Popular culture reflected the national mood. Ernest Hemingway, for example, argued in Esquire in mid-decade, “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason….Of the hell broth that is brewing in Europe we have no need to drink. Europe has always fought, the intervals of peace are only Armistices. We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and we should never be sucked in again.”54 A similar theme was expounded in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and William March’s Company K, as well as in Lewis Milestone’s hugely popular film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The journalist and historian Walter Millis added seeming heft to the claim that involvement in World War I had been pointless with his 1935 bestseller Road to War: America, 1914–1917.55 Efforts to push back against this narrative, including by such luminaries as Walter Lippmann—Americans, he wrote, were being “duped by a falsification of history…miseducated by a swarm of innocent but ignorant historians, by reckless demagogues”—were only partly successful.56

Kennedy also found support for his views in the writings of the well-known historian Charles A. Beard, who in a series of books and articles pushed the argument that the United States should steer clear of any involvement in Europe’s looming crisis. A single lengthy sentence in The Open Door at Home, published in 1934, captured the essence:

By cultivating its own garden, by setting an example of national self-restraint (which is certainly easier than restraining fifty other nations in an international conference, or beating them in war), by making no commitments that cannot be readily enforced by arms, by adopting toward other nations a policy of fair and open commodity exchange, by refraining from giving them any moral advice on any subject, and by providing a military and naval machine as adequate as possible to the defense of this policy, the United States may realize maximum security, attain minimum dependence upon governments and conditions beyond its control, and develop its own resources to the utmost.57

Joe Kennedy would not have changed a word.

Franklin Roosevelt, consummate politician that he was, had no desire to get ahead of public opinion. By heritage and upbringing a thoroughgoing internationalist, Roosevelt as a young man had thrilled at cousin Theodore’s Cuban exploits and relished debating global issues with his Harvard classmates. As assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and as James M. Cox’s running mate on the losing Democratic presidential ticket in 1920, he championed robust U.S. involvement in world affairs. Membership in the League of Nations, Roosevelt argued, sounding at times more Wilsonian than Wilson himself, was critical to the nation’s security and to world peace. It dismayed him that the Senate determined otherwise and rejected League membership. Gradually, however, during the second half of the 1920s, Roosevelt’s internationalism faded, at least in terms of public expression. His eyes now on the White House, he shifted his position to align with popular sentiment and, in the 1932 election, assured voters that he opposed American membership in the organization. In his reelection campaign four years later, he went further: “We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars….We seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”58

It came as no surprise, then, that in mid-decade the president signed a series of neutrality acts by which Congress outlawed the kinds of contacts that had compromised American neutrality during World War I. The Neutrality Act of 1935 banned the export of weapons and ammunition to either side in a military conflict, and also empowered the president to warn American citizens against traveling on ships flying belligerent flags. The Neutrality Act of 1936 renewed these provisions and also outlawed loans to belligerents; such arrangements, lawmakers argued, could give the United States a large monetary interest in a conflict’s outcome. And in 1937, with global tensions ratcheting up and the Spanish Civil War raging, Congress passed a still more stringent Neutrality Act, this one introducing a cash-and-carry principle: warring nations wishing to trade with the United States would have to pay cash for their nonmilitary purchases and carry the goods from American ports on their own ships.59

By the end of 1937 FDR had begun to signal a tougher line. In a major speech in Chicago that October, he called for an “international quarantine” against the “epidemic of world lawlessness” and warned that U.S. national security was at stake. But he still moved gingerly. When the quarantine notion elicited condemnation in Congress and from some quarters of the press, he backed off. (Isolationist lawmakers had threatened him with impeachment.) Neither Roosevelt nor Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a courtly Tennessean and former congressman, objected to the thrust of Kennedy’s draft Pilgrims Society speech; they merely found its tone too rigid, especially at a time when U.S. journalists were clamoring for a firmer American response to “the German rape of Austria.”60

Nor did the White House at this point object to Kennedy’s supportive assessment of Chamberlain’s strategy vis-à-vis Germany. Here, too, hindsight can distort. Time would reveal the British prime minister’s shortcomings—his limited imagination, his tendency toward wishful thinking, his smug and hubristic self-confidence, his hunger for flattery and sensitivity to criticism, his distrust of public opinion, his stubborn belief that Hitler was amenable to individual persuasion and judicious concession. But it is well to remember that Chamberlain was no foreign policy naïf: he disliked Hitler and all that Nazi ideology represented, and he had been among the first, in 1934, to push for British rearmament, albeit in limited form. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that here, in the early months of 1938, the policy of appeasement—in essence, making concessions to Germany and to a lesser extent Italy in order to avert the outbreak of war—had broad support in British officialdom.

At the core of the policy was the belief, widely held among British analysts, including those on the left, that Germany had legitimate grievances with the harshly punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919. A modest redrawing of frontiers on the Continent was justifiable, these observers held, especially if this involved bringing adjacent German-speaking minorities within the Reich. (Even Winston Churchill, certainly no fan of Chamberlain’s approach, was willing to consider adjustments to the borders of Czechoslovakia, a view he was later happy to keep hidden.) In addition, the appeasement policy flowed from a conviction that Britain in 1937–38 had a weak hand, with commitments that massively exceeded its resources as it strove to protect far-flung interests in East Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and continental Europe, and with allies who were not dependable. A rearmament program was under way, but in piecemeal fashion (mostly in the development and production of fighter planes) as policymakers fretted that the soaring costs associated with it could not be sustained without wrecking a fragile national economy hit hard by the world economic crisis that followed the U.S. stock market crash in 1929. Civil defense efforts were also behind schedule, with a mere sixty fire pumps in place for the whole of London.

The public, meanwhile, recalling the horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele and influenced by a wave of anti-war memoirs and literature in the 1920s, shuddered at the thought of a return to the carnage and registered its opposition to military conscription and to policies likely to lead to war. The dominions also counseled peace. And if all that was not enough to condition Chamberlain’s approach, the Chiefs of Staff told him that Britain was in no condition to fight in 1938—the rearmament program needed more time. Alliance blocs could be pursued in the interval, certainly, but, given their role in the outbreak of war in 1914, did it really make sense to tie oneself to one of them?61

Roosevelt got all of this, and he saw value as well in Kennedy’s being able to use his close ties to Chamberlain to get valuable intelligence on British thinking at the highest levels. What got under FDR’s skin was something else: his ambassador’s tendency, evident from his first days in the post, to go it alone and do end runs around the State Department, to speak his mind too much and to write letters directly to prominent U.S. financiers, journalists, and select members of Congress. Discretion seemed a foreign concept to him, just as the skeptics had feared. As a diplomat, Kennedy was supposed to be the eyes and ears of his government, but he seemingly could not resist also being the mouth, peppering the letters with sharp views on policy. He marked them “Private and Confidential,” as if this guaranteed they would in all cases be read only by the recipient. Inevitably, word got around, leading to speculation that Kennedy was intent on using his position to advance his own career, specifically with an eye toward the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination.

“Will Joe Kennedy Run for President?” asked a May 21, 1938, article in Liberty magazine by the respected correspondent Ernest Lindley. Variations of the question were heard often in the press that spring. That Roosevelt had yet to announce his own plans for 1940 only added to the intrigue. Arthur Krock, who had drafted Kennedy’s pro-Roosevelt campaign book in 1936 and was widely known to be an unofficial publicist for the family (he may indeed have been on retainer to Kennedy, without acknowledgment to his readers or to his bosses at The New York Times), could hardly contain his enthusiasm in his column: “Here is Kennedy back again, the rage of London, the best copy in the British press, his counsel steadily sought by statesmen of the country to which he is accredited, his influence manifest and powerful in all matters in which the United States has an interest in Great Britain….Here he is back again, undazzled by such a taking up socially and officially as no American perhaps has known abroad since Franklin’s day.”62

Interior secretary Harold Ickes, whose dislike of the ambassador ran deep, speculated in his diary on the Kennedy-Krock effort: “I have been told that Krock is going to take some time off to devote himself to spreading the Kennedy-for-President gospel. There is probably no doubt that Kennedy is spending a great deal of money to further his Presidential ambitions. He has plenty of it and he is willing to spend it freely. Neither is there any doubt that he is making a good deal of headway in conservative quarters.”63

Roosevelt, annoyed by the burst of speculation and by the brazen opportunism it seemed to signify, rejected the option of recalling Kennedy—that would accomplish little except to give the nation’s most prominent Irish Catholic two years at home in the United States to cause mischief before the election. It could also alienate the Irish American electorate in key Northern states in the lead-up to the vote. Far better to keep Kennedy overseas but to clip his wings. Accordingly, Roosevelt allowed his press secretary, Steve Early, to leak copies of Kennedy’s “Private and Confidential” letters to the Chicago Tribune, which ran the story on June 23 under the headline “Kennedy’s 1940 Ambitions Open Roosevelt Rift.” The ambassador, furious at what he saw as presidential backstabbing, immediately denied any claims on high political office. When he complained to FDR about the leak, the president artfully pretended innocence.64

“In this way he assuaged my feelings and I left again for London,” Kennedy later wrote of the exchange, “but deep within me I knew that something had happened.”65