The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Jack had asked him to tone down his rhetoric and avoid the term appeaser, but his father was too stubborn, too proud, and too loyal to the master appeaser, Neville Chamberlain, to do this. Instead, he tried to deflect criticism by redefining the term. “Another label used as a smear against certain citizens who favor keeping America out of war is the word ‘appeaser.’ I have been called one. Here is my answer. If by that word, now possessed of hateful implications, it is charged that I advocate a deal with the dictators contrary to the British desires, or that I advocate placing any trust or confidence in their promises, the charge is false and malicious. . . . But, if I am called an appeaser because I oppose the entrance of this country into the present war, I cheerfully plead guilty. So must every one of you who want to keep America out of war.” What precisely he meant by this was far from clear. How could one be an appeaser and yet agree with Roosevelt that it was futile to attempt to negotiate with, to “appease,” Hitler?

  Since his primary objective was to support Roosevelt without appearing to be his toady, Kennedy had to refocus the discussion. Instead of entering the debate over the lend-lease bill, he spoke on a topic of his own choosing and presented a series of disjointed arguments against the United States entering the war in Europe. He claimed that the United States was not “prepared to fight a war”; that there had been no national debate over “war aims”; that defeating Germany and rescuing Great Britain was insufficient cause to sacrifice American lives and fortune; that there was no danger of a German invasion of the western hemisphere, even after the defeat of Great Britain.

  “It is said that we cannot exist in a world where totalitarianism rules. I grant you—it is a terrible future to contemplate. But why should anyone think that our getting into a war would preserve our ideals, a war which would then practically leave Russia alone outside the war area getting stronger while the rest of the world approached exhaustion? . . . Well, at the end of the war we win—so what? What is the status of the world? Who is going to reorganize Europe? . . . To keep defeated Germany and the other counties from going completely Communistic we will have to reorganize them as well as ourselves, probably standing guard while this reorganization is taking place. I shudder to contemplate it. Are our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives to be spent standing guard in Europe while Heaven knows what happens in America?”

  Only at the end of his address did he refer to the lend-lease legislation, but in such a desultory, confused, conflicted manner that it was near impossible to know whether he opposed or supported it. He declared, to the delight of the president, that he was a firm believer “in centralized responsibility and . . . in conferring all powers necessary to carry out that responsibility. Moreover, I appreciate full well that time is of the essence.” And then, out of nowhere, he voiced his objection to the bill in two sentences: “I am unable to agree with the proponents of this bill that it has yet been shown that we face such immediate danger as to justify this surrender of the authority and responsibility of the Congress. I believe that after the hearings have been completed there will be revealed less drastic ways of meeting the problem of adequate authority for the President.”20

  No one knew quite what to make of his performance. Harold Ickes, who listened on the tiny radio he had placed on the dinner table, wrote in his diary that “Kennedy gave all of us the impression last night that he was doing some tightrope walking. He would seem to take one position and then to reverse himself. The speech was not impressive.” Democratic senator James Byrnes, who was in favor of the president’s bill, praised Kennedy in public for his “very strong statement of the reasons why this country should render all aid to Britain—promptly—short of war.” Burton Wheeler, who opposed the legislation, declared, also publicly, that he was “in entire accord with Kennedy’s remarks concerning the vital necessity of keeping out of war.”21

  Fifteen-year-old Robert Kennedy was relieved, as he wrote his mother, that his father had “really cleared himself from what people have been calling him.” And his father had indeed succeeded in making it clear that he was not an “isolationist” or a “defeatist” or in favor of opening negotiations with the Germans. But he had given Roosevelt’s opponents an opening large enough to drive a truck through by almost casually suggesting that the lend-lease bill might be amended to give Congress some oversight. The Chicago Tribune, published by Colonel Robert McCormick, who would later testify against what he and his paper referred to as the “dictator bill,” reported on the speech in a front-page story headlined in large type, boldface, DON’T ENTER WAR—KENNEDY, with the subhead “Opposes F.D.R. Bill.”22

  Kennedy had not intended to position himself as an opponent of the president or an advocate of the America First position. He supported the bill in principle and in substance; his objections were minor. There were myriad reasons for him to back the president, as he thought he had. He accepted Roosevelt’s argument that it made sense to aid the British in their fight against the Germans if only to buy time until the United States was fully rearmed; he trusted that Roosevelt was telling the truth when he declared that he had no intention of going to war with Germany; and he supported the president’s full-throttle rearmament campaign, which he expected would produce more than enough military goods to share some with the British. More practically, even had he disagreed with the legislation, it is likely he would have kept his complaints to himself or muttered them in private rather than go on the radio and testify to Congress about them. If he or, more probably, his boys, were to have any future in politics, it would be as Democrats. Irish Catholic politicians did not go very far in the Republican Party.

  Why, then, did he not come right out and endorse the legislation? Because he was too proud to permit himself to be viewed, again, as the president’s yes-man; too independent-minded to unequivocally support legislation he had not been consulted on; too obsessed by his own fears to focus on anyone else’s agenda, even that of the president of the United States; too caught up with his own importance to speak to the issue that mattered.

  In the end, he failed to understand what was required of him in a wartime emergency. Joseph P. Kennedy had battled all his life to become an insider, to get inside the Boston banking establishment, inside Hollywood, inside the Roosevelt circle of trusted advisers. But he had never been able to accept the reality that being an “insider” meant sacrificing something to the team. His sense of his own wisdom and unique talents was so overblown that he truly believed he could stake out an independent position for himself and still remain a trusted and vital part of the Roosevelt team.

  His abbreviated, curiously ambiguous, almost obscurantist remarks in his radio address on Saturday night focused added attention on his Tuesday morning testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Again, the consensus opinion was that he would speak in opposition to the bill as written. Walter Trohan of the anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune recalled in a letter written years later that he had been with Kennedy “the night before he testified. . . . He screamed, bellowed, and beat his breast that lend-lease meant war and shouted that war must be stopped because it would wreck our way of life.”23

  —

  He was called to testify at ten A.M. as the lead-off Republican witness. He would hold the floor for the next five hours. “Mr. Kennedy’s testimony,” the New York Times reported the next morning in a front-page story, “drew the largest gallery of any witness so far heard on the lease-lend bill. A throng of several hundred, predominantly women, including many inaugural visitors, jammed all available space in the Ways and Means Committee auditorium. On many occasions the audience broke into applause as Mr. Kennedy, with Irish wit and Boston straight-talk, shot his answer back to a searching question.” No one could nail him down; he treated congressmen from both sides of the debate and both sides of the aisle with studied contempt as they tried to get him to say something he did not intend to say. He did not think the president had made any secret deals with
the British or that the bill, if passed in its present form, would bring the nation closer to war. He was in favor of giving the president the powers needed to provide the British with immediate assistance, but he was opposed to the bill as written because it did not provide for a “coordinating function” for Congress. When asked what he meant by “coordinating function” or if he might suggest how the bill should be amended to provide it, he declined to elaborate, insisting only that he was sure that after the debate in Congress, the matter would be resolved.24

  He left the hearing room satisfied with his performance, unprepared for the reaction that would follow. Taken together, his radio address and congressional testimony would prove an unmitigated disaster. His final descent into the political purgatory in which he would spend the remainder of his years can be dated from the moment he left the hearing room on Tuesday afternoon.

  —

  The press coverage was devastating. He had “out-Hamleted Hamlet,” wrote columnist Dorothy Thompson, who supported the lend-lease bill. “Instead of posing the question ‘To be or not to be’ he managed to make it, ‘To be and not to be.’” Even Time and Life, Henry Luce’s large-circulation weeklies that were usually so friendly, mocked him heartlessly, perhaps in retaliation for his decision to endorse Roosevelt for a third term. “Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who smilingly took the stand,” Time reported in its summary of the first week’s hearings, filled “the room with obfuscation [and] could not even make up his mind whether he should be called ‘Mister’ or ‘ambassador.’ Said Mr. Kennedy cheerfully: ‘Whichever way you want me is all right with me.’ It was the nearest he got to defining his position.” Life reported that “Joe Kennedy had entangled himself in ambiguities from which even his best friends seemed unable to extract him.” The Republicans and America Firsters were astounded by his refusal to come out against the bill or attack the president as a warmonger; the administration accounted him nothing less than a traitor for his reluctance to stand behind the president and his bill.25

  “I tried to be as fair as I could at the testimony before the House Committee,” he wrote John Boettiger from Palm Beach on February 10, “and if you read it sometime you will be convinced that under the circumstances I got out quite well. Now, if my statements and my position means that, outside of the ever loyal Boettigers, I am to be a social outcast by the administration, well so be it. I will be sorry but if that’s the way it is, it’s just too bad. I will, at least, have the satisfaction of having fulfilled all my obligations.”26

  Boettiger sent a copy of Kennedy’s note to the White House, hoping that the president might reassure and welcome the ambassador back into the fold. Roosevelt was reluctant to do either. He was furious that Kennedy, while agreeing in principle with the lend-lease legislation, had refused to give it his unqualified support. “It is, I think, a little pathetic that he worries about being, with his family, social outcasts,” Roosevelt replied to his son-in-law. “As a matter of fact, he ought to realize of course that he has only himself to blame for the country’s opinion as to his testimony before the Committees. Most people and most papers got the feeling that he was blowing hot and blowing cold at the same time—trying to carry water on both shoulders.”

  Displaying an anger that he seldom allowed to be glimpsed outside family confines—and a touch of WASPish condescension that he also hid well—Roosevelt explained to his son-in-law that Joe Kennedy was an unreliable ally, and would always be—not because he was ambitious, which he was, not because he enjoyed wielding power, which he did, but because all he cared about was preserving the fortune he had accumulated and handing it on to his children. “The truth of the matter,” Roosevelt continued, “is that Joe is and always has been a temperamental Irish boy, terrifically spoiled at an early age by huge financial success; thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly selfish, and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with a million dollars apiece, when he dies (he has told me that often). He had a positive horror of any change in the present methods of life in America. To him, the future of a small capitalistic class is safer under a Hitler than under a Churchill. This is sub-conscious on his part and he does not admit it. Personally, I am very fond of Joe and he is wrong in referring to being hurt by my ‘hatchet men.’ I have none of course, though there are lots of people who speak out on both sides of the fence! After the lend-lease Bill goes through, I will write Joe to ask him to stop off on his way North. Sometimes I think I am 200 years older than he is.”27

  It is difficult to argue with any of this, save Roosevelt’s unnecessary reference to Kennedy as being Irish or his thoughtless remark that Kennedy believed the “small capitalistic class . . . safer under a Hitler.” He most definitely did not. Had he, he would have been much less frightened by the likelihood of a German victory in Europe.

  PART VI

  Palm Beach and Hyannis Port

  Twenty-eight

  A FORCED RETIREMENT

  Press attention over Kennedy’s lend-lease testimony subsided soon enough and, with it, any interest in what he had to say or was doing. Except for an item or two in the Palm Beach society pages, his name all but disappeared from the daily newspapers and weekly magazines. Only Arthur Krock made mention of him in columns published in April, May, July, and September 1941, each of which suggested that Kennedy was one of several “brilliant ‘unemployed’” business executives who belonged in Washington.

  There were no more invitations from the America Firsters to write or broadcast or speak out on their behalf. The whirlwind antiwar crusade that he had promised—and that some in the Roosevelt camp had so feared—never materialized. If he had wanted, he could have found venues for his views, or bought them, but he had said his piece, and until the situation changed, he had nothing more to say. “As I promised at the time of my appearance before the Foreign Relations Committee,” he wrote Franklin Gowen, still at the U.S. embassy in London, “if the Lease-Lend Bill were passed after proper debate, I would go along with it, so I have kept religiously quiet. I have disappeared from the stage and will let new faces take on.”1

  Early in the following year, Jack Kennedy would tell his girlfriend Inga Arvad, whose conversations the FBI monitored because they feared she might be a German spy, that “his father’s greatest mistake was not talking enough; that he stopped too quickly and was accused of being an appeaser” because he feared that his comments “might hurt his two sons later in politics.”2

  On resigning as ambassador, Kennedy had, indeed, stopped talking to the press. He retreated into a closed Palm Beach universe, surrounded by adoring children and golfing buddies. He was not a recluse or a shut-away, but preferred to spend time at home—and at the Palm Beach Country Club, the “Jewish club,” which was only a few minutes distant. (He was, he boasted, one of the club’s two non-Jewish members. The other was the Duke of Windsor.) He had given up playing tennis with his boys when Joe Jr. got good enough to beat him. But he still enjoyed a round of golf with them, probably because he still played better than they did. He played fast, never wasted time, never lost a ball (to his children’s and his caddy’s amazement), though he spent a good deal of time looking for the ones that went astray, and seldom lost any money on his bets. His favorite ploy with his boys was to remind them, on those few occasions when they were leading, that they had only “two up with three to go,” ratcheting up the pressure on them not to mess up, which, Ted remembers, they inevitably did.3

  He saw his children over their Christmas and Easter vacations but was alone with his buddies most of the winter. Rose visited occasionally but didn’t stay for long. Joe Jr. was still at Harvard Law School, Kick at Finch College on Manhattan’s East Side, Bob at Priory in Rhode Island, Pat and Jean at the Sacred Heart Convent school in the Bronx, and Rosemary in Washington, D.C., at St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, a residential school for “retarded” girls staffed by Benedictine sisters from St. Scholastica Priory in Duluth,
Minnesota.

  St. Gertrude’s was a temporary solution for Rosemary until the situation improved in England and she could return to live with Mother Isabel. At twenty-two years of age, Rosemary was much older than the other students at St. Gertrude’s, but there were few other institutions in the country that could accommodate the special needs of a woman her age. She was still quite pretty, with short, curly brown hair, a toothsome Kennedy smile, rounder than her waiflike sisters, Patricia and Eunice, but not terribly overweight. Kennedy monitored his daughter’s care, as he had in England, visited her, and kept in touch with Dr. Thomas Moore, the priest who oversaw St. Gertrude’s.4

  Jack and Eunice, both plagued by undiagnosed medical problems (later identified as Addison’s disease), did not go to school that spring. After a short stay in the hospital, Eunice traveled to Latin America with her mother. Jack, after yet another inconclusive battery of tests in Boston, returned south to help his father with his memoirs, then joined his mother and sister on their Latin American tour.

  Ted, the youngest, was the only Kennedy afforded the dubious honor of being allowed to remain in Florida after the Christmas holidays. He was enrolled in a local Palm Beach elementary school for three months until Easter. Then, with the “season” at an end and his parents heading north, his mother arranged for him to attend Priory with his brother Bob. “I entered the seventh grade at Portsmouth Priory in the spring of 1941,” Ted wrote later in his memoirs, “when I was barely nine years old, boarding and competing with boys who were four years older than me. It was a recipe for disaster. My time at Portsmouth Priory was not an education; it was a battle.” His only friend was his pet turtle, who died a few weeks after he arrived.5