The Patriarch (37 page)

Roosevelt’s trial balloon having been punctured, he notified Kennedy that he would be named ambassador to Great Britain. To make sure that the president could not change his mind a second time, Kennedy leaked the story to Arthur Krock, who went public with it on December 9, embarrassing the president, who still had an ambassador in place. Roosevelt was furious and confronted Krock, who intimated that the information had come from the State Department. The president wrote Sumner Welles, his newly appointed under secretary of state, to warn that such leaks had “become a ‘positive scandal. . . . If there is a leak in future, everyone down the line will be sent to Siam!’”
³³

Roosevelt knew that the appointment of Kennedy to such an important and prestigious post as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was not going to sit well with his advisers. In his brief tenure in Washington, Kennedy had made a lot of enemies for himself: by speaking out when he shouldn’t have, by criticizing the president behind his back to his conservative friends, by offering unsolicited advice on matters that were beyond his purview, and by, time and again, making it clear that he thought he was infinitely smarter, certainly about business and the economy, than anyone else who worked for the president. The general consensus was that he was not to be relied on, that his professed loyalty to the president and the New Deal was skin-deep, that he cared only about himself and his future.

In what may have been a preemptive attempt to push back against the inevitable criticism, Roosevelt “got started on Joe Kennedy” in a December 8 meeting with Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau. The president had learned that Floyd Odlum, the wealthy lawyer and industrialist who had extensive holdings in utilities, had “offered Kennedy one million dollars to represent the utilities in Washington.” There was nothing illegal about making such an offer, if indeed one had been made. Still, the fact that the utilities industry, which had so bitterly opposed New Deal regulatory legislation, might think that Kennedy would work for them reflected badly on him and his loyalty to the White House. Roosevelt told Morgenthau that he had “faced Kennedy with this story and that he absolutely denied it.” Still, Morgenthau noted in his diary, the president had agreed with him that Kennedy was “a very dangerous man.” He was sending him to London, he told Morgenthau, “with the distinct understanding that the appointment was only good for six months and that furthermore by giving him this appointment any obligation that he had to Kennedy was paid out.” Morgenthau was not convinced that even with such safeguards, the appointment should be made. “Don’t you think,” he asked Roosevelt, “you are taking considerable risks by sending Kennedy who has talked so freely and so critically against your Administration?” The president assured Morgenthau that he had “made arrangements to have Joe Kennedy watched hourly and the first time he opens his mouth and criticizes me, I will fire him.” He closed the discussion by repeating “two or three times, ‘Kennedy is too dangerous to have around here.’”
³⁴

Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, disliked and distrusted Kennedy even more than Morgenthau did. He was intensely jealous of Kennedy’s relationship with Roosevelt, his fortune, his large family, his overwhelming self-confidence, and his rapport with the Washington press corps. “Kennedy has probably a better press right now than any member of the Administration,” Ickes wrote in his diary for December 18, 1937. “He is a very rich man who is always doing favors for newspapermen. For instance, when he is to be away from his large and luxurious Washington house he will turn it over to some newspaper man who can entertain lavishly, leaving all the bills to Kennedy to pay when he returns.” Ickes’s major fear at the moment, which he noted in his diary was shared by Tom Corcoran, was that Kennedy would use his friendship with Jimmy Roosevelt to exert more and more influence over the president and his policies. “Kennedy . . . is pouring his conservative ideas into the sympathetic ears of Jimmy who relays them to the President. . . . Jimmy is riding with a high hand and, naturally, he is closer to the President than anyone else. Not only this, but he spends more time with him than anyone else.” Ickes’s fears were misplaced. It was true that on Louis Howe’s death, Jimmy Roosevelt had taken over many of his responsibilities and been officially named his father’s secretary in July, but it was sheer folly to believe that the president relied on him for advice or that Kennedy was suborning the New Deal or pushing it in a more conservative direction by feeding Jimmy ideas.
³⁵

While his enemies seethed, most of his friends were delighted for Kennedy, though a few begged him to consider carefully whether he was truly suited for a diplomatic position. When Boake Carter, the most popular radio commentator in the nation and a fiercely unrestrained New Deal critic, asked Kennedy if he could ever be happy in a position in which his main responsibilities would be conveying information back and forth from the State Department to the British Foreign Office, Kennedy responded that he had reached “an ‘understanding’ or an ‘agreement’” with Roosevelt that he was not to be “simply an errand boy in London,” but the president’s eyes and ears abroad, whose advice and counsel would be sought and respected. Carter warned him not to trust such “agreements.”

“My dear lad, agreements mean nothing in his [Roosevelt’s] life,” Carter wrote. “They never have and they never will. . . . If he thinks certain things should be done as far as Great Britain is concerned, which you may think are cockeyed, you’ll either have to carry them out, a la order boy, or explode and resign. That is not a pleasant prospect. . . . Remember also no matter who is sent to London, he will remain there only so long as he does what he is told from Washington. The minute he shows independence, he’s through.” Carter strongly, “desperately” counseled Kennedy to remain in the country, where he could do much good, add to his reputation as an independent-thinking problem solver, and position himself for higher office, if he so chose. “The minute you accept a reward for your services in some key position or official job, you immediately become answerable to Roosevelt and in so doing, you have to sell out your ideals and thoughts, and work only for the things he directs. . . . You become his servant. You cease to become his consultant. . . . You are an honest man. But the job of Ambassador to London needs not only honesty, sincerity, faith and an abounding courage—it needs skill brought by years of training. And that, Joe, you simply don’t possess. . . . Joe, in so complicated a job, there is no place for amateurs.”
³⁶

Senator James Byrnes, among the most influential men on the Hill, also recommended that Kennedy remain at the Maritime Commission until a cabinet position, perhaps at the Treasury Department, opened up. Kennedy responded that had he thought it possible for him to exercise real influence over domestic policy, he might have considered staying behind, but “to continue where I am is certainly a waste of whatever talents I possess. . . . I have never had political ambitions and have none now. I am only vitally concerned with where we are headed. If fellows like yourself think I can help, I will stay and help in whatever job I can do the most good. If I can’t help, I can always go back to my own private affairs and be quite happy.”
³⁷

—

T
he news that Roosevelt was going to appoint Kennedy to be the ambassador to Great Britain set the rumor mills in motion. The
Boston Sunday Post
declared on January 2 in a lengthy story, fronted by very large headlines that the
WORLD’S FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL NERVE CENTRES RIFE WITH RUMORS KENNEDY TO BE 1940 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE.

Three weeks later, the
St. Louis Star-Times
reported that a close business associate of Kennedy’s was spreading the story that a deal had been finalized in Washington to send Morgenthau to London and replace him at the Treasury Department with Kennedy. Morgenthau, convinced that Kennedy had planted the story, called him in Palm Beach. According to the transcript of the conversation recorded by Morgenthau, Kennedy insisted that the story, wherever it came from, was “‘god-damned’ embarrassing and, of course, as you realize it’s ‘god-damned’ embarrassing to me. . . . I’m ‘God-damned’ happy! I mean, I’ve got a ‘God-damned’ good job.” Kennedy offered to find out who had written the story and demand a retraction. The two men hung up, Morgenthau convinced that Kennedy was a liar, Kennedy convinced that Morgenthau was a fool.
³⁸

Kennedy had told the truth to Morgenthau. He was indeed “‘God-damned’ happy” because he had a “‘God-damned’ good job.” If he could not be secretary of the treasury, there was no better place for him than as the first Irish Catholic ambassador to Great Britain. The list of past ambassadors read like a
Who’s Who
of America’s most distinguished publishers, poets, historians, and statesmen. No fewer than five future presidents had held the post. Every one of the Kennedy children—and their children to come—would benefit from having a father and grandfather who had served his country as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

“I know how you feel,” Boake Carter had conceded after what appears to have been hours of conversation on the topic with Kennedy. “I know just how damn fine it would be to give a present like this to your family. I know how it touches your own pride, and what satisfaction one gets out of a thing like this. I know the attraction to you and the type of mind you have. But—I also know the underneath spirit—or at least I think I do—which runs through you. It’s a spirit that likes to go out and do big things, fight big battles, win against huge odds.”
³⁹

With an eerily accurate degree of prescience both men would have found frightening, Carter predicted that if Kennedy accepted the appointment, he would return from London defeated, his reputation destroyed, his progress toward higher office blocked. And he was right.

Kennedy was entirely unprepared to serve as ambassador. His businessman’s skills, his head for numbers, his negotiating talents, his knowledge of domestic finance and markets, and his flair for publicity had served him well at the SEC and Maritime Commission, but they would not help him in London. Nor would his supreme self-confidence, his sense that he knew best, prepare him for a job in which he would have to answer to the secretary of state for everything he said or did.

—

H
e had planned to sail with Rose on February 9 (the children would join them at the end of the school term), but when she was stricken with appendicitis, he delayed his departure for two weeks and flew without her to Palm Beach to join James Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, to whom he had lent his house, for a few days in the sun. Rose arrived in Palm Beach in the middle of February, and Kennedy flew that same day to Washington.

Two weeks earlier, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins had made an appearance before the Senate Committee on Commerce to oppose the “compulsory arbitration” amendment to the Merchant Marine Act that Kennedy had proposed. Kennedy, invited to respond to her, indicated that he would be delighted to do so. The day before he appeared, committee chairman Royal Copeland predicted a “field day” in the hearing room. And that was what he got.

As a witness, future ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy was anything but diplomatic. In a letter read aloud to the committee and in comments afterward, he lashed out with undisguised contempt at Secretary Perkins and those who had sided with the CIO and opposed his call for mandatory arbitration. “His opinions of the Secretary of Labor are hardly printable,”
Time
magazine would later report. “Mr. Kennedy was so steamed up that Senator Copeland cautioned: ‘As chairman of this committee I welcome your fury, Joe, but as a doctor I must tell you it isn’t doing your stomach ulcer any good.’” While we don’t know what the president thought of Kennedy’s attack on his secretary of labor, the newspapers by and large applauded it, as did several congressmen, including Senator Copeland, who, when Kennedy had concluded his remarks, “turned to him and said, ‘The members of this committee are very sorry that you are leaving your present post to go to England. We wish you would stay here.’”
⁴⁰

—

H
e had resigned as chairman of the Maritime Commission after only eight months in office, but with a near universal roar of approval, his reputation among the press and the public enhanced by his tough-talking attack on the maritime unions and Frances Perkins.
Time
magazine marked his departure with an article titled “Kennedy Candor.” “In a mood of mingled relief and regret, Chairman Joseph Patrick Kennedy of the U.S. Maritime Commission wrote President Roosevelt last week: ‘I should like to report in relinquishing my post that the ills of American Shipping had been cured. . . . Candor compels me to say, however, that the shipping problem is far from solved.’ . . . The President replied: ‘My dear Joe. . . . You have maintained your justly earned reputation of being a two-fisted, hard-hitting executive.”
⁴¹

PART IV

London

Fifteen

A
P
LAINSPOKEN
A
MBASSADOR

T
he day before he was to sail to London, Kennedy was invited to Hyde Park to meet one last time with the president. They spent the morning discussing the faltering American economy, “the foreign situation in general,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, British politics, and Anglo-American relations. The question of what the new ambassador would wear at court was brought up. The president had, from the moment he made the appointment, never stopped joking about how bad Kennedy would look in knee breeches, the traditional dress at court. “He told me of his mother’s worry that I shall not wear knee breeches and suggested that, if she brought up the matter at luncheon, I might say I am waiting until I get to London to decide. If I didn’t do something of the kind, the President warned me, no lunch might be eaten.”
¹

Confronted by reporters after lunch, the president, with Kennedy beside him, good-naturedly turned aside any serious questions about their discussions. “When the interviewers finally turned to Mr. Kennedy and jokingly suggested that he come outside so they might ‘work’ on him, the President said that suggestion also had to be ruled out because Mr. Kennedy had to get his stomach ready for his ocean voyage.”
²

The press was out in force the next day to cover Kennedy’s departure in the misconceived hope of a public confrontation between the seamen who manned the S.S.
Manhattan
and Kennedy, who had once claimed that maritime labor conditions were so bad that he would never allow a member of his family to take sail on an American-flagged ship. Regrettably for the reporters, there was no confrontation or ugliness of any sort, though for Kennedy the departure was “a nightmare. All of the children, except Jack, were there to see me off, but I couldn’t get to them. Newspaper men, casual well-wishers, old friends and strangers by the thousand, it seemed to me, pressed into my cabin until we all nearly suffocated. . . . Jimmy Roosevelt managed to get to my cabin and I took him into the bedroom for a brief chat. Even there, the photographers had to snap us as we sat on the bed trying to make sense. Finally, I got up to the deck and the children.”
³

The Kennedy send-off was front-page news, in large part because the new ambassador was so unlike his predecessors. As Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr., of the
New York Times
reported from London, until Kennedy, American ambassadors had “sprung from . . . the ‘chosen race’ of Anglo-Scottish Protestants. . . . Almost invariably they have been chosen for the Englishness of their background and their manner, among their other qualities.”
⁴

This was one of the reasons Roosevelt had selected Kennedy for the London post. He was not an admirer of all things British, nor was it anticipated that he would become one. As Senator James Byrnes, citing Woodrow Wilson, wrote Kennedy just before his departure, “You can send an American to London, but it is difficult to keep an
American
there. . . . Notwithstanding President Wilson’s statement, I venture to predict that in you we have one American who will remain an American.”
⁵

The month before, at the annual Mayflower Hotel dinner of the recently fabricated J. Russell Young School of Expression, named for the White House correspondent of the
Washington Star,
the president had awarded Kennedy and Eddie Moore mock “Doctor of Oratory” degrees. His delight at awarding the degrees was, he confessed, “conditioned by certain grave fears, nay, apprehensions—a veritable dread that our Joe’s accent may suffer a change with the change of air just ahead of him. Not a few travelers to the bourne whither he is bound have returned with an intonation wholly unintelligible to American ears.” Kennedy’s degree was being offered provisionally and would be formally ratified only if “Joe, at some future time, shall demonstrate that he still speaks our mother tongue in its full American purity, free from all foreign entanglements.”
⁶

Kennedy did not disappoint Roosevelt. Aside from adding “bloody” to his already robust lexicon, he never abandoned his American accent. Nor did he appear anywhere in knee breeches. He broke with British tradition—and affirmed the American tradition that grown men do not appear in public in short pants—by wearing a formal evening suit to court. Having violated one sacred Anglo-American tradition, he modified another by declaring, after consultations abroad and at home, that in future he would limit the number of American debutantes presented at court to those whose fathers were working and residing in Great Britain.

—

H
e arrived in England already a celebrity. Newsreel cameras recorded his landing in Plymouth and were there when, later in the day, he inspected his new residence in London. Before and after he delivered his brief remarks, he bantered lightheartedly with the reporters. Once the cameras were turned on, he was all business, staging the scene as he wanted it shot, with just the right camera angles, yelling, “Cut!” when he stumbled or got his emphases misplaced.

He had only a few complaints, he wrote Jimmy Roosevelt. The new American embassy at 1 Grosvenor Square might look impressive from the exterior, but it was woefully designed. “If there was ever a badly laid out building for which the United States Government has to pay regular money this tops it all.” His private office, decorated in the American style of the 1820s, was a joke. “I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect is a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May. If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my life.”
⁷

He was more pleased with the ambassador’s residence, a six-story, fifty-two-room mansion at 14 Prince’s Gate, which J. Pierpont Morgan had donated to the government in 1920. The residence was well situated within walking distance of the embassy and just off Hyde Park and its Rotten Row bridle path, where Kennedy rode almost every morning before work. Though a large amount of money had already been spent to refurbish the interior of the mansion, it was not suitable for a family of eleven. It would take a fortune to renovate the space and another one to keep it up. Serving his country in London, Kennedy quickly realized, was going to cost him a great deal of money.

Because the family could not be expected to survive on English goods alone, Kennedy imported American products for them, including plenty of Maxwell House coffee, tons of candy, dozens of cans of clam chowder, and household supplies unavailable in London like Nivea skin oil, Jergens lotion, and bottles of Cherrico cough medicine. When he discovered that English freezers did not handle ice cream well, he had an American freezer shipped from New York. Through Carmel Offie, Ambassador William Bullitt’s assistant at the U.S. embassy in Paris, he purchased cigars, fine wines, and fresh vegetables at wholesale prices. In May 1938, he ordered two thousand bottles of Pommery & Greno champagne, five hundred to be shipped to London at once, the remainder to be stored “in the Pommery cellars at Rheims.” He himself seldom drank, and when he did, he preferred Haig & Haig with water before dinner, but a large part of his job as ambassador would be holding formal dinners—for visiting Americans, English gentlemen, and government officials—and he intended to be prepared.
⁸

He spent his first Saturday in England playing a round of golf and shooting a hole in one off the second tee. The press roared with delight on both sides of the Atlantic, though his sons questioned whether some chicanery had been involved. After Mass on Sunday, he visited the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton to register his daughters for school.
⁹

The first American to pay a formal visit to the embassy was Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was so impressed by the new ambassador that he wrote a “Private and Confidential” letter to the president, congratulating him on his appointment. “I know you will be glad to hear, through probably you will have heard it before this, that J.K. has already made a very good impression. These Britishers will hear, of course in private, language from him to which their dainty ears are not accustomed.”
¹⁰

Rabbi Wise had come to London to confer with Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists on what appeared to be a shift in British policy on Palestine. He had cabled Felix Frankfurter the day before Kennedy’s arrival to “ask him to send word to J.K. to the end that I may have the earliest and most favourable opportunity of meeting with him. He ought to be warned about the present situation.” The Zionists feared, rightly, that the British government was intent on reneging on the Balfour Declaration pledge to establish a Jewish homeland, at precisely the moment when such a homeland was needed more than ever. Two and a half years earlier, in the fall of 1935, the Nazi government had instituted the Nuremberg Laws, which formally revoked all citizenship rights from Jews. German Jewish emigration did not increase immediately, but, as Saul Friedländer has written, “the very idea of leaving the country, previously unthinkable for many, was now accepted by all German-Jewish organizations.”
¹¹

On meeting with Kennedy, Wise was delighted, as he wrote his colleagues in New York, to find that the new ambassador agreed with him entirely on the need to pressure the British on Palestine. “J.K. is going to be very helpful, as he is keenly understanding, and there is just enough Irish in him to make him sympathetic to those of us who resent the British promise [to permit Jewish immigration to Palestine] that is in danger of being broken.” In the months to come, Wise predicted, the Zionist leadership would be able to count on Kennedy, as it did on Roosevelt, to support their position on Palestine.
¹²

—

W
ell, old boy,” Kennedy wrote Jimmy Roosevelt the day after he arrived, “I may not last long over here, but it is going to be fast and furious while it’s on.” As Kennedy’s friend Boake Carter had warned him, this was not the best of times for an amateur to enter the diplomatic ranks. In Asia, the Japanese armies that occupied Manchuria had begun their march southward in the summer of 1937, capturing Beijing, Shanghai, and other coastal cities. In Europe, Franco’s attempted coup against the Republican government in Spain had turned into a full-scale proxy war, with the Soviets aiding the loyalists and Italian troops and German armaments sustaining Franco’s rebels. Mussolini, having brutally conquered Ethiopia in 1936, was now pressuring the British for diplomatic recognition of his newly annexed prize. Hitler was making threatening noises about the future incorporation of Austria and portions of Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich.
¹³

President Roosevelt’s hands were tied by the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 that embargoed American trade in arms with belligerents and prohibited loans and credits to nations threatened or victimized by aggression, but he sought other ways to support resistance against what he characterized as “the present reign of terror and international lawlessness.” In October 1937, in a major speech in Chicago, he had warned the American people, more bluntly and directly than they were used to, that if the contagion of international lawlessness, aggression, and treaty violations was not halted, the western hemisphere and America would be threatened. Drawing a bit awkwardly on the metaphor that war was a “contagion” spreading uncontrolled across the globe, he proposed that the peace-loving nations actively but nonviolently punish aggressor nations that violated treaties, engaged in violence, and threatened international anarchy by quarantining them. What he meant by this was not entirely clear, though the implication was that he favored some sort of collective economic sanctions. Vague as his proposal was, it was criticized for violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the Neutrality Acts.
¹⁴

Under an attack broader and louder than he had anticipated, Roosevelt had to back away from his quarantine policy—and rhetoric. Unwilling to withdraw entirely from the international arena, however, he supported a proposal by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles to convene an international conference on November 11, 1938, Armistice Day, and invite nations from every region of the world to the White House to draw “up programs for international conduct, arms reduction, methods of war, and equal access to raw materials.” On February 2, 1938, as Kennedy prepared to leave for London, the president informed the British government that he would disclose his plans for the conference within a few days. But events, as they would too often in the months to come, got in the way of grand schemes for peacemaking.

On February 4, 1938, Hitler dismissed his war minister and his commander of the army, took personal control of the German armed forces, and elevated Hermann Goering to field marshal and Joachim von Ribbentrop to foreign minister. Taken together, these changes pointed in the direction of future military adventurism. On February 9, Sumner Welles informed the British ambassador in Washington that the president had decided not to push forward with the conference plans until he had better intelligence on the German situation.

All signs indicated an imminent invasion of Austria, which would be put off only if the Austrian government peacefully agreed to
Anschluss,
or annexation, by Germany. The Americans, Kennedy made clear on arriving in London, were going to stay out of the matter entirely. In his introductory meeting with Lord Halifax, who had been named foreign secretary two weeks earlier, Kennedy noted in his diary that he had “talked pretty frankly to him about the isolationist tendencies at home and found him prepared for that point of view.” Two days later, Kennedy said much the same to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who “was apparently prepared as Lord Halifax had been, for my assurances that the United States must not be counted upon to back Great Britain in any scrape, right or wrong. He said he was making his plans for pacification or fighting, as things might develop without counting on us, one way or the other. I talked to him quite plainly and he seemed to take it well.”
¹⁵