The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Steve Early, the president’s press secretary, called in Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune was the most consistently anti-New Deal major paper in America, and it was a measure of the subtlety of FDR’s chicanery that Trohan should be the vehicle that he chose. Trohan was Joe’s supposed friend, but he said that he was ready to “write a story against any New Dealer.”

  “The boss thought you would,” Early replied. “Joe wants to run for president and is dealing behind the boss’s back.” The press secretary tossed a bunch of letters toward the reporter, a collection of the “Private and Confidential” letters Joe had written Krock. The New York Times reporter had sent the correspondence to the White House as evidence of his patron’s perceptive thinking.

  “The guy’s working both sides of the street,” Early said.

  Joe was in the United States for an official visit when he was confronted with the Tribune’s front-page headline—” Kennedy’s 1940 Ambition Open Roosevelt Rift.” Trohan wrote that “the chilling shadow of 1940 has fallen across the friendship of President Roosevelt and his two-fisted trouble-shooter, Joseph Patrick Kennedy.” The story said that Joe had “besought a prominent Washington correspondent to direct his presidential boom from London.” For Joe’s career, the most ominous words were that inside the administration he was being called “the soul of selfishness” in words “crisp with oaths.”

  Joe was in Washington on June 25, 1938, when he learned of the story that had run two days earlier. “It was a true Irish anger that swept me,” Joe noted in his diary, the first time in years he had acknowledged that he might have some of his forebears’ more dubious qualities. Joe talked to Roosevelt, who did a superb job of pretending innocence. Joe was proud that he did not “mince words,” but berating the president was an indulgence of the worst sort. An enemy will do you ten times the harm that a friend will do you good, and President Roosevelt was the worst enemy of all. For all Joe’s proud bluster and Early’s “half hearted denial,” the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s realized “that something had happened.”

  Roosevelt held his diverse New Deal coalition together in part with the glue of manipulativeness. He nodded approvingly to one subordinate’s ideas, then nodded approvingly to another who suggested quite the opposite. Joe represented many of the twenty-one million Roman Catholic Americans, a crucial if uncertain part of Roosevelt’s coalition. Roosevelt needed Joe, even if he neither liked nor trusted him. He needed him to pull back fully within the parameters of the administration, and to do in London what he had been sent there to do. It was a message as clear in its delivery as it was impossible for a man of Joe’s character to carry out.

  As disdainful as Joe was of the often tedious work of diplomacy, he reveled in the more pleasurable rituals of life at the Court of St. James’s. In the evenings, the palatial thirty-six-room ambassadorial residence at 15 Prince’s Gate often resounded with gay laughter and spirited discussions as members of the British elite took their measure of this irrepressible, irreverent new ambassador; many of them were no more interested in taking on the Nazis than he was. Rose was usually there beside him in a splendid Parisian gown.

  Joe introduced his happy brood and had his older children sitting at the dinner table, imbibing the sophisticated conversation. Kathleen was making her debut that season, and she was full of exuberance and wit, her laughter cascading across any gathering. She was a triumphant success, pursued by several of the most desirable young men in the kingdom. Eunice, Pat, and Jean were studying at the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton, where many of their classmates were from the titled families of Europe.

  Bobby and Teddy attended the Gibbs Preparatory Boy’s School on Sloane Street, within walking distance of the ambassadorial residence. Bobby took the school’s rigid discipline in stride, but Teddy took umbrage at being whacked on the fingers with a ruler for some silly infraction. Rosemary was sent the farthest away, to a Montessori school in Hertfordshire.

  Luella Hennessey, an ebullient, warmhearted nurse, had come over from Boston to watch over the Kennedy children. She saw that Joe was extraordinarily busy with his diplomatic duties while Rose had a more leisurely existence, her days lightly punctuated by social events and fittings. And yet Joe told her: “Any problems you have with the children, Luella, you are to bring them to me, not to my wife.” Joe dominated his children’s lives with an often mysterious presence. He investigated any young man so bold as to date one of his daughters and even went so far as to check out the men whom Luella was dating.

  Joe applied true diplomatic skills to his own sex life, practicing a discretion that had eluded him in America. He arrived at a Wimbledon tennis match with a young blonde on his arm, while his daughter Kathleen attended the match watched over by a chaperone. But for the most part Joe kept his affairs quiet. He was enamored enough of British life to have forsaken actresses and showgirls for sophisticated, upper-class British ladies.

  These aristocratic ladies were at what the British upper class considered the age of dalliance—old enough to have successfully bred an heir or two, young enough to have their looks and desire fully intact, bored enough to welcome occasional diversions. As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Joe was a powerful, virile man who quickly adapted to the more subtle forms of sexual conquest practiced in London.

  Occasionally Joe took his aide Harvey Klemmer aside and bragged to the younger man of his latest conquests. This at first startled Klemmer. After all, Joe insisted that Klemmer always include in the speeches he wrote for the ambassador a few paragraphs about the ambassador’s wonderful family, his loyal, loving wife, and their nine precocious children. But Klemmer found himself mesmerized by Joe’s detailed accounts, especially when he started dropping one famous name after another. “His name was connected to various women all the way up to the top,” Klemmer recalled. “Once he said the queen was one of the greatest women in the world. He wanted even that left to speculation, when there was absolutely nothing.”

  Early in their stay Rose and Joe spent one wondrously memorable weekend at Windsor Castle as the guests of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Rose recalled later in her autobiography that after the master of the household had shown them to their rooms in the tower of the castle and the servant bearing crystal glasses of sherry had left, Joe turned to his wife and said: “Rose, this is a helluva long way from East Boston.” As full of momentary awe as he may have been, Joe was not the kind of man ever to admit to being impressed by mere surroundings or acquaintances. He did not spend this weekend in fawning obeisance but over dinner expressed his isolationist views to Queen Elizabeth in a blunt American idiom. Joe was nothing if not bold in word and manners. When the queen lost her napkin and said that it was gone, he noted in his diary that he had spied it “sticking up and retrieved it.”

  That weekend Joe met sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for the first time. The dour, cryptic, uncommunicative Chamberlain was in some ways as curious a choice as prime minister as Joe was as ambassador. Both had achieved success in business. In their lifestyles however, Chamberlain, the ascetic, had little in common with Joe Kennedy, the libertine.

  The two men did hold the same pessimistic vision of the world situation and had the same dark foreboding about the cost of confronting the growing menace of Nazi Germany. From their first meeting they had a special relationship. The State Department had deep doubts about Joe, but it was a major coup for the ambassador to strike up such an immediate and deep rapport with the prime minister.

  All during the summer of 1938 the Nazi propaganda machine blared out its tales of the poor Sudetenland Germans cut off from their beloved fatherland in a Czechoslovakia that repressed them. Czechoslovakia was a polyglot affair, an artificial construct, but it was a democracy whose sovereignty France had pledged to support. Hitler screamed that he would wait no longer before moving into Czechoslovakia, and the timid democracies of the West shivered in fear that they would be driven into a war they
did not want and might not win.

  In August, Joe prepared a speech to be given in Aberdeen, Scotland. He intended to say that “for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which would be remotely considered worth shedding blood for.” There was Joe’s entire political philosophy laid out in a single sentence. He couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go to war to save anybody but himself. To save himself and his kind, he was all for a triage in which those outside the protective circle would have to fend for themselves. He was willing to announce to the Nazi wolf that the shepherd was not guarding the sheep and he could move on his prey at will.

  Roosevelt was dismayed when he saw the speech. “The young man needs his wrists slapped rather hard,” he told Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., a curious choice of words since Joe was only six years younger than the president. Roosevelt had come to believe that the defeatist group in England had taken in Joe. So, Roosevelt believed, had Chamberlain. Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “The president called him [Chamberlain] ‘slippery’ and added, with some bitterness, that he was ‘interested in peace at any price if he could get away with it and save his face.’”

  That was a searing judgment. But it was Chamberlain whose nation was poised to go to war, not Roosevelt’s, and given the temper of America and the strictures of the Neutrality Act, if Chamberlain did go to war, all that the president would be able to offer was a toast to the intrepid British.

  In early September, Joe called Rose where she was vacationing on the French Riviera and told her that she had to return to London immediately. Hitler was tired of waiting and was about to send his armies into Czechoslovakia to claim the Sudetenland as his own. The acrid smell of war was in the air, and Joe was afraid, not for himself so much as for Rose and his sons and daughters. He was, as he wrote a friend, “trying to keep up my contacts so we would know what really was going on before it actually happened so that we would not be caught unprepared contemplating the possibility of the bombing of London with eight children as prospective victims.” Joe personalized politics, seeing every event in terms of his own fortune and family. That gave immediacy and passion to his every move and now, as war appeared imminent, an increasingly desperate urgency.

  Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, asked Joe how America would react if Hitler ran over Czechoslovakia. “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Joe replied, “except that we want to keep out of war.” This led the British diplomat to ask why his country should defend all the ideals and values of democracy by itself. “The British made the Czechoslovak incident part of their business … and where we should be involved, the American people failed to see.”

  Joe paraded before the British his friend Charles Lindbergh, with his terrifying tales of the awesome arsenal of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, the strongest in the world. As Chamberlain attempted to negotiate with Hitler, Joe seemed incapable of realizing that language itself—a word, a phrase, a subtle interpretation—had become the very stuff of life and death, peace and war. He gave an interview with the Hearst papers in which he said that Americans must “not lose our heads.”

  Roosevelt was aghast at the idea of Joe spouting off once again and told Hull that he would have to take his ambassador to task. In the end he thought better of risking a confrontation. Instead, he wrote Joe a letter in the grammar of political Washington, in which words meant the opposite of what they said: “I know what difficult days you are going through and I can assure you that it is not much easier at this end!”

  The president was attempting to support morally those who stood up against the menace of Hitler while not making promises of aid he could not keep and in proffering would only give solace and strength to his enemies and set back even further what he considered the common cause. In London he needed a loyal ambassador with a subtle mind and a nuanced character, an ambassador who worked for Roosevelt, not for himself.

  Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler once again and returned with empty-hands and a heavy heart. Rose noted in her diary: “Everyone unutterably shocked and depressed.” Those who had taken Hitler’s measure may have been saddened and disheartened, but they were not shocked that the man had acted as they knew he would act.

  Joe was not only morose and depressed but full of self-pity. He felt no comparable sympathy, however, for the several hundred thousand opponents of Hitler living in the Sudetenland, whose risk was somewhat more imminent than his own. “I’m feeling very blue myself today,” he wrote Krock, “because I am starting to think about sending Rose and the children back to America and stay here alone for how long God only knows. Maybe never see them again.”

  Chamberlain made a final dramatic trip to Munich, where he reached a settlement with Hitler. The Anglo-German agreement, the Munich Pact, was not so much a compromise as a capitulation, giving Hitler the Sudetenland in return for a promise that he would stop there and respect what was left of Czechoslovakia. With this agreement, Chamberlain flew back to England and announced, “I believe it is peace for our time.” The church bells rang out, peeling a joyful timbre. The streets were full of Londoners shouting their approval.

  Joe fought his way through the crowds to the embassy, as exuberant and exhilarated as any of the celebrants. Later he happened to meet Jan Masaryk, the despondent Czech minister to London. The Czech diplomat knew that all Chamberlain had done was to throw a sacrificial lamb to the Nazi beast. Once Hitler had digested his meal, he would move on to the rest of Czechoslovakia. “I hope this doesn’t mean they are going to cut us up and sell us out,” Joe recalled the Czech leader saying. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Joe exclaimed, as Masaryk remembered. “Now I can get to Palm Beach after all.”

  Joe was a truthmonger who shouted his truths so loudly that all could hear them. Three weeks after Munich on October 19, 1938, Joe spoke at the Navy League’s Trafalgar Day dinner. He told his audience that it was foolish to emphasize the difference between democracies and dictatorship when, “after all, we have to live together in the same world whether we like it or not.”

  This was the same little drum Joe had been beating on since he arrived in England, but it had begun to sound hollow and thin. The audience in that room was full of navy officers, some of whom had fought against the Germans in World War I. The larger audience was hardly more receptive. America was slowly waking up to the stark menace of Hitler, and Joe’s words set off a firestorm of criticism across America. Joe had been used to laudatory press treatment; now, as he wrote later, he was “hardly prepared, despite years in public office, for the viciousness of this onslaught.”

  Joe had his own fervent supporters, including Jack, who from Harvard wrote him a comforting letter: “The Navy Day speech while it seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc. was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-Fascist.”

  Jack was echoing his father’s sentiment that the tedious, troublesome Jews had the audacity to object when their brethren in Germany were either shipped off to camps or stripped of their belongings and thrown out of their native land. As both Kennedys saw it, the Jews could not seem to understand that there were geopolitical considerations far more important than the survival of some of their people.

  In mid-December 1938, Joe returned to the United States for a vacation and consultations. In Washington, as Joe recalled in his unpublished memoirs, Roosevelt told him that “he would be a bitter isolationist, help with arms and money, and later, depending on the state of affairs, get into the fight.” Joe was utterly opposed to such a plan, and by rights he should have resigned or Roosevelt should have fired him. Instead, the two men chatted amiably in a discussion that was nothing if not duplicitous.

  “I have never made a public statement criticizing you,” Joe told the president. “As to what I say privately, you know perfectly well that I will never say anything that I have not said to you face to face. But you know the way I feel about you and I won’t be any good to you unless we are on good terms.”

  Roosevelt knew indeed
what Joe felt about him, but this was not the moment for candor. “Don’t worry,” Roosevelt said. “I know how you feel—and as for those cracks at you, some people just like to make trouble.”

  The president knew that Joe was one of those who liked to make trouble, but he preferred having him an ocean away rather than committing political mischief at home, rallying the forces of isolationism around his banner. As for Joe, he returned to London in February 1939 a member of isolationist ranks that had once been full of many honorable, if misguided, men and women. Now, after Hitler’s troops had marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, even Chamberlain himself, the personification of isolationism, realized his policy had failed. In reluctantly signing a pact to come to the aid of an invaded Poland, he drew a line in the parched earth of Central Europe from which he could not withdraw.

  Out of the debacle of the failed policy came a new opening for Joe. He knew what Roosevelt was thinking, and he had unique credibility as Chamberlain’s friend. He could have subtly insinuated to Chamberlain that his island nation would not be alone in fighting Hitler. Aid might not come in the quantities sought, and the soldiers might not arrive as soon as they were needed, but in due course they would probably come.

  Joe could not have said such things boldly, for the repercussions for Roosevelt and his race for a third term would have been devastating. But he could have gently pressed his president’s agenda. He could have listened to the voices of Britain, truly listened, and gauged the moral fiber of a people and passed on that word to Washington.

  The only voices that Joe listened to, however, were the upper-class accents that entered his salon at 15 Prince’s Gate. He was disdainful of the privileged young men who came to the ambassadorial residence as his daughters’ escorts and his sons’ friends, and he took them as an honest measure of British strength. They listened to his loud contempt for them and their nation, and they put the old man on, telling him that they would never fight. And Joe took them at their word.