2

The Ambassador

WHETHER OR NOT one cared for Joseph P. Kennedy, one had to admit he had a nose for opportunity. Those who disliked him—and they were legion—enjoyed characterizing him as a rather desperate social climber who grasped at wealth with a remarkable and single-minded tenaciousness. Those who opposed him in business usually wound up poorer for their trouble, and went away with grudging respect for the guile Kennedy was prone to display just when one least expected it. Those who thought to use Kennedy for their own ends soon found themselves used in turn, for Joe was never one to let a debt owed him, be it financial or political, go unpaid; and interest on things owed Joe had a way of compounding at quite a frantic rate.

President Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of this in the autumn of 1937, when he noticed the New York Times’s Arthur Krock and others of Kennedy’s friends in the press mention him as a likely candidate to replace the ailing Robert Worth Bingham as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. The prominent Kentucky newspaper publisher had lately been a patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where malaria, having already ended his career, now threatened to end his life.

While the gentleman of the press telegraphed Kennedy’s desires indirectly, it was left to James Roosevelt, the president’s eldest son and secretary, to bring FDR specific details on Kennedy’s wants. Jimmy had, in recent years, received a large number of favors and gifts from Kennedy. The forty-nine-year-old financier had aided the younger Roosevelt—aged thirty—in building a lucrative Boston insurance business, had brought him and his wife along as guests on a European vacation, and was currently suggesting that in future he’d be pleased to help the easily flattered Jimmy make a run at the Massachusetts governorship.

Speaking years later about his role as messenger boy for the aspiring ambassador, Jimmy would recall his father laughing “so hard he almost toppled out of his wheelchair” when first presented with the prospect of sending Kennedy to London. During a dinner at his Hyde Park home, surrounded by WASPs like himself who had always had easy entrée to the society that had routinely been forbidden to the overambitious Kennedy, FDR said that to appoint a Boston Irishman as emissary to the king would be “a great joke, the greatest joke in all the world.” FDR, a master at misdirection, did not tell his guests the joke might very well wind up being played. And he threw Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., off the scent with the blunt assertion that Kennedy was “a very dangerous man.”

Dangerous or not, there were, FDR told Jimmy, several simple facts to keep in mind. First of all, Joseph Kennedy had donated more than $360,000—the equivalent of over $3.8 million in today’s dollars—to the Democratic campaigns of 1932 and 1936. He had also been instrumental in breaking a deadlock at the 1932 Democratic convention when he persuaded publisher William Randolph Hearst (who controlled no fewer than eighty-six delegates) to throw his support behind FDR, thus assuring Roosevelt the nomination. Now, FDR judged, had come the day of reckoning when he would be made to pay Kennedy back in spades.

FDR correctly guessed that Joe would not take no for an answer when it came to the ambassadorship, and that his desire for the London appointment was intense. Over the long years, Joe had been denied membership in the Harvard Clubs of Boston and New York, the University Club, the Knickerbocker Club, and numerous other bastions of old-money culture. In London, as ambassador, he would automatically be made a member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, the Athenaeum, the Queen’s Club, the Monday Luncheon Club, the International Sportsmen Club, and many other elite establishments to which the best of American society often aspired in vein. It was just like Kennedy, the president told his son, to want to leapfrog those who would snub him and become a peer of their betters.

As FDR pondered Kennedy’s appointment to London that autumn, he knew his old ally was unhappy. He also knew from experience that an unhappy Kennedy was a vengeful and vocal Kennedy, a Kennedy prone to talk too much to the press and say harmful things. FDR had, since 1932, dedicated great amounts of energy to containing the sometimes bitter, routinely passionate Irishman who was always so easily offended, and seemed so full of insecurities and brooding resentments. “The trouble with Kennedy,” an exasperated FDR once explained to Henry Morgenthau, “is you always have to hold his hand.” Joe, said Roosevelt, was far too thin-skinned and temperamental, and could become absolutely babyish when not doted upon. Roosevelt said he was getting tired of Kennedy’s calling up and saying “he is hurt because I have not seen him.”

Still, Kennedy had demonstrated abilities as a manager—abilities FDR first sought to exploit when he appointed him to head the new Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. “Send a thief to catch a thief,” Roosevelt told Morgenthau shortly before leaking news of Joe’s appointment to the press. By the time Kennedy resigned one year later, even his harshest critics—among them The New Republic’s John T. Flynn—had to admit the former Wall Street buccaneer had done a splendid job of taking the new SEC regulations and putting them to work. Flynn, who at first had staunchly opposed Kennedy’s appointment, wound up bidding him adieu in The New Republic by saying, “I think it but fair to him to say that he disappointed the expectations of his critics. He was, I firmly believe, the most useful member of the Commission.”

Subsequently, in the summer of 1936 (a presidential election year), Kennedy emerged with an audacious bid to court the ultimate in Rooseveltian favor. “I have no political ambitions for myself or for my children,” Kennedy lied in the foreword to his book I’m for Roosevelt. “I put down these few thoughts about our President, conscious only of my concern as a father for the future of his family and my anxiety as a citizen that the facts about the President’s philosophy be not lost in a fog of unworthy emotion.” Kennedy published his little manifesto—ghostwritten by Arthur Krock—at his own expense. Subsequently Kennedy went on national radio (again at his own expense) to urge Americans to vote the Democratic ticket. For all these efforts, however, FDR rewarded Joe with only the smallest of morsels from the presidential table. Kennedy—who’d originally (and quite unrealistically) hoped to be handed Morgenthau’s job as secretary of the treasury—instead received a lackluster appointment to chair the obscure Federal Maritime Commission, where he started in April 1937. It was from this bureaucratic wasteland that he now, only six months later, petitioned for release to exciting London.

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IT DOES NOT DO to simply say these two Harvard men, Kennedy and Roosevelt, came from opposite sides of the tracks. They came, in fact, from opposing worlds and embraced opposing worldviews. Their philosophies, sensibilities, and agendas were always fundamentally at odds. Theirs was a complex, highly pragmatic, and entirely political relationship. Each often viewed the other cynically; each always did his best to use the other for his own purposes.

Only two generations removed from the Potato Famine, Kennedy inherited wit, stamina, and a respectable (though not vast) amount of wealth from his street-smart, entrepreneurial father. More important, however, he also inherited a driving ambition to maximize that wealth and assure his clan’s advance in the world.

More than one contemporary speculated that Joe’s one and only allegiance was not to country or to the general good, but to family. He had little civic feeling. He actively loathed what he once called “the dim and dull-eyed masses” for whom he produced sophomoric film entertainments and imported liquor. The general welfare of the non-Kennedy public was not, for him, a priority. (In an interview toward the end of his time as ambassador, Kennedy would look back on his New Deal service in the mid-1930s and loudly complain about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose main drawback was that “she bothered us more on our jobs in Washington to take care of the poor little nobodies who hadn’t any influence than all the rest of the people down there altogether.”) To Joe, the public was little more than a mass of outsiders to be conquered and manipulated to the best advantage of Kennedy interests. “I think,” recalled one who knew him well, “the world outside his house was war for Mr. Kennedy.”

Given his view of the public, it is no surprise that Kennedy did not approach public service altruistically. Having been repeatedly rejected by WASP society—a society he at first craved to be a part of and then, eventually, grew to detest—Joe came to view public service as a tool for gaining the respectability and acceptance that all his fortune could not buy no matter how many times he deftly doubled and tripled it. As the shrewd FDR must have surmised, Joe also saw public service as a stepping-stone to something far more profound and insidious than mere social acceptance. His most genuine ambition was one he would reveal bluntly only after his son had been elected to the presidency. When asked what had been his main aspiration in life, the confident and triumphant first father responded flatly: “I wanted power. I thought money would give me power and so I made money, only to discover that it was politics—not money—that really gave a man power.”

Truth be told, Kennedy cared much more for power than he did for Roosevelt. He told friends he viewed FDR as clever, but also as an accident of privilege who did not know what it was to suffer. When word of these criticisms filtered back to Henry Morgenthau, the treasury secretary told a colleague that Kennedy had Roosevelt “figured out not at all.” Morgenthau dryly pointed out that the crippled president could always, despite his privileged background, confidently say he knew a thing or two about suffering and struggle.

Still, unlike Kennedy, FDR had been raised from the cradle safe in the knowledge that he was one of the elite. FDR arrived, in every sense of the word, on the day he was born. His family name, the age of his money, and the facts of his pedigree on both sides of his family tree gave him an immediate place in the most rarefied precincts of the Eastern Seaboard. Like his father, FDR was an avid clubman. He was a member of the Century, Harvard, and University clubs, to name just a few of the establishments where Kennedy had been blackballed. Yet, despite his aristocratic roots, FDR was a democrat with a small d—one driven by a genuine concern for the welfare of the common man.

FDR’s wealth, though modest compared to Kennedy’s net worth of over $9 million, was enough to inoculate against the craven desire for more. By refusing to give his full attention to his few entrepreneurial ventures, the brilliant and inspired political tactician often proved a notoriously poor businessman who almost always lost money whenever he took a stab at private enterprise. Kennedy, on the other hand, had the veritable Midas touch in business. He was well known to be the shrewdest of generals when marshaling his forces on every and any financial front. He never missed a beat on Wall Street, saying and doing all the right things at just the right time, such as when he gleefully sold short into the plummeting stock market of late 1929, hastening the market’s collapse and making millions in the process.

Previously he’d made substantial gains in the market by just the kind of activity he subsequently regulated as head of the SEC. Throughout the early 1920s, Joe had become expert in the subtle art of stock pooling: conspiring with other traders to bid up the price of a stock and then dumping that stock once the market had been fooled into buying at the higher price. He likewise enjoyed great successes not only in liquor distribution (legitimate and otherwise) and filmmaking, but also as a banker and real-estate speculator. Yet in politics he frequently misread popular sentiment and was prone to strategic blunders. He often made arbitrary and self-destructive public statements, and he had no knack for shaping the type of loyal alliances and practical compromises that were essential for long-term survival in public life. Thus FDR had good reason to wonder how Kennedy would fare as a diplomat.

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THAT AUTUMN FOUND the would-be ambassador’s two eldest sons—Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., twenty-three, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, twenty-one—living in Harvard’s Winthrop House. Here they energetically pursued their studies, sports, and women while at the same time balancing the biases and assumptions of the great seat of Protestant learning against the weight of their ancient Roman Catholic faith. As the Kennedys knew all too well, their unfashionable religious affiliation had its consequences not only at Harvard but everywhere throughout the society of the Northeast. Like “the old man” a quarter of a century before, Joe Jr. (now a senior) had been elected to the Hasty Pudding Institute in the autumn of his sophomore year only to see his career as a clubman come to an abrupt halt shortly thereafter. He was not chosen for any of Harvard’s eight exclusive final clubs, and had to settle for lowly Pi Eta. “It was better than nothing,” remembered one associate from those days, “but it created a bad feeling in him.”

Jack—now a sophomore—hoped and planned to fare better. Of the two brothers, he was certainly the more likely candidate: amiable and without Joe’s off-putting demeanor. (Joe Jr.’s Harvard tutor, Ken Galbraith, described Joe as “slender and handsome, with a heavy shock of hair and a serious, slightly humorless manner.” Jack, on the other hand, was “gregarious, given to various amusements, much devoted to social life and affectionately and diversely to women.”) Jack also tended to be the shrewder, more politically savvy of the two—something he demonstrated when he focused his ambitions on the Spee Club, the president of which, Ralph Pope, was known to deplore the anti-Catholic bias then dominating a host of Harvard institutions.

Looking around the campus for likely Catholic candidates, Pope had taken a pass on Joe Jr. two years before and now as well decided against Jack’s friend and roommate Torbert Macdonald. Pope considered Joe to be pushy and a bit of a bully. As for Macdonald, Pope told friends the football star struck him as an intellectual lightweight. (Besides, Macdonald had yet another strike against him. He was poor.) Pope also thought both Joe and Torb were a little too likely to enforce, rather than destroy, Irish-Catholic stereotypes. Jack, however, gave off a completely different impression. By the time the rushing season ended at the start of December 1937, Jack had found himself a home. The Spee Club, recalled Jack’s friend and fellow member Jimmy Rousmaniere many years later, gave Jack “a base and a social standing which his brother never had. Jack and Joe were good friends, but I think that Jack always felt happy that he was able to do some things that Joe couldn’t do. And the Spee Club was the means of doing that.”

Contemporaries recall Joe Jr.’s being visibly annoyed upon receiving word that his younger brother had made it into the Spee. Perhaps Joe’s jealous and sour reaction was just a symptom of his personality. Or perhaps the timing of the news had something to do with Joe’s response, for it came on the heels of one of the greatest disappointments in the young man’s life: his failure to achieve his school’s varsity letter, the large H.

Joe had played for the Harvard football team (first the freshman squad, and later the varsity) all of his four years on campus, but he had never advanced to the first string despite the fact that his position—end—demanded little in the way of technical skill. A friend, looking back, cited Joe’s thinly veiled contempt for coach Dick Harlow as the reason why he’d spent so much time warming the bench. The same friend cited the same obvious animosity as the reason why Harlow, breaking with tradition, refused to give Joe and other second- and third-string seniors a chance to earn their letters during the last game of the ’37 season. The date was November 20. The place: Soldiers Field, Harvard. The opponent: Yale. Harvard led by seven points as the final quarter neared its end.

“With six minutes to go,” wrote Joe’s biographer Hank Searls, “the Harvard bench writhed in anticipation: Harlow, in the lead, would surely start to substitute now. It was humanly impossible for the seniors to keep their seats. The coach sat impassively as the minutes flew. Some seniors stayed tight-faced; some, like Joe, fought tears; some could bear it no longer and begged. . . .”

Years later, Joe’s Harvard contemporary John Edward Regan, Jr., would comment: “All those others who didn’t get into that big game—the last game of the ’37 season and the first Harvard win over Yale since 1933—had Joe to thank. Harlow—who knew Joe hated him and hated Joe right back—didn’t want to give Joe the satisfaction, but at the same time Harlow couldn’t make Joe the only one of the last-year men he left out. So an entire class of second- and third-stringers wound up leaving the school without those varsity letters: all thanks to Joe’s unbridled, unconcealed, and unproductive animosity.”

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MANY MILES FROM HARVARD, FDR’s inner circle appeared divided on the question of whether or not Joseph Kennedy, Sr., should be dispatched to Great Britain. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau—whose job Kennedy still coveted—did not like the idea and by now perhaps regretted having been the man who’d first brought Kennedy and Roosevelt together as political allies in 1930. Morgenthau reminded Roosevelt that Kennedy, though backing FDR for a second term, had nevertheless voiced frequent criticisms of FDR’s economic policies, calling them too liberal and even socialistic. “England is a most important post,” Morgenthau, by his own account, told FDR, “and there have been so many people over there talking against the New Deal. Don’t you think you are taking considerable risks by sending Kennedy, who has talked so freely and so critically against your administration?” Roosevelt replied that he had made arrangements “to have Joe Kennedy watched hourly, and the first time he opens his mouth and criticizes me, I’ll fire him.” Besides, said Roosevelt, Kennedy was “too dangerous” to keep around in the States. If nothing else, the appointment would at least get Kennedy away from the domestic press corps.

Others in the administration—among them Tommy Corcoran (a Harvard-trained lawyer then working for FDR as a liaison to Capitol Hill) and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes—encouraged Kennedy’s appointment in order to get him out of the way. Both expressed concern (to each other and to Morgenthau) about Kennedy’s influence on Jimmy Roosevelt, who in turn had the presidential ear. As Corcoran complained to Ickes, Joe had to be gotten out of town in order to stop him from “pouring his conservative ideas in the sympathetic ears of Jimmy, who relays them to the president.” Corcoran reminded Ickes of the words uttered long before by Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward. “Some persons,” Seward had said, “are sent abroad because they are needed, and some are sent because they’re not wanted at home.” Still, Kennedy’s case was debated back and forth for quite some time behind the White House walls, with Morgenthau leading the arguments against Kennedy’s appointment and the president eventually concurring—albeit briefly.

Arthur Krock happened to be at Joseph Kennedy’s rented mansion outside Washington on December 2 when Jimmy Roosevelt showed up dangling a minor cabinet appointment, secretary of commerce, as bait to lure Joe away from wanting the London assignment. After Jimmy’s departure, recalled Krock, “he [Kennedy] came back to me, clearly very indignant, very angry, and said, ‘He tried to get me to take the Secretaryship of Commerce and I knew it was only an attempt to shut me off from London, but London is where I want to go and it is the only place I intend to go and I told Jimmy so, and that’s that.’ ” FDR appears to have green-lighted Kennedy’s London appointment within days of this rebuff. He nevertheless expressed his severe displeasure when Arthur Krock—apparently with Jimmy Roosevelt’s approval, if not the president’s—published advance word of Kennedy’s new ambassadorial role in the New York Times, preempting the White House announcement.

Friends as well as foes pronounced themselves chagrined by the news. Journalist Boake Carter of the New York Daily Mirror and the Boston Globe—who, like Krock, was a frequent recipient of Kennedy largesse—went so far as to warn Kennedy that he should not take the job. The ambassadorship to Great Britain, wrote Carter, “needs skill brought by years of training. And that, Joe, you simply don’t possess. Do not think me unkind in saying that. On the contrary, I’m trying to save you some heartaches. . . . Joe, in so complicated a job, there is no place for amateurs. . . . If you don’t realize that soon enough, you’re going to be hurt as you were never hurt in your life.” Interestingly, even Kennedy’s telegram to the president acknowledging his confirmation in mid-January would have a fatalistic ring to it. “Just got news of my confirmation . . .” Kennedy wired. “I want to say now that I don’t know what kind of diplomat I shall be, probably rotten, but I promise to get done for you those things that you want done.” FDR shared Kennedy’s pessimism. Roosevelt’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., would recall that in speaking in private of Kennedy as the future ambassador to Britain, “FDR did not hesitate to mention Catholic connections as a bar to political trust.”

FDR told Morgenthau that “he was going to send [Kennedy] to England as Ambassador with the distinct understanding that the appointment was only good for six months and that, furthermore, by giving him this appointment, any obligation that he had to Kennedy was paid for.” How true this was, and whether FDR was just trying to placate Morgenthau by telling the man what he wanted to hear, is perhaps indicated by the fact that Roosevelt subsequently told Postmaster General and Democratic National Committee chairman James Farley that he did not think Kennedy would stay in the job more than a year. Kennedy himself told Harvey Klemmer, a Maritime Commission aide whom he now recruited to accompany him to London as publicist and speechwriter, “Don’t go buying a lot of luggage. We’re only going to get the family in the Social Register. When that’s done, we come back and go out to Hollywood to make some movies and some money.”

Joe informed Tommy Corcoran that he wanted the London post chiefly to please his wife, Rose, forty-seven. Like her husband, Rose Kennedy viewed herself and her family as perennial outsiders marked as completely by their Catholic faith and Irish roots as they were, according to the dogma of the Church, by the stain of original sin. While the divinely ordained blemish could be washed away through mere baptism and contrition, the other birthmark had thus far proved much tougher to get rid of. Rose fervently hoped the mission to London would finally do the trick.

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THE NEWLY APPOINTED ambassador scheduled his departure for February 23. Rose—sidelined by an attack of appendicitis—planned to follow him on March 9 with eighteen-year-old Kick and the four youngest children (Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy). The New York Times’s society page published the timetable for the various voyages of the remaining Kennedys. The ambassador’s eldest daughter, Rosemary—whom the Times identified as a student at Marymount Convent in Tarrytown—was to follow two months later accompanied by her sister Eunice, currently enrolled at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Noroton. Then, finally, the ambassador’s two eldest boys would journey to England as soon as they concluded their spring terms at Harvard.

Visiting FDR at Hyde Park the night before he embarked, Kennedy received an informal briefing from the president, who spent more than an hour describing the European situation as he saw it. FDR expressed concern at the recent break between Anthony Eden and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Eden having resigned from Chamberlain’s government two days earlier in protest over Chamberlain’s apparent willingness to recognize Mussolini’s annexation of Ethiopia. Like the firebrand Winston Churchill, Eden believed it would be better to fight the beast of Italian (and by extension German) militarism now, in the short term, rather than help it grow large with the spoils of appeasement. What, Eden had asked in an editorial published shortly after his resignation, would the fascists demand next, once they held a decisive geographical advantage in North Africa and Europe?

Eden, FDR insisted to Kennedy, was a good man. It was a pity to see him go. Still, FDR had heard good things about Eden’s successor, the aged Lord Halifax (Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, third Viscount Halifax and later first Earl of Halifax). There were rumors that Halifax—a Yorkshire nobleman and grandson to Lord Grey of Reform Bill fame—did not share the yellow stripe FDR suspected ran down the back of Prime Minister Chamberlain. (Chamberlain’s predecessor, Baldwin, had been much the same type of fellow, FDR complained, and was largely to blame for recent Italian and German provocations. After all, Hitler had been making noises for years about how he would reunite the millions of Germans separated at the end of World War I by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. FDR believed the Führer had been sent a dangerous signal when, after ordering his forces into the Rhineland in 1935, he found neither France nor Baldwin’s England disposed to stand in his way.) Complete dedication to the concept of peace was a dangerous predilection in those who would often have to speak and act from a stance of confident belligerence in order to avoid war. Britain, FDR knew full well, was rearming with a vengeance in the face of growing German and Italian territorial ambitions. Still, no amount of firepower would be enough for a ship of state commanded by officers without the spine to use it.

At the same time, FDR told his ambassador to caution Prime Minister Chamberlain that the United States—though supportive—would be hard pressed to come to Britain’s aid militarily in the event of a face-off with Hitler. FDR reminded the sympathetic Kennedy that he was constrained not only by neutrality legislation, but also by the wishes of the vast majority of American voters, who stood stridently and squarely against the prospect of American involvement in another European war. As Michael Beschloss has pointed out, FDR by this time suspected that the dictator nations “must ultimately be faced down” and admitted to some in his inner circle “that the European picture looked dark and that American involvement in some form was a distinct possibility.” But Kennedy—whom FDR regarded quite accurately as an isolationist of the first rank—received no such confidences.

Thus coached in FDR’s concerns and priorities, Kennedy set sail on the 23rd aboard the Manhattan bound out of New York. Rain fell in torrents as Kennedy stood on the promenade deck, waving and blowing kisses down to his most cherished assets, his children, gathered far below on the drenched pier.