by David Nasaw
Encouraged by the president’s comments and thinking his “businessman’s manifesto,” properly edited, might reach a broader general audience, he contacted Arthur Krock with a proposal and forwarded a copy of the letter he had received from the president. “I gather from it that he is anxious to have it done,” Kennedy wrote Krock, “and if it is done, I should like to have it done in bang-up shape. I imagine that you are going on your vacation after this convention, and I wonder if you could give some of your time each week, for, say the next five weeks, to help put it in shape. I shall avail myself of your services, however, if you will permit me to pay you for the work you do on it. I should like to make a deal with you for $1000 a week for five weeks, if that is worth your while.” Krock, who had no business writing campaign literature while covering the White House for the New York Times, agreed to edit the book for him.24
In July, having now been away from Washington and without any official position for nearly a year, Kennedy invited reporters to Hyannis Port, where he entertained and lectured them for hours on why Roosevelt should be reelected.
JOE KENNEDY STICKS HIS NECK OUT: SAYS HIS BUSINESS FRIENDS WILL JUMP ON HIM, BUT TELLS WHY HE THINKS ROOSEVELT REELECTION WILL BE BEST THING FOR BUSINESS AND FUTURE OF COUNTRY, read the headline over the half-page spread that appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 26, 1936. Kennedy was supporting Roosevelt for a second term, he explained, because in his four years in office, he had rescued capitalism from the worst depression in American history. “I was in Chicago in 1933 and I saw the mounted police charge in to drive the people out of the banks and I got a glimpse of the kind of powder barrel our system was sitting on without plan or leadership. That wasn’t very long ago. Some people have forgotten very quickly.” Every business index now pointed upward. The stock market was rising, production was up, the automobile and steel industries were “going ahead beyond anybody’s expectation,” railway car loadings were up. Even the bankers railing against the administration were stuffing their portfolios with government securities, proof positive that they were worth something. He urged his fellow businessmen to stop trying to turn the clock back to the Hoover years, but instead to follow his example, acknowledge the breadth of the recovery, and cooperate with the administration. There was nothing more dangerous to the future of the economy—and the nation—than misguided conservatism. “I remember my father was in the Massachusetts Legislature when the 54-hour law was being changed,” he told the reporters gathered for his informal press briefing. “He has told me how the mill owners talked against the 48-hour law. Now nobody would go back. I remember the howl against the Federal Reserve act when it was new. Everybody is for it now.” His endorsement of administration policies was indeed so powerful that he felt obligated to insist that there was no quid pro quo involved. He was “sticking his neck out” only because “he was interested in establishing a system that will make my family secure. Nothing that an administration can give me is as important as that. I’m all through in politics. I haven’t any Government job. I won’t take any.”25
This was the only press interview Kennedy would give that summer. He remained at Hyannis Port the entire season, except for a few brief excursions elsewhere. One was a trip to Skowhegan, Maine, the home of Lakewood, among the country’s premier summer theater colonies. During his stay there, Kennedy rented a cottage with Day Eliot, one of the actresses who was appearing in Star Light, Star Bright, a comedy by Owen Davis. Muriel Palmer, whose father rented the cottage to Kennedy, remembered her mother being upset that her family was a party to such goings-on.26
Having forfeited his last two summers to the SEC, Kennedy was set on enjoying this one. “You know when I go on vacation,” he wrote Robert Allen, Drew Pearson’s partner in Washington, “I don’t ever write letters. I answer an occasional telephone call, and become a first-class bum. . . . Give my best to Drew and tell him that I am an economic royalist of the loafing type.”27
I’m for Roosevelt was scheduled for publication in early fall. Kennedy’s friend from the 1932 campaign train, Louis Ruppel, now at the Chicago Daily Times, wired him in Hyannis Port on August 4 to ask for prepublication rights: “Understand your book will be a sensation. . . . What do you say to making it available in whole or in part for the readers of Chicago’s outstanding liberal newspaper, the Times? It’s a cinch your old pal Bill Hearst won’t print it and after you dispose of five hundred copies in Wall Street what will you do with the rest?” Three weeks later, after having read the manuscript, Ruppel told Kennedy that he was enormously impressed by the power of his manifesto. “Never let the Fascists prevail,” he wrote Kennedy, “or it will be a toss up whether you or Tugwell [Rexford Tugwell, one of the original brain trusters and a strong advocate for economic planning] face the firing squad first. Really it is the clearest presentation of the facts which require Roosevelt’s reelection that has yet been made. . . . Hurry, Hurry, Joe and give me a release remembering that whatever price you set you’ll have to sue to collect.”28
His campaign book was published, with excerpts splashed across the Scripps Howard papers and elsewhere, in September 1936. Kennedy paid the full costs of production, publication, and distribution, made hundreds of copies available to old friends from Boston and Hollywood, new friends from New York such as Ellin Mackay and her husband, Irving Berlin, and dozens of members of the Roosevelt administration. He was immensely proud of the book. “I have lots of letters about it—practically all of them favorable,” he wrote Patrick Campbell, his old headmaster from Boston Latin, and dozens of others who wrote to congratulate him on his effort.29
I’m for Roosevelt presented Kennedy’s profit and loss statement on the New Deal, which he claimed had succeeded in rescuing the economy from the depths of depression. Roosevelt deserved reelection because he had proven himself, time and again, “the real defender of American freedom” and American capitalism. “The New Deal is founded upon a basic belief in the efficacy of the capitalistic system. Every effort had been strained to preserve the system.” The book, as published, made for rather dry reading, sold few copies, and probably won over few voters, but it received enough attention in the press to make the project a success for its author.30
In late September, after his summer in Hyannis Port and a brief trip to Europe on Somerset business, Kennedy joined the campaign on a full-time basis. “I’m so glad you’re back,” Tommy Corcoran wrote on September 21. “The Boss sorely needs paladins whose maces swing heavy and whose lances don’t splinter.” Kennedy helped arrange Jimmy Roosevelt’s campaign tour of Massachusetts and paid for it out of his own pocket. When Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, permitted newsreel companies to film the president and his family at Hyde Park, Kennedy was asked to supervise the shooting and review the edited film and the narration. He also made several speeches, gave interviews, and buttonholed influential businessmen across the country, repeating, reemphasizing, and hammering home his one essential truth, that the Roosevelt presidency had been good for business. “It is the business man, large and small, who has chiefly prospered through the policies of the President,” he wrote in an extended Sunday magazine article for the September 6 New York Times. “The wealthy have been the chief beneficiaries of the New Deal policies, as witness the financial pages of any paper. . . . He [Roosevelt] has never condemned wealth as such, but only the ignoble, the selfish, the irresponsible wealthy. Is it reasonable to suppose that he would sponsor an indiscriminate hatred against the whole class to which he and his kin have always belonged?”31
On October 1, the campaign suffered a major setback when Al Smith, in a nationally broadcast radio address from Carnegie Hall, endorsed Republican candidate Alf Landon, charging, as Hearst and Coughlin had, that the New Deal was rife with Communists. The next morning, Louis Ruppel asked Kennedy to answer Smith’s charges at a meeting of the Chicago Bar Association. Kennedy spoke with campaign officials in Washington, then replied to Ruppel that he could
not spare the time to come to Chicago. “Appointments have been made for practically every day and night from now until twenty-ninth of October. I never knew I was so good. Think our interest will be served best by my staying here.”32
Four days later, he gave the first of several nationally broadcast radio speeches. He did not refer directly to Smith’s accusations or the Communist issue. Instead, he repeated his “Roosevelt is good for business” mantra. “Incidentally,” Drew Pearson joked with him a few days after the first talk, “did you know that your radio voice is a double for Groucho Marx? Any time Groucho is late at the broadcasting studio, all they will have to do is to get you to read his lines; no one would know the difference.”33
By early October, the Democrats seemed headed for victory. “The campaign looks to me distinctly Roosevelt, but it will be by no means an easy fight,” Kennedy wrote Ambassador Robert Bingham on October 6, 1936. “Father Coughlin has definitely made bother in the states that we need to carry, and the Communist cry has been raised rather successfully among the Catholics, I believe, to the damage of Roosevelt.”34
As election day approached, Kennedy was everywhere at once, defending the president’s record in newspapers and magazines, on the stump, over the radio. On October 23, from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, he introduced the president, who spoke from Washington via nationwide radio hookup to “businessmen’s dinners” across the country.
The following evening, he delivered his own nationally broadcast address from the Copley Plaza in Boston, in which as a homegrown Irish Catholic he answered the charges hurled by Coughlin and Smith that Roosevelt was under the sway of Communist advisers. He reminded his audience that “nearly every piece of social legislation passed by the state to protect the laborer from oppression,” like those passed by the Roosevelt administration, had “been denounced in their day as entering wedges of socialism and communism [by] Back-Bay Brahmins [and] Bourbons in all countries. It was against such attacks that the encyclicals of Poe Leo XIII and Poe Pius XI were aimed.” Roosevelt was not a Communist for advocating social and economic reforms. “Tugwell, Hopkins and Frankfurter aren’t Communists. . . . I know all three of these men very well and I can tell you unhesitatingly . . . they are no more communists than you and I.” Communists, Kennedy declared, were opposed to private property, individual liberties, and religion. But the president and his advisers had time and time again demonstrated an “abiding belief in private property.” As for a commitment to individual liberties, the president, Kennedy joked, had sent “no editors . . . to concentration camps, and my friends in the Harvard Club can call the President anything they care to without fear of reprisal.” Kennedy closed his speech by responding, as only he could, to the charge that Roosevelt was “an enemy of organized religion” by invoking the exalted names of Notre Dame, which had granted Roosevelt an honorary degree, and His Eminence George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, who had publicly commended the president. “In the face of this compelling evidence,” he concluded, “certainly no American should be disturbed in the slightest by those who either in the name of politics or through ignorance or fear cry out ‘Roosevelt is a Communist.’”35
In the next week, he gave speeches in Hartford, New York, and then Boston again and spoke on national radio at least twice more. On October 27, he forwarded to Harpo Marx a photograph of the president that he had asked for. “We always deliver, kid. Come on East after Tuesday and help us celebrate.” “Win, lose, or draw,” he wrote James Byrnes, senator from South Carolina and a big Roosevelt supporter, “after Tuesday—Joseph Patrick Kennedy retires from the political ring for ever and a day.”36
The election of Roosevelt to a second term was a foregone conclusion by the time the polls opened on Tuesday, November 3, 1936. But no one had predicted the size of his victory. Roosevelt won forty-six of the forty-eight states, 523 of 531 electoral votes, and 61 percent of the votes. No candidate had ever done better.
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There was little time for a victory lap—for the president or for Kennedy. In October, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, had arrived in the Port of New York. While he insisted otherwise, the reason for the visit was to discuss with the president the possibility of the United States renewing diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Pacelli was accompanied by Enrico Galeazzi, the Rome liaison to the Knights of Columbus and a close friend to Francis Spellman, the highly influential auxiliary bishop of Boston. On Spellman’s suggestion, Galeazzi visited Kennedy at his office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to work out arrangements for a meeting with the president, which it was agreed would have to wait until after the election.
“The floor of all rooms of his office,” Galeazzi remembered, “was covered with a thick light blue moquette, of the same color as the eyes of this man.” He was impressed by Kennedy’s take-charge attitude, his devotion to the church, and his charm. “Tall, elegant, gentlemanly,” Galeazzi recalled, Kennedy “could be as gentle and kind as a gallant knight or as violent and cross as a general at war.” The two men would become and remain the closest of friends and allies for the rest of their lives.
To be called upon to do a favor for the Vatican was the highest honor Joseph P. Kennedy could receive. He arranged for a private railroad car to transport Pacelli and his entourage between New York and Hyde Park and scheduled a lunch with the president for November 5, two days after the election. There would be no discussion in the press as to what the president and the Vatican secretary of state spoke about. Galeazzi would later recall only that Cardinal Pacelli had visited Hyde Park “in cordial intimacy and stayed for lunch. The aged mother of the President and his son James were present. Joe Kennedy was, with Bishop Spellman, the life of the party.” On his return trip to New York City, Cardinal Pacelli stopped over in Bronxville to visit the Kennedy family. Teddy, who was four at the time, recalled being “fascinated by his long robe and scarlet skullcap, and his long aristocratic nose.” Uninvited, he crawled up on the cardinal’s lap while he was seated on the family’s favorite sofa.37
Two and a half years later, Cardinal Pacelli would be crowned Pope Pius XII in St. Peter’s Square before a gathering of church officials, worshippers, and foreign dignitaries, including Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, his wife, and eight of their children. When, in 1946, the Bronxville house was sold, Rose made sure that the sofa the cardinal, now pope, had sat on was moved to Hyannis Port with a plaque made and attached to it to commemorate the 1936 visit.
Fourteen
MARITIME COMMISSIONER
William Randolph Hearst and his media empire were early casualties of the Roosevelt victory.
By relentlessly referring to the president as “Moscow’s candidate” and Stalin’s “comrade,” Hearst had forced his largely urban, working-class, Democratic readers to choose between him and the president. They had chosen the president and stopped buying Hearst papers. Hearst might have survived had he not already been deeply in debt to newsprint suppliers and to the banks. As long as circulation remained stable, his creditors had permitted him to roll over his debt, but with circulation and advertising revenues falling, they refused to do so any longer. Faced with a debt of $2.1 million to the International Paper Company, $300,000 of which was due in early January, Thomas J. White, Hearst’s top lieutenant, contacted Kennedy in New York.
As with RCA and Paramount, Kennedy knew he had been called on not simply because he was an astute businessman and banker, but because he had written the SEC rules that governed the issuance of the new stocks and bonds the Hearst corporations would have to sell to pay off their debts. To protect himself from conflict of interest charges, Kennedy kept his work with Hearst quiet. There were no announcements, no press conferences. He did not request a fee for his services, but asked only that Hearst pay the men who worked with him on the project. He agreed to prepare a restructuring plan, write the registration statements required for the issuance of new stocks or bonds, and then, if wa
rranted, assume some leadership role in the restructured corporation.
On January 20, Kennedy flew north from Palm Beach to Washington, D.C., for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inauguration. This time around, in acknowledgment of all he had done during the campaign, Roosevelt had not only invited him to the inauguration, but encouraged him to bring as many family members as he could gather. Jack and Joe Jr. were occupied with midterm examinations and could not make it, but the other seven children, escorted by a governess and Eddie and Mary Moore, took the train to Washington, were put up at the Brighton Hotel, had dinner at the Mayflower, and were asked to luncheon the next day in the White House ballroom and introduced to the president.
The following month, he heard from the president, who asked if he would accept appointment as the first chairman of the United States Maritime Commission. This was not the type of position Kennedy had hoped for, but he accepted it four days after it had been offered. While no promise was made, the presumption was that if he took on one more impossible task for the president, the next appointment would be more to his liking.
“I am planning to take the same house I had before if possible,” he wrote James Byrnes, with whom he had become quite friendly during his days in Washington. “If by any chance the boys hold you in Session for the summer we’ll at least have some nice cool mint juleps and Boston lobster. If I am confirmed I expect to be in Washington from next Friday on and then I’d like to see you as often as you can find time to see me.”1