by David Nasaw
The Kennedy send-off was front-page news, in large part because the new ambassador was so unlike his predecessors. As Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr., of the New York Times reported from London, until Kennedy, American ambassadors had “sprung from . . . the ‘chosen race’ of Anglo-Scottish Protestants. . . . Almost invariably they have been chosen for the Englishness of their background and their manner, among their other qualities.”4
This was one of the reasons Roosevelt had selected Kennedy for the London post. He was not an admirer of all things British, nor was it anticipated that he would become one. As Senator James Byrnes, citing Woodrow Wilson, wrote Kennedy just before his departure, “You can send an American to London, but it is difficult to keep an American there. . . . Notwithstanding President Wilson’s statement, I venture to predict that in you we have one American who will remain an American.”5
The month before, at the annual Mayflower Hotel dinner of the recently fabricated J. Russell Young School of Expression, named for the White House correspondent of the Washington Star, the president had awarded Kennedy and Eddie Moore mock “Doctor of Oratory” degrees. His delight at awarding the degrees was, he confessed, “conditioned by certain grave fears, nay, apprehensions—a veritable dread that our Joe’s accent may suffer a change with the change of air just ahead of him. Not a few travelers to the bourne whither he is bound have returned with an intonation wholly unintelligible to American ears.” Kennedy’s degree was being offered provisionally and would be formally ratified only if “Joe, at some future time, shall demonstrate that he still speaks our mother tongue in its full American purity, free from all foreign entanglements.”6
Kennedy did not disappoint Roosevelt. Aside from adding “bloody” to his already robust lexicon, he never abandoned his American accent. Nor did he appear anywhere in knee breeches. He broke with British tradition—and affirmed the American tradition that grown men do not appear in public in short pants—by wearing a formal evening suit to court. Having violated one sacred Anglo-American tradition, he modified another by declaring, after consultations abroad and at home, that in future he would limit the number of American debutantes presented at court to those whose fathers were working and residing in Great Britain.
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He arrived in England already a celebrity. Newsreel cameras recorded his landing in Plymouth and were there when, later in the day, he inspected his new residence in London. Before and after he delivered his brief remarks, he bantered lightheartedly with the reporters. Once the cameras were turned on, he was all business, staging the scene as he wanted it shot, with just the right camera angles, yelling, “Cut!” when he stumbled or got his emphases misplaced.
He had only a few complaints, he wrote Jimmy Roosevelt. The new American embassy at 1 Grosvenor Square might look impressive from the exterior, but it was woefully designed. “If there was ever a badly laid out building for which the United States Government has to pay regular money this tops it all.” His private office, decorated in the American style of the 1820s, was a joke. “I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect is a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May. If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my life.”7
He was more pleased with the ambassador’s residence, a six-story, fifty-two-room mansion at 14 Prince’s Gate, which J. Pierpont Morgan had donated to the government in 1920. The residence was well situated within walking distance of the embassy and just off Hyde Park and its Rotten Row bridle path, where Kennedy rode almost every morning before work. Though a large amount of money had already been spent to refurbish the interior of the mansion, it was not suitable for a family of eleven. It would take a fortune to renovate the space and another one to keep it up. Serving his country in London, Kennedy quickly realized, was going to cost him a great deal of money.
Because the family could not be expected to survive on English goods alone, Kennedy imported American products for them, including plenty of Maxwell House coffee, tons of candy, dozens of cans of clam chowder, and household supplies unavailable in London like Nivea skin oil, Jergens lotion, and bottles of Cherrico cough medicine. When he discovered that English freezers did not handle ice cream well, he had an American freezer shipped from New York. Through Carmel Offie, Ambassador William Bullitt’s assistant at the U.S. embassy in Paris, he purchased cigars, fine wines, and fresh vegetables at wholesale prices. In May 1938, he ordered two thousand bottles of Pommery & Greno champagne, five hundred to be shipped to London at once, the remainder to be stored “in the Pommery cellars at Rheims.” He himself seldom drank, and when he did, he preferred Haig & Haig with water before dinner, but a large part of his job as ambassador would be holding formal dinners—for visiting Americans, English gentlemen, and government officials—and he intended to be prepared.8
He spent his first Saturday in England playing a round of golf and shooting a hole in one off the second tee. The press roared with delight on both sides of the Atlantic, though his sons questioned whether some chicanery had been involved. After Mass on Sunday, he visited the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton to register his daughters for school.9
The first American to pay a formal visit to the embassy was Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was so impressed by the new ambassador that he wrote a “Private and Confidential” letter to the president, congratulating him on his appointment. “I know you will be glad to hear, through probably you will have heard it before this, that J.K. has already made a very good impression. These Britishers will hear, of course in private, language from him to which their dainty ears are not accustomed.”10
Rabbi Wise had come to London to confer with Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists on what appeared to be a shift in British policy on Palestine. He had cabled Felix Frankfurter the day before Kennedy’s arrival to “ask him to send word to J.K. to the end that I may have the earliest and most favourable opportunity of meeting with him. He ought to be warned about the present situation.” The Zionists feared, rightly, that the British government was intent on reneging on the Balfour Declaration pledge to establish a Jewish homeland, at precisely the moment when such a homeland was needed more than ever. Two and a half years earlier, in the fall of 1935, the Nazi government had instituted the Nuremberg Laws, which formally revoked all citizenship rights from Jews. German Jewish emigration did not increase immediately, but, as Saul Friedländer has written, “the very idea of leaving the country, previously unthinkable for many, was now accepted by all German-Jewish organizations.”11
On meeting with Kennedy, Wise was delighted, as he wrote his colleagues in New York, to find that the new ambassador agreed with him entirely on the need to pressure the British on Palestine. “J.K. is going to be very helpful, as he is keenly understanding, and there is just enough Irish in him to make him sympathetic to those of us who resent the British promise [to permit Jewish immigration to Palestine] that is in danger of being broken.” In the months to come, Wise predicted, the Zionist leadership would be able to count on Kennedy, as it did on Roosevelt, to support their position on Palestine.12
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Well, old boy,” Kennedy wrote Jimmy Roosevelt the day after he arrived, “I may not last long over here, but it is going to be fast and furious while it’s on.” As Kennedy’s friend Boake Carter had warned him, this was not the best of times for an amateur to enter the diplomatic ranks. In Asia, the Japanese armies that occupied Manchuria had begun their march southward in the summer of 1937, capturing Beijing, Shanghai, and other coastal cities. In Europe, Franco’s attempted coup against the Republican government in Spain had turned into a full-scale proxy war, with the Soviets aiding the loyalists and Italian troops and German armaments sustaining Franco’s rebels. Mussolini, having brutally conquered Ethiopia in 1936, was now pressuring the British for diplomatic recognition of his newly annexed prize. Hitler was making threatening noises about the future incorporation of Austria and port
ions of Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich.13
President Roosevelt’s hands were tied by the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 that embargoed American trade in arms with belligerents and prohibited loans and credits to nations threatened or victimized by aggression, but he sought other ways to support resistance against what he characterized as “the present reign of terror and international lawlessness.” In October 1937, in a major speech in Chicago, he had warned the American people, more bluntly and directly than they were used to, that if the contagion of international lawlessness, aggression, and treaty violations was not halted, the western hemisphere and America would be threatened. Drawing a bit awkwardly on the metaphor that war was a “contagion” spreading uncontrolled across the globe, he proposed that the peace-loving nations actively but nonviolently punish aggressor nations that violated treaties, engaged in violence, and threatened international anarchy by quarantining them. What he meant by this was not entirely clear, though the implication was that he favored some sort of collective economic sanctions. Vague as his proposal was, it was criticized for violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the Neutrality Acts.14
Under an attack broader and louder than he had anticipated, Roosevelt had to back away from his quarantine policy—and rhetoric. Unwilling to withdraw entirely from the international arena, however, he supported a proposal by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles to convene an international conference on November 11, 1938, Armistice Day, and invite nations from every region of the world to the White House to draw “up programs for international conduct, arms reduction, methods of war, and equal access to raw materials.” On February 2, 1938, as Kennedy prepared to leave for London, the president informed the British government that he would disclose his plans for the conference within a few days. But events, as they would too often in the months to come, got in the way of grand schemes for peacemaking.
On February 4, 1938, Hitler dismissed his war minister and his commander of the army, took personal control of the German armed forces, and elevated Hermann Goering to field marshal and Joachim von Ribbentrop to foreign minister. Taken together, these changes pointed in the direction of future military adventurism. On February 9, Sumner Welles informed the British ambassador in Washington that the president had decided not to push forward with the conference plans until he had better intelligence on the German situation.
All signs indicated an imminent invasion of Austria, which would be put off only if the Austrian government peacefully agreed to Anschluss, or annexation, by Germany. The Americans, Kennedy made clear on arriving in London, were going to stay out of the matter entirely. In his introductory meeting with Lord Halifax, who had been named foreign secretary two weeks earlier, Kennedy noted in his diary that he had “talked pretty frankly to him about the isolationist tendencies at home and found him prepared for that point of view.” Two days later, Kennedy said much the same to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who “was apparently prepared as Lord Halifax had been, for my assurances that the United States must not be counted upon to back Great Britain in any scrape, right or wrong. He said he was making his plans for pacification or fighting, as things might develop without counting on us, one way or the other. I talked to him quite plainly and he seemed to take it well.”15
After returning to the embassy from his meeting with the prime minister, Kennedy called in the press and, feet planted firmly on his desk, volunteered that the average American was much “more interested in how he’s going to eat and whether his insurance is good, than in foreign politics. Some, maybe, even, are more interested in how Casey Stengel’s Boston Bees are going to do next season.” Given the fact that at that moment Hitler was laying the groundwork for the invasion of Austria, Kennedy’s remarks were meant to be provocative—and to demonstrate graphically that Americans were not and would never be as concerned with conflicts on the continent as the British were.16
For his part, Kennedy was fairly sanguine that the crisis would be settled peacefully. “Nothing is likely to happen except to have [Austrian chancellor Kurt von] Schuschnigg eventually give in unless there is some indication that France and England are prepared to back him up. . . . My own impression,” he wrote Roosevelt on March 11, “is that Hitler and Mussolini, having done so very well for themselves by bluffing, are not going to stop bluffing until somebody very sharply calls their bluff.” Since nobody, certainly not Great Britain, was going to call that bluff, war was not in the offing. “I am thoroughly convinced and the heads of the various departments in the Government and outside of the Government all feel that the United States would be very foolish to try to mix in. All they are interested in is to have the United States stay prosperous and build a strong navy. . . . This feeling is almost unanimous among the topside people. . . . I am more convinced than ever that the economic situation in Europe is becoming more and more acute and if our American business does not pick up so that trade is generated for these countries, we will have a situation that will far overshadow any political maneuverings.”17
Kennedy’s letter to Roosevelt was written at noon on March 11. His prediction that Hitler was bluffing would be proved wrong within hours. Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg had announced on March 9 that he would hold a plebiscite on Austrian independence. To prevent the plebiscite from being held, Hitler ordered an immediate invasion of Austria. Schuschnigg canceled the plebiscite and resigned on March 11. At two A.M. the next day, fourteen hours after Kennedy had declared Hitler was bluffing, German troops marched into Austria, followed soon afterward by Hitler. On March 13, 1938, the German government declared that Austria was henceforth a province of the Reich.
The annexation of Austria was accomplished quickly, efficiently, bloodlessly. The paramount question that remained was what Anschluss would mean for Czechoslovakia, which was now bordered by the Reich on the west, north, and south. Would Hitler attempt to annex the Sudetenland, which was populated by more than three million ethnic Germans? And if he did, would France and Britain fulfill their treaty obligations to protect Czechoslovakia from aggression? “We are helpless as regards Austria—that is finished,” Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, recorded ominously in his diary on March 13. “We may be helpless as regards Czechoslovakia, etc. That is what I want to get considered. Must we have a death-struggle with Germany again? Or can we stand aside? Former does no one any good. Will latter be fatal?”18
Neville Chamberlain downplayed the significance of the German invasion, called for calm, and argued against any saber-rattling gestures. His Conservative Party nemesis, Winston Churchill, on the other hand, declared in the House of Commons that the only way to prevent Hitler from engaging in further aggression was to proclaim Britain’s “renewed, revivified, unflinching adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations” and assemble a “Grand Alliance in a solemn treaty for mutual defense against aggression.” To Kennedy, the choice between the two men and the two positions was simple. Chamberlain would appease Hitler and preserve the peace; Churchill would enrage him and provoke war. As Kennedy’s first and only priority was preventing war in Europe—and Chamberlain was more committed to preserving the peace at any price than Churchill—the new ambassador was drawn at once into the Chamberlain camp.19
He had been impressed with Chamberlain from the moment he met him. Neville Chamberlain was tall, thin, and handsome, with a full mustache, upright posture, and a craggy, slightly rumpled look to him. As Kennedy noted in his diary on March 4 after their first meeting, he “found him a strong decisive man, evidently in full charge of the situation here.” Chamberlain had been a businessman and, Kennedy believed, still behaved like one, which was all to the good. The prime minister understood the value of negotiation, the need to compromise with one’s opponents, the dangers of rhetorical overkill. His preference was always to make the deal rather than walk away from the table empty-handed. Kennedy was impressed as well by Lord Halifax, the tall, one-armed, ba
lding Uriah Heep–looking foreign secretary, and his dapper and meticulous second, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of state.20
Chamberlain, Halifax, and Cadogan were equally taken with the new American ambassador. They appreciated his frankness and intelligence and, from the moment he arrived in London, treated him not as the oddity he was—the first Irish Catholic ambassador ever and a blunt, plain-speaking businessman to boot—but as a trusted colleague with whom they could speak freely and candidly and occasionally share information gathered by British intelligence.
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It was customary for the newly arrived American ambassador to introduce himself to his British hosts with a speech at the Pilgrims Society. A month before sailing for London, Kennedy had hired Harold Hinton, a former New York Times reporter on foreign affairs, as his speechwriter and asked him, with Krock and a few others, to begin assembling ideas for his address. He continued to work on the speech after arriving in London and forwarded a copy to the State Department for review on March 11.21
As ambassador, Kennedy reported directly to Cordell Hull, the tall, lean, white-haired, former Tennessee congressman whom Roosevelt had asked to be his secretary of state. When Kennedy’s speech arrived by cable in Washington, Hull delegated career diplomat Jay Pierrepont Moffat, chief of the Western European division, to look at it. Moffat suggested minor changes and passed the speech along the chain of command. The following day, Saturday, March 12, the speech was edited a second time and significant excisions made by Secretary Hull and other “internationalists” in the State Department who, Moffat reported in his diary, feared that Kennedy had “swung far too much towards the isolationist school.” It was one thing to avoid comment on the Anschluss, quite another to emphasize that Americans believed they had no stake in European affairs, which was what Kennedy appeared to be implying.22