The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Twenty-two

  DEFEATIST

  On November 22, Kennedy was granted permission to return to the United States on home leave. In his final meetings with the king and queen, prime minister, foreign secretary, first lord of the Admiralty, and other members of the war cabinet, he repeated the message he had been delivering since the war began. It was better to attempt to appease Hitler while the war was still a “phony” one than to wait for him to turn his troops and planes west and, after defeating the British and French, dictate terms for surrender.

  Having swallowed whole Lindbergh’s analysis of Germany’s overwhelming military advantages, Kennedy had no doubt that the German army, aided by the air force, would sweep through Western Europe and then invade and conquer Britain. Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, the American-born Conservative member of Parliament, wrote in his diary that Kennedy had prophesied to him “the end of everything and goes about saying that England is committing suicide.” Even the ambassador’s devoted friend and admirer Lady Astor was worried about his pessimism. At their final meeting before his return to the States, she gave Kennedy a sealed letter for her dear friend Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, now the ambassador to Washington. In it she remarked that Kennedy had “said to someone the other day, that if the war did not stop soon, there would be no markets!!! It looks as though he may be a bit of a defeatist, so you had better watch out for this. (I trust he does not open this letter!) He has been a splendid Ambassador, but people are just a little frightened of that.”1

  On November 29, Kennedy left London for Paris to meet with the American ambassadors to France, Russia, and the Netherlands, after which he proceeded to Lisbon. After a three-day weather delay, he boarded the Dixie Clipper, a twenty-seat seaplane, bound for Port Washington. He carried with him an important and very secret message for the president from the first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill was preparing to mine the waters off the western coast of neutral Norway, as the British Navy had in 1918, to prevent the Germans from shipping Swedish iron ore south during the winter months when ice blocked the Baltic Sea. Before he moved ahead with this plan, he wanted to know what the president thought of it. “The code arranged between the First Lord and Mr. Kennedy for communication on this matter was that if Mr. Kennedy replied ‘My wife cannot express an opinion,’ this would mean that while the President was not prepared to commit himself, he did not receive the notion too badly. If he reacted very unfavourably the message was to be something like the following: ‘My daughter [or Eunice] is unable to accept the invitation.’”2

  On landing in Port Washington, Kennedy was met by Rose and dozens of reporters with whom he chatted about London in the blackout, the mood of the British people, their acceptance of the fact that the Americans were not going to join them in war, and the importance of his home visit. He was, he announced, on his way to Washington at once to confer with the president and secretary of state. “I want to tell them some things that it might not be wise to put on the cables.” Roosevelt tried to slow him down and called him in Bronxville to suggest that he delay his trip to Washington until he had spent time with his family. “In postponing the conference with Kennedy for a day,” the Chicago Tribune opined, “the President was seen as minimizing the importance of the conference and the secret nature of the report the ambassador will offer.”3

  Kennedy, undeterred, arrived in Washington at seven thirty the next morning, declared his support for a Roosevelt third term to the reporters who met him at Union Station, and was driven to the “Carlton Hotel, shaved, changed my clothes, had breakfast, arrived White House at 9 A.M.” Roosevelt was “in bed; looked terribly tired; was most cordial in his reception.” Kennedy delivered Churchill’s letter with his plan to mine Norway’s waters and, when the president raised no objections, cabled as much to London. The president and his ambassador then discussed economic affairs, with Kennedy trespassing into matters that were not within his mandate. The ambassador recommended that the United States provide the British with American-flagged ships to transport American goods and warned that the sale of British securities to raise dollars would have a “disastrous” effect on American markets.

  On the whole, he was delighted by his reception in Washington. Roosevelt had charmed him out of any complaints he might have had, greeting him as if he were a long-lost friend. He offered Kennedy the treasured first and last appointments of the day, had breakfast in his presence, and then, during their afternoon meeting, shared the latest political gossip and prognostications. When Kennedy asked about a third term, imploring Roosevelt to seek one, the president responded that he wouldn’t run again “‘unless we are in war.’ He added, almost as an aside, ‘Even if we are in war, I’ll never send an army over there. We’ll help them with supplies.’”4

  Encouraged to speak his mind—as if he needed any such encouragement—Kennedy warned again of the coming apocalypse. “Joe Kennedy was utterly pessimistic,” the president later reported to Harold Ickes. “He believes that Germany and Russia will win the war and that the end of the world is just down the road.”5

  Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who was one of the few men in the State Department with whom Kennedy enjoyed a reasonably good relationship, was delighted when the ambassador dropped by and “spent about forty minutes between appointments in my office, summarizing in staccato fashion his views.” The Chamberlain government, Kennedy told Moffat, understood that the United States had no intention of entering the war in Europe. “Churchill, however, wants us there as soon as he can get us there. He is ruthless and scheming. He is also in touch with groups in America which have the same idea, notably, certain strong Jewish leaders. All told,” Moffat concluded, “K. is very bearish. He sees little hope for a prosperous England after the war, and little hope for the Continent to preserve its social structure. He says the British are a combination of cleverness and stupidity; but where they are really clever, and can walk circles around us, is in matters financial. . . . He says there is no question but that they have all our codes [the secret codes the embassy used to cable dispatches to Washington]. Three or four times Ministers have by references and allusions given the show away. . . . He said that his main work was now done, and that pretty soon the British would start trying to undermine him, as he was too much of a fighter. If so, they would do it via Washington and not in London. I gathered that he would prefer a key job here in Washington, but, lacking that, will go back in mid-January with pleasure.”6

  The ambassador was correct that the British had broken the American codes and with such remarkable ease that the Foreign Office was worried that others, including the Germans, had done or would do the same. On March 18, 1940, the Foreign Office would recommend that the minister of economic warfare “warn members of your Department that what they may say in confidence to members of the United States Embassy may easily get round rather quickly . . . to our enemies, and that they should therefore frame their remarks with this consideration in mind.”7

  Kennedy was also on the mark when he told Moffat that British officials would endeavor to “undermine” him because he was too much of “a fighter.” The Foreign Office had indeed been debating since autumn if, when, and how to get him recalled. These discussions would continue—and, in fact, intensify—during Kennedy’s home visit. T. North Whitehead, the son of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and himself a Harvard professor who consulted from Cambridge with the American desk at Whitehall, had informed London in January that he believed that as necessary as it might be to get Kennedy removed from office, it would be best to delay any action until after the 1940 elections. “Mr. Roosevelt has had some difficulties in handling the unconventional political habits of the Irish in the United States without thereby antagonising them. I think it possible that Mr. Kennedy is a valuable asset to the Administration in view of the forthcoming election. I question the wisdom of letting the Administration know of our objections to Mr. Kennedy, however informally.” Whitehead’s comments set off a ne
w round of sniping, snarling, and rumormongering in the Foreign Office and cabinet about Kennedy, his “défaitiste activities,” the “perpetual ‘spilling’” of his views, and his “gastric troubles.” “Mr. Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double-crosser and defeatist,” scrawled Sir Robert Vansittart, a close ally of Churchill’s and now chief diplomatic adviser to the cabinet. “He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of his type.”8

  —

  From Washington, Kennedy traveled to East Boston for a reunion of parishioners at Our Lady of the Assumption Church, where he had once been an altar boy. He hadn’t prepared a speech for the occasion—none had been requested—but spoke extemporaneously to his fellow parishioners. “There’s no place in this fight for us. It is going to be bad enough as it is. . . . There is no reason—economic, financial or social—to justify the United States entering the war.” The following day, his remarks were picked up by the British press. The Foreign Office was aghast that the ambassador was now saying in public what he had been saying privately: that the British were finished and that the United States should not come to their assistance.9

  Kennedy stayed overnight in Boston and the next day checked into the Lahey Clinic. His doctors could find nothing organically the matter with his stomach but wanted him to have another set of tests before he returned to London in February. Because he feared, and rightly, that no one in Washington would understand how serious his stomach condition was, he asked Dr. Sara Jordan, his gastroenterologist, to write Roosevelt, which she did, declaring that Kennedy’s “chronic gastritis” had reached “an acute phase.” Under ordinary circumstances, Dr. Jordan told the president, Kennedy’s condition would require “hospitalization, with rest and medication; but in view of the fact that Mr. Kennedy has such excellent facilities for rest in Florida, we feel he should go there and follow a very careful routine, which to be effective should be of at least two months duration.”10

  Back in Washington, Kennedy continued to pour out his cataclysmic predictions. “To anyone who comes within hailing distance,” Joe Alsop and Bob Kintner reported in their nationally syndicated December 19 column, “our ambassador to England freely predicts the collapse of capitalism, the destruction of democracy and the onset of the dark ages. He says that only an early peace, at almost any price, can save the world.” A prolonged war would inevitably, no matter which side won, lead to “general ruin. This must not be taken to mean that either Kennedy or his English friends do not believe that Hitler must be stopped. While they thought capitalism might survive in a Europe only partly Nazi-dominated, they know general Nazi rule would sweep away the landmarks as efficiently as a bloody world conflict. Naturally, however, Kennedy is desperately anxious to see the war stopped as soon as possible.” Alsop and Kintner hoped he would remain in place in London. “A pessimist is always more useful than an optimist in international affairs.”11

  Kennedy did not spend any time in Westchester. Instead, he flew from D.C. to Palm Beach, where he would spend the Christmas holidays with the family and January and most of February recuperating from his stomach problems.

  On February 24, he returned to New York City to board the Manhattan, bound for Naples in neutral Italy. It was not safe to land in Great Britain or France, as it had once been. He wrote Rose, as if it were entirely coincidental, that “Clare Luce and Miss [Margaret] Case of Vogue” happened to be on the same ship. “The trip across the Atlantic,” he would recall in his unpublished memoir, “was uneventful, marked by inclement weather and poor food. Happily, Clare Luce was on hand. . . . Her gay conversation was a contrast to the greyness of sea and sky.” Kennedy and Luce, who was on assignment to report for Life magazine on the effect of the war in Europe, disembarked in Naples at noon on March 4, visited Pompeii, then returned to Rome together. “Jo and I walk in moonlight, coliseum,” Clare noted in her diary. The next evening, they dined together and attended the opera.12

  One might have thought that the ambassador, after more than three months away from his post, would hurry back to London. But Kennedy was in no great rush. After two days in Rome with Clare Boothe Luce, he boarded a train with his valet and “London Jack” Kennedy, whom he had arranged to meet him in Naples. On their way north, they stopped off in Milan, where he was able to secure a private viewing of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and visit the fourteenth-century Duomo.13

  Kennedy returned to his post in March, having been away since late November. Rather than taking up residence at Prince’s Gate, he moved into St. Leonard’s, a sixty-room castlelike mansion in Windsor (since 1996 home of the Legoland Windsor Theme Park), which automobile mogul Horace Dodge had invited him to use rent-free.

  His extended absence had not been taken well by the British, who considered it something of an insult for the American ambassador to remove himself from London in this, their time of troubles. The once popular American ambassador had become very much persona non grata. Clare Boothe Luce was so concerned that she asked the Time magazine offices in London to prepare a “research memorandum” explaining the causes of “this present wave of unpopularity.” She received back a lengthy report listing several reasons for Kennedy’s unpopularity: “(1) His [antiwar] speech on arrival [in America] before Christmas in which he advised Americans ‘to keep out of it.’ . . . (2) His long absence from England, following the speech. . . . (3) The fact that he has not brought his family back. (4) That he has given up his London house and lives in the country.”14

  Had the British government, press, and public known how far out of the policy-making loop Kennedy was, they would have rested easier. But it was assumed in London that the ambassador remained a valuable adviser to Roosevelt. When in early March Washington announced that the president was sending Sumner Welles to consult with German, Italian, French, and British officials, the Chamberlain government worried that he was going to launch peace negotiations with the Germans and Italians, as Kennedy had advocated.15 Welles had been sent instead to find out if there was any chance to end the war before it started up again. Roosevelt did not believe there was but wanted to make sure.

  The under secretary of state arrived in London on March 10. Kennedy met him at the airport and, as he wrote Rose, the two men “have been spinning ever since. . . . We have had two or three conferences with the Prime Minister and Halifax and saw Churchill, Lloyd George, Eden, Atlee, Sinclair [future secretary of state for air], and all the rest. They treated Welles exceptionally well here. . . . Welles is very intelligent and is hoping that out of all the mess some plan may be devised that can save the world from this devastating war. There is always a hope, but the chances look like about one in a thousand.” Kennedy did not tell his wife that he had been left off the invitation list for Welles’s visit “to the palace to have tea with the King and Queen,” which vexed him no end. Welles offered several explanations for the snub—none of which was ever confirmed—then intervened to have Kennedy added to the list. The ambassador interpreted his exclusion as further sign of the disfavor with which he was now held in British government circles.16

  Welles returned to Washington at the end of March. The exercise had been a total failure. “The leaders he talked to,” Hull recalled in his memoirs, had “offered no real hope for peace.”17

  —

  You would never believe the way public opinion in this country has turned anti-American and incidentally anti-US Ambassador Kennedy,” he wrote Rose on March 20. “The things they say about me from the fact I’ve sent my family home because they were afraid, to the fact that I live in the country because I am afraid of being bombed etc. etc. All rotten stuff but all the favorite dinner parties at Mayfair go right to work hauling the U.S. Ambassador down. It’s for that reason it would be silly for you or the children to come over. It might spoil your pleasant impressions.” As in the past, Kennedy blamed much of his unpopularity on the Jews, believing they were against him because he was not
sufficiently bellicose. “Walter Lippmann is around saying he hasn’t liked the US Ambassador for the last 6 months. Of course the fact he is a Jew has something to do with that. It is all a little annoying, but not very serious.”18

  Rose gently suggested that Kennedy might want to do something to rescue his reputation. “Joe, dear, I have a definite idea that it would be a wonderful feat if you could put over the idea that although you are against America’s entering the war—still you are encouraging help to England in some way. It seems to me most people in America would be sympathetic to that idea, & it would endear you to the hearts of the British. It may be impractical, but I have felt it strongly the last two weeks.”19

  Kennedy, unwilling or unable to apologize for saying what was on his mind, did nothing of the sort.

  —

  He spent Easter 1940 with Clare Boothe Luce at St. Leonard’s in Windsor. Rosemary remained with Miss Gibbs and Mother Isabel in Hertfordshire. Her eight brothers and sisters spent the holiday with their mother at Palm Beach. “It is lovely weather down here,” Jean wrote her father. “We all flew down and the trip was very smooth. No one was sick except Miss Dunn. Everyone is down except Joe. He is coming down later. Teddy is learning how to play tennis and is using everybody’s tennis racket. It’s a wonder he hasn’t broken any by now. I am working very hard trying to make a sweater and I am nearly finished.”20