now under Nazi control, would be invaluable, and his sense of entitlement left him indifferent to the complaints of the embassy.
    In keeping with the peculiar way in which he moved between the serious and the frivolous at this time of his life, Jack spent part of August on the French Riviera, where his family had again rented a villa for the summer at