by Thomas Maier
During his long, controversial tenure in New York, Spellman became known as “the American Pope” and remained close to the Kennedys for years. Perhaps his biggest favor to Joe Kennedy involved an introduction to the archdiocese’s ace real estate broker, John J. Reynolds, a savvy Bronx Irishman who promised to make Kennedy a bundle of money. At Reynolds’ suggestion, Kennedy gobbled up various commercial buildings. He immediately doubled their fees, earning an estimated $100 million before World War II and prompting tenants to complain of rent-gouging. The best buy suggested by Spellman’s real estate man was the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, which Kennedy bought from Marshall Field for $12.5 million, less than half the construction cost. It soon turned into the jewel in Kennedy’s personal fortune.
Joe Kennedy learned that money, power and intrigue were not the sole province of government or Wall Street. Though founded on a rock of faith, the egos and human frailties within the Roman Catholic Church were enough to rival those of any institution. Kennedy understood the faults and weaknesses of men such as Spellman and O’Connell, but his fidelity to the church of his forefathers remained unquestioned. At times, Kennedy’s life mirrored so many contradictions within the American Catholic Church— the different educational standards for men and women, the clash between monetary and spiritual needs, the ascendancy from a rejected immigrant clan to a respected family in the upper echelons of American society. Like any good Irish Catholic, Joe Kennedy attended Mass on Sundays with his wife, and they raised their children according to the moral guidelines of the nuns and priests who taught them. But the Kennedys were a different kind of Irish Catholics,much better prepared for modern American society than the old emigrants from Eire. As “one of the nation’s leading Catholic laymen,” to use his wife’s phrase, Joe Kennedy mastered the intricacies of his own church, resisted anti-Catholic discrimination and privately influenced the American government in ways so discreet that they would remain unexplored for years by historians. He avoided the brassy, political machine methods of Al Smith, the unpolished Democratic Party candidate, whom a bigoted nation viewed as leading a horde of unwashed foreigners into the White House. Instead, Joe Kennedy and his family maneuvered smartly through the established corridors of Washington and Rome to make their own mark.“They were something new in America—the immigrants’ final surpassing of the blue bloods,” observed historian James MacGregor Burns.
In this inexorable march toward his ultimate goal, the church became an instrument, a means for gaining more power and influence. Joe Kennedy was determined not to fail.
Chapter Ten
An Irishman in the Court of St. James
IRISH POLITICIANS GATHERED in Boston for a showing of the green at the Clover Club’s annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner in 1937, an event started fifty-five years earlier when Famine emigrants were still digging holes and driving stakes to survive in their adopted city. Though life in Boston was much better than before, even the most successful Irish-American tended on this holiday to look back with nostalgia.
Inside the Somerset Hotel, judges, businessmen and government officials listened appreciatively to a program of Irish music, poetry and drama, including the city’s Mayor Frederick W. Mansfield, an Irish Catholic who would later work as counsel for the archdiocese. The Clover Club’s famous glee club sang a parody titled “If Roosevelt Ruled Ireland.” And the featured presentation reenacted the last hours of Michael Collins, the sainted hero of the 1916 uprising who created the Irish Free State only to be murdered by his own. Former Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, decked out in a tuxedo, smiled approvingly.
Boston was now an Irish Catholic town. Though restrictive immigration laws and the Depression had reduced the flow of newcomers, the Catholic population was more than one million in the late 1930s, a number surpassed only in New York and Chicago. Slowly but inevitably, the last bastions of Brahmin-controlled culture, education and finance, yielded to this reality. With parochial schools booming, vocations on the rise and the number of parishes doubling, Cardinal O’Connell’s dream of a separate Catholic culture in the city appeared to be coming true.
At this dinner toasting the Irish, the evening’s main speaker, Joseph P. Kennedy, rose to offer a distinctly different view. Kennedy surprised the crowd with a message that the days of Irish power were almost over, that Irish Catholics were no longer to be hyphenated Americans, but melded into American society without regard to their Celtic race or Roman creed.
“As we listen to the song and story and hear the haunting melodies of the homeland of our fathers, it is not easy to appreciate the great change in the status of the Irish in America,” Kennedy said.“The melting pot process implicit in a democracy will fashion, and is already fashioning, a new and different people. The evolution will absorb and mold the offspring of even the most unregenerate Fenian. Thus the influence of the Irish culture in this country must be recognized as on the wane. Nor is it likely that anything or any person can change this process of cultural absorption.”
Kennedy’s salute to American assimilation that evening, while giving slight credit to the eclipsed Yankee culture, made it clear that the Kennedy clan and other families of immigrant heritage were the rightful heirs to what their ancestors had wrought in the New World.“The Irish in Boston always suffered under the handicap of not possessing family traditions adequate to win the respect and confidence of their Puritan neighbors,” he said. “This Yankee pride of ancestry developed a boastfulness and a snobbishness which, although difficult to understand, explains many of the strange idiosyncrasies of Boston. To the descendants of the early settlers, the newer races meant annoyance, a class to be endured but never treated as equals. The inevitable happened. At first a political and then an economic change occurs to improve the status of the late comers.”
After the speech, some mistook Kennedy’s intent as a call for the Irish to be more like the Brahmins, which he later took pains to deny and clarify. In his own mind, though, the loyalties of Joe Kennedy often weren’t clear. Kennedy’s adult life had been predicated on the belief that he would be accepted in American society, go as far as he could on his brains, drive and constant persistence—the stuff of Horatio Alger legends and modern-day fortunes like his own. Always aware of his Irish Catholic roots,Kennedy didn’t like to be reminded of them, especially by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men whose money or positions of power he coveted. Two months after this speech, Kennedy complained bitterly to Fortune magazine about an upcoming profile that he believed revealed a “social prejudice against my origin.”
This tension between striving and acceptance, this undercurrent of inferiority and resentment, lay beneath the surface of his complicated relationship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No matter how much money he raised, no matter how many problems he fixed, deals he negotiated or arms he twisted, Kennedy sensed the president saw him in a box, defined by his religion and ethnic background. That feeling existed from the very first job offer Roosevelt made to him—as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Years later, President Kennedy joked that he’d support any presidential candidate who offered him this same job when his second term ended in 1968. It was also the same position that his daughter, Jean Kennedy Smith, eagerly sought and accepted when it was offered by President Clinton in the 1990s. But in 1934, going to Ireland seemed like a step backward to Joe Kennedy. Unlike his father, he’d never been to Ireland, and he considered himself a full-blooded American. He didn’t want to be perceived simply as another Irish politician tending to his own ethnic group, but as a new breed, different from the Honey Fitzs and the Curleys of the world. Supporting FDR, rather than Smith, had seemed to be his ticket out of this confining world. Roosevelt’s first offer of a job in Ireland must have been a disappointment.
When Roosevelt’s son, James, relayed his father’s offer of Ireland, Kennedy refused to consider it. Shortly afterward at the White House, the president summoned Kennedy to talk again about Ireland. As Kennedy related in a letter to his oldest son in 1934: “He (Roosevelt) said tha
t he thought I had an obligation to do something, and then suggested that I go to Ireland as Minister because there is a very strained situation between the Irish Free State and the English Government. He thought it would be a very nice thing for me to go back as Minister to a country from which my grandfather had come as an immigrant. But Mother and I talked it over, and we decided that this wasn’t of any particular interest, and I told him so.” Even years later, Roosevelt contended that Kennedy, as he recorded in his diary,“was the only one who could straighten out the Irish problem.”
CHARMED AND SLIGHTLY awed by Roosevelt,Kennedy accepted his offer to oversee the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and later the U.S. Maritime Commission, important positions that gained him recognition for a job well done. However, the plum assignment Kennedy hoped for—the one to add prestige to his family—took nearly four years to obtain and came only after considerable lobbying. During a conversation with James Roosevelt, who served as his father’s aide, Kennedy mentioned the idea of becoming ambassador to England.“Oh, c’mon, Joe, you don’t want that,” he replied.
Kennedy persisted.“I’ve been thinking about it and I’m intrigued by the thought of being the first Irishman to be ambassador from the United States to the Court of Saint James.”They both chuckled at the prospect, but mindful of Kennedy’s service and friendship, James Roosevelt agreed to mention the idea to his father.
When he heard of Kennedy’s latest idea, the president “laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” But before his son could call Kennedy, the president changed his mind; he was, he said, “intrigued with the idea of twisting the lion’s tail a little,” and instructed Kennedy to come see him.
When Kennedy arrived at the White House, he was greeted with a broad hello from the president, who then made what seemed like a friendly request.“Joe,would you mind stepping back a bit, by the fireplace perhaps, so I can get a good look at you?”
Taken aback, Kennedy nevertheless complied.
The president continued his instructions. “Joe, would you mind taking your pants down?”
Neither Kennedy nor Roosevelt’s son could believe their ears. After being assured they had heard him correctly, James Roosevelt recalled that Kennedy “undid his suspenders and dropped his pants and stood there in his shorts, looking silly and embarrassed.”
The president explained that he knew someone who had once seen Kennedy in a bathing suit and claimed that he was bowlegged. Now that it was confirmed with his own eyes, Roosevelt said this awkward condition preempted Kennedy from consideration as the new British ambassador. “Don’t you know that the ambassador to the Court of St. James has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee britches and silk stockings?” he teased.“Can you imagine how you’ll look? When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughingstock. You’re not right for the job.”
Kennedy, desperate not to be turned down, asked for a two-week grace period so that he could get approval from the British monarch to wear a cutaway coat and striped pants instead for the ceremony. Roosevelt laughed and agreed. When Kennedy produced his promised letter, the president appointed him the new ambassador to Great Britain.
FROM A HISTORICAL vantage, the idea of Joseph Patrick Kennedy—an Irish Catholic from Boston, the grandson of an immigrant pushed out of Ireland during the Famine—going to Great Britain as the new U.S. ambassador seemed too fanciful to believe, almost like sweet revenge. As the Times of London had warned a century earlier when British policies caused a massive emigration to the West,America was now filled with Irish descendants who remembered the foul treatment by the British. Would Kennedy avenge his forefathers in some subtle ways, as skeptics in London wondered. As British historian David Nunnerly flatly declared, “Irish-Americans, particularly those who live in the Boston area, are almost to a man staunchly anti- British.” Some in America also had their doubts about the appointment. “I do not believe you can promote peace on earth by sending an Irishman to London,” Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina confided to Arthur Krock, the New York Times reporter who broke the exclusive story. Harold Ickes, a Roosevelt aide, couldn’t understand Kennedy’s obsession with London. “You don’t understand the Irish,” explained Thomas Corcoran, a speechwriter for FDR. “London has always been a closed door to him. As Ambassador of the United States,Kennedy will have all doors open to him.”
Well aware of the historical ironies, Roosevelt called his choice of Kennedy “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world.” In Boston and New York, Irish Catholics were delighted by his selection. Honey Fitz declared the British ambassadorship “the most important job that the Administration has to give out”; and Al Smith called Kennedy “Mr. Irish-American.” Despite all his claims of being fully assimilated, Kennedy realized he had been chosen by his president partly for what he was, rather than who. “In many quarters,” Kennedy later wrote,“my appointment was applauded for the very reason that my Irish and Catholic background,my self-made qualities and lack of homage to old-fashioned protocol, my bluntness and outspokenness, would render me proof against British wiles.”
In London, the Kennedy family attracted great attention. Ambassador Kennedy’s wide-ranging speeches (extolling the virtues of America’s freedom of religion, for instance, or suggesting the British study American history in the same way U.S students imbibed Shakespeare and English history) inspired numerous newspaper articles, and his ebullient, photogenic clan made plenty of news.“He is Irish and Roman Catholic, and proud of it,” profiled the Times of London. “The appointment would have created quite a stir some years ago, when the Irish question was an obstacle to better Anglo-American relations. Now it will provoke little more than wonder that it has not occurred before.” In the past, the U.S. embassy was filled with esteemed Brahmin names such as James Russell Lowell, Joseph Choate, Whitelaw Reid, Frank B. Kellogg. (In suggesting that Kennedy employ both his Harvard-educated oldest boys as aides, Felix Frankfurter reminded the new ambassador of the experiences of his predecessors, John Adams and Charles Francis Adams, who served Washington and Lincoln, respectively, and viewed the London post as an excellent foreign policy training ground for their sons.) But the Times profile did hint that Kennedy’s heritage might be too parochial for the job.
As an Irishman, he represents the new Boston which has grown up within the last 50 years and has come increasingly to conform to the type of northern American cities having a large proportion of Irish in its citizenship. As Roman Catholics and as racial exiles these people have formed strong political coteries, often crowding together in the more humble parts of the city, and keeping mostly to themselves in religion, education and politics.
INSTEAD, THE KENNEDYS surprised everyone. “London will be grand,” Joe predicted to a band of reporters upon landing with his family. They immersed themselves in British culture, the genesis for many future Anglophile theories about individual family members. While Kathleen Kennedy partied and enjoyed the company of young British squires, her brother John devoured lessons about the aristocracy from his English friends and from such books as Pilgrim’s Way by John Buchan, later named Lord Tweedsmuir for his services to the Crown. In a reversal of their treatment in Boston, where the Kennedy girls were not invited to the Junior League balls, the ambassador’s daughters were embraced as debutantes by London society. The Kennedys lived lavishly in the six-story embassy residence at Prince’s Gate, with its twenty-seven bedrooms and staff of some two dozen maids, butlers and other servants. Invited to Windsor Castle for a splendid weekend with the king and queen, Joe couldn’t resist crowing to his wife,“Well, Rose, it’s a hell of a long way from East Boston, isn’t it?”
In his own independent style, Ambassador Kennedy quickly ended the embassy’s practice of presenting upper-class American young women to the British monarch, rejecting what he called an “undemocratic” selection process. He also refused to follow the tradition in which American ambassadors appeared at court functions in kn
ee breeches, silk stockings and formal black coats. “Not Mrs. Kennedy’s little boy,” he remarked. Yet some biographers and analysts of the Kennedys have insisted this American family, arising from new money and Irish immigration, were transformed by English immersion into would-be royalty. In these accounts, the Kennedys were enlightened by—and recognized the superiority of—the same British culture that had once forced their Irish grandparents to rebel or emigrate. So weak and secondary was the Irish Catholic culture to the Kennedys, according to these accounts, that a miraculous transformation took place in London before the eyes of the world. Yet in the late 1930s, there were plenty of reminders for the Kennedys, both home and abroad, of their minority background. At an exclusive London bottle club, a journalist for the London Daily Express came up to Joe Kennedy Jr. and asked “whether Kennedy pere had a chance of becoming President despite the fact that he is a Roman Catholic.” Young Joe, surrounded by friends, replied that everyone had assumed his father’s religion would bar him from the ambassadorship but they were wrong. Another reminder came when Ambassador Kennedy returned to America in late spring 1938 to attend his eldest son’s graduation at Harvard. No doubt at Kennedy’s urging, the newspapers predicted that his alma mater also would bestow an honorary degree on the senior Kennedy, recognizing his prominence in Britain. (Two years earlier, Kennedy’s bid for appointment to the Harvard Board of Overseers had been rejected because of what he privately considered bias against Irish Catholics.) But when Kennedy learned that no honor would be forthcoming, he told reporters he’d “declined” the offer. “Can you imagine Joe Kennedy declining an honorary degree from Harvard?” Roosevelt laughed.