The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (28 page)

Nary an honest word had passed between the two men. The president preferred to keep his troublemaker away from America until after the election, while Joe feared what a third term for FDR would mean. Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon. He had begun to press his case not only with words but also with what could only be perceived as threats.

“For the United States to come in and sign a blank check for all the difficulties that are faced here is a responsibility that only God could shoulder unless the American public knows what the real conditions of this battle are,” he wrote Welles on September 11, 1940, leaving unsaid who he considered the best-qualified person to inform the Americans. “I can quite appreciate their desire to help this country fight this battle but they should have a very clear notion for what the responsibility will entail for the American people to take up a struggle that looks rather hopeful on the surface but is definitely bad underneath.”

Joe found ample time to write his children from London. He took special care in his letters to little Teddy. Joe was aware of the petty dissembling of his youngest son. He was not going to confront his son, but told him, “I certainly don’t get all of those letters you keep telling me you write to me.”

Little Teddy had been shuttled around from school to school, and from home to home. He did not have the strong hand of his father pointing him down the pathway that all the Kennedy sons must tread. Instead, he had these letters from Joe in which his father placed himself at the epicenter of danger.

“I am sure, of course, you wouldn’t be scared, but if you heard all those guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety,” Joe wrote. “It is really terrible to think about, and all those poor women and children and homeless people down in the East End of London all seeing their places destroyed.”

All eight-year-olds are literalists. Poor Teddy couldn’t know how much his father was exaggerating, and that Joe was safely in the country, belittled by Londoners as a coward. He must surely have feared that his father might never return. “I know you will be glad to hear that all these little English boys your age are standing up to this bombing in great great shape. They are all training to be great sports.”

Life was a merciless competition, and even here Teddy was being compared to others; he too was supposed to be a “great sport.” His father concluded: “Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know that I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren’t you?” Teddy wasn’t his pal at all, for Joe was never a pal to his sons, never a comrade.

I
n his time alone, Joe had apparently sought solace in the arms of Clare Boothe Luce, the brilliantly acerbic playwright and journalist. Clare combined the coquettish skills of a courtesan with an ambition for power and influence the equal of any man’s. That she and Henry, her husband, no longer had a sex life together hardly appeared to shake their marriage, for the games of power that the couple enjoyed playing took place outside the boudoir.

When Joe met her in Paris in April 1940, using the excuse that he had traveled across the Channel to visit a sick Eddie Moore, he spent much of his time with Clare at the Ritz Hotel. Clare was a bold writer who rarely employed euphemisms, but this time she noted coyly in her diary that Joe had been “in bedroom all morning.”

Clare was everything Rose was not: a daring, passionate woman who after dinner stayed with the men in the salons of power instead of demurely rising and taking her coffee and brandy with the ladies in another room. Her pillow talk was not simply the cooing words of love but a bold dialogue on great events.

Clare was a woman of hard reactionary views who trumped even Joe in her disdain for the lower classes and the Jews and what she considered the mongrel races of the world. She shared with Joe the belief that America had better quickly rearm, turning itself into a fortress that would be impregnable to the onslaughts of war.

She had a gift for self-dramatization that was a journalist’s common failing, but here Joe bested her. He wrote her on October 1, 1940: “Yesterday a Messerschmitt just missed the house as it crashed. I could see the pilot’s face, his head lolling over one side … headed straight for the ground…. I imagine it will take a long time to get the drone of German motors out of my ears after I get back; and not to hear gunfire nine or ten hours a night will make me rather lonesome for the battlefront. When somebody asks me what I did in the second war I’ll say I lived in London, and that’s a damn sight worse than anything else I can think of, unless it is Dunkerque.”

Beneath the boyish bravado was a shameless quality to Joe’s dissembling. Most of the time he was living well outside London, and he had suffered nothing compared to those who nightly weathered the Nazi bombs.

With Clare and Henry, Joe had begun what Roosevelt could only believe was a treacherous dialogue with his enemies. The ambassador was in frequent contact with the Luces, who were backing the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, in his race against Roosevelt. Willkie campaigned on the theme
that Roosevelt was lying in his pledge to keep America out of war. If he was reelected for a third term, American sons would soon be dying on foreign shores.

Joe agreed largely with this thesis and proffered the possibility that he would return to the United States to endorse Willkie, a gesture that, as he wired Luce, would produce “25 million Catholic votes,” enough “to throw Roosevelt out.”

Joe may have been exaggerating the numbers, but his was not an idle boast. Many of his fellow American Catholic voters were reluctant tenants in the house of the New Deal, and as the election neared they seemed to be moving away in droves. Joe was the most powerful Catholic in the administration, and if he left the New Deal in dramatic fashion, the road behind him would be full of Catholics leaving the Roosevelt camp.

Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice and one of the president’s closest advisers, saw that Joe could be a force of great and crucial good if he would return to America and give an impassioned radio address confirming his support for Roosevelt. That would not only stop the flow of Catholics away from Roosevelt but also bring enough of them back to ensure a third term for Roosevelt.

I
n the United States his own son, Joe Jr., was playing an active role as a youthful isolationist. At Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. became his father’s proud surrogate, one of the leaders of the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. Some of his opponents considered “isolationist” little more than another name for cowardly expediency, but men of principle espoused this cause as well, and Joe Jr. was no coward physically or intellectually.

Joe Jr. took on the internationalists on their turf, talking at Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline among the very people whom his father accused of willfully manipulating America into war. He debated Harvard professors in whose classes he had only recently studied, giving them not one iota of deference in his attacks on their positions.

Joe Jr. was a more vociferous isolationist even than his father. He opposed U.S. lend-lease aid to Britain, calling it a prelude to the sending of men and the inevitable entry of America into the war. “I urge you to consider … that convoys mean war. I support all aid to England but we must not throw away our greatest asset, our hemispherical position…. We will only sacrifice everything by going in,” he said.

Joe Jr. took the politically daring step of supporting James Farley as the Democratic candidate for president, in opposition to Roosevelt’s third term. Joe Jr. had gone as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in
1940, and even knowing that Farley could not win, Joe Jr. insisted on voting for him on the first ballot.

Joe Jr. was speaking out against intervention, but his was a voice that could hardly be amplified. Joe Sr., for his part, knew that the moment had arrived when he might stand at the epicenter of history. Henry Luce wired him that he should return to the United States to tell the truth about Roosevelt’s war plans, the “ordinary antiquated rules” of loyalty and protocol be damned. Clare Luce sent another cable:
WHEN YOU LAND TELL THE PRESS

AND THE PEOPLE THE TRUTH AS YOU HAVE ALWAYS TOLD IT TO ME.

In one moment Joe would pay back all the rebuke, the humiliation, the misunderstanding that he felt he had suffered. Roosevelt had word of Joe’s plans, and he raised the ante by refusing Joe’s request to return to the United States for consultation. Joe decided that if he could not come back in person, he would send his words back instead. He wrote a devastating article that he called “an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration for having talked a lot and done very little,” and he vowed that if he was not called home, he would publish his article the week before the election.

Joe had simply had it with London. In early October, he told Lord Halifax that he intended to give up his ambassadorship, going out with a bang, not a whimper. Joe confided to the British diplomat that he had sent his article attacking Roosevelt to the United States, where it was scheduled for publication just before the presidential election.

Roosevelt understood that in a close election the whole future of his administration and his alliance with Churchill and the British might stand or fall on the actions of one man, and he reluctantly agreed to call Joe back to Washington. Roosevelt prepared for the meeting with all the staging of a great director. The newspapers were full of rumors about Joe resigning or coming out for Willkie. Knowing Joe’s brash propensity for mirthless candor, Roosevelt knew that he might well make some intemperate remarks to the scribes who waited at the airport in New York.

Roosevelt stipulated that when Joe’s plane landed, he was “not to make any statement to the press on your way over nor when you arrive in New York until you and I have had a chance to agree upon what should be said. Please come straight through to Washington on your arrival.” That would give Joe no time to meet with the president’s opponents, and no opportunity to stoke the fires of his fury even higher. The president insisted that Rose be invited as well, a brilliant and crucial part of his strategy.

Rose’s years as an ambassador’s wife had been the happiest moments of her public life. As the plane flew south to the capital, Rose pleaded with her husband not to resign. “The president sent you, a Roman Catholic, as
ambassador to London, which probably no other president would have done,” she argued. “You would write yourself down as an ingrate in the view of many people if you resign now.” Rose went on to tell Joe that he risked hurting not only himself but also his own sons and their political futures. If Joe’s remarks won the election for Willkie, Joe would have his moment of revenge, but the retribution would be meted out not on him but on his sons and their careers. As long as the Democrats held forth their banner, Kennedy would be a traitor’s name.

Joe listened to his wife’s counsel and afterward admitted that she had “softened” him up. He did not care about what he considered the dubious honor of the ambassadorship any longer; most likely what rang deepest and truest to him were his sons’ possible fates. By his actions in London he was hoping to save their lives, but he was not doing so in order to destroy their futures.

Roosevelt had alerted his secretary, Grace Tully, to “be sure and butter up Joe when you see him” before she showed him into the private quarters. Joe, who was planning a bold, merciless confrontation with the president, found Roosevelt seated over a cocktail shaker mixing drinks for his close friend Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Mrs. Byrnes.

Over a Sunday dinner of scrambled eggs and sausages, Joe was at his civil best, relating tales of life in beleaguered London. “I’ve got a great idea, Joe!” Byrnes said, as if a glowing lightbulb had appeared above his head. “Why don’t you make a radio speech on the lines of what you have said here tonight and urge the president’s reelection?”

At the level that Roosevelt was playing politics, and for the stakes that were on the table, not a moment of this evening was unscripted. Joe was not for a moment taken in by Byrnes “acting as though a wonderful idea had just struck him.” Roosevelt, for his part, surely knew that Joe was not fooled and realized also that his angry ambassador would not dare call the president’s bluff. They were like two men sitting across a game board from each other, but while Joe was playing checkers, Roosevelt was playing a master’s game of chess.

Joe did not respond to the senator’s “great idea” but sat and fumed quietly. Roosevelt had already felt Joe’s anger in other meetings, and he had staged this modest dinner in part so that with other guests present, his ambassador would not dare show his venom. Despite the staging, Joe was not about to spend the evening in chitchat and meaningless pleasantries.

“Since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the president alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody,” Kennedy said suddenly. As Joe went through the litany of abuses he felt he had suffered,
Rose noticed that Roosevelt’s eyes snapped nervously, the only sign of emotion the president allowed himself.

“I am damn sore at the way I have been treated,” Joe went on, like a prosecutor making his final arguments. Joe was not so bold as to attack the president, whom he considered the architect of his abuse. Instead, Joe trashed State Department officials, such as Sumner Welles, who had bypassed their ambassador, humiliating him. Welles and his subordinates had only been the honest messengers of Roosevelt’s policy, but Joe berated them in fiery assault.

Roosevelt was not interested in speaking the truth now, but only in placating this enraged and dangerous man. So the president started attacking the State Department with ferocity even greater than Joe’s. After the election the president would have “a real housecleaning,” throwing out these officials who had so wronged the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe would suffer no longer. There were many words of untruth in Roosevelt’s harangue, but his words did what they were supposed to do. They calmed Joe down and made him and Roosevelt momentary allies against their common foe.