The Patriarch (58 page)

The following morning, May 10, at six
A.M.
, the “telephone rang and they said it was Secretary Hull. I held on five minutes and the Secretary came on and asked me if I knew of anything that was going on. I said, ‘Nothing.’” Hull reported that he had heard from Ambassador John Cudahy in Belgium that “the Germans had attacked Holland and Belgium, and that there was great concentration of airplanes over Luxembourg.”

On ringing off, Kennedy “called the Admiralty and got the map room and they indicated that the only news they had was that Holland had been invaded. . . . Again it struck me that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what was going on.” Kennedy got dressed and was driven to his office, where he placed calls to the American embassies in Holland, Belgium, and Italy. The Germans, he learned, had mined the Dutch harbors, bombed The Hague, were attacking Brussels from the air, and were concentrating airplanes over Luxembourg. There was no news from Rome. He called Lord Halifax at Whitehall and “asked him what the British were doing and he said, ‘We are moving all ways—air, navy, and army.” He then called Sumner Welles at the State Department, “gave him all this information” he had gathered, and promised to remain in touch as long as the telephone lines remained open. Welles thanked him. “He said they hadn’t been able to get through to anybody, not even Paris, and he was very anxious to keep in touch with the countries and to know what was going on.”
³²

The first British casualty of the German assault was the prime minister, who resigned his position on May 10. He had preferred that his successor be Lord Halifax, but when the foreign secretary declined the offer, he turned to Churchill. Kennedy was distraught by the fall from power of the man he admired most in Great Britain, and devastated by the news that the gentlemanly Chamberlain would be succeeded by the warmongering, near alcoholic Winston Churchill.

As Prime Minister Churchill assembled his war cabinet, naming himself minister of defense, the German Panzer divisions pushed through Holland, Belgium, and into France. Barely ninety hours after the initial attacks, Paul Reynaud, the French premier, reported to Churchill by telephone that the French lines had been broken and the army cut in two. He called again the next morning at seven
A.M.
“The battle is lost,” he told Churchill in English.
³³

Kennedy was fully occupied at the embassy with evacuating those Americans still in England. The State Department had suggested ferrying them across the English Channel to the southern coast of France, where they could be picked up by American ships. For Kennedy, the notion of ferrying anyone across the English Channel, “the most dangerous stretch of water now being used by any passenger service in the world,” was further proof that Washington had no idea what was happening on the continent. Kennedy suggested that Irish ports were far more accessible from England and far safer. After much back and forth, his recommendation was accepted.
³⁴

The evening of May 14, Kennedy went to the theater with Franklin Gowen from his embassy and Bill Hillman, the former Hearst correspondent. On the way back to Windsor, he stopped off to see Lord Beaverbrook, who told him that he had just accepted an appointment as minister of aircraft production in the Churchill government and was on his way to a midnight appointment with the prime minister. Minutes later, the telephone rang at Beaverbrook’s residence, and Kennedy, who hadn’t left yet, was asked to “come right away to the Admiralty; that Churchill would like to see me.”

Kennedy had never liked or trusted Churchill. Now, confronted with the rotund red-faced little man, surrounded by his aides, he was truly frightened. “I couldn’t help but think as I sat there talking to Churchill how ill-conditioned he looked and the fact that there was a tray with plenty of liquor on it alongside him and he was drinking a scotch highball, which I felt was indeed not the first one he had drunk that night, that, after all, the affairs of Great Britain might be in the hands of the most dynamic individual in Great Britain but certainly not in the hands of the best judgment in Great Britain.”
³⁵

“I just left Churchill at one o’clock,” Kennedy cabled Roosevelt and Hull an hour later. “He is sending you a message tomorrow morning. . . . The reason for the message to you is that he needs help badly. I asked him what the United States could do to help that would not leave the United States holding the bag for a war in which the Allies expected to be beaten. It seems to me that if we had to fight to protect our lives we would do better fighting in our own backyard. I said you know our strength. What could we do if we wanted to help you all we can? You do not need money or credit now. The bulk of our Navy is in the Pacific and we have not enough airplanes for our own use and our Army is not up to requirements. So if this is going to be a quick war all over in a few months what could we do. He said it was his intention to ask now for a loan of 30 or 40 of our old destroyers and also whatever airplanes we could spare right now. He said that regardless of what Germany does to England and France, England will never give up as long as he remains a power in public life even if England is burnt to the ground. Why, said he, the government will move to Canada and take the fleet and fight on.”
³⁶

This was precisely what Kennedy expected and feared Churchill was going to say. The newly installed prime minister intended to push the British to fight on until the Americans had no choice but to enter the war or watch from the sidelines as Great Britain was conquered.

On May 16, Roosevelt called on Congress to appropriate $896 million to upgrade American air, ground, and naval defenses. “New powers of destruction, incredibly swift and ready, have been developed; and those who wield them are ruthless and daring. . . . No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening, and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored.” He made no mention of supplying any military assistance to the British or the French.
³⁷

After delivering his message to Congress, the president returned to the White House and wrote to inform Churchill that the United States could not loan the British any destroyers, no matter how old, without congressional approval, which he declined to seek. On the matter of airplanes, he promised nothing, insisting only that the United States would do “everything within our power to make it possible for the Allied Governments to obtain the latest types of aircraft in the United States.” As to the American fleet, which Churchill hoped would be repositioned to the Atlantic, it was “now concentrated in Hawaii where it will remain at least for the time being.” Roosevelt was, however, prepared to permit the British to purchase steel in the United States, and he pledged to give “the most favorable consideration . . . to the request” for antiaircraft equipment and ammunition, though he added that the request would have to be considered “in the light of our own defense needs and requirements.”
³⁸

Churchill responded by pressing his case and posing a frightening scenario. Although he had no intention of negotiating with the Germans, he could not vouch for his successors, who might, as part of a peace settlement, hand over the British fleet. For the moment, the United States was seemingly impregnable, but should the Germans gain control of the British fleet, they would rule the seas as well as the European continent and be free to do as they pleased in the western hemisphere. “Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly. . . . However, there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.”
³⁹

Roosevelt was persuaded by Churchill’s argument that the defeat of the British would pose a direct threat to American security, especially if the fleet fell into Germany’s hands. In his May 15 dispatch, Kennedy had argued that “if we had to fight to protect our lives we would do better fighting in our own backyard.” Roosevelt disagreed.

“The President and I,” Cordell Hull recalled decades later in his
Memoirs,
“reached a different conclusion from Kennedy’s. It seemed to us we should do better to keep fighting away from our own back yard. This we could do by helping Britain and France remain on their feet.” Although it was unclear as yet what could be done to assist the British given the neutrality laws and public opinion, “of one point, the President and I had not the slightest doubt; namely, that an Allied victory was essential to the security of the United States.”
⁴⁰

Twenty-three

T
HE
F
ALL OF
F
RANCE

I
t was Saturday, May 18, 1940. The ambassador was spending his weekend at St. Leonard’s. Late in the evening, Herschel Johnson, his number two man at the embassy, called to say that he had been visited that afternoon by Maxwell Knight of MI5, British Military Intelligence. “Johnson’s language,” Kennedy recalled in his unpublished
Diplomatic Memoir,
“was guarded but I gathered enough from what he said to learn that one of our clerks was suspected of having given out confidential information to sources allied to the Nazis.”

Johnson met with Kennedy at St. Leonard’s the next morning and told Kennedy a most “extraordinary story” of espionage at the American embassy. Tyler Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old code specialist from an old Virginia family who had joined the U.S. Foreign Service after college, served in Moscow, and been transferred to London in October 1939, had been consorting with Anna Wolkoff, the daughter of a former admiral in the czar’s navy. Wolkoff was connected to the Right Club, a secret society of English Fascists led by Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Conservative member of Parliament. Through the use of undercover agents, MI5 had learned that Wolkoff had bragged about receiving information from Kent that could only have come from the embassy. Scotland Yard was preparing to arrest Wolkoff the next morning, Monday, “and would search Kent’s rooms at the same time provided that we would waive any diplomatic immunity that might prevent such a search.” Kennedy agreed to waive immunity.
¹

The ambassador arrived at the embassy early on Monday morning, May 20. That same morning, Maxwell Knight of MI5, Franklin Gowen of the embassy, and three men from Scotland Yard made their way to Tyler Kent’s flat. They arrived at 11:15. On being refused entrance, they broke down the door, took Kent into custody, let the woman he was with go home, and searched his rooms, where according to Knight they discovered “a most amazing collection of documents [including] copies of secret and confidential code telegrams between various United States Embassies and Washington.” An hour or so later, they returned to the embassy, where Kennedy and Johnson took a quick look at the stolen materials: almost two thousand documents, two sets of duplicate keys to the code and file rooms, a tin box, and a locked, leather-bound book. Kent was brought into the office, where he insisted that he was not a spy but had taken the documents “only for my own information.”
²

Tyler Kent had not been the highest-ranking or most efficient of the decoders, but it had fallen to him to code and decode the clandestine Churchill-Roosevelt cables. Had it become public knowledge in the spring of 1940 that the president of the United States, whose actions in the international arena were bound by strict neutrality laws, had been in secret communication with the bellicose first lord of the British Admiralty, Roosevelt and the Democrats would have been severely embarrassed six months before the presidential elections.
³

The ambassador in London was frightened to the core at the possible repercussions. There were too many unanswered questions. For how long had MI5 suspected that Tyler Kent was a spy? Did the British have potentially embarrassing information about other embassy employees? Was Kent part of a larger spy ring? Were officials at other American embassies involved? To whom had Kent and his British Fascist accomplices given the materials they had stolen from the code and file rooms?

At seven o’clock that evening, Kennedy cabled Washington with the news he knew would set off alarms. He did his best to pretend that he had the situation fully in control, though it was obvious that he did not. “Following the receipt on Saturday of information that Tyler Kent associated with a gang of spies working in the interests of Germany and Russia, I today caused his private quarters to be searched, finding there substantial amounts of confidential embassy material, including true readings of messages in most confidential codes; also evidence of his personal connections with the spy group.” He had waived Kent’s immunity, participated fully with MI5 and Scotland Yard, and permitted Kent to be placed in custody. Kennedy “urgently requested . . . the department’s approval and instructions.”
⁴

Within hours, he received a cable from Washington with orders that all further communications be decoded by Herschel Johnson and no one else. Hull needed to know at once if the strip cipher system, the most secret of the codes used by the State Department, had been compromised. A second cable informed the ambassador that Tyler Kent had been dismissed. A third directed him to keep a careful watch of all code clerks, their associates, and their outside activities.

The State Department was near frantic. To determine whether Kent had associates in other American embassies in Europe, Breckinridge Long, with J. Edgar Hoover’s assistance, recruited and dispatched teams of undercover agents, disguised as special couriers, to several European embassies.
⁵

Embassy staff in London were instructed to put together a catalog of the stolen documents. “They are a complete history of our diplomatic correspondence since 1938,” Long wrote in his diary on receiving the documents. “It is appalling. Hundreds of copies—true readings—of dispatches, cables, messages. Some months every single message going into and out from the London Embassy were copied and the copies found in his room. It means not only that our codes are cracked a dozen ways but that our every diplomatic maneuver was exposed to Germany and Russia. . . . It is a terrible blow—almost a major catastrophe.”
⁶

Long was overreacting. Kennedy proved remarkably adept at damage control. He met with the under-secretary at the Home Office, who spoke with the chief censor on his behalf. “They assure me,” he cabled Hull on May 24, that “nothing will be permitted to be printed here or abroad.” To avoid the spectacle of a public espionage trial, Kent was not deported but tried in London under the British Official Secrets Act, with no reporters, visitors, or spectators allowed into the courtroom and no documents from the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, or indeed any other sensitive dispatches or cables, put into evidence. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts after deliberating for twenty-four minutes and sentenced Kent to seven years penal servitude, of which he would serve a little more than five.
⁷

Breckinridge Long’s investigation revealed that Tyler Kent had acted alone. There had been no leak of the secret Churchill-Roosevelt communiqués. The “catastrophe” that the State Department had anticipated had not come to pass. In the end, the Tyler Kent affair was a sideshow, though a thoroughly frightening one.

—

M
eanwhile, on the continent all that Kennedy had feared and expected had come to pass. The Germans pushed on, almost unimpeded, pounding the French army and the British Expeditionary Force from the air and on the ground.

“The situation is terrible,” Kennedy wrote Rose on May 20 in his own hand, as he did not want to share what he had to say with his typists. “I think the jig is up. The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the Allies. I’m planning to get Rose[mary] and the Moores out either to Ireland or Lisbon. We will be in for a terrific bombing pretty soon and I’ll do better if I just have myself to look after. The English will fight to the end but I just don’t think they can stand up to the bombing indefinitely. What will happen then is probably a dictated peace with Hitler probably getting the British Navy, and we will find ourselves in a terrible mess. My God how right I’ve been in my predictions. I wish I’d been wrong. Well darling it’s certainly been a great adventure. It’s getting near the finish.”
⁸

During the last week in May, after the failure of a French counteroffensive, General John Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in Europe, established a safe haven at the port of Dunkirk, just northeast of the advancing German troops, and began to evacuate his army across the English Channel. Churchill, who had urged his generals to fight on, reluctantly agreed that the army would be destroyed or captured by the Germans if it did not leave the continent at once. “My impression of the situation here,” Kennedy cabled Washington on the evening of May 27, “is that it could not be worse. Only a miracle can save the British expeditionary force from being wiped out or as I said yesterday, surrender.” Kennedy insisted that the Allies had no choice now but to sue for peace. “I suspect that the Germans would be willing to make peace with both the French and British now—of course on their own terms, but on terms that would be a great deal better than they would be if the war continues. . . . I realize this is a terrific telegram, but there is no question that it’s in the air here. . . . Churchill, Atlee and others will want to fight to the death, but there will be other numbers who realize that physical destruction of men and property in England will not be a proper offset to a loss of pride. In addition to that, the English people, while they suspect a terrible situation, really do not realize how bad it is. When they do, I don’t know which group they will follow—the do or die, or the group that want a settlement. It is critical no matter which way you look at it.”
⁹

Kennedy’s suggestion that the British and French attempt “to make peace” before it was too late was not an outlandish one. Lord Halifax, still foreign secretary, had already proposed to the cabinet that the British consider joining with the French and inquiring of Mussolini, perhaps through President Roosevelt, what his terms were for staying out of the war and whether he would be willing to attend a four-power conference, with Germany, France, and Great Britain, to negotiate an end to the crisis. After three days of strenuous internal debate, Churchill convinced his colleagues not to approach Mussolini.
¹⁰

“With France apparently falling,” Hull called together senior State Department officials “to consider the possible eventualities of the war situation in Europe. . . . We came to the general conclusion that the position of the Allied armies was desperate, and our attention centered on the necessity” of keeping the French and British navies out of German hands. Roosevelt cabled both governments asking for assurances, which were given, that they would not surrender their fleets to the Germans.
¹¹

The possibility that Britain’s gold supplies might be seized or surrendered to the Germans was no less frightening. Kennedy, on instructions from Hull, suggested to Kingsley Wood, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, and Montague Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, that it might be prudent for the government to consider shipping its gold and securities to Canada. “Kingsley Wood said he would consult the Prime Minister. . . . The next day he told me that Churchill would not agree to ship valuables to Canada because it might make the country think that the government was in panic. . . . I was learning rapidly,” Kennedy recalled in his
Diplomatic Memoir,
“that one can become unpopular by offering advice that people don’t want to hear. My contacts with the Churchill cabinet were certainly far less friendly than with the old government.”
¹²

All of these scenarios, one more nightmarish than the next, were founded on the anticipated loss of most, if not all, of the quarter-million-man British Expeditionary Force. What neither Washington nor London knew was that Hitler, for reasons that remain open to debate to this day, instead of pressing forward to capture the British Army, had on May 24 halted the forward movement of his Panzer divisions fifteen miles south of Dunkirk. By the time he revoked that order two days later, the British evacuation was under way. On May 26 and 27, some 8,000 troops crossed the English Channel; on May 28, another 19,000; on May 29, some 47,000 more. By June 4, when the last boats departed from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, the impossible had happened: the bulk of the British Army and more than 100,000 French and Belgium troops had been saved.
¹³

“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance,” Churchill told the House of Commons on June 4, “the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.” Still, the army had been saved to fight again. “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. . . . We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
¹⁴

Kennedy was stirred by Churchill’s eloquence. Still, for him, the most significant passages of the speech, as he recalled them years later in his
Diplomatic Memoir,
were not those devoted to the call to arms, struggle, sacrifice, and endless battle, but the prime minister’s admission and warning that “our thankfulness at the escape of our army . . . must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.”
¹⁵

“If the French break—and the consensus here is that they will—,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. on June 6, two days after Churchill’s address, “then I should think the finish may come quite quickly. The British, of course, will fight, but only through pride and courage. With the French out of the way and the Germans in control of all the ports I can see nothing but slaughter ahead. I am arranging to send everybody away with the exception of about ten of us . . . who will stay and sleep at the Chancery [the embassy]. I am going to try to keep this place operating as long as they leave the building standing up.”
¹⁶