The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

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  In London, as elsewhere, Kennedy awoke before seven A.M. After breakfast, he went for a horseback ride, then showered, dressed in his ambassadorial uniform—striped pants, short black jacket, white shirt, stiff collar, and dark necktie—and walked or was driven to the embassy, arriving by 8:45 at the latest. Every day brought another contingent of American journalists and publishers, Broadway and Hollywood big shots, businessmen and bankers, each of whom expected a private interview. The phone began ringing the moment he arrived at his office—and kept ringing all day long—interrupting the carefully laid-out schedules that Eddie Moore had prepared. “It is almost impossible to do any desk work when he is here,” Moore confessed to Paul Murphy in New York, “for the telephone is popping from morning until night, and what with it and the newspaper men and visitors in addition, it leaves very little time for anything else.”40

  His hard work won the admiration of embassy personnel, who had not expected their new ambassador to be this dedicated to his new job. “Kennedy has started off very well, I think he will do a first class job,” Alan Steyne, a minor official at the embassy, wrote his uncle, Boston department store owner Louis Kirstein, on April 16, 1938. “He arrived with quite a few preconceived notions and prejudices but he is very keen and is slowly dropping those which do not jibe with the facts here. . . . The pressure on his time is very great and the number of people who want to meet him makes Bingham [his predecessor] look as if he had the Measles. Kennedy’s seen about more in one month than Bingham was in a year. . . . He’s far more outspoken than the run of the mill Ambassador. . . . He is not easy to work for in that he is very nervous and suffers from stomach ulcers which doesn’t improve his disposition the days when they bother him. However, he has a very keen, quick intellect and is open to conviction if you can marshal a good argument. His informality is delightful and his language longshoremanesque.”41

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  The week after the dueling speeches brouhaha with Cordell Hull, Kennedy, recognizing that he would have to work with the man for the rest of his tenure in London, wrote to flatter him by reporting how much the queen had enjoyed his speech, which “came through nicely [over the radio] and, of course, made a terrific impression here.” The war scare that had so unsettled him had passed. “Popular opinion has changed from being all upset regarding war as a real possibility to a much more complacent attitude and more inclined to follow Chamberlain’s original thesis—to try every possible means of averting a war. . . . I imagine the England-Italy situations will be worked out within the next few weeks . . . and then Chamberlain is going definitely to work to try to fix up something with Hitler.” The preliminaries cleared away, he got to the point of his dispatch: “From what I have seen of the job here and assuming nothing happens of world import, I can deliver your messages, but I probably can do nothing very constructive. I can talk Chamberlain’s language and Halifax’s language and if there were anything vital to do would have a reasonable chance of getting it done, but, as matters stand today, the only possible help I can give you is to express my opinion as to events in Europe. The annoying part of this is that, while I am busy from 9:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night, I don’t feel I am doing you very much good and if anything occurs to you, outside of the ordinary instructions, where I can be of any real assistance, please let me know. . . . I hope you get some good out of my services; I am sure I will have a fine time.”42

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  On March 24, Joseph Kennedy joined several other ambassadors in the Peers’ Gallery of the House of Commons to listen to a major address by Prime Minister Chamberlain, who declared that Great Britain would not offer Czechoslovakia any “prior pledge” of assistance in case of a German invasion, nor would it agree in advance to join France should it decide to come to Czechoslovakia’s rescue. Having made these statements, Chamberlain came close to emptying them of meaning by declaring that “if war broke out . . . the inexorable pressure of facts might well prove more powerful than formal pronouncements” and that there was every probability that countries such as Great Britain and France, not party to the “original dispute would almost immediately become involved.” As the New York Times summarized the speech the morning after, “Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain today kept Germany and the rest of the world guessing as to whether Britain would fight in case of a German onslaught upon Czechoslovakia.”43

  Kennedy thought the speech nothing less than “a masterpiece. I sat spellbound and heard it all. It impressed me as a combination of high morals and politics such as I had never witnessed. . . . As I size it up, there will be no war if Chamberlain stays in power with strong public backing, which he seems to be acquiring day by day. A deal will be made with Italy (it may be practically complete by now), . . . Germany will get whatever it wants in Czechoslovakia without sending a single soldier across the border. The Czechs will go, hat in hand, to Berlin and ask the Fuhrer what he wants done, and it will be done. . . . The Germano-Czech situation will solve itself without interference.”44

  Kennedy’s observations were made in one of the long “political letters” he had begun writing to influential friends in the press and in government. Though the letters were marked “Private and Confidential,” Kennedy sent them to every major conservative columnist, senator, and Washington insider, clearly not shy about advertising his admiration and support for Chamberlain, Halifax, and their appeasement policy. Bob Allen, Drew Pearson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” writing partner, warned Kennedy to tread lightly. “I wouldn’t think of advising you,” he wrote him from Washington, “but just as a friend, Joe, I’d keep my fingers crossed on Chamberlain and his Tory crew. You are going to see important changes in the British government in the not very distant future. . . . From the inside information we get here, the Chamberlain government is about as competent as Hoover’s and is rapidly becoming as unpopular.” Allen was wrong about Chamberlain, who would continue in office for another two years, but he was correct about the dangers of Kennedy remaining so close to him.45

  On April 6, at the start of his second month in London, Kennedy met with Lord Halifax to discuss, among other things, the British negotiations with the Italian government, “with a view to the settlement of all matters outstanding between them.” The most controversial part of the agreement under discussion was that in return for concessions from the Italians in a number of areas and professions of future friendship, the British were prepared to end any and all opposition to the Italian annexation of Ethiopia. Before proceeding, Halifax wanted Roosevelt to publicly signal that he approved or would not actively oppose British recognition of the Italian conquest. Kennedy told Halifax “that he would willingly mention the point to the President and thought it was the kind of thing he might well do.”46

  He cabled Hull that evening with details of his conversation with the foreign secretary on the “Italian situation.” He then ventured his “own opinion . . . that ninety per cent of the people in Great Britain will hail [the Italian accord] with great acclaim and there is no question about its being the beginning of a step in the right direction.” There was no direct response from the secretary of state.47

  A week later, the negotiations with the Italians that much closer to conclusion, Halifax forwarded through Kennedy a “Personal and Confidential” letter for Hull and Under Secretary Welles, outlining the proposed terms of the Italian agreement and asking again that Roosevelt “give some public indication of his approval.” Sumner Welles was delegated to draft Roosevelt’s answer and did so in diplomatic doublespeak that withheld comment on the substance of the agreement but praised the fact that it had resulted from “peaceful negotiations.”48

  Because the statement failed to condemn or criticize Mussolini, it was greeted enthusiastically by Americans who favored further negotiation with the dictators and condemned by those who considered accommodation with aggression a sign of moral and diplomatic weakness. Welles took the brunt of the criticis
m, but Kennedy was singled out as having been an important influence on the president. The cruelest rebuke came from Kennedy’s friends Drew Pearson and Bob Allen, who intimated that Kennedy had supported the British cave-in on Ethiopia because he had been brainwashed by Lord and Lady Astor and the Tory appeasers who were headquartered at Cliveden, the Astors’ country estate. “Latest American to be wooed by the Cliveden group is genial Joe Kennedy,” Pearson and Allen reported in their April 22, 1938, column. “Reports are that Joe has been taken in just a bit by the Cliveden charm, not on the Nazi-Fascist theories, but on the idea of cooperating with the Tories of Great Britain. Joe, who has a lot of Irish-American common-sense, will probably snap out of it. But the tragedy of the American diplomatic service for years has been its unabashed obeisance before the throne of British foreign policy.”49

  Kennedy was furious with the column, if only because it portrayed him as the dupe of Tory aristocrats. “I know you and Bob don’t want to hurt me unless you have definite reasons,” he wrote Drew Pearson. “Your story on the Cliveden set is complete bunk. There is not one single word of truth to it and it has done me great harm. You know I would not make this firm denial unless it was so. It is unfortunate when I am working as hard as I can to keep this situation straight that this kind of story should be published. The repercussions over here have been extremely bad. I don’t know what you can do about it, but thought I should tell you.”50

  Pearson wrote back at once to say that he doubted his column would “have any serious effect. Let me add, however, that the information in the story came to us from very good friends in the State Department—friends both of yours and of ours.” This news could not have come as any comfort to Kennedy. The gossip that he was a confirmed member of the Cliveden set was bad enough; that it had come from the State Department was worse.51

  Kennedy was not a member of the Cliveden set, nor had he been unduly influenced by their views. He had come to believe that appeasement was the best, perhaps the only route to preserving the peace long before he had visited Cliveden. Still, he might have done well, as the representative of his nation, to follow the advice of Pearson and Allen and keep a bit of distance from Lady Astor and her circle.

  The former Nancy Witcher Langhorne of Danville, Virginia, now Lady Astor and a Conservative member of the House of Commons since 1919, though magnetically charming at age sixty, had become more vituperative than ever in her condemnation of those who criticized the Germans, especially those who were Jewish. Ten months earlier, on boarding a ship to return to England after a brief stay in America, she had denounced to a New York Times reporter the “anti-German propaganda in the United States. . . . ‘If the Jews are behind it they are going too far, and they need to take heed. . . . Anyone who reads the papers can see what is coming; it will react against them. And I tell all my Jewish friends the same thing.’” She was not, she insisted, “pro-German,” but she felt obliged to point out that the “agitators against Germany . . . were forgetting completely the atrocities going on in other nations, in Russia, in Spain and Ethiopia.”52

  None of this prompted Kennedy to steer clear of her. He had no problem with Lady Astor’s pronouncements about the Jews, in large part because she was simply saying in public what others, Kennedy included, were saying in private: that the Jews were too powerful in the media and too outspokenly anti-German. No matter how outrageous her comments and no matter what the press might make of his visits to the Astors and Cliveden, Kennedy had no intention of staying away or encouraging any member of his family to do so. The Astors would become fast family friends of the Kennedys, not just because of their political affinities, as the ambassador’s critics back home would argue, but because they were British royalty, gloriously wealthy, glamorous, sociable, lots of fun, and loyal.

  Asked by Lady Astor to speak at an event at Plymouth in December 1938, Kennedy readily agreed. “If you asked me to go to Plymouth or anywhere else you were interested in, I would get on a bicycle and go there. When I was very young, my father impressed upon me that I would notice as I went through life that gratitude was mostly found in the dictionary, and he always urged me never to be unappreciative of the kind things done for me and I have tried to keep that in mind all my life. I would seem very unappreciative indeed if I didn’t express to you my thanks for your many kindnesses to Rose, Kathleen and the children. If my going to Plymouth gave you half as much pleasure as I had in going and making that speech and getting such a wonderful reception, then I am very happy.”53

  He continued to see a great deal of the Astors, almost in defiance of those who criticized him for doing so. He invited them to dinner at the residence and accepted their invitation for luncheon with George Bernard Shaw and Charles Lindbergh on May 5. When Drew Pearson and Robert Allen attacked him, he sent her a copy of the column, making light of what was the most offensive aspect: the insinuation that he was not his own man. “Well, you see what a terrible woman you are, and how a poor fellow like me is being politically seduced. O weh ist mir!”54

  In any other context, Kennedy’s use of a Yiddish expression might be interpreted as a weak attempt at humor. But at this time, in this place, after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, the removal of citizenship rights from German Jews, their expulsion from the universities, the hospitals, the law courts, the military, and the civil service, the expropriation of their shops and small businesses, and the recent unprovoked and brutal acts of violence against Austrian Jews, and given Lady Astor’s own penchant for anti-Semitic comments, his lighthearted remarks were particularly distasteful.

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  The Anschluss of March 1938 had had a devastating and immediate impact on the 190,000 Jewish citizens who were swept up into the new German empire. “The persecution in Austria, particularly in Vienna,” Saul Friedländer has written, “outpaced that in the Reich. Public humiliation was more blatant and sadistic; expropriation better organized; forced emigration more rapid.” The president, though outraged, refrained from saying or doing much, fearful that the simplest humanitarian efforts might be perceived and trumpeted by his opponents as proof of the pernicious influence of his Jewish advisers on what was too often referred to now as the “Jew Deal.” Still, Roosevelt was disturbed enough by Nazi violence against Jews to instruct Secretary of State Hull on March 23, twelve days after the Germans entered Austria, to call on the governments of Europe and Latin America and ascertain “if they would be willing to co-operate with the Government of the United States in setting up a special committee . . . for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees.” That the vast majority of these refugees were Jews was not mentioned. On the contrary, in a March 25 press conference, Roosevelt insisted that the new initiative “embraced Jews, Protestants and Catholics, as well as the persecuted minorities of Russia, Italy and Spain.” When asked point-blank “if it were not true that the main purpose of the Government’s cooperative gesture was the relief of Jews in Germany and Austria,” he “answered in the affirmative,” then emphasized again that a “very large number of Christians would be benefited by the plan.”55

  Kennedy conveyed Hull’s request to Lord Halifax, who on April 6, 1938, officially accepted the invitation to send a British representative to the international conference scheduled to take place at Évian-les-Bains, France, in June. He handed Kennedy a memorandum with the “points” the British government expected to be “particularly borne in mind in handling the matter” of the Austrian refugees. The British had no intention of opening Palestine for Jewish settlement or of increasing immigration quotas for Jews to Great Britain or its overseas colonies and dominions. On the contrary, the Home Office had taken steps after the Anschluss to restrict the number of refugees. Austrian Jews were admitted on three-month visas, requiring them to register immediately with the police on entering the country, and prohibited from seeking or taking employment.56

  The State Departmen
t neither questioned these actions nor protested the conditions the British government placed on the discussions that would take place at the Évian Conference. Kennedy adhered scrupulously to the letter and intent of the State Department instructions. When Joseph Karmel, a “reporter and literary critic” for two Polish newspapers, asked for a chance to interview him “on behalf, if I may say so, of thousands of Jewish readers,” the ambassador agreed, on the understanding that their conversation was not “for publication. . . . You will appreciate, I am sure,” Kennedy wrote Karmel, “that any official discussion of any government attitude must come from the proper authorities in Washington.”57

  While Kennedy made no public pronouncements on the British refusal to do anything for the Jewish refugees, it clearly did not sit well with him. This was a humanitarian crisis of the first order, and the British, like the Americans, had the responsibility to do what they could. Harold Ickes recalled in his diary that during his honeymoon in London in May 1938, Kennedy took him to “call on Lord Halifax at the Foreign Office. Halifax brought up the question of the Jews and the rough treatment they are receiving in the Fascist countries. Their position is rapidly being made untenable in Germany and Austria. . . . The question is where to find a place for them on the surface of the earth where they can be left alone in comparative peace and security.” For the British, Palestine was a closed issue. Lord Halifax asked “whether it might be possible to locate these Jews in the United States, in South America, and in some of the British colonies.” Ickes responded that though “the Jewish question with us was not as acute as elsewhere, there was a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment which would undoubtedly increase if an attempt were made to bring in a large number of Jews.” He and Kennedy turned the tables and suggested “that there ought to be plenty of room in some of the British Colonies to take care of all the Jews who need a new home, and it would also seem that there must be plenty of room in South America.”58