by David Nasaw
The older children were free during the day to do as they pleased. Rose and the governesses took the little ones to the hotel for swimming and lunch. The family reconvened for dinner at the villa at a long table, the youngest at one end, their table manners monitored by their mother, the older children, at the other end, discussing “topics and issues proposed by their father. He ran the discussions like a master conductor,” recalled Dietrich’s daughter, Maria, “posing questions about world affairs, politics, the economy. Most of the questions were directed at the bigger boys, but the younger children, boys and girls, were expected to listen and contribute if and when they had something to add. He drew them out, prodded them to back up their arguments, filled in the blanks.”6
A strange twist of fate had that summer of 1938 placed the ambassador together in the South of France with the man he had hoped to replace in the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Kennedy, supremely confident in his own charm—and his ability to disarm potential or past opponents—attempted to draw Morgenthau closer to him by running down his colleagues in the cabinet. His particular bête noire at the moment was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, whom he referred to only as “the old man.” That spring and summer, Hull had pushed Kennedy hard for assistance in negotiating a bilateral trade treaty with Great Britain. Kennedy had been less than helpful because he thought Hull’s demands ridiculous. “The old man” simply didn’t understand business or international trade and was making requests that no British official was going to take seriously. Morgenthau listened carefully, and no doubt gleefully, as Kennedy explained why he was doing less than he might have to follow the instructions that came out of the State Department. He made mental notes of every disparaging word out of Kennedy’s mouth, and as soon as he returned to Washington, he reported it all to the president.7
The Kennedys were not the most famous vacationers in Cannes that season, but they dominated the scene by sheer force of numbers and personality. Henry Morgenthau III, who was Jack’s age, remembered him and Joe Jr. “chasing a shapely brunette in and out of the swimming pool.” Joe Jr. led the way, with near godlike self-confidence, charm, good looks, and a well-chiseled athletic body; Jack, Morgenthau recalled, held back a bit. The rumors circulating among the other hotel guests were that he was suffering from some incurable ailment and had only two years to live.8
While Henry Morgenthau III was a bit cool toward the Kennedys, thirteen-year-old Maria, Dietrich’s daughter, was smitten at first sight by the “wonderful” Kennedy children. “I would have gladly given up my right arm, the left, and any remaining limb, to be one of them. They looked, and were, so American. All had smiles that never ended, with such perfect teeth each of them could have advertised toothpaste.” She found their father “kind of rakish. For a man with such a patient little wife, who had borne him so many children, I thought he flirted a bit too much, but outside of that, Mr. Kennedy was a very nice man.” She saw a lot of the ambassador that August. He was, Maria recalled, “a regular visitor to our beach cabana” and made sure that everyone knew it.9
—
Despite the president’s growing coolness toward the ambassador, John Burns, who was now in private practice but remained a friend and associate of Kennedy’s, and Arthur Krock were confident that he still had a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in 1940—if Roosevelt decided not to put his own name forward. Kennedy’s strength was with the party’s conservative wing.
Burns cautioned him to reach out to the liberals. “I think it is important that you have the good will of the liberals, the kind of good will which I believe Tommy [Corcoran] is attempting to build up through Rabbi Wise, [labor leader] Sidney Hillman and the 100% New Dealers.” He suggested that Kennedy, while pursuing “a policy of friendliness to the leftish group, but no identification . . . accentuate your New England [roots] rather than your New York association. . . . There is a surprisingly strong sentiment throughout the country, and particularly in New England, in favor of your designation.” Burns recommended that Kennedy seek out at once “an expert politician” to begin lining up convention support for him.10
Krock’s political advice was different, though not contradictory. “Your publicity continues good,” he wrote Kennedy, “and on every hand one hears golden opinions of what you are doing.” The problem was that much of that publicity was of the wrong kind. Kennedy’s strength as a candidate—his down-home, plain-folk, blunt-spoken appeal—was being lost in the sea of photographs of him in top hat and tails, entertaining and being entertained by English aristocrats. “I don’t want the impression to get round that you are anything of a prima donna. . . . I urge you to keep away for a goodish while from the Royal Family. Today again you were boating (in the paper) with the Windsors. My instinct tells me there has been enough of that, and I can see how it could be misused and distorted by unfriendly persons. Get some very different kind of social publicity for a while, and soon, is my unsought counsel.”11
Krock may have been getting his information about Kennedy’s growing reputation as a prima donna from his contacts at the State Department. Less than six months into his tenure, Kennedy was already making a nuisance of himself with continual complaints about procedures and pay rates. “I really believe you must be the most patient man in the world,” he wrote George Messersmith, assistant secretary of state for administration, “to have to sit there and take all these letters from fussy Ambassadors and not lose your sense of humor or temper. It is an art I wish I had cultivated in my youth. However, maybe you will get your reward in Heaven.” He then asked Messersmith to see that Joe Jr. was “added to my staff as my private secretary at a dollar a year. He is a graduate of Harvard and I want to keep him with me this year, because of the tremendous amount of personal work I find myself called upon to perform here. . . . The reason I am asking for diplomatic status for him is that I can use him on a lot of small events where they want members of the family, and to build up good-will.”12
When he didn’t get an immediate answer, Kennedy followed with an angry telegram. Messersmith replied a few days later that he could not grant Joe Jr. diplomatic status, as department rules precluded ambassadors from appointing family members to their staffs. Kennedy accepted Messersmith’s explanation and apologized again for his impatience. “I was mad as hell when I didn’t get an answer for a month [really two weeks] to what I considered a very simple request regarding young Joe.”13
Instead of working for his father at the embassy, Joe Jr. would spend his year abroad between college and law school traveling from capital to capital, embassy to embassy, from Paris to Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow, then the Scandinavian capitals, Berlin, The Hague, then Paris again, and if it could be arranged, Madrid. Wherever he went, he was treated like royalty. In Warsaw, Ambassador Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr., allowed him to read “all his dispatches.” When it came time to visit Spain, he asked his father to “write some letters to famous pals, possibly the Duke of Alba might do it, so they could show me the works. Also some letters from newspaper men to correspondents down there.”14
—
On August 28, Kennedy ended his vacation and flew to Paris to attend a meeting on the Jewish refugee problem with Ambassador Bullitt, Myron Taylor, and George Rublee, who on Roosevelt’s recommendation had been appointed director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the organization set up at the Évian Conference. Rublee wanted to visit Germany as soon as possible to negotiate terms for the emigration of German and Austrian Jews, but he could not do so until he had some idea as to the number of refugees that Great Britain, France, and the United States would accept. Bullitt and Kennedy agreed to inquire of the French and British governments what they were prepared to do for the refugees.15
Kennedy arrived in London late on August 29 in the midst of several crises, the least important of which, certainly for Halifax, was the Jewish refugee one. The foreign secretary and the prime minister we
re too preoccupied with German threats to Czechoslovakia to pay much attention to the Jewish question. When asked by Kennedy “about the Jewish situation,” Halifax responded that “he was not very well up on it.” There had been some discussion, he told Kennedy, “about placing Jews in Rhodesia and Kenya, but just how many they cannot tell yet.” He added that he was not sure the attempt to resettle the German and Austrian Jews was a good idea as “other countries who want to get rid of their Jews will be encouraged to throw them out, hoping that America, England and France will find some way of taking care of them.”16
On August 30, Prime Minister Chamberlain convened an emergency cabinet meeting to consider whether the British government should issue a formal warning to Germany that it would defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia by force, if necessary. It was decided to make no such commitment for now, but to keep Hitler guessing as to what the British might do should he invade Czechoslovakia. At the conclusion of the cabinet meeting, Chamberlain met with Kennedy at 10 Downing. Kennedy, who had not seen the prime minister in more than a month, was shocked at his appearance.
“He does not look well at all,” he cabled Hull at five P.M. that afternoon. “The gist of the conversation was that he is very much disturbed about the Czechoslovakia situation. All the information that he gets . . . is that Hitler has made up his mind to take Czechoslovakia peacefully if possible but with arms if necessary.” The nightmare scenarios that had haunted Kennedy since the Anschluss were one step closer to denouement. Only Chamberlain, Kennedy believed, stood between war and peace. “He still is the best bet in Europe today against war, but he is a very sick looking individual. He is worried but not jittery.”17
The day after Kennedy’s interview with the prime minister, he met with Halifax, who wanted to know “what would be the reaction in America if the Germans went into Czechoslovakia, with the Czechs fighting them, and England did not go along.” Kennedy forwarded Halifax’s request to Hull. He then, bizarrely, before he had received any reply, “called in a mixed audience of newspaper men” and told them about Halifax’s request. Reporters on both sides of the Atlantic were aghast at his lack of discretion. As the Chicago Tribune asked rhetorically, “Why he touched on a subject considered a dark secret is best known to himself.”18
Kennedy violated State Department protocol a second time that same day by giving an exclusive telephone interview to Hearst’s Boston Evening American, without clearing it with the State Department.
Roosevelt directed Hull to inform Kennedy that the American government had no intention of specifying, in advance, how it would respond to the hypothetical scenario Halifax had described and to chastise him for granting interviews to selected newspaper chains. Morgenthau, who met with the president that same day, “got the impression that the President felt that not only was Kennedy talking to the press, but he was definitely trying to force the President’s hand in this manner in his process of playing the Chamberlain game.” By leaking the news of the British request, Kennedy had placed his government in an impossible situation. “We are in the position now,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary, “that anything we do now makes us a party either way, a party to their fighting or not fighting. They have us, for the moment, stymied. Kennedy is playing with the British Foreign Office and the Prime Minister. He has spilled the beans, and the President knows this.”19
Morgenthau reported to Roosevelt what Kennedy had said at Cannes about “the old man” (Secretary of State Hull) and his mishandling of the Anglo-American trade bill. When he had finished his Kennedy story, Roosevelt told one of his own. He had recently sent a commission to Britain “to study labor conditions abroad.” Though the commission members were in London for a full three weeks, Kennedy had not entertained a single member “with the exception of Gerard Swope,” chairman of General Electric and brother of Kennedy’s friend Herbert Bayard Swope. At a dinner given by the British in honor of the commissioners, Kennedy “got up and gave a talk. He said that in America legislation was prepared on a ten minute study by the brain trust; it was then passed by Congress and subsequently found to be imperfect or unconstitutional and that’s the way we did things in America, while in England everything was carefully prepared by Commissions so that it could be readily passed by Parliament and that it worked well. The President,” Morgenthau noted in his diary, “was perfectly furious when he heard this and . . . tempted to recall Kennedy.”
Morgenthau, stoking the president’s anger, suggested that Kennedy’s “popularity with the English” was due to such critical remarks about the United States. The president agreed. “I don’t think there is much question but what Kennedy is disloyal to his country.” He asked Morgenthau if, when they were together in the South of France, Kennedy had mentioned resigning. “If Kennedy wants to resign when he comes back [for his next leave, probably at the end of the year], I will accept it on the spot and . . . if Kennedy returns to private life he is through.”20
—
On September 2, Kennedy and Jack took the train to Aberdeen, Scotland, to lay the cornerstone of a memorial chapel dedicated to an American bishop from Connecticut. Anxious not to get himself into any more trouble, the ambassador had forwarded a draft of his remarks to the State Department for review and marked those paragraphs that might cause “some concern on broad political grounds.” One of them contained as clear an articulation of his views on war and peace as he would ever make: “I should like to ask you all if you know of any dispute or controversy existing in the world which is worth the life of your son, or of anyone else’s son? Perhaps I am not well informed of the terrifically vital forces underlying all this unrest in the world, but for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which could be remotely considered worth shedding blood for.”21
When Moffat received the draft and read the highlighted paragraph, he immediately went looking for Hull, who he hoped would show the draft to the president. “Joe Kennedy’s star is not shining brightly these days,” Moffat noted in his diary on September 1. “He cannot move without a blare of publicity and in tense moments like these publicity is the thing most to be avoided. . . . All of us thought that the Secretary should have Presidential authority to reject the paragraphs.”22
Roosevelt, on reading the draft, was confirmed in his opinion that Kennedy had gone over to the other side. His position—that Czechoslovakia was not even “remotely” a cause “worth shedding blood for”—was but a paraphrase of Chamberlain’s position—that Britain had no vital interest in going to war to preserve the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia. “Who would have thought,” he told Morgenthau on September 1, 1938, “that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman? . . . The young man needs his wrists slapped rather hard.”23
It was apparent now, six months into his tenure, that Joseph P. Kennedy was unfit to serve as ambassador. Unfortunately, there was no way Roosevelt could recall him. On the contrary, he needed him in London more than ever. The nominating conventions were less than two years away and there was already, as Harold Ickes had written in his diary that summer, a strong feeling “in some quarters that there may be an understanding between [Vice President] Garner and [Postmaster General] Farley looking to a ticket consisting of these twain in 1940 [and this] has led to the suggestion that in such an event the President might have to turn to Joe Kennedy as a candidate for Vice President. This would match a Roman Catholic against a Roman Catholic.”24
While Roosevelt, contrary to Ickes’s speculations, was not considering Kennedy for the vice-presidential nomination, he knew that whether he ran for a third term or chose a liberal New Dealer like Hopkins to succeed him, he was going to need Kennedy’s endorsement. The ambassador was too rich, too outspoken, too charming, and too well connected to the national media to have as an enemy. The solution would have been to bring Kennedy back to Washington and give him another position. However, the ambassador had made it clear that the only position he would accept, i
n lieu of his ambassadorship, was secretary of the treasury, and Roosevelt was not about to replace Morgenthau, whom he trusted, with a known renegade.
Roosevelt was trapped. In the months to come, the president would speak ill of his ambassador, trust him less and less, and detour around him to communicate with London, but he would never, as he had suggested to Morgenthau he should, slap his wrists, criticize him publicly, or let him know of his dissatisfaction. Kennedy, with no direct knowledge of the president’s displeasure, would continue to follow his own agenda.
—
On September 6, Joseph P. Kennedy celebrated his fiftieth birthday by himself. Rose and Kick, who were shopping in Paris, called to wish him a happy birthday at 8:45 in the morning but missed him. Joe Jr., also in Paris, telegrammed his birthday wishes: “The first fifty they say are the toughest but it’s going to be much tougher for your all too promising son to come anywhere near duplicating your great achievements. Love and Congratulations on your half century of phenomenal success.” There were letters as well from Eunice and Rosemary, who reported that they were having a grand time on their tour of Scotland and Ireland. “We have been getting plenty of attention,” Eunice, now seventeen, informed her father from County Cork. “We had the special De Luxe room on the boat. A couple of people wanted to interview us and two people have asked us for our autograph. . . . Well Daddy I hope you had a very happy birthday and a very ‘quiet one.’ I only wish you were with us.”25
—
By early September, Lord Halifax had come up with a new strategy for keeping the peace, the very opposite of the one he and Chamberlain had pursued to this point. Hitler, Halifax now believed, might be persuaded to back away from his threat to seize the Sudetenland if he could be convinced that the British and the French, with American support, would go to war to protect Czechoslovakian territorial integrity. The problem with such a scenario was that the Americans had never evidenced any intention of joining a campaign, military or otherwise, against Germany.