by David Nasaw
On the Sunday of the Lothian funeral, Kennedy noted in his diary that before attending Mass at St. Matthew’s, he had “read in Washington Post, owned by Eugene Meyer, a Jew, that five prominent men had written short eulogies on Lothian.” Four of the five were active in the campaign for American assistance to the British war effort: Felix Frankfurter, “who is supposed directly and indirectly to influence Roosevelt on Foreign Policy over Hull’s and Welles’s heads [and] whose cohort of young lawyers are in practically every government department, all aiding the cause of Jewish refugees getting into America”; “John W. Davis attorney for J. P. Morgan . . . Tom Lamont, head of Morgans, who would certainly like to get U.S. in”; and William Allen White, the publisher/editor of the Kansas Emporia Gazette and chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. “It looks to me,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “as if the English sympathizers were tying their cause in with the Jews because they figure they’ve got all the influence in U.S.”6
He was not alone in his fear that the Jews had too much influence in Washington. Kennedy reported in his diary that Justice Frank Murphy had told him the month before, when they met in New York City, that “it was Frankfurter and Ben Cohen who wrote the Attorney General’s opinion on destroyers and bases. Murphy regards the Jewish influence as most dangerous. He said that after all, Hopkins’ wife was a Jew; Hull’s wife is a Jew; and Frankfurter and Cohen and that group are all Jews.” Sumner Welles had also told Kennedy that he thought Frankfurter “dangerous.” Frankfurter, he told Kennedy, “read all the papers [diplomatic dispatches?] and made suggestions to Roosevelt— He’s a Jew chiseler.”7
Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long reported to Kennedy that he too was having difficulties with the Jewish organizations that were lobbying for an immediate and significant increase in “emergency visas” for refugees from Nazi-occupied territories. With the support of Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and in partnership with J. Edgar Hoover, Long had demanded that visa requirements for Jewish refugees be tightened, not loosened, to prevent the Nazis from flooding the nation with spies. “Saw Long,” Kennedy noted in his diary. “Getting madder and madder at tactics of Frankfurter, Meyer [Eugene, publisher of the Washington Post], and other Jews to get Jew political refugees in U.S.— They were constantly harassing him. . . . The Department of Justice was split up—[Solicitor General Francis] Biddle headed up the Jews and their connection. They wouldn’t let the FBI investigate the names of the refugees. Just an unholy show. (Looks like it needs an investigation.) [Long] told me again [about] the copy of the letter from big Jew who offered German cause $300,000 to get some Jews out. This refugee situation stinks to Heaven but no paper will print the story.”8
Long, in slightly more decorous and disguised language, confirmed in his diary that same day that he was under siege by organized Jewry. “The attacks on the Department and the unpleasant situation in the press over the refugee matter seems to continue. It is more widespread than it was and seems to be joined up with the small element in this country which wants to push us into this war. Those persons are largely concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard, and principally around New York. There are elements of them in the Government here. They are all woven together in the barrage of opposition against the State Department which makes me the bull’s eye.”9
Upon his return to Palm Beach, Kennedy wrote John Burns, recounting what he had learned from Long. The British government and the American Jews were “getting together in this whole campaign to get America into this war” and no one dared speak out against it. Worse yet, the Jews had become so powerful that they were steamrolling their proposals for refugee resettlement through Washington. “A greater fraud and well-engineered scheme was never perpetrated on the American public than that a thousand refugees have been taken into the United States; not one of them, I know, had ever been investigated by the F.B.I., and yet I don’t suppose any newspaper in the United States would print the truth for fear of losing advertisers—and then we boast of the freedom of the press. Nuts, I say.” He still trusted Roosevelt to “make the right decision, if left alone,” he claimed in a letter to Frank Murphy in late December. “It is the influence around him, I fear.”10
Since returning to the United States, Kennedy’s paranoia about Jewish influence had gotten the better of him. The more he found himself on the outside, scorned and criticized as an appeaser, a man out of touch with reality, a traitor to the Roosevelt cause, the more he blamed the Jews. Incapable of understanding why his warnings that the British were doomed and were doing all they could to bring down America with them was nowhere heeded, he looked for conspiracy—and found it. The Jews opposed him and orchestrated the attacks on him, he convinced himself, because he was committed to finding a way to live at peace with Hitler, while they were committed to going to war. That there was no basis for such conclusions did not deter him from voicing them in gratuitous and increasingly grotesque anti-Semitic language.
His fears that the Jews had become too powerful in Washington were, of course, entirely misplaced. Jewish influence on foreign policy was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent. In the months and years to come, Breckinridge Long would, virtually unopposed, institute visa requirements that succeeded in cutting back the number of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States. By mid-1941, new regulations, supposedly written to keep out Nazi spies masquerading as German Jews, had reduced the number of visas offered to about 25 percent of the available quota. After Pearl Harbor, visa procedures would be tightened again, preventing even more Jewish refugees from entering the country.11
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As Kennedy had feared, and warned, and as Lord Lothian had undiplomatically announced in November two weeks before his death, the British were “broke”—or if not yet “broke,” very close to running out of the dollars they needed to pay for the military hardware they were requesting. Giving them any armaments on credit was illegal according to the current Neutrality Acts; giving them away as a gift was politically impossible. Roosevelt found a third option, which he explained at a December 17 press conference. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.”12
In a fireside chat on December 29, Roosevelt further elaborated on what has become known as “lend-lease”—a program, he declared at the onset, that was about national security, not war. He began by ruling out any possibility that the United States would ever attempt to broker or “encourage talk of peace” with the “aggressor nations.” “The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” There were those, he admitted, who believed “that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us,” but they were dangerously wrong. National security depended on the survival of Britain. “If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” The British had not asked for American troops, and even if they had, the president had no intention of sending them. “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.” To protect the nation from future attacks and assist the British in repelling the current one, America had to become “the great arsenal of democracy.”13
While Roosevelt put his ca
binet to work on writing legislation to implement the lend-lease program, the America First Committee, disturbed by both his declaration that he would not seek a negotiated peace and his intention to supply the British with increased military assistance, marshaled its arguments and its forces. On January 4, Robert Stuart, Jr., the national America First Committee director who had earlier met with Kennedy in Palm Beach, wrote Page Hufty, the coordinator of the Florida branch, to ask him to get back in touch with the ambassador. “With relation to Ambassador Kennedy, I feel more than ever that he is one of our most important cards. He has got to be played right. . . . More than any other man in the country today, he can cut through the confusion that exists in so many people’s thinking. I do hope that if you have any influence with him, or know anyone who has, you will prevail upon him to come out and take a stand at the earliest possible moment.”14
Hufty tried but got nowhere. Kennedy did not, he wrote Stuart, “feel it was wise for him to make a move until the Administration’s program had been presented in tangible form which would give him something more specific to attack. He felt that the American people would not be interested in what he had to say much more than once and that therefore he should be very careful to pick his spot for that time.” Though Kennedy had left the door open to joining the anti-intervention campaign, Hufty held out little hope that he ever would. “Ambassador Kennedy still clings to his conviction that President Roosevelt is sincerely anxious to keep us out of war.”15
Hufty was correct. In a letter to Cornelius Fitzgerald in Boston, Kennedy directly contradicted the America Firsters’ assumption that Roosevelt wanted to get Americans into the European war. “Until Hitler decides that it is to his best interest to have the United States in, we won’t go in. Maybe I am one of those who has too much confidence in what Roosevelt says, but . . . I just don’t believe that we are going in.”16
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On January 10, Roosevelt’s lend-lease bill was introduced in both houses of Congress, with hearings scheduled to begin before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs the following Wednesday. The Democratic majority called as its first witnesses the secretaries of state, treasury, war, and the navy, and William Knudsen, director of the president’s Office of Production Management. After a recess for the inauguration, to which Kennedy was invited but did not attend, Hamilton Fish, the senior Republican on the committee, called his witnesses. First on the list was Joseph P. Kennedy, whom Fish and nearly everyone else in Washington believed would forcefully and persuasively oppose the legislation.
Kennedy, aware that the spotlight was going to be turned on him and there was no way to avoid it, booked a half hour of radio time two days before he was scheduled to testify. He was not going to allow his first public appearance since his resignation to be choreographed by congressional committee protocols. Because he was still nominally ambassador to Great Britain (his successor had not yet been named), he called Sumner Welles to inquire whether there were any procedures he should be aware of, and to tell him that he had booked time for himself “to go on the radio and broadcast Saturday night—I am sick and tired of being attacked by both sides and think I am at least entitled to state my position clearly.” He was, he added, particularly “sore” at the president for not “calling off his ‘Henchmen’” who were preemptively attacking him for his opposition to the lend-lease bill.
Welles called back the next day to report that Hull wanted to go over his testimony with him. This Kennedy would not do. He did, however, agree to meet with the president on Thursday morning, two days before his radio address and four days before his House testimony. Because the weather was bad and he was afraid his plane might be grounded, Kennedy took the 12:50 A.M. train to Washington. He arrived at the White House on schedule that morning. After a fifteen-minute wait, he was “ushered into [Roosevelt’s] bedroom and found he was in his bathroom in his wheel chair. He was attired in sort of grey pajamas and was starting to shave himself. I sat on the toilet-seat and talked with him.” As he had every time he had encountered the president over the past few years, Kennedy began by complaining about “the treatment I had received.” Roosevelt listened, then commented almost casually that no one had “received worse treatment than he had in the last eight years.” The preliminaries out of the way, they proceeded to the business at hand: the lend-lease legislation. Kennedy told the president that he believed the bill might be passed without amendments, but it would be difficult, because as now written, it expanded presidential powers in a way the American people would oppose “unless they understood it better.” Kennedy suggested that Roosevelt allow the Democrats to amend the bill to give Congress more oversight, rather than risk having the Republicans push through their own amendments. The president replied that he would not oppose an amendment that would establish a joint committee that he would “keep posted on what was going on,” but he was not going to delegate to Congress powers that the Constitution had given the executive branch.
Kennedy asked Roosevelt if he had decided on his successor as ambassador to Great Britain. They discussed a number of possibilities, then talked a bit about Jimmy Roosevelt’s decision to try his hand in Hollywood, the administration’s difficulty in getting reliable information about the extent of British dollar holdings, and a few other matters. “His whole attitude was very friendly,” Kennedy recalled in his diary. “I said numerous times that I couldn’t understand why so many people were so anxious about our not being friends. He said he paid no attention to this, but he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t.” Roosevelt kept the meeting going to the point where “he was about an hour late on his appointments.” Nothing, of course, could have pleased Kennedy more. He was back on the inside again, an intimate, a trusted presidential confidant and adviser. Roosevelt was also pleased with the meeting. Later that afternoon, he told his cabinet that he now “thought that Kennedy would not go too far overboard, although he realized that he was always unpredictable and might say anything.”17
That was not the impression Kennedy gave the newspaper reporters he spoke to on leaving the White House. The last thing he wanted was to appear as the president’s stooge. And he did not. The New York Times, in a front-page story, headlined KENNEDY TO URGE OUR “STAYING OUT,” quoted the ambassador as declaring emphatically that “for once, I am going to say for myself what I have in my mind.” The New York Daily News reported on Kennedy’s meeting with Roosevelt in a syndicated front-page story that the Los Angeles Times carried under the headline PRESIDENT GIVEN REBUFF BY KENNEDY: ENVOY SECRETLY CALLED TO WHITE HOUSE OPPOSES AID-TO-BRITAIN BILL. As evidence that Kennedy was going to oppose the president, the Daily News reported that on leaving the White House, he had returned to his suite at the Carlton to meet Burton Wheeler, the leader of the opposition. When reporters finally caught up with the ambassador, he was uncharacteristically “tight lipped and terse. All he would say for publication was: ‘In order that there be no misunderstanding about this at this time, I am going to tell my story in full on Saturday. The accent will be on keeping this country out of war.’”18
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Joseph Kennedy had been preparing to deliver this, his first major foreign policy speech as a private citizen, for months now. His primary consultant was his twenty-four-year-old son, Jack, who had proven his worth as a foreign policy analyst in his senior thesis. Father and son had spent hours together during the ambassador’s November trip to California, discussing how Kennedy might best respond to the accelerating attacks that had followed the Lyons article in the Boston Sunday Globe. He trusted Jack’s judgment because he knew his son had listened carefully and absorbed into his thinking much of what he had told him. Kennedy expected Jack to put his thoughts into words that were less provocative than he was likely to come up with himself.
Jack advised his father to take the high road and avoid personal attacks on the columnists who had been savaging him, as journalists “have 365 days a year to strike back.” “I think it is
important that you write in a very calm and a judicious manner, not as though you were on the defensive.” Jack also urged his father to correct the impression that he was still an “appeaser.” “It seems to me that if this label is tied to you it may nullify your immediate effectiveness. . . . Lindbergh may prove a good example of this. I don’t mean that you should change your ideas or be all things to all men, but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser.” “Where I think Lindbergh has run afoul is in his declarations that we do not care what happens over there—that we can live at peace with a world controlled by the dictators. . . . I would think that your best angle would be that of course you do not believe this, you with your background cannot stand the idea personally of dictatorships—you hate them—you have achieved the abundant life under a democratic capitalistic system—you wish to preserve it. . . . The point that I am trying to get at is that it is important that you stress how much you dislike the idea of dealing with dictatorships, how you wouldn’t trust their word a minute—how you have no confidence in them.”19
A little less than six weeks after Jack had laid out his guidelines for his father, on Saturday evening, January 18, 1941, Kennedy spoke into the microphones at the WEAF station in New York, first in several takes for the newsreel cameras, then at seven P.M. live over the NBC Red Network. He opened with a call for “tolerance.” Too many well-meaning public servants, himself included, were being smeared by “a few ruthless and irresponsible Washington columnists [who] have claimed for themselves the right to speak for the nation.” He intended to set the record straight and correct the “many false statements regarding my views on foreign policy.” He rejected the label of “defeatist.” As ambassador, he had reported accurately and faithfully on the problems facing Great Britain, but he had never predicted defeat.