The Patriarch (36 page)

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K
ennedy spent more time at Hyannis Port that summer than he had planned. What had begun as a peaceful vacation had turned hectic when Pat was stricken at camp with an acute case of appendicitis and had to be transported to Boston for an emergency operation. Soon afterward, Bobby came down with pneumonia and was taken to the same hospital. Kennedy arranged for round-the-clock nursing for both children. When they were well enough to come home, Luella Hennessey, one of the six nurses who had cared for them, was asked and agreed to accompany them to Hyannis Port and remain there until they were well again. Luella would remain part of the Kennedy family for the rest of her life, caring for children, grandchildren, and after his stroke, Joe Kennedy himself.

It was not until after Labor Day that Kennedy was able to return to Washington. “I just got back to Washington this week,” he wrote a business associate on September 9, “after having stayed up at the Cape with two very sick children. . . . I gave up all business and confined myself exclusively to them.”
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A
lmost immediately upon his return, Kennedy got a phone call from the American vice consul in Montevideo, Uruguay. A group of American seamen on the S.S.
Algic
had defied the orders of their captain, refused to unload cargo, and gone on a sympathy strike with the local longshoremen. Because the ship was owned by the government, though leased to a private concern, the ship’s captain wanted Kennedy to order the sailors back to work and punish them as mutineers if they refused. Kennedy could have ignored the request or deflected it elsewhere. But he did not. He had made it clear in May that he was going to involve himself in maritime labor disputes. The strike or mutiny of a few seamen, though thousands of miles away, presented him with the opportunity he had been looking for to dramatize—to the seamen, their unions, Congress, the president, the press, and the public—the need to reform labor practices in the maritime industry.

Kennedy notified the president that he needed to speak to him “about the terrible conditions on our American ships with regard to discipline.” He had, he wrote Roosevelt, consulted with the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, who had indicated that he was prepared to use the “Mutiny Statute” against any sailors who were guilty of refusing to “obey the lawful order of the Master.” Kennedy was “firmly convinced that such action if promptly taken would go a long way toward clearing up insubordination and generally deplorable conditions in the American Merchant Marine.” To make sure his letter was brought to the president’s attention, Kennedy sent a separate note to James Roosevelt, who now worked as his father’s secretary: “This thing is getting terribly serious. If you think it worthwhile to give it a little pressure, all right, but if you don’t we will take it out of our files. Really though, something should be done.”
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Arthur Krock claimed to be in Kennedy’s office when Roosevelt called to urge restraint but was, according to Krock, talked out of it by his maritime commissioner. “‘No, sir, I don’t go with that idea of compromise. . . . Listen, boy. If we do that we’ll land in the ———.’ (At which mention of the ignoble but functional edifice to which Kennedy was wont to refer, came a delighted roar . . . from the other end of the wire).”
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Kennedy cabled the ship’s captain to “instruct crew to proceed with your lawful orders. If they still refuse warn crew that all still refusing . . . will be placed in irons and prosecuted to full extent of law on return to United States. If they still refuse, place ringleaders in irons. If other crew members still refuse duty, have them removed from ship and replace them with American, if available, and if not, foreign seamen.” The cable was signed, “United States Maritime Commission,” though as
Time
magazine reported, its “terse message . . . looked as if it had had the personal attention of Chairman Kennedy.”
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The National Maritime Union (NMU), to which the sailors belonged, protested immediately that Kennedy and the commission had no right to intervene in a labor dispute in Uruguay. Nonetheless, the seamen returned to duty.

When the
Algic
landed in Baltimore a few weeks later, fourteen crew members were arrested by federal agents and indicted for “revolt and mutiny.” Joseph Curran, the president of the NMU, publicly blamed Kennedy for the arrests, declared the union was “going to get Kennedy’s scalp,” and cabled Roosevelt at Hyde Park, “asking that justice be procured” for the jailed sailors and that Mr. Kennedy be fired. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who was on good terms with Curran and the CIO officials who backed him defused the crisis by suggesting that Roosevelt ignore the telegram. She then persuaded Curran to apologize to Kennedy for making the
Algic
affair into a personal dispute. Kennedy accepted the apology but refused to back down. He was not, as he had made clear in his Harvard speech that spring, antiunion, but neither was he going to sit idly by and let unionized seamen disrupt commerce by going on sympathy strikes in Montevideo.
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The fourteen seamen were found guilty of violating a 1790 mutiny law. Nine were given two-month prison sentences, the remaining five $50 fines. The CIO unions would never forgive Kennedy. The business community, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for his tough talk and actions.

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K
ennedy sailed on from triumph to triumph. On July 1, 1937, he had announced at a press conference that the Maritime Commission had reached agreement with twenty-three of the shipping companies that for the past nine years had received bloated “disguised” subsidies for carrying the mail. That Kennedy had secured these agreements by July 1, less than three months into his tenure as chairman, and saved the government millions of dollars was, Arthur Krock reported, nothing less than miraculous. Even the president sent Kennedy a letter of congratulation or, rather, had his son James do so over his signature: “It was a grand job to get those contracts out of the way on time.”
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In November, with consummate showmanship, Kennedy made even larger headlines with the release of a compendious report to Congress on the state of the merchant shipping industry. “Joe Kennedy was a genius at public relations,” recalled Harvey Klemmer, who worked at the Maritime Commission in Washington and then with Kennedy in London. “He had the whole country waiting for the economic survey. He built up suspense until you thought it was the second coming of Christ.” To gather maximum publicity for the commission’s report—and its chairman—Kennedy sat for interviews with newspaper and magazine reporters and appeared in a
March of Time
and a Hearst newsreel. The
New York Times
declared in an extended editorial that Kennedy’s report was “a model of what such a report should be. . . . It is informative, concise, lucid, and above all readable” and urged that Congress follow its recommendations.
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In early December, Kennedy appeared before the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries to present his report and answer questions about his progress—or lack of it—in getting new ships into the water.

“‘You have been chairman of the Maritime Commission for eight months?’

“Kennedy nodded in agreement.

“‘How many ships have you laid down in that time?’

“‘One.’

“‘Are any others to be built soon?’

“‘I have no assurance under the act as it stands that any ships will be built.’

“‘Do you think this act is workable as it now stands?’

“‘No . . . I think it is about the worst I have ever seen.’”
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Kennedy insisted that until Congress passed the amendments to the 1936 maritime legislation the commission had recommended—and mandated compulsory arbitration of labor disputes—it would be impossible to get more American ships into the water.

The next week, he took his seat for a repeat performance, this time before a joint meeting of the Senate Committee on Commerce and the Committee on Education and Labor.

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T
he president’s second term had begun rather disastrously when, in February 1937, he proposed legislation to radically change the composition of a hostile Supreme Court by adding an additional justice for each sitting justice seventy years or older. The response of the public, the press, and members of both parties to what became known as his “court-packing” plan was decidedly negative. As a loyal member of the Roosevelt team, Kennedy agreed to line up support for the president. “Before I ask you in the name of the Holy Father to help on a plan,” he wrote Bernard Baruch on March 3, 1937, “are you for or against the Holy Father’s suggestion on the Supreme Court and if you are for his plan would you care to go along and help. Wire me care of the White House.” In the end, there was nothing Baruch or Kennedy or anyone else friendly to Roosevelt could do to save him from the grievous political miscalculation that he would be able to bully the Congress into approving his plan.
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In late July, the doomed bill was “recommitted” to committee, where it would die of inaction. Weeks later, the bottom fell out of the economy.

The administration had decided earlier in the year that the recovery was proceeding so impressively, it was time to steer back to normalcy, reduce federal expenditures, and cut the budget. The result was economic disaster. Stock market prices began falling in August, the sell-off accelerated in October, and by December the Dow Jones Industrial Average was a third of what it had been at the start of the summer. The economy appeared to be going through the same kind of meltdown as at the start of the Great Depression eight years earlier. Corporate profits fell, national income declined, and unemployment increased dramatically.

Kennedy could have kept quiet and ridden out the storm, but he preferred not to. As an insider now, he defended the administration and, as he had in his 1936 campaign book, insisted that he was doing so not as a professional politician, but as a businessman who understood the workings of the economy.

On December 7, 1937, he took the pro-Roosevelt side in a debate organized before fifteen hundred members of the Economic Club of New York at its annual black-tie dinner at the Hotel Astor. The anti-Roosevelt position was presented by former budget director Lewis Douglas and Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia. Douglas attacked the administration for being antibusiness. He was followed to the podium by Senator Glass, who declared that he was “totally in disagreement with nearly everything that had been done in Washington” since Roosevelt took office. After Glass had received round after round of applause and shouts of “More!” from the crowd, Kennedy was called to the podium. He began by pledging to follow the instructions he had been given and not to make a speech. “I have only one thing to say. About three years ago I went to Washington as a real enthusiast of the New Deal, and in spite of everything that has been said, and in spite of everything that has happened, I still am an enthusiast for the New Deal.” He urged the members of the Economic Club to stop “bellyaching” and if they had ideas about recovery, to do as he had, go to Washington and offer “to help and assist, not for Roosevelt, not for the New Deal, for yourselves, because by doing something now, you can help the whole cause.” His speech, the
New York Times
reported the next morning, “was greeted with applause and an undercurrent of booing.”
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A
s James Roosevelt recalled in his memoir, Kennedy had “made it clear” after the 1936 election “that he felt he deserved a reward—which he did—and he hinted broadly that the reward he had in mind was the post of secretary of the treasury—which was out of the question. Father was not going to remove Henry Morgenthau from office. Father did not tell Joe in so many words, but in time it became clear to him.” A year later, after Kennedy had successfully organized the Maritime Commission as its first chairman, Roosevelt mentioned to his son that “we’ve got to do something for old Joe, but I don’t know what. He wants what he can’t have, but there must be something we can give him he’ll be happy with.” James was informally delegated to raise the subject of a future appointment with Kennedy, which he did “several times.” “One evening Joe said that if he couldn’t be secretary of the treasury, there was one other job he’d consider: ‘I’d like to be ambassador to England.’ I was surprised. I really liked Joe, but he was a crusty old cuss and I couldn’t picture him as an ambassador, especially to England.” James reported Kennedy’s request to his father, who on first hearing it “laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” Kennedy had never demonstrated any interest in or knowledge of foreign affairs, and he was among the least diplomatic men in Washington. He spoke his mind, got into fights with cabinet members such as Ickes and Frances Perkins, whom he considered softheaded, had no patience for ceremonial events or occasions, was possessed of a fierce temper and a foul mouth, and he was third-generation Irish and a practicing Catholic.
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Still, there was a logic to it all. The president was well aware, in late 1937, that whatever the future brought, he was going to have to find a way to confront the looming presence and increasingly aggressive behavior of Hitler and Mussolini on the continent and the Japanese in China. To do so effectively, he needed intelligence not only about internal political currents, but about the European economies, public opinion, what the bankers, industrialists, and political leaders were contemplating. This Kennedy might be able to provide. Say what you might about the man, he was a superb analyst and reporter, a clearheaded, tough-minded, independent thinker who appeared not to be swayed by ideology, belonged to no political faction, was beholden to no industrial sector, and was loyal to the president.

In early December 1937, James Roosevelt reported to Kennedy that his father was prepared to appoint him to the London post. A few days later James visited Kennedy at Marwood. Arthur Krock, who was dining alone with Kennedy that evening, as he did quite often now, recalled watching “as the pair retired to another room for a half hour or so, after which James Roosevelt departed and Kennedy returned to the table. He was fuming. ‘You know what Jimmy proposed? That instead of going to London, I become Secretary of Commerce! Well, I’m not going to. FDR promised me London, and I told Jimmy to tell his father that’s the job, and the only one, I’ll accept.’”
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