Describing the “debonair and brilliant and brave” English noble Raymond Asquith, who died in World War I, Buchan wrote a passage John F. Kennedy recited from memory for the rest of his life, perhaps because it reminded him of himself on the eve of World War II: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him. . . . He went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” One of Kennedy’s best British friends, David Ormsby-Gore, who served as ambassador to the United States during Kennedy’s presidential years, theorized, “Whether Jack realized it or not,
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