The Patriarch (46 page)

The president and Hull were furious—not so much at Kennedy, whom they expected to say such things, but at the State Department, which had falled to censor him. “The Secretary,” Moffat wrote in his diary on October 21, “is very upset over the effect of Kennedy’s recent speech. . . . He thinks we should have definitely called Kennedy off in advance, despite his claim that he was advancing a ‘pet theory of his own.’ The Secretary asked Sumner why he did not see the danger of the speech. Sumner replied that he had been thinking of Mexico and had assumed that the Secretary himself had given attention to the matter and had initialed blind.” Hull then turned to Moffat and blamed him for the fiasco. “A ‘goat’ is needed and I shall be the goat,” Moffat concluded. “In the long run, however, no one is going to be hurt unless it be Mr. Kennedy himself.”
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Hull held a press conference the morning after the speech to insist that Kennedy had been speaking for himself, not the government. This did nothing to quiet the storm. On October 26, just a week after the Trafalgar Day speech, the White House called Adolf Berle, one of the original members of Roosevelt’s brain trust who now served as an assistant secretary of state, to ask him to “prepare a fifteen minute speech” for the president that “would undo the damage done by Kennedy’s recent speech [and] make it clear that our foreign policy was unchanged.” Without mentioning Kennedy by name, the president repudiated everything the ambassador had said in a speech broadcast from the White House. There could, he declared, be no peace with nations that threatened war as an instrument of national policy and persecuted and denied freedom of speech and religion to their own citizens.
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The president’s clarification did not quiet the controversy over Kennedy’s remarks but intensified it. Frank Kent reported in his October 28 column that Kennedy had that past week received a “journalistic lambasting so completely in contrast to his accustomed laudation that it could hardly help but be a shock to him.” In a telephone conversation with Moffat the following week, Kennedy noted that he had “just received a week’s batch of newspaper clippings and I should judge by them that I had never been right in anything since the war broke out in 1914.” Without apologizing, and in fact confirming the major charge leveled against him, that he was too close to Chamberlain, Kennedy warned Moffat that “you fellows in Washington should know one thing, that if I am to get results here I can only do it by staying on the right side of the men in power.”
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Arthur Krock and John Burns, who both thought that Kennedy’s comments on the need to open negotiations with the dictators were so out of line that they might get him recalled from London, warned him to watch his temper and his mouth. “You ought not to talk with Tommy [Corcoran] or anyone else in a complaining or querulous tone about what has happened,” Burns wrote on November 4. “It’s much better to keep up, as I know you can very well, the appearance of being entirely confident of the goodness, sweetness and charity of the ‘Great White Father’ [Franklin Delano Roosevelt].”
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Publicly, Kennedy tried to disguise his anger. Privately, he let it all out. He could not, for the life of him, understand what he had said that should so offend anyone back home. The English, French, and Americans had two choices: either fight a war with the dictators or make peace with them. Since it made no sense to fight with an enemy that was so much stronger, the only available path was to seek a mutually acceptable accommodation.

It was ludicrous to believe that anything positive could come from verbally abusing Hitler and Mussolini. Nasty words, no matter how eloquently delivered, and moral posturing, no matter how sincere, were not going to get them to change their ways. Only war or economic boycott might, but these were alternatives no one was seriously advocating at the moment.

“I believe that unless England and France are prepared to fight and endanger civilization,” Kennedy wrote Tom White in mid-November, “then there is no point in staying on the side lines and sticking your tongue out at somebody who is a good deal bigger than you are. As far as the United States goes, we ought to mind our own business, but that means minding our own business and not one minute kicking the dictators’ head off and the next suggesting that they cooperate along certain lines. It is my theory in doing business with individuals or with nations that you must either keep away from them altogether or, if you are going to stick your tongue out at them or slap them on the wrist, you have better be prepared to punch them in the jaw.”
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In his unpublished
Diplomatic Memoir,
Kennedy was still trying a decade later to understand the furor over his speech. Much of it, he claimed, came from those, including “a number of Jewish publishers and writers,” who wanted to precipitate a war with Germany. In separate letters written to New York
Daily News
columnist Dorothy Fleeson and to Tom White, Kennedy insisted that “75% of the attacks made on me by mail were by Jews.” In his memoir, he claimed that he understood why the Jews wanted Great Britain and America to go to war against Hitler and why they had attacked those who advocated appeasement. “After all, the lives and futures of their compatriots were being destroyed by Hitler. Compromise could hardly cure that situation; only the destruction of Nazism could do so.” Still, even after excusing his Jewish critics for what he believed was their warmongering, he was not ready to forgive them for their unfair attacks on him: “Some of them in their zeal did not hesitate to resort to slander and falsehood to achieve their aims. I was naturally not the sole butt of their attack but I received my share of it.” The only Jewish names he mentioned were journalists. Max Lerner, who he claimed had unfairly attacked him in a speech to a Boston audience, and Walter Lippmann, who had declared in his column that ambassadors had no business airing their personal views in public. Lippmann’s was not a particularly nasty column, certainly not as damning as columns written at the same time by Heywood Broun, Dorothy Thompson, and Hugh Johnson, none of them Jewish.
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Joe Jr. defended his father by drafting a letter that was apparently never sent. “Mr. Lippmann[’s] article shows the natural Jewish reaction to the speech of ambassadors calling for some kind of cooperation between the democratic and fascists nations.” Almost parroting his father, young Joe lectured Lippmann: “Either you have to be prepared to destroy the fascist nations . . . or you might as well try to get along with them. I know this is extremely hard for the Jewish community in the US to stomach, but they should see by now that the course which they have followed the last few years has brought them nothing but additional hardship.”
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Jack reported from Cambridge that while the Navy Day speech “seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc. [it] was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-Fascist.”
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There was more than a hint of paranoiac rage here directed at Jewish letter writers, columnists, and newspaper reporters. The Kennedys had to blame someone for the criticism—and who better than Europe’s most venerable scapegoats. One of the staples of twentieth-century anti-Semitism, on the continent, in Great Britain, and in America, was the notion that the Jews had unfairly, perhaps criminally, seized control of the news media and were using it for their own ends. Kennedy grabbed hold of this myth even though it was clear that in numbers and ferocity, his gentile critics far outnumbered the Jewish.

His prejudices were reinforced by his friends the Lindberghs, the Astors, and Lord Beaverbrook. In a particularly vicious letter to Anne Morrow Lindbergh written on November 2, 1938, Lady Astor had mentioned that “only yesterday I was talking to someone who traces the origin of the ‘yellow press’ to an American Jew, named Pulitzer. . . . It is horrible how much one can trace back to them. I don’t believe in persecution, but there is something evidently wrong with their whole make-up.” Lord Beaverbrook, who as a newspaper mogul should have known better, agreed entirely that the Jews had far too much influence on both sides of the Atlantic. “The Jews are after Mr. Chamberlain,” he wrote American publisher Frank Gannett in December 1938. “He is being terribly harassed by them. . . . All the Jews are against him. . . . They have got a big position in the press here. . . . I am shaken. The Jews may drive us into war . . . their political influence is moving us in that direction.”
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K
ennedy’s anger at the Jewish community was stoked by his sense that they did not appreciate his efforts on their behalf. While the Roosevelt administration had given no indication that it intended to press the British government to permit increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, Kennedy had on his own been meeting with and trying to counsel the American Zionist leaders who had come to London to lobby the British. When Ben Cohen visited in October 1938, supposedly on vacation but in truth as an unofficial emissary of Justice Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, Kennedy arranged an introduction and meeting for him with Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald.
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Two weeks later, Kennedy met with Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization. In a document marked “Secret” in the Weizmann archives in Jerusalem, Weizmann, referring to himself as “X,” reported his “general impression . . . that Mr. K. was both friendly and optimistic. . . . He himself was keeping in close touch with the Palestine problem. As a Catholic in Boston he had reason to know what discrimination meant; his own father had been unable to find any entrée in Boston, and had eventually been forced to look elsewhere for a livelihood. But for the Jews the position was a hundred times worse. He knew that Bullitt was a friend of ours, but neither Bullitt nor the President, as Protestants, could feel about the Jewish question in the same way as he, K., felt about it.” Kennedy assured Weizmann “that if any time the red light were to show [if the British decided to cut off all immigration to Palestine], we should not hesitate to give him the signal, and he would do whatever he could to help.” Kennedy’s meeting with Weizmann ended rather spectacularly when the ambassador inquired what Weizmann “would think if he, K., were to go and visit Hitler to discuss the Jewish question. ‘X’ replied that from all he had heard, this subject was an obsession with Hitler, so that he became virtually insane when it was raised. Mr. K. said that he had nevertheless more than half a mind to pay him such a visit. It might light a few bonfires in the United States, but all the same he was tempted to intervene.”
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Kennedy also met with Rose Gell Jacobs, an American representative on the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. As he had in his discussions with Weizmann, though this time more directly, Kennedy offered his opinion that the only way to solve the refugee problem was to negotiate a deal with Hitler. “He mentioned the attacks that are being made on him by the newspapers and Jewish columnists in America, because of his suggestion that efforts be made to come to terms with Hitler on the Jewish problem. He says he is ready to listen to any scheme that will work, as he has not yet come across any. To his mind, winning Hitler over to a plan is essential.” Although Jacobs, like Weizmann, considered Kennedy an ally, she reported back to New York that he was not fully in tune with Zionist aspirations. He had intimated to her, without saying so directly, that the answer to the refugee problem was not going to be found in Palestine because the British were not going to permit increased immigration. Jacobs did not argue with Kennedy but reminded him only that more Jews were attempting to immigrate to Palestine, because at present there were no safe havens for them in central or Eastern Europe.
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Benjamin Cohen, Chaim Weizmann, and Rose Jacobs all came away impressed by what Jacobs referred to as the ambassador’s “sincerity and genuine desire to be helpful.” And they were right to be won over. Kennedy had nothing to gain by dissembling. He met with them—and other Zionist representatives in London, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement—because he hoped to convince them that his was the only way to rescue the German Jews, that angry words and anti-German boycotts made things worse, that unless Hitler approved, no German Jews were going to be let out of Germany.

The outpouring of unrestrained anti-Semitic brutality and sadism that the world would come to know as
Kristallnacht
shattered overnight the hopes of those such as Joseph P. Kennedy who, in the weeks following Munich, had believed that the time was propitious for negotiating a comprehensive settlement with Hitler that included provision for the emigration of Germany’s Jews. “The Munich pact . . . now seemed to be a mockery of the notion ‘peace in our time,’” historian Deborah Lipstadt has written. “For the first time since the Nazi accession to power a nationwide anti-Semitic action had taken place in full public view.”
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The events of
Kristallnacht
on November 9 and 10 were not the first acts of unprovoked violence against Jews in Germany or Austria, but never had that violence been so widespread, so obviously coordinated and state-sanctioned, so violent, so effective. German and Austrian Jews, men, women, children, and the elderly, were beaten, their homes vandalized, their shops broken into, their synagogues destroyed, many burned to the ground. “The only immediate aim,” Saul Friedländer has concluded, “was to hurt the Jews as badly as the circumstances allowed, by all possible means: to hurt them and to humiliate them.” It was hoped and expected that, terrified by the violence, their possessions and economic resources plundered, Germany’s Jews would not only acquiesce but actively participate in their own removal.
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The policy of appeasement that Chamberlain had, to Kennedy’s mind, pursued successfully to this point had been based on the expectation that the Germans would fulfill their side of the bargain. In return for being permitted to annex Austria and the Sudetenland without a shot fired, they would eschew aggression, abide by their treaty obligations, and, in short, behave like a “civilized” nation. All that had been called into question by the brutal excesses of
Kristallnacht
. “I am hopeful that something can be worked out, but this last drive on the Jews,” Kennedy wrote Charles Lindbergh just days after
Kristallnacht,
“has really made the most ardent hopers for peace very sick at heart. . . . 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.”
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