The Patriarch (43 page)

Kennedy arrived in London late on August 29 in the midst of several crises, the least important of which, certainly for Halifax, was the Jewish refugee one. The foreign secretary and the prime minister were too preoccupied with German threats to Czechoslovakia to pay much attention to the Jewish question. When asked by Kennedy “about the Jewish situation,” Halifax responded that “he was not very well up on it.” There had been some discussion, he told Kennedy, “about placing Jews in Rhodesia and Kenya, but just how many they cannot tell yet.” He added that he was not sure the attempt to resettle the German and Austrian Jews was a good idea as “other countries who want to get rid of their Jews will be encouraged to throw them out, hoping that America, England and France will find some way of taking care of them.”
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On August 30, Prime Minister Chamberlain convened an emergency cabinet meeting to consider whether the British government should issue a formal warning to Germany that it would defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia by force, if necessary. It was decided to make no such commitment for now, but to keep Hitler guessing as to what the British might do should he invade Czechoslovakia. At the conclusion of the cabinet meeting, Chamberlain met with Kennedy at 10 Downing. Kennedy, who had not seen the prime minister in more than a month, was shocked at his appearance.

“He does not look well at all,” he cabled Hull at five
P.M.
that afternoon. “The gist of the conversation was that he is very much disturbed about the Czechoslovakia situation. All the information that he gets . . . is that Hitler has made up his mind to take Czechoslovakia peacefully if possible but with arms if necessary.” The nightmare scenarios that had haunted Kennedy since the
Anschluss
were one step closer to denouement. Only Chamberlain, Kennedy believed, stood between war and peace. “He still is the best bet in Europe today against war, but he is a very sick looking individual. He is worried but not jittery.”
¹⁷

The day after Kennedy’s interview with the prime minister, he met with Halifax, who wanted to know “what would be the reaction in America if the Germans went into Czechoslovakia, with the Czechs fighting them, and England did not go along.” Kennedy forwarded Halifax’s request to Hull. He then, bizarrely, before he had received any reply, “called in a mixed audience of newspaper men” and told them about Halifax’s request. Reporters on both sides of the Atlantic were aghast at his lack of discretion. As the
Chicago Tribune
asked rhetorically,
“Why he touched on a subject considered a dark secret is best known to himself.”
¹⁸

Kennedy violated State Department protocol a second time that same day by giving an exclusive telephone interview to Hearst’s
Boston Evening American,
without clearing it with the State Department.

Roosevelt directed Hull to inform Kennedy that the American government had no intention of specifying, in advance, how it would respond to the hypothetical scenario Halifax had described and to chastise him for granting interviews to selected newspaper chains. Morgenthau, who met with the president that same day, “got the impression that the President felt that not only was Kennedy talking to the press, but he was definitely trying to force the President’s hand in this manner in his process of playing the Chamberlain game.” By leaking the news of the British request, Kennedy had placed his government in an impossible situation. “We are in the position now,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary, “that anything we do now makes us a party either way, a party to their fighting or not fighting. They have us, for the moment, stymied. Kennedy is playing with the British Foreign Office and the Prime Minister. He has spilled the beans, and the President knows this.”
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Morgenthau reported to Roosevelt what Kennedy had said at Cannes about “the old man” (Secretary of State Hull) and his mishandling of the Anglo-American trade bill. When he had finished his Kennedy story, Roosevelt told one of his own. He had recently sent a commission to Britain “to study labor conditions abroad.” Though the commission members were in London for a full three weeks, Kennedy had not entertained a single member “with the exception of Gerard Swope,” chairman of General Electric and brother of Kennedy’s friend Herbert Bayard Swope. At a dinner given by the British in honor of the commissioners, Kennedy “got up and gave a talk. He said that in America legislation was prepared on a ten minute study by the brain trust; it was then passed by Congress and subsequently found to be imperfect or unconstitutional and that’s the way we did things in America, while in England everything was carefully prepared by Commissions so that it could be readily passed by Parliament and that it worked well. The President,” Morgenthau noted in his diary, “was perfectly furious when he heard this and . . . tempted to recall Kennedy.”

Morgenthau, stoking the president’s anger, suggested that Kennedy’s “popularity with the English” was due to such critical remarks about the United States. The president agreed. “I don’t think there is much question but what Kennedy is disloyal to his country.” He asked Morgenthau if, when they were together in the South of France, Kennedy had mentioned resigning. “If Kennedy wants to resign when he comes back [for his next leave, probably at the end of the year], I will accept it on the spot and . . . if Kennedy returns to private life he is through.”
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O
n September 2, Kennedy and Jack took the train to Aberdeen, Scotland, to lay the cornerstone of a memorial chapel dedicated to an American bishop from Connecticut. Anxious not to get himself into any more trouble, the ambassador had forwarded a draft of his remarks to the State Department for review and marked those paragraphs that might cause “some concern on broad political grounds.” One of them contained as clear an articulation of his views on war and peace as he would ever make: “I should like to ask you all if you know of any dispute or controversy existing in the world which is worth the life of your son, or of anyone else’s son? Perhaps I am not well informed of the terrifically vital forces underlying all this unrest in the world, but for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which could be remotely considered worth shedding blood for.”
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When Moffat received the draft and read the highlighted paragraph, he immediately went looking for Hull, who he hoped would show the draft to the president. “Joe Kennedy’s star is not shining brightly these days,” Moffat noted in his diary on September 1. “He cannot move without a blare of publicity and in tense moments like these publicity is the thing most to be avoided. . . . All of us thought that the Secretary should have Presidential authority to reject the paragraphs.”
²²

Roosevelt, on reading the draft, was confirmed in his opinion that Kennedy had gone over to the other side. His position—that Czechoslovakia was not even “remotely” a cause “worth shedding blood for”—was but a paraphrase of Chamberlain’s position—that Britain had no vital interest in going to war to preserve the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia. “Who would have thought,” he told Morgenthau on September 1, 1938, “that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman? . . . The young man needs his wrists slapped rather hard.”
²³

It was apparent now, six months into his tenure, that Joseph P. Kennedy was unfit to serve as ambassador. Unfortunately, there was no way Roosevelt could recall him. On the contrary, he needed him in London more than ever. The nominating conventions were less than two years away and there was already, as Harold Ickes had written in his diary that summer, a strong feeling “in some quarters that there may be an understanding between [Vice President] Garner and [Postmaster General] Farley looking to a ticket consisting of these twain in 1940 [and this] has led to the suggestion that in such an event the President might have to turn to Joe Kennedy as a candidate for Vice President. This would match a Roman Catholic against a Roman Catholic.”
²⁴

While Roosevelt, contrary to Ickes’s speculations, was not considering Kennedy for the vice-presidential nomination, he knew that whether he ran for a third term or chose a liberal New Dealer like Hopkins to succeed him, he was going to need Kennedy’s endorsement. The ambassador was too rich, too outspoken, too charming, and too well connected to the national media to have as an enemy. The solution would have been to bring Kennedy back to Washington and give him another position. However, the ambassador had made it clear that the only position he would accept, in lieu of his ambassadorship, was secretary of the treasury, and Roosevelt was not about to replace Morgenthau, whom he trusted, with a known renegade.

Roosevelt was trapped. In the months to come, the president would speak ill of his ambassador, trust him less and less, and detour around him to communicate with London, but he would never, as he had suggested to Morgenthau he should, slap his wrists, criticize him publicly, or let him know of his dissatisfaction. Kennedy, with no direct knowledge of the president’s displeasure, would continue to follow his own agenda.

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O
n September 6, Joseph P. Kennedy celebrated his fiftieth birthday by himself. Rose and Kick, who were shopping in Paris, called to wish him a happy birthday at 8:45 in the morning but missed him. Joe Jr., also in Paris, telegrammed his birthday wishes: “The first fifty they say are the toughest but it’s going to be much tougher for your all too promising son to come anywhere near duplicating your great achievements. Love and Congratulations on your half century of phenomenal success.” There were letters as well from Eunice and Rosemary, who reported that they were having a grand time on their tour of Scotland and Ireland. “We have been getting plenty of attention,” Eunice, now seventeen, informed her father from County Cork. “We had the special De Luxe room on the boat. A couple of people wanted to interview us and two people have asked us for our autograph. . . . Well Daddy I hope you had a very happy birthday and a very ‘quiet one.’ I only wish you were with us.”
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B
y early September, Lord Halifax had come up with a new strategy for keeping the peace, the very opposite of the one he and Chamberlain had pursued to this point. Hitler, Halifax now believed, might be persuaded to back away from his threat to seize the Sudetenland if he could be convinced that the British and the French, with American support, would go to war to protect Czechoslovakian territorial integrity. The problem with such a scenario was that the Americans had never evidenced any intention of joining a campaign, military or otherwise, against Germany.

Kennedy, informed by Halifax of his new strategy, thought it worth pursuing and offered his support. According to Halifax’s summary of their meeting on September 10, Kennedy had declared that “American opinion was more excited against Germany now than he had ever known it. . . . If war should come, he anticipated that the immediate reaction would be a desire to keep out of it, but that, if we [Great Britain] were drawn into it and, for example, London was bombed, he thought there would be a strong revulsion of feeling and that the history of the last war would be repeated, leading a great deal more rapidly than in the last war, to American intervention.”
²⁶

The next morning, on September 11, the foreign secretary and the ambassador met again. Knowing full well that neither Roosevelt nor Hull intended to make any public commitment to backing the British should they call Hitler’s bluff, Kennedy set out to find a way to create the illusion of one. He “suggested,” according to Halifax’s notes, “that it might be useful were he to call on the Prime Minister this evening in order to encourage German speculation regarding the fact that our two countries were apparently keeping in such close touch. I welcomed the ambassador’s suggestion and told him that I had no doubt that the Prime Minister would be glad to see him, quite apart from the political value which his visit might have in the eyes of the outside world.” In his diplomatic dispatch, Kennedy reported to Hull that he was “seeing the Prime Minister at 7:30” but didn’t tell him that the meeting had been his idea and was intended to create the illusion that the British and Americans were pursuing or formulating some joint declaration or action.
²⁷

Kennedy took a second and much more dangerous step toward constructing the appearance of an Anglo-American alliance by leaking news of one to officials in the German embassy. On September 12, the German chargé d’affaires in London cabled Ribbentrop that he had learned “from a reliable source [that] President Roosevelt has made it known through the Ambassador that Great Britain could count on the support of the United States if she should become involved in a war.” The “reliable source” was Kennedy, who was cited in another dispatch to Berlin as having declared that while “he himself had two sons and would work” to keep America out of the war, he was “convinced that America would nevertheless intervene in the end.” With the English, French, and ultimately the Americans poised to come to Czechoslovakia’s rescue, Kennedy had told the German envoy that it now “depended on Hitler whether there was to be chaos, from which no country in the world could remain immune.” Should Hitler back away from a military invasion and takeover of the Sudetenland, Kennedy assured the German envoy, “there would be a big change in public opinion through the world . . . and above all in the United States.” Hitler would be hailed by the world as a “benefactor of mankind. . . . His ideas in the social and economic field which were responsible for such extraordinary achievements in Germany would be a determining influence on the economic development of the United States and economic cooperation between all nations.” Desperately seeking to avert the catastrophe he saw just over the horizon, Kennedy was alternately threatening and flattering the Germans in the mistaken expectations that Hitler did not want war and that he cared about European and American public opinion.
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