The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Clare was everything Rose was not: a daring, passionate woman who after dinner stayed with the men in the salons of power instead of demurely rising and taking her coffee and brandy with the ladies in another room. Her pillow talk was not simply the cooing words of love but a bold dialogue on great events.

  Clare was a woman of hard reactionary views who trumped even Joe in her disdain for the lower classes and the Jews and what she considered the mongrel races of the world. She shared with Joe the belief that America had better quickly rearm, turning itself into a fortress that would be impregnable to the onslaughts of war.

  She had a gift for self-dramatization that was a journalist’s common failing, but here Joe bested her. He wrote her on October 1, 1940: “Yesterday a Messerschmitt just missed the house as it crashed. I could see the pilot’s face, his head lolling over one side … headed straight for the ground…. I imagine it will take a long time to get the drone of German motors out of my ears after I get back; and not to hear gunfire nine or ten hours a night will make me rather lonesome for the battlefront. When somebody asks me what I did in the second war I’ll say I lived in London, and that’s a damn sight worse than anything else I can think of, unless it is Dunkerque.”

  Beneath the boyish bravado was a shameless quality to Joe’s dissembling. Most of the time he was living well outside London, and he had suffered nothing compared to those who nightly weathered the Nazi bombs.

  With Clare and Henry, Joe had begun what Roosevelt could only believe was a treacherous dialogue with his enemies. The ambassador was in frequent contact with the Luces, who were backing the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, in his race against Roosevelt. Willkie campaigned on the theme that Roosevelt was lying in his pledge to keep America out of war. If he was reelected for a third term, American sons would soon be dying on foreign shores.

  Joe agreed largely with this thesis and proffered the possibility that he would return to the United States to endorse Willkie, a gesture that, as he wired Luce, would produce “25 million Catholic votes,” enough “to throw Roosevelt out.”

  Joe may have been exaggerating the numbers, but his was not an idle boast. Many of his fellow American Catholic voters were reluctant tenants in the house of the New Deal, and as the election neared they seemed to be moving away in droves. Joe was the most powerful Catholic in the administration, and if he left the New Deal in dramatic fashion, the road behind him would be full of Catholics leaving the Roosevelt camp.

  Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice and one of the president’s closest advisers, saw that Joe could be a force of great and crucial good if he would return to America and give an impassioned radio address confirming his support for Roosevelt. That would not only stop the flow of Catholics away from Roosevelt but also bring enough of them back to ensure a third term for Roosevelt.

  In the United States his own son, Joe Jr., was playing an active role as a youthful isolationist. At Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. became his father’s proud surrogate, one of the leaders of the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. Some of his opponents considered “isolationist” little more than another name for cowardly expediency, but men of principle espoused this cause as well, and Joe Jr. was no coward physically or intellectually.

  Joe Jr. took on the internationalists on their turf, talking at Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline among the very people whom his father accused of willfully manipulating America into war. He debated Harvard professors in whose classes he had only recently studied, giving them not one iota of deference in his attacks on their positions.

  Joe Jr. was a more vociferous isolationist even than his father. He opposed U.S. lend-lease aid to Britain, calling it a prelude to the sending of men and the inevitable entry of America into the war. “I urge you to consider … that convoys mean war. I support all aid to England but we must not throw away our greatest asset, our hemispherical position…. We will only sacrifice everything by going in,” he said.

  Joe Jr. took the politically daring step of supporting James Farley as the Democratic candidate for president, in opposition to Roosevelt’s third term. Joe Jr. had gone as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940, and even knowing that Farley could not win, Joe Jr. insisted on voting for him on the first ballot.

  Joe Jr. was speaking out against intervention, but his was a voice that could hardly be amplified. Joe Sr., for his part, knew that the moment had arrived when he might stand at the epicenter of history. Henry Luce wired him that he should return to the United States to tell the truth about Roosevelt’s war plans, the “ordinary antiquated rules” of loyalty and protocol be damned. Clare Luce sent another cable: WHEN YOU LAND TELL THE PRESS

  AND THE PEOPLE THE TRUTH AS YOU HAVE ALWAYS TOLD IT TO ME.

  In one moment Joe would pay back all the rebuke, the humiliation, the misunderstanding that he felt he had suffered. Roosevelt had word of Joe’s plans, and he raised the ante by refusing Joe’s request to return to the United States for consultation. Joe decided that if he could not come back in person, he would send his words back instead. He wrote a devastating article that he called “an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration for having talked a lot and done very little,” and he vowed that if he was not called home, he would publish his article the week before the election.

  Joe had simply had it with London. In early October, he told Lord Halifax that he intended to give up his ambassadorship, going out with a bang, not a whimper. Joe confided to the British diplomat that he had sent his article attacking Roosevelt to the United States, where it was scheduled for publication just before the presidential election.

  Roosevelt understood that in a close election the whole future of his administration and his alliance with Churchill and the British might stand or fall on the actions of one man, and he reluctantly agreed to call Joe back to Washington. Roosevelt prepared for the meeting with all the staging of a great director. The newspapers were full of rumors about Joe resigning or coming out for Willkie. Knowing Joe’s brash propensity for mirthless candor, Roosevelt knew that he might well make some intemperate remarks to the scribes who waited at the airport in New York.

  Roosevelt stipulated that when Joe’s plane landed, he was “not to make any statement to the press on your way over nor when you arrive in New York until you and I have had a chance to agree upon what should be said. Please come straight through to Washington on your arrival.” That would give Joe no time to meet with the president’s opponents, and no opportunity to stoke the fires of his fury even higher. The president insisted that Rose be invited as well, a brilliant and crucial part of his strategy.

  Rose’s years as an ambassador’s wife had been the happiest moments of her public life. As the plane flew south to the capital, Rose pleaded with her husband not to resign. “The president sent you, a Roman Catholic, as ambassador to London, which probably no other president would have done,” she argued. “You would write yourself down as an ingrate in the view of many people if you resign now.” Rose went on to tell Joe that he risked hurting not only himself but also his own sons and their political futures. If Joe’s remarks won the election for Willkie, Joe would have his moment of revenge, but the retribution would be meted out not on him but on his sons and their careers. As long as the Democrats held forth their banner, Kennedy would be a traitor’s name.

  Joe listened to his wife’s counsel and afterward admitted that she had “softened” him up. He did not care about what he considered the dubious honor of the ambassadorship any longer; most likely what rang deepest and truest to him were his sons’ possible fates. By his actions in London he was hoping to save their lives, but he was not doing so in order to destroy their futures.

  Roosevelt had alerted his secretary, Grace Tully, to “be sure and butter up Joe when you see him” before she showed him into the private quarters. Joe, who was planning a bold, merciless confrontation with the president, found Roosevelt seated over a cocktail shaker mixing drinks for his close frie
nd Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Mrs. Byrnes.

  Over a Sunday dinner of scrambled eggs and sausages, Joe was at his civil best, relating tales of life in beleaguered London. “I’ve got a great idea, Joe!” Byrnes said, as if a glowing lightbulb had appeared above his head. “Why don’t you make a radio speech on the lines of what you have said here tonight and urge the president’s reelection?”

  At the level that Roosevelt was playing politics, and for the stakes that were on the table, not a moment of this evening was unscripted. Joe was not for a moment taken in by Byrnes “acting as though a wonderful idea had just struck him.” Roosevelt, for his part, surely knew that Joe was not fooled and realized also that his angry ambassador would not dare call the president’s bluff. They were like two men sitting across a game board from each other, but while Joe was playing checkers, Roosevelt was playing a master’s game of chess.

  Joe did not respond to the senator’s “great idea” but sat and fumed quietly. Roosevelt had already felt Joe’s anger in other meetings, and he had staged this modest dinner in part so that with other guests present, his ambassador would not dare show his venom. Despite the staging, Joe was not about to spend the evening in chitchat and meaningless pleasantries.

  “Since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the president alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody,” Kennedy said suddenly. As Joe went through the litany of abuses he felt he had suffered, Rose noticed that Roosevelt’s eyes snapped nervously, the only sign of emotion the president allowed himself.

  “I am damn sore at the way I have been treated,” Joe went on, like a prosecutor making his final arguments. Joe was not so bold as to attack the president, whom he considered the architect of his abuse. Instead, Joe trashed State Department officials, such as Sumner Welles, who had bypassed their ambassador, humiliating him. Welles and his subordinates had only been the honest messengers of Roosevelt’s policy, but Joe berated them in fiery assault.

  Roosevelt was not interested in speaking the truth now, but only in placating this enraged and dangerous man. So the president started attacking the State Department with ferocity even greater than Joe’s. After the election the president would have “a real housecleaning,” throwing out these officials who had so wronged the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe would suffer no longer. There were many words of untruth in Roosevelt’s harangue, but his words did what they were supposed to do. They calmed Joe down and made him and Roosevelt momentary allies against their common foe.

  Joe was an angry, cynical man who still might lash out in vitriol against Roosevelt and his third term. His greatest vulnerability lay not in the many things he hated but in the few things he loved. The man loved his sons, and it was of his sons that Roosevelt spoke now.

  “I stand in awe of your relationship with your children,” Roosevelt said in his first words of the evening that rang with some semblance of truth. “For a man as busy as you are, it is a rare achievement. And I for one will do all I can to help you if your boys should ever run for political office.”

  A promise is sometimes only another name for a threat. According to Roosevelt’s son James, the president went on to say that if Joe decided to throw his lot in with Willkie now and abandon the president, he would be an outcast and his sons’ political careers would be destroyed before they began.

  Years later Joe told Clare Luce that Roosevelt offered him an irresistible deal that evening: if Joe would endorse Roosevelt in 1940, “then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.” Even if Roosevelt did not make such an explicit offer, the implications were clear that if Joe cared about his sons’ futures, he had best be quiet. A year and a half later Jack declared in a conversation that “his father’s greatest mistake was not talking enough; that he stopped too quickly and was accused of being an appeaser. He stated that the reason his father stopped talking and didn’t go on and present his side of the question fully was due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in politics.”

  The evening had not changed Joe’s belief that Roosevelt was slowly manipulating the country into war. Joe could have walked out of the White House that evening, flown back to New York to meet the Luces, and cast his lot with Willkie. If the Republican won, Joe would be the man who had dared to stand up and say what had to be said.

  Roosevelt had just promised that he would get rid of Joe’s enemies, and if momentarily Joe had believed him, upon reflection he was too shrewd to think that the president would change. But his love for his sons outweighed even his own ambition for power and position. He was not going to give them a tainted name as their inheritance or hobble them in the race of life.

  What he was about to do was as noble and selfless as anything he would do in his life. His sons were not unaware of the sacrifice their father made that evening. Afterward Jack discussed his father with his friend Torby Macdonald. Torby wrote Jack that few people realized that “self-success” was more important than “worldly success,” and that Jack’s father was one of the few who had done so by “putting family over Ambassadorship.”

  “All right,” Joe finally said that night, giving in to Roosevelt’s request that he make a radio speech. “I will. But I will pay for it myself, show it to nobody in advance, and say what I wish.”

  Joe spoke Tuesday evening on CBS Radio like the bearer of truth from the bloody fields of war. For months he had been saying privately that Roosevelt was leading America into war; now he stated that “such a charge is false.”

  Joe knew that many of those listening across the nation had heard of his disagreements with Roosevelt, and he did not deny them but asked how many employees agreed completely with their employer. “In my years of service for the government, both at home and abroad, I have sought to have honest judgment as my goal,” he said. “After all, I have a great stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world.”

  Joe had touched the deepest chord within his own life, a chord that resonated in the lives of most Americans. His speech was a triumph, lauded in the press and applauded by Democratic politicians. In the end Roosevelt won in an electoral landslide, and Joe’s speech was not the seminal event that it would have seemed in a close election. Joe, however, in one great public moment, had proved his fealty to Roosevelt. He had good reason to believe that his sons would be rewarded for their father’s loyalty.

  Roosevelt saluted him, but the Luces and the Willkie forces considered Joe a betrayer. “There was that radio address when everyone thought he was going to come out for Willie,” Henry Luce recalled. “We thought he was and Clare tried to get hold of him and he wouldn’t answer the phone. We were appalled when he came out for FDR as the man to keep us out of war.”

  On Saturday after the election, Joe’s secretary showed Louis Lyons of the Boston Globe and two reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch into his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Joe was in suspenders, eating apple pie, having a casual morning on a casual day.

  In London, Joe had become used to calling the press into his office and spewing out his most intemperate attack on his enemies, knowing that the scribes would cut his remarks down to fit into the narrow confines of acceptable discourse.

  Joe believed his remarks this morning were not to be printed, but it was a mad gamble to talk as he did to journalists whom he did not know intimately, betraying all the glorious rhetoric of the radio speech he had just given. He said nothing that he had not said a hundred times before, that “democracy is all finished in England” and “it may be here” as well. He prophesied that if America entered the war, “everything we hold dear would be gone.”

  Joe had learned little in London about the necessary parameters of diplomacy, and he took unseemly pleasure in speaking the unspeakable. He laced his diatribe with wildly inappropriate comments on everyone from Queen Elizabeth (“more
brains than the Cabinet”) to Eleanor Roosevelt (“She bothered us more on our jobs in Washington to take care of the poor little nobodies who hadn’t any influence than all the rest of the people down there altogether”).

  The story that appeared the next day, November 10, 1940, in the Boston Globe finished off whatever effectiveness Joe still had in London and destroyed whatever residue of trust Roosevelt might still have had in his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe submitted a letter of resignation and retreated to Palm Beach.

  He did not sit in Florida playing and replaying the scenes of his life in London, trying to pick out where he had gone wrong. Devoid of self-criticism, Joe was even more convinced of the correctness of his views, and more determined to struggle against what he considered his and the nation’s implacable enemy, the internationalists who were wooing America toward the crimson fields of war.

  10

  Child of Fortune, Child of Fate

  Joe had tied his two eldest sons to himself so tightly and with so many entanglements that to be men they had to sever the bonds to break free. Yet in doing so they risked falling into an abyss. Success was the tightest knot that bound them. Few fathers did as much for their sons as Joe did for his, and few fathers demanded more of his children.

  Joe inscribed their names on a contract that they had not seen. He gave them privilege, opportunity, and wealth. In return, they would have to be among the great men of their time. They could not have inheritors’ pale lives, measuring out their days in games and chitchat at their clubs, envied for their lives of pleasure and revered for nothing except their good fortune.

  Joe had marked off the high road to manhood that his sons must travel. Joe Jr. marched proudly up the middle, far ahead of his younger brother. When Joe Jr. looked back and saw Jack coming up behind him, it irritated him. Jack’s thesis “seemed to represent a lot of work but did not prove anything,” Joe Jr. jealously wrote his father when he first read it. Despite what his brother might say, Jack kept walking ahead, occasionally wandering off onto strange byways, but always returning to continue up the same arduous pathway.