The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (21 page)

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 ambassador 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.

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.

A
s 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.