12. However, Churchill and Roosevelt were aware of Kennedy’s potential political influence, which is why they continued to transmit their correspondence through the American embassy in London, occasionally spicing them with a few positive phrases about Kennedy. They wished to avoid letting him feel that they were bypassing him because they distrusted him. But, as the summer went on, Kennedy knew that he was being bypassed, and he complained bitterly to Roosevelt. In October he returned to the United States and then resigned.

13. One member of his staff, the diplomat and writer Paul Morand, who had been posted there because of his impeccable knowledge of English and English things, had a low estimate of the British ability to resist and survive. This very cultured and originally very Anglophile personage had gradually become deeply disillusioned in the 1930s by what he saw as a decline, if not a degeneration, of earlier British virtues and qualities. After the French armistice he joined the Pétain regime, ending up as the Vichyite minister to Romania.