The Patriarch (54 page)

Roosevelt and Hull were astounded by Kennedy’s suggestions that the president initiate negotiations with Hitler while Great Britain and France were at war with him. The president, according to James Farley, thought that Kennedy’s cable was “the silliest message to me I have ever received. It urged me to do this, that, and the other thing in a frantic sort of way.”
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It may not have been coincidental that the day he received Kennedy’s dispatch, the president initiated direct contact with Winston Churchill, now first lord of the Admiralty and Chamberlain’s expected successor at 10 Downing. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty,” Roosevelt explained in his first letter to Churchill, sent by diplomatic pouch to the embassy but sealed so that no one would open or read it at Grosvenor Square. “Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors, but the essential is not very different. What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.”
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There was something daring and wholly irregular in the American president bypassing his ambassador and opening a secret channel of communication with a British cabinet member at a moment when the nation was bound by strict neutrality laws and its people overwhelmingly opposed to engagement in another European war. Churchill covered himself by clearing every message he sent with Prime Minister Chamberlain. Roosevelt had no superior to provide him cover.

Three weeks after the correspondence had been initiated, Kennedy found out about it from Churchill. Embarrassed and infuriated, he referred in that evening’s diary entry to the president’s clandestine correspondence with Churchill as yet “another instance of Roosevelt’s conniving mind which never indicates he knows how to handle any organization. It’s a rotten way to treat his Ambassador and I think shows him up to the other people. I am disgusted.” What made the matter worse to Kennedy’s mind was that Roosevelt’s overtures to Churchill indicated that he trusted him. Kennedy most certainly did not. “I can’t help feeling he’s not on the level. He is just an actor and a politician. He always impressed me that he’d blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would get the U.S. in. Maybe I do him an injustice but I just don’t trust him.”
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On October 6, the evening after Churchill confided in him that he was receiving secret communications from the president, Kennedy was awakened after midnight by the first lord of the Admiralty, who apparently not only never slept but didn’t want anyone else to. Churchill had had a call from the president and wanted Kennedy to cable his reply from the American embassy. Kennedy had the cable coded and sent that same evening. “Again I am amazed at Roosevelt’s complete lack of understanding of organization. He calls Churchill up and never contacts me. A rotten way to win men’s loyalty . . . I’ll have my say some day!”
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O
n Sunday morning, September 17, two weeks after the declaration of war, Lord Beaverbrook called Kennedy with the news that “the Russians had crossed the borders into Poland. He was frightfully disturbed. He said, ‘This puts a terrible new aspect on the war.’” Beaverbrook wanted Kennedy to “get your President to see what plans can be worked out to save this catastrophe.” The news was indeed terrible and terrifying. If the Soviet invasion of Poland was the first move in a Soviet-German military alliance to divide up Europe (with Italy as junior partner), there was no conceivable way to save the democracies.
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Chamberlain, whom Kennedy visited the next day, downplayed the significance of “the Russian situation.” The prime minister did not believe that the move into Poland signaled the beginning of “a straight military alliance with Germany.” In that evening’s dispatch to the State Department, Kennedy recounted and then dismissed Chamberlain’s relative equanimity. “I think he is probably doing some wishful thinking.”
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The American ambassador showered Washington regularly now with Cassandra-like predictions of the end of civilization, capitalism, and representative government in Europe. On September 30 alone, he wrote three separate letters to the president, each arguing that there was no way to save the British from defeat—and it might not be worth even trying to do so. The British claimed for themselves the highest moral ground, but the government had gone to war not to save Poland or Western civilization, but to protect and preserve its colonial “possessions and place in the sun, just as she has in the past.” This was not a war to protect “democracy—the only form of government I want to live under.” It was another war to preserve the British Empire.
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He was disgusted by the drumbeating for war, by the moral certainty of the British and their American supporters that war had to be waged. “Of course, I am not carried away by this war for idealism,” he wrote Missy LeHand on October 3. “I can’t see any use in everybody in Europe going busted and having communism run riot. My own belief is that the economics of Germany would have taken care of Hitler long before this if he didn’t have a chance to wave that flag every once in a while. But, of course, one isn’t supposed to say this out loud. The British are going into this war hating it, but with determination to fight it out. I still don’t know what they are fighting for that is possible of accomplishment.”
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As long as Chamberlain and Halifax had pursued a peace agreement with Hitler, the ambassador had been their uncompromising supporter—so uncompromising, in fact, that he had been accused of going over to the other side. Now that the Chamberlain government had declared war and the prime minister and foreign secretary ruled out the possibility of further negotiations, Kennedy distanced himself from them both. As he told Lord Halifax, who reported their conversation to Lord Lothian in Washington, it was “his opinion [that] the consequences of indefinite continuance of the war were so serious that every effort should be made by diplomatic resources to find the way of peace.” Halifax answered that while “everyone would agree that peace was desirable if it could be achieved [insofar as] the present German Government were quite untrustworthy nothing was to be gained by deluding ourselves into supposing that any paper peace terms proposed by them could . . . offer the way of peace. The Ambassador did not seem to disagree with this, but recurred to the tragic results that prolongation of the war must involve.”
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T
he British Foreign Office now began to monitor the ambassador’s activities as if he were an enemy agent. A secret “Kennedyiana” file was opened, and under the heading “U.S. Ambassador’s Views as to the Outcome of the War,” Foreign Office officials filed their reports, all secondhand, of the “defeatist” remarks the ambassador had supposedly made to foreign journalists, colleagues in the diplomatic corps, and whoever happened to be at the dinner table with him. They were so concerned by the ambassador’s endless badmouthing of British war efforts that they debated whether to notify Lord Lothian in Washington and, if “necessary . . . ask him to speak to Mr. Roosevelt.” Another option was for the Foreign Office to voice the government’s concerns to career diplomat Herschel Johnson so that he might “take the hint” and report his chief’s indiscretions to Washington. A third was to confront the ambassador directly and ask him to desist.

In late September, the Foreign Office sent Lord Lothian “a specimen of the reports” gathered in the “Kennedyiana” file. “While it is very regrettable that Kennedy should be adopting this attitude, we do not propose, for the time being at any rate, to pursue the matter further. We had thought it well, however, to let you know about his indiscreet utterances in case it should later become necessary for us to ask you to drop a hint in the proper quarters.” The consensus was that any attempt at “‘splitting’ Mr. Kennedy at the state department or elsewhere” might only backfire. “A complaint might, of course, make him shut up, but in that case we shall neither know what he is thinking nor what he is telling the U.S. Government.” As one officer suggested, Kennedy’s “defeatism” might also, in a perverse sort of way, “have its good side in jogging the Americans out of their eighty-two percent [according to a recent Gallup poll] wishful thinking that the French and we are going to win!” The more frightened the American public and politicians were that the British were going to lose, the more likely Congress might be to amend the Neutrality Acts to permit direct assistance of the British war effort.

Various explanations were offered for the ambassador’s defeatism: that as an Irish American, he was “naturally predisposed to twist the lion’s tale”; that he had been convinced, wrongly, of German air superiority, first by Lindbergh and then by his son Joe Jr., recently returned from a visit to the continent; that as a politically ambitious American, he had “to make sure that he is not tarred with the pro-British brush.” The shrewdest observation was made by an officer (whose handwritten signature is indecipherable) who noted that because Kennedy was “primarily interested in the financial side of things, he cannot, poor man, see the imponderables which, in a war like this, will be decisive.”
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In mid-October, Charles Peake on the American desk at the Foreign Office sought out William Hillman, the former Hearst foreign correspondent in London, hoping that Hillman, who knew Kennedy well, might offer some insight into his character. Hillman told Peake that the key to understanding Kennedy was to recognize that he was not only “a professing Catholic who loathed Hitler and Hitlerism, almost, though perhaps not quite, as much as he loathed Bolshevism, but he was also a self-made man” who feared for his and his family’s economic future. He had made a pile of money—and was fearful now that it would be lost in the economic catastrophe that would accompany the fighting of another European war. “Mr. Kennedy was convinced that this war unless it was soon stopped would bankrupt the British Empire and also bankrupt the United States, who would be bound to come in before it was over. . . . Bankruptcy and defeat, said Mr. Hillman, were obsessions now in the American Ambassador’s mind and though he had tried to reason with him, he was not amenable to reason, his argument being that Hitler and the Nazis could not last forever and that there was bound to be a change in regime in Germany one day if we had only let it alone.”
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The Foreign Office fully accepted Hillman’s assessment. As Sir Oliver Harvey, Halifax’s private secretary, noted in his diary on November 1, 1939, Kennedy was “engaged in defeatist propaganda” because “he only thinks of his wealth and how capitalism will suffer if the war should last long.”
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T
he excitement of the first weeks of war quickly dissipated. All of the Americans who had wanted to go home had done so; trenches and shelters had been dug; the barrage balloons launched; London’s children (and their dogs with them) evacuated to the countryside, their older brothers sent away to military training camps. Even the blackouts and sirens, at first so distressing, had become second nature. And while the theaters and movie houses were empty, the nightclubs had opened again.

Kennedy spent more time now at Wall Hall, where he was well cared for by Jack Morgan’s staff. On weekends, Rosemary, her companion, the Moores, and two golf-playing colleagues from the embassy, Jim Seymour and “London Jack” Kennedy, stayed with him. He was alone most of the time. “I’m running true to form,” he wrote his wife, the one person who could always be counted on to sympathize with him. “I’m sick of everybody and so I’m alone tonight by choice. It’s funny that nobody in the world can be with me very long without boring me to death. I just can’t help it. You are the only individual in the world that I love more every day. . . . This job without you is comparable with a street cleaner’s at home.”
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He had never expected he would miss the children so much, because he never had before. “Having to live this life with the family in America,” he wrote Boake Carter, “is nothing short of hell, and it adds greatly to my boredom and depression over the present situation.” “I notice it much more, I suppose,” he confided to Johnnie Ford, “because they were with me so much the last year and a half and because I had such a great time with them.”
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While he complained of the boredom, he also took great pleasure in being in the middle of the action. “I have to admit,” he wrote Phil Reisman on October 3, 1939, “that I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity of having a front row seat for the show that’s going on here. It may become a hot seat later on, but at any rate, exciting adventures make life interesting, and to be in business with this going on would irk me no end.”
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His guess was that it was going to be a short war. The German army had marched into Poland almost unimpeded. On September 27, Warsaw had surrendered. There had been no bombardment of Great Britain—and no counterattack by the Royal Air Force (RAF). There were battles at sea as German U-boats went after British merchant ships, but the naval war, though intense at first, had subsided by late September. A month after the declaration of war, hostilities on land, air, and sea had ceased.

The peace offer that Kennedy and everyone else had expected Hitler to make after the Polish surrender arrived in mid-October. It was a nonstarter. Hitler refused to even discuss the restoration of Polish sovereignty. When Chamberlain rejected his peace offer, Hitler declared that the war would continue. He didn’t say where or when.

“Everyone here is amazed that the war is going as it is,” Kennedy wrote Johnnie Ford on October 26. “They can’t understand it and don’t know just where it will finally lead to. I can’t believe that, even if it starts in real earnest, it can go on for a long time. It is too potentially catastrophic in character, but if anybody thinks he can tell in advance what’s going to happen in Europe, he is crazy.”
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