by David Nasaw
Kennedy pressed his case. “Supposing it isn’t just a broadcast to America but that American companies pick up this broadcast to England?” Welles tried again to impress his point on Kennedy. The American government was not about to prevent radio companies from broadcasting whatever they wished, but neither he nor Hull nor the president thought it a good idea for Chamberlain to speak live on the radio to the American people. “A direct broadcast would be interpreted as an appeal to the United States and would be undesirable at this moment.”47
On Monday, September 26, the day he received Roosevelt’s plea for renewed negotiations, Hitler addressed Germany and the world from the Sportpalast in Berlin. “Shouting and shrieking in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him in,” the CBS radio commentator in Germany, William Shirer, wrote in his diary, “he stated . . . that he would have his Sudetenland by October 1—next Saturday. . . . If [Czech president Eduard] Beneš doesn’t hand it over to him, he will go to war. . . . For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”48
Chamberlain, who had been praised in Hitler’s speech as a peacemaker, prostrated himself yet again by declaring in a public statement that if Germany refrained from using force, the British government would guarantee the cession of Czech territory without delay. Hitler remained intransigent.
Answering Roosevelt’s telegram, he bluntly declared that the question of whether there would be peace or war in Europe rested not with him, but with the Czechoslovak government. Kennedy, frightened that war—and the German bombardment of London—was now imminent, cabled Washington to find out from the Maritime Commission “what ships could be made available for the hordes of American citizens clamoring to get home.”49
That Tuesday, September 27, while “lunching at home with Teddy,” who was still suffering from tonsillitis, Kennedy was interrupted by a phone call from 10 Downing. Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s personal envoy, was flying back to London. “He had seen Hitler this morning and Hitler had remained ‘obdurate.’ They regard the situation as almost hopeless.” Hitler had shouted at Wilson in their face-to-face meeting that as far as he was concerned, the British cabinet and the Czechoslovak government had only two choices: to accept his terms or to reject them. If they chose the latter, Hitler thundered, then repeated several times, “I will smash the Czechs.” He gave the governments until two P.M. the following day to accept his terms.50
Kennedy cabled Hull the news and asked him to please make preparations for ships “to get the Americans out, because the panic would be great.” Preparations for the coming bombardment were now in full swing. Even in Roehampton, which was outside the central city, the three Kennedy girls were fitted for gas masks in the basement bunker. In London, work had reached an almost fever pitch. “All during the night of September 26–7,” Kennedy wrote in his Diplomatic Memoir, “workmen were busily digging trenches in the parks under the glare of flashlights. But there were not enough men for this work on the unemployment rolls. An SOS call had been issued for every able-bodied man to report to the nearest labor exchange to help to dig trenches. The distribution of gas masks also continued. In many of the city boroughs the schools had been closed in order to facilitate their distribution to the lengthening queues of applicants.” Expecting the German invasion of Czechoslovakia the following afternoon, the Admiralty announced on the evening of September 27 that it was mobilizing the British fleet.51
That afternoon, Kennedy visited the king to deliver a “sealed” letter from Roosevelt. Since Kennedy knew that it contained an invitation to the royal family to visit the United States, which he had suggested, he was “annoyed” at having to deliver it “sealed.” He was delighted when the king opened the letter and read its contents aloud. “The King then asked me to sit down and we discussed the foreign situation. He was noticeably disturbed. . . . The talk turned to the Duke of Windsor, whom I had seen at Cannes. . . . ‘One of the minor calamities of a war,’ the King said, ‘will be his return.’” He was no doubt referring to the likelihood that should Hitler win the coming war, he would recall the pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor to London and restore him to the throne.52
Kennedy returned home to listen to Chamberlain address the nation over the radio on Hitler’s latest demands. Across the Atlantic, a radio was set up in the cabinet room, where Ickes and his colleagues listened. “His words were carefully measured and several times his voice was at the breaking point. He spoke slowly and feelingly. He gave the impression that the tears were just beneath the surface.”53
When the speech was over, Roosevelt called a cabinet meeting to explore the possibility of sending a second message to Hitler, asking him, as Chamberlain had, to delay any action that might lead to war. At three P.M. Washington time (eight P.M. in London), Sumner Welles phoned Kennedy in London with “a message from the President. He asks if you will see Mr. Chamberlain as quickly as possible and tell him that the President is considering making a reply to the message which he received from Berlin last night. In his reply he is considering doing two things. The first of them is to supplement the existing negotiations, should it be thought desirable, by the holding of a conference of the nations directly interested, immediately, in some neutral European capital. . . . The second point he has in mind is to make a direct appeal to the man [Hitler] who sent him the message last night and to limit the message to that man and no one else.”54
Kennedy didn’t call back until 1:45 A.M. London time. He had been delayed meeting with Chamberlain, who, he believed, had abandoned all hope for peace. The prime minister was terrified that Hitler was going to march on the following day, Wednesday, instead of waiting until Saturday, October 1. Ninety minutes later, 3:15 A.M. London time, 10:15 P.M. Washington time, Roosevelt sent his second telegram to Hitler, proposing an international peace conference.
On Wednesday, September 28, the day Hitler had demanded that the Czechoslovak government sign off by two P.M. on his demands, Kennedy phoned Rose at the nearly deserted Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland, where she had gone to vacation after returning from Cannes. “Said I should come back tonight, as we must make some sort of plans for the children because war is imminent,” she recalled later. “Everyone depressed and sober. Waiters chattering in groups. Some of the reserves called out. Took golf lesson.” What she didn’t do was make plans to return to London. Her husband had the week before called her back from Cannes and it had been a false alarm.55
In Rose’s absence, Kennedy began packing the household and making arrangements to get the girls back from Roehampton as soon as passage to America had been secured for them.
At eight A.M. on the morning of September 28, after being up all night cabling and talking by telephone to Washington, he placed a call to the Swedish American Line to ask that the Kungsholm, en route from Gothenburg, Sweden, to New York, stop “at a British port” to take on American passengers. When the company agreed to permit the ship to stop at Leith in Scotland at midnight, Kennedy organized a special train to transport Americans there from London. Later that afternoon, he received a call from the company “to say that they heard the Firth of Forth had been mined and they could not accept the responsibility of permitting the ship to go into Leith.” Kennedy arranged for the ship and the trainload of passengers from London to be directed to Newcastle instead. “All this was done under the pressure of British mobilization . . . with telephone lines jammed and only priority messages permitted to get through.”56
That afternoon, the president cabled Kennedy with a personal message: “In these difficult days I am proud of you.” Kennedy, delighted with the cable but unaware that the same note had been sent to the American ambassadors in Paris, Prague, and Berlin, stuffed it into his pocket and left for the House of Commons to attend what everyone believed would be Chamberlain’s final speech before war was declared.57
Kennedy was seated in the Peers’ Gallery, listening
to Chamberlain, when a messenger arrived with a note for Lord Halifax, who passed it on to former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who then, as Kennedy watched, left his seat and went downstairs. The note was passed along the treasury bench to Sir John Simon, chancellor of the Exchequer, who handed it to Home Secretary Hoare. Chamberlain, approaching the end of his eighty-minute speech, was thanking Mussolini for requesting that Hitler postpone mobilization for twenty-four hours when Home Secretary Hoare handed him the note.
“It was twelve minutes after four,” Harold Nicolson, a member of Parliament at the time, wrote in his diary. The prime minister “adjusted his pince-nez and read the document that had been handed to him. His whole face, his whole body, seemed to change. He raised his face so that the light from the ceiling fell full upon it. All the lines of anxiety and weariness seemed suddenly to have been smoothed out; he appeared ten years younger and triumphant. ‘Herr Hitler,’ he said, ‘has just agreed to postpone his mobilization for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and Signor Daladier at Munich.’ . . . For a second, the House was hushed in absolute silence. And then the whole House burst into a roar of cheering, since they knew that this might mean peace”58
“The cheers in the House from both sides were terrific,” Kennedy cabled Hull. “Everybody feels tremendously relieved tonight.” While Chamberlain had pointedly thanked Mussolini, not Roosevelt, for his last-minute intervention with Hitler, Kennedy seized the occasion to flatter the president and claim, rather preposterously, that his cable to Hitler had changed the tide of history. He closed his note with the sort of light touch that had been absent for months. “Well, as they say on the radio, ‘signing off’ and will try to get 6 hours sleep which I have not had for 7 days.”59
“As we left the House of Commons,” Kennedy recalled in his Diplomatic Memoir, “the tone of the crowds had changed. They were cheering and laughing and waving at every passerby, crowding about the cars and even running beside them in their exuberance. I was happy, too. It was a smiling, grinning individual, I was told, who stepped into the Embassy that afternoon and said: ‘Well, boys, the war is off.’”60
Chamberlain flew to Germany, this time to Munich, where he, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier of France, Benito Mussolini of Italy, and Hitler agreed in writing to the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany, the evacuation to commence on October 1 and be completed by October 10. In the years to come, those who were present in the House of Commons that afternoon or heard the news on their radios or read it in their newspapers or welcomed Chamberlain back from Munich, Germany, would take little pleasure in remembering the delight with which they had greeted the prime minister’s declaration that after months of preparation for war, “peace was at hand.” Even President Roosevelt, certainly no fan of Chamberlain’s, was so pleased with news of the agreement signed in Munich that he asked Hull to cable Kennedy with his congratulations. “Personal for the Ambassador. Transmit urgently following message to Prime Minister Chamberlain: ‘Good man. Signed Franklin D. Roosevelt.’”61
“Tonight,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, “a feeling is spreading all over London that . . . war will be averted. . . . It may be the beginning of a new world policy which may mean peace and prosperity once again.” Rose, who had waited out the crisis at Gleneagles, decided that she could now “stay on at least over the weekend.”62
Eighteen
THE KENNEDY PLAN
The euphoria that greeted Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich was shared by most of those who would later turn against the agreement he carried with him. As the choice between no agreement and the one signed at Munich was a choice between war and peace, to argue against it was, in effect, to welcome war. Few were willing to do so. There were exceptions, of course. Duff Cooper, first lord of the Admiralty, resigned from the cabinet in opposition; Winston Churchill spoke eloquently against the notion that the Munich Agreement preserved the peace. “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat. . . . We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. . . . Do not let us blind ourselves to that. . . . Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom.” Despite such warnings, when the time came to stand for or against the government that had negotiated the agreement with Hitler, Churchill remained seated. So too did a dozen or so other Conservative Party critics of Munich and Chamberlain. In the end, the vote to approve the agreement was almost three to one in favor; no Conservative Party member voted in the negative; twenty abstained.1
President Roosevelt, apparently as swept up in this moment of hopeful expectation as his ambassador to Great Britain, cabled London on October 4 with a “personal message” he wanted Kennedy to convey “orally” to Chamberlain. Now that Chamberlain had succeeded in establishing “personal contact with Chancellor Hitler,” Roosevelt suggested that he attempt to open discussions with the chancellor on the Jewish refugee problem. There were well over half a million Jews in the Reich, and their circumstances were growing more horrific by the day. The number who sought to leave was growing exponentially, but the German government would not allow Jews to take their assets with them; worse yet, no country was willing to accept them. Roosevelt knew better than to suggest that Chamberlain criticize or call into question “the present German policy of racial persecution.” All he asked was that he try to negotiate an agreement that would permit Jewish refugees who wanted to leave Germany “to take with them a reasonable percentage of their property. . . . As time may be of the essence, I am sending you this message without further delay in the hope that you will be able to find an appropriate opportunity to lay these considerations before the Reich Chancellor.”2
Kennedy did not, as he had been instructed to do, deliver the note “orally” to Chamberlain, who was occupied in the House of Commons by the debate over the Munich Agreement. Instead, he read it to Lord Halifax, then forwarded it in written form to the prime minister. When he visited 10 Downing the next day to say good-bye to Chamberlain, who was going off on a long overdue fishing holiday, he read aloud the president’s request that the prime minister appeal directly to Hitler on behalf of the Jewish refugees. Chamberlain responded “that he had already given the Jewish problem much thought and that it was part of the series of problems that in due course could now be taken up with Hitler and Mussolini.” The critical phrase was “in due course.” The following day, October 7, Chamberlain cabled Roosevelt that he agreed that “the first suitable opportunity should be taken of urging . . . the German Government to make a practical contribution to the solution of the [refugee] problem.”3
Roosevelt didn’t press the issue. Neither did his ambassador. Kennedy had complete faith that Chamberlain would raise the issue of the Jewish refugees with Hitler when that “first suitable opportunity” arrived. The prime minister was, he wrote David Sarnoff on October 7, “the best bet in the world today on this question, so, if some of your high class Jewish friends will stop selling the American public that I am pro-British, I may be able to help the cause. Anyway, I will do the best I can.”4
George Rublee, the director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, was not nearly as sanguine about the Chamberlain government’s commitment to solving the refugee problem. The British government, he urged Sumner Welles in an October 10 phone call, had to “be persuaded to take the matter more seriously. This can only be done through Ambassador Kennedy,” who, while “personally sympathetic” to the plight of the refugees, “feels that our undertaking is hopeless. He does not want to go out on it because he has other matters he considers more important.” Welles promised to speak directly to the British ambassador in Washington.5
Rublee’s fears were well-founded. A lawyer by training and a skilled negotiator, he had taken on the tas
k Roosevelt had given him and was trying to do the best he could, but he was hitting obstacle after obstacle. Three days after his call to Welles, at a “buffet dinner given by Ambassador Kennedy,” Rublee wrote an associate in Washington, “I remarked that he had told me that if I got into a ‘jam’ he would help me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am in a “jam” and I wish you would help me.’ He assured me that he would talk to Lord Halifax when Halifax came back on Monday and that he would also talk to the Prime Minister. He said that he had had a talk with the German Ambassador earlier in the day and that the German Ambassador had said that Hitler was not quite ‘right’ for this matter yet. The Ambassador said that he had read all my cables to the Department and that he understood my situation. I was encouraged by his manner and tone which were much more reassuring than I expected.”6
Rublee had every right to be alternately frustrated and encouraged by Kennedy. The ambassador was not insensitive to the plight of the German Jews, as Rublee had told Welles in their phone conversation, but he prided himself on being a realist and as such agreed with the British that the priority in these halcyon, post-Munich days should be placed not on getting Jews out of Germany and Austria, but on securing a viable, long-term peace agreement with the dictators, one that would include but not be centered on the rescue of the Jews. There was, as Kennedy well knew, another reason, almost as important, for the British reluctance to engage with the Jewish refugee problem. The last thing Chamberlain and Halifax wanted at this moment was further discussion of the issue, if only because they feared that it would lead inevitably to the demand that Palestine be opened to Jewish emigration. A demand they had no intention of meeting.
In the ever more likely event of future hostilities with the Germans and/or the Italians, the strategic importance of the Middle East and the support of Arab regional leaders was paramount. The British had no intention of taking any step in Palestine that might endanger that support. Legal Jewish immigration, which had been hearty in the middle 1930s, had been drastically reduced from 61,800 in 1935 to 10,500 in 1937 to placate Arab leaders and stem cascading violence between Arabs and Jews.