by David Nasaw
On August 27, Kennedy, unable to contain himself any longer, confronted Roosevelt head-on in a “Triple Priority” cable marked “For the President, Personal and Confidential.” For weeks now, he had known about but been excluded from any participation in the destroyers-for-bases negotiations. “I am sure you must be aware of the very embarrassing situation I feel myself in this connection. . . . I would have no knowledge whatsoever of the situation had it not been for the fact that the Prime Minister had seen fit to send some cables back through me and also has furnished me with supplementary data. You may properly say there is no reason for my knowing anything about it but if I am not acquainted with facts of vital importance to both countries I fail to see how I can function with any degree of efficiency. . . . Rarely, as a matter of fact, am I ever advised when important conversations are held in Washington with the British Ambassador. . . . I have been fairly active in any enterprise which I have taken up for the last twenty-five years. Frankly and honestly I do not enjoy being a dummy. I am very unhappy about the whole position and of course there is always the alternative of resigning, which I would not hesitate to do if conditions were not as they are.”27
Roosevelt could not ignore Kennedy’s complaints this time or delegate someone else to answer them. Not daring to risk a congressional vote on the destroyers-for-bases deal, which he had been assured he would lose, he had decided to detour around Congress and assert his constitutional authority as commander in chief to sign an agreement that strengthened American defenses, as this one would. He expected, and rightly, that the Republicans would attack him as soon as the deal was announced and that there might even be calls for his impeachment. The last thing he needed, in such circumstances, was to have Kennedy join the opposition.
Roosevelt wrote Kennedy back the day after he received his letter. He did not apologize for excluding Kennedy from the negotiations but reassured him that he was still a vital member of his team. “The destroyer and base matter was handled in part through you and in part through Lothian but the situation developed into a mapping proposition where the Army and Navy are in constant consultation with me here and the daily developments have had to be explained verbally to Lothian. There is no thought of embarrassing you and only a practical necessity for personal conversations makes it easier to handle details here. . . . Don’t forget that you are not only not a dummy but are essential to all of us both in the Government and in the Nation.” Roosevelt asked Kennedy to “explain” to Churchill why he could not give the destroyers as a gift. Only if he offered them in return for military bases could he argue that he had made the swap to strengthen America’s defenses.28
Kennedy was gratified by the president’s letter, especially by what he thought was the request that he assume a role in the negotiations by consulting with Churchill. He did as he was asked and explained to the prime minister why the bases could not be gifted but had to be offered as a quid pro quo for the destroyers. Churchill, he notified Washington, understood and was agreeable.
There was no response from the president or the State Department.
Days later, Kennedy was shocked and embarrassed to learn from Admiral Ghormley that “the agreement was to be signed at six o’clock the following day.” Even after the Sturm und Drang of the previous week, his angry cable to the president, and the president’s conciliatory letter, Kennedy discovered that he had not only been excluded from the final negotiations, but was, in fact, considered so incidental to the process that he was not even informed when an agreement was reached.29
Twenty-five
THERE’S HELL TO PAY TONIGHT
On his fifty-second birthday, the ambassador went riding at St. Leonard’s. “The air-raid warning was on and it was interesting to be riding through the fields and looking up in the sky looking for air raiders and bombs. One interesting sight was the movement of a lot of training planes from the airport to an ordinary field near where we rode.”1
The next afternoon, the sirens sounded in London, which had not yet been attacked from the air. It was Saturday, 4:25 P.M. General Raymond Lee, who was at the embassy catching up on his correspondence, “heard some antiaircraft guns cracking away in the distance and then a series of heavy explosions to the northeast and not as far away. They kept on, and at the same time the droning of planes overhead increased and I went out on the square where I could see little flecks like bits of tinfoil darting about overhead, so high that they were almost out of sight. Only an occasional burst of machine-gun fire showed that fierce combat was going on in the heavens.” One of his colleagues went up on the roof to see what was going on, then “came down and reported that great fires were raging as a result of the bombardment.”2
Some 100 German airplanes were approaching London in formation, the large bombers in the middle, the fighters outside. Less than an hour later, at 5:18, the second wave of 250 airplanes attacked. Dusk turned to dark, and the raids continued. The first targets were the docks, warehouses, and small factories on the East End, which, hit spot-on, burst into flames. The London fire brigades did their best but, lacking resources and experience, were overwhelmed by the number and magnitude of the conflagrations. When the all-clear sounded at five that morning, after twelve hours of nearly continuous attack, much of East London lay in ruins; some 430 people were dead.3
The bombers came again the following evening and 400 more lives were lost. The next day, a Monday, they took 370 lives. Discovering that the shelters provided little or no protection from the bombs that fell and the fires they set off, the people of London took to the tube stations, which offered better protection and, more critically, an escape from the aboveground cacophony that made sleep impossible: the drone of the aircraft, the clatter of the machine guns, the whistling, screaming bombs, the alerts and all-clears and alerts again, the nonstop wailing of the sirens.4
For Kennedy it was the beginning of the end. “The first night of the blitz,” Harvey Klemmer recalled, “we walked down Piccadilly and he said I’ll bet you five to one any sum that Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks.”5
“The last three nights in London have been simply hell,” Kennedy wrote Rose on September 10. “Last night I put on my steel helmet and went up on the roof of the Chancery and stayed up there until two o’clock in the morning watching the Germans come over in relays every ten minutes and drop bombs, setting terrific fires. You could see the dome of St. Paul’s silhouetted against a blazing inferno that the Germans kept adding to from time to time by flying over and dropping more bombs. 14 Prince’s Gate has just missed being hit. One of the bombs hit the barracks, you know, facing Rotten Row; one last night dropped in the bridle path opposite the house; and Herschel Johnson was almost killed the other night when the house next door to his was completely demolished. . . . Last night, after I had looked the situation over, I slept in the air raid shelter at the Chancery and did very nicely for myself. When I have to stay in town I am planning to sleep there and the rest of the time go out to Windsor. . . . I am completely a fatalist about bombing accidents. I don’t think anything is going to happen to me, and for that reason it doesn’t worry me the slightest bit.”6
He wrote the children separate letters and asked them to hand them around. “For a man with a weak stomach,” he wrote Jack, “these last three days have proven very conclusively that you can worry about much more important things than whether you are going to have an ulcer or not. . . . The only thing I am afraid of is that I won’t be able to live long enough to tell all that I see and feel about this crisis. When I hear these mental midgets talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils. What is this war going to prove? And what is it going to do to civilization? The answer to the first question is nothing; and to the second I shudder even to think about it.”7
Bobby, who had been following the war with unusual intensity and focus for a fourteen-year-old, received the most detailed descriptions and nightm
arish analysis. If the Germans joined forces with the Italians, his father predicted, there would be no stopping them from marching through Turkey into the Middle East and gaining control of the Suez Canal and the oil wells that supplied British needs. “Should Italy and Germany get control of these oil fields the prospect for England becomes darker by the minute. The whole problem will finally be dropped in the lap of the United States, because as the manufacturing facilities here are destroyed or disorganized, we in the United States will have to furnish more supplies, and that means that England will have to have more money, and they can’t get more money unless we give it to them.” He concluded by saying how sorry he was not to have “had a chance to see you this summer Bob, but I do hope you will put in a good effort this year. It is boys of your age who are going to find themselves in a very changed world and the only way you can hold up your end is to prepare your mind so that you will be able to accept each situation as it comes along, so don’t, I beg of you, waste any time.”8
To Ted, he wrote of the fires in East London “and all those poor women and children and homeless people . . . all seeing their places destroyed,” and then, rather poignantly and presciently, he added that he hoped “when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to work out plans to make people happy instead of making them miserable as war does today.” In happier days, Ted had been invited into his father’s bedroom to chat while the ambassador dressed for his evening engagement. Now, to illustrate how much had changed in so little time, he wrote Ted about an incident the night before when he had dashed home to “put on my dinner jacket” before a concert at Queen’s Hall and dinner with Duff Cooper, Churchill’s minister of information. “When I got to Queens Hall I found the concert was cancelled, and then I went back to my office, and after sitting there three-quarters of an hour I noticed by the merest chance that I had forgotten to shave for a couple of days, and I was going out to a dinner party without being shaved. So you can see how busy I am. I am sure everybody will laugh at this. Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know that I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren’t you.”9
He wanted to remain in London now to see “how this thing is going to work out,” he wrote John Burns, “but I also want to have something to do or say about my family in the few years I have got left to enjoy them.” Joe Jr. was doing okay at Harvard Law, but Jack had been sidelined again by health problems and, on Dr. Jordan’s recommendation, was taking a year off before beginning law school. “I received a cable from him today about possibly going to Stanford,” Kennedy wrote Burns in mid-September. “It is almost impossible to make up your mind over here what is the best thing for him to do over there, and I am sure you will give him the best advice.”10
His major concern was not what the boys were going to do that September, but what would come next. The conscription bill that President Roosevelt had endorsed in July had been signed into law. Jack and Joe Jr., along with other American males twenty-one to thirty-five years of age, would register for the draft on October 16 and receive their “numbers” on October 29.
If war came, Kennedy would not be able to keep his boys out of uniform—and he knew it. All he could do was make sure they got the most out of their military service. The war was going to be a proving ground for the next generation of American leaders. Those who advanced quickly through the ranks and covered themselves in glory would have a step up on those who had merely served their time.
“I have had with me rather intimately,” he wrote Joe Jr. on September 11, “Major General Emmons, in charge of the Air Force of the U.S.A., General Strong, second in command of the Army, and Admiral Ghormley, second in command of the Navy, and I have been having discussions about you and Jack. Strong, who is really the topside man in the Army feels that the chance for promotion and for position is much better in the Air Force than in anything else, principally because it is going to be expanded quickly and because it isn’t as hidebound as the regular army. . . . As far as Jack goes, I don’t know what to say. If he isn’t well enough to continue his law school course, I don’t see how he is going to be well enough to go in the army, but I am going to talk to Emmons and Ghormley about him, so that when you fellows talk your own situations over we will have somebody you can talk with to get good advice.”11
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As the bombs fell on London, Kennedy, perpetually out of step with everyone around him, constructed and forwarded alternative narratives to the heroic ones proffered by Churchill and the British press. “After four days of bombing, the people in the East End . . . have taken on the aspect of refugees. The rest of the people living in London are also affected by having to spend most of their nights in air raid shelters and by the noise of the constant attacks,” he wrote in a dispatch to the State Department on September 11. No one was getting any sleep, and without sleep, vital work was not being performed in government offices or defense plants. “Leaving aside all the direct damage to military objectives done by explosions and fires, the war effort is being very definitely hampered by the lack of efficiency of the people who are tired and also by the lack of efficiency of the transportation units. . . . In spite of all, I don’t mean that the people are going to quit.” On the contrary, they appeared ready to follow Churchill’s lead and fight on until they had nothing left with which to fight. This, Kennedy believed, was the tragic underside of their heroism. The best outcome—the one that would spare the most lives and halt the slaughter and sacrifice—would have been for the British to accept defeat. The worst outcome—and the most likely one—would be that they kept fighting in the expectation that the Americans would, responding to their misery, “come into this war and sign a blank check.” What nobody on the other side of the ocean wanted to accept was the harsh reality that American intervention would only prolong the war and the agony of civilians caught in it. Americans who were in favor of intervention did not want to look the tragedy in the face. “Their desire to help this country fight this war, I can quite appreciate, but I do think they should very clearly understand what the responsibility will entail.”12
He wanted the American public to know the truth: that tales of heroism and sacrifice were not the whole story; that the British could not survive without massive infusions of American assistance; that the dollars loaned would never be repaid; that a prolonged war would mean prolonged slaughter and suffering; and that in the final analysis, American boys in uniform might be compelled to follow American dollars across the Atlantic and into battle.
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And the bombs continued to fall. The cacophony in the air was now accentuated by the rounds fired from antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks or on ships in the Thames. In the days and weeks that followed the first raids on East London, bombs would hit Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s, the Tower of London, the Natural History Museum, the BBC, Queen’s Hall, the Zoo, and London’s residential areas. They fell in the parks and in the squares and on churches, tube stations, and theaters, on small row houses that burned to cinders and great brick town houses that collapsed into ruins. London’s East End, West End, and the City were pockmarked by craters and smoldering ruins, streets and parks cordoned off by unexploded and delayed-action bombs. Nothing and no one was spared, from the humblest East Enders to the king and queen to the ambassador and those who worked with him at Grosvenor Square.
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On Saturday, September 14, during the second week of bombing, Kennedy called Sumner Welles “to report to him that everybody was getting along well here. Of course,” he added in his diary entry, “my telephone conversation was sarcastic, because I was amazed that the Department showed so little interest in the welfare of the people.” As Kennedy had anticipated, the president, no doubt alerted by Welles, phoned at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon to cheer him up. “Taking into account that everybody might be listening,” Kennedy recorded in his diary, “he made a rather perfunctory inquiry as to how we were all ge
tting along and said he hoped we were all right. I wasn’t particularly impressed with it.”13
The next day, a Monday, Kennedy cabled Welles. “For ten days now there has been continual day and night bombing. It has been aggravated by an anti-aircraft barrage that has lasted all during the night. The members of my staff who are living in London have not had much sleep under these conditions. . . . The Embassy has been able to function in the last several days for only three hours daily; the rest of the time has been spent in the air raid shelter. I have taken the risk of keeping the staff at their desks until the spotter on the roof telephoned me that planes are nearby; I should not be called upon to take that risk indefinitely.” He had “been living at St. Leonard’s with about ten officers during weekends” and would be sleeping there, whenever possible, “since 14 Prince’s Gate is now considered in a danger zone.” He intended to relocate several embassy functions and officers to St. Leonard’s, Coworth Park, which Lord Derby had made available to him, and Headley Park, a facility near Epsom that had been placed at the disposal of the American embassy by its owner, an American banker. He would continue to work out of “London as long as there is an Embassy there.”14
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On September 17, after ten days and nights of bombing, with Luftwaffe losses exceeding those of the RAF, the Germans no closer to clearing the airspace over the English Channel, and the British more unwilling than ever to entertain peace talks, Hitler canceled plans for the invasion. Kennedy’s pessimism remained untouched and unbounded.
