by David Nasaw
Benjamin Cohen, Chaim Weizmann, and Rose Jacobs all came away impressed by what Jacobs referred to as the ambassador’s “sincerity and genuine desire to be helpful.” And they were right to be won over. Kennedy had nothing to gain by dissembling. He met with them—and other Zionist representatives in London, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement—because he hoped to convince them that his was the only way to rescue the German Jews, that angry words and anti-German boycotts made things worse, that unless Hitler approved, no German Jews were going to be let out of Germany.
The outpouring of unrestrained anti-Semitic brutality and sadism that the world would come to know as Kristallnacht shattered overnight the hopes of those such as Joseph P. Kennedy who, in the weeks following Munich, had believed that the time was propitious for negotiating a comprehensive settlement with Hitler that included provision for the emigration of Germany’s Jews. “The Munich pact . . . now seemed to be a mockery of the notion ‘peace in our time,’” historian Deborah Lipstadt has written. “For the first time since the Nazi accession to power a nationwide anti-Semitic action had taken place in full public view.”27
The events of Kristallnacht on November 9 and 10 were not the first acts of unprovoked violence against Jews in Germany or Austria, but never had that violence been so widespread, so obviously coordinated and state-sanctioned, so violent, so effective. German and Austrian Jews, men, women, children, and the elderly, were beaten, their homes vandalized, their shops broken into, their synagogues destroyed, many burned to the ground. “The only immediate aim,” Saul Friedländer has concluded, “was to hurt the Jews as badly as the circumstances allowed, by all possible means: to hurt them and to humiliate them.” It was hoped and expected that, terrified by the violence, their possessions and economic resources plundered, Germany’s Jews would not only acquiesce but actively participate in their own removal.28
The policy of appeasement that Chamberlain had, to Kennedy’s mind, pursued successfully to this point had been based on the expectation that the Germans would fulfill their side of the bargain. In return for being permitted to annex Austria and the Sudetenland without a shot fired, they would eschew aggression, abide by their treaty obligations, and, in short, behave like a “civilized” nation. All that had been called into question by the brutal excesses of Kristallnacht. “I am hopeful that something can be worked out, but this last drive on the Jews,” Kennedy wrote Charles Lindbergh just days after Kristallnacht, “has really made the most ardent hopers for peace very sick at heart. . . . It is more and more difficult for those seeking peaceful solutions to advocate any plan when the papers are filled with such horror. So much is lost when so much could be gained.”29
During his first six months in London, the American ambassador had been an enthusiastic, perhaps too enthusiastic, supporter of Chamberlain and Halifax, because he was convinced they knew what they were doing. After Kristallnacht, he was no longer sure this was the case. Besieged internally and internationally for what was now perceived as a sell-out at Munich, the Chamberlain government was floundering. Instead of answering its critics by offering up new policy initiatives, the prime minister remained largely silent, reinforcing the notion that he was spineless, ineffective, incapable of standing up to Hitler.
Kennedy was disturbed both by Chamberlain’s seeming passivity and by the virulence of the attacks on him. The ambassador recommended that the Chamberlain government demonstrate that it was still a major actor in European affairs by reopening the question of Jewish rescue. He understood and sympathized with British reluctance to permit unrestricted or expanded immigration to Palestine. But the British Empire was vast with underpopulated dominions, colonies, and League of Nations mandates. Surely there was someplace, somewhere, for the German and Austrian Jews.
Like a terrier with a small animal in its mouth, the ambassador held on tight to his new project, wrestling it back and forth, up and down, refusing to let go. Here was the magic panacea for Europe’s ills. If the British opened up territory for Jewish settlement, everything else would fall into place: Jewish hostility and agitation against Germany would abate, the reputation of the Chamberlain government would be improved, negotiations between the British and the Germans for a comprehensive peace settlement could proceed to a successful conclusion.
He first discussed his plans with Chamberlain at 10 Downing on November 12, just days after news of Kristallnacht had reached London. The next day, invited with Rose and Joe Jr. to a luncheon at Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald’s house in Essex, Kennedy dominated the discussion by putting forward his solution to the Jewish question. If Great Britain would take the lead in opening territory for Jewish resettlement, other nations would fall into line and the onus would be taken off the Chamberlain government for not opening up Palestine to Jewish refugees. Kennedy proposed that the British “call the bluff of all the countries immediately” by asking them “how much money they were willing to put up for the Jews, and how many they were prepared to take.” MacDonald responded that he preferred to proceed slowly “for fear of the reaction.”30
In retrospect, the Kennedy plan was not nearly as fanciful—or indeed as original—as it might have appeared. Since that spring, Roosevelt and the State Department had been involved in their own lobbying efforts to find territories outside Palestine in which to settle Jewish refugees. The United States had no intention of opening its own lands to Jewish resettlement; its contribution to the problem would be to pressure the Latin American republics to do so. Administration officials and friends floated plans to resettle European Jews in the Orinoco River valley in Venezuela, in Costa Rica near the Panama border, in Mexico, Haiti, and Brazil. As these plans fell flat, one after another, the administration latched on to what Roosevelt called “the big idea,” promoted by Herbert Hoover and Bernard Baruch in the United States, and by Anthony Gustav de Rothschild in Great Britain, to raise $300 million of private moneys to establish a “United States of Africa” somewhere in Africa, perhaps in Portuguese Angola.31
Kennedy should, by rights, have coordinated his campaign to open up British territory for resettlement with the White House and the State Department. Instead, he leaked news of his “Kennedy plan” to New York Times London bureau chief Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr., who reported on it in a front-page story on November 15: KENNEDY IS ACTIVE. LARGE-SCALE MOVE BY 2 NATIONS TO RESETTLE JEWS HELD URGENT.
That afternoon at four P.M. in Washington, President Roosevelt was asked at a press conference about the “reports from London that Mr. Kennedy has made a suggestion to the British Government concerning a place wherein the Jewish refugees would be taken care of.” Roosevelt responded tartly that he could not “comment on the report, because I know nothing of what has been happening in London.” It was becoming increasingly evident, as Moffat noted in his diary, that the American ambassador was “negotiating on his own with the British Government.” “We are still,” Moffat added the following day, “in the dark as to what Kennedy is doing in London on refugees.”32
At almost the same moment that Roosevelt was dismissing any knowledge of the Kennedy plan, the ambassador was promoting it at a dinner given by the king and queen for King Carol of Romania. He cornered the prime minister and urged him again “to do something for Jews.” Chamberlain replied that he was familiar with Kennedy’s plan, having heard about it from Halifax and MacDonald, and that he intended on doing something. What, he did not say.33
The next day, Kennedy met with Lord Halifax at Whitehall to push again for British assistance, if only for the sake of public opinion in the United States, which, he warned, was becoming “generally less sympathetic to His Majesty’s Government. The Ambassador stressed the need of finding some means of counteracting this development.” To facilitate the resettlement process once the British had designated territory for Jewish refugees, Kennedy volunteered to Halifax that he “thought that private sources in America might well contribu
te $100 or $200 million if any large scheme of land settlement could be proposed.”
Halifax could scarcely disguise his anger. According to the record of the conversation he cabled to Ambassador Lindsay in Washington, the foreign secretary told Kennedy that he was “at a loss to understand why American opinion should blame His Majesty’s Government because German Government persecuted the Jews, especially as the United States did not show much desire to do anything substantial.” Lord Halifax reminded the American ambassador that the United States had as yet refused to open up any of its own territory to Jewish resettlement. Kennedy responded that, if only for the “psychological effect,” it was imperative that Britain take the “lead” by opening up some part of the empire to Jewish immigrants, then, after making “an offer of land and financial assistance,” ask the United States government “to what extent they were prepared to support the effort.”34
That day, at cabinet, Halifax declared that he had “reached the conclusion that perhaps the best course was to do nothing as any positive action on our part would only make the position of the German Jews still worse.” The cabinet agreed with him that it was a mistake to muddy the diplomatic waters “with this Jewish question.” When one of the ministers asked about the use of “economic sanctions” against Germany over its treatment of the Jews, Halifax responded that “his anxiety was that Germany should not go to war with us as a consequence of any action we might take to help the German Jews.” Incensed that the Americans, Kennedy chief among them, were putting pressure on the British to solve the refugee problem while they refused to take in any more Jews, the cabinet instructed the foreign secretary to inquire of the U.S. government if it would allow German Jewish refugees to enter America under the unfilled sixty-thousand-person British quota. There was also some vague discussion of resettling German Jews in British Guiana.35
Despite the fact that Kennedy’s proposal had been mentioned and then dismissed as impracticable by Chamberlain, Halifax, and the British cabinet, the American papers carried page-one stories about what was now referred to as “the Kennedy plan” to rescue the German Jews and resettle large numbers of them in British colonies or League of Nation mandates in Africa. The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Daily Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other American papers reported on November 18 that Great Britain had called on its colonial and mandate administrators to report immediately on how many refugees they could accommodate.
On the morning of November 17, British ambassador Ronald Lindsay, as instructed by the cabinet, called on Sumner Welles and formally requested that the American government apply the unused portion of the sixty-thousand quota for British immigrants to German Jewish refugees. Welles dismissed the idea out of hand. The British quota, he informed Lindsay, was for British citizens and no one else. Lindsay then proceeded to tell Welles that “he had been very much disturbed by newspaper reports during the past two days of plans which it was alleged Ambassador Kennedy had presented to the British Government for the solution of the refugee question.” Kennedy, the British ambassador claimed, had gone so far as to virtually blackmail the British government by insinuating that American revulsion against the “treatment accorded Jews and Catholics in Germany” was provoking “vehement and widespread criticism in America against the policy of appeasement pursued by Mr. Chamberlain.” Welles responded by disowning Kennedy, much as Roosevelt had two days earlier. “I told the Ambassador that if Mr. Kennedy had any plan he had not reported it to us. . . . This Government had not sent any instructions to Mr. Kennedy in the matter, nor had it instructed him to present any plan.”36
Washington may well have been playing a double game here. The president and secretary of state had to have known what Kennedy was doing, if only by reading the press reports. They had allowed him to proceed instead of instructing him to desist, hoping he would gain some traction with the British. Now that Ambassador Lindsay had lodged a complaint, however, Hull had no choice but to call his ambassador on the carpet and inquire of him, for the first time, precisely what he had been doing. Kennedy responded without apology that he had, that past Sunday, at luncheon with Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald discussed “among other subjects . . . Palestine and the atrocities in Germany. I asked him why in heaven’s name England did not show more interest as she had all the land and if she offered some of it,” it would be easier to negotiate an agreement with the Germans and raise private moneys for resettlement. “I told him it looked to me that everyone was feeling sorry for the Jews but that nobody was offering any solution.” Kennedy insisted that he had not informed the State Department about the discussions because nothing concrete had come of them. “If I had any news of any description concerning this matter which I thought would be of interest to you, you would have had it as you always do from me. If I have made any contribution it is that I have urged the British to do something quickly . . . but then I have been doing that for four months.”37
Kennedy’s explanation satisfied no one in Washington. “Tension between Kennedy and the Administration is so acute,” Moffat noted in his diary on November 22, “that he must be handled with kid gloves; in fact many people feel that he is merely looking for an opportunity to get out with a resounding attack on the Administration.” Moffat admired Kennedy’s work ethic and enthusiasm and his detailed diplomatic dispatches from London, but he too was growing weary with Kennedy’s penchant for shooting himself in the foot. “He is in many ways a curious personality and one whom in many ways I like and admire. His record of accomplishment in England is good but it is spoiled by an inordinate pushing of personal publicity. . . . I doubt if he has been anything but helpful in pushing the British on the refugee matter, yet the whole tenor of the articles from London, which are apparently inspired, gives him the entire credit of accomplishment and has infuriated the friends of George Rublee, Myron Taylor, and others to a point where they can scarcely be civil.”38
The ambassador was furious at the reprimands and frightened at the consequences that might follow from the White House disowning “the Kennedy plan.” Unless something was done to rescue European Jews from Nazi terror, American and British Jews would become implacable opponents of further negotiations, and they would apply their media influence and political power to force America into war against Germany. The fact that there was no organized or unorganized effort by American Jews to push America or Britain into a war with Germany had no effect on his increasingly hysterical thinking.
In many ways, Joseph Kennedy had become a victim of his own prejudices. The more he exaggerated the extent of the Jews’ political and media power, the more he worried about the future. “I get very disturbed reading about what’s taking place in America on the Jewish question,” he wrote Robert Fisher on November 25. “When I hear that America wants to be an isolationist country and then people get themselves into such a dither over this question, I wonder how safe your sons and mine are from war. Of course frightful things are happening in the world and we all feel terribly sorry about it, but we have a country of our own with problems that require all of our ingenuity and sympathy.” He made the same point in a letter to Russell Davenport and in conversations with his son Joe. Jr. “He is alarmed,” Joe Jr. wrote in his diary on December 10, “that the country should get so worried up by the treatment of the Jews, for if they can be roused to fever heat on this question, there doesn’t seem to be much possibility of keeping them out of war.”39
Kennedy had convinced himself that his was the only voice of sanity in a world veering closer and closer to another European war. And that voice was in danger of being silenced. He had been abandoned not only by the once friendly American press, but by his friends in the White House. His father-in-law had written that even Missy LeHand, for whom he had done so many favors in the past, was saying “very unkind things about me.” “All I have been having poured into me for the last three months,” he wrote the president’s son-in-law, John Boettiger, “is how Roo
sevelt is off me, how the gang is batting my head off, and that I am persona non grata to the entire Roosevelt family. Well, of course I know a lot of this is hooey, but it is damned annoying three thousand miles away. When I add up my contributions to this cause over the past five years—and I do not mean monetary ones—I get damned sick that anybody close to the Boss finds it necessary to do anything but say a good word.” He had, Joe Jr. wrote in his diary, begun to speak “about quitting. He is afraid that they are trying to knock him off at home, and may make a monkey out of him in some diplomatic undertaking.”40
His reputation in the United States was dealt another, near fatal blow when, on November 23, under questioning in the House of Commons, Sir John Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledged that the American ambassador had been quite helpful in the government’s recent attempts to get Paramount to censor newsreels that contained interviews with two furiously anti-Chamberlain, anti-appeasement journalists. The American newspapers, alerted to the two-minute debate in the House of Commons, seized on it as an occasion to attack Kennedy once again for, as the Chicago Daily Tribune put it, “playing the role of office boy of empire.” “There was a bad break in the news for Joe Kennedy the other day,” Harold Ickes noted with delight in his diary on November 25. “I suspect that this collaboration between Kennedy and the British Foreign Office looking to a censorship of a perfectly legitimate section of film will not go well either in this country or in England.”41