Why England Slept "The New York Times," to assist in redrafting the thesis, which had originally been titled "Appeasement At Munich". The writer Garry Wills claims that this assistance amounted to rewriting and retitling the manuscript, as well as finding an agent for its publication. As ambassador to Britain, Kennedy, Sr. supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement during the late 1930s. John F. Kennedy lived with his father in Britain at that time and as such witnessed the Luftwaffe's bombings of Britain first-hand. After publication in 1940, the book sold 80,000 copies in the United Kingdom and the United States, collecting
Why England Slept could well have been more disastrous in the long run, rather than castigating the appeasement policy which the British government pursued at the time. The book was originally intended to be no more than a college thesis. It was rated "magna cum laude" by Professor Henry A. Yeomans and "cum laude plus" by Professor Carl J. Friedrich. However, Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., keen to elevate his son's reputation, encouraged Kennedy to convert the thesis into book form and publish it. He then enlisted Henry Luce to write the foreword, and his friend Arthur Krock, former bureau chief of