Kennedy explained how in Boston, where he came from, it was not only Jews but Irish Catholics, like himself, who had suffered discrimination. “Such pronounced attitudes were quite common,” Dirksen quoted Kennedy, “but . . . people avoided making such an outward fuss about it.” The Protestant majority back then, Kennedy allowed, didn’t have to face, as Germany now did, an American press “strongly influenced by Jews.”
In short, the United States ambassador in London, descended himself from a shunned and shunted-aside minority, told two different representatives of the Third Reich that their government’s harassment and persecution of their Jewish citizens was not the issue. In Kennedy’s view, public relations was the real problem. By repackaging their Jewish policies for outside consumption, they would solve it.
“While telling them what they wanted to hear about American anti-Semitism and Jewish media dominance,” Joseph Kennedy biographer David Nasaw has observed, “he was not saying anything he did not believe himself.”
Upon his arrival in London, Joseph Kennedy had swiftly established a strong relationship with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Both men were in agreement on what appeared to them the greater wisdom of letting Hitler play out his hand. They were willing to let him stretch Germany’s borders in land grabs that could, with closed eyes and a bad conscience, be accepted as reasonable territorial demands, thereby avoiding another European war.
In the last week of September 1938 Chamberlain traveled to Germany several times. But not until the waning hours of the 29th did he and the three other European leaders with whom he was meeting—Adolf Hitler; the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who in 1936 had agreed to a treaty with Germany; and the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier—sign what is known as the Munich Agreement. There in the Führerbau, Hitler’s Munich headquarters, Chamberlain, wanting nothing more than to keep Britain at peace, behaved expediently—thereby turning his name into a synonym for ignominious retreat: appeasement.
The deal to which he agreed said, basically, that neither the British nor the French would intervene in Hitler’s imminent annexation of the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, which stretched along the eastern German border and were known as the Sudetenland. It was a cold-blooded sacrifice, nothing less. No moral claim could cover it. What drove it was the hope, which Joseph Kennedy also clung tightly to, that this concession would avert a second world war, one that America would be again impelled to enter—and this time threaten his beloved older sons who were of an age to fight.
Winston Churchill, then outside government and not regaining any official position until the autumn of 1939, saw it very differently: “We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year.”
But Ambassador Kennedy not only accepted the Munich accord; he went out of his way to offer his support. “It is unproductive for both democratic and dictator countries to widen the division now existing between them by emphasizing their differences, which are self-apparent,” he said in a speech on that October day the British annually celebrate Admiral Horatio Nelson’s 1805 victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets. “After all, we have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not.” The American ambassador to Britain was endorsing a policy of live-and-let-live with Adolf Hitler, the man who’d grabbed Austria and now part of Czechoslovakia.
Three weeks later came the horrors of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. Across Germany and Austria, violence against Jews raged through the streets, shocking the world. The American ambassador to Great Britain had just been trying to proselytize the notion that democracies and dictatorships needed to share the same world. But Kristallnacht decisively demolished such thinking. Kennedy was now a man fighting history.
In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The new war in Europe was now a reality. Joseph Kennedy, having long opposed the conflict, now responded to Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany with a personal genuflection to defeatism. Remaining in London himself, he began sending his family back to America and out of harm’s way.
He could never shield them from the legacy of “Munich” and his own part in appeasing Adolf Hitler. Although barely a teenager at the time, his father’s legacy from London would hang on Bobby Kennedy for the rest of his life.
Joe Jr., Jack, and Bobby with Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.
CHAPTER THREE
HONOR THY FATHER
“The most important obligation, binding on everybody, was the preservation, at all costs, of the good name of the family. It is much more powerful than any notion of good citizenship . . . stronger and more compelling than any ethical or moral law.”
—CAOIMHíN Ó DANACHAIR, “THE FAMILY IN IRISH TRADITION”
Returning to the States with his family, Bobby was, by his father’s decision, packed off to St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire. An elite boys boarding school with Episcopal ties, its alumni list had on it Astors, Biddles, and Vanderbilts. The famed banker J. P. Morgan had gone there as well. It was an institution that meshed perfectly with Joseph Kennedy’s ambitions—though not, as it turned out, with the reality of his third son’s nature and skills and, more importantly, his needs.
Bobby would say that he was always “going to different schools, always having to make new friends.” Only a kindergartner when the Kennedys left Boston, he’d been placed in a public primary school in Riverdale, New York, staying there through second grade. When they next moved—to Bronxville, only a few miles distant—he attended third through fifth grades. For sixth grade, he switched from public to private, enrolling at Riverdale Country School. After this, it was off to England and the despised red cap at Gibbs.
Bobby described himself as “quiet,” never troubled by being alone. But at St. Paul’s, his adjustment, from the start, was rocky, and his poor performance was a result of that. It was his first time living away on his own from the familiarity of all that he knew: his mother and father, his sisters and brothers, the rituals and rhythms of so many in the same house. Within a month, he was gone.
Whether or not he’d have adjusted—as fourteen-year-old boys often succeed at doing in such cases—his mother’s response to her son’s difficulties put the blame on the Protestantism of St. Paul’s. Though her older sons both had graduated from the very similar Choate, a school also chosen by her husband, Rose’s view was that it had none of the spiritual shelter necessary to her keenly faithful third son. Alerted to the fact—and not happy—that the St. Paul’s chapel relied solely upon the King James Bible, she decided to remove Bobby and enroll him at Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine-run school in Rhode Island. If only for the moment, she was able to follow her own wishes regarding the education of her “pet.”
She could do so only because her strong-willed husband’s attention—ordinarily bent on his boys being educated beside the heirs of the American establishment—was elsewhere. Still in London and still the United States ambassador, Joseph Kennedy was starting to contend in earnest with the challenge of his own diminishing credibility.
At this point, Kennedy needed a corrective PR campaign of the type he’d suggested to the Nazis. Seen as an “appeaser” on both sides of the Atlantic, America’s man at the Court of St. James’s had backed himself into a bad corner. He’d allowed himself to appear, certainly to his harshest critics, an apologist for Adolf Hitler.
Claiming that his sole concern all along had been to avoid war, it didn’t square with his well-known remarks on the subject.
Kennedy had surpassed even Neville Chamberlain in his desire to appease the German chancellor. Britain’s prime minister had realized at last the folly of trusting any deal with Hitler. In demanding the territory that was the Sudetenland, the Führer had spoken only of his goal to restore German-speaking popula
tions to the Fatherland. He then trampled on that claim when the Wehrmacht marched into what was left of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939.
More even than an appeaser, Joe Kennedy was, from the start, a defeatist. Before Munich, he’d flown famed aviator Charles Lindbergh to England to argue that German airpower could devastate London and Paris. Then, with Hitler unchecked, Kennedy kept up the idea, against all the evidence, of reaching “good relations” with Germany.
In truth, Joe Kennedy was never a team player, and the less savory aspects of this self-interested maverick were now pushing through the polished surface he’d so carefully cultivated. He’d gotten where he was being exactly who he was—by relying upon his instincts and his own distinct vision of the world. “Ruthless”—the word so often applied to him—had fit him his entire life and still did.
But now he was floundering. On the most vital question of the day—whether his country should aid a beleaguered Britain against Adolf Hitler, the American ambassador was opposed. He had one thought, and one thought only: a sustained British resistance to Hitler only insured the inevitability of a United States entry.
On May 10, 1940, eight months after Britain and France declared war on Germany, the “Phoney War”—the name given to the period in which the belligerents held only to defensive positions—abruptly ended. Suddenly Hitler’s panzers were racing through Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and on into France.
In July, Hitler prepared to invade Great Britain. His first target was Royal Air Force fighter bases, needing to crush them in order to permit a sea assault across the English Channel. For two months, German bombers struck at the British airfields and industrial targets. Starting in September, the target became London itself. And now came the Blitz. With unceasing attacks day and night, German bombers carried out raids aimed at crippling British morale. More than a million buildings were hit and tens of thousands killed. Walking along Piccadilly, Joseph Kennedy told a companion, “I’ll bet you five to one any sum that Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks.”
Against this terrifying backdrop, with Europe and Britain in mortal struggle against a demoniac foe, the three adult Kennedy men each now continued on his path. Joe Sr., the father, carried on with his ambassadorial duties, even as President Roosevelt pushed him further to the sidelines, choosing to communicate directly with the new prime minister, Winston Churchill. Joe Jr., who’d graduated Harvard in 1938, the same year his dad received the ambassadorship, had returned there after his stint as his father’s secretary to enter Harvard Law. Jack, for his part, finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard just as the war entered the deadly phase that would last over the next five years.
As his senior thesis, Jack—who the year before began taking seriously his studies for the first time—wrote “Appeasement in Munich.” In it he offered his thoughts about the fateful decision made by Neville Chamberlain when he’d met with Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier. Praised by professors, and encouraged by his father, he transformed the paper into a bestselling book, Why England Slept, published the year he graduated. He took the title from a recent book by Churchill, which was a collection of his speeches, starting in 1932, warning Britain about the rise of German military power and its own need to rearm.
Jack Kennedy took a nuanced angle on the Munich decision. He defended Chamberlain’s failure to fight in 1938, but accepted Churchill’s argument that Britain had been guilty of not being prepared to confront Hitler. He carried the argument further, writing that his own country must not make the same mistake. Jack was using his book as a megaphone, exhorting his country to prepare itself for war and, at all costs, to avoid finding itself in the same weak position as Britain in 1938.
In July of 1940, Franklin Roosevelt, breaking the two-term tradition set by George Washington, was again nominated to head the Democratic ticket in that November’s presidential election. His opponent, Wendell Willkie, an Indiana lawyer and businessman, had been an active Democrat until the year before.
By October, FDR had reason to think his man in London increasingly a public problem, political and diplomatic both. Kennedy had continued to make abundantly clear his belief that the British would lose the war. Defiantly, he persisted in fighting Roosevelt’s plan to send Churchill fifty destroyers in return for long-term leases on U.S. naval bases on British overseas islands.
FDR was worried also about Catholic voters defecting from the New Deal coalition. One was Kennedy’s own son, Joe Jr., who as a Massachusetts delegate to the Democratic convention had backed Roosevelt’s opponent James Farley over the third-term issue. Roosevelt had hopes Kennedy senior would agree to one last timely service: a nationwide radio address urging his reelection. An election eve broadcast from such a prominent and successful Irish American would be an eleventh-hour boost.
Joseph Kennedy had been signaling his wish to come home, and now asked for a “consultation” with the president. Roosevelt obliged, summoning him back. Stopping over in Bermuda, he contacted the White House to say he’d be late arriving in New York. Getting on the phone, FDR was “very pleasant.” He urged Joe—and Rose, who was joining him—to come directly down to the White House for the night.
Lyndon Johnson, then a junior Texas congressman and fervent New Deal supporter, happened to be in the room with the president when he spoke to Joe. Here’s the version he left of the conversation he overheard as he sat there. First, there was FDR’s brief opening retold LBJ style: “Joe, how are you? Been sittin’ here with Lyndon just thinkin’ about you, and I want to talk to you, my son. Can’t wait. Make it tonight.” After hanging up—again here in Johnson’s telling—the president turned to him. “I’m gonna fire the sonofabitch,” he announced with a grin.
LBJ took glee in sharing his rendering of that one-sided conversation. What gratified him most, obviously, was showing how close he’d been to his political hero, Roosevelt. But it also made clear his unabashed contempt for Joe Kennedy.
Like all good stories, it traveled wide, to be heard incessantly by friend and foe alike. For many of those listeners, it served only to burnish the notoriety of a man whose stubborn public positions—defeatist and even cowardly—in the lead-up to World War II had placed him forever on the wrong side of history. Getting wind of LBJ’s gem of a story years later, Bobby Kennedy took it as an insult to his family.
President Roosevelt, of course, won the controversial third term he sought, carrying thirty-eight of the then forty-eight states. He exceeded Willkie’s total by five million votes and carried the electoral college by a sweeping 449 to 82.
His task of firing Joseph Kennedy was then made easier by the ambassador’s remarks that ran in a Boston Globe front-page story on Sunday, November 10, just five days after the election. “Democracy All Done in England” ran the headline on the Associated Press wire, which had picked up the story.
Joe had been interviewed at the Ritz-Carlton. It was Boston’s most exclusive and luxurious hotel, expecting its guests to be in either Who’s Who or The Social Register. There he greeted a Boston Globe reporter and two writers from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while eating a slice of apple pie. With no ground rules set for the conversation and yet assuming the session was off the record, Ambassador Kennedy spoke frankly. “People call me a pessimist. I say, what is there to be gay about? Democracy is all done.” He went on to add, “Democracy is all finished in England. It may be here . . .” He saw the Labour Party’s inclusion in the British government leading the country to socialism. He believed American entry into the war would put us on the same road. “A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone.”
Kennedy, later feeling the heat for what he claimed were “off the record” remarks, said that he was merely trying to keep the U.S. out of the war. It was too late. On December 1, Joseph Patrick Kennedy offered his resignation to President Roosevelt. His two years at the Court of St. James’s were over. The dark stain he’d laid upon his own reputation became an indelible one. It
would cast a shadow on his family that never quite went away.
• • •
Many of us today know the Kennedys only from the perspective of history. Yet others, like Chuck Spalding, then a new friend of Jack’s, were around to see them as a real and lively family. Recounting to me his first visit to Hyannis Port that summer of 1940, Chuck painted an unforgettable picture. Greeting him as he arrived at the big house overlooking Nantucket Sound was a happy crowd of sisters and brothers all yelling down at him from a window. He couldn’t tell for sure, but to him they all appeared to be naked. It took him aback. “I regarded myself as fairly sophisticated having gone to prep school and all that,” he told me. Yet he hadn’t been prepared, he said, for such unselfconscious high spirits. Eventually, he found his pal Jack sitting wrapped in a towel autographing copies of Why England Slept to an impressive set of world leaders—including one, he remembered, for the prime minister of Australia.
The Kennedys’ joy in life would come, of course, to prove vulnerable. It was the following year, 1941, that brought what Rose Kennedy would call “the first of the tragedies.” Her third child and oldest daughter, Rosemary—who’d suffered serious oxygen deprivation at birth—was then living at St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts in Washington, D.C. There, “educable or mildly emotionally disturbed, handicapped girls” were looked after by a small but devoted staff of Benedictine sisters.
Rosemary, in her early twenties, was causing problems: she’d get angry, even violent, striking at people. Worse, especially for her protective father, was her tendency to disappear from the grounds and then be found wandering local streets. Hearing of an experimental surgery—known as a prefrontal lobotomy, a procedure necessitating the cutting away of brain matter—Joe made the decision, entirely on his own, to have it performed on Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital. His hope was, if not a cure, then at least an improvement in her behavior. But it was far from a success.
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