The Patriarch (67 page)

Why, then, did he not come right out and endorse the legislation? Because he was too proud to permit himself to be viewed, again, as the president’s yes-man; too independent-minded to unequivocally support legislation he had not been consulted on; too obsessed by his own fears to focus on anyone else’s agenda, even that of the president of the United States; too caught up with his own importance to speak to the issue that mattered.

In the end, he failed to understand what was required of him in a wartime emergency. Joseph P. Kennedy had battled all his life to become an insider, to get inside the Boston banking establishment, inside Hollywood, inside the Roosevelt circle of trusted advisers. But he had never been able to accept the reality that being an “insider” meant sacrificing something to the team. His sense of his own wisdom and unique talents was so overblown that he truly believed he could stake out an independent position for himself and still remain a trusted and vital part of the Roosevelt team.

His abbreviated, curiously ambiguous, almost obscurantist remarks in his radio address on Saturday night focused added attention on his Tuesday morning testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Again, the consensus opinion was that he would speak in opposition to the bill as written. Walter Trohan of the anti-Roosevelt
Chicago Tribune
recalled in a letter written years later that he had been with Kennedy “the night before he testified. . . . He screamed, bellowed, and beat his breast that lend-lease meant war and shouted that war must be stopped because it would wreck our way of life.”
²³

—

H
e was called to testify at ten
A.M.
as the lead-off Republican witness. He would hold the floor for the next five hours. “Mr. Kennedy’s testimony,” the
New York Times
reported the next morning in a front-page story, “drew the largest gallery of any witness so far heard on the lease-lend bill. A throng of several hundred, predominantly women, including many inaugural visitors, jammed all available space in the Ways and Means Committee auditorium. On many occasions the audience broke into applause as Mr. Kennedy, with Irish wit and Boston straight-talk, shot his answer back to a searching question.” No one could nail him down; he treated congressmen from both sides of the debate and both sides of the aisle with studied contempt as they tried to get him to say something he did not intend to say. He did not think the president had made any secret deals with the British or that the bill, if passed in its present form, would bring the nation closer to war. He was in favor of giving the president the powers needed to provide the British with immediate assistance, but he was opposed to the bill as written because it did not provide for a “coordinating function” for Congress. When asked what he meant by “coordinating function” or if he might suggest how the bill should be amended to provide it, he declined to elaborate, insisting only that he was sure that after the debate in Congress, the matter would be resolved.
²⁴

He left the hearing room satisfied with his performance, unprepared for the reaction that would follow. Taken together, his radio address and congressional testimony would prove an unmitigated disaster. His final descent into the political purgatory in which he would spend the remainder of his years can be dated from the moment he left the hearing room on Tuesday afternoon.

—

T
he press coverage was devastating. He had “out-Hamleted Hamlet,” wrote columnist Dorothy Thompson, who supported the lend-lease bill. “Instead of posing the question ‘To be or not to be’ he managed to make it, ‘To be and not to be.’” Even
Time
and
Life,
Henry Luce’s large-circulation weeklies that were usually so friendly, mocked him heartlessly, perhaps in retaliation for his decision to endorse Roosevelt for a third term. “Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who smilingly took the stand,”
Time
reported in its summary of the first week’s hearings, filled “the room with obfuscation [and] could not even make up his mind whether he should be called ‘Mister’ or ‘ambassador.’ Said Mr. Kennedy cheerfully: ‘Whichever way you want me is all right with me.’ It was the nearest he got to defining his position.”
Life
reported that “Joe Kennedy had entangled himself in ambiguities from which even his best friends seemed unable to extract him.” The Republicans and America Firsters were astounded by his refusal to come out against the bill or attack the president as a warmonger; the administration accounted him nothing less than a traitor for his reluctance to stand behind the president and his bill.
²⁵

“I tried to be as fair as I could at the testimony before the House Committee,” he wrote John Boettiger from Palm Beach on February 10, “and if you read it sometime you will be convinced that under the circumstances I got out quite well. Now, if my statements and my position means that, outside of the ever loyal Boettigers, I am to be a social outcast by the administration, well so be it. I will be sorry but if that’s the way it is, it’s just too bad. I will, at least, have the satisfaction of having fulfilled all my obligations.”
²⁶

Boettiger sent a copy of Kennedy’s note to the White House, hoping that the president might reassure and welcome the ambassador back into the fold. Roosevelt was reluctant to do either. He was furious that Kennedy, while agreeing in principle with the lend-lease legislation, had refused to give it his unqualified support. “It is, I think, a little pathetic that he worries about being, with his family, social outcasts,” Roosevelt replied to his son-in-law. “As a matter of fact, he ought to realize of course that he has only himself to blame for the country’s opinion as to his testimony before the Committees. Most people and most papers got the feeling that he was blowing hot and blowing cold at the same time—trying to carry water on both shoulders.”

Displaying an anger that he seldom allowed to be glimpsed outside family confines—and a touch of WASPish condescension that he also hid well—Roosevelt explained to his son-in-law that Joe Kennedy was an unreliable ally, and would always be—not because he was ambitious, which he was, not because he enjoyed wielding power, which he did, but because all he cared about was preserving the fortune he had accumulated and handing it on to his children. “The truth of the matter,” Roosevelt continued, “is that Joe is and always has been a temperamental Irish boy, terrifically spoiled at an early age by huge financial success; thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly selfish, and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with a million dollars apiece, when he dies (he has told me that often). He had a positive horror of any change in the present methods of life in America. To him, the future of a small capitalistic class is safer under a Hitler than under a Churchill. This is sub-conscious on his part and he does not admit it. Personally, I am very fond of Joe and he is wrong in referring to being hurt by my ‘hatchet men.’ I have none of course, though there are lots of people who speak out on both sides of the fence! After the lend-lease Bill goes through, I will write Joe to ask him to stop off on his way North. Sometimes I think I am 200 years older than he is.”
²⁷

It is difficult to argue with any of this, save Roosevelt’s unnecessary reference to Kennedy as being Irish or his thoughtless remark that Kennedy believed the “small capitalistic class . . . safer under a Hitler.” He most definitely did not. Had he, he would have been much less frightened by the likelihood of a German victory in Europe.

PART VI

Palm Beach and Hyannis Port

Twenty-eight

A
F
ORCED
R
ETIREMENT

P
ress attention over Kennedy’s lend-lease testimony subsided soon enough and, with it, any interest in what he had to say or was doing. Except for an item or two in the Palm Beach society pages, his name all but disappeared from the daily newspapers and weekly magazines. Only Arthur Krock made mention of him in columns published in April, May, July, and September 1941, each of which suggested that Kennedy was one of several “brilliant ‘unemployed’” business executives who belonged in Washington.

There were no more invitations from the America Firsters to write or broadcast or speak out on their behalf. The whirlwind antiwar crusade that he had promised—and that some in the Roosevelt camp had so feared—never materialized. If he had wanted, he could have found venues for his views, or bought them, but he had said his piece, and until the situation changed, he had nothing more to say. “As I promised at the time of my appearance before the Foreign Relations Committee,” he wrote Franklin Gowen, still at the U.S. embassy in London, “if the Lease-Lend Bill were passed after proper debate, I would go along with it, so I have kept religiously quiet. I have disappeared from the stage and will let new faces take on.”
¹

Early in the following year, Jack Kennedy would tell his girlfriend Inga Arvad, whose conversations the FBI monitored because they feared she might be a German spy, that “his father’s greatest mistake was not talking enough; that he stopped too quickly and was accused of being an appeaser” because he feared that his comments “might hurt his two sons later in politics.”
²

On resigning as ambassador, Kennedy had, indeed, stopped talking to the press. He retreated into a closed Palm Beach universe, surrounded by adoring children and golfing buddies. He was not a recluse or a shut-away, but preferred to spend time at home—and at the Palm Beach Country Club, the “Jewish club,” which was only a few minutes distant. (He was, he boasted, one of the club’s two non-Jewish members. The other was the Duke of Windsor.) He had given up playing tennis with his boys when Joe Jr. got good enough to beat him. But he still enjoyed a round of golf with them, probably because he still played better than they did. He played fast, never wasted time, never lost a ball (to his children’s and his caddy’s amazement), though he spent a good deal of time looking for the ones that went astray, and seldom lost any money on his bets. His favorite ploy with his boys was to remind them, on those few occasions when they were leading, that they had only “two up with three to go,” ratcheting up the pressure on them not to mess up, which, Ted remembers, they inevitably did.
³

He saw his children over their Christmas and Easter vacations but was alone with his buddies most of the winter. Rose visited occasionally but didn’t stay for long. Joe Jr. was still at Harvard Law School, Kick at Finch College on Manhattan’s East Side, Bob at Priory in Rhode Island, Pat and Jean at the Sacred Heart Convent school in the Bronx, and Rosemary in Washington, D.C., at St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, a residential school for “retarded” girls staffed by Benedictine sisters from St. Scholastica Priory in Duluth, Minnesota.

St. Gertrude’s was a temporary solution for Rosemary until the situation improved in England and she could return to live with Mother Isabel. At twenty-two years of age, Rosemary was much older than the other students at St. Gertrude’s, but there were few other institutions in the country that could accommodate the special needs of a woman her age. She was still quite pretty, with short, curly brown hair, a toothsome Kennedy smile, rounder than her waiflike sisters, Patricia and Eunice, but not terribly overweight. Kennedy monitored his daughter’s care, as he had in England, visited her, and kept in touch with Dr. Thomas Moore, the priest who oversaw St. Gertrude’s.
⁴

Jack and Eunice, both plagued by undiagnosed medical problems (later identified as Addison’s disease), did not go to school that spring. After a short stay in the hospital, Eunice traveled to Latin America with her mother. Jack, after yet another inconclusive battery of tests in Boston, returned south to help his father with his memoirs, then joined his mother and sister on their Latin American tour.

Ted, the youngest, was the only Kennedy afforded the dubious honor of being allowed to remain in Florida after the Christmas holidays. He was enrolled in a local Palm Beach elementary school for three months until Easter. Then, with the “season” at an end and his parents heading north, his mother arranged for him to attend Priory with his brother Bob. “I entered the seventh grade at Portsmouth Priory in the spring of 1941,” Ted wrote later in his memoirs, “when I was barely nine years old, boarding and competing with boys who were four years older than me. It was a recipe for disaster. My time at Portsmouth Priory was not an education; it was a battle.” His only friend was his pet turtle, who died a few weeks after he arrived.
⁵

Though it was Rose who made the decisions as to where the younger children went to school, Kennedy was becoming more active as a parent now that he was home from London and unemployed. When Rose left for her extended tour of Latin America, Kennedy became not only “housekeeper,” as he wrote Hearst, but was put in charge of finding a companion to accompany Rosemary to Wyonegonic Camps in Denmark, Maine, that summer. He monitored Teddy’s schooling, arranged for Pat to “take the [Wellesley] entrance examinations” now that she was about to graduate from the Sacred Heart Convent in the Bronx, and worked with his contacts in the military to secure the right placements for his boys, who had decided to enlist instead of waiting to be drafted.
⁶

Joe Jr., athletic, healthy, and now in his second year at Harvard Law School, was going to have no trouble getting a plum assignment in whatever branch or unit he chose, but Jack, almost grotesquely underweight and with a slew of unresolved health problems, needed all the help his father could give him. That spring of 1941, Kennedy wrote George McDonald at the “Office of the Chief of the Air Corps” on Jack’s behalf. An army air corps unit was being organized at Harvard, and Kennedy wondered whether Jack should apply in Boston, from Palm Beach (where he was now residing), or from California, where he had registered for the draft. “To be perfectly honest with you I am more confused as to what my two sons are going to do than I have ever been on any job I have ever tackled in my life. Joe is planning on entering the Air Corps, but if Jack goes into the Army Air Corps, I understand that Joe is entering the Naval branch of the service. I hope they know what they’re doing because I am frank to say that I don’t. I get dizzier and dizzier.”
⁷

In June 1941, after his second year at law school, Joe Jr. enlisted in a special unit of the U.S. Naval Air Corps that was being organized at Harvard. He would spend his summer training at Squantum, a stone’s throw from the Fore River shipbuilding plant where his father had done his service in the Great War.

Jack, on returning from Latin America, went to work as an intern in the East Boston bank his grandfather had founded and in which his father had served as president. Kennedy, knowing how anxious his second son was to follow his brother into the military and how impossible it would be for him to pass his physical, got in touch with Captain Alan Kirk, whom he had met in London. Kirk pulled whatever strings he had to and arranged for Jack to take and pass his physical in Boston in early August. Jack then filled in some questionnaires, sat for an interview, received his security clearance, and was commissioned an officer in the navy and ordered to report in the fall to Captain Kirk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington. For the time being, both Kennedy boys were where they wanted to be: in uniform in Uncle Sam’s peacetime military.

—

W
ith the children scattered across the country, Rose traveling, and Kennedy in Palm Beach, there was no need to hold on to the Bronxville mansion. Kennedy had put it on the market while he was in London and kept it there awaiting a reasonable offer. He certainly didn’t need the money from the sale. Whatever happened, he was confident that the family trust funds would keep growing and the cash flow from Somerset Importers remain large enough to fund the family’s living expenses. The British needed dollars and would continue to export Scotch to ever-thirsty Americans. To protect himself against the unlikely possibility that the Germans might close down transatlantic trade, Kennedy had, while still in London, pulled all the strings he could to secure precious cargo space for his Scotch. He now had enough of it stockpiled in American warehouses to last the war.
⁸

He had feared that war in Europe would further depress the American economy, but the opposite seemed to have been the case. As government funds for military spending poured into the industrial sector, the domestic economy showed signs of heating up. The most likely short-term effect would be inflation, but a shrewd investor such as Kennedy could adjust for that.

He was going to play it safe from now on. The world economy remained too shaky, the equity markets too volatile, and the rules he had written and enforced at the SEC too restrictive for him to return to the trading patterns that had served him so well in the 1920s. Whatever spare capital he had would go into real estate and oil, the soundest of investments in an inflationary economy. When Honey Fitz asked him to take a position in Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, a fairly safe stock, Kennedy turned him down. “It probably is all that you say that it is, but I have made up my mind that my day of buying securities is over and it looks like I will have to live on my capital until I pass out of the picture.” “I don’t feel much like putting any capital into anything at this time,” he wrote a Boston associate who had inquired about his interest in buying the
Boston Post.
“I think if I do any work at all, I will furnish my brain as my capital from now on.”
⁹

He was, he wrote his friends, tongue only partly in cheek, “developing my career as a first-class bum” in Palm Beach, watching “the idle rich enjoy their last fling” in Hot Springs, and making “arrangements to join the ‘Fishermen’s Union’” in Hyannis Port.
¹⁰

—

T
he spring of 1941 had been a dreadful one for the British. They had done well against the Italians in Greece but were no match for the Germans, who had invaded Yugoslavia and then cut through Greece and Crete. The same scenario played out in North Africa, where the British had held their own against Italian troops but were pushed onto the defensive with the arrival of General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps. In the Atlantic, they were losing more shipping to German U-boats and battle cruisers than they could replace. The question asked on both sides of the Atlantic was where would Hitler strike next. Would he move his troops from Greece and the Balkans into Turkey, solidify his control of the Mediterranean, and move on to conquer the Middle East and take over the Suez Canal? Or would he prepare for a 1941 invasion of Great Britain?

In late spring, Kennedy accepted invitations to give commencement addresses and receive honorary degrees at Oglethorpe University and Notre Dame. While he reemphasized his hatred for the Nazis, “their philosophy, their silly racism and their nightmare of world domination,” he repeated in his Oglethorpe speech what he had said in his January radio address, that it was “nonsense to say that an Axis victory spells ruin for us.” Ignoring the consequences for European Jews or, in fact, for any of the peoples or nations that were or might be brought under Nazi rule should the British lose the war, he argued that whatever happened across the ocean, the United States would survive and endure. “From 90 to 95% of our trade is internal. We depend less on foreign markets than any great nation. If worse came to worst, we could gear ourselves to an intelligent self-contained national economy and still enjoy a fair degree of prosperity.” That such a reconfiguration in the direction of a “self-contained national economy” would entail increased centralization of decision making in Washington and an end to free market capitalism, as he had earlier predicted, no longer appeared to bother him.
¹¹

On May 27, three days after Kennedy’s Oglethorpe speech, the president delivered his first radio address since the “Arsenal of Democracy” talk five months earlier. Directly contradicting everything Kennedy had said about the United States surviving a totalitarian victory in Europe, Roosevelt described in detail the catastrophic consequences that would follow. Quislings would arise to destroy American democracy and freedom from the inside. “The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world.” Tariff walls would descend against American goods. “The whole fabric of working life as we know it . . . could be mangled and crippled. . . . Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened.” After cataloging the dangers facing America should Great Britain be conquered, Roosevelt “issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.” What he didn’t do was even hint that the United States might consider going to war to save the British from defeat.
¹²

On the Sunday following the president’s speech, Kennedy delivered his commencement address at Notre Dame. He began by acknowledging the president’s proclamation of an unlimited emergency, one that, he told his audience, demanded “unlimited loyalty” from all Americans. The rest of the speech was stuffed with emptied-out, high-toned platitudes that sounded as if they had been lifted directly from papal encyclicals. The president having declared that America was not going to war, there was no necessity for Kennedy to say anything more, especially at Notre Dame, where political speeches were frowned upon.
¹³

Three weeks later, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The danger of British defeat had been deterred, at least until the Germans could turn west again.