Over the weekend several meetings were held between Roosevelt, His Royal Highness and Cordell Hull at the president’s Hyde Park estate on the Hudson River. The meetings were held in the late afternoon and evening and their content was never discussed openly. In point of fact, the meetings outlined the American strategy that would eventually become Lend Lease, and while Roosevelt made no direct commitment to fighting in a European war, he did tell the king that he would intercede should Hitler actually invade England. At the end of the weekend the king and his queen consort boarded their train again, returned to Canada and eventually went back to England. The identity of the dead man in room 509 of the Poughkeepsie Inn was never discovered. His killing by Jane Todd, a newspaper photographer from New York City, was deemed to be justifiable, and after a hearing in the Dutchess County Superior Court the file was closed, although it is public information and can be viewed at any time if there is sufficient reason for doing so.
John Bone’s body was cremated and the remains dispersed without ceremony or record.
Although FDR was personally advised of both the assassination attempt by Bone and the conspiracy that led to it, he dealt with the situation internally rather than by hanging the Democratic Party’s seditious dirty laundry out in public, both for his own political good and also for the good of a country poised on the edge of war, something FDR was even more aware of after the royal visit.
Within twelve months of the events at the World’s Fair, Postmaster General Farley had been removed from office as a cabinet member and as both national and New York State chairman of the Democratic Party. Those jobs were then taken over by Ed Flynn. Prior to the 1940 elections and without warning, Roosevelt summarily dropped Cactus Jack Garner as his running mate, replacing him with Henry Wallace. As soon as it became diplomatically possible, Joseph P. Kennedy was removed from office as ambassador to the Court of St James. He never held any kind of public office again.
Considered at the time to be one of the most dangerous men involved in the complex plot to see Roosevelt unseated, Allen Dulles, a lawyer with the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, was given a straightforward choice: go to jail or come and work for us. Roosevelt, always a man to keep his enemies close where he could see them, offered Dulles a job with another lawyer acquaintance of his, Bill Donovan, who would go on to form the Office of Strategic Services, an Ivy League intelligence service that was tailor-made for Dulles’s personality. Following the war and after Roosevelt’s death, Dulles became head of the Central Intelligence Agency while his older brother, also a lawyer at S&C, became secretary of state. Cardinal Spellman was never directly implicated in the plot, although the FBI file on Joe Kennedy noted Farley’s visit to the cardinal who was in residence at Kennedy’s Palm Beach house earlier that year.
Percival ‘Sam’ Foxworth was shot down and killed in North Africa while on a secret mission during the war.
Sean Russell died of a ruptured appendix on board a German submarine that was returning him to Ireland after a meeting in Berlin in 1941. He was buried at sea and a statue of him stands in a Dublin park to this day.
Jane Todd’s sister died of influenza less than a year after the events depicted here. Unable to join any of the women’s branches of the armed forces as a result of the wounds she received during the bomb attack on her office, Jane headed for Hollywood, eventually becoming a well-known publicity agent there. In 1972 she wrote her autobiography, Hot Toddy, but mentioned nothing about her connection to the royal visit of 1939.
Sheila Connelly remained with the IRA for the rest of her life, acting as a courier and occasionally as a driver. During the war she married another IRA member named O’Toole and bore him two children, Eamon and Sean. Her husband was convicted of murder in 1947 and was executed for his crime. She outlived both her children, seeing Eamon into the ground after a skirmish with the RUC during the marching season of 1958 and burying the remains of her son Sean in 1964 after an accident involving a shipment of Czechoslovakian-made Semtex plastic explosive.
Sheila Connelly herself died in a similar accident while shipping 250 pounds of the explosive to an IRA weapons depot in Clonmany by Malin Head. Fortunately the accident occurred in the early morning on a deserted road and no one else was injured, although the blast was said to have been heard as far as Buncranna, more than twenty miles away.
Thomas Barry returned to England immediately following the events outlined here, resigned from Scotland Yard a few weeks before the outbreak of war and joined a military intelligence unit. Eventually becoming a high-ranking officer in MI5, Barry retired in 1965 and was seen on the Civil List the following year in recognition of his long service to the Crown. He was prevented from writing his own memoirs under the conditions of the Official Secrets Act, although it is doubtful that he would have done so anyway. He returned to Ireland on only one occasion – the memorial service for Sheila Connelly held in the churchyard of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh on July 12, 1974. His presence at the memorial service in the Ulster city was noted and photographed and he was questioned about the event by his one-time colleagues at MI5 but he refused to say anything. The matter was not pursued. Sir Thomas Barry never married and died in 1980 at his small country estate in Herefordshire, the Glory. As requested in his will, several hundred letters written to him by Jane Todd between 1940 and her death in 1978 were interred with him.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, once known as Buffy by her husband and John Bone’s second target on that day, is still alive as of this writing and still has a definite preference for powder-blue dresses and pink Betty Prior roses.
Paul Christopher
Dublin, Republic of Ireland, 1999; Nassau, the Bahamas, 2001