The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Kennedy got Krock’s letter in Hyannis Port. After attending the pre-commencement “Class Day” events, which his son, as chairman of the 1938 Class Day committee, had helped organize, he had left Cambridge, avoiding the next day’s commencement exercises and the award of honorary degrees to Walt Disney and thirteen others but not to him. When asked by Boston reporters why he had not attended his son’s graduation and whether he was disappointed not to have received an honorary degree, he claimed that he had left Cambridge because his younger son Jack had stomach problems and needed him in Hyannis Port. Jack, it was true, had a few days earlier checked into the New England Baptist Hospital, where doctors tried unsuccessfully to figure out why he was losing weight again. Whatever his condition—and the doctors remained baffled by it—he recovered quickly enough to join his brother and other members of the Harvard team in the intercollegiate sailing championship held that year at Wianno. As their father watched with pride, the Kennedy boys sailed well enough (though they took no firsts) to help the Harvard team take home the championship.

  That same day, on June 23, the two reporters to whom Early had spoken, Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune and William Murphy, Jr., of the Philadelphia Inquirer, published nearly identical stories about the rift between the president and his ambassador to Great Britain. “One of the most notable friendships of the New Deal,” Murphy wrote, “appeared tonight to be headed for possible wreckage on the jagged rocks of Presidential ambitions. The reason for this situation is that the Roosevelt inner circle has become convinced that Kennedy seriously cherishes the idea that he might be selected as the Democratic standard-bearer in 1940. The idea does not appear to be pleasing to the White House.” Both reporters offered as evidence of the ambassador’s nascent candidacy the “secret circular which Kennedy has been forwarding to selected Washington correspondents [his political letters]” and an offer to a “prominent Washington correspondent [Arthur Krock] to direct his presidential boom from London.”

  Usually so quick to respond to any perceived slight, Kennedy decided to let this one go. He could not confront Early directly without telling him that his information had come from Krock, which Krock had asked him not to do. Instead, he waited until he was back in London and then let his anger out in a letter to the editors who had published the articles. Colonel McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and a Palm Beach neighbor of Kennedy’s, wrote him at once to say that his anger was misdirected. Walter Trohan, who had broken the story, had had no malicious intent. He was simply repeating what he had been told by high administration officials. “He had complete authority for everything he said. . . . You are the victim not of the reporter, but of your political associates.”11

  —

  Though the signs were there for the reading, Kennedy had refused to recognize that Roosevelt was the source of the story. Roosevelt had known for a long time that Kennedy was criticizing him behind his back, but he had let it go as long as Kennedy had been of use to him, as a campaigner, SEC and Maritime Commission chairman, and liaison with the business community. Roosevelt could tolerate a great deal, but not Kennedy’s presumption in believing himself a viable candidate for president. He had no intention of breaking formally with his ambassador, but neither was he going to allow him to position himself as the president’s dear friend, confidant, trusted adviser, and possible successor.

  Kennedy either did not understand what was happening or, if he did, thought the break in his relationship with Roosevelt was easily repaired. Part of his confusion may have been caused by the president’s demeanor. When they met for dinner at the White House only a few days after the published reports of Roosevelt’s “coolness” toward him, the president not only evidenced no sign of displeasure or lack of confidence, but gave him a new and critically important assignment.

  Roosevelt asked him to meet, on his behalf, with Thomas Lamont, who represented J. P. Morgan on the U.S. Steel board of directors. Under intense pressure from the White House, U.S. Steel had agreed to cut prices to stimulate the economy. The understanding was that it would do so without cutting wages. Only after the agreement had been reached did the company inform the White House that it was going to cut wages. The president was furious. Across-the-board wage reductions in a major industrial sector would inevitably lead to decreased purchasing power, declining consumption, and sustained unemployment.

  Unbeknownst to the press, Kennedy met with Lamont at the Waldorf-Astoria the morning after his dinner at the White House. He brought along Arthur Krock, whom he was taking to Europe with him the next day. Krock did not write about the meeting in his newspaper, but he took notes that he published years later in his memoirs. According to Krock, Lamont insisted to Kennedy that U.S. Steel had no choice but to cut wages now that the government had pressured it to cut prices and that “John L. Lewis [then head of the CIO] understood its position.”

  Kennedy suggested that the company hold off wage reductions for at least ninety days to ascertain what, if any, effect the price cuts were going to have on revenues. If, after ninety days, there was proof that the price cuts were destroying the steel business, the company might then with impunity declare that it had no choice but to cut wages. Kennedy shared with Lamont a memorandum, written by Tommy Corcoran and Secretary Ickes and approved by Roosevelt, that recommended that if U.S. Steel agreed to cooperate with the White House and keep wages stable, the government would provide it and its subsidiaries with additional contracts while simultaneously depriving Bethlehem Steel of whatever competitive advantages it enjoyed from importing Canadian raw materials.

  “Lamont,” Krock observed, “turned pale. He said he would not ask the Steel Corporation to be a party to a deal of that sort. He said it was unfair and wrong. He asked what business was going to do in contention with a government holding such ideas.

  “Kennedy answered, ‘Tom, you are a respectable man. You can’t understand these people. But you’ve got to. There they are. You don’t have to be a party to any deal. I’m just telling you what you can expect if you hold off these wage cuts and follow my suggestion. But, forgetting the deal, my suggestion has greater value and some moral quality.’”

  If U.S. Steel waited ninety days before cutting wages and then did so only after significant revenue loses, it would seize the upper hand. Under these circumstances, Roosevelt could not accuse the company “of failure to cooperate.”

  As he had at the SEC, Kennedy positioned himself as the corporate sector’s best friend and protector and a man whose business sense and moral standing were superior to those of the New Deal politicians on whose behalf he was negotiating. Lamont did not formally sign off on any deal with the government, but U.S. Steel did not cut wages. Once again, Kennedy had done the president’s bidding—and done it well.12

  —

  Whatever satisfaction Kennedy might have enjoyed was quickly washed away. On Tuesday, the day before he was to sail back to Europe, the latest issue of the Saturday Evening Post went on sale with an article by Alva Johnston titled “Jimmy’s Got It” about James Roosevelt’s insurance business, which, it claimed, earned between $250,000 and $2 million annually. Joseph P. Kennedy was identified as one of his boosters.13

  Johnston was not the first to suggest that there was something slightly sinister about Kennedy’s friendship with the much younger Jimmy Roosevelt, but he was the first to put the thought into print. His accusations reverberated through the daily press. Jimmy checked himself into the Mayo Clinic to avoid having to comment.

  Kennedy dismissed Johnston’s charges as malicious nonsense. Questioned by reporters as he prepared to depart for Europe on the Normandie, Kennedy declared that he was “not at all perturbed by” the article, which among other things had asserted “that he was the premier Scotch-whisky salesman in the United States.” He joked with the reporters that while he tried to be the best in everything, he was not the nation’s number one whiskey salesman. “This magazine a
rticle,” he continued, “tries to make me out a phony, but if all of it is as true as the part I have read about myself, it is a complete, unadulterated lie.”14

  The next day Kennedy boarded the Normandie with his two oldest boys and Arthur Krock. Joe Jr., having graduated from Harvard only days before, was off to London to serve as his father’s secretary, as Felix Frankfurter had recommended he do. Jack was going to take a long summer’s vacation before returning to Harvard for his junior year—or at least that was what his father had planned for him. “You really should give yourself plenty of rest. You are almost 21 now and really should take very good care of your health and you can only do that by getting lots of rest. I don’t like to close a letter with an admonition, but it is for your own good, and I am sure you realize it.”15

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  There remained at the end of Kennedy’s whirlwind nine-day trip the same confusion about its purpose that there had been at the beginning. Kennedy had told reporters that he had come home for his son’s graduation, which he had missed, and for frank talks about the European situation with the president. He had told the German diplomats in London that the objective of his trip home was to brief the president on Germany. Only after he sailed did Drew Pearson and Robert Allen report in their “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column that despite “those sensational dope stories giving the real lowdown for Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s hurried visit . . . the real purpose . . . was to confer with Roosevelt about the tragic German and Austrian refugee problem. . . . In his private talks with the President, Kennedy reported that the situation of German and Austrian Jews is extremely hazardous and that unless a plan for their migration is worked out at the Evian conference thousands of them are doomed. On top of all the other refugee complications, Kennedy reported that the secret policy of the Nazis is to demand ransoms for the release of these people whom they claim they are anxious to get rid of.”16

  Pearson and Allen had most likely gotten their story from Kennedy. In June, just before leaving London, Kennedy had warned Viscount Bearsted not to expect much from the Évian Conference or from Myron Taylor, the president’s representative. He had no faith in Taylor’s competence and inferred, in his talks with Bearsted, that he would tell the president as much when he saw him. And that was precisely what he did.

  Few if any commentators were using language as stark as Kennedy was employing in the early summer of 1938; few understood, as he appeared to, the catastrophic consequences that would follow the failure to negotiate a viable plan for rescuing German and Austrian Jews. Still, he was optimistic.

  Hitler, he believed—and this was still, in mid-1938, the dominant view in Washington and London—was not a madman but a calculating, rational actor. He would be willing to let the Jews emigrate with some portion of their assets, but only if Germany was given something in return. The proceedings at Évian were mere window dressing. Even if the nations assembled there agreed to offer safe havens for every one of the German Jewish refugees, which was not going to happen, no Jews would be rescued until Hitler gave them permission to emigrate.

  Kennedy’s position was clear: the only way to save the refugees was to negotiate a comprehensive settlement of Germany’s grievances, one arrived at without sound and fury and certainly without the chorus of condemnation that Kennedy believed organized Jewry was mounting.

  Seventeen

  MUNICH

  In public, Ambassador Kennedy remained unfailingly optimistic. Times were tough, dangers lurked around every corner, but there was no need for concern, he insisted, certainly no reason to panic. Privately, he was more frightened of the future than he had ever been. Hitler, he expected, would sooner or later make a move to annex the Sudetenland, that part of Czechoslovakia in which three million ethnic Germans lived; the Czech government would resist; Hitler would invade; France, under treaty with the Czechs, would declare war on Germany; the British would fight to defend the French; the Americans would be drawn in to assist the British. And then the worst would come. World war, in the midst of depression, would lead to economic collapse and economic collapse to political upheaval and the end of democracy in Great Britain and the United States.

  “Kennedy was much more worried and pessimistic than he was during my last conversation with him,” the German ambassador reported to Berlin on July 20, 1938. “The idea that Germany might go to war against Czechoslovakia, which would then result in the intervention of England and France and, first indirectly and then directly, of the United States appeared to have a pretty firm hold on him.”1

  The only positive news was from Barcelona. The Sacred Heart nuns whose release he had sought were on a British warship bound for London. “I decided to let the newspapers know of the rescue of the nuns,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, “for a variety of reasons. I wanted to emphasize that the Jews from Germany and Austria are not the only refugees in the world, and I wanted to depict Chamberlain and Halifax as human, good-hearted men, capable of taking an active interest in such a bona fide venture. I also wanted to give them credit for sending the warship after the poor women.”2

  The fact that the British government had intervened to assist a handful of refugee nuns did not, as the New York Times cautioned its readers on July 31, signify that it was willing to help Jewish refugees. On the contrary, the Chamberlain government had made it clear, most recently at the Évian Conference, that it had no intention of opening any territory in Great Britain or Palestine to Jewish refugees, though it claimed to have under consideration “the possibility [of] the small-scale settlement of Jewish refugees” in the colony of Kenya or another of the East African territories.3

  —

  In late July, Rose and the children left for Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. Kennedy remained behind in London until the end of July, when Parliament adjourned. Kick, now eighteen, stayed behind as well. She had accepted an invitation to weekend at Cliveden, where she hoped to spend some time with William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, one of Britain’s wealthiest and most eligible young bachelors. Billy Hartington, as he was known, was not just another British aristocrat, but a member of the Cavendish family, which since the 1530s had made its fortune and fame dispossessing Catholics of their assets and, more recently, opposing home rule for Ireland. Although Billy had not an ounce of anti-Irish or anti-Catholic prejudice in him, the same could not be said for his father, Edward William Spencer Cavendish, the 10th Duke of Devonshire, whom he would succeed.4

  On August 3, twelve days after the rest of the family had departed, Kennedy flew with Kick to Paris, changed planes for Marseilles, and continued by limousine to Cap d’Antibes, between Nice and Cannes. The Domaine de Beaumont, which he had rented for the month, was perfect except for the pool, which was filled with water pumped from across the hills and (to Rose’s disgust) changed only every few weeks. “It looks and feels so stagnant, so cloudy, so uninviting. Of course, I do not like the children to dive or put it in their mouths.” Fortunately, the luxurious and exclusive Hôtel du Cap was nearby, with its rocky cliffs, saltwater pool, outdoor pavilion, and celebrated restaurant. Kennedy rented a cottage-sized cabana for the family. Among the guests and visitors at the hotel that season were Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and his family; Elsa Maxwell; tennis star Bill Tilden; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; socialite decorator Elsie de Wolfe; and Marlene Dietrich, who was vacationing with her entourage, which this year included her husband, her latest lover, Erich Maria Remarque, her husband’s lover, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Maria, who would try to spend as much time with the Kennedys as she could.5

  While awaiting her husband’s arrival, Rose tried to find household help, reliable secretaries, and milk for the smaller children and Jack. A whirlwind of self-improvement schemes for herself and the children, Rose took the children on a “cook’s tour” of the area, tried to interest Pat and Eunice in collecting autographs, and prodded them all to keep diaries. Now that her children were under
one roof, she was able to focus her attention on fattening up Jack and slimming down the others. In her weight loss campaigns, Rose had her husband’s full approval and gratitude. Kennedy, the son of an obese mother, could not countenance extra weight on himself or his children. He watched his diet, exercised, and kept slim. He expected his children to do the same.

  For the next few weeks, the Kennedy world would revolve around the patriarch. His word was law, as it had always been. He didn’t yell or scold or argue with his children. They knew he had a temper, but they seldom saw it. He said what he thought, with the understanding that his thoughts were deeper and more often correct than anyone else’s. When Jack refused to drink the milk his mother gave him because it tasted sour, his father explained that it tasted that way because it was unpasteurized. He had had some like it in Wales and had gotten used to it, which he suggested Jack could do as well. Jack drank his milk. When Rose outlined her plans for returning to the United States so that Kick could make her formal debut at Thanksgiving, Kennedy quickly but gently vetoed the idea.