The Patriarch (57 page)

Had the British government, press, and public known how far out of the policy-making loop Kennedy was, they would have rested easier. But it was assumed in London that the ambassador remained a valuable adviser to Roosevelt. When in early March Washington announced that the president was sending Sumner Welles to consult with German, Italian, French, and British officials, the Chamberlain government worried that he was going to launch peace negotiations with the Germans and Italians, as Kennedy had advocated.
¹⁵
Welles had been sent instead to find out if there was any chance to end the war before it started up again. Roosevelt did not believe there was but wanted to make sure.

The under secretary of state arrived in London on March 10. Kennedy met him at the airport and, as he wrote Rose, the two men “have been spinning ever since. . . . We have had two or three conferences with the Prime Minister and Halifax and saw Churchill, Lloyd George, Eden, Atlee, Sinclair [future secretary of state for air], and all the rest. They treated Welles exceptionally well here. . . . Welles is very intelligent and is hoping that out of all the mess some plan may be devised that can save the world from this devastating war. There is always a hope, but the chances look like about one in a thousand.” Kennedy did not tell his wife that he had been left off the invitation list for Welles’s visit “to the palace to have tea with the King and Queen,” which vexed him no end. Welles offered several explanations for the snub—none of which was ever confirmed—then intervened to have Kennedy added to the list. The ambassador interpreted his exclusion as further sign of the disfavor with which he was now held in British government circles.
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Welles returned to Washington at the end of March. The exercise had been a total failure. “The leaders he talked to,” Hull recalled in his memoirs, had “offered no real hope for peace.”
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Y
ou would never believe the way public opinion in this country has turned anti-American and incidentally anti-US Ambassador Kennedy,” he wrote Rose on March 20. “The things they say about me from the fact I’ve sent my family home because they were afraid, to the fact that I live in the country because I am afraid of being bombed etc. etc. All rotten stuff but all the favorite dinner parties at Mayfair go right to work hauling the U.S. Ambassador down. It’s for that reason it would be silly for you or the children to come over. It might spoil your pleasant impressions.” As in the past, Kennedy blamed much of his unpopularity on the Jews, believing they were against him because he was not sufficiently bellicose. “Walter Lippmann is around saying he hasn’t liked the US Ambassador for the last 6 months. Of course the fact he is a Jew has something to do with that. It is all a little annoying, but not very serious.”
¹⁸

Rose gently suggested that Kennedy might want to do something to rescue his reputation. “Joe, dear, I have a definite idea that it would be a wonderful feat if you could put over the idea that although you are against America’s entering the war—still you are encouraging help to England in some way. It seems to me most people in America would be sympathetic to that idea, & it would endear you to the hearts of the British. It may be impractical, but I have felt it strongly the last two weeks.”
¹⁹

Kennedy, unwilling or unable to apologize for saying what was on his mind, did nothing of the sort.

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H
e spent Easter 1940 with Clare Boothe Luce at St. Leonard’s in Windsor. Rosemary remained with Miss Gibbs and Mother Isabel in Hertfordshire. Her eight brothers and sisters spent the holiday with their mother at Palm Beach. “It is lovely weather down here,” Jean wrote her father. “We all flew down and the trip was very smooth. No one was sick except Miss Dunn. Everyone is down except Joe. He is coming down later. Teddy is learning how to play tennis and is using everybody’s tennis racket. It’s a wonder he hasn’t broken any by now. I am working very hard trying to make a sweater and I am nearly finished.”
²⁰

Jack arrived in Palm Beach in a triumphant mood, having finished the senior thesis he had been working on all winter: “Appeasement at Munich: The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy to Change from a Disarmament Policy to a Rearmament Policy.” “Jack rushed madly around the last week with his thesis,” Joe Jr. wrote his father on March 17, “and finally with the aid of five stenographers the last day got it in under the wire. I read it before he had finished it up and it seemed to represent a lot of work but did not prove anything. However, he said he shaped it up the last few days and he seemed to have some good ideas so it ought to be very good.”
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As proud as Jack was of his thesis, what he wanted more than anything else was his father’s approval. “Arthur Krock read it and feels that I should get it published,” he wrote his father. “Please let me know what you think about the thesis as soon as you can— Am sending it to an agent Krock gave me—and see what he thinks—the chief questions are 1. Whether it is worth publishing if polished up. 2. If it can be published while you’re still in office.”
²²

Kennedy read the thesis and showed it “to various people around here. Everyone agrees that it is a swell job, and that you must have put in some long hard hours assembling, digesting and documenting all of this material.” The thesis was, as it now stood, a well-documented, though not entirely convincing, defense of Neville Chamberlain’s actions at Munich. The prime minister, Jack concluded, had had no choice but to appease Hitler because an antiwar, antimilitary British public had refused to spend money in the 1930s on maintaining and modernizing the British army, navy, and air force. “I believe that the basis of your case—that the blame must be placed on the people as a whole—is sound,” Kennedy wrote Jack. The danger was that because Jack blamed the “people,” not the politicians, his thesis was susceptible to being read as a “complete whitewash” of Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, his predecessor. This had to be corrected. “You might also be trying to improve the writing,” Kennedy concluded his long letter to his son. “After you are satisfied with it, ask Arthur Krock to go over it again. If Krock is willing, let his agent handle the publication. I suggest that, when you are going over the material again, you check your references. We have found several misspellings of names and a couple of wrong dates.”
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I
t had not been a particularly good spring for Kennedy. On March 26, he learned of the death of Joe Sheehan, his oldest friend from East Boston, Boston Latin, and Harvard. Days later, he received word that Eddie Moore had been taken ill in Paris with a bad case of the “flu.” Kennedy flew to Paris at once, visited Moore, spent two nights with Clare Boothe Luce, then brought Eddie and his wife, Mary, back to London and moved them both into his estate in Windsor. “He doesn’t want to go home, of course,” he wrote Rose after getting the Moores safely back to England, “because he figures we will all be going home pretty soon and he would rather stay so that we can all go back together.”
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He still had no idea how long he was going to be in place as ambassador, or indeed how long he wanted to remain in place. “The news all seems to be Roosevelt won’t run so automatically I’m out,” he wrote Rose on April 5. “The only thing is how soon? . . . Well darling I guess it’s right nothing is perfect in this life and I just don’t like being so completely away from you. Yet knowing myself as I do when I’ve been home 6 months I’ll want to get going again. Maybe old age and a bad stomach will change me. I don’t know. I guess I’m a restless soul: Some people call it ambition. I guess I’m just
nuts
. Nevertheless, I love you so much.”
²⁵

Kennedy’s brief period of ennui came to an abrupt end four days later when, at three in the morning on April 9, German ships entered Oslo, Bergen, and Norway’s southern port cities; at five
A.M.
, more ships landed in Copenhagen and German soldiers crossed the Danish frontier. Denmark, under threat of aerial bombardment, surrendered without a fight. The Norwegians chose to resist.

While the rest of the world reeled at the ease, the speed, the secrecy, and the success with which the Germans occupied Copenhagen and every major Norwegian port, Lord Halifax, whom Kennedy visited at three thirty in the afternoon of April 9, “seemed more cheerful than usual. Kept repeating ‘a very interesting situation.’ Felt the Germans had made a false move.” Churchill, Halifax told Kennedy, had been “almost thrilled with the news and he had convinced the Cabinet that Hitler had made a major strategic error.” The British military was prepared for the landing, Churchill declared in the House of Commons on April 11, and would quickly repel it.
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Exhibiting an exquisitely poor sense of timing, Kennedy wrote Roosevelt two days after the phony war turned real to complain about British finances: “It may seem strange that I should be writing to you at this moment about such matters as gold and British holdings of American securities, but although the necessity to face up to this situation is not yet as urgent as events which are now taking place in Scandinavia, it is nevertheless real and soon may be the none-the-less urgent.” The British were buying the dollars they needed to pay for American imports and military supplies by selling gold in the United States at $35 an ounce instead of liquidating their investments in American securities, as they had pledged to do. Kennedy recommended that Roosevelt step in immediately and curtail British gold sales by legislation, if necessary, before the treasury was overrun with gold it did not need and could not exchange.
²⁷

On April 29, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, whom Roosevelt had asked to answer Kennedy’s four-page letter, assembled his chief advisers for a 10:15 meeting. “Now, the reason I have got you fellows in here, this is extra confidential. I got one of these typical Joe Kennedy letters to the President on gold. . . . It is one of these typical asinine Joe Kennedy letters.” Morgenthau was opposed to Kennedy’s recommendation that the British be pressured to sell their securities to fund the war effort, because he feared that dumping those securities on the market would result in a dramatic fall of American stock prices. Only months earlier, Kennedy had warned of this eventuality. When a colleague asked Morgenthau why the ambassador might now be pushing the president in the opposite direction, Morgenthau, furious that Kennedy had dared interfere with treasury policy from the other side of the ocean, exploded with rage and insisted that Kennedy wanted to depress stock prices so he could make money selling short. “The only thing that has explained Joe Kennedy to me for the last couple of years is that he has been consistently short in the market. . . . Every single move he has made is to depress [the prices of] our securities and our commodities.”
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Morgenthau had no evidence for this charge, other than the fact that Ben Smith, a notorious short seller with whom Kennedy had traded a decade earlier, had recently been in London. But lack of evidence did not stop him from adding his voice to the whispering campaign against the ambassador. The reality that no one in London or Washington would have believed was that Kennedy had virtually stopped trading stocks when he’d entered government service, first, because the rules he had written at the SEC made selling short much more difficult, and second, because he knew that there were spies everywhere looking to brand him as an unscrupulous, unpatriotic stock swindler. He wasn’t going to give them the chance to do so.

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T
he situation tonight,” Kennedy wrote Rose a week after the German landing in Norway and Denmark, “is more bewildering than ever. The Norwegian situation is far from being a simple one. . . . It is going to take a lot of work to drive the Germans out. . . . But the difficulty is that nobody really knows what [Hitler] is liable to do or what’s going to come out of this whole Scandinavian episode. . . . I am more convinced than ever that the children should not come over here. I quite understand Kathleen’s interest [she was desperate to see Billy Hartington again], but she can take my word for it that she would have the dullest time she ever had in her life. All the young fellows are being shuttled off to war.”
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As it quickly became apparent that the British attempt to dislodge the Germans in Norway was turning out disastrously, the public and press, having been fed only good news by Prime Minister Chamberlain and First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, began to turn against the government. “Had a long call from Joe Kennedy,” Lord Halifax wrote in his diary for April 25, “who came to talk about the inefficiency of what he called our showmanship. I thought there was a good deal in what he said. . . . I become more and more convinced that the Minister of Information ought to sit in at the Cabinet, but the P.M. is very sticky about this.”
³⁰

While the Norwegian operation had been planned and executed by Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty, it was Chamberlain who, as head of the government, was going to take the fall for its failure. On the evening of May 8, after a two-day debate on the prosecution of the war capped by Churchill’s eloquent defense of the Norwegian exercise, a “division” was called, ostensibly on an adjournment motion but, in fact, on whether or not to censure the present government. Chamberlain’s majority, recently over two hundred, was cut to eighty-one. Thirty-three Tories, including Anthony Eden, defected; another sixty, including Lady Astor, abstained.
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Kennedy, as had become his habit, “went to Beaverbrook’s house to get his slant on the situation.” Beaverbrook “felt that Chamberlain would have to go—if not right away, very shortly.” Concerned that the Chamberlain government was about to fall, Kennedy placed a call to the White House at midnight. The president came to the phone and Kennedy reported what he had heard. The president replied that “he had just heard that Germany had delivered an ultimatum to Holland.” What it all meant, Roosevelt did not yet know. “There is,” Kennedy concluded in his diary entry that evening, “a very definite undercurrent of despair because of the hopelessness of the whole task for England.”