The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Moffat cabled Kennedy to explain that further cuts had been made in his speech, not because anyone in the department disagreed with what he had to say, but because the American press was hammering the State Department to respond “to the German rape of Austria” and any utterance by an American official would “be read as having been written with the Austrian situation in view.” Hull emphasized the same point in a cable sent the same day. Although neither he nor the president found fault with Kennedy’s address, they were “inclined to think that the tone of the speech is a little more rigid, and hence subject to possible misinterpretation, than would appear advisable at this precise moment.” To make sure the international community understood that the American government was going to pursue a policy that avoided “the extremes of isolationism and internationalism,” Hull told Kennedy that he had decided to give his own speech the day before Kennedy’s was scheduled.23

  What Hull was saying—and Kennedy understood it at once—was that he didn’t trust his new ambassador to speak for the administration, and to prevent him from doing so, he had decided not only to censor his inaugural address, but to preempt it with one of his own. Kennedy should have backed off at this point, but he did not. The stakes were too high.

  On Tuesday, March 15, Kennedy was visited at the embassy by Lord Astor, who told him “that some of the leading men here believe that immediate war is a greater danger than they like to let the public know.” The antiappeasement faction in Parliament, led by Winston Churchill, was calling for a tougher stance against Germany, and if Churchill’s group carried the debate, it would embarrass Chamberlain, anger Hitler, and push Europe closer to war.24

  Kennedy placed a transatlantic call to the State Department to report what Astor had told him. It was nine thirty in the morning Washington time. He was in a panic now that Hull, in his forthcoming speech, would say something that would give the Churchill faction an edge in the parliamentary debate on the British response to Hitler’s seizure of Austria.

  Mr. Moffat: The Secretary is here and you are talking to him on the receiver but he has a bad throat and I am his voice answering back to you. . . .

  Ambassador: Will you connect me up with the President after I finish talking with you? . . . I am very much concerned about the idea of the Secretary’s making the speech outlined in the wire last night. The situation is very, very acute here. . . . They don’t know what they are going to do and anything we say now would only complicate the situation. . . .

  Moffat: The Secretary has asked whether you have seen his speech.

  Ambassador: No, I have not. . . .

  At this point, Secretary Hull, bad throat and all, felt compelled to get on the phone and explain that his speech contained nothing new but simply summed up the general principles under which the United States believed world order could be maintained.

  Ambassador: A speech of the Secretary’s is not going to help at all. Why say anything when there is nothing you can say or do which will help the situation? Why not keep quiet?

  Kennedy refused to let up. He continued to argue against Hull’s giving his speech. Moffat mercifully brought the conversation to an end by expressing the secretary’s appreciation for Kennedy’s call and “point of view” and announcing that he had just received a note that the president was “with his dentist” and unable to talk to the ambassador.25

  After hanging up, Hull and Moffat met with the department’s senior advisers, including Sumner Welles. “A few of them,” Moffat noted in his diary, “were quite brutal in their comment that Kennedy wanted the Secretary’s speech canceled in order that his own which was more isolationist in trend would receive a better play. Had he offered to cancel the Pilgrims Society speech the situation might be different but in the circumstances the consensus of opinion was against any change of plans.”26

  Kennedy had indeed feared Hull’s speech would undercut his own, but that was not his only concern. He feared that the secretary of state was going to offer some moralistic/legalistic condemnation of Hitler’s move into Austria, that this would be interpreted as a sign that the United States would stand behind a tough British response to the Anschluss, and that such a “sign” would provide the Churchill saber rattlers with a boost in the House of Commons. Two weeks into his tenure, Ambassador Kennedy was already trying to usurp the authority of the secretary of state and interfere in British politics. And two weeks into his tenure, he had already been slapped down by Cordell Hull for doing so.

  —

  On March 18, 1938, Kennedy was formally welcomed by the Pilgrims Society at a dinner at Claridge’s. The evening opened with a message from King George VI read by his youngest brother, the Duke of Kent, followed by introductions from the Earl of Derby, the society’s president, and Lord Halifax. The new ambassador then took the podium, his posture perfect, his smile dazzling, his formal dinner dress perfectly tailored. He was going to be “frank” with his hosts, he warned them. Instead of soothing them with the “usual diplomatic niceties,” he would “speak plainly” about “certain factors in American life which have a greater influence than some of you may realize on my countrymen’s attitudes toward the outside world.” Americans were “appalled by the prospect of war” and desired peace for themselves and for the peoples of the world, but “the great majority” were opposed to entering into any sort of “entangling alliances.” Kennedy did not rule out the possibility that “circumstances, short of actual invasion,” might arise in the future and compel Americans to “fight.” But he wanted it fully understood that the assumption, widely held in both nations, “that the United States could never remain neutral in the event a general war should break out” was both dangerous and wrong.

  The speech was carefully balanced between what were at the time the two shaky pillars of American foreign policy: diplomatic unilateralism and economic cooperation. After asserting that the United States was not interested in entering into diplomatic alliances, Kennedy insisted that it “would be glad to join and encourage any nation or group of nations in a peace program based on economic recovery, limitation of armaments and a revival of the sanctity of international commitments. . . . We regard the economic rapprochement of the nations as imperative. Economic appeasement . . . means a higher standard of living for the workers of the world and a consequent reduction in those internal pressures which all too frequently lead to war.”27

  There was nothing particularly inflammatory about Kennedy’s speech—anything that might have been had been carefully deleted by the State Department editors. In fact, as the German ambassador to the United States reported in his dispatch to the German Foreign Ministry, Kennedy’s address differed from Hull’s, given the day before, “only in form. While Secretary Hull treats the problem with his usual academic and monotonous phraseology, Ambassador Kennedy does not shrink from employing an unmistakable and resolute tone. Mr. Kennedy really says nothing new. He merely says what he has to say more clearly than it has hitherto been expressed by the President or Mr. Hull.”28

  Strangely enough for one who identified himself and would be identified as an isolationist, Kennedy the businessman could not help but think globally. The continuing and, after mid-1937, deepening depression in the United States was going to have a disastrous effect on stability in Europe. “Our continual tail-spin,” he wrote Tommy Corcoran from London, “is making this problem here and all through Europe more difficult, because the basis of the correction of conditions here is not political but economic.” There could be no peace or political stability in the world without economic security. The most effective role the United States could play in reducing tensions and preventing wars was to promote economic recovery at home, which would have positive domino-like effects abroad.29

  The farther he got from Washington, the more disturbed he was that the president did not understand how critical it was—for European peace—to get the American economy going again. To stimulate recovery
, the president had to convince American businessmen that the administration was on their side, as Kennedy had at the SEC and the Maritime Commission. Unfortunately, instead of cozying up to the nation’s businessmen and assuring them it was safe to invest again, the president was continuing, Kennedy feared, to alienate them with pseudopopulist rhetoric. In a transatlantic phone call to Cordell Hull, Kennedy reported that at a recent dinner he had hosted, every one of the “eighteen . . . big bankers here in London” had expressed discomfort with the president’s antibusiness outbursts at a speech in Gainesville, Georgia. A former chancellor of the Exchequer had gone so far as to tell Kennedy that he blamed Roosevelt’s failure to promote capital investment in American industry for the “dismal economic condition of England.” “Who was responsible for that Gainesville speech? Whoever was ought to be horsewhipped,” Kennedy volunteered to Hull.30

  His fear that economic distress could not help but foment political unrest in Europe was not an abstract possibility, but a recurring nightmare. Dutifully responding to a letter from Honey Fitz about Boston politics in early April, Kennedy remarked on the sorry state of the American economy. “Sometimes I wonder if I will have money enough to last out a decent term in London. I hate to think how much money I would give up rather than sacrifice Joe and Jack in a war, and there is no danger of that in America, whereas there is a real danger of it for boys of their age over here.”31

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  In mid-March, Rose arrived in London with Kick and the four youngest children. The new Kennedy residence, Rose complained gently to the press, was large for any ordinary family, but a bit small for hers. “The house will be large enough for these five . . . but no place will be large enough in the summer when all the rest come with their friends from Harvard and Princeton.” She brought with her the younger children’s governess, Elizabeth Dunn; Luella Hennessey, the nurse who had cared for Patricia and Bobby when they got sick at camp; and the family cook. There were already at the residence handfuls of English butlers, chauffeurs, maids, and secretaries.32

  On April 27, Rosemary and Eunice, accompanied by Eddie and Mary Moore, landed at Plymouth. Eunice, Patricia, and Jean were enrolled at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton; Rosemary in a Montessori-oriented school; Bobby and Teddy at the nearby Gibbs Preparatory School. The boys had the hardest time adjusting. David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech, spent a good deal of time as a teenager with the Kennedys in London. Bobby, he recalled, “rather disliked the school he was sent to. . . . He thought it was rather ridiculous . . . that the uniform they had to wear was ridiculous. . . . He was always very sensitive about his appearance. . . . They were made to wear these red magenta hats which were made like a sort of tweed cap which was unique for any school, even in England. I think this acutely embarrassed him and I don’t think he ever settled down.”33

  Teddy had his own difficulties. He was younger and smaller than his schoolmates and didn’t make friends easily. “Bobby tried to keep me company,” he recalled, “but he’d joined a circle of friends his age.” For the first time in years, Kennedy was living in the same house as his children, and when he noticed his youngest son’s discomfort, he tried to ease it. “Dad spent as much time with me as he could. . . . He came to my cricket games at school. He invited me with him on morning horseback rides. . . . In the evenings, before leaving the house with Mother for a dinner or the theater, he would come into my bedroom and read to me, sometimes for forty-five minutes or an hour.”34

  On May 11, Rosemary and Kick were presented at court. The preparations—the selection of the dresses, the fittings, the search for the perfect tiara for Rose, the practice walks and curtsies—had taken days. The ceremony itself took but a few minutes and went off without a hitch. Rose had worried that Rosemary, now twenty years of age, might not be up to the event, which was choreographed as carefully as a ballet, but she did beautifully.

  There had been some talk—but not much—of Kick’s attending college in England, but she decided not to. It was her first London “season” and she expected to take it all in, unencumbered by schoolwork. Almost on arrival she had become the darling of the London social set, her every evening and weekend taken up with dinner dances, excursions to grand country estates, racing and regattas and Scottish hunting parties.

  The three Kennedys, sometimes separately but often together—the ambassador reluctantly, Rose and Kick more enthusiastically—spent much of that spring of 1938 attending garden parties, rowing regattas, formal balls, afternoon teas, dinner dances, racing at Epsom Downs and the Royal Ascot, tennis matches at Wimbledon. They were invited to a weekend with the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, an evening court at Buckingham Palace, and a ball given by Lady Astor for the king and queen.

  Rose had been waiting all her life for this. To the press and her dinner companions, she appeared totally at ease and fully in control. In private, however, she worried a great deal about fitting in. She was horrified, as she confided to her diary, to discover that on Sunday lunch at Windsor Castle, she was the only one dressed in tweeds; the others wore afternoon dresses. She was so confused about when and where she should wear a tiara that she contacted officials at Buckingham Palace, who told her that it should be worn at any dinner at which a member of the royal family was present. She also asked in writing if she should provide “finger bowls at dinners at which Royalty are present” and was informed that there was no formal rule against them.35

  —

  With the arrival in London of all the Kennedys save the two older boys, who were still in school, the press on both sides of the Atlantic stepped up its parade of news items, photographs, and adoring profiles. Not a day, it seemed, had passed that spring of 1938 without a story or two about a Kennedy or two: about Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s decision not to dress in drag in a Harvard satirical review; Jack’s recovery from illness so that he could swim for the Harvard varsity; Kick’s possible engagements; Rosemary’s hospitalization for an unnamed ailment; Eunice’s graduation from the Sacred Heart Convent in Noroton; Patricia’s and Jean’s enrollment at the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton; Bobby’s interview, on departing New York, with Mary Pickford, who was preparing for her next role as a reporter; Teddy’s having “gone missing” for a moment upon the family’s arrival at Plymouth; Rose’s being selected with Ginger Rogers, Dolores del Rio, and Kitty Carlisle as one of the eleven “best dressed” women in the United States; and Elsa Maxwell’s inclusion of Ambassador Kennedy as one of the six most “chic” males on the planet, with Crown Prince Umberto and Count Ciano of Italy, Fred Astaire, Joe DiMaggio, and William Rhinelander Stewart, the debonair New York socialite.36

  It got to the point where even Honey Fitz began to joke about the coverage. Kennedy, who had little sense of humor when it came to his father-in-law, responded that he had had nothing to do with the avalanche of publicity. “We are not sending any pictures to any paper. . . . If you have an attractive daughter and attractive grandchildren, you can’t get mad if their pictures appear in the papers.”37

  Kennedy did not shy away from the attention. On the contrary, he did everything he could to remind the folks back home that he was still serving his country. He employed one of the largest and most accomplished press, public relations, and speechwriting offices in the government, headed by Eddie Moore and James Seymour, whom Kennedy had lured away from Harvard a decade before to join his staff in Hollywood. Kennedy had also taken with him to London Harvey Klemmer, a speechwriter who had worked with him at the Maritime Commission and remained on its payroll; Arthur Houghton, whom he had borrowed from Will Hays’s office in Hollywood; and an RKO publicist in London named Jack Kennedy, who was referred to as “London Jack” Kennedy.

  Kennedy adjusted easily to the social demands of his new life. He was the perfect dinner companion, the consummate weekend guest, a magnificent host at the dinners he gave at the residence. Nobody in London had as star-studded an invitation list, with lords and ladies,
American corporate and government leaders, and Hollywood royalty seated next to one another. Formal dinners, with guests in tuxedos and gowns greeted and served by liveried servants, were held for magazine publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a former actress and now a celebrated writer; for Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck and his wife, Virginia Fox Zanuck; for actress Rosalind Russell; and for Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes when he toured Europe with his new wife, Jane. Although Ickes had nothing good to say of Kennedy in Washington, he was happy to be entertained by him in London. After dinner, the Kennedys veered sharply from London social customs and invited their guests, men and women alike, to watch the latest Hollywood films in the drawing room. At the May 17 dinner for Foreign Secretary Halifax and Lady Halifax, which Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh attended, Kennedy screened Test Pilot with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable. On May 30, he screened The Adventures of Robin Hood but arranged for the prime minister, one of the guests for the evening, to “stay out of the drawing room in order to talk with Arthur Sulzberger [of the New York Times], Harry Luce and one or two others.” Luce, who did not much enjoy socializing, noted appreciatively that compared with other formal dinners, there was “not much conversation” at a Kennedy-hosted affair. “Old Joe wasn’t much for that sort. We had a movie after dinner. That eliminated the necessity for postprandial conversation.”38

  Kennedy disliked the constant socializing he had to endure as American ambassador—he had never much enjoyed having to make idle chitchat with people he did not know or care about—but there were distinct advantages to being in London for the season. Kennedy had always been a Toscanini fan and was now able not only to attend each of the maestro’s spring concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but also to sit in on the ten A.M. rehearsals as well. Joseph P. Kennedy was not a man given to hero worship, except perhaps for Arturo Toscanini. Among the most cherished possessions at Hyannis Port was a framed Toscanini baton.39