by Thomas Maier
THERE WERE MANY IRONIES late in the fall 1940 campaign when President Roosevelt visited Boston and embraced the Kennedy clan. A few nights before, Joe Kennedy had given a radio speech in support of the president, allaying fears of defections by Kennedy and many other Catholic voters to the Republican candidate Wendell Wilkie. In a gesture typical of their relationship, Roosevelt smoothed Kennedy’s riled feathers by inviting him to dinner at the White House, where he charmed Rose, flattered the ambassador and, most important, implied that he’d help Joe Jr.’s budding political future. (In return for his own support in 1940, Joe Kennedy later suggested he’d worked out a deal for FDR’s support of a gubernatorial run for Joe Jr. in Massachusetts.) In his radio speech,Kennedy vouched for the president; any claim that he was “trying to involve this country in the world war” was “false”—even though Kennedy deeply suspected it to be true. His endorsement’s most effective part, however, was also his most heartfelt line:“After all, I have a great stake in this country,” Kennedy concluded.“ My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world. The kind of America that they and their children will inherit is of a grave concern to us all.”
When the president’s train arrived in Boston, Jack and Joe Kennedy Jr. went with their grandfather, Honey Fitz, to meet Roosevelt, who welcomed them with open arms. At the Boston Garden, before a packed audience, Roosevelt introduced his headstrong envoy as if they were old friends. “Welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, Ambassador to the Court of St. James . . . Joe Kennedy!” The crowds roared their approval and, with the specter of war looming on the horizon, they listened to their president give his solemn vow.
“And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance,” Roosevelt said. “I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
With his own two boys beside him, Joe Kennedy listened to the president’s promise with a faint smile, knowing in his heart that it was all a lie.
The isolationist views of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy were different from those of most American politicians. A long history of geopolitical isolation— keeping the United States out of foreign entanglements in Europe and the rest of the world—existed in nearly every American political party, from the Progressives to conservative Republicans, and dated back to the Republic’s birth. This strain of isolationism in the heartland often found itself intertwined with a similar anti-immigrant sentiment, a distinct aversion to anything perceived as foreign. Among Kennedy’s own friends and acquaintances, Charles A. Lindbergh, the celebrated aviation hero who became prominent in the America First movement,was a typical American isolationist of his time. But the origin of Kennedy’s views was different. Despite his money and power, Joe Kennedy had spent his whole life trying to remove the hyphen from the “Irish-American” attached to his name. “I was born here, my children were born here,” he said on more than one occasion. “What the hell do I have to do to be an American?”
Isolationism was one of Kennedy’s answers. By protecting America’s shores, performing their patriotic duties, Irish immigrants and their descendants had proved their allegiance to their new country. Kennedy wasn’t immune. “A need to assert and reassert his Americanism may have helped to motivate Kennedy to take the most narrowly American approach in foreign policy,” said biographer David Koskoff.“Isolationism helped to identify Kennedy with traditional America, and proclaimed that his only concern was for America.” Even though he and his family enjoyed their stay in London, Joe never intended to help England, certainly not at the expense of young Americans like his sons. “I hate to think how much money I would give up rather than sacrifice Joe and Jack in a war,” he wrote to Honey Fitz from London. To say the Kennedys were Anglophiles fails to account for their actions in England when the empire truly was at stake. During the worst times, when bombs were falling on London, Kennedy sent his family home to the safety of America, far from the reach of foreign powers. He endured the remainder of his tenure largely alone.“For Christ’s sakes, stop trying to make this a holy war because no one will believe you,” Kennedy burst out in one meeting in London with British officials.“You’re fighting for your life as an Empire, and that’s good enough.” In the estimation of British officials, especially Winston Churchill, now prime minister, Kennedy’s isolationism was nothing more than defeatism and, as they murmured behind his back, sheer cowardice. A British foreign office memo about Kennedy’s position explained that Roosevelt owed much of his political success to the “East Coast Irish,” which it characterized as “about the most dirty group of politicians in the country.” To “pacify” the Irish, it reported, the president felt compelled to appoint one of their own. As the memo concluded:“From Mr. Kennedy’s point of view he owes his position to the fact that he represents a Catholic, Irish, anti-English group.”
Within Roosevelt’s administration, several other top officials who were Irish Catholic shared a reluctance to join Great Britain in the war. They perceived the state visit in 1939 of the king and queen, for example, an ominous sign.“The announcement of the royal visit infuriated the Irish at the White House,” recalled Thomas Corcoran, FDR’s speechwriter and confidant.“It signalled an impending alliance and we interpreted it to mean that America would soon be at war.” Frank Murphy, Roosevelt’s attorney general and later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, felt that some of the president’s advisers who were Jewish, such as Felix Frankfurter and Ben Cohen, also were pushing a physically weakened president into the war. “Murphy regards the Jewish influence as most dangerous,” Kennedy recorded in his diary. After attending a Notre Dame football game, Kennedy listened to Murphy as he ticked off a litany of Roosevelt aides who were either Jewish, married to Jews or sympathetic to Communists. “We can’t have both Catholics and Communists,” Murphy insisted. “We must have one or the other.” Clearly, Murphy had found a receptive audience for his anti-Semitic diatribe in Kennedy. A few months later, Kennedy would repeat the same litany in his own diary: “The four men who followed me to Europe: [Harry] Hopkins had a Jew wife and 2 Jew children. [Averell] Harriman a Jew wife. [Ben] Cohen a Jew. [Charles Harold] Fahey— lawyer—a Jew mother.”
The virulent anti-Semitism shared by Kennedy and Murphy expressed a wider attitude within the Catholic Church. Despite assurances to Roosevelt in 1936, the hate-spewing Father Coughlin managed to remain in the public eye as late as 1940. Even after he was off the air, Coughlin continued publishing his reactionary magazine, Social Justice, which editorialized against “communistic Jews” and published the phony Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged “plot” by Jews to gain financial control of the world. Kennedy’s own professed distance from Father Coughlin must be questioned. In February 1939, Social Justice devoted its full cover page to a picture of the Kennedy family and designated the ambassador its “Man of the Week.” When war erupted in Europe, Coughlin urged his followers to form into a “Christian Front,” a small but violent group of mostly Catholic men in New York, Boston and other cities who sometimes beat up Jews in the streets, just as the Nazis did. Coughlin pushed hard for American isolationism, expressing disdain for the English and admiration for Hitler’s policies in Germany.“Had we Christians enforced the discipline and produced the good accomplished by the Nazis for a good end, we would not be weeping at the wailing wall,” Coughlin cried. Only after Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt threatened sedition charges against him, did Coughlin finally end his tirades. What is so disconcerting is that the Catholic Church allowed Father Coughlin to fester this hatred for such a long time and, as the historical record shows, that America’s radio priest expressed views that weren’t too far from those privately held by the ambassador to the Court of St. James.
JOE KENNEDY’S BITTERNESS about impending war, well known to his circle of intimates, soon spilled over.
Within days after Roosevelt’s Election Day victory in 1940, Kennedy granted an interview while home in America to a reporter who published his candid comments without any self-censorship. In this interview, Kennedy’s true feelings were exposed for the world to see. “Democracy is finished in England,” he said. “It may be here.” Contradicting the spirit of his recent radio speech in support of Roosevelt, Kennedy instead painted a damning picture of Great Britain’s chances against totalitarianism, and expressed support for American isolationists.“ Lindbergh’s not so crazy either,” he added. Though his comments were tucked into a Boston Globe article with a quiet, almost misleading headline, the content caused a sensation worldwide. Nailed by his own words, Joe Kennedy seemed almost disoriented by the outcry, especially from the British. In a long letter to his father, twenty-three-year-old Jack Kennedy made several lengthy suggestions about how to write a speech that would extricate Joe Sr. from the mess.“I think it is important that you write in a very calm and a judicious manner, not as though you were on the defensive,” advised his son. But his words came too late.
At a meeting in Hyde Park before Thanksgiving, Roosevelt accepted Kennedy’s letter of resignation. After a short contentious meeting, the president asked Kennedy to step out of the room.“I never want to see that son of a bitch again as long as I live,” the infuriated president told his wife.“Take his resignation and get him out of here!”
Although he agreed to stay in London until the president named a replacement, Kennedy’s ambitious political career was essentially over.
Chaper Twelve
Tortured Souls
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1943, alone and feeling blue, Kathleen Kennedy poured out her soul in a letter home. Using the nickname by which everyone knew her, she signed it “much love to all from Kick.” Apart from her family in America, and the young Englishman she loved who was fighting in the war, Kick Kennedy longed for a future still so far away.
Her romance with Billy Hartington—William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, the future Duke of Devonshire—compelled Kick to return to England during the height of World War II. She had left her newspaper job in Washington to work as a Red Cross volunteer. In her Christmas letter, she talked about wartime hardships, and mentioned the decline of some of the old English manor houses, including Chatsworth, the palatial 150-room mansion where she thought Billy might live someday. So much of the “grandeur, tradition and strength that is very much a part of England” would be lost if those beautiful mansions disappeared, she explained to her family. Then, in the very next line, Kick seemed to remember her other self—the young woman born and reared as an Irish Catholic in Boston— who could not forget her own history.
“I know my little brothers will think ‘Kick has gone more British’ than ever,” she admitted.“My persecuted Irish ancestors would turn over in their graves to hear talk of England in this way but I don’t care. I think a landed aristocracy can be an instrument of good as much as of evil and when it is the former than—‘Perserve [sic] it.’ (You’d better not let Grandpa Fitz see the above.)”
During World War II, the Kennedy family faced several tragedies and moral dilemmas that tested their faith and their family loyalties, and played upon their Irish sense of fate’s cruel ironies. The war that Joe Kennedy had tried so hard to prevent, the conflict that had ruined his own political chances, now threatened the lives of his children. Rather than run for office in Massachusetts, Joe Kennedy Jr. enlisted in the navy and volunteered as a pilot for dangerous bomber flights over Europe. Instead of continuing his budding career as a writer, Jack Kennedy also joined the navy, becoming the skipper of a torpedo boat in the Pacific. But no Kennedy was more conflicted than Kick, the vivacious daughter so much a focus of the Kennedy family life. She followed the dictates of her heart and returned to war-torn London—a place where her father was vilified as an appeaser, willing to see the British Isles collapse in defeat to Hitler so long as his own country was spared war. Kick felt differently.“I feel that my devotion to the British over a period of years has not been without foundation and I feel this is a second home more than ever,” Kick wrote to her brother Jack that same year. This extraordinary time would define the Kennedys for years to come, not only in the public image of this Irish Catholic clan but in the subtle and often profound ways they related to their God and religion, their sense of love and fidelity to each other, and the random, often tragic events that neither their mother’s prayers nor their father’s wealth could keep them from confronting.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY, the fourth child of Joe and Rose Kennedy, had inherited differing traits from each of her parents, though she could arguably be called the favorite of both. Kick possessed the charm and social graces of her mother—with what Rose described as a “glowing, lightly pink Irish complexion”—as well as the sly, quick wit of her father. In an intriguing combination, she was a smart, poised young woman with curly brown hair, a wide dimpled smile, and a sweet sense of naughtiness. “Sir Francis says that ninety percent of the people who write on newspapers haven’t a bit of talent,” she observed as a cub reporter for the Washington Times-Herald in 1942. “Well, brother, another member has joined those ranks.” She appreciated her family’s Gaelic ancestry and understood the Irish quest for social acceptance in all forms of American life. “Green was very prominent around the Times-Herald on St. Patrick’s Day,” she wrote home. “I think Irishmen must have a great weakness for newspapers.” She possessed the fondness of many Irish-Americans for discovering someone with the same heritage. One afternoon in the newsroom,“a rather cultured gentleman” called up with an idea for her boss, and Kathleen was asked to take the message. When she asked the caller’s name, he said his identity didn’t matter.“Just an old Irish name,” he replied.
Kick’s curiosity was piqued. “Tell me, because I certainly have an Irish name,” she insisted.
“What is it?” the man asked.
“Kennedy,” she answered proudly.
There was a pause on the other end, and then the voice continued.“I’ve liked every Kennedy I’ve ever known—except Joe Kennedy.”
Kathleen’s “ears perked up” at this reply, as she later recalled, and she continued her inquisition.“Why don’t you like him?” she asked sweetly,“I hear he’s quite a nice guy.”
The voice would have none of it. “I know him,” the man growled. “I went to college with him.”
Kick never did get the man’s name, but the story of her conversation was so amusing that she repeated it in a letter to her parents.
LIKE HER SISTERS, Kathleen Kennedy’s education followed the path set by her mother. Rose made certain her daughters learned their Catholic catechism along with their mathematics and a foreign language from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at their convent school at Noroton, outside Greenwich, Connecticut, a tony enclave on the Long Island Sound. Mrs. Kennedy didn’t want her daughters socializing with boys from the public schools in Bronxville but rather improving their minds with purposeful study and cultivating their souls through prayer. Irish Catholics, even at the Kennedys’ strata of the American economic pyramid, still were not found in significant numbers at the select all-girls boarding schools or the Ivy League’s seven sister schools of the 1930s. Instead, these successful children of Irish immigrants, usually more than a generation removed from the mother country, created their own social world around the church. At Noroton, young women were instructed by nuns who molded students to show “distinctively feminine qualities: tact, quiet courage, and the willingness to subordinate her will to another’s gracefully and even gaily.” In this small, private elite school for the daughters of wealthy Catholic families, Rose and her daughters met families—such as the McDonnells and Coakleys—who set a social pace that the Kennedys found hard to match. As a “First Irish family” in New York, the McDonnell patriarch refused to let his daughter Charlotte date Jack Kennedy because of his father’s controversial past. When Charlotte McDonnell married a few years later, Rose wrote to her da
ughters: “Mrs. McDonnell rather hints that I am long on education and short on match-making as far as my children are concerned.”
The Kennedy women showed more independence than most Irish Catholic women in their social group, none more so than Kick. Because she was so much like Jack, Kick loved and admired her brother. His breezy style and devil-may-care antics were such a change from the subdued, controlling atmosphere of the convent. “She really thinks you are a great fellow,” their father wrote to Jack when both siblings were still in boarding school. “She has a love and a devotion to you that you should be very proud to have deserved. It probably does not become apparent to you, but it does to both Mother and me. She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow who ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.” In 1935, Kick went to a Sacred Heart convent in Europe for a year, just as her mother had, to further her education and devotion to the church. She raved to her mother that her first Solemn High Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was “the most impressive thing I have ever seen.”A highlight was her visit during March break to the Vatican with four other students and a chaperone. Her father’s friend, Count Enrico Galeazzi, helped Kick and her friends receive an audience with the Pope.
Though a fine student, Kick didn’t possess the same religiosity as her younger sister, Eunice, whom many thought might become a nun. Eunice, a smart, energetic young woman deeply devoted to her faith, embodied the ideal sought by the Sacred Heart nuns. In her teasing manner, Kick would poke a little fun at her sister’s vaunted reputation. She told her family that Hugh Fraser, a potential beau just back from the war, had inquired about Eunice. Fraser, the playwright who stayed friendly with Jack and the family for decades, was one of several Catholics in the Kennedy’s British social circle.“He asks a lot about her,” Kick relayed,“and hopes and prays that she is not taking herself into a nunnery.” In a similar vein, Jack teased Eunice about her religiosity.“I hope everything is going nicely at the Convent, and that the novenas etc. are going off on schedule,” wrote Jack. “It always seemed to me that if you worried less about your chances of getting into heaven and more about your chances of getting a man, which are slimmer and slimmer as you get fatter and fatter—it would take a great load off your brother’s mind.”