by David Nasaw
The royal commission charged with finding a solution to the Palestine problem had, in the spring of 1937, suggested partition into two states, but the proposal—and the map the commission drew of the proposed states—had been withdrawn because of opposition from both Arabs and Jews. A second High Commission on Palestine had been appointed in February 1938 to try again to come up with a workable plan. Rumors abounded on both sides of the Atlantic in the fall of 1938 that within days the commission would recommend further restriction, perhaps curtailment of Jewish immigration to the Middle East, this at a moment in time when the numbers of Jews seeking to emigrate had increased exponentially.7
On October 6, Chaim Weizmann in London cabled Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and other Zionist leaders in New York and Washington that he feared the British were about to restrict immigration to Palestine and that only pressure from the Americans was going to stop them. It was imperative that Roosevelt be asked at once to instruct his ambassador in London to express the American government’s steadfast objection to any proposal by the British to reduce Jewish immigration to Palestine.8
Hull and Welles, on Roosevelt’s instructions, cabled Kennedy in London to ask him to find out precisely what was in the British plan and to let the Chamberlain government know how significant the question of Palestine was to the American Jewish community. “Unless you perceive serious objection,” Hull cabled Kennedy on October 12, “I should like to have you see Lord Halifax at your early convenience and, entirely personally and unofficially, inform him that during the past few days the White House and the Department have received thousands of telegrams and letters from all over the United States protesting against the alleged intention of the British Government to alter the terms of the Palestine Mandate in such a way as to curtail or eliminate Jewish immigration.”9
Kennedy did as he was asked, exasperated at what he perceived to be the posturing going on in Washington. Hull, Welles, and Roosevelt had to know that the Chamberlain government was likely to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine and that no matter what Roosevelt might say to Zionist leaders and sympathizers in Washington, the U.S. government was not going to involve itself in what it regarded as a British matter.
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Joseph P. Kennedy had arrived in London believing that one of his major tasks would be negotiating the Anglo-American trade and tariff agreement that was at the top of Secretary of State Hull’s agenda. On October 14, he called Hull in Washington to offer his assistance in the final round of negotiations. “I don’t know anything about the terms of the agreement, but I know something about trading. I have been doing that for twenty-five years and I know how you have put your heart on this thing and I don’t want to see it fall down. I am on the ground here and I think I know exactly what’s going on here.” Hull let Kennedy ramble on, to the point where the ambassador became concerned that no one was paying attention at the other end of the line and asked pointedly if someone was “taking this down.” He then offered his recommendations on the terms that should be offered the British on lard, tobacco, lumber, plywood, corn, wheat flour, electric motors, typewriters, wool, and motorcars. Hull promised that he would stay in touch.10
Kennedy was angry about being shut out of the trade negotiations, but angrier still when the news of his exclusion was leaked to the press. As Drew Pearson and Robert Allen reported on October 31, “One sidelight on British treaty negotiations has been the attitude of Ambassador Joe Kennedy. . . . Much interested in the treaty negotiations, Joe frequently wired the State Department . . . for details. But the State Department never obliged. Joe’s requests for information were not answered. Department officials feared Joe might use the information to chisel the treaty’s progress.”11
Such snubs from Washington were, he feared, having an adverse influence on his ability to conduct business in London. He had also been excluded from discussions about the royal family’s visit to the United States. “While I do not like to bother you with this,” he cabled the State Department in a “For the Secretary Personally” dispatch, “I am somewhat embarrassed by being questioned every day in connection with the King’s trip by the King’s Secretaries and by the Foreign Office. . . . Because I imagine my contacts and prestige here would be seriously jeopardized I hate to admit knowing nothing about it. Possibly nothing can be done about this and although it is difficult I can continue to look like a dummy and carry on the best I can.”12
Five days later, Kennedy received a “Dear Joe” note from the president, asking “if he would be good enough” to deliver another letter to the king. “I feel sure,” Roosevelt explained, offhandedly responding to the ambassador’s complaints, “you will understand that the preliminary discussions about the proposed visit of Their Majesties next year is only in the preliminary stage and that, therefore, I am conducting it personally.” Roosevelt’s explanation was ridiculous (he could at one and the same time have conducted the discussions “personally” and consulted with his ambassador) and served only to reinforce Kennedy’s sense of isolation now verging on paranoia.13
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On October 19, Kennedy addressed the annual Trafalgar Day dinner of the Navy League, the first American ambassador ever invited to do so. The speech was, for the most part, a lighthearted, thoroughly conventional paean to the informal but grand alliance between the English and American navies. The ambassador began by jokingly listing the topics he had decided not to talk about, including “a theory of mine that it is unproductive for both democratic and dictator countries to widen the division now existing between them by emphasizing their differences, which are self-apparent. Instead of hammering away at what are regarded as irreconcilables, they can advantageously bend their energies toward solving their remaining common problems and attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis. . . . After all, we have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not.” The reporters covering the speech, not a few of them lurking in wait for him to say something off-color or blatantly undiplomatic, seized immediately on these sentences. The New York Times, reporting on the speech the next morning in an article titled KENNEDY FOR AMITY WITH FASCIST BLOC: URGES THAT DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS FORGET THEIR DIFFERENCES IN OUTLOOK. CALLS FOR DISARMAMENT, printed verbatim the two paragraphs in which Kennedy had called “for amity with Fascist bloc,” labeling it “an excellent summary of the attitude repeatedly stated here by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain” and asking whether Kennedy’s pronouncements, vague as they were, indicated a shift in American policy from “quarantining” the dictators to making friends with them.14
The president and Hull were furious—not so much at Kennedy, whom they expected to say such things, but at the State Department, which had falled to censor him. “The Secretary,” Moffat wrote in his diary on October 21, “is very upset over the effect of Kennedy’s recent speech. . . . He thinks we should have definitely called Kennedy off in advance, despite his claim that he was advancing a ‘pet theory of his own.’ The Secretary asked Sumner why he did not see the danger of the speech. Sumner replied that he had been thinking of Mexico and had assumed that the Secretary himself had given attention to the matter and had initialed blind.” Hull then turned to Moffat and blamed him for the fiasco. “A ‘goat’ is needed and I shall be the goat,” Moffat concluded. “In the long run, however, no one is going to be hurt unless it be Mr. Kennedy himself.”15
Hull held a press conference the morning after the speech to insist that Kennedy had been speaking for himself, not the government. This did nothing to quiet the storm. On October 26, just a week after the Trafalgar Day speech, the White House called Adolf Berle, one of the original members of Roosevelt’s brain trust who now served as an assistant secretary of state, to ask him to “prepare a fifteen minute speech” for the president that “would undo the damage done by Kennedy’s recent speech [and] make it clear that our foreign policy was unchanged.” Without mentioning Kennedy b
y name, the president repudiated everything the ambassador had said in a speech broadcast from the White House. There could, he declared, be no peace with nations that threatened war as an instrument of national policy and persecuted and denied freedom of speech and religion to their own citizens.16
The president’s clarification did not quiet the controversy over Kennedy’s remarks but intensified it. Frank Kent reported in his October 28 column that Kennedy had that past week received a “journalistic lambasting so completely in contrast to his accustomed laudation that it could hardly help but be a shock to him.” In a telephone conversation with Moffat the following week, Kennedy noted that he had “just received a week’s batch of newspaper clippings and I should judge by them that I had never been right in anything since the war broke out in 1914.” Without apologizing, and in fact confirming the major charge leveled against him, that he was too close to Chamberlain, Kennedy warned Moffat that “you fellows in Washington should know one thing, that if I am to get results here I can only do it by staying on the right side of the men in power.”17
Arthur Krock and John Burns, who both thought that Kennedy’s comments on the need to open negotiations with the dictators were so out of line that they might get him recalled from London, warned him to watch his temper and his mouth. “You ought not to talk with Tommy [Corcoran] or anyone else in a complaining or querulous tone about what has happened,” Burns wrote on November 4. “It’s much better to keep up, as I know you can very well, the appearance of being entirely confident of the goodness, sweetness and charity of the ‘Great White Father’ [Franklin Delano Roosevelt].”18
Publicly, Kennedy tried to disguise his anger. Privately, he let it all out. He could not, for the life of him, understand what he had said that should so offend anyone back home. The English, French, and Americans had two choices: either fight a war with the dictators or make peace with them. Since it made no sense to fight with an enemy that was so much stronger, the only available path was to seek a mutually acceptable accommodation.
It was ludicrous to believe that anything positive could come from verbally abusing Hitler and Mussolini. Nasty words, no matter how eloquently delivered, and moral posturing, no matter how sincere, were not going to get them to change their ways. Only war or economic boycott might, but these were alternatives no one was seriously advocating at the moment.
“I believe that unless England and France are prepared to fight and endanger civilization,” Kennedy wrote Tom White in mid-November, “then there is no point in staying on the side lines and sticking your tongue out at somebody who is a good deal bigger than you are. As far as the United States goes, we ought to mind our own business, but that means minding our own business and not one minute kicking the dictators’ head off and the next suggesting that they cooperate along certain lines. It is my theory in doing business with individuals or with nations that you must either keep away from them altogether or, if you are going to stick your tongue out at them or slap them on the wrist, you have better be prepared to punch them in the jaw.”19
In his unpublished Diplomatic Memoir, Kennedy was still trying a decade later to understand the furor over his speech. Much of it, he claimed, came from those, including “a number of Jewish publishers and writers,” who wanted to precipitate a war with Germany. In separate letters written to New York Daily News columnist Dorothy Fleeson and to Tom White, Kennedy insisted that “75% of the attacks made on me by mail were by Jews.” In his memoir, he claimed that he understood why the Jews wanted Great Britain and America to go to war against Hitler and why they had attacked those who advocated appeasement. “After all, the lives and futures of their compatriots were being destroyed by Hitler. Compromise could hardly cure that situation; only the destruction of Nazism could do so.” Still, even after excusing his Jewish critics for what he believed was their warmongering, he was not ready to forgive them for their unfair attacks on him: “Some of them in their zeal did not hesitate to resort to slander and falsehood to achieve their aims. I was naturally not the sole butt of their attack but I received my share of it.” The only Jewish names he mentioned were journalists. Max Lerner, who he claimed had unfairly attacked him in a speech to a Boston audience, and Walter Lippmann, who had declared in his column that ambassadors had no business airing their personal views in public. Lippmann’s was not a particularly nasty column, certainly not as damning as columns written at the same time by Heywood Broun, Dorothy Thompson, and Hugh Johnson, none of them Jewish.20
Joe Jr. defended his father by drafting a letter that was apparently never sent. “Mr. Lippmann[’s] article shows the natural Jewish reaction to the speech of ambassadors calling for some kind of cooperation between the democratic and fascists nations.” Almost parroting his father, young Joe lectured Lippmann: “Either you have to be prepared to destroy the fascist nations . . . or you might as well try to get along with them. I know this is extremely hard for the Jewish community in the US to stomach, but they should see by now that the course which they have followed the last few years has brought them nothing but additional hardship.”21
Jack reported from Cambridge that while the Navy Day speech “seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc. [it] was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-Fascist.”22
There was more than a hint of paranoiac rage here directed at Jewish letter writers, columnists, and newspaper reporters. The Kennedys had to blame someone for the criticism—and who better than Europe’s most venerable scapegoats. One of the staples of twentieth-century anti-Semitism, on the continent, in Great Britain, and in America, was the notion that the Jews had unfairly, perhaps criminally, seized control of the news media and were using it for their own ends. Kennedy grabbed hold of this myth even though it was clear that in numbers and ferocity, his gentile critics far outnumbered the Jewish.
His prejudices were reinforced by his friends the Lindberghs, the Astors, and Lord Beaverbrook. In a particularly vicious letter to Anne Morrow Lindbergh written on November 2, 1938, Lady Astor had mentioned that “only yesterday I was talking to someone who traces the origin of the ‘yellow press’ to an American Jew, named Pulitzer. . . . It is horrible how much one can trace back to them. I don’t believe in persecution, but there is something evidently wrong with their whole make-up.” Lord Beaverbrook, who as a newspaper mogul should have known better, agreed entirely that the Jews had far too much influence on both sides of the Atlantic. “The Jews are after Mr. Chamberlain,” he wrote American publisher Frank Gannett in December 1938. “He is being terribly harassed by them. . . . All the Jews are against him. . . . They have got a big position in the press here. . . . I am shaken. The Jews may drive us into war . . . their political influence is moving us in that direction.”23
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Kennedy’s anger at the Jewish community was stoked by his sense that they did not appreciate his efforts on their behalf. While the Roosevelt administration had given no indication that it intended to press the British government to permit increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, Kennedy had on his own been meeting with and trying to counsel the American Zionist leaders who had come to London to lobby the British. When Ben Cohen visited in October 1938, supposedly on vacation but in truth as an unofficial emissary of Justice Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, Kennedy arranged an introduction and meeting for him with Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald.24
Two weeks later, Kennedy met with Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization. In a document marked “Secret” in the Weizmann archives in Jerusalem, Weizmann, referring to himself as “X,” reported his “general impression . . . that Mr. K. was both friendly and optimistic. . . . He himself was keeping in close touch with the Palestine problem. As a Catholic in Boston he had reason to know what discrimination meant; his own father had been unable to find any entrée in Boston, and had eventually been forced to look elsewhere for a livelihood. But for the Jews the position was a hundred times
worse. He knew that Bullitt was a friend of ours, but neither Bullitt nor the President, as Protestants, could feel about the Jewish question in the same way as he, K., felt about it.” Kennedy assured Weizmann “that if any time the red light were to show [if the British decided to cut off all immigration to Palestine], we should not hesitate to give him the signal, and he would do whatever he could to help.” Kennedy’s meeting with Weizmann ended rather spectacularly when the ambassador inquired what Weizmann “would think if he, K., were to go and visit Hitler to discuss the Jewish question. ‘X’ replied that from all he had heard, this subject was an obsession with Hitler, so that he became virtually insane when it was raised. Mr. K. said that he had nevertheless more than half a mind to pay him such a visit. It might light a few bonfires in the United States, but all the same he was tempted to intervene.”25
Kennedy also met with Rose Gell Jacobs, an American representative on the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. As he had in his discussions with Weizmann, though this time more directly, Kennedy offered his opinion that the only way to solve the refugee problem was to negotiate a deal with Hitler. “He mentioned the attacks that are being made on him by the newspapers and Jewish columnists in America, because of his suggestion that efforts be made to come to terms with Hitler on the Jewish problem. He says he is ready to listen to any scheme that will work, as he has not yet come across any. To his mind, winning Hitler over to a plan is essential.” Although Jacobs, like Weizmann, considered Kennedy an ally, she reported back to New York that he was not fully in tune with Zionist aspirations. He had intimated to her, without saying so directly, that the answer to the refugee problem was not going to be found in Palestine because the British were not going to permit increased immigration. Jacobs did not argue with Kennedy but reminded him only that more Jews were attempting to immigrate to Palestine, because at present there were no safe havens for them in central or Eastern Europe.26