by David Nasaw
In a phone conversation with Morgenthau, Jim Farley, Roosevelt’s postmaster general and political adviser, mentioned that Roosevelt had been “quite annoyed” with the publicity over Kennedy’s latest gaffe. “I think when Joe comes back [for his next home visit] that that will probably be the beginning of the end.”42
Kennedy too was beginning to contemplate “the end” of his tenure in London. “After ten months of carrying out his ambassadorial duties, Dad is rather tired of his work,” Joe Jr. wrote in his diary. “He claims that he would give it up in a minute if it wasn’t for the benefits that Jack and I are getting out of it and the things Eunice will get when she comes out next Spring. He doesn’t like the idea of taking orders and working for hours trying to keep things out of his speeches which an Ambassador shouldn’t say. He also doesn’t like the idea of sitting back and letting the Jewish columnists in American kick his head off. The papers have made up a pile of lies about him, and he can’t do anything about it.” Joe Jr. again paid no attention to the fact that the only “Jewish” columnist who had attacked his father was Walter Lippmann and that his chief supporter, Arthur Krock, was Jewish.43
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On November 29, Sumner Welles announced that Kennedy was returning “on leave for the Christmas holidays, but his visit will have no official significance.” “The trip is entirely his own idea,” Drew Pearson and Robert Allen confirmed in their column. “Two motives are behind it—politics and the press. Personable, ingratiating, and with the flair of the Irish for politics, Joe is very ambitious in this direction. He is a brilliant business man and stock market operator, but he has made his pile and now wants to carve a name for himself in public affairs. What he is secretly after is the 1940 nomination for Vice President. . . . He is using the disturbed European situation as an excuse to dash across the Atlantic for a few weeks to look over the lay of the land and do some quiet fence building.”44
Kennedy’s first stop on his fence-mending tour was Washington. He brought with him the long memorandum he and his staff had been working on in London, which laid out in harrowing detail “the effect on the United States of the decline or collapse of the British Empire” through defeat in war or appeasement to prevent war. Germany, Italy, and Japan were on the rise and on the move, determined to take—by military action if necessary, by negotiations if possible—what they believed rightfully belonged to them as world powers. Great Britain and France had only a few choices, none of them palatable. They could enter into and be defeated in war with the dictators; they could surrender territory piecemeal through appeasement; or they could join the ascendant powers, and the United States, in restructuring a new, post-Versailles world order. There was, Kennedy insisted, no other way forward.45
Kennedy met only briefly with the president in Washington. They did not share cocktails or a meal or much small talk, as they had in the past. Instead of apologizing or attempting to explain why he had acted without or contrary to instructions from Washington, Kennedy seized the offensive, blaming the president and Secretary of State Hull for ignoring his advice, bypassing him on decisions he should have been consulted on, failing to defend him in the press. Roosevelt, who didn’t enjoy such confrontations and had no intention of letting Kennedy return home before the 1940 elections, quickly put out the fire. He assured him that he was doing a fine job in London. There was no talk of recall or resignation.
After his meetings in Washington and a short stay in New York, which included a night at the opera with Arthur Goldsmith, Kennedy flew to Palm Beach for a six-week vacation with Jack, who had decided to take the next semester off and serve as his father’s secretary in London. As always, Kennedy imported his buddies to spend the vacation with him. At one time or another, he was joined in Palm Beach by Arthur Houghton, “London Jack” Kennedy, Jack’s friends Lem Billings and Rip Horton, Hearst columnist Walter Winchell, radio commentator Boake Carter, and David Sarnoff. Except for a brief New Year’s Day excursion to Miami for the Orange Bowl, Kennedy and his guests remained within the protective cocoon of the island, playing golf at the Palm Beach Country Club, eating fresh fish prepared at his home by his chef, and spending an evening or two at Colonel Bradley’s casino, where Kennedy enjoyed the food, but never bet more than a dollar or two.
The rest of the Kennedy family spent their Christmas vacation at St. Moritz, skiing, sledding, and being photographed by the press. “The photographers were out en masse this morning,” Rose wrote her husband at Palm Beach. “You probably will have seen the results by now.” Sensitive as only a politician’s daughter could be to the essential weirdness of her husband’s spending his vacation in Palm Beach while his wife and eight children were in Switzerland, Rose suggested a preemptive remedy to whatever rumors might be set in motion. “Do you suppose you and Jack should have some pictures taken there as I do not think much publicity was given to the fact that you went home to be with Jack.”46
Kennedy’s vacation was interrupted when he was called back to Washington to testify, alongside Ambassador Bullitt, before a closed-door joint session of the House and Senate Committees on Military Affairs. The hearing was carefully staged and the secret testimony skillfully leaked to support the president’s call for an unprecedented peacetime allocation of $2 billion for national defense. Both ambassadors, but Kennedy especially, relied on Charles Lindbergh’s report to frighten Congress into allocating every dollar the president had requested. The Los Angeles Times headlined its page-one story EUROPE WAR NEAR, ENVOYS TELL CONGRESS.47
Kennedy had intended to spend a full six weeks in Palm Beach, then head north for two speaking engagements before sailing back to England on February 23. When Neville Chamberlain suggested that it might be better if he returned a bit sooner, the president, on Hull’s request, called him in Palm Beach to ask that he cut short his vacation.48
He stopped over in Washington for a final meeting with Roosevelt before departing. “He had a bad cold that day and received me in his upstairs study,” Kennedy would later write in his Diplomatic Memoir. “He had no particular instructions to give me, but once more I told him I did not want to go to London unless I had his confidence.” Again, the two men sang their signature duet, with Kennedy complaining and Roosevelt patting him on the back and assuring him that he had had nothing to do with the criticism emanating from the White House. To cement their renewed relationship, they gossiped together about Bernard Baruch, whom neither professed to like or trust.49
Following his session with Roosevelt, Kennedy “turned up” at Moffat’s office at the State Department for a brief chat. “Personally I think highly of Kennedy’s work,” Moffat commented in his diary on February 9, “but there is no doubt that the Secretary [Hull] has his fingers crossed. He is willing to admit that Kennedy reflects faithfully what Chamberlain is thinking and doing, but he does not think that Kennedy adequately presents the American point of view to Chamberlain.”50
Nineteen
SIDELINED AND CENSORED
Kennedy had delayed his return to London as long as he could, not simply because of the strain of the job, but because he was haunted by the sense that something had gone wrong, very wrong. He had been pushed to the sidelines, a place he had never before occupied, not in Boston or Hollywood or New York or Washington. As he resumed his post in London after less than eleven months in service (four of which had been spent on two home leaves and a vacation at Cannes), he did so determined, it appeared, to make a new start, repair the damage done to his reputation, and work his way back into the inner circle of Roosevelt advisers.
Within hours of his arrival, he was on his rounds again, meeting with Prime Minister Chamberlain at 10 Downing, Lord Halifax and Permanent Under-Secretary Cadogan at Whitehall, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon, Colonial Secretary MacDonald, other cabinet members at their offices, and fellow ambassadors at their embassies. Every morsel of information he gathered from this moment on—on pr
oposed British loans to the Chinese, trade negotiations with German industrialists, discussions of whether and when to recognize the Franco government, rumors that the Germans were about to invade Albania or the Netherlands, British initiatives to establish closer ties to the Soviet Union and Turkey—was that same day synthesized, digested, coded, and cabled to the State Department.
Try as he might, he could not quite do what was expected of him. He was simply unfitted by temperament for the position of impartial, impassive listener and reporter, especially at moments of crisis. Scarcely a day passed now when there was not some development, some incident or rumor of an incident, that raised or lowered tensions. He was buffeted back and forth, alternately elated and depressed by the news from Germany or Italy or Turkey, Albania, Romania, and Poland, as relayed to him by his British informants. World war was approaching—of that he was sure—and neither he nor his government could do anything to stop it. The Spanish Civil War dragged on; Hungary had fallen under German influence; Germany, having absorbed the Sudetenland, was preparing to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Ukraine; Mussolini threatened Tunisia. As if this were not enough to signal the coming apocalypse, in late January the British Foreign Office informed the U.S. State Department of its belief that Hitler was preparing to invade Holland.
On taking up his post again, Kennedy discovered to his dismay that the prime minister was out of touch with developments on the continent. He informed Kennedy at their first meeting, then at dinner three days later, that there was no indication of German “moves toward Holland, Switzerland, or elsewhere to the west or to the Ukraine.” The German economy, Chamberlain told Kennedy, was in a shambles, leaving the fuehrer with two choices, war or trade, and he had chosen the latter.1
Chamberlain’s assessment of Hitler’s intentions was so out of line with other intelligence that Sumner Welles felt obligated to diplomatically question the British ambassador about the prime minister’s competency. Ambassador Lindsay’s reply was that Chamberlain, though a “very logical, and very clear thinker,” did not always take “into account the human elements involved and the mercurial factors with which he was dealing.” The British ambassador doubted that Chamberlain’s optimism about the future was shared by his colleagues in the cabinet. “The Foreign Office,” Ambassador Lindsay told Welles, “was exceedingly apprehensive.”2
In early March 1939, Kennedy sent the president a second doomsday scenario memorandum, more powerful and pessimistic than the one he had delivered in December. His premise, which he believed unassailable, was that Great Britain, whose military power was based on its navy and its economic power on its colonial trade, could not possibly prevail in a war with Germany and Italy in Europe, or with Japan in the East. “Great Britain and France are no longer able to maintain the old world order. They are on the defensive; the totalitarian states are on the offensive with the rise of air power. The preeminence of Great Britain has disappeared, for obviously a country so vulnerable to air attack cannot be the center of a really stable world system.” The British were going to lose their empire, he concluded, which would result in a reduction in American exports of “at least 50 percent in volume.” To survive in a hostile world with few trading partners, the United States would have no choice but to replace free market capitalism with “a regimented industrial order under Government control. Such centralization would tend to reproduce, possibly under other names, the basic features of the Fascist state: to fight totalitarianism, we would have to adopt totalitarian methods. . . . In short, America, alone in a jealous and hostile world, would find that the effort and cost of maintaining ‘splendid isolation’ would be such as to bring about the destruction of all those values which the isolation policy has been designed to preserve.”3
What did Kennedy propose to save the nation from the coming apocalypse? He didn’t quite say, though the implication was clear. The only solution was to find some sort of modus vivendi with the dictators before it was too late.
Roosevelt did not respond to Kennedy’s memorandum. He had heard it all before, especially the part about the inevitability of the United States having to adopt Fascist methods of centralized economic control. Recognizing nonetheless that Kennedy’s estimates of German military strength, though perhaps overstated, might be useful in frightening the public and Congress into supporting rearmament, which he thought of paramount importance, he forwarded the memo to “the chief of Naval Operations,” with the warning that it “be kept confidential but may be made available to Operations and the General Board.”4
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On February 10, while Kennedy was still in the United States, Pope Pius XI died in Rome. In a letter to Enrico Galeazzi, sent two weeks afterward from London, Kennedy held out hope that “our friend” Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, whom Galeazzi worked for and whom Kennedy and his family had entertained during his 1936 visit to America, would be named his successor. When he was, Kennedy lobbied Sumner Welles for permission to represent the president at the coronation. On March 7, he was notified that his request had been granted.5
No president had ever before sent an official representative to Rome for a papal coronation. That Roosevelt had been persuaded to do so and had decided to send Kennedy instead of Ambassador William Phillips, who was already in Rome, was a considerable honor. It erased (if only momentarily) earlier presidential snubs and went a long way toward convincing Kennedy that it might still be possible for him to work his way back into the Roosevelt inner circle. Kennedy had earlier that spring forwarded to the president a long memorandum from Cardinal Pacelli, then Vatican secretary of state, explaining the church’s attitude toward the Anschluss. With Pacelli now pope and Galeazzi one of his chief advisers, Kennedy would become the de facto liaison between the pope and the president, a not insignificant honor for an Irish Catholic kid from East Boston.
Without asking anyone’s permission, Kennedy notified the American embassy in Rome that he intended to bring his family with him to the coronation. The Kennedy children had attended Roosevelt’s second inaugural, but as grand as that had been, it would pale beside the experience of witnessing a papal coronation. Only Joe Jr., who was in Spain, and feared that he would have trouble getting back into the country if he left it, could not attend.
On Sunday, March 12, the eight Kennedy children were awakened at dawn, scrubbed, brushed, dressed, and packed into limousines for the ride to the Vatican. Kennedy and Rose drove with Count Galeazzi, who would serve as their escort; the children, with the Moores and two governesses, arrived in separate limousines. They were dropped off outside St. Peter’s Square and ushered through the crowds to their seats in the outside portico of the Basilica, near the statue of Charlemagne. The original seating plan had made allowance for two Kennedys, the ambassador and his wife, but it had to be altered on the run to make room for twelve more. When Count Ciano, the Italian minister of foreign affairs who was married to Mussolini’s daughter, found that his assigned seat in the portico was occupied by a Kennedy child, he protested loudly and, according to the future pope Paul VI, threatened “to leave the Basilica and to desert the ceremony. The situation was immediately resolved,” Pope Paul VI later recalled, “but there remained in our memory the procession of the children of Ambassador Kennedy.” Kennedy, who “heard that Ciano was mad,” concluded that he “was a swell-headed Muggo,” which indeed he was.6
The next morning, at around eleven A.M., the Kennedy entourage of Moores, governesses, and eight children, supplemented by Arthur Houghton, Franklin Gowen, second secretary at the U.S. embassy in London, and Rose’s French maid, arrived for their audience with the pope in his anteroom. Two days later they would return, this time to the pope’s private chapel, for Teddy’s First Communion.
The ambassador’s official business was concluded on Monday evening, March 13, at a dinner given by American ambassador William Phillips. Kennedy, always alert to opportunities to secure information that might be of use to the St
ate Department, tried to engage Count Ciano in conversation but found it impossible as the count had eyes only for the “young attractive Italian girls” whom Phillips had invited to the dinner, “for otherwise he just would not come.” With the count occupied, Kennedy chatted with Ciano’s wife, Mussolini’s daughter. She complained to him that Americans understood neither Italy nor fascism. Kennedy left the dinner disappointed and not a little disgruntled at having wasted his time. “As a result of my observations of Ciano,” he wrote Hull, “and the gossip that Mussolini now has a German sweetheart, I came away believing that we would accomplish much more by sending a dozen beautiful chorus girls to Rome than a fleet of airplanes and a flock of diplomats.”7
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At six A.M. on March 15, as Teddy Kennedy was putting on his white suit in preparation for his First Communion, the German army crossed the Czechoslovak border. By nine A.M., German troops occupied Prague. That afternoon, Hitler and his entourage entered the former Czechoslovak capital in a fleet of Mercedes limousines.
Kennedy arrived in Paris two days later, at eight A.M. on March 17. Rose, who had left earlier, was not at the Hôtel Ritz where he had expected her to be, but at Madeleine Church, “praying with her eyes closed.” Kennedy took her back to the hotel, then set off for breakfast with Ambassador Bullitt. That afternoon he flew back to London, where after a brief stop at the embassy, he visited with Lord Halifax at Whitehall, saw the Romanian minister, met with Clarence Dillon of Dillon, Read, the New York investment bank, and Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, and had dinner at the embassy with Frederick Lonsdale, the British playwright. After his three months in the United States and his week in Rome, it was as if he were making up for lost time, devoting his every waking moment to gathering information on the deteriorating situation in Europe. On Tuesday, March 21, at a dinner the king held for the president of France at Buckingham Palace, Kennedy was so frantic for news that he monopolized conversation with Lord Halifax until “Lady Halifax came up to pull [her husband] away saying we had talked together all night.” The ambassador sent her flowers the next day to “square” himself.8