by David Nasaw
Jack arrived in Palm Beach in a triumphant mood, having finished the senior thesis he had been working on all winter: “Appeasement at Munich: The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy to Change from a Disarmament Policy to a Rearmament Policy.” “Jack rushed madly around the last week with his thesis,” Joe Jr. wrote his father on March 17, “and finally with the aid of five stenographers the last day got it in under the wire. I read it before he had finished it up and it seemed to represent a lot of work but did not prove anything. However, he said he shaped it up the last few days and he seemed to have some good ideas so it ought to be very good.”21
As proud as Jack was of his thesis, what he wanted more than anything else was his father’s approval. “Arthur Krock read it and feels that I should get it published,” he wrote his father. “Please let me know what you think about the thesis as soon as you can— Am sending it to an agent Krock gave me—and see what he thinks—the chief questions are 1. Whether it is worth publishing if polished up. 2. If it can be published while you’re still in office.”22
Kennedy read the thesis and showed it “to various people around here. Everyone agrees that it is a swell job, and that you must have put in some long hard hours assembling, digesting and documenting all of this material.” The thesis was, as it now stood, a well-documented, though not entirely convincing, defense of Neville Chamberlain’s actions at Munich. The prime minister, Jack concluded, had had no choice but to appease Hitler because an antiwar, antimilitary British public had refused to spend money in the 1930s on maintaining and modernizing the British army, navy, and air force. “I believe that the basis of your case—that the blame must be placed on the people as a whole—is sound,” Kennedy wrote Jack. The danger was that because Jack blamed the “people,” not the politicians, his thesis was susceptible to being read as a “complete whitewash” of Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, his predecessor. This had to be corrected. “You might also be trying to improve the writing,” Kennedy concluded his long letter to his son. “After you are satisfied with it, ask Arthur Krock to go over it again. If Krock is willing, let his agent handle the publication. I suggest that, when you are going over the material again, you check your references. We have found several misspellings of names and a couple of wrong dates.”23
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It had not been a particularly good spring for Kennedy. On March 26, he learned of the death of Joe Sheehan, his oldest friend from East Boston, Boston Latin, and Harvard. Days later, he received word that Eddie Moore had been taken ill in Paris with a bad case of the “flu.” Kennedy flew to Paris at once, visited Moore, spent two nights with Clare Boothe Luce, then brought Eddie and his wife, Mary, back to London and moved them both into his estate in Windsor. “He doesn’t want to go home, of course,” he wrote Rose after getting the Moores safely back to England, “because he figures we will all be going home pretty soon and he would rather stay so that we can all go back together.”24
He still had no idea how long he was going to be in place as ambassador, or indeed how long he wanted to remain in place. “The news all seems to be Roosevelt won’t run so automatically I’m out,” he wrote Rose on April 5. “The only thing is how soon? . . . Well darling I guess it’s right nothing is perfect in this life and I just don’t like being so completely away from you. Yet knowing myself as I do when I’ve been home 6 months I’ll want to get going again. Maybe old age and a bad stomach will change me. I don’t know. I guess I’m a restless soul: Some people call it ambition. I guess I’m just nuts. Nevertheless, I love you so much.”25
Kennedy’s brief period of ennui came to an abrupt end four days later when, at three in the morning on April 9, German ships entered Oslo, Bergen, and Norway’s southern port cities; at five A.M., more ships landed in Copenhagen and German soldiers crossed the Danish frontier. Denmark, under threat of aerial bombardment, surrendered without a fight. The Norwegians chose to resist.
While the rest of the world reeled at the ease, the speed, the secrecy, and the success with which the Germans occupied Copenhagen and every major Norwegian port, Lord Halifax, whom Kennedy visited at three thirty in the afternoon of April 9, “seemed more cheerful than usual. Kept repeating ‘a very interesting situation.’ Felt the Germans had made a false move.” Churchill, Halifax told Kennedy, had been “almost thrilled with the news and he had convinced the Cabinet that Hitler had made a major strategic error.” The British military was prepared for the landing, Churchill declared in the House of Commons on April 11, and would quickly repel it.26
Exhibiting an exquisitely poor sense of timing, Kennedy wrote Roosevelt two days after the phony war turned real to complain about British finances: “It may seem strange that I should be writing to you at this moment about such matters as gold and British holdings of American securities, but although the necessity to face up to this situation is not yet as urgent as events which are now taking place in Scandinavia, it is nevertheless real and soon may be the none-the-less urgent.” The British were buying the dollars they needed to pay for American imports and military supplies by selling gold in the United States at $35 an ounce instead of liquidating their investments in American securities, as they had pledged to do. Kennedy recommended that Roosevelt step in immediately and curtail British gold sales by legislation, if necessary, before the treasury was overrun with gold it did not need and could not exchange.27
On April 29, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, whom Roosevelt had asked to answer Kennedy’s four-page letter, assembled his chief advisers for a 10:15 meeting. “Now, the reason I have got you fellows in here, this is extra confidential. I got one of these typical Joe Kennedy letters to the President on gold. . . . It is one of these typical asinine Joe Kennedy letters.” Morgenthau was opposed to Kennedy’s recommendation that the British be pressured to sell their securities to fund the war effort, because he feared that dumping those securities on the market would result in a dramatic fall of American stock prices. Only months earlier, Kennedy had warned of this eventuality. When a colleague asked Morgenthau why the ambassador might now be pushing the president in the opposite direction, Morgenthau, furious that Kennedy had dared interfere with treasury policy from the other side of the ocean, exploded with rage and insisted that Kennedy wanted to depress stock prices so he could make money selling short. “The only thing that has explained Joe Kennedy to me for the last couple of years is that he has been consistently short in the market. . . . Every single move he has made is to depress [the prices of] our securities and our commodities.”28
Morgenthau had no evidence for this charge, other than the fact that Ben Smith, a notorious short seller with whom Kennedy had traded a decade earlier, had recently been in London. But lack of evidence did not stop him from adding his voice to the whispering campaign against the ambassador. The reality that no one in London or Washington would have believed was that Kennedy had virtually stopped trading stocks when he’d entered government service, first, because the rules he had written at the SEC made selling short much more difficult, and second, because he knew that there were spies everywhere looking to brand him as an unscrupulous, unpatriotic stock swindler. He wasn’t going to give them the chance to do so.
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The situation tonight,” Kennedy wrote Rose a week after the German landing in Norway and Denmark, “is more bewildering than ever. The Norwegian situation is far from being a simple one. . . . It is going to take a lot of work to drive the Germans out. . . . But the difficulty is that nobody really knows what [Hitler] is liable to do or what’s going to come out of this whole Scandinavian episode. . . . I am more convinced than ever that the children should not come over here. I quite understand Kathleen’s interest [she was desperate to see Billy Hartington again], but she can take my word for it that she would have the dullest time she ever had in her life. All the young fellows are being shuttled off to war.”29
As it quickly became apparent tha
t the British attempt to dislodge the Germans in Norway was turning out disastrously, the public and press, having been fed only good news by Prime Minister Chamberlain and First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, began to turn against the government. “Had a long call from Joe Kennedy,” Lord Halifax wrote in his diary for April 25, “who came to talk about the inefficiency of what he called our showmanship. I thought there was a good deal in what he said. . . . I become more and more convinced that the Minister of Information ought to sit in at the Cabinet, but the P.M. is very sticky about this.”30
While the Norwegian operation had been planned and executed by Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty, it was Chamberlain who, as head of the government, was going to take the fall for its failure. On the evening of May 8, after a two-day debate on the prosecution of the war capped by Churchill’s eloquent defense of the Norwegian exercise, a “division” was called, ostensibly on an adjournment motion but, in fact, on whether or not to censure the present government. Chamberlain’s majority, recently over two hundred, was cut to eighty-one. Thirty-three Tories, including Anthony Eden, defected; another sixty, including Lady Astor, abstained.31
Kennedy, as had become his habit, “went to Beaverbrook’s house to get his slant on the situation.” Beaverbrook “felt that Chamberlain would have to go—if not right away, very shortly.” Concerned that the Chamberlain government was about to fall, Kennedy placed a call to the White House at midnight. The president came to the phone and Kennedy reported what he had heard. The president replied that “he had just heard that Germany had delivered an ultimatum to Holland.” What it all meant, Roosevelt did not yet know. “There is,” Kennedy concluded in his diary entry that evening, “a very definite undercurrent of despair because of the hopelessness of the whole task for England.”
The following morning, May 10, at six A.M., the “telephone rang and they said it was Secretary Hull. I held on five minutes and the Secretary came on and asked me if I knew of anything that was going on. I said, ‘Nothing.’” Hull reported that he had heard from Ambassador John Cudahy in Belgium that “the Germans had attacked Holland and Belgium, and that there was great concentration of airplanes over Luxembourg.”
On ringing off, Kennedy “called the Admiralty and got the map room and they indicated that the only news they had was that Holland had been invaded. . . . Again it struck me that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what was going on.” Kennedy got dressed and was driven to his office, where he placed calls to the American embassies in Holland, Belgium, and Italy. The Germans, he learned, had mined the Dutch harbors, bombed The Hague, were attacking Brussels from the air, and were concentrating airplanes over Luxembourg. There was no news from Rome. He called Lord Halifax at Whitehall and “asked him what the British were doing and he said, ‘We are moving all ways—air, navy, and army.” He then called Sumner Welles at the State Department, “gave him all this information” he had gathered, and promised to remain in touch as long as the telephone lines remained open. Welles thanked him. “He said they hadn’t been able to get through to anybody, not even Paris, and he was very anxious to keep in touch with the countries and to know what was going on.”32
The first British casualty of the German assault was the prime minister, who resigned his position on May 10. He had preferred that his successor be Lord Halifax, but when the foreign secretary declined the offer, he turned to Churchill. Kennedy was distraught by the fall from power of the man he admired most in Great Britain, and devastated by the news that the gentlemanly Chamberlain would be succeeded by the warmongering, near alcoholic Winston Churchill.
As Prime Minister Churchill assembled his war cabinet, naming himself minister of defense, the German Panzer divisions pushed through Holland, Belgium, and into France. Barely ninety hours after the initial attacks, Paul Reynaud, the French premier, reported to Churchill by telephone that the French lines had been broken and the army cut in two. He called again the next morning at seven A.M. “The battle is lost,” he told Churchill in English.33
Kennedy was fully occupied at the embassy with evacuating those Americans still in England. The State Department had suggested ferrying them across the English Channel to the southern coast of France, where they could be picked up by American ships. For Kennedy, the notion of ferrying anyone across the English Channel, “the most dangerous stretch of water now being used by any passenger service in the world,” was further proof that Washington had no idea what was happening on the continent. Kennedy suggested that Irish ports were far more accessible from England and far safer. After much back and forth, his recommendation was accepted.34
The evening of May 14, Kennedy went to the theater with Franklin Gowen from his embassy and Bill Hillman, the former Hearst correspondent. On the way back to Windsor, he stopped off to see Lord Beaverbrook, who told him that he had just accepted an appointment as minister of aircraft production in the Churchill government and was on his way to a midnight appointment with the prime minister. Minutes later, the telephone rang at Beaverbrook’s residence, and Kennedy, who hadn’t left yet, was asked to “come right away to the Admiralty; that Churchill would like to see me.”
Kennedy had never liked or trusted Churchill. Now, confronted with the rotund red-faced little man, surrounded by his aides, he was truly frightened. “I couldn’t help but think as I sat there talking to Churchill how ill-conditioned he looked and the fact that there was a tray with plenty of liquor on it alongside him and he was drinking a scotch highball, which I felt was indeed not the first one he had drunk that night, that, after all, the affairs of Great Britain might be in the hands of the most dynamic individual in Great Britain but certainly not in the hands of the best judgment in Great Britain.”35
“I just left Churchill at one o’clock,” Kennedy cabled Roosevelt and Hull an hour later. “He is sending you a message tomorrow morning. . . . The reason for the message to you is that he needs help badly. I asked him what the United States could do to help that would not leave the United States holding the bag for a war in which the Allies expected to be beaten. It seems to me that if we had to fight to protect our lives we would do better fighting in our own backyard. I said you know our strength. What could we do if we wanted to help you all we can? You do not need money or credit now. The bulk of our Navy is in the Pacific and we have not enough airplanes for our own use and our Army is not up to requirements. So if this is going to be a quick war all over in a few months what could we do. He said it was his intention to ask now for a loan of 30 or 40 of our old destroyers and also whatever airplanes we could spare right now. He said that regardless of what Germany does to England and France, England will never give up as long as he remains a power in public life even if England is burnt to the ground. Why, said he, the government will move to Canada and take the fleet and fight on.”36
This was precisely what Kennedy expected and feared Churchill was going to say. The newly installed prime minister intended to push the British to fight on until the Americans had no choice but to enter the war or watch from the sidelines as Great Britain was conquered.
On May 16, Roosevelt called on Congress to appropriate $896 million to upgrade American air, ground, and naval defenses. “New powers of destruction, incredibly swift and ready, have been developed; and those who wield them are ruthless and daring. . . . No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening, and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored.” He made no mention of supplying any military assistance to the British or the French.37
After delivering his message to Congress, the president returned to the White House and wrote to inform Churchill that the United States could not loan the British any destroyers, no matter how old, without congressional approval, which he declined to seek. On the matter of airplanes, he promised nothing, insisting only that the United States would do “everything within our power to make it possible for the Allied Governments to obtain the latest types of
aircraft in the United States.” As to the American fleet, which Churchill hoped would be repositioned to the Atlantic, it was “now concentrated in Hawaii where it will remain at least for the time being.” Roosevelt was, however, prepared to permit the British to purchase steel in the United States, and he pledged to give “the most favorable consideration . . . to the request” for antiaircraft equipment and ammunition, though he added that the request would have to be considered “in the light of our own defense needs and requirements.”38
Churchill responded by pressing his case and posing a frightening scenario. Although he had no intention of negotiating with the Germans, he could not vouch for his successors, who might, as part of a peace settlement, hand over the British fleet. For the moment, the United States was seemingly impregnable, but should the Germans gain control of the British fleet, they would rule the seas as well as the European continent and be free to do as they pleased in the western hemisphere. “Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly. . . . However, there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.”39
Roosevelt was persuaded by Churchill’s argument that the defeat of the British would pose a direct threat to American security, especially if the fleet fell into Germany’s hands. In his May 15 dispatch, Kennedy had argued that “if we had to fight to protect our lives we would do better fighting in our own backyard.” Roosevelt disagreed.
“The President and I,” Cordell Hull recalled decades later in his Memoirs, “reached a different conclusion from Kennedy’s. It seemed to us we should do better to keep fighting away from our own back yard. This we could do by helping Britain and France remain on their feet.” Although it was unclear as yet what could be done to assist the British given the neutrality laws and public opinion, “of one point, the President and I had not the slightest doubt; namely, that an Allied victory was essential to the security of the United States.”40