IV
Though Jack didn’t mention it in his correspondence with friends, one other element factored into his thinking: the association of his surname with cowardice, courtesy of his father’s ostensible routine in wartime London. In recent months, some British observers had accused the ambassador of lacking grace under fire because of his habit of retreating most every evening from the city to his sixty-room rented mansion in Windsor rather than face the German air raids in central London: the Blitz had begun on September 7 and would last until May 10, 1941. (By October the Luftwaffe had ceased daytime operations in favor of night attacks alone.)38 “Jittery Joe,” the critics called him, and soon the accusation made its way into the press. “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy,” one Foreign Office wit sneered, and even some Americans took notice: “Once the Blitz started,” Kennedy’s aide Harvey Klemmer recalled, “he went to the country almost every night. He kept saying he had nine kids to look after, this big family he was responsible for. He took off every night before it got dark.”39
The “Jittery Joe” charge was largely bogus. By all accounts, Kennedy showed scant fear when the German bombs fell close to him, including at least once near his country home. Henry Luce remembered speaking with him on the transatlantic phone on one occasion when aerial attacks could be heard in the background; Kennedy spoke calmly and conveyed no special concern.40 What really lay behind the cowardice claim, one suspects, was British annoyance at the ambassador’s unyielding bearishness. He still believed—as did, it should be noted, a great many other informed observers on both sides of the Atlantic—that Britain faced ultimate, inevitable defeat against the Germans and should therefore seek to make peace with them.41 He failed to realize that this defeatism, and in particular his willingness to express it so openly, only served to reduce his already plummeting influence with policymakers. Winston Churchill didn’t trust him, and neither did the Foreign Office. His own government in Washington kept him out of all high-stakes bilateral negotiations, including the destroyers-for-bases agreement, sealed in early September, in which fifty aging U.S. destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy in exchange for access to air and naval bases in British colonies. The isolation left Kennedy angry and humiliated in equal measure.*1
“The people here keep saying their chin is up and that they can’t be beaten,” he vented in a letter to Jack in September, “but the people who have had any experience with these bombings don’t like it at all….The only thing I am afraid of is that I won’t be able to live long enough to tell all that I see and feel about this crisis. When I hear these mental midgets (USA) talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils. What is this war going to prove? And what is it going to do to civilization? The answer to the first question is nothing; and to the second I shudder even to think about it.”42
Having long since grasped that he remained in London only because Franklin Roosevelt wanted to keep him from inserting himself into the hotly contested presidential campaign back home (FDR and Willkie were neck and neck in the polls), Kennedy in October took the risky step of demanding to be recalled. If the State Department did not do so, he added, aide Eddie Moore would release to the press a document containing a full and frank expression of Kennedy’s views. The ensuing hoopla, the ambassador implied, could be enough to swing the election to Willkie. It was naked blackmail, and it worked: Kennedy was summoned to Washington in late October, with instructions to make no public comment of any kind until he had met with the president. Before departure he called on the king and queen and visited Neville Chamberlain, dying of throat cancer, who whispered to him, “This is goodbye. We will never see each other again.”43
No love lost: Joe Kennedy and Winston Churchill outside 10 Downing Street, in the final days of Kennedy’s ambassadorship.
Thus came to an end, for all practical purposes, the great adventure known as “Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador.” He was, it must be said, miscast for the role, as some had suspected from the start. He lacked the successful diplomat’s skill at discretion, lacked a sense of history, lacked a subtle understanding of people and their motivations, lacked a feel for the abstractions of world politics. Cynical and pessimistic by nature, he tended to view political matters, including foreign affairs, mostly according to what they meant for him personally and for his family; if the same could be said for many people in this world, with Kennedy it was more extreme, more unfiltered, and left him without a broad sense of responsibility to a shared cause. Though no champion of Nazi Germany, he tolerated Hitler far longer than did most other appeasers, including Chamberlain—through the invasion of Poland, through the fall of France, through even the Blitz and the end of his ambassadorship. Some part of him even lamented the stoic fortitude of his British hosts, since the longer they endured, the greater the likelihood of a U.S. military intervention.44
For all that, Kennedy’s tenure in London was not without successes. He won deserved praise, for example, for reorganizing embassy operations to make them more efficient and productive. He was affable, vigorous, and hardworking, and his early dispatches to Washington showed that he could be an insightful observer of the British political scene. (Even seasoned State Department experts appreciated his missives, which drew on his close contacts with Chamberlain and Halifax in particular.) In bilateral trade talks he was in his element, and he proved adept at negotiating trade issues with skill and finesse. If Europe had remained in a state of peace during his ambassadorship, Kennedy might have departed triumphantly, his political future still rosy at age fifty-two; instead he left under the darkest of clouds, his prospects for high elected office shattered forever.45
His sons, though, were a different story. They still had the future open to them, even if their father’s troubles added a layer of uncertainty. Franklin Roosevelt shrewdly played to this notion at a White House dinner on the evening of October 27, nine days before the election. Since Kennedy’s return earlier that day, the speculation had been intense: would he endorse Wendell Willkie, come out for the president, or stay quietly neutral? Henry and Clare Boothe Luce and top GOP leaders urged him to declare for the internationalist Republican; Rose Kennedy argued with equal fervor that he would be condemned as an ingrate if he turned against the president now. Joe suspected she was right, and moreover he saw Willkie as barely distinguishable from Roosevelt on the pressing issues of world affairs. (To frustrated isolationists, the two candidates were the “Willkievelt twins,” whose repeated proclamations that they would keep America’s boys out of foreign wars were not to be trusted.) That evening, with Mrs. Kennedy and several others present, Roosevelt mixed charm and not-so-veiled threats. “I stand in awe of your relationship with your children,” he said, after nodding in sympathetic support as Kennedy went through his list of grievances. “For a busy man as you are, it’s a rare achievement. And I for one will do all I can to help you if your boys should ever run for political office.” According to FDR’s son James, the president then pivoted, warning that if Kennedy endorsed Willkie, he would become an outcast, his sons’ prospective political careers scuttled before they could even begin. Two days later, in an evening address on CBS Radio, Kennedy endorsed Roosevelt for another term. One week after that, Roosevelt won a decisive victory, though with lower margins than in 1932 or 1936.46
The story of Joseph Kennedy as diplomat still had one more sorry chapter. Three days after the election, he sat for a ninety-minute interview in Boston with Louis Lyons of The Boston Globe and two reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Accustomed to the British system, where journalists typically took care to shape an interviewee’s remarks to fit within the strict borders of acceptable discourse, and assuming—he subsequently said—that his most provocative comments were off the record, Joe launched in. “Democracy is all finished in England,” he declared, and “it may be here,” too. If the United States entered the war, “everything we hold dear would be gone.” Warming up, he said he supported FDR because he was the only man who could control the “have-nots” who “haven’t any stake of ownership.” He tossed in inappropriate remarks about the queen (she had “more brains than the Cabinet” and would be the one to salvage a deal with Hitler in the end) and reminded the reporters that Charles Lindbergh’s views had a lot to commend them. To the question of whether America would refuse to trade with the Nazis if Hitler won the war, Kennedy shot back, “That’s nonsensical.”47
The story ran in the Globe on November 10, 1940, right beside the announcement of Neville Chamberlain’s death. The uproar was instantaneous, in Europe as well as in the United States. Only the Berlin Börsen-Zeitung editorialized in support. Kennedy pressured the Globe’s executives to repudiate Lyons’s story, but the damage was done.48 Kennedy officially resigned his post and retreated to Palm Beach, as convinced as ever of the correctness of his geopolitical views and resentful of the ostracism he had suffered. As he often did when feeling aggrieved, he pointed the finger at American Jews for what he saw as their outsize power in Washington and their nefarious schemes to get America into the war. He longed for some means of hitting back at his critics, and asked Jack to outline an article for him; the resulting pair of documents, belatedly and rapidly produced, one of them nine pages in length, are remarkable for what they show of Jack’s sharpening political skills and his changing relationship with his father—it was now a more complex and dynamic bond than the one Joe had with Joe Junior. Jack was his own man in a way his brother would never be.49
Jack urged his father to avoid going nasty—the high road was the only road worth traveling in this instance, not least because journalists had endless opportunities to strike back. This meant being calm and judicious and avoiding any hint of defensiveness. “I don’t mean you should change your ideas or be all things to all men, but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser unless they indict themselves as war mongers.” Here Jack hit upon one of his main themes: the “appeaser” label was an albatross from which his father needed to free himself. And he needed also to disabuse critics of the notion that he saw little to worry about in Hitler and the other dictators of the world:
I would think that your best angle would be that of course you do not believe this, you with your background cannot stand the idea personally of dictatorships—you hate them—you have achieved the abundant life under a democratic capitalist system—you wish to preserve it. But you believe that you can preserve it by keeping out of Europe’s wars etc. It’s not that you hate dictatorships less [than the interventionists do]—but that you love America more….The point that I am trying to get at is that it is important that you stress how much you dislike the idea of dealing with dictatorships, how you wouldn’t trust their word a minute—how you have no confidence in them.50
The accompanying draft article, sketched out by the son on the father’s behalf, flowed from these judgments. “On November 6, the day after the election, I resigned from a post that I have held for nearly three years,” Jack began, before laying out the older man’s explanation for his belief in appeasement and his grim analysis of the geopolitical situation: “My views are not pleasant. I am gloomy and I have been gloomy since September, 1938. It may be unpleasant for Americans to hear my views but let me note that Winston Churchill was considered distinctly unpleasant to have around during the years from 1935 to 1939. It was felt he was a gloom monger,” Jack wrote, neatly attempting to tie his father to the Briton’s coattails. And so on the piece went, for several pages and in clear and economical prose, stressing Joe Kennedy’s faith in open diplomacy and his determination to do his level best to aid President Roosevelt in keeping the United States out of the war.51