The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe’s relationship with Roosevelt was by now so full of duplicity that endless scrubbing would not have washed away all the lies. In July, Joe’s friend and journalistic promoter Arthur Krock wrote a column titled “Why Ambassador Kennedy Is Not Coming Home,” in which he said that the president’s militant young New Dealers had set out to destroy the ambassador with a series of lies. It was whispered that he had gone to bed with the British appeasers and was badmouthing the president. “None of these statements was true,” Krock said. “But they were sedulously circulated for quite a while.”

  Roosevelt knew the source of this missile, but he was too shrewd to signal that he had spotted his attacker. Instead, in a letter to Joe he unloosed his venom on Krock. “He is, after all, only a social parasite whose surface support can be won by entertainment and flattery, but who in his heart is a cynic who has never felt warm affection for anybody—man or woman.” Although he supposedly was attacking Krock, the president clearly had another target in mind.

  In August 1939, the Soviets and Nazis signed a pact, making allies of the two great totalitarian powers. While Nazi troops surreptitiously massed at the Polish border, the American ambassador was off in southern France on what he considered a much-needed vacation. From Cannes, Joe wrote a letter to the president, replying in part to Roosevelt’s letter. If ever there was a time for the ambassador to step back from all the tedious minutiae of the diplomatic life and impart all the precious insight he had gained during his tenure in London, that time was here. But he had no deep thoughts, no telling perspicacity, and no warning call of the events to follow.

  Joe wrote from Cannes that “the chief thing I have noticed in the South of France, on the part of caddies, waiters and residents, is a very strong anti-Semitic feeling. Beyond that … I can contribute nothing to an understanding of the international state of affairs.”

  Caddies and waiters did not pop off with anti-Semitic cracks unless they felt the remarks would be well received. That aside, it was a curious state of affairs indeed when the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s believed that his sole insight into European affairs was the mindless gossip that he picked up around the golf course and the dinner table.

  As he swam at Hotel du Cap Eden Roc and dined on the Riviera, Joe was full of pathetic self-pity. “About my position in England my only thought was to wonder whether my experience and knowledge were not being completely wasted,” he continued in his letter to the president. He nonetheless assured FDR that he would stay where he was asked to stay. He told Roosevelt that as a boy his father had “taught me two principles: gratitude and loyalty. He said 90% of people seem to forget favors and kindnesses done them. Of the second principle, he said, no matter how you may fail in ability you can make it up by being unfailingly loyal to your friends. I have tried to live up to those two principles and, to you personally, I owe a debt on both counts.”

  Joe’s father had indeed acted on those principles, and he was a revered soul. Joe had honored his father’s ideals by mouthing the words and acting the opposite. He had no deep gratitude toward the president, but a mounting anger at the man’s refusal to heed his despairing messages. As for loyalty, he had talked so loudly behind the president’s back that Roosevelt had long since heard his rude imprecations and taken his subordinate’s measure. Roosevelt knew, however, that at this crucial time he had to keep Joe at his post; back home in the United States he would be an articulate critic and a natural leader of American isolationists.

  During those long August days, Joe had opportunity to spend hours with his family, who had all convened at the villa Domaine de Ranguin near Cannes. His sons were the measure of the man, and he took pleasure in twenty-four-year-old Joe Jr., with his stories of the fall of Spain, and twenty-two-year-old Jack, a Harvard senior. At thirteen, Bobby was still too young to join in the spirited discussions on war and peace, and little Teddy was still little more than a family mascot.

  During the day Rose took the family to Hotel du Cap Eden Roc to swim. High above the water stood a cliff that only the most daring made their diving platform. Joe Jr. and Jack dove off again and again while the rest of the Kennedys watched in awed admiration.

  Then the brothers called upon seven-year-old Teddy to join them in diving thirty feet into the water. If Joe Jr. and Jack believed that Teddy would rush fearlessly up to that high perch, willing to do anything to impress them, they did not know their little brother. He walked up the stone steps, but he did it leaden of feet and spirit, heavy with fear. Most mothers would have risen and scolded their grown sons for putting their little brother up to such a foolhardy dare, but Rose sat quietly, believing this exercise a part of manly education.

  Like his big brothers, Teddy dove into the water again and again. Years afterward he could remember the day as he did few things in his childhood. “I think it was Joe [Jr.] for the most part who encouraged me to jump off the rock,” he recalled. “I could barely swim at that point. I’d jump in the water and grab hold of them. I did this several times. I think I was pretty scared.”

  If Rose even saw the fear that Teddy felt, she would have considered it something that had to be purged. She did see the bonding of her sons, and the trust that little Teddy showed in his brothers. “Joe [Jr.] took Teddy to the high cliff and Teddy dove down with confidence that Joe would be there to catch him when he went down or at least rescue him when he dove down from this tremendous height,” she said. “I used to watch them with that relationship between the brothers.”

  On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland with all the fires of hell. World War II had begun. Two days later Joe sat at 10 Downing Street with Chamberlain reading the speech that the prime minister was about to deliver to Parliament declaring war. Joe read the haunting, searingly honest words: “Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins.” Joe was an emotional man, and he cared for Chamberlain as a man and as a vehicle for ideas that were as much his own as the prime minister’s. And as he sat there reading the words, his eyes filled with tears.

  Back at the embassy Joe put in a call to Roosevelt, even though it was 4:00 A.M. in Washington. Joe began by telling the president the substance of Chamberlain’s address. Roosevelt had known that it would come to this one day, and if he was solemn at the thought of what faced him, he was full of resolve.

  Joe, however, was almost hysterical. He was a man without hope. He portrayed a desperate, impotent Britain that soon would be overrun. In their fight against fascism, the democracies would come to resemble the very dictatorships that they fought. The world economies would crumble. Those with full stomachs now would go hungry, and those who were hungry now would starve. Joe told the president that the shadows of a new dark age were falling on Europe. Everywhere there would be chaos.

  Roosevelt had incalculable weight on his shoulders, and matters more urgent to attend to than listening to the endless laments of a man who despised him. But listen he did, trying to calm an ambassador who should have been trying to calm the president. “It’s the end of the world,” Joe moaned, “the end of everything.” For Joe, the world was his family, and his overwhelming fear was that he would lose his sons.

  Joe had no intention of attending Chamberlain’s speech, but Rose, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen hurried out into the streets to Parliament to hear the prime minister’s historic address. Joe’s children did not share their father’s brooding morbidity but presented a frolicsome air to a photographer who captured the impeccably dressed contingent.

  They had been a gay presence in the house at 15 Prince’s Gate. For months Joe Jr. and Jack had debated the issues of peace and war vigorously with their father. Kathleen had been full of her tales of life among the privileged, and the other children were almost as outspoken. Now they were leaving England, departing after a final weekend in the country.

  America was neutral, but the flames of war burned without reason or selection. On September 3
, a German torpedo sunk the Athenia, a British liner whose fourteen hundred passengers included three hundred Americans. Joe asked Jack to travel to Glasgow, Scotland, with his aide, Eddie Moore, to meet and comfort the surviving Americans.

  It was no easy audience Jack faced that day. “You can’t trust the goddamn German navy!” a survivor shouted. “We won’t go home without a convoy!” Jack comforted the Americans with the savvy of a seasoned diplomat. He listened to their wrath and sorrow and fear. He felt that not only should a ship be sent directly to Glasgow to pick up the survivors, but also that it should be sent back to America as part of a convoy. “The natural shock of the people would make the trip to America alone unbearable because of the feeling that they will have that the United States exposed them to this unnecessarily,” he noted in a memo. After serving as his father’s surrogate, Jack flew back to America from Foynes, Ireland, on the Dixie-Clipper to begin his senior year at Harvard.

  Aft er his family returned to America, Joe was alone, and for a man who cherished his family as he did, solitude was like a fog that rolled over his life and stayed there, covering everything with gray. The palette on which Joe painted his picture of the world had only dark colors on it now. His judgment ultimately was based on what political judgment always comes down to, not issues, but men themselves, their strengths and resolution, and he found the British a doomed race. His judgments were sweeping in magnitude. He told the president in a letter that “there are signs of decay, if not decadence, here, both in men and institutions … democracy as we now conceive it in the United States will not exist in France and England after the war, regardless of which side wins or loses.”

  Soon after the invasion of Poland, Joe had lunch with Winston Churchill. For years Churchill had been sounding the alarm against the rising forces of fascism, but his warnings had gone unheeded. His champions considered him eloquent and truthful, while his detractors condemned him as a verbose, exaggerating, drunken has-been. Now, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Churchill had become a prophet with honor, and the likely wartime prime minister.

  There was an eerie emptiness in the skies. The war against Britain had not yet begun in earnest. Churchill knew that one day the “phony war” would end and that he might look up and see the sky full of German planes flying to bomb English towns. “If the Germans bomb us into subjection,” Churchill remarked to Joe, “one of their terms will certainly be that we hand them over our fleet. If we hand it over, their superiority over you becomes overwhelming and then your troubles will begin.”

  Joe considered Churchill’s remark tantamount to blackmail. The old mountebank was daring Washington to be so stupid as not to allow Britain to buy war goods in America. As Joe saw it, Churchill was as bad as the Jews in his determination to suck America into the conflict.

  “Maybe I do him an injustice,” Joe wrote in his diary, though he was sure that he was right, “but I just don’t trust him. He always impressed me that he was willing to blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would get the United States in.”

  Hitler had possibly burned down the Reichstag in Berlin and blamed the disaster on the Communists. If Churchill was willing to do the same, then the world that Joe prophesied had already arrived. There was no difference between fascism and democracy. Joe did not see that, as desperately as Churchill wanted America to enter the war, there were moral limits on what he would do. He pleaded. He seduced. He manipulated. He threatened. But Churchill would simply not commit an evil act of his own, stage his own Reichstag fire, in order to seduce his erstwhile ally into entering the war.

  Joe recalled that it was the day after that luncheon that the first of a series of secret letters from Roosevelt to Churchill arrived by diplomatic pouch at the embassy, the beginning of a historic correspondence. Joe resented the exchange, seeing it rightly as an attempt to bypass him. He had failed Roosevelt as his honest prolocutor, and the president was seeking out another channel.

  It was unprecedented for the American president to be sending secret letters to the new first lord of the Admiralty, the most vociferous foe of Chamberlain’s policies. It would have been judged foolhardy and provocative if the stakes had been any less. But Roosevelt and Churchill saw themselves and their nations allied in a great and noble struggle against Nazism, and they endeavored to push forward the tacit alliance in every way they could. The odds were terribly against them, as Joe had reminded the president ad nauseam. The two leaders, however, were not desperate gamblers throwing their last chip on the roulette wheel, but men who believed that, if they lost, civilization lost and life as the world had known it would be gone forever.

  At its highest level, the level at which Churchill and Roosevelt operated, politics is not the art of the possible, but an alchemy that transforms the impossible into the possible. That is the political alchemy that the two leaders were practicing, alchemy that cynical, sullen Joe could not possibly grasp.

  In March 1940, Joe led Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of State, to Churchill’s office at the Admiralty for an afternoon meeting. Churchill sat in a large chair in front of the fireplace, reading a paper and smoking one of his famous cigars with a drink at his side. Joe noted these details in his unpublished memoirs as if they were proof of the man’s decadence.

  During Welles’s visit, Joe stopped the British officials cold when they started spouting what he considered sentimental garbage about their noble purpose. “For Christ’s sakes,” he exclaimed, “stop trying to make this a holy war, because no one will believe you; you’re fighting for your life as an Empire, and that’s good enough.” Joe, however, had not reckoned with Churchill, who rose up and spoke in words charged with passion. He described the Nazis as a “monster born of hatred and of fear,” but to Joe such eloquence was at best little more than gaudy gift-wrapping. That Churchill used it on his two auditors suggested his further chicanery; he did not see the two American diplomats as worthy of simpler words. Joe did not see that eloquence was one of Churchill’s strongest weapons, one he used wherever and whenever he thought it might forward his cause.

  “What we have lost on balance is not significant,” Churchill said, looking at a chart of naval losses. Welles suggested the obvious, that the war had not truly begun and that when it did the losses would be enormous and the world economy would suffer horrendously.

  “I am not sure of that,” Churchill said. “The last war did not bring about conditions of that type. In fact, the standard of living all over the world has been bettered since then.”

  Joe had had quite enough of this dissembling British politician who masqueraded as a statesman. “That is taking a short view of it,” he interrupted, giving Churchill a dose of what he considered unvarnished, ineloquent truth. “The well that the water has been taken out of has become drier and drier. This war is the climax of your process of ‘raising standards.’ To keep on doing it, even to maintain the standards that have been reached, seems to have made it necessary now to go out and tap other people’s wells. That kind of an economic structure is nothing to brag about.”

  Churchill went on as if Joe had never spoken, rising again to eloquent heights as he declared that Nazi Germany had to be destroyed once and forever. The gulf between the two men was as wide as the ocean that separated their countries. If Joe listened, he did not hear, and if he heard, he did not believe.

  Later, when Churchill had heard more tales of Joe’s defeatist diatribes, he said: “Supposing, as I do not for one moment suppose, that Mr. Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men.” Joe, for his part, had the cowardice of his lack of conviction. He was unwilling to have himself or his sons die in what he considered a foolish, futile fight.

  Back at Harvard in the fall, Jack worked diligently on his honors’ thesis. His whole intellectual life these last two years had prepared him for analyzing why England had woken up so be
latedly to the Nazi threat. In exploring the subject, he risked confronting his own father and the views that Joe had professed.

  No one watched Jack’s progress with more interest than Joe Jr., who was now studying at Harvard Law School. “Jack rushed madly around the last week with his thesis and finally with the aid of five stenographers the last day got it [in] under the wire,” Joe Jr. wrote his father.

  The 151-page essay was the most sustained intellectual effort of Jack’s life. As he saw it, the fault for Britain’s belated rearmament lay largely not in its leaders but in the nature of democracy. The naturally self-indulgent British democracy could not be awakened by a few shouts but only by the thunderous barrage of cannon fire. Jack shared his father’s profound pessimism about democracy, believing that only a totalitarian state could defeat a totalitarian foe.

  “The [British] nation had failed to realize that if it hoped to successfully compete with a dictatorship on an even plane [sic], it would have to renounce temporarily its democratic privileges,” Jack wrote. “It meant actual totalitarianism, because after all, the essence of a totalitarian state is that the national purpose will not permit group interest to interfere with its fulfillment.”

  Jack had some diversions from his academic work that left him with another health problem that would plague him the rest of his life. That college year he suffered from a condition described as “nonspecific urethritis,” which was treated at the Lahey Clinic with “local urethral treatment and sulfonamides.” The disease was a swelling and inflammation of the urethra, the duct that drains the bladder. “Nonspecific” is the medical way of saying that the exact cause may not be known, though the condition was usually the result of unprotected sexual intercourse.