Joseph E. Persico (7 page)

Among codes the British were able to break was one used by the German foreign ministry. Soon after Maringliano's delivery of the Kent messages to Rome, the codebreakers intercepted cables sent by Hans Mackensen, the German ambassador to Italy, to the foreign ministry in Berlin. One report demonstrated that Mackensen knew all about Churchill's assurances to Roosevelt that American merchant vessels would not be forced into British ports to be searched. This intelligence played right into Germany's hands. Hitler's foreign office now tipped off other neutrals, who quickly bombarded the British Admiralty, complaining about the favoritism shown the Americans.

More explosive was a message FDR sent on May 16, six days after Churchill took over as prime minister, which Tyler Kent had stolen. As Nazi military victories began swallowing up the European continent, Churchill knew that the key to Britain's survival lay in keeping the sea lanes open, free of German submarines. He asked FDR to spare fifty old moth-balled American destroyers to bolster his thinly stretched fleet. The Bletchley cryptanalysts were shocked to find Roosevelt's response to this request reported nearly verbatim in a dispatch sent from Ambassador Mackensen to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The secret FDR cable now available in Berlin read, “It would be possible to hand over 40 or 50 destroyers of the old type, but this is subject to the special approval of Congress, which would be difficult to obtain at present.”

That Roosevelt was even considering giving fifty ships to Britain would raise Cain among American isolationists. Almost from the moment he had become president, FDR had been struggling inside a straitjacket of neutrality. In the mid-thirties, the U.S. Senate's Nye Committee held hearings that concluded the United States had been sucked into the First World War by international bankers, munitions manufacturers, and war profiteers, a consortium branded in the shorthand of the day the “Merchants of Death.” In 1934, 1935, and 1936, Congress enacted laws deliberately intended to keep America out of Europe's congenital squabbles. This legislation prohibited loans to any government in default on its war debts, barred even private loans to warring governments, and outlawed arms shipments to any belligerent. In 1938 a proposed amendment to the Constitution would have required a nationwide vote before the country could go to war, except if invaded. The measure was narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives only after strenuous lobbying by the White House.

FDR believed that the politicians were making the mistake usually attributed to generals—fighting the last war. Nineteen thirty-nine was not 1917. Hitler had reneged on his promise that if given Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland his appetite would be appeased. Instead, in March 1939, he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Next he began threatening Poland over the Polish Corridor, the strip of land separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The hounding of the Jews in Germany—the gradual stripping away of their citizenship, their property rights, their very right to earn a livelihood—was in full flood well before the war broke out. And Hitler had turned Germany into the most powerful military force in Europe. Roosevelt accepted what the isolationists did not, that Britain's fight was the good fight and vital to all democracies. Even before the war, he had begun to nudge his nation away from purist neutrality. His Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., recorded in his diary what FDR told his staff in confidence on April 20, 1939: “He . . . says that he is going to have a patrol from Newfoundland down to South America and if some submarines are laying there and try to interrupt an American flag and our Navy sinks them, it's just too bad. . . . If we fire and sink an Italian or German . . . we will say it the way the Japs do, ‘So sorry. Never happen again.' Tomorrow we sink two.”

The President repeated his intention in a private conversation with Britain's King George VI during a visit to the United States in June 1939, an occasion now remembered more for the hot dogs served to the royal couple at Hyde Park than for strategies discussed. The king later wrote of his visit that FDR had promised full support if Britain went to war against Germany. Roosevelt also repeated his covert plan for a naval patrol in the Western Hemisphere, “about which he is terribly keen,” the king wrote. “If he saw a U-boat he would sink her at once and wait for the consequences.”

Roosevelt's subsequent redefining of the frontiers of the Western Hemisphere was mind boggling. In an age of airplanes and swift ships, he claimed, having the traditional three-mile limit define the hemisphere's extent was obsolete. He summoned the State Department's geographer to the White House to consider a more up-to-date sphere within which the Monroe Doctrine would prevail—that is, where no foreign intrusion would be tolerated. The geographer watched stunned as the President drew a north-south line on a map on his desk running from Iceland to the Azores. Henceforth, FDR said, these Portuguese islands should be considered part of the Western Hemisphere.

Still, as he leaned toward Britain, the President was constantly looking over his shoulder. Every pro-British move needed to be cloaked by stealth and subterfuge. A perception that he was a war lover could prove politically lethal, especially as he wrestled over the decision as to whether to break the two-term tradition and run for a third term. He liked to say that he was weary of the killing burdens of his office and longed for the tranquility of Hyde Park. He told Senator George Norris, who had stopped by to see him, “People come in here day after day, most of them trying to get something from me, most of them things I can't give them, and wouldn't if I could. You sit in your chair in your office too, but if something goes wrong or you get irritated or tired, you can get up and walk around, or you can go into another room. But I can't, I am tied down to this chair day after day, week after week, and month after month. And I can't stand it any longer. I can't go on with it.” But Eleanor Roosevelt read her husband better than he read himself. She told an interviewer, “When you are in the center of world affairs, there is something so fascinating about it that you can hardly see how you are going to live any other way. In his mind, I think, there was a great seesaw: on one end, the weariness which had already begun, and the desire to be at home and his own master; on the other end, the overwhelming interest which was the culmination of a lifetime of preparation and work, and the desire to see and to have a hand in the affairs of the world in that critical period.”

Should he choose to run again, the last thing FDR needed was premature disclosure that he was considering turning over fifty American ships to one side in a war his countrymen hoped to avoid. Yet, even Berlin knew that he was contemplating the destroyer transfer. From the time Bletchley Park detected the leak, MI5 and Scotland Yard had begun to investigate its source. Since Roosevelt's dispatches to Churchill came to London and since Ambassador Mackensen's dispatches originated in Rome, the British suspected that the link was the Italian embassy in England. Their search led to Don Francesco Maringliano, who was followed to the Russian Tea Room, which in turn pointed the investigation toward Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent. Kent's behavior may have been more perverted patriotism than deliberate treachery, but the outcome was the same. What Roosevelt and Churchill told each other in their most confidential communications passed from Kent to Wolkoff to Maringliano, to the Italian foreign ministry, to Ambassador Mackensen, and to the Nazi foreign office. By May 20, British officials believed they had more than enough evidence to arrest Wolkoff and to search Kent's lodgings. It was then that they had found the extraordinary cache of pilfered documents, duplicate keys to the code room, and a steel cabinet plastered with stickers proclaiming,
THIS IS A JEW'S WAR.

Kent, as an American citizen employed by the State Department, should have enjoyed diplomatic immunity. Nevertheless, the British police took him into custody and brought him to Joe Kennedy at the ambassador's residence. There the clerk from the code room found himself facing not only the American envoy, but also an immensely rich, politically powerful figure. Kennedy later described his fifteen minutes with Kent: “. . . I asked him how on earth he could break trust with his country and what he must be thinking about in its effects on his parents. Kent never batted an eye. He played up and down the scale of an intense anti-Semitic feeling, showed no remorse whatever except in respect to his parents and told me to ‘just forget about him.' It was a tragic scene.” After Kennedy had finished with him, the British police locked up Kent in Brixton Prison.

More than a little irony and some hypocrisy pervades this scene. Kennedy had amassed a formidable fortune in banking, shipbuilding, motion pictures, and, reportedly, bootlegging during Prohibition. Like many men who have made money, he wanted to prove he could shine in other circles. He contributed substantially to FDR's national campaigns, thus winning appointments as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then the U.S. Maritime Commission. Still he was hungry. Kennedy next had his eye on the Treasury Department. However, FDR was not about to dislodge his old friend Henry Morgenthau Jr. The President knew that he owed Kennedy something more, and he used his eldest son, Jimmy, as his go-between. Young Roosevelt made so many journeys to Marwood, Kennedy's Maryland estate, that he and the older man became friendly. On one such occasion Kennedy confessed that if he could not have Treasury he was “intrigued by the thought of being the first Irishman to be ambassador from the United States to the Court of Saint James's.” Jimmy later recalled, “I really liked Joe, but he was a crusty old cuss and I couldn't picture him as an ambassador, especially to England.” Nevertheless, young Roosevelt relayed Kennedy's wish to FDR. “When I passed it on to father,” Jimmy subsequently wrote, “he laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” But as time went on, Roosevelt was taken by Kennedy's audacity. As Jimmy described a conversation with the President, “he was kind of intrigued with the idea of twisting the lion's tail a little. . . .” FDR summoned Kennedy to the White House, and young Roosevelt has described a moment, if believed, surely unique in the screening of potential ambassadors. “Father said to him, ‘Joe, would you mind stepping back a bit, by the fireplace perhaps, so I can get a good look at you?' Puzzled, Kennedy did so. Then father said, ‘Joe, would you mind taking your pants down?' I was as surprised as Joe was. We couldn't believe our ears. Joe asked father if he'd said what he thought he'd said, and father said he had indeed. I guess it was the power of the presidency, because Joe Kennedy undid his suspenders and dropped his pants and stood there in his shorts, looking silly and embarrassed. Father said, ‘Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true. Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen. Don't you know that the ambassador to the Court of Saint James's has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee britches and silk stockings? Can you imagine how you'll look? When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world we'll be a laughingstock. You're just not right for the job, Joe.'” “All you had to say was something was impossible for Joe to want it,” Jimmy recalled. Kennedy then asked, if he could persuade the British to allow him to wear a cutaway coat and striped pants to the ceremony, would the President then appoint him? The relentless Kennedy won the protocol point with Britain and the ambassadorial appointment from FDR.

The President may have had an ulterior motive. Joe Kennedy had proved something of a misguided missile in Washington. The right wing saw him as a renegade, a businessman who attacked his own kind. The left painted him as a man who could be troublesome for labor. Within the administration, he was counted a power-hungry publicity hound, a harsh critic of the administration when it suited him, and a man whose business dealings might not stand up to close scrutiny. Henry Morgenthau met with the President shortly before Kennedy's appointment became official and recorded in his diary a presidential display that astonished him. “I have made arrangements to have Joe Kennedy watched hourly,” FDR said, “and the first time he opens his mouth and criticizes me, I will fire him.” He repeated several times, Morgenthau remembered, “Kennedy is too dangerous to have around here.” Thus the bootstraps Irishman, snubbed while a student at Harvard, still socially banging on society's door, attained the most prestigious American appointment in international diplomacy.

Kennedy turned out to be a smash choice from the moment of his arrival in 1938 at the palatial thirty-six-room embassy residence on Grosvenor Square. The British public embraced Kennedy, his appealing wife, Rose, and brood of nine handsome children. The luck of the Irish held as the ambassador scored a hole in one on his first round of golf at the Stoke Poges course in Buckinghamshire. Joe Kennedy's London life appeared charmed.

He may have been a favorite of the British people, but Joe Kennedy was not popular in government circles. Early in 1939 he angered FDR by attempting to consort with Nazis. Helmuth Wohlthat, an economic advisor to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, wanted to meet with Kennedy to consider an American gold loan to Germany. Kennedy's request to see the man was instantly turned down by a horrified FDR. Unabashed, Kennedy repeated the request, and again the President refused. Kennedy then, in direct contradiction of FDR's orders, allowed Wohlthat to come see him in London. Learning of the ambassador's insubordination, Roosevelt put a stop to any further encounters.

In December, after the war had begun, Kennedy returned temporarily to Washington, where he delivered to the President his blunt opinion of Churchill. The then First Lord of the Admiralty, he told FDR, was “ruthless and scheming.” The man, he claimed, was in touch with an American clique eager to embroil the United States in Europe's war, “notably, certain strong Jewish leaders.” During this Washington sojourn Kennedy stopped by the State Department, on February 1, 1940, to see another visiting ambassador, Bill Bullitt, FDR's envoy to France. There, Kennedy blithely interrupted an interview that Bullitt was having with Joseph M. Patterson and Doris Fleeson, respectively publisher and Washington reporter of the New York
Daily News.
Bullitt later described his astonishment at Kennedy's bad manners to Interior secretary Harold Ickes. As Ickes summarized Bullitt's account, “Before long he [Kennedy] was saying that Germany would win, that everything in France and England would go to hell, and that his one interest was in saving his money for his children. He began to criticize the President very sharply, whereupon Bill took issue with him.” The argument became so heated that Patterson and Fleeson discreetly withdrew. “Joe continued to berate the President,” Ickes's account went on, and “Bill told him that he was disloyal and that he had no right to say what he had before Patterson and Fleeson.” Kennedy's language offended Bullitt, to which Kennedy responded, according to Ickes, “[H]e would say what he Goddamned pleased before whom he Goddamned pleased. . . .”