by David Nasaw
The ambassador arrived in New York at two thirty on Sunday afternoon, two days late. The White House sent Max Truitt, his closest friend still in government service, to hand-deliver yet another note from Roosevelt. Truitt was accompanied by Robert Stewart, who headed up the British Empire desk at the State Department and had been ordered to stay at Kennedy’s side until he arrived in Washington.
On exiting the plane, Kennedy was besieged by reporters and photographers. “Do I have to go through this before I even see my family?” he asked, laughing. At almost the same moment, he caught sight of Rose, Jean (nearly thirteen), Patricia (sixteen), Eunice (nineteen), and Kick (almost twenty-one)—mother and three older daughters in fur coats, Jean in cloth. Teddy, not yet nine, was missing, his car having been delayed in traffic. After embraces, tears, and smiles all around, the girls and Rose left the room momentarily so that Kennedy could greet the reporters. Looking “for all the world like a man bursting with things to say,” the New York Times reported the next morning, the ambassador “limited himself to these words: ‘I have nothing to say until I have seen the President.’ . . . He promised to ‘talk a lot’ when he had had his discussion with the President.”4
He left the reporters and the newsreel cameras to see his daughters, then for a meeting with Rose, John Burns, Eddie Moore, Ted O’Leary, and a trusted and political-savvy Boston friend, Cornelius Fitzgerald. They “talked the situation over as to whether or not I would be for or against the President. I told them that I had many personal grievances, but questioned as to whether or not they were sufficient grounds on which to take a definite stand.” Rose argued rather strenuously that for the good of the family, Kennedy had to back Roosevelt. The president had appointed him as the first Roman Catholic ambassador to London, something no other president had or would have done. He had sent him as his representative to the pope’s coronation. To abandon him now would forever mark Kennedy as an “ingrate.” Burns agreed and warned Kennedy that if he backed away from Roosevelt, it would “turn him into a pariah. . . . None of his boys will able to hold their heads up at a Democratic convention ever again. It will be destructive for all his dreams and hopes for his children.”5
In the end, there was no real question as to what Kennedy would do. He had no faith that Willkie was qualified to serve as president, and despite his dissatisfactions with Roosevelt, he thought him infinitely more competent. He believed as well that Roosevelt would be true to his word and keep America out of the war in Europe.
A little after five P.M., only a few hours after his plane from Bermuda had landed, the ambassador was in the air again, this time with Rose and the State Department official as their chaperon. They arrived in Washington at six thirty and, after posing for photographers and waving to reporters, were whisked away to the White House in a presidential limousine.
Roosevelt brilliantly orchestrated Kennedy’s reception, as he had every step of his journey from London to Lisbon to the Azores to Bermuda to New York to Washington. With James Farley having abandoned the administration and Al Smith campaigning for Willkie, the president needed a high-profile Irish American to come to his defense and declare unequivocally that he was not plotting to send American boys to die in trenches to save the British Empire. The week before Kennedy’s arrival, Felix Frankfurter, now a Supreme Court justice but still among Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers, had approached Frank Murphy, the former governor of Michigan, recent attorney general, and now Supreme Court justice, while they were both “sitting on the bench” and asked his advice on saving “the Catholic vote, which was rapidly leaving Roosevelt.” Murphy, Kennedy wrote later in his diary, had suggested to Frankfurter that the ambassador be asked to make a speech on the president’s behalf. A few days later, Justice Murphy was called to the White House for a meeting with Harry Hopkins and his two colleagues on the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas. The subject, Murphy told Kennedy, was “how they could get me [Kennedy] to come out for them. Douglas and Murphy agreed that I was absolutely important to get. Frankfurter appreciated that I was, but hated to ask me. . . . There was a lot of conversation and it was left to the President to get in touch before (as they said) Krock could get me.”6
Roosevelt, knowing Kennedy’s desire to be treated as an insider, invited him and Rose to spend the night at the White House and arranged for an informal scrambled eggs and sausages dinner to be served not in the dining room, but “on the Upper Floor right off his Study,” with Missy sitting in for Eleanor, and James Byrnes and his wife the only other guests. “When we were about half through the dinner,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “Jim Byrnes, acting as though a wonderful idea had just struck him, said he thought it would be a great idea if I would go on the radio Tuesday night on my own. He thought it absolutely essential that I go and most necessary for the success of the Roosevelt campaign. . . . I didn’t say, Yes, Aye, or No. The President worked very hard on Rose, who I suspect he had come down because of her great influence on me. He talked to her about her father. All through dinner, Byrnes kept selling me the idea, but I made no comment, because I wanted to talk alone with the President before making any decision.”
When, after dinner, the group reassembled in the president’s study, Kennedy announced that “since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the President alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody.” He was, he told the president, “damn sore at the way I have been treated. I feel that it is entirely unreasonable and I don’t think I rated it.” He reminded Roosevelt how, at a rather low point in his presidency, he had “come out for you for a Third Term.” Still, in spite of all that he had done, “you have given me a bad deal.” He cataloged his complaints, from Donovan to the generals to the destroyer deal, as if he were talking to a business associate, not the president of the United States. As he had anticipated, Roosevelt “promptly denied everything,” blaming Knox and Welles and the “career men” in the State Department. After Kennedy confronted him about the leak of one of his cables to Alsop, Roosevelt “disclaimed any responsibility, and protested his friendship for me. Rose chimed in at this point and said it was difficult to get the right perspective on a situation that was 3,000 miles away.” “Somebody is lying very seriously,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “and I suspect the President.”
The discussion “went on and on.” There was, tellingly, no mention of foreign policy initiatives, no questions from Kennedy as to what the president planned to do next, no talk of anything other than the ambassador’s grievances. Rose, in her diary entry, recalled that “Joe did most of the talking. The President looks pale.” After what seemed like hours of Kennedy complaints and Roosevelt explanations, the ambassador brought the long evening to an end, as he recalled in his diary, by telling the president that he would “make the God damned speech for you and I will pay for it myself. It will cost twenty-two or twenty-three thousand dollars but that is alright. . . . I will write the speech myself. I don’t want anyone else to do it for me. . . . I am not going to show it to anyone. You will all trust me or you won’t get it. . . . I have my own ideas about this and I want to get it out my own way.”
Everyone thought that a fine idea; Missy LeHand called the Democratic National Committee and arranged for radio time for the following Tuesday. “I made up my own mind,” Kennedy later told Frank Murphy, “that I was going to acquit myself of all my indebtedness to the President, that I would stand by him, that I would go down the line for him, that I would pay for it myself.”7
Roosevelt had suggested that Kennedy and Rose spend the night at the White House, then return to New York with him on his campaign train. Kennedy declined. If he took the train with Roosevelt, everyone would know he was going to endorse him. It would be better to maintain the suspense and build as large an audience as possible for the Tuesday radio broadcast. Though he hadn’t seen his wife, much less spent the night with her, in more than eight months, he took the late flig
ht back to New York. Rose slept over at the White House in the bedroom where, according to a plaque under the mantelpiece, the Queen of England had slept on her recent visit. “There was no mention made of the King.” Rose could not help but wonder where he had slept.8
The ambassador had promised the reporters who met him at the airport that he would talk to them at eleven A.M. the following morning at the Waldorf. But instead of doing so, he had his secretary issue a press release declaring that he would “speak over the nation-wide Columbia network on Tuesday at 9 P.M.” The Democratic National Committee announced only that it had released one half of the one-hour block it had previously booked and that Kennedy’s radio time would be paid for by his wife and nine children. Kennedy sequestered himself in his hotel suite with John Burns and a few others to draft his speech. He saw no visitors, took no calls, and leaked nothing of what he might say.
“I’ve tried all day long to get you,” Clare Boothe Luce telegraphed on Monday. “The fact that I can’t is I’m afraid answer to a number of questions. First and foremost I’m so happy you are home and safe and you are to me, like millions of others, as well as Ambassador, a grand guy—even a bit of a hero. I want only for you to know, when you make that radio address tomorrow night . . . you’ll probably help to turn the trick for him. And I want you also to know that I believe with all my heart and soul you will be doing America a terrible disservice. I know too well your private opinions not also to know that half of what you say (if you say it) you really won’t believe in your heart. . . . I know you will, in the end, do what you think is the right thing. But please remember that the rift that the election of FDR will drive through the National heart is the same rift your speech in support of a third term is going to drive through mine tomorrow.”9
Kennedy’s radio endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt on October 29 was not nearly as full-throated or enthusiastic as four and eight years before. Instead, he delivered an extended, almost pedantic policy statement on the need for the United States to rearm. He had taken to heart the lessons of Jack’s senior thesis, that only rearmament on a grand scale would protect the United States from being bullied by Hitler and the dictators. To preserve the peace, the United States was going to have to quickly rebuild its military strength until it rivaled that of the dictators. “What counts in this hour of crisis is what we in the United States of America are prepared to do in order to make ourselves strong. . . . We are re-arming because it is the only way in which America can stay out of war. . . . It is today our guarantee of peace.” To those who might charge that his was “an unduly pessimistic view of the world situation,” that he was “steeped in gloom,” he asked where in the “world picture” was there “any excuse for gaiety. A large part of the productive capacity of the world is devoted to the cause of killing; millions are facing starvation; millions are facing disease. Great peoples are being sacrificed. . . . Gloom, under such circumstances, is nothing more than ‘facing the facts.’” He closed his talk by focusing attention back to himself, his experience, and his family. “As a servant of the American people I feel that they are entitled to my honest conclusions. In my years of service for the Government, both at home and abroad, I have sought to have honest judgment as my goal. . . . After all, I have a great stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world. The kind of America that they and their children will inherit is of grave concern to us all. In the light of these considerations, I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President of the United States.”10
His address was over by 9:30. At 10:18, the president sent a telegram to his suite at the Waldorf. “We have all just listened to a grand speech. Many thanks. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow evening.” Jack cabled from California, “Proud to have sponsored you.”11
The following day, at a rally and speech at the Boston Garden, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his audience how pleased he had been to “welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador in the Court of St. James’s, Joe Kennedy.” Kennedy, who had decided not to accompany the president to Boston, got a telegram that night from Kick, who reported from Eddie Moore that “the Pres really went to town for you tonight in Boston amidst terrific cheers from the crowd. . . . It’s great to be famous. Goodnight from your 4th hostage.”12
The Republicans picked up on the president’s reference in his Boston speech to “my” rather than “our” ambassador as further evidence of the president’s dictatorial pretensions. The White House issued a legal opinion that the ambassador, having been appointed by the president, was indeed “his” ambassador, but the critiques continued. Roosevelt could have cared less. Kennedy’s address had done what he had wanted it to do and more. It had rallied reluctant Irish Catholic voters to his side, buttressed his claims that he was not going to take the nation into war, and emphasized that he alone had the experience to lead the nation in these difficult times.
On the Saturday before election day, Kennedy joined seventy-six thousand fans at Yankee Stadium to watch Notre Dame defeat Army, 7–0. After the game, he visited with Frank Murphy, who recorded their conversation in his diary notes. “‘For heaven sakes, get me some tea and cinnamon toast at once—I am starved,’ he [Kennedy] remarked as he sprawled out on the davenport to rest.” For the next hour or so, he recounted in a stream of unbroken bitterness all the affronts he had suffered in London. “He was violent and profane in explaining it all. He practically left no one uncursed but that is the style of this able and dynamic man and so it ought not to be given too much emphasis. That he was filled with wrath and possessed contempt for those who have tried to undo him was plain.”13
Three days later, on November 5, 1940, the American people went to the polls and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with 55 percent of the popular vote and 449 of 531 of the electoral college votes.
The Wednesday after the election, Kennedy returned to Washington and visited the White House, congratulated the president, and told him he wanted to resign his position. Roosevelt asked him to wait until he had found and named a replacement.
The ambassador’s next stop was the State Department, where he met with Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, and Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, now head of a special division handling problems related to the European war, including the refugees. Nothing could shake or temper Kennedy’s pessimism, which was so stark and out of line with recent events that Long attributed it to a kind of battle fatigue. The ambassador refused to see what everyone else in Washington saw: that the RAF had turned back the Luftwaffe campaign to free the airspace over the English Channel; that the Germans had called off their invasion plans; that Spain had not entered the war on the side of Germany and Italy; that there had been no coordinated German-Italian thrust toward the Suez Canal; that Italy, in fact, had turned away from the Middle East and invaded Greece instead; that the British were already and the Americans would soon begin turning out more fighters and bombers than the Germans.
None of this had had any effect on Kennedy. The cataclysm he had feared had come to pass. Even Breckinridge Long, no cheery-eyed optimist, was frightened and disturbed by Kennedy’s relentless negativity. “He sees a new philosophy, both political and economic, with the United States excluded from European markets and from Far Eastern markets and from South American markets. . . . Consequently he thinks that we ought to take some steps to implement a realistic policy and make some approach to Germany and to Japan which would result in an economic collaboration. He does not see how or what. He has no suggestion to make. He only feels that what we are doing is wrong but does not know how to do it right. . . . He does not believe in our present policy. He does not believe in the continuing of democracy. He thinks that we will have to assume a Fascist form of government here or something similar to it if we are to survive in a world
of concentrated and centralized power.” At the conclusion of their meeting, Kennedy told Long that “he was going to the west coast and would see Hearst and try and set him right and see other publishers like McCormick and I [Long] told him that he ought not to talk to the press or to talk in a way that would scare the American people . . . that the American people needed education in foreign affairs and that to thrust it upon them too suddenly would be disastrous. He agreed and said that he would not do that.”14
Kennedy would have been wise to heed Long’s counsel.
—
On November 7, the day after Long had warned him not to talk to the press, the ambassador flew to Boston to visit with Joe Jr. in Cambridge and Bob at Priory, catch up with friends and family, and check into the Lahey Clinic for a full physical examination. When he arrived at the Ritz-Carlton, he found a note from Boston Daily Globe reporter Louis Lyons, who had interviewed him four years earlier for a favorable story that received wide national coverage: “The Globe hopes I can persuade you to talk to me a little for our people—just as a traveler home from the wars, not political talk. . . . Anytime, anywhere that you can spare me a snatch of time, I’d like to make the most of it.”15
Kennedy could not say no.
On Saturday afternoon, Lyons arrived at the Ritz-Carlton for the interview. With him were Charles Edmonson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and his editor, Ralph Coghlan, to whom Kennedy had promised a “background” briefing on the war. The three journalists found Kennedy in his shirtsleeves, eating apple pie, perhaps celebrating the clean bill of health he had gotten the day before at the Lahey Clinic. Thinking that he was among friends—after all, Lyons was a Boston reporter—and assuming that he was speaking off the record and would not be quoted directly, Kennedy held court for the next ninety minutes. He was at his best that afternoon: jovial, warm, opinionated, a reporter’s dream. He never stopped talking and did not censor what he had to say. He repeated in clear, plain, tough talk what he had been putting into his diplomatic dispatches for more than a year. Lyons took it all down.
