The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Thanks to men like Krock, Joe had managed to become one of the most celebrated members of Roosevelt’s administration. He was also one of its most disloyal. Joe did most of his bellyaching not to Roosevelt but to conservative journalists such as Krock, who heard his complaints not as treacherous whining but as a principled assault on New Deal doctrines.

  Roosevelt realized that in Joe he had a subordinate who approved of neither his fiscal nor social policies, a man who in less troubled times perhaps would have been sacked. The president, however, was holding together a disparate and troubled coalition. Joe was no more disloyal than many Democratic Catholics who listened on the radio to the vicious anti-New Deal jeremiads of Father Charles Coughlin as if they were Sunday sermons. Joe was friendly enough with the demagogic priest that he wrote Coughlin in August 1936 thanking him for calling Joe “a shining star among the dim ‘knights’ of the present administration’s activities.”

  During the interlude between his two positions in Washington, Joe had hired himself out to various troubled corporations for princely sums. He was brilliant at ferreting out excess, fraud, and corporate squalor and singularly unsympathetic to the mediocre inheritors who often sat at the heads of America’s major corporations.

  In a stint at troubled Paramount Studios, Joe prepared a harshly candid portrait of a company in which directors who were the architects of “dissension and division in management policies” still sat on the board. He condemned the “cumulative effects of a chain of incompetent, unbusinesslike and wasteful practices,” and he backed up his critique with figures as firm as his words.

  Joe received $50,000 in return, plus another $24,000 for his assistants, but he apparently thought that Paramount itself would have been fairer compensation. “Roosevelt is worried about anti-Semitism in America and one of the causes is all the movie companies being owned by Jews,” he told the board of directors, including Edwin Weisl, a senior partner in the Wall Street firm of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett. Weisl recalled the incident to his son, Edwin Weisl Jr., who, like his father, was a leading Democratic operative.

  “What are we supposed to do?” a board member replied, painfully aware of the wages of fear rising across the world.

  “The company ought to be owned by a non-Jew, and Roosevelt says you should sell it to me.”

  Weisl had excellent political connections, and before he advised the board to sell, he wanted to confirm everything with Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest aides. “Hey, Chief,” Hopkins asked Roosevelt as Weisl stood near by. “What’s this about Joe Kennedy and Paramount?”

  “What’s Paramount?” the president queried.

  “Have you heard enough?” Hopkins replied, and the two men left the president alone. Weisl went back to the board to tell them that they should not sell Paramount to Joe but pay him off with money and thanks and be rid of him.

  Joe returned to Cambridge in November 1937 for the Harvard-Yale game, in which Joe Jr. would have his last chance to win a letter. His son had had a sad, unfulfilling career on the Harvard team, condemned to perpetual life on the bench.

  He had practiced as hard as any of the varsity players and was never known to shirk an exercise or cut practice. Joe Jr.’s tenure on the team, however, had been plagued by injuries. In his freshman year he had broken his arm. The next year he had suffered such a serious knee injury that in his junior year his leg was operated upon. His father, despite his quasi-religious belief in football, feared that his eldest son was going to end up with a gimpy leg or worse, an honor that he would wear longer than a Harvard “H.” “You should think very seriously whether it is worthwhile or not,” Joe wrote his son.

  Joe Jr. took his admonitions from the book of life he had learned from his father in the summers at Hyannis Port. A man did not give up or give in. He had lost weight, and he was far down on the list of ends on the team. Yet he went out for his final year, another dispirited season largely spent watching his teammates from the sidelines.

  For his sheer devotion to the team, Joe Jr. deserved to be shuttled in for at least one play to win his Harvard “H.” Joe Jr. had no doubt but that he would indeed see action, for it was the honorable Crimson tradition to let all the seniors in for at least one play during their final Yale game.

  His father could have told his son that as far as he was concerned, that tradition had ended a quarter-century ago on the baseball diamond. Since then his father had come to believe that fate was another word for pathetic fatalism. On the Friday evening before the game, as the backfield coach, Al McCoy, sat in his office perusing the list of seniors who were likely to play, Coach Dick Harlow received a call from a person identifying himself as a friend of Joe Kennedy. “He wanted to know if Joe [Jr.] was going to get his letter tomorrow because he wanted to tell the father,” Harlow fumed as he hung up the phone. “Well, nobody’s going to high pressure me!” Later that evening a man who identified himself as Joe Kennedy attempted unsuccessfully to reach the coach to put in a further plug for his son.

  Saturday afternoon several games were played before the fifty-seven thousand fans as the damp wind blew fiercely across the Charles River. For some, the least interesting of the games was the one played on the frigid field. There the Yale and Crimson elevens struggled up and down the turf until, in the last quarter, with six minutes remaining, Harvard broke the tie with a touchdown.

  For the seniors, the game that truly mattered centered on the coach’s decision to let them play in their last competition and win their letter. With that final Harvard touchdown, they were sure their moment had arrived. Up until then only seven substitutes had seen play, and the sideline was full of restive, nervous athletes ready for their moment of glory. The new coach had been brought in from Western Maryland, where he had a stellar record. Harlow’s mandate was to win. It was one of the ironies of this day that of all men it should have been that champion of winning at all costs, Joseph P. Kennedy, who glowered down on the coach, wanting his own son to play, winning be damned.

  Harlow looked up and called for a new end to enter the game. If power and history meant what Joe thought they did, the coach would have bypassed Green, Jameson, and Winter and called out “Kennedy.” Instead, Harlow barked out, “Jameson.” The coach had made his last substitution, and when the final gun went off, there was as much sadness as joy on the long Harvard bench.

  While Joe Jr. was lost in the surging crowds, his father made his way to the center of the field, where he greeted Coach Harlow with words that did not make their way into Monday’s Harvard Crimson. The Harvard paper did mention the names of seven worthy seniors who did not play that day. To add a modicum more of indignity to Joe Jr.’s final game, his name was not even listed.

  8

  Mr. Ambassador

  When Joe was named the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the announcement was greeted with wide approval. Joe was not what Americans perceived as the stereotypical diplomat, a pinstriped, lisping, top-hatted fop, but a straight-shooting, straight-talking American whom the British could not bamboozle. He was not going to be taken in by the highfalutin’ tomfoolery that had supposedly seduced previous ambassadors and turned them into hapless agents for the British establishment.

  Before setting off from New York, Joe planned a dramatic gesture against those elitists who thought themselves better than a third-generation American. The most privileged young ladies of America came to England each year to be presented at court, a practice that Joe decided to end as soon as he arrived in London. Joe would keep the honor intact for Americans resident in London. Thus the debuts of his daughters could be occasions uncluttered by a hundred fluttering American young women. “That neat little scheme you cooked up, before you left … to kick our eager, fair and panting young American debutantes in their tender, silk covered little fannies, certainly rang the bell,” the journalist Frank Kent wrote Joe. “A more subtle and delightful piece of democratic demagoguery was never devised.”

  The forty-nine-year-old a
mbassador arrived in London on March 1, 1938, to assume one of the most crucial assignments in American diplomatic history. Joe had not even presented his credentials when he was confronted with the darkening dilemma of Europe and the transcendent question of what America’s role should be in the growing conflict. That month German armies marched into Vienna and Adolf Hitler pronounced the Anschluss, the uniting of the two countries. From the Austrian capital, Hitler cast his predatory eye on Czechoslovakia. In Germany itself, those Hitler considered his enemies—Jews, Communists, pacifists, and democrats—were being herded into camps with names such as Dachau and Buchenwald. In Spain, the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco, aided by their German and Italian allies, moved forward in Catalonia, driving the Republican armies back.

  Joe’s first speech was the traditional one given by each new American ambassador to London’s Pilgrim Club, a prestigious gathering of leaders in business and politics as well as ranking diplomats. It was a fitting venue for a modest address by an ambassador new both to diplomacy and to Britain. Joe wanted to say something substantial, however, “thereby breaking a precedent of many years’ standing,” as he wrote in his diary. The new ambassador imagined himself a fearless man who would serve up healthy platters of unparsed reality to an audience unused to such simple fare. He drafted a preachy discourse that sought to push American foreign policy up the road of isolationism, away from Britain and the struggle against Nazism. Joe put a far higher value on candor than it deserved, for truths and policies changed, and it was a fool’s game proudly to state the obvious, rubbing British noses in the face of American policies that offended many of them. Joe was full of arrogant self-assurance and his idée fixe that America had to stay out of the sordid, dangerous, deadly strife of Europe.

  As much as Joe despised and feared communism, he shared with Marxists the belief that economics was the bedrock reality beneath politics. People were a largely mediocre, self-serving lot whose most important organ was not their head but their stomach. “An unemployed man with a hungry family is the same fellow, whether the swastika or some other flag floats over his head,” he wrote Kent. Joe made the same sort of cynical assertions in his draft speech. “I think it is not too much to say that the great bulk of the people is not now convinced that any common interest exists between them and any other country.”

  When Joe sent his proposed address back to the State Department, Secretary of State Cordell Hull needed to use a full measure of his diplomatic skills to get his newest ambassador to cut the most offensive passages without taking his changes as a rebuke. As tactful as Hull tried to be, he played his trump card, ending his lengthy telegram: “I have shown this to the President and he heartily approves.”

  Joe’s agenda, as he wrote Bernard Baruch, was to “reassure my friends and critics alike that I have not as yet been taken into the British camp.” Since he had just arrived in London, it is hard to see how he could have already become a fifth columnist, seeking to seduce an innocent America into a marriage of inconvenience with a declining, troubled Britain. As Joe looked out on the cordial gathering of much of the British establishment, he wrote Baruch that he found it “difficult to let them have the unpalatable truth I had to offer.” But brave man that he thought himself to be, he overcame his reluctance and signaled to the British that the newly arrived ambassador had already fully made up his mind about the crucial issue of the day. He was startled, though he should not have been, that “parts of it fell flat.”

  Joe was not a man who liked to dawdle. He had no time or patience for silly posturing and the daily inanities of the diplomatic world. Diplomacy, however, is a game largely of tiny victories, of nuanced rituals in which everyone is a player, both friends and enemies. He seemed hardly to understand that an ambassador is called a “diplomat” for a reason. The refined manners and cautious language of the diplomatic circles are not silly affectations but the very procedures that allow friends to stay friends, enemies to sup with one another, and belligerents to enter into civilized discourse.

  Joe’s candor was a gift that he passed out promiscuously. In June he had his first meeting with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador. The Nazi official reported afterward that Joe had expressed his full understanding of the plight of the misunderstood Nazis. The American ambassador had even attempted to advise him on ways to minimize the unfortunate image that much of the world had of the Nazis. The Nazi ambassador said that Joe told him that what was harmful to the Nazis was not that they wanted to get rid of the Jews, “but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely; he was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted for the past … years.” The Nazi diplomat quoted Kennedy as saying that the great things Hitler had done for Germany impressed him. Von Dirksen added that Kennedy believed “there was no widespread anti-German feeling in the United States outside the East Coast where most of America’s 3,500,000 Jews were living.”

  Years later Joe denied that he had ever made such a statement, calling it “complete poppycock.” But the words resonated with the harsh tenor of his candor. Joe was not pro-Nazi, but he rationalized the unrationalizable, turning his eyes away from the worst of Hitler’s excesses.

  Joe’s anti-Semitism—and there is no more benign word for his beliefs—was common among those of his class and background. The hard center of anti-Semitism in America lay not among the poor but among the rich, perpetuated not by the assaults of street thugs but by genteel whispers. Hoffman Nickerson, in his 1930 book The American Rich, celebrated the fact that the wealthy class had raised barriers so that the Jew lost “his hope of concealing his separateness in order to rise to power within non-Jewish societies, half unseen by those among whom he moves.” The more Joe and his family had risen in society, the more they observed the wages of anti-Semitism.

  Joe’s life paralleled the social exclusion of Jews from elite American life, all done without any clamor at all. In 1922, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard gave a graduation address at Harvard in which he proposed quotas limiting Jewish students. In Bronxville, the Kennedys lived in a community proud of not having Jewish residents. In Palm Beach, Jews were not welcome at the premier hotels and were excluded from membership in the most desirable clubs.

  Joe believed himself a man of the immutable world of power, part of the elite world. He considered it only natural to point out that America had its “Jewish problem” too. And it was natural that the Germans believed that there were millions of Americans like Joseph P. Kennedy who understood what the Führer was doing. After all, a nation that had systematically excluded Jews from the haunts of its social elite could certainly understand why another nation felt that it had to exclude them from its very precincts.

  From his early days in London, Joe was obsessed with the Jews and their perilous propensity to yell out when they were struck. As he saw it, they were fully capable of manipulating America into a war to save their lives and possessions. Joe feared war not for himself or for his nation as much as for his precious sons. His boys might die or suffer in a conflict that he considered none of his country’s business.

  When Joe’s aide Harvey Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany, he told the ambassador of the horrendous things he had seen as he wandered through the streets. Nazi storm troopers molesting Jews in the streets, painting swastikas on windows, and trashing the merchandise in Jewish-owned stores. Joe listened to this newest witness to the Fascist savagery. Then, as Klemmer recalled, he turned to his aide and said, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”

  Joe was certain of his own judgment, and deeply suspicious of Roosevelt. The new ambassador began sending a series of essaylike letters to a select group of influential friends in the United States, each one marked “Private and Confidential,” as if the letter had only one recipient. It was a foolish, needlessly provocative thing to be doing. He was supposed to be the eyes and ears of his government. Yet in one of these often-weekly
missives he wrote that he had “been to no great pains thus far in reporting to the State Department the various bits of information and gossip which have come my way, because they don’t mean anything as far as we are concerned.”

  Joe considered himself smarter than most of those around him, able to read the self-serving motives that propelled society along. That was his most dangerous illusion, for there was often a transparency to his manipulations that made even those he called his friends suspicious of him. His associates may have been flattered to receive these candid memos. But they were less flattered when they realized that they were simply names on a list. Kent, his irony perfectly in place, wrote another recipient, Baruch: “Just had another of Ambassador Kennedy’s syndicated ‘Private and Confidential’ letters.”

  One of those not on the list who was less than amused by Joe’s machinations was Roosevelt. The president was contemplating running for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and was inordinately sensitive to any Democrat who would dare to think of challenging him. Joe’s letters seemed an attempt to curry favor with some of the most important opinion makers in America. “Will Kennedy Run for President?” asked Liberty magazine in May 1938, a question that many were beginning to ask, no one more seriously than Roosevelt himself.

  Roosevelt was worried in part because Joe had told him that America would have to “come to some form of fascism here.” Joe believed that only an authoritarian government would be able to contain social unrest, hold down the grasping masses, and build a strong economy. It was a foolish thing to tell Roosevelt and only exacerbated the president’s growing distaste for his new ambassador. Roosevelt could have recalled Joe, but that would have brought him back to America with two full years to create mischief before the presidential election. Joe probably would have been able to pry away several million Catholics from the unwieldy New Deal coalition. Roosevelt decided that he would cauterize this little wound before it became serious.