The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  In his dispatches to Washington, he did everything he could to counter the propaganda efforts of the British and downplay their preparedness to fight an extended war. In his September 27 cable, written after the announcement that Japan had joined Germany and Italy in a “tripartite pact,” he derided British claims of stepped-up war production. “Production is definitely falling, regardless of what reports you may be getting. . . . I cannot impress upon you strongly enough my complete lack of confidence in the entire conduct of this war. . . . If by any chance we should ever come to the point of getting into the war we can make up our minds that it will be the United States against Germany, Italy and Japan, aided by a badly shot to pieces country which in the last analysis can give little if any assistance to the cause. It breaks my heart to draw these conclusions about a people that I sincerely hoped might be victorious, but I cannot get myself to the point where I believe they can be of any assistance to the cause in which they are involved.”15

  —

  Kennedy had made it clear to the president during their August 2 phone call that he was anxious to return home but would remain in place for at least a month and then evaluate the situation in London. Two months had passed since then with not a word from Washington about his coming home. His strongest argument for leaving his post, which he had repeated time and again, was that he was no longer serving any purpose in London. “The only thing I am unhappy about,” he wrote Missy LeHand, “is that I have nothing important to do. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I didn’t want it to look as if I was leaving here before the bombing began, I would have left long ago. I have never been very happy sitting around and not making a real contribution to the job I was supposed to do.” On the final day of September, he declared to his wife that he could take no more. “For all the good I am doing the United States or England now, I might as well be in Palm Beach. . . . I have . . . made up my mind that I shall come home, either for consultation or to resign—that is entirely dependent on Mr. Roosevelt. Frankly, I don’t care which.”16

  On October 5, the Chicago Daily News, in an article picked up by papers across the country, reported in language that suggested the story came from Kennedy or someone close to him that the ambassador planned to leave his post “within the next 10 days or 2 weeks. . . . It has been an open secret for many weeks that Kennedy considered his continued stay in London as superfluous [but] didn’t wish to leave Great Britain while the course of the war was completely in the air and that, under no circumstances, did he wish anyone to be able to say that he was running away from the blitzkrieg. Now that he has gone through one solid month of the Battle of Britain and on several occasions has been within sound of falling bombs, he feels that nobody will accuse him of running out on the show.”17

  Joe Alsop and Robert Kintner commented on the story in their October 8 column. Under the title, “Kennedy, Unwilling Sojourner,” they reported on the “mercurial” ambassador’s preemptive move “in an obscure but exciting little game. The players are Kennedy and the President. For Kennedy, the goal has been to come home as soon as he decently could; for the President, to keep Kennedy in London as long as possible.” It was clear why Kennedy wanted to come home. The question was why Roosevelt wouldn’t let him. Alsop and Kintner believed that the president wanted him to remain in London because he could “do less harm there. . . . An emotional fellow, he has strong convictions and less than no remaining fondness for his chief. He will certainly express his opinions to every available American listener the instant he gets through the customs. He will be in a position to speak impressively and persuasively. The President is represented as fearing he will reduce large numbers of leaders of opinion to such a state of hopeless blue funk that our foreign policy will be half-immobilized by fear.” Alsop and Kintner, with the help of cables and other materials leaked to them by the State Department, went on to ridicule Kennedy for his “gloom,” which was “now so intense that while the American military mission headed by General George Strong was in London, Kennedy constantly tried to persuade them they had not seen the worst” and insisted that munitions plants that had been bombed “were wholly out of commission,” when, in fact, they were up and running in weeks. “If Kennedy does come home,” they warned their readers, “it will be well to listen to him carefully, but to take his jeremiads with a grain of salt.”18

  Kennedy was infuriated by the article, but more so by the realization that someone in the White House or the State Department was leaking his confidential dispatches to Alsop and Kintner. When, two days after the article had appeared, Summer Welles called him in London, Kennedy declared unequivocally that he was coming home, preferably “for consultation,” but if the State Department “did not want to call me home, then I would extend my resignation, to take effect here and at once; that I was damned sick and disgusted with sitting here and doing nothing, and having that little pimp Alsop write nasty columns.” He told both Arthur Krock and Frank Murphy that he had warned Welles that “he had written a full account of the facts to Edward Moore, his secretary in New York, with instructions to release the story to the press if the Ambassador were not back in New York by a certain date.” He threatened Welles that if he was not officially recalled, he would come home on his own and tell the American public that the destroyer-for-bases deal was “the worst ever,” that no written contract had ever been signed for the bases, and that when “‘all the facts are known’ they will ‘shock the American people.’”19

  The day after their telephone conversation, Welles reported what Kennedy had told him in a meeting with Roosevelt. Breckinridge Long, who sat in, recalled in his diary that Welles was in favor of permitting Kennedy to return to the United States, but “the President did not want him to come. He looks upon him as a trouble-maker and a person entirely out of hand and out of sympathy. Welles insisted upon [his] recommendation and [Roosevelt] finally compromised by saying he could come home the latter part of this month and that he would himself send him a personal letter, which Welles was to draft, giving him instructions about his conversation and conduct when he got here.” Welles raised his concern that Kennedy “might come out for Willkie. He realizes Kennedy is in a terrible blue funk about England, would give that impression here, and would advise the public probably that England was about to collapse. The president thought that it would be very unfortunate. He also thought Kennedy’s resentment would carry him so far as to urge the election of Willkie.”20

  Welles cabled Kennedy that he was going to be recalled for consultations. Six days later, the president sent the letter he had asked Welles to draft for him:

  “Dear Joe: I know what an increasingly severe strain you have been under during the past weeks and I think it is altogether owing to you that you get a chance to get away and get some relief. The State Department has consequently telegraphed you by my desire to come back for consultation during the week commencing October 21.” The rest of the telegram contained the toughest possible warning to Kennedy to keep his mouth shut. “I need not tell you that a great deal of unnecessary confusion and undesirable complications have been caused in the last few months by statements which have been made to the press by some of our chiefs of mission who have been coming back to this country. In your particular case the press will be very anxious to get some statements from you and no matter how proper and appropriate your statements might be, every effort will be made to misinterpret and to distort what you say. I am, consequently, asking you specifically not to make any statement to the press on your way over nor when you arrive in New York until you and I have had a chance to agree upon what should be said. Please come straight through to Washington on your arrival since I will want to talk with you as soon as you get here.”21

  The request was clear and Kennedy honored it—in his way, by not talking to the press. Only in his final interviews with British government officials, including Lord Halifax, did he make clear his dissatisfaction with his shabby treatment by Washington
and his intention to protect his reputation. As Halifax reported to Lord Lothian in Washington, Kennedy had told him that he had forwarded an article “to the United States to appear on November 1, if by any accident he was not able to get there, which would be of considerable importance appearing five days before the Presidential election. When I asked him what would be the main burden of his song, he gave me to understand that it would be an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration for having talked a lot and done very little. He is plainly a very disappointed man. I did what I could to soothe his feelings.”22

  Halifax’s memo set off a flurry of activity in the Foreign Office, which like the rest of the British government had a good deal invested in Roosevelt’s reelection. Halifax kept calm. He didn’t much like Kennedy, but he trusted that he would do no harm in Washington. The American ambassador, he knew from experience, took great pleasure in foulmouthed histrionics, but more often than not, his bark was much worse than his bite. “He was breathing threats of brutal speech to Roosevelt when he gets back but he does not intend to make things any more difficult for him in the election and will indeed, I have no doubt, when he gets there, help him.”23

  The ambassador spent his last days in London, as he had his first, calling upon his colleagues in the diplomatic corps. Rather like a lawyer constructing a brief, he was gathering evidence to support the position he had arrived at, that the British could not possibly defeat the Germans. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone he spoke to agreed with him. The Brazilian ambassador “was very pessimistic.” The Portuguese ambassador “was very bearish on the outlook for England, and saw very little if any hope.” The Turkish ambassador was “particularly pessimistic on the whole picture, unless the United States comes in and quickly.” The only diplomat who held any hope for the future was Ivan Maisky of the Soviet Union, whom Kennedy liked but had never much trusted.24

  He spent time as well with the leaders of the Labour Party. What he wanted from them—and they gladly supplied it—was confirmation that the end result of war, no matter who might win, would be some sort of socialism in Great Britain. He asked his “friend” Herbert Morrison, the Labour Party stalwart who had recently become home secretary, “point-blank just what type of government he visualized in England at the close of the war; at what point did he think he could stop short of National Socialism? He said he quite agreed that the old form of Government was gone. He thought Democracy could function, however, and get the advantages of National Socialism without the Gestapo and other disagreeable features. However, when I asked him to tell me how that was going to happen, he was at a loss—as are all the other leaders of the Socialist party. They see their opportunity to come to the leadership of the country and they believe they can fix their brand of Socialism so that it will be palatable to the country.” Kennedy posed the same question to Clement Attlee, the head of the Labour Party, who admitted that he was “spending a great deal of time trying to work out just what form of government England is going to have.” Kennedy concluded, “All those in authority believe they will have to have something pretty soon to sell to the people of England which will give them an idea of what they are fighting for.” John Reith, a Chamberlain Conservative, now minister of works and buildings, told Kennedy the government had decided that when it rebuilt East London, it wouldn’t put “workers’ houses up against the docks any more; we’ll have green lawns.” Kennedy’s response, as recorded in his diary: “Oh boy! I’m beginning to see National Socialism budding up so fast that these fellows don’t recognize it.”25

  The more he probed and learned, the more he was convinced that the free market capitalism he had known and profited from in the 1920s was doomed. He had recognized this years before—and that recognition had prompted his decision to support the New Deal and to send his older boys to study with the Socialist Harold Laski. The unfettered, unregulated markets on which he had built his fortune were artifacts of the past. Should the Americans enter the war, they would, he feared, have no option but to follow the British and control imports, exports, currency exchange, investment opportunities; dictate what should be produced and how and when; and set profits and wage rates. American capitalism would not survive the coming of war, as the British had not. Here, in a nutshell, was the most basic reason he was committed to doing everything he could, inside or outside the government, to keep his country out of war.

  —

  His final London farewell was the most difficult. Neville Chamberlain, the man who had welcomed him to Great Britain and had treated him as an insider, a partner, a collaborator for peace, was dying a dreadful death from cancer. Kennedy visited to say good-bye in person, then, the night before he left, wrote a final note: “Here I am tonight getting ready to fly at daybreak tomorrow. Before I go, I must tell you what I feel in my heart about you. . . . Your conception of what the world must do in order to be a fit place to live in, is the last sensible thing we shall see before the pall of anarchy falls on us all. For me to have been any service to you in your struggle is the real worthwhile epoch in my career. You have retired but mark my words the world will yet see that your struggle was never in vain. My job from now on is to tell the world of your hopes.” He signed his letter, “Now and forever, Your devoted friend, Joe Kennedy.”26

  He would be good to his word. Whenever the occasion arose—and sometimes when it didn’t—he would defend Chamberlain. If the British were now, in 1940, able to hold their own and forestall invasion and defeat, Kennedy was convinced it was because Chamberlain at Munich had bought them two years to rearm. His actions in 1938, more than Churchill’s in 1940, had made possible whatever military success the British would achieve.

  —

  Joseph P. Kennedy left London on Tuesday, October 22, two and a half years after his arrival. He had been warned before he ever set foot in London that he had neither the training nor the temperament for a diplomatic position, but his self-confidence, buoyed by successes in Boston, New York, Hollywood, Washington, and on Wall Street, was such that he could not imagine he would not do himself and his family proud. And he did—for the first few weeks—before that same self-confidence led him to speak his mind rather than follow State Department orders.

  He had sought to be an insider but refused to be a team player because he was convinced that he knew better than his superiors and that it was his responsibility to speak the truth, not tie it up in diplomatic obfuscations. He prided himself on being a realist, unlike Cordell Hull, who he feared was too moralistic, too sentimental, and Roosevelt, who did not always think rationally and relied too much on academics and politicians who knew little of the real world.

  As ambassador, he had had his priorities and he’d pursued them relentlessly, breaking rules and protocol whenever he thought it necessary. It was essential that the economy be righted, that prosperity return, and that the free enterprise system be preserved. None of this would be possible without peace in Europe. In the final analysis, he believed anything, even giving Hitler more than he justly deserved, was better than fighting a war against him. He had sympathy with the victims of Nazi aggression but would not allow that sympathy to interfere with his better judgment, that war with Germany had to be avoided no matter what the cost. If the well-being of Austrians and Czechs and Poles and Europe’s Jews had to be sacrificed, so be it. That millions of those Jews would later be murdered was not a consideration—as neither he nor anyone else in Washington or London considered it a possible outcome.

  Wiser heads had failed to prevent war from engulfing Europe in 1940, but that war could and had to be contained and brought to a negotiated end. Whatever happened to Great Britain, it was imperative that America not go to war.

  PART V

  Washington, but Briefly

  Twenty-six

  HOME AGAIN

  Upon arriving in Lisbon, the only safe place from which to fly across the Atlantic, Kennedy was “handed a note from Roosevelt specifically reque
sting me to come to the White House and make no statements to the newspaper men. I was, of course indignant,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, “but could understand Roosevelt’s position particularly when I came home and saw what the status was.” There was a second telegram waiting in Lisbon, this one from Clare Boothe Luce, who with her husband was backing Wendell Willkie and expected Kennedy to do so as well. Clare urged Kennedy to “tell the press and the people the truth as you have always told it to me. . . . If you say what you have never said to me or never believed that the boy on the burning deck [FDR] is the master of foreign policy of all time, then you will have to pay my funeral expenses and after that nothing in this land will be safe or sure. Them’s me parting words, my hero.”1

  Bad weather forced a day’s delay in Lisbon. The White House and the State Department, increasingly anxious lest Kennedy talk to the press before he spoke with the president, monitored his every move. When the Pan Am Clipper on which Kennedy was flying was held over a second day in the Azores, Sumner Welles called the White House and spoke with Edwin “Pa” Watson, the president’s secretary and adviser, who relayed the message to Roosevelt. Kennedy was not expected to arrive “until sometime Sunday. He [Welles] is going ahead with arrangements to get Joe Kennedy down here Sunday afternoon, as that would be the only place he could see you before (as Sumner Welles expresses it) any one else got at him to talk.” Lauchlin Currie, chief economic adviser in the White House, wrote Missy LeHand that “Arthur Goldsmith, a very close personal friend of Joe Kennedy’s, called Jerome Frank today and suggested that it would be most helpful if the President were to send Kennedy a little note on his arrival tomorrow and arrange to have him met by somebody important from the State Department.”2

  In Bermuda, the next leg of his journey, Kennedy was handed another telegram from the president, this one inviting him and Rose to “come to Washington immediately after your arrival in New York to spend Saturday night at the White House.” From Bermuda he called the White House to explain that he would be late arriving in New York, and got Missy LeHand on the phone. She “turned me over to the President whom they evidently had to awaken. The President was very pleasant. . . . He urged Rose and me to come down immediately on arrival.”3