The World Wide Web is a wonderful invention. Recently an old school friend of mine, who I haven’t seen since we were both sixteen, got in touch with me to say that my website seemed to be down; I was in the process of redesigning it. We had both been incarcerated in a small boarding house attached to a grammar school in a Derbyshire market town which abutted the Chatsworth Estate, home of the Dukes and duchesses of Devonshire. One of my clearest memories as a young pupil in 1963, is standing with the others and watching the presidential helicopter carry President Kennedy over to Chatsworth to visit the then Duke and Duchess and the grave of his sister Kathleen who was buried in Edensor on the Chatsworth Estate, having been married to the Duke’s elder brother, the late Marquess of Hartington. The helicopter and its escort flew low over the dales and disappeared, the whole area was in a ferment of excitement that the most powerful and, outside the US, the most popular man on earth, was visiting a remote English county. Five months later a group of us gathered round the black and white television in the building over which the presidential helicopter had flown, to watch the seemingly endless replays of the footage from Dallas. We watched hope and optimism being snuffed out and even we, youthful and inexperienced as we were, grasped that a global tragedy was unfolding.

Some of these events are covered, from a very different perspective, in the recently published correspondence of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the writer and war hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor under the title In Tearing Haste. I was given the book by a friend for my sixtieth birthday and found it compulsive reading. It covers from the 1950’s up to the present. The strong friendship that developed between President Kennedy and the then Duchess unfolds through the letters with the characteristic warmth and sharp insight into human character that both correspondents display. The letters are not just the ramblings of the upper classes bemoaning a lost world. Fermor is a phenomenal correspondent, and one of the great English prose writers of the twentieth century; Debo, as the Duchess is known in the correspondence, is sharp, funny and displays, as she should, as one of the Mitford sisters, a shrewd understanding of the people around her. She is no snob and has little time for snobbishness in others. Her politics and those of President Kennedy I suspect differed widely, but she found him fascinating, charming and intelligent and was certainly aware at an early stage of his great weakness, which the rest of us had only heard rumours about. The letters cover in detail the inauguration up to the state funeral; and finish with a very funny account of the trip home with various VIP’s including the then Prime Minister.

Once again that huge surge of hope and optimism has arisen with the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the U.S. Like Kennedy he is attractive, intelligent and charismatic. He also shares the same gift of powerful, inclusive oratory. The expectations of what he can achieve are too high and the dangers surrounding him are too great. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the White House. The U.S. was not ruled from Rome as many feared. Obama is the first African-American president, and has already demonstrated that he wants an all-inclusive administration, which has largely been welcomed by the world. Russia has responded to his election pretty much as Khrushchev heading the then U.S.S.R, did with the election of Kennedy, a display of military muscle to test the international waters. Some things never change, only the names.

We all hope his presidency goes well and he is given the time and support to sort out the terrible global problems we all face, and I have another less important wish, that somehow the Dowager Duchess and President-Elect Obama meet. I would love to read her impressions of him, particularly in letters to Patrick Leigh Fermor; I think they would like each other.