"Take It From Me"

The new U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, able Joseph Patrick Kennedy, stepped off the Manhattan onto an admiral's barge at Plymouth in the middle of the night last week, reached London before dawn, alighted from his sleeping car at 7:15 a. m. to be greeted by top-hatted officials.

At the new U. S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the Ambassador cocked his feet up on his highly-polished desk, to the satisfaction of Britons who always thought the "English gentleman" manners of his predecessor, the late Robert Worth Bingham, somewhat pretentious. Joe Kennedy proceeded to go for a ride on a "rented horse," played golf (see p. 28), shook hands with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

"You can take it from me that I have no precise instructions from the President," he confided. "You can't expect me to develop into a statesman overnight. . . . By 1940 I believe there will be regular passenger and freight airlines across the Atlantic, and I would be willing to be the first passenger myself. . . . Right now the average American isn't as interested in foreign affairs as he is in how he's going to eat and whether his insurance is good. Some, maybe, even are more interested in how Casey Stengel's Boston Bees are going to do next season." This week the Ambassador presents his credentials to George VI at Buckingham Palace.

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