The Patriarch (64 page)

His address was over by 9:30. At 10:18, the president sent a telegram to his suite at the Waldorf. “We have all just listened to a grand speech. Many thanks. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow evening.” Jack cabled from California, “Proud to have sponsored you.”
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The following day, at a rally and speech at the Boston Garden, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his audience how pleased he had been to “welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador in the Court of St. James’s, Joe Kennedy.” Kennedy, who had decided not to accompany the president to Boston, got a telegram that night from Kick, who reported from Eddie Moore that “the Pres really went to town for you tonight in Boston amidst terrific cheers from the crowd. . . . It’s great to be famous. Goodnight from your 4th hostage.”
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The Republicans picked up on the president’s reference in his Boston speech to “my” rather than “our” ambassador as further evidence of the president’s dictatorial pretensions. The White House issued a legal opinion that the ambassador, having been appointed by the president, was indeed “his” ambassador, but the critiques continued. Roosevelt could have cared less. Kennedy’s address had done what he had wanted it to do and more. It had rallied reluctant Irish Catholic voters to his side, buttressed his claims that he was not going to take the nation into war, and emphasized that he alone had the experience to lead the nation in these difficult times.

On the Saturday before election day, Kennedy joined seventy-six thousand fans at Yankee Stadium to watch Notre Dame defeat Army, 7–0. After the game, he visited with Frank Murphy, who recorded their conversation in his diary notes. “‘For heaven sakes, get me some tea and cinnamon toast at once—I am starved,’ he [Kennedy] remarked as he sprawled out on the davenport to rest.” For the next hour or so, he recounted in a stream of unbroken bitterness all the affronts he had suffered in London. “He was violent and profane in explaining it all. He practically left no one uncursed but that is the style of this able and dynamic man and so it ought not to be given too much emphasis. That he was filled with wrath and possessed contempt for those who have tried to undo him was plain.”
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Three days later, on November 5, 1940, the American people went to the polls and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with 55 percent of the popular vote and 449 of 531 of the electoral college votes.

The Wednesday after the election, Kennedy returned to Washington and visited the White House, congratulated the president, and told him he wanted to resign his position. Roosevelt asked him to wait until he had found and named a replacement.

The ambassador’s next stop was the State Department, where he met with Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, and Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, now head of a special division handling problems related to the European war, including the refugees. Nothing could shake or temper Kennedy’s pessimism, which was so stark and out of line with recent events that Long attributed it to a kind of battle fatigue. The ambassador refused to see what everyone else in Washington saw: that the RAF had turned back the Luftwaffe campaign to free the airspace over the English Channel; that the Germans had called off their invasion plans; that Spain had not entered the war on the side of Germany and Italy; that there had been no coordinated German-Italian thrust toward the Suez Canal; that Italy, in fact, had turned away from the Middle East and invaded Greece instead; that the British were already and the Americans would soon begin turning out more fighters and bombers than the Germans.

None of this had had any effect on Kennedy. The cataclysm he had feared had come to pass. Even Breckinridge Long, no cheery-eyed optimist, was frightened and disturbed by Kennedy’s relentless negativity. “He sees a new philosophy, both political and economic, with the United States excluded from European markets and from Far Eastern markets and from South American markets. . . . Consequently he thinks that we ought to take some steps to implement a realistic policy and make some approach to Germany and to Japan which would result in an economic collaboration. He does not see how or what. He has no suggestion to make. He only feels that what we are doing is wrong but does not know how to do it right. . . . He does not believe in our present policy. He does not believe in the continuing of democracy. He thinks that we will have to assume a Fascist form of government here or something similar to it if we are to survive in a world of concentrated and centralized power.” At the conclusion of their meeting, Kennedy told Long that “he was going to the west coast and would see Hearst and try and set him right and see other publishers like McCormick and I [Long] told him that he ought not to talk to the press or to talk in a way that would scare the American people . . . that the American people needed education in foreign affairs and that to thrust it upon them too suddenly would be disastrous. He agreed and said that he would not do that.”
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Kennedy would have been wise to heed Long’s counsel.

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O
n November 7, the day after Long had warned him not to talk to the press, the ambassador flew to Boston to visit with Joe Jr. in Cambridge and Bob at Priory, catch up with friends and family, and check into the Lahey Clinic for a full physical examination. When he arrived at the Ritz-Carlton, he found a note from
Boston Daily Globe
reporter Louis Lyons, who had interviewed him four years earlier for a favorable story that received wide national coverage: “The
Globe
hopes I can persuade you to talk to me a little for our people—just as a traveler home from the wars, not political talk. . . . Anytime, anywhere that you can spare me a snatch of time, I’d like to make the most of it.”
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Kennedy could not say no.

On Saturday afternoon, Lyons arrived at the Ritz-Carlton for the interview. With him were Charles Edmonson of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and his editor, Ralph Coghlan, to whom Kennedy had promised a “background” briefing on the war. The three journalists found Kennedy in his shirtsleeves, eating apple pie, perhaps celebrating the clean bill of health he had gotten the day before at the Lahey Clinic. Thinking that he was among friends—after all, Lyons was a Boston reporter—and assuming that he was speaking off the record and would not be quoted directly, Kennedy held court for the next ninety minutes. He was at his best that afternoon: jovial, warm, opinionated, a reporter’s dream. He never stopped talking and did not censor what he had to say. He repeated in clear, plain, tough talk what he had been putting into his diplomatic dispatches for more than a year. Lyons took it all down.

“People call me a pessimist. I say, ‘What is there to be gay about? Democracy is all done.’”

“You mean in England or this country, too?” he was asked.

“Well, I don’t know. If we get into war it will be in this country, too. A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone. They tell me that after 1918 we got it all back again. But this is different. There’s a different pattern in the world.”

Asked about British democracy and what it meant “to have labor men now at the center of government,” he answered bluntly, “It means national socialism is coming out of it. . . . Democracy is finished in England. It may be here. Because it comes to a question of feeding people. It’s all an economic question. . . . We haven’t felt the pinch of it yet. It’s ahead of us.”

He insisted it was important to provide Great Britain with military aid “to give us time” to rearm. He would not even try to guess how the war would end but was insistent that America stay out.

“‘I’m willing to spend all I’ve got to keep us out of the war,’ Kennedy flashed towards the end of his talk. ‘There’s no sense in our getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.’” He claimed that he was starting up his own “determined and fighting crusade, to ‘keep us out. . . . I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it’s up to me to see that the country gets it,’ he says in explanation of the role of carrying the torch that he has cut out for himself.”

The reporters left the hotel that afternoon with more than they had bargained for. Coghlan, assuming the interview remained off the record and “for background,” did not publish anything. But Lyons, knowing a big story when he saw one, wrote up what Kennedy had told him.

To make it clear to his readers—many of whom were Kennedy fans—that he had not intended to hang Kennedy and that any damage done was self-inflicted, he embedded a paragraph, subheaded “Reporter’s Dilemma,” in the middle of his article, explaining that he had planned to do a “soft” Sunday piece but had been given much more, which he now felt obligated to share with his readers.
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T
he next morning, back in Bronxville, Kennedy was called to the phone by Joe Dinneen, another
Boston Daily Globe
reporter. Neville Chamberlain had died and Dinneen wanted a quote from Kennedy.

“‘That’s quite an interview you gave Louis Lyons for this morning’s paper,’ the reporter [Dinneen] said.

“‘Why? What did he say?’ Joe asked.

“‘What did he say?’ [Dinneen] repeated. ‘He wrote everything you told him.’

“Dinneen proceeded to read some of Kennedy’s quotes from the story.

“There was a dead silence on the other end. [Dinneen] thought they had been cut off. . . .

“‘He wrote all that?’ Kennedy asked incredulously.

“‘All that and a lot more,’ he was told. ‘Anything wrong with it? You said it, didn’t you?’

“There was another pause. ‘I said it,’ he agreed.”
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The interview appeared in Boston in full, with an edited and more volatile version syndicated by the Associated Press on front pages across the country. Kennedy claimed the next day that the interview had been “off the record” and not for publication and that Lyons, who took no notes, had gotten several quotes wrong and manipulated others to “create a different impression entirely than I would want to set forth.” The problem with his explanation, as Arthur Krock wrote him, was that “the general impression here seems to be—and this goes for the State Department also—that whatever the facts about the off-the-record restrictions the sentiments sound very much like yours, with one or two exceptions.”
¹⁸

The
New York
Herald Tribune
called on Kennedy to explain himself or resign. Alsop and Kintner had a field day. “The history of American diplomacy is replete with fantastic incidents,” they wrote forty-eight hours after the article appeared, “but a good many State Department officials agree that the recent interview given by Joseph P. Kennedy . . . comes near to winning the prize.” The two reporters concluded, without any evidence, that the ambassador’s “crusade for ‘peace’ . . . is obviously a potential front, behind which Kennedy and the men who go along with him may be able to start the first articulate, unblushing movement for appeasement the country has yet seen.” That Kennedy had mentioned nothing about “appeasing” Hitler did not register with Alsop and Kintner, who had gone looking for and found numerous “indications of appeasement-mindedness” in the interview.
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To protect himself from the onslaught in London, Kennedy cabled a warning to Lord Beaverbrook. “The bombers may be tough in London but the ill-disposed newspapers are tougher in America. . . . Tell my friends not to pay any attention to anything they read that I say unless I sign or deliver it myself. There is as much conniving . . . in this country as there is in Russia.”
²⁰

On November 19, Republican congressman George Tinkham inserted into the
Congressional Record
a verbatim copy of the article and follow-up stories in the
New York Times
and the
Boston Evening Transcript.

Kennedy reluctantly and belatedly recognized that he had to now issue a “restatement of his position.” Bluntly, unapologetically, and quite untruthfully, he denied having made “anti-British statements in this country [or] saying that I do not expect the British to win the war.” His chief concern, he emphasized, remained “keeping America out of the war—but there has never been any secret about that. Everyone has known from the beginning that I have been against American entry into the war.”
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G
eneral Raymond E. Lee, Kennedy’s military attaché in London, had noted earlier the ambassador’s penchant for “going off into a tirade or oration” at the drop of a hat. He “used almost to get drunk on his own verbosity, and I am inclined to think that is what betrayed him on many occasions.” This was precisely what had happened at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. It would happen again a week later, on the other end of the continent.

Kennedy had flown west to visit with Jack, who was taking courses at Stanford, and drive with him to see Hearst and Marion at Wyntoon, their estate in northern California. On his way back to New York, he accepted an invitation from the Warner brothers to speak at a luncheon at their studio. His topic was supposed to have been the difficulties of importing films to Europe in wartime, but he instead delivered a thundering three-hour monologue, in which he declared with an almost manic urgency that the British were doomed, that Britain’s Jews were being blamed for the war in Europe, and that Hollywood and America’s Jews would be similarly blamed for whatever hardships might occur should the United States enter the war. According to one Hollywood insider who provided columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner with an account of the talk, Kennedy’s discussion of anti-Semitism was not only “strangely irrelevant,” but in the view of most of those assembled had been “introduced into the discussion for scare-head purposes.”
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“He apparently threw the fear of God into many of our producers and executives,” Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., wrote President Roosevelt the day after the speech, “by telling them that the Jews were on the spot, and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the ‘democracies’ versus the ‘dictators.’ . . . He continued to underline the fact that the film business was using its power to influence the public dangerously and that we all, and the Jews in particular, would be in jeopardy, if they continued to abuse that power.”
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