The Patriarch (38 page)

After returning to the embassy from his meeting with the prime minister, Kennedy called in the press and, feet planted firmly on his desk, volunteered that the average American was much “more interested in how he’s going to eat and whether his insurance is good, than in foreign politics. Some, maybe, even, are more interested in how Casey Stengel’s Boston Bees are going to do next season.” Given the fact that at that moment Hitler was laying the groundwork for the invasion of Austria, Kennedy’s remarks were meant to be provocative—and to demonstrate graphically that Americans were not and would never be as concerned with conflicts on the continent as the British were.
¹⁶

For his part, Kennedy was fairly sanguine that the crisis would be settled peacefully. “Nothing is likely to happen except to have [Austrian chancellor Kurt von] Schuschnigg eventually give in unless there is some indication that France and England are prepared to back him up. . . . My own impression,” he wrote Roosevelt on March 11, “is that Hitler and Mussolini, having done so very well for themselves by bluffing, are not going to stop bluffing until somebody very sharply calls their bluff.” Since nobody, certainly not Great Britain, was going to call that bluff, war was not in the offing. “I am thoroughly convinced and the heads of the various departments in the Government and outside of the Government all feel that the United States would be very foolish to try to mix in. All they are interested in is to have the United States stay prosperous and build a strong navy. . . . This feeling is almost unanimous among the topside people. . . . I am more convinced than ever that the economic situation in Europe is becoming more and more acute and if our American business does not pick up so that trade is generated for these countries, we will have a situation that will far overshadow any political maneuverings.”
¹⁷

Kennedy’s letter to Roosevelt was written at noon on March 11. His prediction that Hitler was bluffing would be proved wrong within hours. Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg had announced on March 9 that he would hold a plebiscite on Austrian independence. To prevent the plebiscite from being held, Hitler ordered an immediate invasion of Austria. Schuschnigg canceled the plebiscite and resigned on March 11. At two
A.M.
the next day, fourteen hours after Kennedy had declared Hitler was bluffing, German troops marched into Austria, followed soon afterward by Hitler. On March 13, 1938, the German government declared that Austria was henceforth a province of the Reich.

The annexation of Austria was accomplished quickly, efficiently, bloodlessly. The paramount question that remained was what
Anschluss
would mean for Czechoslovakia, which was now bordered by the Reich on the west, north, and south. Would Hitler attempt to annex the Sudetenland, which was populated by more than three million ethnic Germans? And if he did, would France and Britain fulfill their treaty obligations to protect Czechoslovakia from aggression? “We are helpless as regards Austria—that is finished,” Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, recorded ominously in his diary on March 13. “We
may
be helpless as regards Czechoslovakia, etc.
That
is what I want to get considered. Must we have a death-struggle with Germany again? Or can we stand aside? Former does no one any good. Will latter be fatal?”
¹⁸

Neville Chamberlain downplayed the significance of the German invasion, called for calm, and argued against any saber-rattling gestures. His Conservative Party nemesis, Winston Churchill, on the other hand, declared in the House of Commons that the only way to prevent Hitler from engaging in further aggression was to proclaim Britain’s “renewed, revivified, unflinching adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations” and assemble a “Grand Alliance in a solemn treaty for mutual defense against aggression.” To Kennedy, the choice between the two men and the two positions was simple. Chamberlain would appease Hitler and preserve the peace; Churchill would enrage him and provoke war. As Kennedy’s first and only priority was preventing war in Europe—and Chamberlain was more committed to preserving the peace at any price than Churchill—the new ambassador was drawn at once into the Chamberlain camp.
¹⁹

He had been impressed with Chamberlain from the moment he met him. Neville Chamberlain was tall, thin, and handsome, with a full mustache, upright posture, and a craggy, slightly rumpled look to him. As Kennedy noted in his diary on March 4 after their first meeting, he “found him a strong decisive man, evidently in full charge of the situation here.” Chamberlain had been a businessman and, Kennedy believed, still behaved like one, which was all to the good. The prime minister understood the value of negotiation, the need to compromise with one’s opponents, the dangers of rhetorical overkill. His preference was always to make the deal rather than walk away from the table empty-handed. Kennedy was impressed as well by Lord Halifax, the tall, one-armed, balding Uriah Heep–looking foreign secretary, and his dapper and meticulous second, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of state.
²⁰

Chamberlain, Halifax, and Cadogan were equally taken with the new American ambassador. They appreciated his frankness and intelligence and, from the moment he arrived in London, treated him not as the oddity he was—the first Irish Catholic ambassador ever and a blunt, plain-speaking businessman to boot—but as a trusted colleague with whom they could speak freely and candidly and occasionally share information gathered by British intelligence.

—

I
t was customary for the newly arrived American ambassador to introduce himself to his British hosts with a speech at the Pilgrims Society. A month before sailing for London, Kennedy had hired Harold Hinton, a former
New York Times
reporter on foreign affairs, as his speechwriter and asked him, with Krock and a few others, to begin assembling ideas for his address. He continued to work on the speech after arriving in London and forwarded a copy to the State Department for review on March 11.
²¹

As ambassador, Kennedy reported directly to Cordell Hull, the tall, lean, white-haired, former Tennessee congressman whom Roosevelt had asked to be his secretary of state. When Kennedy’s speech arrived by cable in Washington, Hull delegated career diplomat Jay Pierrepont Moffat, chief of the Western European division, to look at it. Moffat suggested minor changes and passed the speech along the chain of command. The following day, Saturday, March 12, the speech was edited a second time and significant excisions made by Secretary Hull and other “internationalists” in the State Department who, Moffat reported in his diary, feared that Kennedy had “swung far too much towards the isolationist school.” It was one thing to avoid comment on the
Anschluss,
quite another to emphasize that Americans believed they had no stake in European affairs, which was what Kennedy appeared to be implying.
²²

Moffat cabled Kennedy to explain that further cuts had been made in his speech, not because anyone in the department disagreed with what he had to say, but because the American press was hammering the State Department to respond “to the German rape of Austria” and any utterance by an American official would “be read as having been written with the Austrian situation in view.” Hull emphasized the same point in a cable sent the same day. Although neither he nor the president found fault with Kennedy’s address, they were “inclined to think that the tone of the speech is a little more rigid, and hence subject to possible misinterpretation, than would appear advisable at this precise moment.” To make sure the international community understood that the American government was going to pursue a policy that avoided “the extremes of isolationism and internationalism,” Hull told Kennedy that he had decided to give his own speech the day before Kennedy’s was scheduled.
²³

What Hull was saying—and Kennedy understood it at once—was that he didn’t trust his new ambassador to speak for the administration, and to prevent him from doing so, he had decided not only to censor his inaugural address, but to preempt it with one of his own. Kennedy should have backed off at this point, but he did not. The stakes were too high.

On Tuesday, March 15, Kennedy was visited at the embassy by Lord Astor, who told him “that some of the leading men here believe that immediate war is a greater danger than they like to let the public know.” The antiappeasement faction in Parliament, led by Winston Churchill, was calling for a tougher stance against Germany, and if Churchill’s group carried the debate, it would embarrass Chamberlain, anger Hitler, and push Europe closer to war.
²⁴

Kennedy placed a transatlantic call to the State Department to report what Astor had told him. It was nine thirty in the morning Washington time. He was in a panic now that Hull, in his forthcoming speech, would say something that would give the Churchill faction an edge in the parliamentary debate on the British response to Hitler’s seizure of Austria.

Mr. Moffat:
The Secretary is here and you are talking to him on the receiver but he has a bad throat and I am his voice answering back to you. . . .

Ambassador:
Will you connect me up with the President after I finish talking with you? . . . I am very much concerned about the idea of the Secretary’s making the speech outlined in the wire last night. The situation is very, very acute here. . . . They don’t know what they are going to do and anything we say now would only complicate the situation. . . .

Moffat:
The Secretary has asked whether you have seen his speech.

Ambassador:
No, I have not. . . .

At this point, Secretary Hull, bad throat and all, felt compelled to get on the phone and explain that his speech contained nothing new but simply summed up the general principles under which the United States believed world order could be maintained.

Ambassador:
A speech of the Secretary’s is not going to help at all. Why say anything when there is nothing you can say or do which will help the situation? Why not keep quiet?

Kennedy refused to let up. He continued to argue against Hull’s giving his speech. Moffat mercifully brought the conversation to an end by expressing the secretary’s appreciation for Kennedy’s call and “point of view” and announcing that he had just received a note that the president was “with his dentist” and unable to talk to the ambassador.
²⁵

After hanging up, Hull and Moffat met with the department’s senior advisers, including Sumner Welles. “A few of them,” Moffat noted in his diary, “were quite brutal in their comment that Kennedy wanted the Secretary’s speech canceled in order that his own which was more isolationist in trend would receive a better play. Had he offered to cancel the Pilgrims Society speech the situation might be different but in the circumstances the consensus of opinion was against any change of plans.”
²⁶

Kennedy had indeed feared Hull’s speech would undercut his own, but that was not his only concern. He feared that the secretary of state was going to offer some moralistic/legalistic condemnation of Hitler’s move into Austria, that this would be interpreted as a sign that the United States would stand behind a tough British response to the
Anschluss,
and that such a “sign” would provide the Churchill saber rattlers with a boost in the House of Commons. Two weeks into his tenure, Ambassador Kennedy was already trying to usurp the authority of the secretary of state and interfere in British politics. And two weeks into his tenure, he had already been slapped down by Cordell Hull for doing so.

—

O
n March 18, 1938, Kennedy was formally welcomed by the Pilgrims Society at a dinner at Claridge’s. The evening opened with a message from King George VI read by his youngest brother, the Duke of Kent, followed by introductions from the Earl of Derby, the society’s president, and Lord Halifax. The new ambassador then took the podium, his posture perfect, his smile dazzling, his formal dinner dress perfectly tailored. He was going to be “frank” with his hosts, he warned them. Instead of soothing them with the “usual diplomatic niceties,” he would “speak plainly” about “certain factors in American life which have a greater influence than some of you may realize on my countrymen’s attitudes toward the outside world.” Americans were “appalled by the prospect of war” and desired peace for themselves and for the peoples of the world, but “the great majority” were opposed to entering into any sort of “entangling alliances.” Kennedy did not rule out the possibility that “circumstances, short of actual invasion,” might arise in the future and compel Americans to “fight.” But he wanted it fully understood that the assumption, widely held in both nations, “that the United States could never remain neutral in the event a general war should break out” was both dangerous and wrong.

The speech was carefully balanced between what were at the time the two shaky pillars of American foreign policy: diplomatic unilateralism and economic cooperation. After asserting that the United States was not interested in entering into diplomatic alliances, Kennedy insisted that it “would be glad to join and encourage any nation or group of nations in a peace program based on economic recovery, limitation of armaments and a revival of the sanctity of international commitments. . . . We regard the economic rapprochement of the nations as imperative. Economic appeasement . . . means a higher standard of living for the workers of the world and a consequent reduction in those internal pressures which all too frequently lead to war.”
²⁷

There was nothing particularly inflammatory about Kennedy’s speech—anything that might have been had been carefully deleted by the State Department editors. In fact, as the German ambassador to the United States reported in his dispatch to the German Foreign Ministry, Kennedy’s address differed from Hull’s, given the day before, “only in form. While Secretary Hull treats the problem with his usual academic and monotonous phraseology, Ambassador Kennedy does not shrink from employing an unmistakable and resolute tone. Mr. Kennedy really says nothing new. He merely says what he has to say more clearly than it has hitherto been expressed by the President or Mr. Hull.”
²⁸