The Patriarch (66 page)

Hufty was correct. In a letter to Cornelius Fitzgerald in Boston, Kennedy directly contradicted the America Firsters’ assumption that Roosevelt wanted to get Americans into the European war. “Until Hitler decides that it is to his best interest to have the United States in, we won’t go in. Maybe I am one of those who has too much confidence in what Roosevelt says, but . . . I just don’t believe that we are going in.”
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O
n January 10, Roosevelt’s lend-lease bill was introduced in both houses of Congress, with hearings scheduled to begin before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs the following Wednesday. The Democratic majority called as its first witnesses the secretaries of state, treasury, war, and the navy, and William Knudsen, director of the president’s Office of Production Management. After a recess for the inauguration, to which Kennedy was invited but did not attend, Hamilton Fish, the senior Republican on the committee, called his witnesses. First on the list was Joseph P. Kennedy, whom Fish and nearly everyone else in Washington believed would forcefully and persuasively oppose the legislation.

Kennedy, aware that the spotlight was going to be turned on him and there was no way to avoid it, booked a half hour of radio time two days before he was scheduled to testify. He was not going to allow his first public appearance since his resignation to be choreographed by congressional committee protocols. Because he was still nominally ambassador to Great Britain (his successor had not yet been named), he called Sumner Welles to inquire whether there were any procedures he should be aware of, and to tell him that he had booked time for himself “to go on the radio and broadcast Saturday night—I am sick and tired of being attacked by both sides and think I am at least entitled to state my position clearly.” He was, he added, particularly “sore” at the president for not “calling off his ‘Henchmen’” who were preemptively attacking him for his opposition to the lend-lease bill.

Welles called back the next day to report that Hull wanted to go over his testimony with him. This Kennedy would not do. He did, however, agree to meet with the president on Thursday morning, two days before his radio address and four days before his House testimony. Because the weather was bad and he was afraid his plane might be grounded, Kennedy took the 12:50
A.M.
train to Washington. He arrived at the White House on schedule that morning. After a fifteen-minute wait, he was “ushered into [Roosevelt’s] bedroom and found he was in his bathroom in his wheel chair. He was attired in sort of grey pajamas and was starting to shave himself. I sat on the toilet-seat and talked with him.” As he had every time he had encountered the president over the past few years, Kennedy began by complaining about “the treatment I had received.” Roosevelt listened, then commented almost casually that no one had “received worse treatment than he had in the last eight years.” The preliminaries out of the way, they proceeded to the business at hand: the lend-lease legislation. Kennedy told the president that he believed the bill might be passed without amendments, but it would be difficult, because as now written, it expanded presidential powers in a way the American people would oppose “unless they understood it better.” Kennedy suggested that Roosevelt allow the Democrats to amend the bill to give Congress more oversight, rather than risk having the Republicans push through their own amendments. The president replied that he would not oppose an amendment that would establish a joint committee that he would “keep posted on what was going on,” but he was not going to delegate to Congress powers that the Constitution had given the executive branch.

Kennedy asked Roosevelt if he had decided on his successor as ambassador to Great Britain. They discussed a number of possibilities, then talked a bit about Jimmy Roosevelt’s decision to try his hand in Hollywood, the administration’s difficulty in getting reliable information about the extent of British dollar holdings, and a few other matters. “His whole attitude was very friendly,” Kennedy recalled in his diary. “I said numerous times that I couldn’t understand why so many people were so anxious about our not being friends. He said he paid no attention to this, but he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t.” Roosevelt kept the meeting going to the point where “he was about an hour late on his appointments.” Nothing, of course, could have pleased Kennedy more. He was back on the inside again, an intimate, a trusted presidential confidant and adviser. Roosevelt was also pleased with the meeting. Later that afternoon, he told his cabinet that he now “thought that Kennedy would not go too far overboard, although he realized that he was always unpredictable and might say anything.”
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That was not the impression Kennedy gave the newspaper reporters he spoke to on leaving the White House. The last thing he wanted was to appear as the president’s stooge. And he did not. The
New York Times,
in a front-page story, headlined
KENNEDY TO URGE OUR “STAYING OUT,”
quoted the ambassador as declaring emphatically that “for once, I am going to say for myself what I have in my mind.” The New York
Daily News
reported on Kennedy’s meeting with Roosevelt in a syndicated front-page story that the
Los Angeles Times
carried under the headline
PRESIDENT GIVEN REBUFF BY KENNEDY: ENVOY SECRETLY CALLED TO WHITE HOUSE OPPOSES AID-TO-BRITAIN BILL.
As evidence that Kennedy was going to oppose the president, the
Daily News
reported that on leaving the White House, he had returned to his suite at the Carlton to meet Burton Wheeler, the leader of the opposition. When reporters finally caught up with the ambassador, he was uncharacteristically “tight lipped and terse. All he would say for publication was: ‘In order that there be no misunderstanding about this at this time, I am going to tell my story in full on Saturday. The accent will be on keeping this country out of war.’”
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J
oseph Kennedy had been preparing to deliver this, his first major foreign policy speech as a private citizen, for months now. His primary consultant was his twenty-four-year-old son, Jack, who had proven his worth as a foreign policy analyst in his senior thesis. Father and son had spent hours together during the ambassador’s November trip to California, discussing how Kennedy might best respond to the accelerating attacks that had followed the Lyons article in the
Boston Sunday Globe.
He trusted Jack’s judgment because he knew his son had listened carefully and absorbed into his thinking much of what he had told him. Kennedy expected Jack to put his thoughts into words that were less provocative than he was likely to come up with himself.

Jack advised his father to take the high road and avoid personal attacks on the columnists who had been savaging him, as journalists “have 365 days a year to strike back.” “I think it is important that you write in a very calm and a judicious manner, not as though you were on the defensive.” Jack also urged his father to correct the impression that he was still an “appeaser.” “It seems to me that if this label is tied to you it may nullify your immediate effectiveness. . . . Lindbergh may prove a good example of this. I don’t mean that you should change your ideas or be all things to all men, but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser.” “Where I think Lindbergh has run afoul is in his declarations that we do not care what happens over there—that we can live at peace with a world controlled by the dictators. . . . I would think that your best angle would be that of course you do not believe this, you with your background cannot stand the idea personally of dictatorships—you hate them—you have achieved the abundant life under a democratic capitalistic system—you wish to preserve it. . . . The point that I am trying to get at is that it is
important that you stress how much you dislike the idea of dealing with dictatorships,
how you wouldn’t trust their word a minute—how you have no confidence in them.”
¹⁹

A little less than six weeks after Jack had laid out his guidelines for his father, on Saturday evening, January 18, 1941, Kennedy spoke into the microphones at the WEAF station in New York, first in several takes for the newsreel cameras, then at seven
P.M.
live over the NBC Red Network. He opened with a call for “tolerance.” Too many well-meaning public servants, himself included, were being smeared by “a few ruthless and irresponsible Washington columnists [who] have claimed for themselves the right to speak for the nation.” He intended to set the record straight and correct the “many false statements regarding my views on foreign policy.” He rejected the label of “defeatist.” As ambassador, he had reported accurately and faithfully on the problems facing Great Britain, but he had never predicted defeat.

Jack had asked him to tone down his rhetoric and avoid the term
appeaser,
but his father was too stubborn, too proud, and too loyal to the master appeaser, Neville Chamberlain, to do this. Instead, he tried to deflect criticism by redefining the term. “Another label used as a smear against certain citizens who favor keeping America out of war is the word ‘appeaser.’ I have been called one. Here is my answer. If by that word, now possessed of hateful implications, it is charged that I advocate a deal with the dictators contrary to the British desires, or that I advocate placing any trust or confidence in their promises, the charge is false and malicious. . . . But, if I am called an appeaser because I oppose the entrance of this country into the present war, I cheerfully plead guilty. So must every one of you who want to keep America out of war.” What precisely he meant by this was far from clear. How could one be an appeaser and yet agree with Roosevelt that it was futile to attempt to negotiate with, to “appease,” Hitler?

Since his primary objective was to support Roosevelt without appearing to be his toady, Kennedy had to refocus the discussion. Instead of entering the debate over the lend-lease bill, he spoke on a topic of his own choosing and presented a series of disjointed arguments against the United States entering the war in Europe. He claimed that the United States was not “prepared to fight a war”; that there had been no national debate over “war aims”; that defeating Germany and rescuing Great Britain was insufficient cause to sacrifice American lives and fortune; that there was no danger of a German invasion of the western hemisphere, even after the defeat of Great Britain.

“It is said that we cannot exist in a world where totalitarianism rules. I grant you—it is a terrible future to contemplate. But why should anyone think that our getting into a war would preserve our ideals, a war which would then practically leave Russia alone outside the war area getting stronger while the rest of the world approached exhaustion? . . . Well, at the end of the war we win—so what? What is the status of the world? Who is going to reorganize Europe? . . . To keep defeated Germany and the other counties from going completely Communistic we will have to reorganize them as well as ourselves, probably standing guard while this reorganization is taking place. I shudder to contemplate it. Are our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives to be spent standing guard in Europe while Heaven knows what happens in America?”

Only at the end of his address did he refer to the lend-lease legislation, but in such a desultory, confused, conflicted manner that it was near impossible to know whether he opposed or supported it. He declared, to the delight of the president, that he was a firm believer “in centralized responsibility and . . . in conferring all powers necessary to carry out that responsibility. Moreover, I appreciate full well that time is of the essence.” And then, out of nowhere, he voiced his objection to the bill in two sentences: “I am unable to agree with the proponents of this bill that it has yet been shown that we face such immediate danger as to justify this surrender of the authority and responsibility of the Congress. I believe that after the hearings have been completed there will be revealed less drastic ways of meeting the problem of adequate authority for the President.”
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No one knew quite what to make of his performance. Harold Ickes, who listened on the tiny radio he had placed on the dinner table, wrote in his diary that “Kennedy gave all of us the impression last night that he was doing some tightrope walking. He would seem to take one position and then to reverse himself. The speech was not impressive.” Democratic senator James Byrnes, who was in favor of the president’s bill, praised Kennedy in public for his “very strong statement of the reasons why this country should render all aid to Britain—promptly—short of war.” Burton Wheeler, who opposed the legislation, declared, also publicly, that he was “in entire accord with Kennedy’s remarks concerning the vital necessity of keeping out of war.”
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Fifteen-year-old Robert Kennedy was relieved, as he wrote his mother, that his father had “really cleared himself from what people have been calling him.” And his father had indeed succeeded in making it clear that he was not an “isolationist” or a “defeatist” or in favor of opening negotiations with the Germans. But he had given Roosevelt’s opponents an opening large enough to drive a truck through by almost casually suggesting that the lend-lease bill might be amended to give Congress some oversight. The
Chicago Tribune,
published by Colonel Robert McCormick, who would later testify against what he and his paper referred to as the “dictator bill,” reported on the speech in a front-page story headlined in large type, boldface,
DON’T ENTER WAR—K
ENNEDY
, with the subhead “Opposes F.D.R. Bill.”
²²

Kennedy had not intended to position himself as an opponent of the president or an advocate of the America First position. He supported the bill in principle and in substance; his objections were minor. There were myriad reasons for him to back the president, as he thought he had. He accepted Roosevelt’s argument that it made sense to aid the British in their fight against the Germans if only to buy time until the United States was fully rearmed; he trusted that Roosevelt was telling the truth when he declared that he had no intention of going to war with Germany; and he supported the president’s full-throttle rearmament campaign, which he expected would produce more than enough military goods to share some with the British. More practically, even had he disagreed with the legislation, it is likely he would have kept his complaints to himself or muttered them in private rather than go on the radio and testify to Congress about them. If he or, more probably, his boys, were to have any future in politics, it would be as Democrats. Irish Catholic politicians did not go very far in the Republican Party.