The Patriarch (60 page)

In every letter he wrote, he mentioned the fact that the president had called him the day before. Only in his letter to Rose did he explain why: “My own feeling is that the reason Roosevelt rang me up . . . was that he is afraid I will walk out because of my dissatisfaction with things and he wanted to ‘soft-soap’ me.” He understood fully, as he wrote both Clare Boothe Luce and Joseph Davies at the State Department, that Roosevelt’s remarks “that he had heard from various sources that I was doing a fine job” were nothing more than “apple sauce,” his favorite nonexpletive term for bullshit.
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He was staying at his post, he made clear to Rose, Eddie Moore, and the others, not out of loyalty to the president, but to protect and preserve his and his family’s reputation. He had been dogged for some time by whispered accusations that his antiwar stance and long absences from London were due, as John Balfour at the American desk in the Foreign Office had put it, not to his being “anti-British,” but to his being “a coward.” Should he leave London now, such slanders would become commonplace. “After having worked as hard as I have the last six years and a half,” he wrote Rose, “I don’t want to do anything that would reflect on the family. After all that’s why we went into this and I don’t want to spoil it for the sake of a month or two. The boys are doing so well.”
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He had, he reported to Rose and to Dr. Jordan, gained some weight and was “feeling surprisingly well, considering everything”—so well, in fact, that he had stopped taking belladonna for his stomach troubles. When the French ambassador closed up “his house” in London, Kennedy had inherited the wines in the cellar and “his French chef,” who was “terrific” and could puree vegetables, which the English chefs could not master. “I think he could puree a bale of hay and make it taste like chocolate ice cream. He is having quite a time making those egg muffins and broiling bacon so that I can eat it.”
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L
ess than a week after his phone call from the president—and Donovan’s departure—it happened all over again. Washington, he learned, again secondhand, had gone behind his back and informed the British War Office that it was sending a military fact-finding delegation to London, this one led by an admiral and two generals. “Now there is probably a good reason why it is necessary to go around the Ambassador in London and take up the matter with the British before he knows about it,” he cabled Hull. “However, I do not like it and I either want to run this job or get out. At this time, this job is a delicate one and to do the job well, requires that I know what is going on. Not to know what is going on causes embarrassment and confusion. I want to know, in other words, what is going to happen before the British are notified. Not to tell me, is very poor treatment of me, and is bad organization.”
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When told that he had not been informed about the delegation because “secretary Stimson desires ‘to avoid any publicity whatever,’” Kennedy exploded in righteous anger. “I just do not figure what you people are getting at in Washington,” he cabled Welles on August 8. “All I can say is that you are laying the groundwork . . . for a real bombshell for your foreign policy.” There was no way to keep the arrival in London of an admiral, a brigadier general, and a major general a secret from the British and American press. “You had better tell the Army and whoever else has anything to do with them to get their story fixed up and get it fixed up quickly because pretty soon everybody in the world is going to know all about them and there is nothing that can be done about it by this Embassy.”
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O
n July 31, after a six-week pause, Churchill renewed his secret correspondence with Roosevelt. “It has now become most urgent for you to let us have the destroyers, motor boats, and flying boats for which we have asked.” He requested “50 or 60 of your oldest destroyers. . . . Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do
now. . . .
I am beginning to feel very hopeful about this war if we can get ’round the next 3 or 4 months. The air is holding well. We are hitting that man hard, both in repelling attacks and in bombing Germany. But the loss of destroyers by air attacks may well be so serious as to break down our defense of the food and trade routes across the Atlantic. . . . I am sure that with your comprehension of the sea affair, you will not let this crux of the battle go wrong for the want of these destroyers. I cabled to Lothian some days ago, and now send this through Kennedy, who is a grand help to us and the common cause.” (The reference to Kennedy would be excised from the “copy” of the telegram that Churchill included in his multivolume history of the war. Churchill had put it in only because he knew Kennedy was going to read the message before having it coded and cabled and saw no reason not to flatter the man.) While Churchill did not offer Roosevelt any quid pro quo
in exchange for the destroyers, he was willing, he cabled Lord Lothian, should it be necessary, to lease the Americans military bases in the West Indies and Bermuda
.
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On August 2, Roosevelt met with his cabinet to consider Churchill’s request. He was convinced now, his conviction bolstered by Colonel Donovan’s report, that while the odds were against a British victory, they had at least a fighting chance of surviving German air attacks and preventing a full-scale invasion. That being the case, he saw no reason not to give them the fifty aged destroyers. Although Churchill had made no mention of the British fleet, its future disposition, should the British be defeated, remained of paramount importance to the president. “It was agreed,” he wrote in his summary of the cabinet meeting held to consider Churchill’s destroyer request, “that the British be approached through Lord Lothian to find out if they would agree to give positive assurance that the British Navy, in the event of German success in Great Britain, would not under any conceivable circumstances fall into the hands of the Germans.”
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Churchill desperately needed the destroyers and was willing to gift or lease the bases in return, but, as he cabled Lord Lothian in Washington, he refused to make any declarations about what might happen to the fleet should Great Britain be defeated. “We have no intention of relieving United States from any well-grounded anxieties on this point. . . . There is no warrant for discussing any question of the transference of the Fleet to American or Canadian shores. I should refuse to allow the subject even to be mentioned in any Staff conversations, still less that any technical preparations should be made or even planned. . . . Pray make it clear at once that we could never agree to the slightest compromising of our full liberty of action, nor tolerate any such defeatist announcement, the effect of which would be disastrous.”
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On August 14, Kennedy inquired if he might visit the prime minister at three thirty to hand-deliver a message from the president. Churchill put off the meeting “because he said he has a sleep then. . . . He said after his sleep he was good until two o’clock in the morning.” At their meeting held later that afternoon, after the ritual offer of a Scotch highball, Churchill read the president’s terms for delivering the destroyers, reiterated that he had no problems with providing leases on the bases, then repeated that he could make no public pronouncements about the fleet. Kennedy emphasized how important the issue was for the president. Churchill promised to do what he could. “I am seeing the Admiralty tonight and I will have a statement for you tonight. We will get around it somehow.”
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The very next day, Kennedy greeted the military delegation whose visit he had so strenuously opposed and invited them and his military attaché, General Lee, to his estate in Windsor to brief them before the British War Office had a chance to.

He spent the afternoon berating Churchill for military blunders in Norway, Belgium, and France and declaring the British were on “the brink of disaster.” He told his visitors that he “saw dynamite in their visit because if they were here for staff talks that meant we were getting ready to go in.” Rear Admiral Robert Lee Ghormley, who had met with Roosevelt before leaving Washington, reported that he had asked the president directly if their mission—and the speed with which they were being rushed to London—meant that the United States was about to enter the war. “Positively not” had been Roosevelt’s answer. Kennedy came away from the meeting wholly befuddled by what was on the president’s mind. “I don’t understand Roosevelt,” he wrote in his diary. “I feel all the time he wants to get us into war and yet take what he says to Ghormley. I just can’t follow him.”
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The British, when they finally got the chance to brief the American military men, tried desperately to undo the damage they were sure Kennedy had caused. “It is only to be hoped,” an American desk official at the Foreign Office wrote his colleagues after the visit was concluded, “that what these . . . officers have seen will have demolished any wrong impressions that may have been created upon their minds by their having been sequestrated by Mr. Kennedy for five whole days after their arrival in England.”
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A
t 7:20 the first air raid warning in London since the day of the declaration of war,” Kennedy wrote in his diary late in the evening on August 15. He had been dining at 14 Prince’s Gate when the alert was sounded, but having heard no bombs detonate, he’d decided against the advice of his butler not to retreat to the cellar. Instead, he continued with his dinner, after which he and his guest, a Mrs. James King, proceeded to Queen’s Hall to hear Sir Henry Wood conduct the London Symphony. (Eight months later, Queen’s Hall would be demolished by German bombs.) “It was remarkable to see how well behaved and quiet the whole audience was. A young man came on the platform to apologize saying, since some of the orchestra were missing due to air raid warning did we mind waiting 4 or [5] minutes. (I tell you they are a strange people, I can’t make out whether they’re stupid, courageous, or complacent.)”
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Kennedy did not get to hear the entire concert at Queen’s Hall that evening. At 10:20, he was approached by an usher who “told me American Embassy wanted me on phone. . . . PM wanted to see me at 11.” The ambassador left at once for 10 Downing, where he met Churchill. “We went into Cabinet room and he told the guard to mix me a scotch & soda. (He never seems to remember I don’t drink.) I turned it over to him. He then offered me a cigar; again I said I’m not smoking or drinking for the duration of the war. ‘My God’ he said ‘you make me feel as if I should go round in sackcloth & ashes.’”

Churchill then went into his monologue. He was one of the few individuals alive whom Kennedy did not even attempt to interrupt once he got going. He wanted Kennedy to know that as a favor to Roosevelt, he was arranging for the Tyler Kent trial to be postponed until after the November elections, which would prevent the release of any “telegrams [that] showed too close a connection between the Prime Minister and the President.” He remained certain that England would win the war and that it was in a better situation now that it was fighting alone. He didn’t want or need the American military to fight the war, but he could use some “volunteer aviators,” as the RAF was short of pilots. He closed their meeting—it was by now well after midnight—by inviting Kennedy to “come in and see me any time . . . I’m always glad to see you.”
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The German bombing campaign, with pauses for bad weather, continued through the third week of August. On August 25, Windsor was hit with a bomb falling within three hundred yards of Kennedy’s house. It being a Sunday, Kennedy was in residence and, according to the American papers, personally inspected the crater. For those—and there were many in government, the diplomatic corps, the press, and the public—who thought it disgraceful and cowardly for the American ambassador to spend even the weekends outside of London, the bombing of Windsor came as a sort of divine intervention. When, a few days later, now back in London, Kennedy told Lord Halifax about “the bombs that had fallen near his house,” the foreign minister half joked in his diary that the fact that they had fallen “pretty close” to his house “everybody is no doubt inclined to think a judgment on Joe for feeling he was likely to be safer there than in London.”
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T
he truth was that Kennedy feared neither German bombs nor an invasion. What bothered him no end—and precipitated his decision to leave London—was his accelerating boredom and growing unease at being ignored in Washington. His worry now was that Roosevelt, afraid of what he might say should he return, had decided to keep him at his post until after the election. Clare Boothe Luce had the opposite worry, that he would return before the election and succumb to the pressure to support Roosevelt again. “I’d rather see you, my sweet stay right in dangerous old London than to come home and identify yourself with the Third Term campaign. . . . If the British do hold on to September, you can—I’m sure, come home quite gracefully. And this would be a fine occasion for you to make a public speech in England before you leave—handing lots of bouquets to the British for their stamina and guts, and saying frankly, ‘Boys, I didn’t think you could do it—you did. Thank God, I was wrong—!’ And then say, ‘I’ll be seeing you later in the winter’ (I hope), . . . and you’ll leave a popular man with a free conscience, and their blessings, I know. Quite simple. So shall we have luncheon at the end of September, here?”
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All through August, while Kennedy watched angrily from the sidelines, the negotiations for the destroyers proceeded. His only information on the status of the talks came, ironically, from Churchill, who shared with him the contents of the cables he sent Roosevelt. The British had now decided that the destroyers-for-bases deal was too one-sided—with the Americans getting long-term leases on valuable military bases in return for sixty overage, worthless destroyer. Fearful of the political fallout in Britain, Churchill suggested that instead of swapping bases for destroyers, he would offer the bases as a gift, made out of friendship; he hoped that the United States would do the same with its destroyers.