by David Nasaw
When he had finished reading the dispatches, Kennedy was invited to join the prime minister, the foreign secretary, Lord Cadogan, and their chief aides in the cabinet room. The prime minister asked Kennedy what he made of Hitler’s proposals and what his recommendations were for a British response. “I said I felt strongly he could not quit on Poland no matter what else happened. He would jeopardize not only the honor of Britain, but would completely break his political party. . . . I then suggested that the answer could contain a suggestion that if [Hitler] accepted a reasonable Polish settlement perhaps he could get U.S. and other countries to get together on an economic plan that certainly would be more important to Germany than what he could possibly get out of getting anything in Poland.6
“‘You must pass the hat before the corpse gets cold,’ I said.
“‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Chamberlain.
“‘You have to make your solution more attractive to Germany than what she is trying now to get out of Poland. Do it this way . . . Propose a general settlement that will bring Germany economic benefits more important than the territorial annexation of Danzig. Get the United States now to say what they would be willing to do in the cause of international peace and prosperity. After all, the United States will be the largest beneficiary of such a move. To put in a billion or two now will be worth it, for if it works we will get it back and more.’”7
Kennedy remained in the cabinet room “for another half hour and then I rose and as I went by the P.M.’s chair, I put my hand on the back of his shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry, Neville, I still believe God is working with you.’ . . . When I left No. 10, I thought to myself that incident has probably been the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Here I was an American Ambassador, called into discussion with the P.M. and Foreign Secretary over probably the most important event in the history of the British Empire. I had been called in before the Cabinet and had been trusted not only for my discretion but for my intelligence. It was a moving experience.”8
Kennedy’s recommendations were dismissed as soon as they were offered. He was proposing nothing less than rewarding Hitler for past aggressions and preventing future ones by settling on him an appeasement package so magnificent, it would divert him from occupying Danzig and the Polish Corridor. It defied the logic of events to believe that Hitler could be bought off with cash or credits or promises of more favorable trade agreements. It was even more preposterous to believe that the Chamberlain government, having failed in its attempt at appeasement at Munich, would try again less than a year later.
—
The next morning, a Saturday, Kennedy was up early as always. After his horseback ride and breakfast, he went to the embassy, where he spent the remainder of the day attempting to cajole, threaten, and beg American and European shipowners to stop at British ports and evacuate Americans. The liners that regularly serviced the British ports were already filled to capacity, having been booked weeks before to bring vacationing Americans home. Several companies, fearful that war was about to be declared, had canceled their sailings, leaving thousands stranded with no way to cross the Atlantic.
On August 28, Sir Nevile Henderson delivered to Hitler the British cabinet’s reply to his “peace offer.” The British proposed that Germany and Poland engage in direct negotiations to settle their differences, that the settlement be guaranteed by the European powers, and that once that settlement was achieved, the British would proceed with further discussions toward a comprehensive Anglo-German agreement.
“I am sitting at my desk,” Kennedy wrote Arthur Houghton on August 29, “waiting to hear what Mr. Hitler says to Sir Nevile and wondering whether it is to be peace or war. The children are all back in London, but I don’t feel I should send them home until I have the rest of the Americans out of London. Another one of those great moral gestures that the American people expect you to make; that is, get your own family killed, but be sure and get Miss Smith of Peoria on the boat.”9
Both Lord Derby and J. P. “Jack” Morgan (who had decided that “whatever the result of the immediate reply from Hitler may be,” he was sailing home) had offered Kennedy use of their country estates. Kennedy chose Morgan’s Wall Hall, with its hundreds of acres of gorgeously landscaped grounds and gigantic faux Gothic castle, in large part because it was fully equipped and staffed by an army of servants, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs who, unlike Morgan, could not escape to America. Unable to get his children out of England yet, he moved them away from London and harm’s way.10
At midnight on Tuesday, August 29, Kennedy cabled Hull in Washington that Hitler had agreed to “direct negotiations with Poland solely out of a desire to insure friendship with Great Britain,” but insisted that a Polish plenipotentiary with full decision-making powers appear in Berlin within twenty-four hours to receive and agree to his demands. “Ambassador Henderson remarked that this last stipulation sounded like an ultimatum. After a heated exchange of remarks Hitler and Ribbentrop assured him it was intended only to stress the urgency of the matter, at a moment when two fully mobilized armies were facing each other.”11
The next morning, the full text of Henderson’s communication arrived in London and Kennedy hurried off to Whitehall to read it. He met briefly with Halifax, who told him that he thought Hitler’s demands that the Polish representative arrive in Berlin and sign an agreement within twenty-four hours were both “impudent and impertinent.” Still, the fact that Hitler had kept open the door to negotiations made the foreign secretary a “little more optimistic” than he had been the day before.
Halifax departed for 10 Downing and Kennedy was ushered into the office of Under-Secretary Rab Butler, where he was given “the text of Hitler’s reply to Britain” and a draft of the cabinet’s reply. Butler asked him “what he thought” of the British reply. Kennedy, according to his diary entry for that day, answered that he thought it was so “tough” that Hitler might well respond, “Well, if this is the attitude the British are going to take the minute I make the slightest concession, what possibility have I got to ever work out any big political or economic scheme with them.”
Kennedy suggested that the British offer Hitler a counterproposal with “something to hang his hat on.” Butler, according to Kennedy’s diary and memoirs, was in full agreement with him and suggested that Kennedy “should see the P.M. and give him my reactions.” Both men believed that Hitler, though erratic and probably a bit of a madman, did not want to go to war with the British. Kennedy reported to Butler that when Joe Jr. had lunched last week in Berlin with Unity Mitford (who, according to Joe Jr., was “the most fervent Nazi imaginable, and is probably in love with Hitler”), Mitford said that “Hitler had really great admiration for the British—they really knew how to rule, but that he was heartbroken when Chamberlain had gone home after Munich” instead of staying behind to negotiate a comprehensive peace treaty between their two nations.12
Rab Butler, hoping that Kennedy would push Chamberlain back onto the appeasement track, arranged a meeting for the ambassador and the prime minister early that evening. “At 6:30, I went to 10 Downing Street and on arriving Sir Horace [Wilson] met me with ‘How is the Stormy Petrel today?’ I said, ‘Fine’ and asked him how he felt.” (Kennedy apparently had no problem with being referred to as a “stormy petrel,” the bird sailors regarded as a harbinger of trouble.) On being ushered in to see the prime minister, Kennedy repeated what he had told Butler and then suggested that Chamberlain “put in some war regulation that will affect the whole people and give them a little taste of what is to come. They then might not be so anxious for Poland to refuse to negotiate and start a war when they saw what they would suffer themselves.” According to Kennedy, even at this very late date, Chamberlain had still not given up hope that war could be prevented. “If he only could get the Poles and Germans really negotiating something could be done. . . . The big thing was a European settlement. . . . ‘It co
uld be done,’ said Chamberlain, ‘if I could only get the chance.’”13
As Kennedy sat in his office that night, distracting himself by writing to his friends in the United States, he still held on to the belief that war might be averted. The Poles, he cabled Hull at seven P.M., had agreed to negotiate, but no one knew what the Germans were going to demand of them. Still, “the mere fact that the Germans have actually formulated proposals is regarded as a slightly favorable sign. The impression given by the Foreign Office is that they are a little more hopeful than they were yesterday, but the general public seems more depressed.”14
At midnight, the ambassador spoke with the president over a secure phone line. Roosevelt had learned that Germany had made sixteen separate demands of the Poles. Kennedy knew nothing about them.
The next morning, September 1, Kennedy called Bill Bullitt in Paris, who agreed that “things were much better.” Hitler, Bullitt told him, “didn’t have the guts to fight.”
“I had hardly hung up the telephone when the news came. It came with a rush, like a torrent spewing from the wires—German troops had crossed the border; German planes were bombing Polish cities and killing civilians; the Germans were using poison gas.” Kennedy called Lord Halifax at the Foreign Office to report that he had heard, but could not confirm, that Warsaw had been bombed. Hull telephoned him at noon to ask for more information. Kennedy cabled him at four P.M., five P.M., eight P.M., eleven P.M., and twelve midnight, each time to confirm that he knew nothing more than that German troops had crossed into Poland.15
The French and British governments tried one more time to defuse the situation. Before declaring war on Germany, which they were obligated by treaty to do once German soldiers crossed into Poland, they delivered formal diplomatic notes demanding that Germany cease its aggression and withdraw its troops from Polish soil.
Kennedy commuted back and forth that weekend from the Morgan estate in Hertfordshire, where he had gathered his family until passage to America could be arranged. He and Rose preferred to travel separately—and usually did, lest an accident deprive the children of both their parents. Kennedy now made plans for his children also to travel in installments.
Luella Hennessey, the younger children’s nurse, wanted to remain in London to get married to the man she had been seeing. Kennedy tried to talk her out of it. “He said it was going to be a long, hard war, and eggs were going to be rationed to one a month. And he gave me quite a bleak picture of the future there, but I still thought that love would take care of everything. So then he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, you come back with us, and when you land in New York, you can do whatever you want. You can wait for the boat to turn around, and come right back again, or you can stay in America. But Mrs. Kennedy and I feel that we brought you over single, and we’ll return you to America single.’” Hennessey obeyed Kennedy’s wishes, “the same as all his children do. I wouldn’t dare argue with him.”16
On Sunday, September 3, Kennedy and Rose drove back from Hertfordshire to their church in London for ten-thirty Mass, only to discover that it had been canceled. Kennedy dropped Rose off at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington so she could attend Mass there, then proceeded to the embassy.
The prime minister was scheduled to address the nation at 11:15 that morning. “I cleaned up my desk, sent for a small radio from the house in a hurry and had it set up. I listened to the speech in my office with several of the staff. It was terribly moving. And when he got to the part of his ‘efforts have failed,’ I almost cried. I had participated very closely in this struggle and I saw my hope crash too.”17
“This country is at war with Germany,” Chamberlain announced that morning. “This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much. I cannot tell what part I may be allowed to play myself; I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been reestablished.”18
When the speech was over, Kennedy called 10 Downing. To his surprise, Chamberlain came to the phone. “Neville, I have just listened to the broadcast. It was terrifically moving. . . . I feel deeply our failure to save a world war.” Chamberlain thanked Kennedy for the call and his steadfast support. “We did the best we could have done but it looks as though we have failed. . . . Thanks, Joe, my best to you always and my deep gratitude for your constant help—Goodbye—Goodbye.”
At 11:27, the air raid sirens started screaming. For a brief moment, tragedy gave way to farce. As there was no shelter at the embassy, Kennedy directed the staff to “Molyneaux [sic], the dressmaker,” whose establishment was just around the corner on Grosvenor Street and “had a reasonably good basement.” When Joe Jr., Jack, and Rose appeared in front of the embassy to drive with their father to the House of Commons, Kennedy directed the boys to take their mother “at once to Molyneaux. . . . I went over to Molyneaux’s to cheer people up and found most of them in pretty good shape.” It was not the worst place to spend the first few minutes of the Second World War.19
Twenty-one
THE LIVES OF AMERICANS ARE AT STAKE
A sense of panic was in the air.” Kennedy rearranged schedules to provide twenty-four-hour staffing at the embassy and begged the State Department for funding for air raid protection. When he was informed that Americans in England might have to wait until early October for ships to bring them home, he lashed out in rage. “After all there is a war on, and it is quite conceivable that England will be bombed. If so, it is probable that Americans will be killed, because there is no place in England where we can store these people and promise them immunity.”1
At two thirty A.M. on September 4, he was awakened at home by a phone call routed through the embassy. “The Foreign Office was on the line. The clipped accents of an unknown clerk spelled out a message that he said had just been received—‘S.S. Athenia, Donaldson Line, torpedoed 200 Miles off Malin Head [Ireland’s most northern point], 1400 passengers aboard, S.O.S. received, ship sinking fast.’” The survivors were being evacuated by a British destroyer and taken to Glasgow. Kennedy directed embassy officials to compile a list of deceased and surviving Americans. He then called Eddie Moore to ask him to leave at once for Glasgow and take Jack Kennedy along as the ambassador’s personal representative.
The sinking of the Athenia reinforced Kennedy’s fears that Americans were unsafe on any but United States–flagged vessels. As sternly as he could, he issued a warning to them not to sail in British ships. And again he implored the State Department to redirect all American-owned ships, including those bound elsewhere, to British ports. When State Department officials did not respond immediately, he blew past them and placed a call to his friend Max Truitt at the Maritime Commission to request that the commission pressure shipowners to dispatch ships to Britain. Secretary of State Hull was furious when, the next morning, the Herald Tribune reported on the contents of Kennedy’s call to Truitt—which included a bitter, foulmouthed denunciation of the State Department. Instead of apologizing, Kennedy pushed back harder.
“Of course,” he cabled Hull, “I know you realize the situation is bad here but I am sure you do not realize how bad it is. There are a great many newspapermen trying to get their wives and children and friends on boats and it is very difficult and people are constantly complaining that no ships are being sent from America. We are doing our best to keep them quiet but when you are bombarded by the Press every minute of the day and night as to what you are going to do about it, the press is going to publish something. . . . With the danger of submarine warfare . . . a critical situation might well arise with Americans sailing on British boats. All I am working for is to get them out as quickly and safely
as we can.”2
Day after day now, there were articles, columns, and editorials about the sinking of the Athenia, German perfidy and denials of perfidy (the Germans claimed the British had sunk the ship to outrage American opinion), fleeing refugees, torpedoes, fire on the deck, and the rescue at sea of more than a thousand survivors. Kennedy’s office, staffed by the most savvy publicists in the diplomatic corps, tried and largely succeeded in positioning the ambassador as the hero of the story.
Time magazine put his face on the cover of its September 18 issue under a “The U.S. and The War” banner. “Last week Joe Kennedy had already shuttered and barred the palatial Embassy house at No. 14 Prince’s Gate . . . and moved to a country house away from the terror of bombs. Thence each morning he drove into London in a Chrysler, waved swiftly through traffic by bobbies. . . . With 9,000 Americans to shepherd in England, with tangible U.S. business interests under his eye, with 150 Americans cabling from the U.S. daily for information on Athenia survivors, with British bigwigs to see, Franklin Roosevelt to keep informed, Joe Kennedy had a bigger job.”
Within the confines of the State Department, Joseph P. Kennedy was not a hero, but a troublesome publicity hound who made impossible demands, then blamed Washington when they could not be met. “Kennedy has been terribly explosive,” Breckinridge Long, former ambassador to Italy and now special assistant secretary of state in charge of repatriation efforts, wrote in his September 7 diary entry. “Kennedy seems to think that the only people needing repatriation are in the lobby of the American Embassy in London. As a matter of fact, there are 2800 in Ireland; there are many thousand in France, and there are scattered and spread hundreds of them in [countries across Europe]. . . . Kennedy had been condemning everybody and criticizing everything and has antagonized most of the people in the Administration. . . . I talked to Truitt this afternoon and told him I thought Kennedy was hurting himself and that the impression that was created in this country and that the news stories and publicity items which went out of London with his permission if not with his origination indicated that he did not view the situation normally.”3