The Patriarch (65 page)

Three weeks earlier, Charlie Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
had opened in New York City. It was drawing good crowds at premium ticket prices across the country. Knowing Hollywood’s herd mentality and understanding the endemic yet often unexpressed rage in Hollywood against Hitler, nazism, and Germany, Kennedy feared that Chaplin’s picture and the earlier release of
The Mortal Storm,
another successful anti-Nazi film starring Jimmy Stewart, would set the stage for similar films. His message to the studio executives was to stay away from the subject entirely, that demonizing Germans, though emotionally satisfying, was going to prolong the war and the suffering by making it more difficult for both sides to approach the bargaining table. The longer war raged in Europe, the greater the likelihood that Americans would be drawn in. And if that happened, Kennedy warned, the cry would go out across the nation that American boys and resources were being sacrificed because the Hollywood Jews had hoodwinked the nation into fighting a war it had no business getting into.
²⁴

Kennedy’s attack on Jewish producers was so intemperate, so uncalled for, and ultimately so provocative that it left observers struggling to figure out if some ulterior motive was in play. “His campaign of terrorism,” British Foreign Service officer Eric Cleugh reported, might have been “prompted by a hope that it will cause some of the Jews to get out of the business, so leaving a gap for Mr. Kennedy.” Several of those who had heard him speak at Warner Brothers “and who ‘sit in high places’ in this industry,” Fairbanks Jr. noted in his letter to Roosevelt, “feel that . . . he is personally ambitious to take over powers in the film business. He has suggested ‘clean-ups’ and ‘clean-outs.’” Darryl Zanuck, who was not Jewish, was asked the day after the luncheon what he thought Kennedy’s motives had been in bringing up the subject of anti-Semitism. He replied, “He wants to scare the Jews out of the film business so that he can get back into it again.”
²⁵

Kennedy’s remarks at the Warner Brothers luncheon were not recorded or reported in the newspapers. But news of what he had said was quickly relayed to Washington and to New York, where the Century Group, a loosely organized committee of journalists, lawyers, retired military men, and politicians who advocated expanded assistance to the British, if not an American declaration of war on Germany, drafted a letter demanding that Roosevelt repudiate Kennedy “as an official spokesman for the United States in any capacity” and remove him from his ambassadorial position, “not on the soft cushion with a ‘well-done’ accolade, but with a summary and indignant discharge.”
²⁶
Roosevelt, who already knew Kennedy was going to resign, saw no need to do anything.

From Hollywood, Kennedy flew back to New York to continue his one-man antiwar crusade, not in public but in a series of meetings at the Waldorf Towers with the country’s most influential opponents of intervention. On Friday, November 22, the day after Thanksgiving, he visited with ex-president Herbert Hoover. The ex-president, delighted but perhaps a bit puzzled by the visit of a Roosevelt appointee who had worked so hard to defeat him in 1932, agreed entirely with Kennedy on the futility of war and the need for a negotiated end to the hostilities, before Europe’s great cities were reduced “to rubble heaps.” Hoover kept a detailed record of the meeting and recalled Kennedy telling him that “if we went into the war, we would have a National Socialist state—he said he could see no return to democratic forms. He said that as between a bet on the British going down and our becoming a totalitarian government, we have to take the risk of British defeat . . . to avoid totalitarianism by keeping out of the war.” On leaving the ex-president, the ambassador announced, unbidden, “that he would keep in communication with me, that we have a joint mission to keep America out of the war, and that he wanted to devote his every energy to it.”
²⁷

Following his session with Hoover, Kennedy met with Joseph Patterson of the New York
Daily News,
Roy Howard, Charles Lindbergh, and others. To all of them, he insisted that the British position was “hopeless” and the best possible outcome to the war was a “negotiated peace.”
²⁸

—

O
n December 1, Kennedy stopped off in Washington on his way to Palm Beach to meet with Roosevelt and formally submit his resignation. Though the president had not yet chosen a replacement, he accepted Kennedy’s resignation with the caveat that he remain in office until a new ambassador could be named and confirmed. He did not rebuke him for telling Lyons that “democracy was finished” in Britain or for mouthing off about Jewish influence in Hollywood. Well aware that he might have need of Kennedy’s support in the recurring battles he anticipated over rearmament and assistance to Great Britain, Roosevelt had no intention of alienating him further. Instead, he discussed with him, as he would with a senior adviser or a man he was considering for a new appointment, “several problems bothering him,” including economic relations with Canada and South America, potential labor problems at defense plants, and the hard road ahead “fitting Naval plans in with naval production contractors, etc.” Kennedy, for his part, greeted the president as he would an old and trusted friend. “When he complained that people don’t understand all the problems and mentioned his own physical indisposition [he was suffering from a bad cold], I said: ‘For God sake don’t let anything happen to you and then have to take Wallace [Henry Wallace, his vice president]—you’re responsible for him and he has no experience.’ He replied, ‘That’s right, I’ll be careful.’”
²⁹

In a statement released to the press on exiting the White House, Kennedy announced that he was resigning.

“Today the President was good enough to express regret over my decision, but to say that, not yet being prepared to appoint my successor, he wishes me to retain my designation as ambassador until he is prepared. But I shall not return to London in that capacity. My plan is, after a short holiday, to devote my efforts to what seems to me the great cause in the world today—and means, if successful, the preservation of the American form of democracy. That cause is to help the President keep the United States out of war.”
³⁰

Twenty-seven

T
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A
pparently Joe Kennedy is out to do whatever damage he can,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary on December 1, 1940, the same day Kennedy had his cordial reunion with the president at the White House. “He has had an interview with Hearst with a view to starting a campaign for appeasement in this country. He has seen, or is about to see, Roy Howard and Joe Patterson, of the
New York News,
who for some reason has been talking appeasement. . . . This would make a powerful combination. Kennedy has lots of money and can probably raise all that he needs.”
¹

Four days later, Alsop and Kintner sounded the same warning, but in public: “Let there be no mistake about it. When Joseph P. Kennedy grandiloquently announced he was laying down his office to fight for the cause of peace, he really meant he was going to peddle appeasement all across the United States. . . . Indeed, he seems to have been at it already. For it must be more than a coincidence that wherever Kennedy has gone in the country since his return from London, there have been sudden crops of defeatist rumors and appeasement talk. By following his announced plan of seeking out leading men and telling them his story, Kennedy may have a great effect on public opinion.”
²

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O
n December 11, 1940, General Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck, the chairman of the anti-interventionist America First Committee, approached Kennedy with a proposal. Believing (as did most foes and friends of the president) that Kennedy was ready to campaign full-time now against the administration, he suggested that he succeed him as chairman of the committee. Kennedy’s reply was courteous, if noncommittal: “My own hunch is, at least for the time being while I am still Ambassador in name, I won’t join any Committees, and after I get out I think I will have to decide just how I think I can work best.” He agreed, nonetheless, to meet in Palm Beach with Robert Stuart, Jr., who had founded the America First Committee while a law student at Yale and now served as its national director. After the meeting, Kennedy wrote Wood again to confirm that he was not going to join the committee just yet, but that he was prepared to “do everything I possibly can to help you.”
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L
ess than two weeks after leaving Washington for Palm Beach, Kennedy was called back for the funeral of Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States and dear friend of Lady Astor’s. Met at Washington Airport by reporters, “he seemed determined as he strode along the concrete runway to avoid political matters,” until he was asked a question about preparedness. He answered “dryly” that what the nation needed was “less talk about going to war and more action about building up our defenses.” This was taken by some as an indication that Kennedy was ready to return to Washington to help build those defenses. “Guessing what Joseph P. Kennedy will do next,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported on December 16, 1940, “is one of Washington’s most popular sports.”
⁴

Arthur Krock, who defended Kennedy in his December 8 column against “the close-knit and sincere, but intolerant group” that attacked him as an “appeaser,” was working on his own plan to bring Kennedy back into the government. He proposed to Roosevelt and to Hull that Kennedy be appointed as a special presidential envoy and sent to Ireland, ostensibly to discuss food supplies but secretly to negotiate with President Éamon de Valera on behalf of the British, who wanted to be able to make use of Irish military bases. The proposal was outlandish, noted Neville Butler, currently in charge of the British embassy in Washington. Still, Butler warned, the suggestion had to be taken seriously, as it came from Krock and Kennedy, “people of importance in this world here with correspondent capacity for mischief.” Butler was instructed by Halifax, with Churchill’s full agreement, to meet with Hull and tell him that the British government “do not consider that good is likely to come of [the initiative]. For your own information, we regard Mr. Kennedy as a highly unsuitable emissary though we appreciate that we must not antagonize him or such Irish-American opinion as is under his influence.”
⁵

On the Sunday of the Lothian funeral, Kennedy noted in his diary that before attending Mass at St. Matthew’s, he had “read in
Washington Post,
owned by Eugene Meyer, a Jew, that five prominent men had written short eulogies on Lothian.” Four of the five were active in the campaign for American assistance to the British war effort: Felix Frankfurter, “who is supposed directly and indirectly to influence Roosevelt on Foreign Policy over Hull’s and Welles’s heads [and] whose cohort of young lawyers are in practically every government department, all aiding the cause of Jewish refugees getting into America”; “John W. Davis attorney for J. P. Morgan . . . Tom Lamont, head of Morgans, who would certainly like to get U.S. in”; and William Allen White, the publisher/editor of the Kansas
Emporia Gazette
and chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. “It looks to me,” Kennedy noted in his diary, “as if the English sympathizers were tying their cause in with the Jews because they figure they’ve got all the influence in U.S.”
⁶

He was not alone in his fear that the Jews had too much influence in Washington. Kennedy reported in his diary that Justice Frank Murphy had told him the month before, when they met in New York City, that “it was Frankfurter and Ben Cohen who wrote the Attorney General’s opinion on destroyers and bases. Murphy regards the Jewish influence as most dangerous. He said that after all, Hopkins’ wife was a Jew; Hull’s wife is a Jew; and Frankfurter and Cohen and that group are all Jews.” Sumner Welles had also told Kennedy that he thought Frankfurter “dangerous.” Frankfurter, he told Kennedy, “read all the papers [diplomatic dispatches?] and made suggestions to Roosevelt—
He’s
a
Jew chiseler.”
⁷

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long reported to Kennedy that he too was having difficulties with the Jewish organizations that were lobbying for an immediate and significant increase in “emergency visas” for refugees from Nazi-occupied territories. With the support of Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and in partnership with J. Edgar Hoover, Long had demanded that visa requirements for Jewish refugees be tightened, not loosened, to prevent the Nazis from flooding the nation with spies. “Saw Long,” Kennedy noted in his diary. “Getting madder and madder at tactics of Frankfurter, Meyer [Eugene, publisher of the
Washington Post
], and other Jews to get Jew political refugees in U.S.— They were constantly harassing him. . . . The Department of Justice was split up—[Solicitor General Francis] Biddle headed up the Jews and their connection. They wouldn’t let the FBI investigate the names of the refugees. Just an unholy show. (Looks like it needs an investigation.) [Long] told me again [about] the copy of the letter from big Jew who offered German cause $300,000 to get some Jews out. This refugee situation stinks to Heaven but no paper will print the story.”
⁸

Long, in slightly more decorous and disguised language, confirmed in his diary that same day that he was under siege by organized Jewry. “The attacks on the Department and the unpleasant situation in the press over the refugee matter seems to continue. It is more widespread than it was and seems to be joined up with the small element in this country which wants to push us into this war. Those persons are largely concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard, and principally around New York. There are elements of them in the Government here. They are all woven together in the barrage of opposition against the State Department which makes me the bull’s eye.”
⁹

Upon his return to Palm Beach, Kennedy wrote John Burns, recounting what he had learned from Long. The British government and the American Jews were “getting together in this whole campaign to get America into this war” and no one dared speak out against it. Worse yet, the Jews had become so powerful that they were steamrolling their proposals for refugee resettlement through Washington. “A greater fraud and well-engineered scheme was never perpetrated on the American public than that a thousand refugees have been taken into the United States; not one of them, I know, had ever been investigated by the F.B.I., and yet I don’t suppose any newspaper in the United States would print the truth for fear of losing advertisers—and then we boast of the freedom of the press. Nuts, I say.” He still trusted Roosevelt to “make the right decision, if left alone,” he claimed in a letter to Frank Murphy in late December. “It is the influence around him, I fear.”
¹⁰

Since returning to the United States, Kennedy’s paranoia about Jewish influence had gotten the better of him. The more he found himself on the outside, scorned and criticized as an appeaser, a man out of touch with reality, a traitor to the Roosevelt cause, the more he blamed the Jews. Incapable of understanding why his warnings that the British were doomed and were doing all they could to bring down America with them was nowhere heeded, he looked for conspiracy—and found it. The Jews opposed him and orchestrated the attacks on him, he convinced himself, because he was committed to finding a way to live at peace with Hitler, while they were committed to going to war. That there was no basis for such conclusions did not deter him from voicing them in gratuitous and increasingly grotesque anti-Semitic language.

His fears that the Jews had become too powerful in Washington were, of course, entirely misplaced. Jewish influence on foreign policy was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent. In the months and years to come, Breckinridge Long would, virtually unopposed, institute visa requirements that succeeded in cutting back the number of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States. By mid-1941, new regulations, supposedly written to keep out Nazi spies masquerading as German Jews, had reduced the number of visas offered to about 25 percent of the available quota. After Pearl Harbor, visa procedures would be tightened again, preventing even more Jewish refugees from entering the country.
¹¹

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A
s Kennedy had feared, and warned, and as Lord Lothian had undiplomatically announced in November two weeks before his death, the British were “broke”—or if not yet “broke,” very close to running out of the dollars they needed to pay for the military hardware they were requesting. Giving them any armaments on credit was illegal according to the current Neutrality Acts; giving them away as a gift was politically impossible. Roosevelt found a third option, which he explained at a December 17 press conference. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.”
¹²

In a fireside chat on December 29, Roosevelt further elaborated on what has become known as “lend-lease”—a program, he declared at the onset, that was about national security, not war. He began by ruling out any possibility that the United States would ever attempt to broker or “encourage talk of peace” with the “aggressor nations.” “The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” There were those, he admitted, who believed “that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us,” but they were dangerously wrong. National security depended on the survival of Britain. “If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” The British had not asked for American troops, and even if they had, the president had no intention of sending them. “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.” To protect the nation from future attacks and assist the British in repelling the current one, America had to become “the great arsenal of democracy.”
¹³

While Roosevelt put his cabinet to work on writing legislation to implement the lend-lease program, the America First Committee, disturbed by both his declaration that he would not seek a negotiated peace and his intention to supply the British with increased military assistance, marshaled its arguments and its forces. On January 4, Robert Stuart, Jr., the national America First Committee director who had earlier met with Kennedy in Palm Beach, wrote Page Hufty, the coordinator of the Florida branch, to ask him to get back in touch with the ambassador. “With relation to Ambassador Kennedy, I feel more than ever that he is one of our most important cards. He has got to be played right. . . . More than any other man in the country today, he can cut through the confusion that exists in so many people’s thinking. I do hope that if you have any influence with him, or know anyone who has, you will prevail upon him to come out and take a stand at the earliest possible moment.”
¹⁴

Hufty tried but got nowhere. Kennedy did not, he wrote Stuart, “feel it was wise for him to make a move until the Administration’s program had been presented in tangible form which would give him something more specific to attack. He felt that the American people would not be interested in what he had to say much more than once and that therefore he should be very careful to pick his spot for that time.” Though Kennedy had left the door open to joining the anti-intervention campaign, Hufty held out little hope that he ever would. “Ambassador Kennedy still clings to his conviction that President Roosevelt is sincerely anxious to keep us out of war.”
¹⁵