The Patriarch (39 page)

Strangely enough for one who identified himself and would be identified as an isolationist, Kennedy the businessman could not help but think globally. The continuing and, after mid-1937, deepening depression in the United States was going to have a disastrous effect on stability in Europe. “Our continual tail-spin,” he wrote Tommy Corcoran from London, “is making this problem here and all through Europe more difficult, because the basis of the correction of conditions here is not political but economic.” There could be no peace or political stability in the world without economic security. The most effective role the United States could play in reducing tensions and preventing wars was to promote economic recovery at home, which would have positive domino-like effects abroad.
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The farther he got from Washington, the more disturbed he was that the president did not understand how critical it was—for European peace—to get the American economy going again. To stimulate recovery, the president had to convince American businessmen that the administration was on their side, as Kennedy had at the SEC and the Maritime Commission. Unfortunately, instead of cozying up to the nation’s businessmen and assuring them it was safe to invest again, the president was continuing, Kennedy feared, to alienate them with pseudopopulist rhetoric. In a transatlantic phone call to Cordell Hull, Kennedy reported that at a recent dinner he had hosted, every one of the “eighteen . . . big bankers here in London” had expressed discomfort with the president’s antibusiness outbursts at a speech in Gainesville, Georgia. A former chancellor of the Exchequer had gone so far as to tell Kennedy that he blamed Roosevelt’s failure to promote capital investment in American industry for the “dismal economic condition of England.” “Who was responsible for that Gainesville speech? Whoever was ought to be horsewhipped,” Kennedy volunteered to Hull.
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His fear that economic distress could not help but foment political unrest in Europe was not an abstract possibility, but a recurring nightmare. Dutifully responding to a letter from Honey Fitz about Boston politics in early April, Kennedy remarked on the sorry state of the American economy. “Sometimes I wonder if I will have money enough to last out a decent term in London. I hate to think how much money I would give up rather than sacrifice Joe and Jack in a war, and there is no danger of that in America, whereas there is a real danger of it for boys of their age over here.”
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I
n mid-March, Rose arrived in London with Kick and the four youngest children. The new Kennedy residence, Rose complained gently to the press, was large for any ordinary family, but a bit small for hers. “The house will be large enough for these five . . . but no place will be large enough in the summer when all the rest come with their friends from Harvard and Princeton.” She brought with her the younger children’s governess, Elizabeth Dunn; Luella Hennessey, the nurse who had cared for Patricia and Bobby when they got sick at camp; and the family cook. There were already at the residence handfuls of English butlers, chauffeurs, maids, and secretaries.
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On April 27, Rosemary and Eunice, accompanied by Eddie and Mary Moore, landed at Plymouth. Eunice, Patricia, and Jean were enrolled at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton; Rosemary in a Montessori-oriented school; Bobby and Teddy at the nearby Gibbs Preparatory School. The boys had the hardest time adjusting. David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech, spent a good deal of time as a teenager with the Kennedys in London. Bobby, he recalled, “rather disliked the school he was sent to. . . . He thought it was rather ridiculous . . . that the uniform they had to wear was ridiculous. . . . He was always very sensitive about his appearance. . . . They were made to wear these red magenta hats which were made like a sort of tweed cap which was unique for any school, even in England. I think this acutely embarrassed him and I don’t think he ever settled down.”
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Teddy had his own difficulties. He was younger and smaller than his schoolmates and didn’t make friends easily. “Bobby tried to keep me company,” he recalled, “but he’d joined a circle of friends his age.” For the first time in years, Kennedy was living in the same house as his children, and when he noticed his youngest son’s discomfort, he tried to ease it. “Dad spent as much time with me as he could. . . . He came to my cricket games at school. He invited me with him on morning horseback rides. . . . In the evenings, before leaving the house with Mother for a dinner or the theater, he would come into my bedroom and read to me, sometimes for forty-five minutes or an hour.”
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On May 11, Rosemary and Kick were presented at court. The preparations—the selection of the dresses, the fittings, the search for the perfect tiara for Rose, the practice walks and curtsies—had taken days. The ceremony itself took but a few minutes and went off without a hitch. Rose had worried that Rosemary, now twenty years of age, might not be up to the event, which was choreographed as carefully as a ballet, but she did beautifully.

There had been some talk—but not much—of Kick’s attending college in England, but she decided not to. It was her first London “season” and she expected to take it all in, unencumbered by schoolwork. Almost on arrival she had become the darling of the London social set, her every evening and weekend taken up with dinner dances, excursions to grand country estates, racing and regattas and Scottish hunting parties.

The three Kennedys, sometimes separately but often together—the ambassador reluctantly, Rose and Kick more enthusiastically—spent much of that spring of 1938 attending garden parties, rowing regattas, formal balls, afternoon teas, dinner dances, racing at Epsom Downs and the Royal Ascot, tennis matches at Wimbledon. They were invited to a weekend with the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, an evening court at Buckingham Palace, and a ball given by Lady Astor for the king and queen.

Rose had been waiting all her life for this. To the press and her dinner companions, she appeared totally at ease and fully in control. In private, however, she worried a great deal about fitting in. She was horrified, as she confided to her diary, to discover that on Sunday lunch at Windsor Castle, she was the only one dressed in tweeds; the others wore afternoon dresses. She was so confused about when and where she should wear a tiara that she contacted officials at Buckingham Palace, who told her that it should be worn at any dinner at which a member of the royal family was present. She also asked in writing if she should provide “finger bowls at dinners at which Royalty are present” and was informed that there was no formal rule against them.
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W
ith the arrival in London of all the Kennedys save the two older boys, who were still in school, the press on both sides of the Atlantic stepped up its parade of news items, photographs, and adoring profiles. Not a day, it seemed, had passed that spring of 1938 without a story or two about a Kennedy or two: about Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s decision not to dress in drag in a Harvard satirical review; Jack’s recovery from illness so that he could swim for the Harvard varsity; Kick’s possible engagements; Rosemary’s hospitalization for an unnamed ailment; Eunice’s graduation from the Sacred Heart Convent in Noroton; Patricia’s and Jean’s enrollment at the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton; Bobby’s interview, on departing New York, with Mary Pickford, who was preparing for her next role as a reporter; Teddy’s having “gone missing” for a moment upon the family’s arrival at Plymouth; Rose’s being selected with Ginger Rogers, Dolores del Rio, and Kitty Carlisle as one of the eleven “best dressed” women in the United States; and Elsa Maxwell’s inclusion of Ambassador Kennedy as one of the six most “chic” males on the planet, with Crown Prince Umberto and Count Ciano of Italy, Fred Astaire, Joe DiMaggio, and William Rhinelander Stewart, the debonair New York socialite.
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It got to the point where even Honey Fitz began to joke about the coverage. Kennedy, who had little sense of humor when it came to his father-in-law, responded that he had had nothing to do with the avalanche of publicity. “We are not sending any pictures to any paper. . . . If you have an attractive daughter and attractive grandchildren, you can’t get mad if their pictures appear in the papers.”
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Kennedy did not shy away from the attention. On the contrary, he did everything he could to remind the folks back home that he was still serving his country. He employed one of the largest and most accomplished press, public relations, and speechwriting offices in the government, headed by Eddie Moore and James Seymour, whom Kennedy had lured away from Harvard a decade before to join his staff in Hollywood. Kennedy had also taken with him to London Harvey Klemmer, a speechwriter who had worked with him at the Maritime Commission and remained on its payroll; Arthur Houghton, whom he had borrowed from Will Hays’s office in Hollywood; and an RKO publicist in London named Jack Kennedy, who was referred to as “London Jack” Kennedy.

Kennedy adjusted easily to the social demands of his new life. He was the perfect dinner companion, the consummate weekend guest, a magnificent host at the dinners he gave at the residence. Nobody in London had as star-studded an invitation list, with lords and ladies, American corporate and government leaders, and Hollywood royalty seated next to one another. Formal dinners, with guests in tuxedos and gowns greeted and served by liveried servants, were held for magazine publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a former actress and now a celebrated writer; for Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck and his wife, Virginia Fox Zanuck; for actress Rosalind Russell; and for Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes when he toured Europe with his new wife, Jane. Although Ickes had nothing good to say of Kennedy in Washington, he was happy to be entertained by him in London. After dinner, the Kennedys veered sharply from London social customs and invited their guests, men and women alike, to watch the latest Hollywood films in the drawing room. At the May 17 dinner for Foreign Secretary Halifax and Lady Halifax, which Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh attended, Kennedy screened
Test Pilot
with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable. On May 30, he screened
The Adventures of
Robin Hood
but arranged for the prime minister, one of the guests for the evening, to “stay out of the drawing room in order to talk with Arthur Sulzberger [of the
New York Times
], Harry Luce and one or two others.” Luce, who did not much enjoy socializing, noted appreciatively that compared with other formal dinners, there was “not much conversation” at a Kennedy-hosted affair. “Old Joe wasn’t much for that sort. We had a movie after dinner. That eliminated the necessity for postprandial conversation.”
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Kennedy disliked the constant socializing he had to endure as American ambassador—he had never much enjoyed having to make idle chitchat with people he did not know or care about—but there were distinct advantages to being in London for the season. Kennedy had always been a Toscanini fan and was now able not only to attend each of the maestro’s spring concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but also to sit in on the ten
A.M.
rehearsals as well. Joseph P. Kennedy was not a man given to hero worship, except perhaps for Arturo Toscanini. Among the most cherished possessions at Hyannis Port was a framed Toscanini baton.
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I
n London, as elsewhere, Kennedy awoke before seven
A.M.
After breakfast, he went for a horseback ride, then showered, dressed in his ambassadorial uniform—striped pants, short black jacket, white shirt, stiff collar, and dark necktie—and walked or was driven to the embassy, arriving by 8:45 at the latest. Every day brought another contingent of American journalists and publishers, Broadway and Hollywood big shots, businessmen and bankers, each of whom expected a private interview. The phone began ringing the moment he arrived at his office—and kept ringing all day long—interrupting the carefully laid-out schedules that Eddie Moore had prepared. “It is almost impossible to do any desk work when he is here,” Moore confessed to Paul Murphy in New York, “for the telephone is popping from morning until night, and what with it and the newspaper men and visitors in addition, it leaves very little time for anything else.”
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His hard work won the admiration of embassy personnel, who had not expected their new ambassador to be this dedicated to his new job. “Kennedy has started off very well, I think he will do a first class job,” Alan Steyne, a minor official at the embassy, wrote his uncle, Boston department store owner Louis Kirstein, on April 16, 1938. “He arrived with quite a few preconceived notions and prejudices but he is very keen and is slowly dropping those which do not jibe with the facts here. . . . The pressure on his time is very great and the number of people who want to meet him makes Bingham [his predecessor] look as if he had the Measles. Kennedy’s seen about more in one month than Bingham was in a year. . . . He’s far more outspoken than the run of the mill Ambassador. . . . He is not easy to work for in that he is very nervous and suffers from stomach ulcers which doesn’t improve his disposition the days when they bother him. However, he has a very keen, quick intellect and is open to conviction if you can marshal a good argument. His informality is delightful and his language longshoremanesque.”
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T
he week after the dueling speeches brouhaha with Cordell Hull, Kennedy, recognizing that he would have to work with the man for the rest of his tenure in London, wrote to flatter him by reporting how much the queen had enjoyed his speech, which “came through nicely [over the radio] and, of course, made a terrific impression here.” The war scare that had so unsettled him had passed. “Popular opinion has changed from being all upset regarding war as a real possibility to a much more complacent attitude and more inclined to follow Chamberlain’s original thesis—to try every possible means of averting a war. . . . I imagine the England-Italy situations will be worked out within the next few weeks . . . and then Chamberlain is going definitely to work to try to fix up something with Hitler.” The preliminaries cleared away, he got to the point of his dispatch: “From what I have seen of the job here and assuming nothing happens of world import, I can deliver your messages, but I probably can do nothing very constructive. I can talk Chamberlain’s language and Halifax’s language and if there were anything vital to do would have a reasonable chance of getting it done, but, as matters stand today, the only possible help I can give you is to express my opinion as to events in Europe. The annoying part of this is that, while I am busy from 9:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night, I don’t feel I am doing you very much good and if anything occurs to you, outside of the ordinary instructions, where I can be of any real assistance, please let me know. . . . I hope you get some good out of my services; I am sure I will have a fine time.”
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