3

Rotten Row

“WELL,” KENNEDY WROTE Jimmy Roosevelt early in the first week of March, “I am here after a very nice trip in the Manhattan. The ship rolled all the way across, but I have had much worse trips and on larger liners in the middle of the summer. The sailors and stewards couldn’t have been nicer—no trouble and no Mickey Finns.” A few days later, crossing his feet atop his ambassadorial desk and leaning back in his plush executive chair, Kennedy warned a friendly gathering of London journalists: “You can’t expect me to develop into a statesman overnight.”

While anxiously expressing his admiration for British society and culture in a steady stream of carefully crafted public remarks, Kennedy painted a very different picture in confidential letters home. His first impression was of a nation adrift and doomed. “I can tell you,” he wrote Jimmy Roosevelt, “after forty-eight hours in this place, that England is faced with an economic problem that makes ours look like a tea party. The armament program is keeping the wolf from the door, but underneath is a condition that seems to me to be as dangerous as ours was during the year 1929. England has used up practically all of its aces. First of all, the debt is large; second, it’s taxing about as much as it can; third, its cost of carrying the debt has been marked down; it has already got the benefit of a tariff imposition and it is now spending all its money on armament and, boy, when this stops they’re in for it, and I believe that this factor, considering our own situation in America, will be the determining factor in writing the fate of the world rather than the political side.”

Kennedy’s busy round of London calls began on March 2 when he visited Eden’s successor, Halifax—a diplomat of the old school who, Kennedy remarked, “looks and acts like a Cardinal or Abraham Lincoln (without a beard).” Two days later, on the 4th, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain received the new ambassador for an hour-long meeting during which Kennedy repeated the message he’d given Halifax: the Brits must not count on the United States to come to their aid in the event of hostilities with Germany. Kennedy told Chamberlain the American people were completely antiwar. Because Great Britain seemed to be the natural ally of the United States, the Americans must avoid creating the appearance of any entangling alliances. Grim, graceless, soft-spoken, and sincere, the aged Birmingham industrialist replied that he was indeed making his plans—for war or for peace, one hoped the latter—without counting on America. Kennedy noted in his diary that he had spoken to Chamberlain quite plainly and honestly, and that Chamberlain had seemed to take his candor in stride.

Kennedy quickly decided that he and Chamberlain were simpatico. He approved when Chamberlain condemned war as a resoundingly stupid and wasteful exercise from which all reasonable men should always recoil. Similarly, Joe agreed when Chamberlain stated emphatically, in terms the entrepreneurial Kennedy was prompt to sympathize with, that there were many smarter ways than military force for conducting the world’s business. The ambassador wrote John Boettiger, a journalist in the employ of his friend William Randolph Hearst and also son-in-law to the president: “Chamberlain believes God has put him at the helm of the British ship of state explicitly for the purpose of steering her away from war. Secondly, he believes conciliation and appeasement are the only methods by which one can maintain peace with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, two of the most belligerent and militaristic leaders the world has ever seen.” Kennedy gave a similar report to Cordell Hull—the dignified former senator from Tennessee now serving as FDR’s secretary of state—emphasizing Chamberlain’s “realistic, practical mind” and assuring Hull that Chamberlain “has assumed the responsibility of trying to straighten out the Italian and German situation. . . . He is convinced concrete concessions must be made to Germany and is prepared to make them to avert war.”

After being duly impressed with the British prime minister, who had been in office since May, and equally impressed with Chamberlain’s new man Halifax, Kennedy privately speculated that those at home, such as FDR, who so regretted the departure of the war-mongering Anthony Eden didn’t know what they were talking about. Kennedy quite wrongly sized up Chamberlain as a strong, decisive man in full charge of events. In letters, dispatches, and diary notes, he repeatedly compared Chamberlain favorably with his shrillest political adversary, Conservative MP Winston Churchill, whom Kennedy had first met during a trip to England in 1935. At that time, the nearly teetotal and pacifist-leaning Kennedy had come away from a typical Churchillian lunch disgusted by the liquor-sipping, cigar-champing militarist. Churchill, Kennedy complained, had spoken of nothing except his dire forecasts of what would happen should the Western democracies fail to arm against the threat of European totalitarianism. Back home in the States, Kennedy had studiously failed to tell FDR of Churchill’s suggestion that America and Great Britain join together in building a vast fleet of battleships to oppose the growing fascist menace.

Presenting his credentials to King George VI at Buckingham Palace on the 8th, Kennedy dressed formally in tails with slacks. He was self-conscious about being bowlegged, and for that reason had asked and received permission to dispense with the knee breeches traditionally worn at court functions. (In a few weeks, describing the presentation of Mrs. Kennedy and several of the Kennedy children to the court, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph would comment dryly in the Evening Standard that “the only trousers at last night’s court were those worn by the American Ambassador and some of the less important waiters.”) Following the formalities, the king went out of his way to congratulate Kennedy on a hole-in-one scored several days earlier at the Stokes Poges golf course—a happy quirk of fate that optimistic British journalists trumpeted as a good omen.

Upon leaving the palace, Kennedy—in a major breach of etiquette—quoted his conversation with the king for interested reporters. These and other hiccups occurred much to the annoyance of the embassy’s most senior professional diplomat, Herschel Johnson, a dignified South Carolinian who liked it best when the political appointees who showed up calling themselves ambassador kept to the script and stayed within the rules of conduct, saying what he told them to say when he told them to say it. Johnson and Kennedy were not to be friends.

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ROSE KENNEDY DEPARTED for Great Britain with Kick, Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy on March 9, sailing out of New York harbor. “It was an exciting and slightly hectic sailing,” she recalled, “because so many friends of all ages were there to wish us bon voyage and a marvelous time in England, to say nothing of a great many members of the press. Among these was our old friend Mary Pickford, pretending to be a reporter because she was about to play the role of one in a movie and wanted to get a little practice in an authentic scene.” A few days later, when their ship made its first port of call at Cobh, Ireland, Rose recalled the impoverished circumstances under which her forebears (and Joe’s) had left that shore so many years before. “Now our family returned, momentarily, in circumstances that could hardly be more dramatically different. There were many thoughts in my mind that day.”

Kick dominated the headlines early in the third week of March when Rose and the children made their triumphant landfall in Great Britain. While they were at sea, the New York World-Telegram had run a story incorrectly reporting Kick’s secret engagement to Peter Grace. The newspaper went on to suggest that this connection lay behind lucrative federal subsidies Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had arranged for the Grace Lines during the former’s time as head of the Maritime Commission. Neither the engagement nor the rumors of patronage were true. Nevertheless, on the day of the family’s arrival in Britain, Kick found herself fending off reporters who in turn seemed to ignore her mother. When asked about young Mr. Grace, Kick insisted: “It’s so silly. He’s awfully nice. I like him a lot.” Then, under more intense questioning, she changed her approach completely: “I do not know anything about him at all.” Her father, in turn, repudiated the rumors of his daughter’s engagement, declaring loudly: “She’s only eighteen!” But none of these denials stopped the London Daily Express from running a two-column story headlined “Kathleen Kennedy, Aged 18, Is in Love.”

In fact she was not in love. Far from it. Indeed, she was having huge second thoughts about Peter and had, before her departure from New York, told close friends that she looked forward to putting an ocean between herself and the shipping heir. It seems he was too pious for her. Like his devout father, Peter Grace practiced a most sincerely profound and consuming Catholicism. In this he was quite unlike the other Catholic men in Kick’s life: her father and brothers. She had recently grown tired of not only Peter, but also Peter’s close associate with whom the couple spent—so far as Kick was concerned—far too many evenings: James Keller, a Maryknoll priest with a penchant for cultivating the scions of wealthy Catholic families. Kick told her closest confidantes that she sometimes did not understand what to make of Peter, a young man with the world at his feet who preferred confessionals to cabanas and Jesuits to jazz. Why was Peter so serious all the time? Didn’t he know how to have fun?

Arriving quite breathlessly in London that March of 1938, Kick seemed ready for a change. She was, at the very least, ready for some fun.

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THE UPPER WINDOWS of Rose and Joe’s new home, the official ambassador’s residence at 14 Princes Gate, provided splendid views looking out over the Knightsbridge traffic to Hyde Park and the Kensington Gardens. Six stories high and boasting thirty-six rooms, the house lay just thirty minutes away by foot from the embassy at Grosvenor Square. French double doors on the second floor opened to a balcony with a good perspective down onto the bridle paths of Rotten Row, where Joe and several of his children would soon begin to ride in the mornings, taking on aristocratic British pretensions with great speed. As Joe was well aware, the mansion along with a lavish country house had been given to the United States of America several decades before by the family of J. P. Morgan—the same man whose son, J. P. Morgan II, had snubbed Joe on more than one occasion. Now Joe used the elder Morgan’s bedroom and toilet, wrote letters at Morgan’s desk, and garaged his black Chrysler (which he’d insisted the State Department ship for him) in Morgan’s old horse stable.

Along with his car, Joe brought his own staff to shore up the already considerable collection of junior consular officials and attachés stationed at the embassy. In addition to Harvey Klemmer from the Maritime Commission, Joe imported several Hollywood cronies. For reasons that remain vague, Will Hays’s Motion Picture Producers and Distribution Association of America supplemented the salary for one Arthur Houghton. A fellow Irishman and a former theatrical agent who had been friends with Kennedy for many years, Houghton’s chief responsibility seems to have been to serve as gregarious company for the boss. “I hate like hell to take him away from you,” Kennedy wrote one of Houghton’s colleagues at the Motion Picture Association, “but, my God, London is cold, dreary and foggy during the winter.” Kennedy needed Houghton, he said, “to make sure I have somebody over there I can have a laugh with.”

Kennedy also brought several personal assistants whom he paid out of his own funds. These included Page Huidekoper, an attractive young friend of Jimmy Roosevelt’s now destined to become a chum of Kick’s; James Seymour, another one of Kennedy’s Hollywood colleagues; and one Jack Kennedy, a rough-and-tumble bodyguard and gofer formerly employed by RKO. (This Kennedy would henceforth go by the nicknames “Ding-Dong Jack” and “London Jack” to differentiate him from the boss’s second-eldest son.)

In addition to Houghton, Kennedy, Huidekoper, and Seymour, Ambassador Kennedy’s perennial assistant Eddie Moore—a former secretary to Rose’s father, Honey Fitz—would arrive shortly with his wife. Finally, Kennedy also hired Harold Hinton, a former reporter for the New York Times, to serve as his personal press liaison. “There is little doubt,” the British chancery in Washington wired the Foreign Office, “Hinton has got his job through the influence of Arthur Krock. . . . It is given out that he is going to write the Ambassador’s speeches and keep contact with the press. From what he himself hints it will appear that he will have other jobs to do in the Embassy. . . . If Mr. Hinton is representative of his paper’s view, he will be welcomed, for the New York Times is as reasonable and as Anglophile as any paper in the United States.”

The embassy in which Kennedy and his cronies were to work consisted of three recently renovated Georgian townhouses at the corner of Broad Street, facing Grosvenor Square’s elegant central garden. Kennedy’s personal office, on the second floor, was spacious, comfortable, and effeminate. “I have a beautiful blue silk room,” he wrote Jimmy Roosevelt, “and all I need to make it perfect is a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May. If a fairy didn’t design this room I never saw one in my life.” A large portrait of Joseph H. Choate, American ambassador from 1899 to 1905, constituted the office’s single masculine aspect. As Kennedy would recall, the old WASP “watched me daily as I began and closed my work. At times it seemed to me that I could hear him say, ‘You are a cad, sir!’ ” It was from this blue room, laboring under Choate’s disapproving glare, that Kennedy would run his ambassadorship, directing not only the small crew he’d brought with him from the States but also the standing staff of twenty-five consular officers plus no fewer than seventy-five clerks, secretaries, cooks, servants, and security guards.

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JOE BARELY HAD a chance to get used to these new environs when the realities of Europe intruded on the glamour of his embassy, the elegance of his mansion, and the pretense of his high-sounding title. Hitler launched his Austrian Anschluss on the evening of March 11–12, and did so with full confidence that neither Britain nor France would move to block him. It took only about twenty-four hours for the Germans to proclaim the end of the Austrian Republic and the expansion of the Reich. Hitler himself visited Vienna on the 14th. Addressing Parliament on the crisis, Chamberlain emphasized that “the fundamental basis of British foreign policy is the maintenance and preservation of peace.” Kennedy sent Krock word calling Chamberlain’s speech a “masterpiece” and told his friend that “there will be no war if Chamberlain stays in power with strong public backing.”

Writing of Austria to FDR, Kennedy stated the obvious when he said that “the U.S. would be very foolish to try to mix in.” Foolish was right. If neither Britain nor France saw fit to try and stop the Führer, it was unlikely the United States, half a world away, would make the attempt. As Kennedy may or may not have realized, the only real question in Hitler’s mind was whether or not his rival dictator, Mussolini, would challenge the Nazis’ latest conquest in a country bordering northern Italy. Looking at the catalog of Kennedy’s many cables, letters, and dispatches to Roosevelt and Hull at this particular hour, all of them rather frantically contrived to persuade the Washingtonians to steer clear of the highly unlikely possibility of U.S. involvement in the Austrian question, one is forced to wonder what homework, if any, Kennedy had done on the Realpolitik of the world he now endeavored to help manage.

Kennedy delivered what was traditionally the first address of every newly appointed American ambassador—a speech to the Pilgrims Society, the old and highly respected organization long dedicated to promoting goodwill and good relations between the United Kingdom and the United States—just six days after the start of the Anschluss. Sitting in an ornate ballroom at Claridge’s Hotel, Joe’s audience rewarded him with relieved applause when he dismissed as incorrect the notion that the United States would never fight any war short of one that threatened actual invasion of the American mainland. They were quiet, however, when he insisted that “the great majority of Americans oppose entangling alliances.” And they were perceptibly grim when they heard the ambassador predict that the United States might likely remain neutral in the event of European hostilities. In any event, said Kennedy, the United States should only be counted upon to pursue whatever course was best for the United States. Little did the ambassador’s glum listeners realize that his originally proposed remarks, sent to Washington for approval shortly before the Anschluss, had been even more provocative. Kennedy had intended to say the United States had “no plan to seek or offer assistance in the event that war—and I mean, of course, a war of major scope—should break out in the world.”

It was Secretary Hull who, with approval from FDR, pulled the ambassador back from this rhetorical edge. Over time, Joe was to become increasingly restive under the wary Hull’s close scrutiny, supervision, and censorship. Whenever possible, he would do end runs around the secretary, addressing letters and cables directly to FDR, to his son Jimmy, and to the likes of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, chief of the State Department’s Division of European Affairs. Kennedy shortly wrote Bernard Baruch, as he would others including the president and Moffat, that “as much as I dislike saying it, Germany is really entitled to what she is asking for.” Joe told Baruch the German peoples of Europe deserved reunification. What was more, he speculated that the real problems of Europe were not political or ethnic, but purely economic. “An unemployed man with a hungry family is the same fellow, whether the swastika or some other flag floats above his head.” What Europe needed was booming stock markets and full employment, said the businessman turned diplomat. Then all would be well.

Such simplistic sentiments as these routinely addressed to Roosevelt and those around him would eventually prove Joe’s undoing. More immediately, they perhaps helped inspire FDR to open lines of private communication with numerous members of the British opposition, among them the staunchly anti-Hitler Harold Laski. When FDR’s ambassador got wind of the president’s correspondence with the socialist economist, he expressed himself “on this score in vigorous language to James Roosevelt, suggesting that he call his father’s attention to the unwisdom of such a procedure. As I look back, it was symbolic of much that was to come.”

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AS HULL BEGAN what was to be a long struggle to keep Ambassador Kennedy’s rhetoric in check, doctors back in Boston at the same time struggled to keep Jack’s illness in check. The young Kennedy’s football career had come to an abrupt halt the previous autumn when, well short of making varsity, he suffered a ruptured spinal disk after being thrown to the ground during a scrimmage. Undaunted, Jack now set his sights on the Harvard varsity swim team, where he thought he had a good shot at achieving his large H. After all, he’d been a star backstroke artist the previous year on Harvard’s undefeated freshman swim team. His dream was to qualify for the starting position in the mid-March competition against Yale—if only his troublesome body would not persist in betraying his tenacious spirit.

Jack spent the third week of February in the Harvard College infirmary with a severe intestinal infection. He was then briefly back in circulation on campus before being rushed to the New England Baptist Hospital the second week of March. During his time at the Harvard infirmary he arranged to sneak out for an hour’s practice in the pool every evening. Subsequently, in the short period between his release from the infirmary and his admittance to New England Baptist, he stoically endeavored to make the team that would take on Yale. Physically exhausted by the grippe that plagued him, Jack nevertheless performed well (though not well enough) in the qualifying heat. Classmate Richard Tregaskis—who was later, like Jack, to make a name for himself in the Solomon Islands and would write the classic Guadalcanal Diary—beat him by three seconds. Jack’s skill at swimming would, however, come in handy soon enough. The day was not far off when it would save his life.