Why England Slept US$40,000 in royalties for Kennedy. Those from the British sales were donated to Plymouth, England, recently bombed by the Luftwaffe, while Kennedy bought a Buick convertible with his income from the book's North-American sales. Joseph Kennedy had initially approached Harold Laski to write the book's foreword, but Laski declined, feeling that it was "the book of an immature mind; that if it hadn't been written by the son of a very rich man, he wouldn't have found a publisher." Why England Slept Why England Slept is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy while in his
Fascism in Asia the late 1930s. Wang Jingwei visited Germany in 1936, and changed his views on fascism, speaking positively about European fascist states, saying, "Several advanced countries have already expanded their national vitality and augmented their people's strength, and are no longer afraid of foreign aggression." Publicist T'iang Leang-Li of the People's Tribune newspaper associated with the "Kai-tsu p'ai" promoted the good nature of fascism in Europe while attempting to distance "Kai-tsu p'ai" from the overtly negative aspects of fascism and wrote in 1937: "Whatever we may think about fascist and Nazi methods and policies, we must recognize the fact that their