Roosevelt in Kennedy’s debt,
Hearst threatens Roosevelt’s chances
for the Democratic presidential nomination,
the power of Father Charles Coughlin.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy had been troubled from the start. When America entered World War One, Kennedy, a married man with two children and a young wife expecting a third, had avoided the draft. Eager nonetheless to be seen to be of public service, he put aside his lucrative career in finance and volunteered to help manage Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.
This put him in the direct line of fire of Roosevelt, the dynamic young assistant secretary of the navy, who aggressively agitated for the speedy delivery of naval vessels protecting transatlantic shipping from German submarines. As Kennedy recalled, “We never got along then. He would laugh and smile and give me the needle, but I could not help but admire the man.”1
It was inevitable, perhaps, that the two would eventually clash. When a pair of Argentine battleships were returned to the shipyard for urgent repairs only a short time after they had been commissioned, Argentina claimed the shipyard was at fault and should bear the cost. The shipyard refused and held the ships pending final payment. Roosevelt, eager to keep Argentina sweet, pressed Kennedy to release the vessels and proposed that the State Department might guarantee payment of the outstanding amount.
Kennedy, under orders from the shipyard owners to keep the dreadnoughts until the money was in the bank, insisted upon full settlement. Roosevelt began negotiating with Kennedy, who recalled him to be “the hardest trader I ever came up against.”2 Unable to reach a deal, Roosevelt ordered marines to the shipyard to commandeer the battleships, then deliver them to the Argentines. “I was so disappointed and angry that I broke down and cried,” Kennedy recalled.3
The next time Kennedy encountered Roosevelt was in very different circumstances, with Roosevelt in need of financial help for his 1932 presidential campaign and Kennedy eager to take a first step on his own political career. In the intervening years, Kennedy had made a vast fortune at stockbrokers Halle and Stieglitz on Wall Street and as a movie mogul in Los Angeles. Having made enough for him and his rapidly expanding family to live comfortably for the rest of their lives, Kennedy began to imagine a life in politics, though he had no intention of working his way up from the bottom. He would buy himself in at the highest level.
What the limit of his ambition was, he did not know. He insisted to anyone who asked, “There is no public office that would interest me.”4 But to his wife, Rose,5 he was more candid. “I am a restless soul,” he said. “Some would call it ambition.”6 As he watched Roosevelt from afar he slowly concluded that, with the right headwind, even the presidency might be within his reach.
Roosevelt was too canny to be caught expressing critical views of those he needed to make use of, but nearly a decade later he would let slip his true feelings about Kennedy. “Joe is and always has been a temperamental Irish boy, terrifically spoiled at an early age by huge financial success,” he confided to his son-in-law John Boettiger.7 “Thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly selfish and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with a million dollars apiece when he dies (he has told me that often). . . . Sometimes I think I am 200 years older than he is.”8
Although Kennedy “inherited a Democratic label at birth,”9 in the early 1920s he weighed whether to join the Massachusetts Republican Party and gave a large sum of money to the presidential campaign of ex-Republican Robert M. La Follette, Sr.,10 who was the candidate of the Progressive Party in the 1924 presidential contest. La Follette had been against America entering World War One and vehemently opposed Wilson’s efforts to join the League of Nations.
Then Kennedy appeared to turn toward the Democrats. Hearing that Kennedy was toying with backing Democratic candidate Governor Al Smith11 of New York in the 1928 presidential election, Roosevelt, one of Smith’s campaign managers, wrote a flattering note suggesting that “there are some matters upon which I would appreciate your suggestions.”12 But Roosevelt was misinformed about Kennedy’s intentions. Though considering himself “a good Democrat,”13 Kennedy threw his support behind the Republican Herbert Hoover, who in November beat Smith in a landslide.
A little over a year later, however, with Hoover floundering, the smart money on who would become president in the 1932 election shifted to Roosevelt, who had succeeded Smith as governor of New York in January 1929. A few years later, Kennedy liked to dress up his switch as a principled change of heart. “I knew that big, drastic changes had to be made in our economic system and I felt that Roosevelt was the one who could make those changes,” he told a reporter. “I wanted him in the White House for my own security and for the security of our kids—and I was ready to do anything to help elect him.”14
Roosevelt’s friend and country neighbor Henry Morgenthau15 made the initial approach to bring Kennedy and his money on board, inviting him to lunch with Roosevelt in the governor’s mansion in Albany. Back home in Westchester that evening, Kennedy told Rose he believed Roosevelt was the man to save America. Two years later, in May 1932, Kennedy consummated the union, taking a trip to Warm Springs, Georgia, where the governor was undergoing water therapy to ameliorate the crippling polio he had contracted in the summer of 1921. Kennedy agreed to support Roosevelt and join him at the party convention in Chicago the following month.
Having recruited Kennedy, Roosevelt immediately put him to use. From his time as a Hollywood movie magnate, Kennedy counted as a friend William Randolph Hearst. While Hearst’s wife remained in New York, he lived with his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, more than thirty years his junior, at Hearst Castle, his antique-stuffed architectural hotchpotch in San Simeon, California, surrounded by 240,000 acres of scrub populated by zebras, camels, llamas, and kangaroos. Hearst, an isolationist, often tilted at Roosevelt. For Roosevelt to stand any chance of winning the Democratic nomination, the tyrant would have to be appeased.
Hearst once craved the presidency himself, but he was hardly equipped for retail politics. A lumbering man with an elongated face and an incongruously high-pitched voice, he was a poor public speaker. Having inherited $100 million from his railroad baron father, he was used to getting his way and had little patience for the collaborative work and glad-handing expected of a political hopeful. He was highly opinionated, rarely inhibited by good taste or sound judgment, and incapable of keeping acerbic thoughts to himself.
Those very qualities, however, made him an effective populist newspaper proprietor whose editors and journalists did his bidding. According to legend, when one of his illustrators, Frederick Remington, who had been dispatched to the war in Cuba in 1897, cabled his news desk, “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war,” Hearst shot back, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”16
At the turn of the century, Hearst forced his way into the Democratic Party leadership stakes by setting up a newspaper in Chicago to influence the 1900 convention. After failing to become the running mate of candidate William Jennings Bryan, Hearst turned his fire on the Republican ticket of President William McKinley17 and his vice presidential candidate, Franklin Roosevelt’s distant cousin Theodore. But the forthright Hearst soon overstepped the mark of good taste. In a tirade against the president, his Evening Journal wrote that if “bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then killing must be done.”18 When a short time later McKinley was shot dead by an assassin, the public blamed Hearst and burned him in effigy.
Undeterred, Hearst was elected to Congress in 1902 representing Midtown Manhattan, and two years later mounted a campaign for the presidency that went nowhere. In 1905 he ran for mayor of New York and lost; the following year he put himself forward for the governorship of New York and lost. In the 1912 presidential contest, in an attempt to prevent Wilson from winning the Democratic nomination, Hearst put his media properties behind the front-runner, isolationist Champ Clark.19 When Wilson won both the nomination and the presidency with no help from Hearst, the press magnate championed opposition to America entering World War One on the Allied side, declaring, “We are simply wasting sorely needed men and supplies by sending them abroad.”20
Ignored by the unimpeachable Wilson, Hearst next ordered his papers to oppose joining the League of Nations. Then Hearst met his political Waterloo. He again tried and failed to win the Democratic nomination for the New York governorship, eventually backing his rival, Smith, who won the subsequent election. Hearst took the defeat badly and, when Smith did not appoint Hearst’s slate of friends to the state judiciary, began waging a poisonous campaign against the governor.
Though Smith had no control over the dairy market, Hearst blamed him for a sharp hike in the price of milk, which, Hearst charged, threatened children with malnutrition. Smith was appalled by the assault. When, on her deathbed, the governor’s mother uttered the words, “My son did not kill the babies!” Smith became determined to confront the tyrant.
He hired Carnegie Hall in New York and challenged Hearst to a debate. The press baron ran scared. “I have no intention of meeting Governor Smith publicly or privately,” he blasted. “I find no satisfaction in the company of crooked politicians, neither have I time nor inclination to debate with every public plunderer or faithless public servant whom my papers have exposed.”21 In a theatrical coup, Smith pressed on with the debate without Hearst, telling the audience, “Of course, I am alone. I know the man to whom I issued the challenge, and I know that he has not got a drop of good, clean, pure red blood in his whole body.” Accusing Hearst of “the gravest abuse of the power of the press in the history of this country,” Smith, quoting from Psalms, urged New Yorkers to “get rid of this pestilence that walks in the darkness.”22
Smith lost the governorship in 1920, and two years later put himself forward for a New York Senate seat at the same time as Hearst. When Smith let it be known that he would not allow his name to go forward for the subsequent governor’s race if Hearst’s name appeared on the same ticket, Roosevelt intervened, telling diplomat and lawyer Joseph E. Davies,23 “I had quite a tussle in New York to keep our friend Hearst off the ticket and to get Al Smith to run.”24 As this proved to be Hearst’s last attempt to win public office, Roosevelt could claim to have snuffed out the fifty-nine-year-old press baron’s political ambitions.
More than a decade later, Hearst was confronted with an invidious choice when he was obliged to take sides in the race between Smith and Roosevelt to become the 1932 Democratic presidential candidate. Hearst dismissed the two men as “Wall Street internationalists.”25 He certainly could not throw his weight behind Smith, which left him with the prospect of Smith’s principal rival, Roosevelt, who had been governor of New York since 1928 and of whom he also had a low opinion.
Not only had Roosevelt abetted Smith’s public humiliation of Hearst, but he held foreign policy positions that Hearst deeply disliked. Roosevelt had backed Wilson’s intervention in World War One and remained committed to taking America into the League of Nations. At first, Hearst backed Roosevelt. “As Roosevelt is a probable presidential nominee and the one we are most likely to support, we should keep him and his policies before the nation,” he told the editor of his New York American. “There has been no adequate promotion of him in our papers. We should begin now to see that there is.”26
But as the convention in Chicago drew nearer, Hearst floated his own candidate, John N. Garner,27 a little known Democrat from San Antonio, Texas, who was “opposed to all foreign entanglements.”28 To launch Garner’s bid for the presidency, Hearst ordered his editors to forget Roosevelt and commend Garner to readers. In a nationwide radio address, Hearst blasted Roosevelt and others as “all good men in their way, but all internationalists—all, like Mr. Hoover, disciples of Woodrow Wilson, inheriting and fatuously following his visionary policies of intermeddling in European conflicts. . . . We should personally see to it that a man is elected to the Presidency this year whose guiding motto is ‘America First’.”29
Garner’s belated arrival in what had been a two-horse race jeopardized Roosevelt’s chances of winning outright on the first ballot in the summer convention in Chicago. As Garner was running as a “favorite son” in Texas, Roosevelt was deprived of the state’s forty-two primary votes. Then, after a vigorous campaign on Garner’s behalf by Hearst’s West Coast media properties, Garner caused an upset in California, winning a further forty-four votes. Roosevelt still led the field, but Garner stood between him and a first ballot win. If the convention was split, it would take hard bargaining and a great deal of luck for Roosevelt to win the nomination.
All attention in the Roosevelt camp turned toward plotting how Hearst could be persuaded to ask Garner to stand aside. The stumbling block appeared to be Roosevelt’s continuing support for the League. Roosevelt’s people deputed Wilson’s confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, to contact Hearst to assure him their candidate’s views on the League had changed since 1920 and that the candidate would like privately to set Hearst’s mind at rest. Hearst’s robust riposte, in a signed editorial splashed across the front pages of twenty-eight papers, ridiculed Roosevelt’s attempt to keep his change of mind quiet.
“If Mr. Roosevelt has any statement to make about his not now being an internationalist, he should make it to the public publicly and not to me privately,” he declared. “He should make his declaration publicly that he has changed his mind and that he is now in favor of keeping the national independence which our forefathers won for us, that he is now in favor of not joining the League.”30
Roosevelt had genuinely been having second thoughts about the wisdom of pressing on with American entry into the League. Since his journey across the Atlantic with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, he had been in favor of the principle of world government and the United States joining the League of Nations. He had watched in despair as the isolationists in the Senate had defeated the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. He had concluded that continuing to try to sell the League would be futile.
In 1924, therefore, Roosevelt had suggested there be “a brand new permanent International organization, i.e., to kill the existing League and set up something in its place,”31 a body that Congress could agree to join. It was with a mind to announce a change of direction, then, that Roosevelt telephoned Hearst to discuss their differences.
Two days after Hearst’s front-page blast, Roosevelt issued a statement. “The League of Nations today is not the League conceived by Woodrow Wilson,” he wrote. “Too often through these years its major function has been not the broad overwhelming purpose of world peace, but rather a mere meeting place for the political discussion of strictly European national difficulties. In these the United States should have no part. . . . American participation in the League would not serve the highest purpose of the prevention of war.”32 It was an embarrassing climb-down by Roosevelt and a triumph for Hearst.
Roosevelt’s about-turn alarmed many of his key supporters, starting with the editorial board of the New York Times, who complained, “It will be generally regretted, we think, that Governor Roosevelt should have been so plainly swayed by political motives in this public recantation.” After a meeting of grumbling internationalists, Roosevelt’s sidekick Robert W. Woolley33 told House, “Every man there looked as if he might be attending his own funeral. . . . I don’t suppose the Governor of New York will ever realize the extent of the tragedy which he wrought in that entirely unnecessary statement. . . . Hearst’s cohorts here are having the time of their lives raucously laughing at the manner in which their chief brought the Governor of New York to his knees. They boast that from now on Roosevelt is at Hearst’s mercy.”34
The ever-pragmatic Roosevelt attempted to reassure Woolley:
Can’t you see that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours? But have you ever stopped to consider that there is a difference between ideals and the means of attaining them? Ideals do not change, but methods do change with every generation and world circumstance. Here is the difference between me and some of my faint-hearted friends. I am looking for the best modern vehicle to reach the goal of an ideal while they insist on a vehicle which was brand new and in good running order twelve years ago.35
After the Democratic primaries, Roosevelt was the clear leader in the nomination race but still about two hundred votes short of the two-thirds needed to be elected on the first ballot. Garner, with ninety pledged votes, held the balance, making Hearst the kingmaker. The newspaperman was enjoying his moment of power and let it be known that he was in no hurry to make up his mind. The continuing uncertainty was perfect for increasing sales of his newspapers, as each twist and turn in the run-up to the Democratic convention stoked the appetite of a public eager to hear what trick Hearst would pull next.
To heighten the temperature of an already torrid contest, on April 24 Hearst wrote another front-page editorial, headed “A Plague On Both Your Houses.” He revealed that despite Roosevelt’s public flip-flop on the League, he was still not satisfied. “The unknown American man is not going to be benefited by Mr. Roosevelt’s plan to put this country into foreign complications by the trap door of the League Court,” Hearst wrote, a mischievous intervention that provoked pandemonium in the Roosevelt camp.
Aware of Kennedy’s Hollywood links to Hearst, Roosevelt’s team asked the Boston financier to fly to San Simeon to persuade the press baron to plump for Roosevelt. Kennedy landed at a small beachside airport beneath the architectural mishmash Hearst called “The Ranch.” With little facility for small talk or interest in the fine art that surrounded him, he quickly got down to business. The upshot was that Hearst could not bring himself to back his archrival Smith, but before he released Garner’s votes he needed further reassurance from Roosevelt that he would keep the US out of foreign wars.
By the time delegates began assembling at the end of June in the Chicago Stadium, a faux Greek temple larger than New York’s Madison Square Garden, the convention was still wide open. For the first time in thirty years, Hearst decided not to attend in person and holed up in San Simeon, operating the votes he had bought by remote control. Before long, the telephone wires between Chicago and the Coast were melting with offers of bargains, concessions, trade-offs, and about-turns.
Roosevelt was now vulnerable to a surprise fourth candidate, who emerged in the shape of Newton D. Baker,36 Wilson’s secretary of war, from Cleveland, Ohio. His backers in Illinois, Indiana, and his home state had held back their votes in order to mount a surprise run. Kennedy was deputed to call Hearst and explain that the convention was on the edge of electing the bellicose Baker, who would certainly take America into the League. Hearst told Kennedy that he would make up his mind when he was good and ready.
After three inconclusive ballots in the middle of the night, the Roosevelt camp was in despair. The longer the process, the more likely that the convention would break the logjam by picking Baker—or some other dark horse candidate. Kennedy was again asked to call Hearst.
Arthur Krock,37 the New York Times Washington correspondent, overheard Kennedy make the call. “W. R., do you want Baker?” Kennedy asked. Hearst did not. “If you don’t want Baker, you’d better take Roosevelt, because if you don’t take Roosevelt, you’re going to have Baker.” Hearst thought for a while and made it clear he was not happy to be railroaded.
He asked Kennedy whether another candidate might emerge and suggested Albert Ritchie, the four-term governor of Maryland. Kennedy held fast. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think if Roosevelt cracks on the next ballot, it’ll be Baker.”38 Hearst reluctantly directed Garner to release his delegates, in exchange for Garner taking the vice presidential slot on the Roosevelt ticket. Roosevelt won the nomination on the following ballot and flew to Chicago to announce that he was offering “a New Deal for the American people.”39 It was the first mention of what would become his trademark economic recovery legislation.
Roosevelt now owed Kennedy a huge favor. The Bostonian enjoyed one outstanding virtue: he came bearing lots of cash. He gave $25,000 ($415,000 in 2014 terms) to Roosevelt’s campaign and lent the Democratic National Committee $50,000 more. Now that the candidacy was secure, Kennedy was encouraged to become a bundler—to call his rich friends and tap them for funds, starting with Hearst, who, despite his persistent misgivings, sent $25,000. Kennedy wrote Hearst, “Considering the fact that there are only two contributions equal to yours, you can well understand what a terrific sensation this check made.”
Kennedy told Hearst that passing the check to the campaign through him “helps a great deal in having consideration paid to any suggestion that I might want to make.” In a veiled acknowledgment that they shared a common interest in holding Roosevelt to his promise to keep America out of the League, Kennedy added, “Whenever your interests in this administration are not served well, my interest has ceased.”40
As his granddaughter Amanda Smith reported many years later, “The financier’s enthusiasm and support [for Roosevelt] would always be tempered and punctuated by critical outbursts.”41 After Kennedy visited Roy Howard,42 chairman of the Scripps–Howard newspaper chain, Howard wrote to Newton Baker that Kennedy was “quite frank in his very low estimate of Roosevelt’s ability” and held in contempt the governor’s “immaturity, vacillation, and general weak-kneed character.” Kennedy’s aim in sticking by Roosevelt was to ensure that others did not “unmake Roosevelt’s mind on some of the points on which Kennedy had made it up for Roosevelt.”43 Roosevelt was aware of Kennedy’s backbiting but found him useful. His general policy was, in any case, to keep his enemies close to him.
As well as keeping Hearst sweet, Kennedy was tasked with minding Father Charles Coughlin, an opinionated, Canadian-born Roman Catholic priest based at the National Shrine of the Little Flower in the Royal Oak suburb of Michigan, who through his gift for oratory had built a weekly audience on Sunday afternoons of 30 million on thirty-five radio stations coast to coast. The Shrine, an imposing Italianate church, was constructed with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by the priest’s radio following. In 1930, as the Great Depression took hold, Coughlin had moved from discussing religion to politics, declaring himself the friend of the common man.
The priest’s political statements became so partisan that CBS, anxious not to offend federal authorities that demanded impartiality on the airwaves, dropped him from its roster. When in January 1931 Coughlin wrote to Roosevelt asking for support against CBS’s censorship, Roosevelt sent a noncommittal letter.
Coughlin roundly and colorfully condemned the un-American activities of socialists and Communists as well as the greed of big businessmen. He was an unashamed anti-Semite, blaming “international financiers” for the Wall Street crash and the Depression. He warned against being drawn into foreign wars. Deeply hostile to Hoover, as the 1932 presidential election approached Coughlin began preaching, “It is either Roosevelt or ruin,” and, “I will never change my philosophy that the New Deal is Christ’s Deal.”44
In May 1931, Roosevelt received a letter from Eleanor’s brother, G. Hall Roosevelt, the controller of Detroit, that Coughlin “would like to tender his services. He would be difficult to handle and might be full of dynamite, but I think you had better be prepared to say yes or no.”45 Coughlin’s support was a mixed blessing. Despite his religious demeanor, he was a hard-drinking, free-cursing businessman in a dog collar, part Elmer Gantry, part Huey Long (the charismatic populist governor of Louisiana).
Roosevelt met Coughlin for the first time in early 1932, in Albany. The priest came away with the impression that the two men had a pact. “He said he would rely on me, that I would be an important advisor,” Coughlin recalled.46 When Eleanor was asked what her husband thought of Coughlin, she said, “He disliked and distrusted him.”47 Still, the Democrats invited the radio priest to address the 1932 Chicago convention. When he returned to Michigan, he cabled Roosevelt, “I am with you to the end. Say the word and I will follow.” A month later he wrote, “I am willing to adopt your views which I know will be just and charitable. But the main point is that we work in harmony.”48
As Coughlin’s biographer Donald Warren put it, “Roosevelt and his staff viewed the relationship with Royal Oak as an awkward, imbalanced, and even seriously unsettling threat.”49 Roosevelt complained to James Farley, his campaign manager in 1932 and 1936 and Postmaster General, “[Coughlin] should run for the Presidency himself. Who the hell does he think he is?”50 Kennedy, the Roosevelt campaign’s most prominent Catholic, was charged with keeping the priest on message and began making visits to Royal Oak. Kennedy became “fascinated by Coughlin’s talent on the radio,” recalled James Roosevelt. “He recognized it as demagoguery, but revelled in what the priest could accomplish.”51 Besides, his attempts to tame Coughlin meant that Roosevelt was even more in Kennedy’s debt.
Invited to join the Roosevelt presidential campaign’s executive committee, Kennedy declined because of personal differences with Roosevelt’s close adviser and political mentor Louis Howe, but he agreed to contribute to Roosevelt’s speeches on business and finance in the hope that Roosevelt would appoint him Treasury secretary. Kennedy worked up some ideas that emerged in a speech delivered by Roosevelt on August 20 in Columbus, Ohio, in which businessmen and stock traders in Hoover’s America were traduced as “promoters, sloganeers, mushroom millionaires, opportunists, adventurers of all kinds.”52 To “act as a check or counterbalance” to the “ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers in the stock markets and in the corporate system,”53 Roosevelt argued that the nation’s financial industry should be reformed, regulated, and policed by a federal body, an idea that would lead to creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The following month, Kennedy joined Roosevelt aboard his campaign train traveling the Pacific Coast. Riding in the carriage just ahead of the president’s own, Kennedy had finally made it to the inner sanctum. If Roosevelt won, a cabinet job might be in the cards. On election night, he threw a party at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and when it became clear that Roosevelt had won by a landslide, taking forty-two states to Hoover’s six, the band played “Happy Days Are Here Again.”54 Kennedy was encouraged in his ambition to join the administration when, to fill time between the election on November 8 and the inauguration on March 4, he was invited to join Roosevelt and many of the campaign’s principal donors aboard Vincent Astor’s yacht for a victory cruise up and down the Florida coast.
Soon after the election, Coughlin arrived at the president-elect’s New York City home on East 65th Street bearing a wish list of Catholics whom he and his bishop, Michael Gallagher, who defended Coughlin from the Catholic hierarchy, thought suitable to be ambassadors in Latin America. Roosevelt stalled, claiming that the incoming secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had already agreed to the appointments. “I’ll tell you what I can do,” said Roosevelt. “You can have the Philippines if you want.”55 Coughlin named as governor-general his friend and political ally Frank Murphy, mayor of Detroit, who as a child had been one of the priest’s altar boys.
Kennedy felt he had every reason to believe he would be offered a cabinet position. But weeks passed and there was no call from Roosevelt. His hopes were briefly raised when he received a telegram from Will Hays,56 the Hollywood film censor, addressing him as “Mr. Secretary,” to which he was obliged to write, “The only secretarial job that I would ever consider would be one to General Will Hays.” “I have no desire for political preferment,” he lied. He wrote a similar note to Hiram Brown, president of RKO: “As far as my accepting any position under [Roosevelt], I can assure you it is the farthest thing from my mind. I went into the fight for the fun it gave me, and there is no hope of an ultimate reward.”57
Roosevelt had no intention of giving Kennedy the important job of secretary to the Treasury, and added his name to a list of candidates for the mostly ceremonial role of Treasurer of the United States, with responsibility for printing banknotes, minting coins, and writing his signature on dollar bills. But even that sinecure was put out of his reach by the intervention of his old enemy and the new president’s dear friend, Louis Howe,58 for whom the arrival in the White House of his protégé Franklin Roosevelt was the crowning moment of a long career spent in smoke-filled rooms.
When the protracted silence emanating from the president-elect’s office suggested that there would be nothing for him in the new administration, Kennedy moodily retreated to his seaside estate in Palm Beach for the winter, taking with him Raymond Moley,59 architect of the president’s “Brain Trust.” There, Kennedy complained about the new president to anyone who would listen. “I heard plenty of Kennedy’s excoriation of Roosevelt, of his criticisms of the President-elect,” recalled Moley. “There must have been hundreds of dollars in telephone calls to provide an exchange of abuse of Roosevelt between Kennedy and W. R. Hearst. The latter by this time was wondering why he had ever supported Roosevelt.”60
In March, after a month of brooding, Kennedy sent Roosevelt a cable laced with praise about how good the new administration was looking. The president cheerily replied, “Do be sure to let us know when you are going through Washington and stop off and see us.”61 Irritated by the brush-off, Kennedy invited himself to the White House. Roosevelt welcomed him in the Oval Office with a beaming smile. “Hello, Joe,” he said. “Where have you been all these months? I thought you’d got lost.”62