The Patriarch (53 page)

At midnight, the ambassador spoke with the president over a secure phone line. Roosevelt had learned that Germany had made sixteen separate demands of the Poles. Kennedy knew nothing about them.

The next morning, September 1, Kennedy called Bill Bullitt in Paris, who agreed that “things were much better.” Hitler, Bullitt told him, “didn’t have the guts to fight.”

“I had hardly hung up the telephone when the news came. It came with a rush, like a torrent spewing from the wires—German troops had crossed the border; German planes were bombing Polish cities and killing civilians; the Germans were using poison gas.” Kennedy called Lord Halifax at the Foreign Office to report that he had heard, but could not confirm, that Warsaw had been bombed. Hull telephoned him at noon to ask for more information. Kennedy cabled him at four
P.M.
, five
P.M.
, eight
P.M.
, eleven
P.M.
, and twelve midnight, each time to confirm that he knew nothing more than that German troops had crossed into Poland.
¹⁵

The French and British governments tried one more time to defuse the situation. Before declaring war on Germany, which they were obligated by treaty to do once German soldiers crossed into Poland, they delivered formal diplomatic notes demanding that Germany cease its aggression and withdraw its troops from Polish soil.

Kennedy commuted back and forth that weekend from the Morgan estate in Hertfordshire, where he had gathered his family until passage to America could be arranged. He and Rose preferred to travel separately—and usually did, lest an accident deprive the children of both their parents. Kennedy now made plans for his children also to travel in installments.

Luella Hennessey, the younger children’s nurse, wanted to remain in London to get married to the man she had been seeing. Kennedy tried to talk her out of it. “He said it was going to be a long, hard war, and eggs were going to be rationed to one a month. And he gave me quite a bleak picture of the future there, but I still thought that love would take care of everything. So then he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, you come back with us, and when you land in New York, you can do whatever you want. You can wait for the boat to turn around, and come right back again, or you can stay in America. But Mrs. Kennedy and I feel that we brought you over single, and we’ll return you to America single.’” Hennessey obeyed Kennedy’s wishes, “the same as all his children do. I wouldn’t dare argue with him.”
¹⁶

On Sunday, September 3, Kennedy and Rose drove back from Hertfordshire to their church in London for ten-thirty Mass, only to discover that it had been canceled. Kennedy dropped Rose off at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington so she could attend Mass there, then proceeded to the embassy.

The prime minister was scheduled to address the nation at 11:15 that morning. “I cleaned up my desk, sent for a small radio from the house in a hurry and had it set up. I listened to the speech in my office with several of the staff. It was terribly moving. And when he got to the part of his ‘efforts have failed,’ I almost cried. I had participated very closely in this struggle and I saw my hope crash too.”
¹⁷

“This country is at war with Germany,” Chamberlain announced that morning. “This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much. I cannot tell what part I may be allowed to play myself; I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been reestablished.”
¹⁸

When the speech was over, Kennedy called 10 Downing. To his surprise, Chamberlain came to the phone. “Neville, I have just listened to the broadcast. It was terrifically moving. . . . I feel deeply our failure to save a world war.” Chamberlain thanked Kennedy for the call and his steadfast support. “We did the best we could have done but it looks as though we have failed. . . . Thanks, Joe, my best to you always and my deep gratitude for your constant help—Goodbye—Goodbye.”

At 11:27, the air raid sirens started screaming. For a brief moment, tragedy gave way to farce. As there was no shelter at the embassy, Kennedy directed the staff to “Molyneaux [
sic
], the dressmaker,” whose establishment was just around the corner on Grosvenor Street and “had a reasonably good basement.” When Joe Jr., Jack, and Rose appeared in front of the embassy to drive with their father to the House of Commons, Kennedy directed the boys to take their mother “at once to Molyneaux. . . . I went over to Molyneaux’s to cheer people up and found most of them in pretty good shape.” It was not the worst place to spend the first few minutes of the Second World War.
¹⁹

Twenty-one

T
HE
L
IVES OF
A
MERICANS
A
RE AT
S
TAKE

A
sense of panic was in the air.” Kennedy rearranged schedules to provide twenty-four-hour staffing at the embassy and begged the State Department for funding for air raid protection. When he was informed that Americans in England might have to wait until early October for ships to bring them home, he lashed out in rage. “After all there is a war on, and it is quite conceivable that England will be bombed. If so, it is probable that Americans will be killed, because there is no place in England where we can store these people and promise them immunity.”
¹

At two thirty
A.M.
on September 4, he was awakened at home by a phone call routed through the embassy. “The Foreign Office was on the line. The clipped accents of an unknown clerk spelled out a message that he said had just been received—‘S.S.
Athenia,
Donaldson Line, torpedoed 200 Miles off Malin Head [Ireland’s most northern point], 1400 passengers aboard, S.O.S. received, ship sinking fast.’” The survivors were being evacuated by a British destroyer and taken to Glasgow. Kennedy directed embassy officials to compile a list of deceased and surviving Americans. He then called Eddie Moore to ask him to leave at once for Glasgow and take Jack Kennedy along as the ambassador’s personal representative.

The sinking of the
Athenia
reinforced Kennedy’s fears that Americans were unsafe on any but United States–flagged vessels. As sternly as he could, he issued a warning to them not to sail in British ships. And again he implored the State Department to redirect all American-owned ships, including those bound elsewhere, to British ports. When State Department officials did not respond immediately, he blew past them and placed a call to his friend Max Truitt at the Maritime Commission to request that the commission pressure shipowners to dispatch ships to Britain. Secretary of State Hull was furious when, the next morning, the
Herald Tribune
reported on the contents of Kennedy’s call to Truitt—which included a bitter, foulmouthed denunciation of the State Department. Instead of apologizing, Kennedy pushed back harder.

“Of course,” he cabled Hull, “I know you realize the situation is bad here but I am sure you do not realize how bad it is. There are a great many newspapermen trying to get their wives and children and friends on boats and it is very difficult and people are constantly complaining that no ships are being sent from America. We are doing our best to keep them quiet but when you are bombarded by the Press every minute of the day and night as to what you are going to do about it, the press is going to publish something. . . . With the danger of submarine warfare . . . a critical situation might well arise with Americans sailing on British boats. All I am working for is to get them out as quickly and safely as we can.”
²

Day after day now, there were articles, columns, and editorials about the sinking of the
Athenia,
German perfidy and denials of perfidy (the Germans claimed the British had sunk the ship to outrage American opinion), fleeing refugees, torpedoes, fire on the deck, and the rescue at sea of more than a thousand survivors. Kennedy’s office, staffed by the most savvy publicists in the diplomatic corps, tried and largely succeeded in positioning the ambassador as the hero of the story.

Time
magazine put his face on the cover of its September 18 issue under a “The U.S. and The War” banner. “Last week Joe Kennedy had already shuttered and barred the palatial Embassy house at No. 14 Prince’s Gate . . . and moved to a country house away from the terror of bombs. Thence each morning he drove into London in a Chrysler, waved swiftly through traffic by bobbies. . . . With 9,000 Americans to shepherd in England, with tangible U.S. business interests under his eye, with 150 Americans cabling from the U.S. daily for information on
Athenia
survivors, with British bigwigs to see, Franklin Roosevelt to keep informed, Joe Kennedy had a bigger job.”

Within the confines of the State Department, Joseph P. Kennedy was not a hero, but a troublesome publicity hound who made impossible demands, then blamed Washington when they could not be met. “Kennedy has been terribly explosive,” Breckinridge Long, former ambassador to Italy and now special assistant secretary of state in charge of repatriation efforts, wrote in his September 7 diary entry. “Kennedy seems to think that the only people needing repatriation are in the lobby of the American Embassy in London. As a matter of fact, there are 2800 in Ireland; there are many thousand in France, and there are scattered and spread hundreds of them in [countries across Europe]. . . . Kennedy had been condemning everybody and criticizing everything and has antagonized most of the people in the Administration. . . . I talked to Truitt this afternoon and told him I thought Kennedy was hurting himself and that the impression that was created in this country and that the news stories and publicity items which went out of London with his permission if not with his origination indicated that he did not view the situation normally.”
³

—

E
leven days after the declaration of war, Kennedy began sending his family home. Kick, Eunice, and Bobby sailed with their mother on the
Washington
on September 14. On September 18, Joe Jr. left on the
Mauretania;
Jack, who had been granted permission from Harvard to arrive a few days late, flew to New York on the Pan Am Clipper on September 19; on September 20, the final contingent of Kennedys, Patricia, Teddy, and Jean, sailed on the
Manhattan
with Miss Hennessey, who, Jean reported to her father, “was very sad to be leaving Roy [her English boyfriend] and was morning [
sic
] all the way over.”
⁴

Only Rosemary stayed behind in England with her father. She was doing so well—and seemed so content—at the Montessori-method convent school, it would have been foolish to uproot her. Instead, she was evacuated with the other students and nuns and Miss Gibbs, her companion, to Boxmoor, a village in Hertfordshire, where the convent school was reestablished on the grounds of the local Catholic church. Boxmoor was conveniently close to Wall Hall, the Morgan estate where Kennedy now spent his weekends.

On Saturday morning, two days after Rose had sailed home, Kennedy visited Mother Isabel, the mother superior at the convent, “and had a nice talk about Rose[mary].” That same night, he called Rosemary to tell her that “she was going to be the one to keep me company, and as this house [Wall Hall] was very handy to her new school I would invite some of her girl friends and herself down to spend every other weekend with me and I would have a picture show at the house. That tickled her no end. So we will see how that works out. I think I will have the Moores stay over . . . until I see how serious this bombing turns out and then if it gets real bad they can take her home. And in the meantime the Moores can take Rose[mary] out every once in a while and between us all she will be really happy and enjoy herself.” He was going to have a telephone installed at the school so he could talk regularly to his daughter. He had also, he wanted Rose to know, arranged for “an extra girl” to spell Miss Gibbs. “So,” he reassured his wife, “that’s that. Don’t give it a moment’s thought at least for the present. . . . Now darling, as to me. With all of the family safe in America I have no worries. I will miss you terribly but that can’t be helped. . . . This position at the minute is probably the most interesting and exciting in the world, and in addition I may be of some help in helping to end this catastrophic chaos.”
⁵

The war was but two weeks old and Kennedy was already attempting to put himself in a position where he could be of “some help” in ending it. Secretary of State Hull detoured around Kennedy, fully aware that in wartime, as in peacetime, Kennedy would try to set his own agenda. When he had information or questions for the British, Hull conveyed them through Lord Lothian, the newly installed British ambassador in Washington.

Within days of the declaration of war, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau had proposed that the U.S. government, in partial payment for British war debts, take possession of the
Normandie
and
Queen Mary,
which were in American ports. Charged with negotiating the transfer, the State Department opened talks with Lord Lothian in Washington. Kennedy found out about the proposal two days later when British Treasury officials, assuming he was involved, asked for clarification. Embarrassed and furious, Kennedy accused Morgenthau of excluding him from the talks. Morgenthau, who had never suggested that Kennedy be shut out, asked Welles to please make that clear. “I’m willing to take the blame,” the treasury secretary told Welles over the telephone, “when the blame is mine, but I don’t think it is this time.”
⁶

Morgenthau called Kennedy in London to explain that it had been the State Department’s decision, not his, to negotiate through Lothian in Washington. Kennedy made it clear he didn’t hold Morgenthau responsible. “It’s dead as far as I’m concerned, Henry, and I’m glad you called me up. And you know how I feel about it. . . . I know very well that I can save you a lot of bumps as far as this place goes . . . if I know what’s going on, but this one struck me so between the eyes that I didn’t know whether I was afoot or horseback.”
⁷

Still unaware or unwilling to recognize that his policy recommendations were dismissed the moment they arrived, not only by Hull but by Roosevelt, Kennedy wrote the president a long letter the week after war was declared, marked it “Personal and Confidential,” and offered “a few of my impressions as to what is taking place here.” The British government, he warned the president, was going to do everything it possibly could to influence American public opinion, “figuring that sooner or later they can obtain real help from America.” For the moment, they were preparing for war—and the economic emergency it would entail.

“The place where the real works are going on is in the economic and financial departments. There the best brains in England have been concentrated. . . . England is as much a totalitarian country tonight from an economic and trade point of view as any other country in Europe—all that is needed is time to perfect the organization. All trade will be directly or indirectly controlled by the Government.” It was imperative, given this developing reality, that the Americans make changes accordingly so as not to be bested in the rounds of trade negotiations over raw materials, finished products, and currency regulations. “This all adds up into one suggestion: That we should be on our guard to protect our own interests. In the economic and financial field the best possible brains should be concentrated on the problems which the European war is bound to raise.”
⁸

A day later, Kennedy sent off a “Triple Priority” telegram labeled “Strictly Confidential and Most Personal for the Secretary and the President.” He had visited for an hour with the king and queen and then spent forty minutes with Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare. The king had told him that he was convinced Poland would be defeated within three or four weeks, after which Hitler would forward a proposal “to France and England to put a stop to this war and to arrive at some understanding.” When that happened, the Chamberlain government would, Kennedy “inferred” from what Hoare had told him, be faced with either entering into negotiations and being voted out of office for doing so; or refusing to enter into negotiations and preparing for endless, probably unwinnable war on the continent and bombardment from the air at home. Each path led to disaster. “They know that if the war continues or if a Government is maintained on a war basis, it signifies entire social, financial and economic breakdown and that after the war is over nothing will be saved. If the war were stopped, on the other hand, it would provide Herr Hitler with so much more prestige that it is a question of how far he would be carried by it.” There was only one way out. Roosevelt, Kennedy suggested, should step in where the British could not and forge a deal with Hitler. “It appears to me that this situation may resolve itself to a point where the President may play the role of savior of the world. As such the English Government definitely cannot accept any understanding with the present German Chancellor but there may be a situation when President Roosevelt himself may evolve world peace plans. . . . Having been a practical person all my life, I am of the opinion that it is quite conceivable that President Roosevelt can manoeuver himself into a position where he can save the world.”
⁹

Kennedy’s recommendation was recklessly bizarre. Roosevelt could not make peace in Europe because he had nothing of substance to offer Hitler, other than perhaps Poland, which was already within his grasp. To even get Hitler to the bargaining table, Roosevelt would have had to recognize his seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia, which he could not possibly do without making a mockery of American pronouncements and principles. The attempt to appease Hitler would surely fail, and failure this time would be catastrophic. It would weaken Roosevelt internationally, cripple him politically a year before a presidential election, embolden Hitler to continue his aggression, offer Italy and Japan tacit assurance that the “democracies” would eventually recognize their conquests, and represent one of the grandest double crosses in world history. Had the ambassador taken an hour or two to think through his proposal before sending it off, he might have realized this. But he had not. His cable was dispatched at two o’clock, only hours after he had met with Hoare. Given the time it took to dictate, type, review, and “Triple Priority” encode a message this long, it was clear that Kennedy had not had the opportunity to reflect on what he was recommending.

Kennedy got his answer two hours after he sent his cable. It was brutally terse. Hull informed him, on a strictly confidential basis, that the president would never, “so long as present European conditions continue,” initiate any peace move. “The people of the United States would not support any move for peace initiated by this Government that would consolidate or make possible a survival of a regime of force and of aggression.”
¹⁰