by David Nasaw
“People call me a pessimist. I say, ‘What is there to be gay about? Democracy is all done.’”
“You mean in England or this country, too?” he was asked.
“Well, I don’t know. If we get into war it will be in this country, too. A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone. They tell me that after 1918 we got it all back again. But this is different. There’s a different pattern in the world.”
Asked about British democracy and what it meant “to have labor men now at the center of government,” he answered bluntly, “It means national socialism is coming out of it. . . . Democracy is finished in England. It may be here. Because it comes to a question of feeding people. It’s all an economic question. . . . We haven’t felt the pinch of it yet. It’s ahead of us.”
He insisted it was important to provide Great Britain with military aid “to give us time” to rearm. He would not even try to guess how the war would end but was insistent that America stay out.
“‘I’m willing to spend all I’ve got to keep us out of the war,’ Kennedy flashed towards the end of his talk. ‘There’s no sense in our getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.’” He claimed that he was starting up his own “determined and fighting crusade, to ‘keep us out. . . . I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it’s up to me to see that the country gets it,’ he says in explanation of the role of carrying the torch that he has cut out for himself.”
The reporters left the hotel that afternoon with more than they had bargained for. Coghlan, assuming the interview remained off the record and “for background,” did not publish anything. But Lyons, knowing a big story when he saw one, wrote up what Kennedy had told him.
To make it clear to his readers—many of whom were Kennedy fans—that he had not intended to hang Kennedy and that any damage done was self-inflicted, he embedded a paragraph, subheaded “Reporter’s Dilemma,” in the middle of his article, explaining that he had planned to do a “soft” Sunday piece but had been given much more, which he now felt obligated to share with his readers.16
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The next morning, back in Bronxville, Kennedy was called to the phone by Joe Dinneen, another Boston Daily Globe reporter. Neville Chamberlain had died and Dinneen wanted a quote from Kennedy.
“‘That’s quite an interview you gave Louis Lyons for this morning’s paper,’ the reporter [Dinneen] said.
“‘Why? What did he say?’ Joe asked.
“‘What did he say?’ [Dinneen] repeated. ‘He wrote everything you told him.’
“Dinneen proceeded to read some of Kennedy’s quotes from the story.
“There was a dead silence on the other end. [Dinneen] thought they had been cut off. . . .
“‘He wrote all that?’ Kennedy asked incredulously.
“‘All that and a lot more,’ he was told. ‘Anything wrong with it? You said it, didn’t you?’
“There was another pause. ‘I said it,’ he agreed.”17
The interview appeared in Boston in full, with an edited and more volatile version syndicated by the Associated Press on front pages across the country. Kennedy claimed the next day that the interview had been “off the record” and not for publication and that Lyons, who took no notes, had gotten several quotes wrong and manipulated others to “create a different impression entirely than I would want to set forth.” The problem with his explanation, as Arthur Krock wrote him, was that “the general impression here seems to be—and this goes for the State Department also—that whatever the facts about the off-the-record restrictions the sentiments sound very much like yours, with one or two exceptions.”18
The New York Herald Tribune called on Kennedy to explain himself or resign. Alsop and Kintner had a field day. “The history of American diplomacy is replete with fantastic incidents,” they wrote forty-eight hours after the article appeared, “but a good many State Department officials agree that the recent interview given by Joseph P. Kennedy . . . comes near to winning the prize.” The two reporters concluded, without any evidence, that the ambassador’s “crusade for ‘peace’ . . . is obviously a potential front, behind which Kennedy and the men who go along with him may be able to start the first articulate, unblushing movement for appeasement the country has yet seen.” That Kennedy had mentioned nothing about “appeasing” Hitler did not register with Alsop and Kintner, who had gone looking for and found numerous “indications of appeasement-mindedness” in the interview.19
To protect himself from the onslaught in London, Kennedy cabled a warning to Lord Beaverbrook. “The bombers may be tough in London but the ill-disposed newspapers are tougher in America. . . . Tell my friends not to pay any attention to anything they read that I say unless I sign or deliver it myself. There is as much conniving . . . in this country as there is in Russia.”20
On November 19, Republican congressman George Tinkham inserted into the Congressional Record a verbatim copy of the article and follow-up stories in the New York Times and the Boston Evening Transcript.
Kennedy reluctantly and belatedly recognized that he had to now issue a “restatement of his position.” Bluntly, unapologetically, and quite untruthfully, he denied having made “anti-British statements in this country [or] saying that I do not expect the British to win the war.” His chief concern, he emphasized, remained “keeping America out of the war—but there has never been any secret about that. Everyone has known from the beginning that I have been against American entry into the war.”21
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General Raymond E. Lee, Kennedy’s military attaché in London, had noted earlier the ambassador’s penchant for “going off into a tirade or oration” at the drop of a hat. He “used almost to get drunk on his own verbosity, and I am inclined to think that is what betrayed him on many occasions.” This was precisely what had happened at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. It would happen again a week later, on the other end of the continent.
Kennedy had flown west to visit with Jack, who was taking courses at Stanford, and drive with him to see Hearst and Marion at Wyntoon, their estate in northern California. On his way back to New York, he accepted an invitation from the Warner brothers to speak at a luncheon at their studio. His topic was supposed to have been the difficulties of importing films to Europe in wartime, but he instead delivered a thundering three-hour monologue, in which he declared with an almost manic urgency that the British were doomed, that Britain’s Jews were being blamed for the war in Europe, and that Hollywood and America’s Jews would be similarly blamed for whatever hardships might occur should the United States enter the war. According to one Hollywood insider who provided columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner with an account of the talk, Kennedy’s discussion of anti-Semitism was not only “strangely irrelevant,” but in the view of most of those assembled had been “introduced into the discussion for scare-head purposes.”22
“He apparently threw the fear of God into many of our producers and executives,” Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., wrote President Roosevelt the day after the speech, “by telling them that the Jews were on the spot, and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the ‘democracies’ versus the ‘dictators.’ . . . He continued to underline the fact that the film business was using its power to influence the public dangerously and that we all, and the Jews in particular, would be in jeopardy, if they continued to abuse that power.”23
Three weeks earlier, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator had opened in New York City. It was drawing good crowds at premium ticket prices across the country. Knowing Hollywood’s herd mentality and understanding the endemic yet often unexpressed rage in Hollywood against Hitler, nazism, and Germany, Kennedy feared that Chaplin’s picture and the earlier release of The Mortal Storm, another successful anti-Nazi film starring Jimmy Stewart, would set the stage for similar
films. His message to the studio executives was to stay away from the subject entirely, that demonizing Germans, though emotionally satisfying, was going to prolong the war and the suffering by making it more difficult for both sides to approach the bargaining table. The longer war raged in Europe, the greater the likelihood that Americans would be drawn in. And if that happened, Kennedy warned, the cry would go out across the nation that American boys and resources were being sacrificed because the Hollywood Jews had hoodwinked the nation into fighting a war it had no business getting into.24
Kennedy’s attack on Jewish producers was so intemperate, so uncalled for, and ultimately so provocative that it left observers struggling to figure out if some ulterior motive was in play. “His campaign of terrorism,” British Foreign Service officer Eric Cleugh reported, might have been “prompted by a hope that it will cause some of the Jews to get out of the business, so leaving a gap for Mr. Kennedy.” Several of those who had heard him speak at Warner Brothers “and who ‘sit in high places’ in this industry,” Fairbanks Jr. noted in his letter to Roosevelt, “feel that . . . he is personally ambitious to take over powers in the film business. He has suggested ‘clean-ups’ and ‘clean-outs.’” Darryl Zanuck, who was not Jewish, was asked the day after the luncheon what he thought Kennedy’s motives had been in bringing up the subject of anti-Semitism. He replied, “He wants to scare the Jews out of the film business so that he can get back into it again.”25
Kennedy’s remarks at the Warner Brothers luncheon were not recorded or reported in the newspapers. But news of what he had said was quickly relayed to Washington and to New York, where the Century Group, a loosely organized committee of journalists, lawyers, retired military men, and politicians who advocated expanded assistance to the British, if not an American declaration of war on Germany, drafted a letter demanding that Roosevelt repudiate Kennedy “as an official spokesman for the United States in any capacity” and remove him from his ambassadorial position, “not on the soft cushion with a ‘well-done’ accolade, but with a summary and indignant discharge.”26 Roosevelt, who already knew Kennedy was going to resign, saw no need to do anything.
From Hollywood, Kennedy flew back to New York to continue his one-man antiwar crusade, not in public but in a series of meetings at the Waldorf Towers with the country’s most influential opponents of intervention. On Friday, November 22, the day after Thanksgiving, he visited with ex-president Herbert Hoover. The ex-president, delighted but perhaps a bit puzzled by the visit of a Roosevelt appointee who had worked so hard to defeat him in 1932, agreed entirely with Kennedy on the futility of war and the need for a negotiated end to the hostilities, before Europe’s great cities were reduced “to rubble heaps.” Hoover kept a detailed record of the meeting and recalled Kennedy telling him that “if we went into the war, we would have a National Socialist state—he said he could see no return to democratic forms. He said that as between a bet on the British going down and our becoming a totalitarian government, we have to take the risk of British defeat . . . to avoid totalitarianism by keeping out of the war.” On leaving the ex-president, the ambassador announced, unbidden, “that he would keep in communication with me, that we have a joint mission to keep America out of the war, and that he wanted to devote his every energy to it.”27
Following his session with Hoover, Kennedy met with Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News, Roy Howard, Charles Lindbergh, and others. To all of them, he insisted that the British position was “hopeless” and the best possible outcome to the war was a “negotiated peace.”28
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On December 1, Kennedy stopped off in Washington on his way to Palm Beach to meet with Roosevelt and formally submit his resignation. Though the president had not yet chosen a replacement, he accepted Kennedy’s resignation with the caveat that he remain in office until a new ambassador could be named and confirmed. He did not rebuke him for telling Lyons that “democracy was finished” in Britain or for mouthing off about Jewish influence in Hollywood. Well aware that he might have need of Kennedy’s support in the recurring battles he anticipated over rearmament and assistance to Great Britain, Roosevelt had no intention of alienating him further. Instead, he discussed with him, as he would with a senior adviser or a man he was considering for a new appointment, “several problems bothering him,” including economic relations with Canada and South America, potential labor problems at defense plants, and the hard road ahead “fitting Naval plans in with naval production contractors, etc.” Kennedy, for his part, greeted the president as he would an old and trusted friend. “When he complained that people don’t understand all the problems and mentioned his own physical indisposition [he was suffering from a bad cold], I said: ‘For God sake don’t let anything happen to you and then have to take Wallace [Henry Wallace, his vice president]—you’re responsible for him and he has no experience.’ He replied, ‘That’s right, I’ll be careful.’”29
In a statement released to the press on exiting the White House, Kennedy announced that he was resigning.
“Today the President was good enough to express regret over my decision, but to say that, not yet being prepared to appoint my successor, he wishes me to retain my designation as ambassador until he is prepared. But I shall not return to London in that capacity. My plan is, after a short holiday, to devote my efforts to what seems to me the great cause in the world today—and means, if successful, the preservation of the American form of democracy. That cause is to help the President keep the United States out of war.”30
Twenty-seven
THE MAN WHO OUT-HAMLETED HAMLET
Apparently Joe Kennedy is out to do whatever damage he can,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary on December 1, 1940, the same day Kennedy had his cordial reunion with the president at the White House. “He has had an interview with Hearst with a view to starting a campaign for appeasement in this country. He has seen, or is about to see, Roy Howard and Joe Patterson, of the New York News, who for some reason has been talking appeasement. . . . This would make a powerful combination. Kennedy has lots of money and can probably raise all that he needs.”1
Four days later, Alsop and Kintner sounded the same warning, but in public: “Let there be no mistake about it. When Joseph P. Kennedy grandiloquently announced he was laying down his office to fight for the cause of peace, he really meant he was going to peddle appeasement all across the United States. . . . Indeed, he seems to have been at it already. For it must be more than a coincidence that wherever Kennedy has gone in the country since his return from London, there have been sudden crops of defeatist rumors and appeasement talk. By following his announced plan of seeking out leading men and telling them his story, Kennedy may have a great effect on public opinion.”2
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On December 11, 1940, General Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck, the chairman of the anti-interventionist America First Committee, approached Kennedy with a proposal. Believing (as did most foes and friends of the president) that Kennedy was ready to campaign full-time now against the administration, he suggested that he succeed him as chairman of the committee. Kennedy’s reply was courteous, if noncommittal: “My own hunch is, at least for the time being while I am still Ambassador in name, I won’t join any Committees, and after I get out I think I will have to decide just how I think I can work best.” He agreed, nonetheless, to meet in Palm Beach with Robert Stuart, Jr., who had founded the America First Committee while a law student at Yale and now served as its national director. After the meeting, Kennedy wrote Wood again to confirm that he was not going to join the committee just yet, but that he was prepared to “do everything I possibly can to help you.”3
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Less than two weeks after leaving Washington for Palm Beach, Kennedy was called back for the funeral of Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States and dear friend of Lady Astor’s. Met at Washington Airport by reporters, “he seemed determined as he strode along the concrete runw
ay to avoid political matters,” until he was asked a question about preparedness. He answered “dryly” that what the nation needed was “less talk about going to war and more action about building up our defenses.” This was taken by some as an indication that Kennedy was ready to return to Washington to help build those defenses. “Guessing what Joseph P. Kennedy will do next,” the Los Angeles Times reported on December 16, 1940, “is one of Washington’s most popular sports.”4
Arthur Krock, who defended Kennedy in his December 8 column against “the close-knit and sincere, but intolerant group” that attacked him as an “appeaser,” was working on his own plan to bring Kennedy back into the government. He proposed to Roosevelt and to Hull that Kennedy be appointed as a special presidential envoy and sent to Ireland, ostensibly to discuss food supplies but secretly to negotiate with President Éamon de Valera on behalf of the British, who wanted to be able to make use of Irish military bases. The proposal was outlandish, noted Neville Butler, currently in charge of the British embassy in Washington. Still, Butler warned, the suggestion had to be taken seriously, as it came from Krock and Kennedy, “people of importance in this world here with correspondent capacity for mischief.” Butler was instructed by Halifax, with Churchill’s full agreement, to meet with Hull and tell him that the British government “do not consider that good is likely to come of [the initiative]. For your own information, we regard Mr. Kennedy as a highly unsuitable emissary though we appreciate that we must not antagonize him or such Irish-American opinion as is under his influence.”5
