But Roosevelt would do no more, such as summon his London ambassador back to Washington or shift American policy in a sharper anti-Nazi direction. Increasingly exasperated with Kennedy and his unhelpful pronouncements, he still saw personal and political advantages in keeping him right where he was, an ocean away. FDR also felt hemmed in politically—he had seen his domestic strength slip after an economic downturn in 1937 and his failed Supreme Court–packing plan, and he remained intimidated by isolationist strength in Congress (more so than he should have been, no doubt—polls showed clearly that the public was more resolute against the dictatorships than were the noisy naysayers on Capitol Hill). More and more, conservatives in his own party were willing to join with Republicans to thwart reform legislation.42 Indications were, moreover, that the upcoming midterm elections would be a disaster for Democrats, as indeed they were—the Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House and eight in the Senate, and they captured thirteen governorships. Our retrospective knowledge that Roosevelt won four successive presidential elections seduces us into thinking he was at all points a political juggernaut, when in fact he faced numerous periods of vulnerability. The fall of 1938 was one such time.
Nevertheless, Kennedy felt he had been stabbed in the back by FDR’s statement. “I am so god-damned mad I can’t see,” he told Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, adding that he hoped Byrnes would seek the 1940 Democratic nomination. But the ambassador understood on some level that he’d committed a massive blunder with the Trafalgar Day speech, and that he stood triply indicted: he had fashioned a statement with which a great many people found fault; had admitted doing so on the basis of much forethought; and had opted to make the statement in public, in a high-profile lecture. Accustomed to receiving mostly laudatory treatment from the press up to this point in his career, he now stood accused in some quarters of secretly siding with the fascists, of being Chamberlain’s pawn, and of subversively undermining his president. He admitted he was “hardly prepared, despite years in public office, for the viciousness of this onslaught.”43
V
Then came Kristallnacht. In the late hours of November 9–10, following the fatal shooting of a German embassy official in Paris by a German Jewish refugee distraught over the deportation of his parents, a state-sanctioned pogrom was launched all over Germany—synagogues were set ablaze, apartments were wrecked and furniture demolished, Jewish men, women, and children were beaten, and some eight thousand Jewish shops and businesses were destroyed by rampaging Nazi hordes. The shattered glass of the shop windows gave a name to the horror: Crystal Night, or Night of Broken Glass. Nearly a hundred Jews were killed, by official figures (the true count was almost certainly higher), and thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they were viciously maltreated and let go only after promising to leave Germany. Hitler had approved the unleashing of the mobs at the urging of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the hope being that it would speed up Jewish emigration. The German government then confiscated the insurance money due to the Jews for the property damage and imposed on them a gargantuan one-billion-mark fine for, as Hermann Göring put it, “their abominable crimes, etc.”44
Appeasers who previously had been able to avert their eyes from instances of anti-Jewish violence in Germany—there had been waves in 1933 and 1935, and another one after the takeover of Austria, earlier in 1938—now found that much harder to do. The savagery of the Nazi regime had been laid bare. Ambassador Kennedy, for one, was appalled by the images in the press, though seemingly as much because of the diplomatic implications as out of concern for the victims. “This last drive on the Jews in Germany has really made the most ardent hopers for peace very sick at heart,” he wrote to Charles Lindbergh on November 12. “It is more and more difficult for those seeking peaceful solutions to advocate any plan when the papers are filled with such horror. So much is lost when so much could be gained.”45
Joseph Kennedy’s attitude toward Jews is not easy to decipher, even at eight decades’ remove. He was not a hardcore anti-Semite in the way of, say, Henry Ford or the “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, attributing all evils to Jews and believing them genetically predisposed to being sinister and morally defective. Beginning in Hollywood in the 1920s and continuing through his career, Joe worked closely and effectively with Jews, often saying to them, “I’m an Irish Catholic; I know what it’s like to be discriminated against.” He admired and tried to emulate financier Bernard Baruch, interacting with him affectionately through the 1930s, and he tried repeatedly to convince Harvard to confer an honorary degree on Justice Louis Brandeis. In the early and mid-1930s he was on friendly terms with Felix Frankfurter and Henry Morgenthau. But Kennedy bought into anti-Semitic prejudices that were common (though by no means universal) among Americans of his station, and that were rife, for example, among the career officers in FDR’s State Department. It was a casual anti-Semitism, marked by indifference and lack of imagination, and it had deeply pernicious effects. Kennedy took for granted the social exclusion of Jews in elite America, in his America. At Harvard in the 1920s, President A. Lawrence Lowell had sought to maintain quotas on Jewish admissions. (Yale and Princeton were even more restrictive.) In Bronxville, the Kennedys resided in a community proud of its exclusion of Jewish residents. In tony Palm Beach, Jews were kept out of the most prestigious clubs, a situation that pertained also in Boston. On top of all that, Joe Kennedy had come of age in an Irish Roman Catholic milieu that distrusted Jews theologically, socially, and culturally.46
As his troubles deepened in late 1938, Kennedy grew more bitter, holding Jewish writers, columnists, and reporters responsible for the harsh press response to his Trafalgar Day speech—never mind that his non-Jewish press critics were far more numerous—and telling friends that the Jews of America were trying to manipulate the nation into war with Germany, a war likely to ensnare his sons. Roosevelt, he believed, was too much under the influence of Jewish advisers. In meetings with his German counterpart in London, Herbert Von Dirksen, Kennedy expressed admiration for Germany’s impressive growth under the Nazis and for the living standards now enjoyed by the German people. In one dispatch, dated June 13, Dirksen told superiors in Berlin that Kennedy “understood our Jewish policy completely; he was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted for the past 50 years.” When Harvey Klemmer returned from a visit to Germany, he told Kennedy of the alarming actions he had witnessed, including Nazi storm troopers molesting Jews in the streets and painting swastikas on windows. In Klemmer’s recollection, Kennedy looked at him and replied, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”47
Yet there is little reason to doubt Kennedy’s later claim that the Kristallnacht violence genuinely pained him. In the days thereafter, he urged the Chamberlain government to embrace a large-scale Jewish rescue by facilitating the emigration of German Jews to territories in Africa and the Western Hemisphere, under the joint administration of the United States and Britain. The scheme, which never moved beyond the conceptual stage, would require an enormous number of transport ships as well as massive financial resources, but Kennedy insisted it could be done. The press took notice, perhaps with an assist from the ambassador’s publicity team. “What Mr. Kennedy has managed to do,” The New York Times reported, “is the talk of diplomatic circles in London at the moment.” But the moment did not last. The State Department, which had not been consulted and which was rife with anti-Semitic sentiments, took scant notice; American Jewish leaders kept their attention focused mostly on Palestine; and the White House, suspecting that Kennedy merely sought a means to reclaim the political momentum following his Trafalgar Day debacle, didn’t bother to respond.48
How Rose felt about Joe’s ambassadorial troubles, or about the deepening European and world tensions, is a mystery. Though she had a deep and abiding interest in history—and knew more of it than her husband did—
her letters from this period are for the most part silent on politics. In the years to come, she would pen innumerable “round-robin” letters to her scattered children, some of them running multiple single-space typewritten pages in length. Lucid and well organized, they offered perceptive and sometimes witty observations about the goings-on within the Kennedy clan, but nary a word about the pressing affairs of the day. Her letters to Joe would be the same: several paragraphs detailing what the children were up to, then a throwaway sentence at the end noting that a speech he’d given had been well received in the press.
In her diary, she sometimes went further, though not by much. On September 15, with Chamberlain en route to the first meeting with Hitler, she recorded: “everyone ready to weep for joy and everyone confident the issues will be resolved.” She added her pride that “Joe has been on hand constantly and has aided [Chamberlain] by his presence. Feel that he has given great moral support.”49
Ever more marginalized within the administration, Joe drew sustenance from his family. Joe Junior, back in London after a tour of European cities—Prague, Warsaw, Leningrad, Stockholm, and Berlin—offered his father full support and expressed enthusiasm for what he had seen in Germany. “They are really a marvelous people,” Young Joe wrote to a friend, “and it is going to be an awful tough thing to keep them from getting what they want. Dad, as you know, got quite a lot of unfavorable comment in the U.S. press for his speech in trying to get along with the dictatorship. Makes me sore that all the rest of the people are trying to get everyone against the dictatorships. If we are not ready to fight them, we might as well get along with them.” Joe lauded his father for trying to find a means for Jews to get out of Germany, while privately agreeing with his claim that American Jews were trying to undermine U.S. neutrality.50
In a journal entry on November 21, Joe Junior wrote, “I don’t think [Dad] is too crazy about the job at this point and the other day spoke about quitting. He is afraid that they are trying to knock him off at home, and may make a monkey out of him in some diplomatic undertaking.” Another entry, from early December, continued the theme: “Dad is rather tired of his work. He claims that he would give it up in a minute if it wasn’t for the benefits that Jack and I are getting out of it and the things Eunice will get when she comes out next spring. He doesn’t like the idea of taking orders and working for hours trying to keep things out of his speeches which an ambassador shouldn’t say. He also doesn’t like the idea of sitting back and letting the Jewish columnists in America kick his head off. The papers have made up a pile of lies about him, and he can’t do anything about it but claims that he is going to let a few blasts when he gets back there in a few days.”51
The letter and diary entries are three examples of many that show Young Joe, twenty-three years old and a college graduate, remained in lockstep with his father’s worldview, unwilling or unable even to consider separating himself from the older man’s positions, however controversial. One looks in vain in Joe Junior’s writings from the period for any sign of independence, any indication that the ambassador had overstepped, had misread the geopolitical situation. It’s all one way: Dad knows best.
Jack, meanwhile, tried to direct his parents’ attention in a more positive way: the Broadway premiere of Cole Porter’s musical Leave It to Me!, starring Sophie Tucker and featuring several references to the Kennedys. (Upon learning that her husband has been named ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mrs. Leora Goodhue, played by Tucker, exclaims, “If only those sneaky Kennedys hadn’t grabbed London first!”) Jack attended on opening night and could hardly fail to hear the warning amid the levity: Ambassador Goodhue is recalled to Washington when he gives a speech calling for nations to get along. Still, Jack gave the performance a thumbs-up: “It’s pretty funny and jokes about us get by far the biggest laughs whatever that signifies,” he wrote to his parents.52 To his father he offered a half-hearted and convoluted endorsement of the Trafalgar Day address: “While it seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc., [it] was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-fascist, although it is true that everyone is deadly set against collective security and don’t seem to have a very accurate conception of England’s position, due to the type of articles that have been written.”53
As it happened, father and son would spend the Christmas holidays together, in Palm Beach, while the rest of the Kennedys stayed behind in Europe, skiing in St. Moritz. In Florida the ambassador sat naked by the pool, lathered in cocoa butter, and took calls from associates around the country. A parade of visitors also stopped in, among them Arthur Krock, Walter Winchell, and “Colonel” Robert McCormick, editor and publisher of the staunchly isolationist Chicago Tribune. Far from walking back his endorsement of the Munich agreement, Joe crowed to Winchell that his decision to push Lindbergh’s grim analysis of Germany’s air strength on the British leadership had influenced Neville Chamberlain’s decision to work harder for a deal with Hitler.54
One wonders what went through Jack’s mind as he heard the elder Kennedy’s pontifications that holiday season. Very much his father’s son, he was at the same time more inclined than either Joe Senior or Joe Junior to keep an open mind on difficult international questions, to see both sides. He had a detachment and an ironic worldview that father and brother both lacked, and it inclined him toward a more noncommittal stance. At Harvard, meanwhile, his discussions inside and outside the classroom had given him a sense of why isolationism might prove untenable for the United States, why the appeasing of dictators might be both morally and strategically bankrupt and might only postpone the day of reckoning. Though isolationism was dominant among the students, the faculty were more mixed in their views. Jack’s Winthrop House tutor, Bruce Hopper, who would have considerable influence on his intellectual development in the year and a half to come, had little patience with the appeasers—on Armistice Day every November, Hopper, a charismatic and authoritative speaker, would don his World War I coat and lecture to students on the vital importance of collective security and of confronting international threats head-on. Democracy, Hopper would insist, had to be defended not just by enunciating principles but by standing up and fighting.55
Hopper introduced Jack to the flamboyant and brilliant British historian John Wheeler-Bennett, a cane-carrying, monocle-wearing expert on Germany (and, incongruously, on the U.S. Civil War) who was in the early stages of penning a book on the Czech crisis. A lecturer at the University of Virginia that fall, Wheeler-Bennett was a spellbinding public speaker, whom Harold Macmillan, who would later be prime minister during the Kennedy administration, once called “one of the best talkers” he’d ever met. At Hopper’s invitation, Wheeler-Bennett visited Cambridge and gave a talk on Munich and appeasement in Hopper’s Government 18 class. After the lecture, Jack introduced himself and asked for a one-on-one meeting, and Wheeler-Bennett remembered being impressed by the “most pleasing, open countenanced, blue-eyed young man.” The following afternoon, during a two-hour conversation along the Charles, with Winthrop and the other houses spread out next to them, golden and mellow in the late-day sun, the Briton impressed upon Jack the importance of considering “the imponderables of the human spirit” when assessing world affairs, and to consider carefully how one should balance principle with power in making policy. Jack, thrilled by the opportunity for sustained discussion with this erudite visitor, duly took down Wheeler-Bennett’s suggestions for books to read.56
As 1938 turned into 1939 and Jack Kennedy prepared to join his father in London after Harvard’s midyear exams, he knew what much of the rest of the world knew: that for a Europe in danger, Munich had provided but a breathing spell. The real crisis waited darkly in the wings.
* Upon disembarking in New York, Jack had his first-ever informal press conference. There to greet him were not only Lem Billings but also a gaggle of reporters keen to know about his father and the European crisis. Jack offered reassuring words, predicting t
here would be no war and Americans would not have to be evacuated. How dire could the situation be, he said, if the ambassador had opted to keep eight of his children in Europe? (Swift, Gathering Storm, 82.)
EIGHT
THE OBSERVER
The day dawned clear and cold in the Italian capital. The Kennedy family, ten strong, was up with the sunrise, as were the two governesses and Mr. and Mrs. Moore. They dressed quickly in their Sunday best, jockeying for position in front of the mirror, gobbled down some breakfast, then piled into waiting limousines. Their destination was St. Peter’s Square, where in a few hours they were to witness that rare and wondrous thing, especially to a Catholic: a papal coronation. It was March 12, 1939.
The Kennedys had been counting down the hours to this moment ever since President Roosevelt approved Joe’s request to be the official American representative at the event. No president had ever sent an emissary to a papal coronation, and Joseph Kennedy relished being the first. To make the experience still more special, he and Rose had met the new pope previously—Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who took the designation Pius XII, had visited their home in Bronxville during a U.S. tour three years before, while serving as Vatican secretary of state, and Joe had met with him again on a subsequent visit to Rome in 1938. Now he would become pope, and Joe was determined to witness the event. The children should be there, too, Joe decided, so he brought them—without asking anyone’s permission. Only Joe Junior, who was touring Spain and feared he would be denied reentry if he left the strife-torn country, did not come, much to his mother’s disappointment.1
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