The Patriarch (33 page)

Almost immediately on turning in his RCA report and pocketing his fee, Kennedy was hired as a special adviser to Paramount. His mandate was to offer recommendations on how the studio could cut costs, increase profits, and cover dividend payments on its preferred stock issues. Six weeks after taking the assignment, Kennedy submitted his report to the board of directors and asked that it be made public. He bit down hard on the hands that had fed him, recommending a shake-up in the board of directors, “drastic and courageous revision of management,” and substantial cuts in executive salaries. He was paid a $50,000 fee, making his total consulting salary for three months’ work $200,000. President Roosevelt’s annual salary in 1936 was $75,000; Vice President Garner’s was $20,000; the dean of Harvard Law School earned $14,000.

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T
o make sure no one in the White House would forget him while he was on what he hoped would be a temporary hiatus from Washington, Kennedy sent bottles of Haig & Haig’s best Scotch to the president for Christmas and stayed in close contact with the Roosevelt children and with Missy LeHand, the president’s secretary since 1920, who now lived in the White House and, when Eleanor was absent, acted as presidential hostess. He called Missy regularly, got her brother Bernard a job with Somerset, and invited her to make use of the Palm Beach house, which she did on several occasions.
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In Washington, he had regularly invited the president, Anna and Jimmy Roosevelt, and Missy to Marwood for fresh seafood dinners and first-run films in his private theater. He tried to keep up with at least part of that tradition by airmailing stone crabs to the White House from Palm Beach. “If after what I called the air plane company yesterday morning [a reference to his foul mouth] they don’t throw the stone crabs off the plane for spite, you will have them in Washington tomorrow afternoon,” he wrote Missy LeHand on February 17, 1937. “They are being cooked and packed in dry ice and leaving here at nine-thirty Thursday morning. In fact the head of the air plane company said he would much rather carry stone crabs than carry one Kennedy, the worst crab he ever knew. . . . Anyhow the crab will be there tomorrow and they better be good.” The following month, he sent lobsters to the president and his entourage in Warm Springs. “This is the first time live lobsters ever flew to Pine Mountain,” FDR wrote back. “We are informing Smithsonian.”
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T
hough he was not above criticizing the president behind his back to his conservative friends in the press, including William Randolph Hearst and Frank Kent, Kennedy considered himself a member of the Roosevelt team and intended to work for his reelection. In January 1936, the president sent him a list prepared by his secretary of commerce of fifty prominent businessmen who might be considered “friendly” to the administration. He followed up with a call to Palm Beach to ask Kennedy to solicit the businessmen on the list for endorsements and/or campaign contributions. Their conversation was cut short so that Kennedy could attend Mass. The next day, Kennedy followed up on the president’s proposal with one of his own: “About the list you sent me, I feel it is not at all strong enough to do what we thought of, but I will go ahead and try to think out some plan and if any of your people have a suggestion as to how it can be well used, I wish they would let me know. It isn’t that I am stubborn or stupid, but I am anxious to get a result that will merely not be just a superficial gesture. I still think I can do it.”
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He had been both astounded and appalled by the depth of anti-Roosevelt sentiment he had encountered in Palm Beach among the wealthy. The very men and women who should have been among the president’s strongest supporters because he had saved capitalism and their fortunes were his most venomous opponents. “We are witnessing,” he would later write in his Roosevelt campaign book,
I’m for Roosevelt,
“the strangest hatred of history.”
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Some among his conservative friends, especially those to whom he had voiced his doubts about New Deal programs and the antibusiness radicals who were running them, had hoped that when he left Washington he would join them in opposition. They were quite disappointed when he did not. “When you resigned as Chairman of the Securities Commission, the whole country rose up as one to acclaim you,” Paul Block the conservative publisher of several newspapers, including the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
wrote him on April 10, 1936. “And when you told me the various reasons for your resignation, I thought even more of you, but now I read in the paper that you are going back to Washington to start fighting for the re-election of the radical New Dealers. If this is true, then all I can say is, ‘Poor Joe,’ and I think I should also say ‘Poor America.’ We thought Joe would help the sane people, but he is going back to the asylum.”
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Kennedy didn’t see it that way, of course. He was supporting Roosevelt for a second term because in his first he had gotten the economy going again. On April 28, when Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau phoned to ask for his assessment of market conditions and the recent drop in stock prices, Kennedy reassured him that there was nothing to worry about. Stock prices might drift a bit lower, but not by much; the bond markets were safe; the worst was over. He told Morgenthau he was drafting an answer to New Deal critics like Al Smith, Herbert Hoover, banker and former Roosevelt appointee James Warburg, and others who insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that the Roosevelt administration had been bad for business.
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He had decided that the best help he could offer the president’s reelection campaign was to concentrate his attention on businessmen and explain to them, as one businessman to another, why he was supporting Roosevelt—and why they should as well. He would put these thoughts into a booklet,
I’m for Roosevelt,
which would be subtitled
A Businessman’s Estimate of the New Deal.
To help him with the writing, he recruited James Landis, his successor at the SEC, and John Burns, still general counsel there. On May 4, he asked Missy LeHand “to tell the president that the booklet is finished, but I am having it re-read and re-edited, and will send it down for comments a little later.” In mid-June, he forwarded a draft to the president, who thought it “splendid and . . . of real service, not only from a campaign point of view but also as a distinct step in sane education of the country.”
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Encouraged by the president’s comments and thinking his “businessman’s manifesto,” properly edited, might reach a broader general audience, he contacted Arthur Krock with a proposal and forwarded a copy of the letter he had received from the president. “I gather from it that he is anxious to have it done,” Kennedy wrote Krock, “and if it is done, I should like to have it done in bang-up shape. I imagine that you are going on your vacation after this convention, and I wonder if you could give some of your time each week, for, say the next five weeks, to help put it in shape. I shall avail myself of your services, however, if you will permit me to pay you for the work you do on it. I should like to make a deal with you for $1000 a week for five weeks, if that is worth your while.” Krock, who had no business writing campaign literature while covering the White House for the
New York Times,
agreed to edit the book for him.
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In July, having now been away from Washington and without any official position for nearly a year, Kennedy invited reporters to Hyannis Port, where he entertained and lectured them for hours on why Roosevelt should be reelected.

JOE KENNEDY STICKS HIS NECK OUT: SAYS HIS BUSINESS FRIENDS WILL JUMP ON HIM, BUT TELLS WHY HE THINKS ROOSEVELT REELECTION WILL BE BEST THING FOR BUSINESS AND FUTURE OF COUNTRY,
read the headline over the half-page spread that appeared in the
Boston Sunday Globe
on July 26, 1936. Kennedy was supporting Roosevelt for a second term, he explained, because in his four years in office, he had rescued capitalism from the worst depression in American history. “I was in Chicago in 1933 and I saw the mounted police charge in to drive the people out of the banks and I got a glimpse of the kind of powder barrel our system was sitting on without plan or leadership. That wasn’t very long ago. Some people have forgotten very quickly.” Every business index now pointed upward. The stock market was rising, production was up, the automobile and steel industries were “going ahead beyond anybody’s expectation,” railway car loadings were up. Even the bankers railing against the administration were stuffing their portfolios with government securities, proof positive that they were worth something. He urged his fellow businessmen to stop trying to turn the clock back to the Hoover years, but instead to follow his example, acknowledge the breadth of the recovery, and cooperate with the administration. There was nothing more dangerous to the future of the economy—and the nation—than misguided conservatism. “I remember my father was in the Massachusetts Legislature when the 54-hour law was being changed,” he told the reporters gathered for his informal press briefing. “He has told me how the mill owners talked against the 48-hour law. Now nobody would go back. I remember the howl against the Federal Reserve act when it was new. Everybody is for it now.” His endorsement of administration policies was indeed so powerful that he felt obligated to insist that there was no quid pro quo involved. He was “sticking his neck out” only because “he was interested in establishing a system that will make my family secure. Nothing that an administration can give me is as important as that. I’m all through in politics. I haven’t any Government job. I won’t take any.”
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This was the only press interview Kennedy would give that summer. He remained at Hyannis Port the entire season, except for a few brief excursions elsewhere. One was a trip to Skowhegan, Maine, the home of Lakewood, among the country’s premier summer theater colonies. During his stay there, Kennedy rented a cottage with Day Eliot, one of the actresses who was appearing in
Star Light, Star Bright,
a comedy by Owen Davis. Muriel Palmer, whose father rented the cottage to Kennedy, remembered her mother being upset that her family was a party to such goings-on.
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Having forfeited his last two summers to the SEC, Kennedy was set on enjoying this one. “You know when I go on vacation,” he wrote Robert Allen, Drew Pearson’s partner in Washington, “I don’t ever write letters. I answer an occasional telephone call, and become a first-class bum. . . . Give my best to Drew and tell him that I am an economic royalist of the loafing type.”
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I’m for Roosevelt
was scheduled for publication in early fall. Kennedy’s friend from the 1932 campaign train, Louis Ruppel, now at the
Chicago Daily Times,
wired him in Hyannis Port on August 4 to ask for prepublication rights: “Understand your book will be a sensation. . . . What do you say to making it available in whole or in part for the readers of Chicago’s outstanding liberal newspaper, the
Times
? It’s a cinch your old pal Bill Hearst won’t print it and after you dispose of five hundred copies in Wall Street what will you do with the rest?” Three weeks later, after having read the manuscript, Ruppel told Kennedy that he was enormously impressed by the power of his manifesto. “Never let the Fascists prevail,” he wrote Kennedy, “or it will be a toss up whether you or Tugwell [Rexford Tugwell, one of the original brain trusters and a strong advocate for economic planning] face the firing squad first. Really it is the clearest presentation of the facts which require Roosevelt’s reelection that has yet been made. . . . Hurry, Hurry, Joe and give me a release remembering that whatever price you set you’ll have to sue to collect.”
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His campaign book was published, with excerpts splashed across the Scripps Howard papers and elsewhere, in September 1936. Kennedy paid the full costs of production, publication, and distribution, made hundreds of copies available to old friends from Boston and Hollywood, new friends from New York such as Ellin Mackay and her husband, Irving Berlin, and dozens of members of the Roosevelt administration. He was immensely proud of the book. “I have lots of letters about it—practically all of them favorable,” he wrote Patrick Campbell, his old headmaster from Boston Latin, and dozens of others who wrote to congratulate him on his effort.
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I’m for Roosevelt
presented Kennedy’s profit and loss statement on the New Deal, which he claimed had succeeded in rescuing the economy from the depths of depression. Roosevelt deserved reelection because he had proven himself, time and again, “the real defender of American freedom” and American capitalism. “The New Deal is founded upon a basic belief in the efficacy of the capitalistic system. Every effort had been strained to preserve the system.” The book, as published, made for rather dry reading, sold few copies, and probably won over few voters, but it received enough attention in the press to make the project a success for its author.
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In late September, after his summer in Hyannis Port and a brief trip to Europe on Somerset business, Kennedy joined the campaign on a full-time basis. “I’m so glad you’re back,” Tommy Corcoran wrote on September 21. “The Boss sorely needs paladins whose maces swing heavy and whose lances don’t splinter.” Kennedy helped arrange Jimmy Roosevelt’s campaign tour of Massachusetts and paid for it out of his own pocket. When Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, permitted newsreel companies to film the president and his family at Hyde Park, Kennedy was asked to supervise the shooting and review the edited film and the narration. He also made several speeches, gave interviews, and buttonholed influential businessmen across the country, repeating, reemphasizing, and hammering home his one essential truth, that the Roosevelt presidency had been good for business. “It is the business man, large and small, who has chiefly prospered through the policies of the President,” he wrote in an extended Sunday magazine article for the September 6
New York Times.
“The wealthy have been the chief beneficiaries of the New Deal policies, as witness the financial pages of any paper. . . . He [Roosevelt] has never condemned wealth as such, but only the ignoble, the selfish, the irresponsible wealthy. Is it reasonable to suppose that he would sponsor an indiscriminate hatred against the whole class to which he and his kin have always belonged?”
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