by David Nasaw
Kennedy, meanwhile, had returned to the ambassador’s residence at Prince’s Gate, “drank my bottle of milk and had a sponge cake . . . and tried to lie down for a few minutes.” At eleven P.M., the phone rang. It was the prime minister requesting that Kennedy return to Downing Street. Churchill wanted him to call Washington immediately and get permission from the president to publish the cable to Reynaud. A call was put through to the White House. Roosevelt came to the phone and “indicated that he didn’t think the message should be printed, but it was not with great firmness that he said that. He said Hull objected to printing it because he thought it was too much of a commitment.” Kennedy urged the president to make no final decision until he was fully aware of conditions in France. He promised to cable him “an outline” of what had occurred, after which he could decide whether or not to publish the note to Reynaud.22
Kennedy hurried back to the embassy, where he cabled Roosevelt and Hull what he had learned from the “minutes” of the British-French summit. The French, he informed Washington, were ready to surrender. Churchill had urged them not to. The prime minister was insistent that Roosevelt’s message be published because he thought it was the only way to revive French morale and “keep them in the fight. . . . I realize the tragedy of the present moment and how important it is for the success of these poor people that their morale should be bucked up; nevertheless I see a great danger in the message as a commitment at a later date.”23
No sooner had he cabled his dispatch than the phone at the embassy rang. It was Churchill, who had drafted another message to Roosevelt that he hoped could be coded and cabled at once. Kennedy “dashed down” to 10 Downing, retrieved Churchill’s message, and suggested that if the prime minister wanted to speak directly to the president, he should call him at two thirty A.M. London time. Churchill replied that “he would be sound asleep long before that time.” Kennedy returned to the embassy, roused Herschel Johnson, who was now in charge of coding all critical messages, sent off Churchill’s cable, then stumbled back to his residence and to bed, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep.
“About 4:30, the telephone rang and the President was on the phone.” He was adamant now, no longer tentative as he had been a few hours earlier, that he did not want his note to Reynaud published. He asked Kennedy to convey this information to Churchill. To make sure Kennedy understood, the president cabled him the next morning: “My message to Reynaud not to be published in any circumstances. It was in no sense intended to commit and does not commit this Government to the slightest military activities in support of the Allies. . . . If there is any possibility of misunderstanding please insist that Churchill at once convey this statement to the appropriate French officials.”24
At 9:20 that morning, Churchill called Kennedy at home and was informed that Roosevelt was not going to permit publication of the message to Reynaud. “Churchill, in a very subdued voice, said if that were the case all would be lost in France. My impression,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, “is that all will be lost in France anyway, and I am sure the publication of the President’s reply would have only delayed the demise very slightly and merely temporarily.”25
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Kennedy spent his weekend at St. Leonard’s, working himself into a rage at the president for delaying his response to Reynaud’s message for almost three days and then writing a note that could be and was interpreted as a “commitment” to come to France’s assistance. Roosevelt had, Kennedy wrote in his diary after midnight on Saturday, June 15, unconscionably played “ducks and drakes with the destinies of millions.” Instead of making it clear that the Americans were not going to enter this war, no matter how bad things got for the Allies, he had stalled and then spoken out of both sides of his mouth.
By refusing to follow Kennedy’s advice and explain clearly but definitively why American assistance—in airplanes, destroyers, armaments, and ammunition—would not be forthcoming, Roosevelt had endangered the future friendship of the British, who would now blame the United States government for promising to come to the aid of the Allies and then abandoning them. Should the British find themselves in the position where they had to sue for peace after a German bombardment, would they send their fleet to Canada to protect it from falling into German hands? Or would they say to hell with the Americans and use it as a bargaining chip to get better terms?
All Friday night into Saturday, Kennedy ruminated on the possible consequences of the president’s actions. None were reassuring. Unlike other parts of his diary, which were dictated, transcribed, and corrected, then put away to be resurrected and rewritten into his Diplomatic Memoir years later, the stream-of-consciousness notes he jotted down that night were unmediated, uncensored, and not for publication in any form.
“We’ve fought with everybody.”
“Here we are tonight flat on our fannies—without a friend in the world.”
“What is the aftermath to be?”
“Even if we keep out of war.”
“What kind of country are we going to have? . . . How’re we going to live in it?”
He was exhausted, lonely, frightened, bitter, and self-pitying:
“Great place for a guy who came for a rest and who has a bad stomach!”
He was angry at Roosevelt:
“Don’t see how FDR could go off on cruise today!” [The president had left Washington for a cruise on the Potomac.]
He was worried that no one in Washington was taking seriously or preparing militarily for the possibility that, having seized control of the French fleet, with the British fleet next in line, the Germans would move aggressively toward the western hemisphere:
“JPK Program: Take over N[orth] A[merica] to Panama Canal; 1st guy who opens mouth, shoot the sucker. Right of free speech doesn’t mean talking against duly delegated authority and gov’t. Put in universal military service right now.”
He was frustrated beyond words that he had been kept on a tight leash instead of being allowed to play a larger part in securing the peace:
“Navy Day Speech re ‘getting along with neighbors.’”
“Twice A[dolf] H[itler] invited JPK to come to Berlin and see him.”
“If Roosevelt had followed my advice, we’d have stopped the war.”26
On Sunday morning, June 16, Churchill phoned Kennedy at St. Leonard’s to report that Premier Reynaud had resigned and been replaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who, “with a heavy heart,” announced the next day that he had “applied to our adversary to ask if he is prepared to seek with me, soldier to soldier, after the battle, honourably the means whereby hostilities may cease.”27
The armistice was signed on June 22. The French army was to assemble in specified ports to be demobilized and disarmed. Pétain’s government would remain in place, but a huge swath of the nation, including Paris, northern France, the borders with Belgium and Switzerland, and the entire coastline from Dover in the north to the border with Spain in the south, was placed under German occupation.
Fortunately, the worst-case scenario did not unfold. The French fleet was permitted to sail to ports in North Africa, where it remained under the nominal control of the Pétain government, until on July 3, the British, rather than risk having it fall into German hands, opened fire upon it. The bulk of the French fleet was destroyed, and some 1,250 French seamen lost their lives.
Twenty-four
THE WORST OF TIMES
Kennedy tried to keep his spirits up, tried to control his rage, tried to look on the positive side. His family and fortune were intact, if an ocean away. The news from home was good. Joe Jr. was doing okay in law school and had made a name for himself by holding tight at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and voting for James Farley, to whom he had been committed, rather than giving in to formidable pressure to switch to Roosevelt. Jack had graduated from Harvard with honors and was about to publish his first book. Rosem
ary had been able to spend part of the summer as a junior camp counselor before withdrawing because the responsibility was too much. Kick was at Hyannis Port, surrounded, as always, by admiring boys. Eunice was winning prizes sailing. Pat had lost ten pounds and had decided to go to college in the fall. Bobby was not taking much interest in sailing or his stamps but was avidly following the war news. Jean was making bandages twice a week for the Red Cross and sailing. Teddy had become “completely self-sufficient.” And Rose, exhausted by a month with the children and not looking forward to August, which would be even more hectic, was at “Elizabeth Arden’s Camp in Maine . . . a quiet place where they have exercises, swimming, golf and massage.”1
Kennedy had moved back to 14 Prince’s Gate but opened up only his own bedroom and study “so the house,” as he wrote his daughter Jean, “looks pretty lonesome.” He spent his weekends at St. Leonard’s in Windsor. After a nasty fall in the spring, he had temporaily given up horseback riding, but he played golf when he could. His stomach was better, but he worried about it and ate lightly. He drank not at all.2
The government was Churchill’s now, and he had his own set of advisers and confidants, none of whom, with the possible exception of Lord Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production, had much time to spare the American ambassador. Kennedy spent long days at the embassy, but there was precious little of importance for him to do. As honorary chairman of the American Red Cross war relief fund, he made speeches and thanked donors for their generosity. As chief negotiator for a ludicrously ill-conceived and underthought scheme to save the lives of British children by sending them to the United States, he wasted days on a rescue plan that was destined to fail because British citizens didn’t want to part with their children, and even if they had, there were not enough ships—or military convoys—to get them across the Atlantic.
Like everyone else, he waited for the German invasion. Since late May and with renewed urgency after the fall of France, the question voiced in the newspapers, in war cabinet meetings, and in the streets was not if but when the Germans would attempt to cross the English Channel. When July 1, the supposed “zero hour for Hitler’s invasion of England,” passed without incident, Lord Cadogan marked in his diary that the date now favored by the tipsters was “about July 8.” Lord Halifax thought it would be July 9. Kennedy thought July 9 or July 15.3
Churchill had been preparing for the invasion since he’d assumed the position of prime minister, perhaps even earlier. “We expect to be attacked here ourselves . . . in the near future, and are getting ready for them,” he had written Roosevelt in his May 15 request for “the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war.” Kennedy had advised Roosevelt and Hull to turn down this and other requests for military assistance, but the president and his secretary of state had made up their minds to not only not listen to Kennedy, but to do precisely what he advised against. In a major speech at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville on June 10, 1940, Roosevelt had signaled a shift in American policy by declaring that the United States while rearming would “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.”4
Though the president, the secretary of state, and the newly appointed secretaries of war and the navy, Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, were prepared to provide the British with all available military assistance consistent with the Neutrality Acts, they could not entirely dismiss Kennedy’s warnings from London. If the British were as woefully unprepared as the ambassador said they were, then any American military supplies shipped to the British would, when the war was lost, end up in German hands. That, obviously, was unacceptable.
Because Kennedy was thoroughly convinced that the German military machine was invincible, neither Roosevelt nor Hull nor, for that matter, anyone in the cabinet and few in the State Department believed him capable of providing any sort of objective evaluation of the state of British military preparedness and civilian morale. He should rightly have been removed from office and replaced by someone the president and Hull could trust. But given the political realities and the fact that the November elections were only a few months away, this was out of the question. It was decided instead to let him remain in place, safely isolated in London, but detour all fact-finding initiatives around him.
In July, Secretary of the Navy Knox, with Stimson’s support and Roosevelt’s approval, enlisted “Wild Bill” Donovan, a Republican lawyer, law school classmate of Roosevelt’s, and Medal of Honor hero, to travel to London to evaluate Britain’s military capacities and will to fight. Knox, the former editor of the Chicago Daily News, asked Edgar Mowrer, a foreign correspondent for that newspaper, to assist Donovan in gathering information. To provide both men with cover, he suggested that they announce they were going overseas to investigate—and prepare a series of articles on—Nazi/fifth column activities.
Kennedy, who had been told nothing about the Donovan mission, was furious when he heard about it secondhand from Edgar Mowrer in London. His own staff, he cabled Hull, was already engaged “in getting all the information that possibly can be gathered and to send a new man in here at this time, with all due respect to Colonel Knox, is to me the height of nonsense and a definite blow to good organization.” Four hours later, he cabled Hull again, at nine P.M. London time, that “if Colonel Knox doesn’t stop sending Mowrers and Colonel Donovans over here this organization is not going to function efficiently.” Still not convinced he was being heard, he cabled his complaints to Roosevelt, sent a copy to Welles, called Welles in Washington to ask him to intervene with the president to get the mission canceled, and the next day had Jim Seymour, his chief assistant now that Moore had gone home, phone the State Department and follow up with a “Triple Priority” telegram.5
Roosevelt, who had enthusiastically supported the Donovan mission, was more amused than distressed by Kennedy’s communications avalanche. He asked Knox to take up the ambassador’s complaint “with Secretary Hull and try to straighten it out. Somebody’s nose seems to be out of joint!”6
On July 14, Colonel Donovan flew from Port Washington to Lisbon, en route to England. Though he carried no official credentials, he was greeted by the British government as a conquering hero, granted an audience with the king, ushered into the new subterranean war bunker underneath Whitehall to talk with Churchill, shown all sorts of secret documents, including intercepted German dispatches, invited to sit down, man to man, with the leaders of the government and the military, and taken on tours of key military installations, arms and aircraft plants, and RAF airfields and command centers. While gathering his information and formulating his conclusions, Donovan kept Kennedy’s military attachés close and the ambassador at a distance.
On August 2, the day before he was to return to the United States with his recommendations, the colonel breakfasted at Claridge’s with General Raymond E. Lee, Kennedy’s army attaché. Lee was delighted, as he wrote in his diary, to find that Donovan, unlike Ambassador Kennedy, was “not at all defeatist” and put the odds of the British repelling a German attack at 60/40. General Lee thought the odds “a little better, say 2 to 1, barring some magical secret weapon.”7
On returning to Washington, Colonel Donovan reported to the president and Secretary of State Hull that the British were willing to fight, were prepared to fight, and should be given American assistance to do so. Almost everything he had to say contradicted the recommendations of the American ambassador, who had warned time and again that the British were going to be beaten and that it made no sense to waste planes or destroyers, already in short supply in America, on a losing cause.
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The German Luftwaffe launched its first waves of air attacks on Great Britain on July 10. The objective was to inflict damage on the RAF, the Royal Navy, and the south coast towns and defense installations in preparation for an invasion later i
n the summer or early fall. As the bombing continued through July and into early August, Kennedy’s letters and cables home grew more pessimistic, not because the Germans were achieving their goal, but because it was apparent that the Luftwaffe was not nearly as invincible as he had believed. The more effective the RAF was in battling the Luftwaffe, the longer the war would go on and the greater the likelihood that the Americans would be drawn in. “If the British air force cannot be knocked out,” he cabled Hull on August 2, “then the war will drag out with the whole world continuously upset, with the final result the starvation of England and God knows what happening to the rest of Europe.” He was, it appeared, furious at the RAF for refusing to “be knocked out,” for making it impossible for the Germans to invade, and for thereby prolonging the war. He scoffed at Churchill’s high oratory, his self-congratulatory paeans to British morale, the government’s relentless exaggeration of RAF triumphs and German losses. He looked past the rhetoric and saw trouble brewing everywhere. The soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk and were now stationed in England were angry at being denied “free smokes” and being paid far less than the munitions workers; the poor worried about their lives deteriorating further; the “intelligent people” were concerned about the effects of the war on colonial holdings. And as the bombardment continued, British military capacity, already weak, was further degraded. The British might succeed in delaying but they could not prevent a victory by the German military.8
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The phone rang first a bit after midnight on July 31. “They told me the President was calling.” The connection was so poor that the call was rescheduled for the next afternoon.
Two weeks earlier, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been nominated for a third term. His opponent was lawyer-businessman Wendell Willkie, whom Roosevelt considered his strongest opponent yet. The first step in launching his reelection campaign was to pull back into camp those who had wandered off or whose enthusiasm might have dwindled. And so the call to London.