The Patriarch (74 page)

By courting Kennedy directly, asking for his support, making him feel wanted again, and inferring that he would have a place of importance in the upcoming Truman administration, Hannegan and Truman—with an assist from the president, who had invited Kennedy to the White House—had accomplished what they’d set out to do. Kennedy did not make any speeches for the Democratic ticket as he had four, eight, and twelve years earlier, but neither did he endorse Dewey nor say a word in his favor. Irish Catholics voted for the president in the same proportions they had in earlier elections. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president for a fourth term on November 7, 1944.

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I
n Europe and the Pacific, the killing of young men continued without pause. The war was not yet over, nor did its end appear imminent. Through the autumn and early winter of 1944, more and more soldiers—and millions of civilians—died as the Russians drove west, reoccupying the Ukraine, moving into Poland and toward East Prussia, while the British and Americans pushed east, their momentum stalled as the Germans, instead of surrendering as they had in World War I, pushed back relentlessly and with some success. In the Pacific, the Japanese fleet had been defeated at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, but the war continued.

The passage of time healed no wounds. On the contrary, the hurt became worse as the months passed, and for Kennedy, at least, the problems that would have to be faced after the war became larger and more unmanageable. “For a fellow who didn’t want this war to touch your country or mine,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook in late October 1944, “I have had rather a bad dose—Joe dead, Billy Hartington dead, my son in the Naval Hospital. . . . As I sit here and write you this letter with the natural cynicism that I know you and I share about a great many things, I wonder if this war will do anything for the world. No matter what peace outline I read, looking behind it, I see the problems of living standards, economics, stability, and national pride are all still standing on shaky ground. . . . To have boys like ours killed for a futile effort would be the greatest reflection on us all. Yet, if you would ask me what I am doing to help, I would tell you nothing. However, I assure you it is not by choice rather by circumstances.”
¹²

Six weeks later, Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder, another old friend, to thank him for his condolence letter. Only to a friend on the other side of the Atlantic whom he did not expect to encounter in person could Kennedy reveal the depth of his pain. “I am trying to reconcile myself to your magnificent spiritual outlook but I, very frankly, haven’t arrived at it yet. I think Jack’s illness and the death of the two boys along with the horrible conditions in the world have left me rather a long road to travel back to arrive at the spiritual point of view. It will come, I know, but it just hasn’t come yet.”
¹³

In May 1945, Kennedy heard from Arthur Houghton that his son, Andy, had been killed in the Pacific. Kennedy tried to find words that might console Houghton but could not. “I don’t think you ever get over the shock. . . . I won’t offer you that hocus-pocus that some people offer—that he died for a great cause—I don’t believe he did. I believe he died like young Joe as a result of the stupidity of our generation. The one thing he did die a martyr to was his own conscience. He wanted to do the right thing because it was his idea of the thing to do, and for that—and that alone—he died. This is the satisfaction which you and I will always have.”

To heal his own wounds, Jack Kennedy had solicited essays from Joe Jr.’s school and navy buddies, some family friends, and Honey Fitz, Kathleen, and Ted for a privately published tribute to his brother,
As We Remember Joe
. Kennedy was able to read only one “article at a time,” and that with much difficulty. He sent Houghton a copy of the book, and Houghton responded by forwarding “the little tribute” he had written about Andy. Again Kennedy tried to find words that might help his friend come to grips with his loss. “You’ll never get it out of your mind no matter what you think or what you do. Everyday interests naturally relieve the strain, but the thought will always be there. . . . It is things like this that darken the few years that we have left, and for that reason I am now telling you that we must get what happiness we can out of the time that we have left to enjoy it.”
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F
ranklin Delano Roosevelt would not survive to greet the peace in Europe or in Asia. He died on April 12, 1945, exactly eight months after Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s bomber had gone down in flames. “The news hit America like nothing since Pearl Harbor,” wrote Roosevelt biographer H. W. Brands. Restaurants, bars, theaters, concert halls, and nightclubs closed for the night. The first baseball games of the year were canceled. The radio networks suspended commercial programming. The New York Stock Exchange announced that it would be closed on the following day. The nation grieved. Joseph P. Kennedy did not.
¹⁵

“Evidently he’d been slipping very badly,” he wrote Kick in London, “and it becomes more and more apparent to all of us that Hopkins and the rest of them were really running this country for the last year and a half, and, if I do say so, damn near ran it into the ground.” He admitted that there had been “real sorrow on the announcement of his death and for two or three days after.” But now, two weeks later, “you rarely, if ever hear his name mentioned, and there is also no doubt that it was a great thing for the country. He had stirred up a hatred in the minds of at least half the country, and no matter whether he proposed anything good or bad, half the country would be against it and half for it.” Roosevelt had lost control of Congress to the point where the federal government was nearly paralyzed. And he had not laid the foundation for a peaceful postwar. “It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, with the death of all these boys and with the world economically and socially in chaos, that we haven’t anything to look forward to in the line of peace for the world as the pay-off for everyone’s sacrifices.”
¹⁶

His anger was unbounded at those he held accountable for bringing on the war that had led to Joe Jr.’s death and Jack’s near fatal illnesses. On April 19, a week after the president’s death, he told former president Herbert Hoover, according to Hoover’s notes, that he had dozens of diplomatic dispatches in his possession that fully documented Roosevelt’s role in pushing the British toward war. On May 15, at a second meeting with Hoover, he elaborated on his theory, insisting that in the spring of 1939, Roosevelt had encouraged Chamberlain to guarantee Polish sovereignty and provide British military support in the event of German aggression. “Kennedy said that if it had not been for Roosevelt the British would not have made this, the most gigantic blunder in history.”
¹⁷

Kennedy’s conspiracy theory of the origins of the war was clearly incendiary, but that did not stop him from repeating it, always in private, usually to those he believed might agree with him. In his diary, James Forrestal recounted a discussion he had on December 27, 1945, while golfing with Kennedy in Palm Beach; almost to the word, it mirrored the one Kennedy had had with Hoover seven months earlier. Kennedy declared unequivocally that there would have been no war in Western Europe had Roosevelt not forced Chamberlain to face down the Germans over Poland. Left to his own devices, Kennedy insisted, Hitler would have turned east toward Russia. There were two separate claims here: one was defensible, that Hitler preferred to move east rather than west; the other, that Roosevelt was somehow responsible for the war, was preposterous.
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O
n May 7, 1945, a little more than three weeks after Roosevelt’s death and almost a year after the landings on Normandy, the German military, with Hitler dead by suicide, agreed to the only terms the British and Americans would accept, unconditional surrender. The American people celebrated briefly before turning their attention to the war in the Pacific. Three months later, that war, too, came to an end. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. President Harry Truman demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender and threatened a further “rain of ruin from the sky.” On August 8, the Soviet Union, as promised at Yalta, entered the war, its armies marching south the next day into Manchuria.

Kennedy, who had opposed unconditional surrender in Europe, was appalled at the American attempt to secure it in Japan by dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations. On August 8, he and Harry Luce visited Archbishop Spellman and implored him to request of the president a few days’ truce to give Japan’s leaders the opportunity to formally surrender. We do not know whether Spellman ever contacted Truman. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 14, Emperor Hirohito agreed to American terms.
¹⁹

While others basked in the glory of unconditional victory, Kennedy’s anger at the results of the war washed away any sense of relief that the bloodshed might now be at an end. “It does seem ironical that somebody who opposed the war as bitterly as I did should lose his oldest son, his son-in-law, and have his second son badly banged up,” he wrote Cissy Patterson on November 26, 1945. “At the minute it does seem that it is rather too much to hope for that the world will be any better as a result of the sacrifices of all these fine young men—but then again, I never thought it would be.”
²⁰

He tried to control his rage and succeeded for the most part, certainly with his children. But the anger within him was such that it sprang out, unbidden, at rather inappropriate moments: at lunch with President Hoover, golf with Secretary Forrestal, on the telephone and in letters to friends. In January 1946, he was invited to have “a chat” with Winston Churchill at Hialeah during the ex–prime minister’s post-election, post-defeat tour of the United States. Churchill offered his condolences for Kennedy’s losses. Kennedy thanked him. Churchill, making small talk with a man he knew despised him and might hold him accountable in some way for his son’s death, remarked almost casually that “the world seems to be in a frightful condition.” Kennedy agreed, then added, “After all, what did we accomplish by this war?”

Churchill had to have been momentarily stunned. The war had accomplished a great deal from his perspective: the destruction of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan, the restoration of the Western European republics, the rescue of Great Britain. Instead of confronting Kennedy and launching into a debate at the Hialeah racetrack, Churchill tried to defuse the situation. “He turned sharply, saying, ‘Well, at least, we have our lives [to which Kennedy] replied, ‘Not all of us.’ With that,” Kennedy recalled, Churchill “dropped the subject at once.”
²¹

He did not dispute the reality that the world war had saved Europe from Nazi domination and much of Asia from Japanese domination. But had it made the world a safer or more tolerant place? Had it brought the American people any added measure of security? In Europe, one enemy, Germany, had been replaced by another, the Soviet Union; one alien, un-Christian, freedom-denying, authoritarian ideology, nazism, by another, communism. To those who argued that the war had eliminated a great evil from the world, Kennedy countered in a June 1946 commencement address at Colby Junior College for Women in New Hampshire that “evil forces there will always be . . . if not Hitler and his gang, then their prototype.” War, he insisted, was not the answer to evil in the world; it solved nothing, protected no one.
²²

Knowing as we do today the full extent of Hitler’s murderous intent, it is difficult for us, as it was difficult for those who greeted victory in 1945, not to celebrate World War II as a triumph of good over evil. From Kennedy’s perspective, the victory over Hitler had cost much and accomplished little. It would not bring back his son or the millions of young men murdered on the battlefields of Europe. And it would most certainly not bring back to life the six million Jews who had perished. Their fate, he believed, had been determined long before American troops set off across the ocean. As he had argued in 1938 and 1939, there was only one way the Jews of Europe might have been protected: through a comprehensive agreement with Hitler that provided for their rescue and resettlement. Once that effort failed and was abandoned, the future of European Jewry was left in the hands of one man, Adolf Hitler.

Unlike his friend Frank Murphy, who in early January 1944 announced that he would serve as chairman of the National Committee Against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews, Kennedy said nothing, wrote nothing, voiced no concern over the fate of European Jews, no outrage at anti-Semitism abroad or at home. As he told Boston reporter Joseph Dinneen in an unpublished interview in May 1944, “Anti-Semitism is their fight—just as anti-Irishism was my fight and the fight of my fathers in this country. . . . I have never discussed anti-Semitism in public, because I could never see how it would be helpful. Whenever I have been asked for a statement condemning anti-Semitism, I have answered: ‘What good would it do?’ If the Jews themselves would pay less attention to advertising their racial problem, and more attention to solving it, the whole thing would recede into its proper perspective. It’s entirely out of focus now, and that is chiefly their fault. . . . Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.”
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As far as he had journeyed from East Boston “outsider” to “insider,” Kennedy still divided the worlds he inhabited between “us” and “them,” Irish Catholics and everyone else. Though Protestants constituted the bulk of the “them” category, the Jews remained the quintessential “other” for him, as they did for most Catholics and Protestants alike. He had several close Jewish friends, Arthur Goldsmith and later in life Carroll Rosenbloom, the Baltimore businessman and future National Football League owner who lived in Palm Beach. As much as he enjoyed their company, he could never look past the fact that they were Jews. His letters to them were filled with joking references to their Jewishness. He meant no harm in this—and none was taken, but it was symptomatic of his worldview. The Jews were a different people with different values, talents, and objectives. Like Irish Catholics, they looked after their own, but with unparalleled intensity, dedication, and success. And that was what made them dangerous. He understood and sympathized with Jewish attempts to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but he remained convinced that such loyalties had biased their judgment and made them unfit for government service.