The Patriarch (63 page)

He would be good to his word. Whenever the occasion arose—and sometimes when it didn’t—he would defend Chamberlain. If the British were now, in 1940, able to hold their own and forestall invasion and defeat, Kennedy was convinced it was because Chamberlain at Munich had bought them two years to rearm. His actions in 1938, more than Churchill’s in 1940, had made possible whatever military success the British would achieve.

—

J
oseph P. Kennedy left London on Tuesday, October 22, two and a half years after his arrival. He had been warned before he ever set foot in London that he had neither the training nor the temperament for a diplomatic position, but his self-confidence, buoyed by successes in Boston, New York, Hollywood, Washington, and on Wall Street, was such that he could not imagine he would not do himself and his family proud. And he did—for the first few weeks—before that same self-confidence led him to speak his mind rather than follow State Department orders.

He had sought to be an insider but refused to be a team player because he was convinced that he knew better than his superiors and that it was his responsibility to speak the truth, not tie it up in diplomatic obfuscations. He prided himself on being a realist, unlike Cordell Hull, who he feared was too moralistic, too sentimental, and Roosevelt, who did not always think rationally and relied too much on academics and politicians who knew little of the real world.

As ambassador, he had had his priorities and he’d pursued them relentlessly, breaking rules and protocol whenever he thought it necessary. It was essential that the economy be righted, that prosperity return, and that the free enterprise system be preserved. None of this would be possible without peace in Europe. In the final analysis, he believed anything, even giving Hitler more than he justly deserved, was better than fighting a war against him. He had sympathy with the victims of Nazi aggression but would not allow that sympathy to interfere with his better judgment, that war with Germany had to be avoided no matter what the cost. If the well-being of Austrians and Czechs and Poles and Europe’s Jews had to be sacrificed, so be it. That millions of those Jews would later be murdered was not a consideration—as neither he nor anyone else in Washington or London considered it a possible outcome.

Wiser heads had failed to prevent war from engulfing Europe in 1940, but that war could and had to be contained and brought to a negotiated end. Whatever happened to Great Britain, it was imperative that America not go to war.

PART V

Washington, but Briefly

Twenty-six

H
OME
A
GAIN

U
pon arriving in Lisbon, the only safe place from which to fly across the Atlantic, Kennedy was “handed a note from Roosevelt specifically requesting me to come to the White House and make no statements to the newspaper men. I was, of course indignant,” Kennedy wrote in his diary, “but could understand Roosevelt’s position particularly when I came home and saw what the status was.” There was a second telegram waiting in Lisbon, this one from Clare Boothe Luce, who with her husband was backing Wendell Willkie and expected Kennedy to do so as well. Clare urged Kennedy to “tell the press and the people the truth as you have always told it to me. . . . If you say what you have never said to me or never believed that the boy on the burning deck [FDR] is the master of foreign policy of all time, then you will have to pay my funeral expenses and after that nothing in this land will be safe or sure. Them’s me parting words, my hero.”
¹

Bad weather forced a day’s delay in Lisbon. The White House and the State Department, increasingly anxious lest Kennedy talk to the press before he spoke with the president, monitored his every move. When the Pan Am Clipper on which Kennedy was flying was held over a second day in the Azores, Sumner Welles called the White House and spoke with Edwin “Pa” Watson, the president’s secretary and adviser, who relayed the message to Roosevelt. Kennedy was not expected to arrive “until sometime Sunday. He [Welles] is going ahead with arrangements to get Joe Kennedy down here Sunday afternoon, as that would be the only place he could see you before (as Sumner Welles expresses it) any one else got at him to talk.” Lauchlin Currie, chief economic adviser in the White House, wrote Missy LeHand that “Arthur Goldsmith, a very close personal friend of Joe Kennedy’s, called Jerome Frank today and suggested that it would be most helpful if the President were to send Kennedy a little note on his arrival tomorrow and arrange to have him met by somebody important from the State Department.”
²

In Bermuda, the next leg of his journey, Kennedy was handed another telegram from the president, this one inviting him and Rose to “come to Washington immediately after your arrival in New York to spend Saturday night at the White House.” From Bermuda he called the White House to explain that he would be late arriving in New York, and got Missy LeHand on the phone. She “turned me over to the President whom they evidently had to awaken. The President was very pleasant. . . . He urged Rose and me to come down immediately on arrival.”
³

The ambassador arrived in New York at two thirty on Sunday afternoon, two days late. The White House sent Max Truitt, his closest friend still in government service, to hand-deliver yet another note from Roosevelt. Truitt was accompanied by Robert Stewart, who headed up the British Empire desk at the State Department and had been ordered to stay at Kennedy’s side until he arrived in Washington.

On exiting the plane, Kennedy was besieged by reporters and photographers. “Do I have to go through this before I even see my family?” he asked, laughing. At almost the same moment, he caught sight of Rose, Jean (nearly thirteen), Patricia (sixteen), Eunice (nineteen), and Kick (almost twenty-one)—mother and three older daughters in fur coats, Jean in cloth. Teddy, not yet nine, was missing, his car having been delayed in traffic. After embraces, tears, and smiles all around, the girls and Rose left the room momentarily so that Kennedy could greet the reporters. Looking “for all the world like a man bursting with things to say,” the
New York Times
reported the next morning, the ambassador “limited himself to these words: ‘I have nothing to say until I have seen the President.’ . . . He promised to ‘talk a lot’ when he had had his discussion with the President.”
⁴

He left the reporters and the newsreel cameras to see his daughters, then for a meeting with Rose, John Burns, Eddie Moore, Ted O’Leary, and a trusted and political-savvy Boston friend, Cornelius Fitzgerald. They “talked the situation over as to whether or not I would be for or against the President. I told them that I had many personal grievances, but questioned as to whether or not they were sufficient grounds on which to take a definite stand.” Rose argued rather strenuously that for the good of the family, Kennedy had to back Roosevelt. The president had appointed him as the first Roman Catholic ambassador to London, something no other president had or would have done. He had sent him as his representative to the pope’s coronation. To abandon him now would forever mark Kennedy as an “ingrate.” Burns agreed and warned Kennedy that if he backed away from Roosevelt, it would “turn him into a pariah. . . . None of his boys will able to hold their heads up at a Democratic convention ever again. It will be destructive for all his dreams and hopes for his children.”
⁵

In the end, there was no real question as to what Kennedy would do. He had no faith that Willkie was qualified to serve as president, and despite his dissatisfactions with Roosevelt, he thought him infinitely more competent. He believed as well that Roosevelt would be true to his word and keep America out of the war in Europe.

A little after five
P.M.
, only a few hours after his plane from Bermuda had landed, the ambassador was in the air again, this time with Rose and the State Department official as their chaperon. They arrived in Washington at six thirty and, after posing for photographers and waving to reporters, were whisked away to the White House in a presidential limousine.

Roosevelt brilliantly orchestrated Kennedy’s reception, as he had every step of his journey from London to Lisbon to the Azores to Bermuda to New York to Washington. With James Farley having abandoned the administration and Al Smith campaigning for Willkie, the president needed a high-profile Irish American to come to his defense and declare unequivocally that he was not plotting to send American boys to die in trenches to save the British Empire. The week before Kennedy’s arrival, Felix Frankfurter, now a Supreme Court justice but still among Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers, had approached Frank Murphy, the former governor of Michigan, recent attorney general, and now Supreme Court justice, while they were both “sitting on the bench” and asked his advice on saving “the Catholic vote, which was rapidly leaving Roosevelt.” Murphy, Kennedy wrote later in his diary, had suggested to Frankfurter that the ambassador be asked to make a speech on the president’s behalf. A few days later, Justice Murphy was called to the White House for a meeting with Harry Hopkins and his two colleagues on the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas. The subject, Murphy told Kennedy, was “how they could get me [Kennedy] to come out for them. Douglas and Murphy agreed that I was absolutely important to get. Frankfurter appreciated that I was, but hated to ask me. . . . There was a lot of conversation and it was left to the President to get in touch before (as they said) Krock could get me.”
⁶

Roosevelt, knowing Kennedy’s desire to be treated as an insider, invited him and Rose to spend the night at the White House and arranged for an informal scrambled eggs and sausages dinner to be served not in the dining room, but “on the Upper Floor right off his Study,” with Missy sitting in for Eleanor, and James Byrnes and his wife the only other guests. “When we were about half through the dinner,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “Jim Byrnes, acting as though a wonderful idea had just struck him, said he thought it would be a great idea if I would go on the radio Tuesday night on my own. He thought it absolutely essential that I go and most necessary for the success of the Roosevelt campaign. . . . I didn’t say, Yes, Aye, or No. The President worked very hard on Rose, who I suspect he had come down because of her great influence on me. He talked to her about her father. All through dinner, Byrnes kept selling me the idea, but I made no comment, because I wanted to talk alone with the President before making any decision.”

When, after dinner, the group reassembled in the president’s study, Kennedy announced that “since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the President alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody.” He was, he told the president, “damn sore at the way I have been treated. I feel that it is entirely unreasonable and I don’t think I rated it.” He reminded Roosevelt how, at a rather low point in his presidency, he had “come out for you for a Third Term.” Still, in spite of all that he had done, “you have given me a bad deal.” He cataloged his complaints, from Donovan to the generals to the destroyer deal, as if he were talking to a business associate, not the president of the United States. As he had anticipated, Roosevelt “promptly denied everything,” blaming Knox and Welles and the “career men” in the State Department. After Kennedy confronted him about the leak of one of his cables to Alsop, Roosevelt “disclaimed any responsibility, and protested his friendship for me. Rose chimed in at this point and said it was difficult to get the right perspective on a situation that was 3,000 miles away.” “Somebody is lying very seriously,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “and I suspect the President.”

The discussion “went on and on.” There was, tellingly, no mention of foreign policy initiatives, no questions from Kennedy as to what the president planned to do next, no talk of anything other than the ambassador’s grievances. Rose, in her diary entry, recalled that “Joe did most of the talking. The President looks pale.” After what seemed like hours of Kennedy complaints and Roosevelt explanations, the ambassador brought the long evening to an end, as he recalled in his diary, by telling the president that he would “make the God damned speech for you and I will pay for it myself. It will cost twenty-two or twenty-three thousand dollars but that is alright. . . . I will write the speech myself. I don’t want anyone else to do it for me. . . . I am not going to show it to anyone. You will all trust me or you won’t get it. . . . I have my own ideas about this and I want to get it out my own way.”

Everyone thought that a fine idea; Missy LeHand called the Democratic National Committee and arranged for radio time for the following Tuesday. “I made up my own mind,” Kennedy later told Frank Murphy, “that I was going to acquit myself of all my indebtedness to the President, that I would stand by him, that I would go down the line for him, that I would pay for it myself.”
⁷

Roosevelt had suggested that Kennedy and Rose spend the night at the White House, then return to New York with him on his campaign train. Kennedy declined. If he took the train with Roosevelt, everyone would know he was going to endorse him. It would be better to maintain the suspense and build as large an audience as possible for the Tuesday radio broadcast. Though he hadn’t seen his wife, much less spent the night with her, in more than eight months, he took the late flight back to New York. Rose slept over at the White House in the bedroom where, according to a plaque under the mantelpiece, the Queen of England had slept on her recent visit. “There was no mention made of the King.” Rose could not help but wonder where he had slept.
⁸

The ambassador had promised the reporters who met him at the airport that he would talk to them at eleven
A.M.
the following morning at the Waldorf. But instead of doing so, he had his secretary issue a press release declaring that he would “speak over the nation-wide Columbia network on Tuesday at 9
P.M
.” The Democratic National Committee announced only that it had released one half of the one-hour block it had previously booked and that Kennedy’s radio time would be paid for by his wife and nine children. Kennedy sequestered himself in his hotel suite with John Burns and a few others to draft his speech. He saw no visitors, took no calls, and leaked nothing of what he might say.

“I’ve tried all day long to get you,” Clare Boothe Luce telegraphed on Monday. “The fact that I can’t is I’m afraid answer to a number of questions.
First
and foremost I’m so happy you are home and
safe
and you are to me, like millions of others, as well as Ambassador, a grand guy—even a bit of a hero. I want only for you to know, when you make that radio address tomorrow night . . . you’ll probably help to turn the trick for him. And I want you also to know that I believe with all my heart and soul you will be doing America a terrible disservice. I know too well your private opinions not also to know that half of what you say (
if
you say it) you
really
won’t believe in your heart. . . . I know you will, in the end, do what you think is the right thing. But please remember that the rift that the election of FDR will drive through the National heart is the same rift your speech in support of a third term is going to drive through mine tomorrow.”
⁹

Kennedy’s radio endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt on October 29 was not nearly as full-throated or enthusiastic as four and eight years before. Instead, he delivered an extended, almost pedantic policy statement on the need for the United States to rearm. He had taken to heart the lessons of Jack’s senior thesis, that only rearmament on a grand scale would protect the United States from being bullied by Hitler and the dictators. To preserve the peace, the United States was going to have to quickly rebuild its military strength until it rivaled that of the dictators. “What counts in this hour of crisis is what we in the United States of America are prepared to do in order to make ourselves strong. . . . We are re-arming because it is the only way in which America can stay out of war. . . . It is today our guarantee of peace.” To those who might charge that his was “an unduly pessimistic view of the world situation,” that he was “steeped in gloom,” he asked where in the “world picture” was there “any excuse for gaiety. A large part of the productive capacity of the world is devoted to the cause of killing; millions are facing starvation; millions are facing disease. Great peoples are being sacrificed. . . . Gloom, under such circumstances, is nothing more than ‘facing the facts.’” He closed his talk by focusing attention back to himself, his experience, and his family. “As a servant of the American people I feel that they are entitled to my honest conclusions. In my years of service for the Government, both at home and abroad, I have sought to have honest judgment as my goal. . . . After all, I have a great stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world. The kind of America that they and their children will inherit is of grave concern to us all. In the light of these considerations, I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President of the United States.”
¹⁰