by David Nasaw
In mid-October, Charles Peake on the American desk at the Foreign Office sought out William Hillman, the former Hearst foreign correspondent in London, hoping that Hillman, who knew Kennedy well, might offer some insight into his character. Hillman told Peake that the key to understanding Kennedy was to recognize that he was not only “a professing Catholic who loathed Hitler and Hitlerism, almost, though perhaps not quite, as much as he loathed Bolshevism, but he was also a self-made man” who feared for his and his family’s economic future. He had made a pile of money—and was fearful now that it would be lost in the economic catastrophe that would accompany the fighting of another European war. “Mr. Kennedy was convinced that this war unless it was soon stopped would bankrupt the British Empire and also bankrupt the United States, who would be bound to come in before it was over. . . . Bankruptcy and defeat, said Mr. Hillman, were obsessions now in the American Ambassador’s mind and though he had tried to reason with him, he was not amenable to reason, his argument being that Hitler and the Nazis could not last forever and that there was bound to be a change in regime in Germany one day if we had only let it alone.”21
The Foreign Office fully accepted Hillman’s assessment. As Sir Oliver Harvey, Halifax’s private secretary, noted in his diary on November 1, 1939, Kennedy was “engaged in defeatist propaganda” because “he only thinks of his wealth and how capitalism will suffer if the war should last long.”22
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The excitement of the first weeks of war quickly dissipated. All of the Americans who had wanted to go home had done so; trenches and shelters had been dug; the barrage balloons launched; London’s children (and their dogs with them) evacuated to the countryside, their older brothers sent away to military training camps. Even the blackouts and sirens, at first so distressing, had become second nature. And while the theaters and movie houses were empty, the nightclubs had opened again.
Kennedy spent more time now at Wall Hall, where he was well cared for by Jack Morgan’s staff. On weekends, Rosemary, her companion, the Moores, and two golf-playing colleagues from the embassy, Jim Seymour and “London Jack” Kennedy, stayed with him. He was alone most of the time. “I’m running true to form,” he wrote his wife, the one person who could always be counted on to sympathize with him. “I’m sick of everybody and so I’m alone tonight by choice. It’s funny that nobody in the world can be with me very long without boring me to death. I just can’t help it. You are the only individual in the world that I love more every day. . . . This job without you is comparable with a street cleaner’s at home.”23
He had never expected he would miss the children so much, because he never had before. “Having to live this life with the family in America,” he wrote Boake Carter, “is nothing short of hell, and it adds greatly to my boredom and depression over the present situation.” “I notice it much more, I suppose,” he confided to Johnnie Ford, “because they were with me so much the last year and a half and because I had such a great time with them.”24
While he complained of the boredom, he also took great pleasure in being in the middle of the action. “I have to admit,” he wrote Phil Reisman on October 3, 1939, “that I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity of having a front row seat for the show that’s going on here. It may become a hot seat later on, but at any rate, exciting adventures make life interesting, and to be in business with this going on would irk me no end.”25
His guess was that it was going to be a short war. The German army had marched into Poland almost unimpeded. On September 27, Warsaw had surrendered. There had been no bombardment of Great Britain—and no counterattack by the Royal Air Force (RAF). There were battles at sea as German U-boats went after British merchant ships, but the naval war, though intense at first, had subsided by late September. A month after the declaration of war, hostilities on land, air, and sea had ceased.
The peace offer that Kennedy and everyone else had expected Hitler to make after the Polish surrender arrived in mid-October. It was a nonstarter. Hitler refused to even discuss the restoration of Polish sovereignty. When Chamberlain rejected his peace offer, Hitler declared that the war would continue. He didn’t say where or when.
“Everyone here is amazed that the war is going as it is,” Kennedy wrote Johnnie Ford on October 26. “They can’t understand it and don’t know just where it will finally lead to. I can’t believe that, even if it starts in real earnest, it can go on for a long time. It is too potentially catastrophic in character, but if anybody thinks he can tell in advance what’s going to happen in Europe, he is crazy.”26
Kennedy’s hours at the embassy were consumed now by what he considered to be necessary work, but not the kind that required his elevated skill set or brought much satisfaction. He found transportation home for those Americans still in England; he opened negotiations to guarantee that U.S. manufacturers would not suffer from price gouging or shortages of necessary raw materials, particularly rubber and tin; he made the rounds of the embassies and met with British cabinet officials and reported his findings in dispatches to the State Department; and he and his embassy served as liaison in repatriating the thousands of Germans still in the British Empire and the far fewer number of British nationals marooned in Germany.
His main task was protecting American business from British import restrictions. The British, desperate to retain as many dollars as possible, cut back severely on American imports. Kennedy did his best on behalf of the tobacco, cotton, and fruit exporters, but he worked overtime for the Hollywood film industry. He negotiated so ferociously on behalf of the picture industry and secured such a favorable agreement that, as he wrote Johnnie Ford, had he been employed by the film companies as a lawyer, they “would probably have to pay me a million dollars.” Phil Reisman, who worked in Hollywood, agreed that “every one of the boys in the picture business should get down on their knees and thank God that you were over there watching out for their interests.”27
He still considered himself a film man and industry watchdog, though he had not been in Hollywood in more than a decade. In mid-November, after watching Jimmy Stewart, the star of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, confront widespread and blatant corruption, dishonesty, and criminality in Congress, he notified Will Hays by cable that he considered the film to be “one of the most disgraceful things I have ever seen done to our country. To permit this film to be shown in foreign countries,” he wrote Hays, “and to give people the impression that anything like this could happen in the United State Senate is to me nothing short of criminal. I am sending a copy of this wire to the President of the United States.” “I do not question that in ‘Mr. Smith,’ you have made a sincere attempt to attack crooked politics,” he wrote Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, which released the film, “but I am also convinced that the picture will definitely discredit American Government and American civilization in the eyes of the English public. . . . In foreign countries this film must inevitably strengthen the mistaken impression that the United States is full of graft, corruption and lawlessness.”28
He was once again, unbidden, taking on the role of moral guardian for the picture industry.
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Although he was not a man prone to self-pity, Kennedy couldn’t help feeling sorry for himself, marooned in London with nothing of importance to do at the embassy and with friends and family an ocean away. “When I read about those Philadelphia Symphony concerts, those dinners with those beautiful women, those dances . . . and various and sundry night clubs,” he wrote Arthur Goldsmith, his friend since Harvard, “and I think of myself in the blackouts, carrying a gas mask, spending all day long—and most of the night—working on rubber and tin and films and shipping and securities, why it just isn’t right. . . . It looks to me as if I were back running a business now, with nothing to get you in the headlines except perhaps a scandal. Of course that is liable to happen anywhere and any time about my past life, but I assure you it cou
ldn’t happen about my present! Not because I haven’t those inclinations; but age has done its bit.”29
“It isn’t that the work is so terribly hard now,” he repeated in a letter to another classmate, Bob Fisher, “it’s really the atmosphere one works in. I mean—seeing youngsters, whom you had to the house for dinner with your own daughters, going off to war and some of them already killed in airplanes; seeing business shot to pieces; seeing, with the vision or imagination I think I have, what’s going to happen to America, even though they never get into the war, and, of course, they shouldn’t. It all makes you sick at heart.”30
The stress was getting to him, though he preferred to blame his weak stomach on a rich diet. “My stomach has been terrible,” he wrote Rose, “due the doctor says to too much rich milk, cream, eggs and butter & bacon. So I go to bed early read and get up to a most uninteresting life. . . . I’ve got to cut out rich food for a while. So between, no liquor [not even his one Haig & Haig with water before dinner], no tobacco, no sweets, no women, and now no food, well I might just as well get hit by a bomb.” His boredom and loneliness and stress were exacerbated by the horrific state of transatlantic communications. Letters arrived weeks after they were sent and were read by censors before they were delivered. To spare Rosemary—and the rest of the family—any embarrassment over the infantile state of her penmanship, Kennedy had decided to evade the censors by forwarding her notes by diplomatic pouch. “I don’t see any point in having any of her letters go to America and be talked about. Over here it doesn’t make any difference.”31
Worse than the delay in the mail was the prohibition against transatlantic phone calls that the British had instituted when they declared war. Kennedy, outraged that he could not call home, wrote Rose that he had complained in person to Lord Halifax: “I’ve got to be permitted to talk to the U.S.A. I’ve got more sense than to discuss the war, in a way to help the Germans, but must keep track of my family. . . . I said I didn’t much care what action had to be taken. I wasn’t going to be of much help to anyone if I didn’t get that privilege. Well anyhow I have it with a warning not to let the Germans know anything. . . . So that’s that!! You’ll be hearing from me.”32
For the rest of the war, Kennedy would place a call to Bronxville or Hyannis Port or Palm Beach every Sunday. The children would line up at the phone, awaiting their turn to talk to their father. The children and Rose also wrote regularly, though they never knew when Kennedy would receive their letters.
Everyone seemed to be thriving in America, as they had in London. Joe Jr. was working hard at Harvard Law School. Kick wrote to say that she had not gotten into Sarah Lawrence but was thinking about applying to “Finch in New York. It is a Junior College and one can get a diploma which is something.” Eunice, in a series of newsy letters, reported that she was doing well at Manhattanville, where she was on the tennis and swimming teams. She had begun the term as a boarding student but had been removed when “mother heard a rumor there were a few mice running around there and she took me out so fast that I couldn’t even explain although she said there were no explanations needed.” Eunice told her father about Jack’s girlfriends, Kick’s new beaus, Pat’s suitor, whom “everyone in the family thought . . . was wonderful” but she thought “a dope,” and Teddy’s weight, which, though only fifteen pounds more than it should be, left him looking “like two boys instead of one.” Jean, almost twelve now, wanted her father to know that Pat’s new boyfriend was “six feet seven [and Pat] can wear her high heel shoes without looking tall” and that Eunice had gotten a “lovely painting from an elderly gentleman who came down one day with Conde Nast and he went crazy over Eunice.”33
Kennedy tried to answer every letter. “Well, old lady,” he replied to Pat’s latest in a handwritten note, “you are doing yourself proud on the letters. I certainly think that you are having a much gayer time there than you possibly could have had over here. . . . I still go out to the country every night, and between you and me, it is pretty lonesome. . . . Tell someone to send me Bobbie’s address and I will write him. Explain that is the reason he hasn’t heard from me. Work hard dear, have fun and think of me.”34
From London, he helped the children with their hobbies and their schoolwork. He had letters sent to the American consuls general in Montreal, Bangkok, Tunis, Algiers, Calcutta, Moscow, Istanbul, and every European and South American embassy, asking them to purchase “small dolls, about 8 to 10 inches high, dressed in the native costume of the country” for his daughter Jean’s collection; he directed embassy staff to save special stamps for Bobby; and when Jack decided to write his senior thesis on British foreign policy and preparedness after the Great War, he mobilized his public affairs office to collect research materials for him.
Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John Burns was keeping a close watch on Jack’s progress at Harvard and Joe Jr.’s in law school, as Kennedy had asked him to. That fall, when Jack published an “isolationist” editorial in the Crimson, Burns suggested that he might be better served by not making his opinions known in public. Burns helped Joe Jr. choose his courses and professors at law school and tutored him for his examinations. In November, Kennedy wrote Burns that he had “been thinking, if there is a soft place, it might not be a bad idea to have young Joe a delegate to the [1940 Democratic] National Convention—primarily for the experience, but, everything considered, it might be good for him. I wish you would give this some thought, and then, in that event, I would probably have Jack appointed an officer of the Convention by the National Committee and they could both be there.”35
While Jack and Joe Jr. were firmly settled at Harvard and Teddy appeared to be doing fine in Bronxville, Bobby was floundering a bit. Kennedy had arranged to get him admitted to St. Paul’s, arguably the most prestigious prep school in New England. Rose had never been happy about sending her boy to an Episcopalian school, and two weeks after the term began, she suggested to her husband that Bobby transfer to Priory, a Catholic preparatory school in Rhode Island. She had raised her concerns about St. Paul’s with Johnnie Burns, who “thinks that you as the leading Catholic should not have a son in a definitely Episcopal School.” If Priory didn’t work out, Bobby could transfer to Andover for his final two years. Kennedy assured his wife that “whatever you do will turn out OK.”36
Kennedy focused his attention on Rosemary that fall. He was, Rose recalled in her diary, “especially attentive to her during that time, supervising everything from her studies to her pocket money and dental care, and writing to her often, and visiting the school.” “She is wonderful,” Kennedy wrote his wife in mid-October, “and Mary Moore who was here [at Wall Hall] said she had never seen such a change in her life. She is completely happy in her work [with the younger children at the school], enjoys being the boss here and is no bother or strain at all. . . . It becomes definitely apparent now that this is the ideal life for Rose[mary]. . . . She is happy, looks better than she ever did in her life, not the slightest bit lonesome, and loves to get letters from the children telling her how lucky she is to be over here. (Tell them to keep writing that way.) She is much happier when she sees the children just casually. For everyone peace of mind, particularly hers, she shouldn’t go on vacation or anything else with them. It certainly isn’t a hardship when everyone especially Rose[mary] is 1,000 times better off. I’m not sure she isn’t better staying over here indefinitely with all of us making our regular trips, as we will be doing, and seeing her then. I have given her a lot of time and thought and I’m convinced that’s the answer.”37
He had come to the conclusion that despite the kindnesses shown her by her brothers and sisters, Rosemary did better on her own. The rest of the family might also do better knowing that she was well cared for by others, that they did not have to worry about her, or feel guilty, or be afraid that she might embarrass herself—or them. For twenty years, Rosemary had tried to keep up, to join in the fun, to dance and swim, joke and flirt, play tenn
is and golf, go sledding, boating, and skiing, to smile a hearty smile for the cameras, exude glamour and gaiety and self-confidence in being one of the worshipped, privileged Kennedys. Joe Jr. and Jack had escorted “her to dances at the Yacht Club at the Cape, or to the Stork Club in New York.” Kick and Eunice had gone swimming and sailed and traveled with her. Jean Kennedy had spent hours hitting tennis balls with her on vacation in the South of France. Teddy “looked out for her too, when I could, though I was fourteen years younger,” he recalled in his memoirs. As her brothers and sisters grew up and progressed intellectually, Rosemary, who did not, fell further behind. She was “slow” but not stupid and had to have been cognizant of the growing separation from her brothers and sisters. Her attempts to keep pace, coupled with the realization that, try as she might, she could not, had been too much for her.38
In Rose’s absence and without consulting her, Kennedy decided that he was going to separate Rosemary from the family. She would stay at the convent school in England as a full-time resident and part-time teacher after he returned to the United States. Rosemary would no longer travel or go on vacation or live with the rest of the family. “She must never be at home for her sake as well as everybody else’s.”39
In mid-November, Kennedy put his new proposal into operation. He was not, he wrote Rose, bringing Rosemary with him when he returned for home leave in December 1939. “Now as to Rosie for Christmas, I think she should stay here, by all means. First of all she would not be able to come back once she got over there. No passports being granted. Second she is so much happier here than she could possibly be in the United States that it would be doing her a disservice rather than helping her. She had another nice girl with her yesterday for the weekend. The girls are very nice and fit in with her limitations without anyone being the wiser. In the meantime she is ‘cock of the walk’ by being by herself so that builds up her self-confidence. She is no bother when she is away from the other children. She gets along very well with Mary Moore and they have lots of fun together. . . . So I think everything is getting along OK. . . . Pray that everything stays quiet for me to get home.”40