Kennedy joins Roosevelt’s administration,
helps temper Father Coughlin’s dissent, and claims
his just reward. Roosevelt starts to prepare himself for
a third term and the American people for war
AFTER THE PRESIDENT passed him over in 1932, Kennedy resumed his business life, fully exploiting his links to the Roosevelt family. In September 1933, he and Rose sailed to London, taking with him the president’s son James and his wife, Betsey. While the women shopped and looked at the sights, Kennedy and the young Roosevelt set about exploiting a popular plank in Roosevelt’s 1932 platform: the imminent repeal of the 1919 Eighteenth Amendment that had outlawed the sale and consumption of alcohol.
The resumption of legal drinking offered an obvious business opportunity. Using James Roosevelt as his entrée, Kennedy negotiated exclusive distribution deals with some of Britain’s top purveyors of alcohol, among them Scotch whisky distillers Haig and Haig and John Dewar, and gin makers Gordon’s. Kennedy also obtained federally issued permits for the sale of alcohol “for medicinal purposes” in America,1 so by the time the final state, Utah, ratified the Twenty-First Amendment, which overturned Prohibition, his warehouses were stacked with cases of whisky and gin ready for sale.
Eventually Roosevelt did offer Kennedy a job: as New York director of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration. Thinking it of insufficient importance, Kennedy declined the offer. When ill health forced Treasury secretary William H. Woodin2 to resign at the end of 1933, Kennedy was again passed over for the post, this time in favor of Roosevelt’s neighbor and friend Henry Morgenthau Jr., who had inherited a real estate fortune and farmed Christmas trees in Dutchess County. An economic conservative, Morgenthau was malleable. Roosevelt explained, “I couldn’t put Joe Kennedy in [Morgenthau’s] place . . . because Joe would want to run the Treasury in his own way, contrary to my plans and views.”3
It was not long before Kennedy’s name suggested itself for a most delicate government position. After the passage of the Securities Exchange Act in 1934, a new body was established to police the financial sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Roosevelt asked Kennedy to become its chairman. The thought of naming a poacher turned gamekeeper appealed to Roosevelt’s sense of mischief, but it was also sound politics. Routinely accused of being hostile to bankers and big business, Roosevelt thought appointing Kennedy, as one of their number, would ensure that Wall Street types cooperated fully with the new body.
In a memo to the president, Ray Moley, who had helped drive the SEC legislation through Congress, described Kennedy as “the best bet for Chairman because of executive ability, knowledge of habits and customs of business to be regulated.”4 When Kennedy was asked by Moley to consider the appointment, he demurred. “I don’t think you ought to do this,” he said. “It will bring down injurious criticism.” “I know darned well you want this job,” said Moley. “But if anything in your career in business could injure the President, this is the time to spill it.” As Moley recalled, “With a burst of profanity he defied anyone to question his devotion to the public interest or to point to a single shady act in his whole life. . . . He would give his critics—and here again the profanity flowed freely—an administration of the SEC that would be a credit to the country, the President, himself, and his family—clear down to the ninth child.”5 Kennedy accepted the post.
The Kennedy appointment provoked incredulity in the press. The New Republic’s John T. Flynn, a sharp critic of both Wall Street and the president, cried, “I say it isn’t true. It is impossible. It could not happen.”6 Within the administration, too, there was doubt that Kennedy was the right man. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes7 confided to his diary:
I am afraid I do not agree with [Roosevelt] as to the chairman he is going to name for the Securities Commission. He has named Joseph P. Kennedy for that place, a former stock market plunger. The President has great confidence in him because he has made his pile, has invested all his money in Government securities, and knows all the tricks of the trade. Apparently he is going on the assumption that Kennedy would now like to make a name for himself for the sake of his family, but I have never known many of these cases to work out as expected.8
Kennedy would prove his doubters wrong. He was a tireless public servant and his energy and application ensured the SEC’s success. Kennedy reveled in the position; at last he was enjoying power and had no one to restrain him but the president. One of the items on his desk of which he was most proud was a white telephone with a direct line to the White House. He used his time in Washington to establish himself as an important figure in the administration and to become better acquainted with the congressmen and senators he would need if he were to make a presidential bid. And he cemented his ambiguous friendship with Roosevelt.
While Rose and the family remained in Bronxville, Kennedy leased Marwood, a ten-bedroom country mansion outside Potomac, Maryland, where he lavishly entertained politicians, journalists, film stars, and, on a regular basis, the president himself. As Eleanor toured the country promoting her own progressive agenda, Roosevelt was often left alone in the White House, and he enjoyed visiting Kennedy at weekends. The president relished the SEC chairman’s glamorous lifestyle, the informality and privacy of Marwood despite its grandeur, the early sight of new movies Kennedy had shipped in from Hollywood, and the dry martinis on tap.
For the next couple of years Roosevelt and Kennedy got on famously. Krock, the New York Times journalist whom Kennedy kept on retainer as an amanuensis and shill, recorded one of the president’s visits. “The party soon became very merry,” he wrote. “The President’s laughter rang out over all, and was most frequent. After a reasonable number of mint juleps, which the President said would be ‘swell’, they dined in the same mood.”9 He continued, rather less plausibly, “[The president] consults Mr. Kennedy on everything, and when the argument is over, President and adviser relax like two school boys.”10
Eleanor encouraged Kennedy’s candor with the president, whom she knew would ignore advice he did not agree with. “I want you to go right on telling Franklin exactly what you think,” she told him.11 Kennedy reciprocated, dropping by the White House several times a week. Yet there remained a tension in the friendship, with the president relentlessly teasing Kennedy and playing practical jokes to delineate the roles of master and supplicant.
Typical of Roosevelt’s taunting of Kennedy was a memo ordering that “in view of the sleepless nights and hectic days of the Chairman of the SEC, in view of his shrunken frame, sunken eyes, falling hair, and fallen arches, he is hereby directed to proceed to Palm Beach and return to Washington six hours after he gets there . . .” then, on the following page “and after ten intervening days have passed by (fooled again).”12
Having established the SEC and ensured its smooth running, Kennedy became impatient. One evening in May 1935, on his way to the White House to tender his resignation, Kennedy caught sight of a placard screaming that the Supreme Court had declared the National Recovery Act, a cornerstone of the New Deal, unconstitutional. Aware that this was no time to add to the president’s woes, he tore up his resignation letter. By August, however, he was again determined to return to private life. He complained that working for Roosevelt was costing him $100,000 a year in lost income and that his government salary barely covered his telephone bills.
In early September he resigned, thanking Roosevelt for being “unfailingly considerate and stimulating.”13 In his letter accepting the resignation, the president warmly paid tribute to Kennedy’s “skill, resourcefulness, good sense and devotion to the public interest” and promised that “in the future, as in the past, I shall freely turn to you for support and counsel.”14 Kennedy insisted that he was finished with government work. “I am leaving public life today for good,” he wrote to the New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.15 “I am going to feel that I’m out of politics—if this is politics—for the rest of my natural life.”16
But Roosevelt still needed Kennedy, and he was asked to try to stem the torrent of vitriol hurled at Roosevelt each week by Coughlin. Once one of his most avid admirers, the radio priest had become a fierce critic, peddling a populist domestic agenda and an isolationist foreign policy. In 1934, the priest founded the National Union for Social Justice as a third political force designed to steal votes from the president. He planned to team up with Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana who had taken to spouting primitive leftist rhetoric from the Senate. A poll suggested that in the coming election, six million voters, many of them traditional Democrats, would support Long and Coughlin.
Coughlin condemned the New Deal as “two years of surrender, two years of matching the puerile, puny brains of idealists against the virile viciousness of business and finance, two years of economic failure.”17 The priest opposed Roosevelt’s efforts to join the World Court, a body proposed at Versailles in 1919 to deliver a common world standard of justice, suggesting that membership would “lead to the pilfering of Europe’s $12 billion war debt to the United States, participation in another war, and the destruction of the American way of life.”18 When the president’s attempt to join the World Court was defeated, Senator William Borah, one of the most intractable isolationists, wrote to Coughlin, “How deeply indebted we are to you for the great victory.”19
Coughlin was such a threat to Roosevelt that it was decided the president should try to smother the priest with his famous charm. In September 1935, Kennedy arranged an audience with Roosevelt at Hyde Park. With Kennedy by his side, the president invited Coughlin by telephone. “Hiya Padre!” he said. “Where have you been all the time? I’m lonesome. I’ve got a couple of days down here. Come on down and see me.”20 When the priest hesitated, citing a funeral as an excuse, the president insisted that he take the overnight train. Kennedy met Coughlin at Albany, where the first thing to greet the priest on the station platform was a placard announcing that the rabble-rousing leftist from Louisiana, Senator Huey Long, Coughlin’s partner in populist radicalism, had been shot dead.
By the time the two men arrived at Springwood in Kennedy’s Rolls-Royce, the president had not yet risen, so Kennedy and Coughlin helped themselves to breakfast. As soon as Roosevelt emerged, he got down to business. With Long dead, the time was propitious for a deal with Coughlin. “Cards on the table, Padre, why are you cooling off to me?”21 the president asked. As the priest fumbled for words, Roosevelt told Kennedy to “go out and look at the pigs” so he and the priest could be alone. An exchange of views took place in which Coughlin, by his account, did most of the talking.
He said that his disenchantment stemmed from information he had received suggesting that federal money was being funneled to Communists in Mexico. Roosevelt promised to look into it. (No convincing evidence was forthcoming.) When Coughlin proposed that the Treasury should inflate the economy to preserve jobs and that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, the president shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t be so innocent as to think that the President of the United States can also be the Congress of the United States,” he said. “I’m only the President.”22
Roosevelt stressed to Coughlin that if he persisted in his opposition, it would invite the return of a Republican administration, which the priest would not like. When the evening drew in, Roosevelt asked Coughlin and Kennedy to stay for dinner, but they declined. To the press, Roosevelt dismissed the Coughlin summit as merely “a social visit.” Asked whether Coughlin was now “back on the reservation,” the president replied, “I don’t know.”23 Pressed on what part Kennedy played in the encounter, Roosevelt could not resist saying, “I have no idea, except to act as a chauffeur, I guess.”
Kennedy and Coughlin drove to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the nearby Berkshire Mountains to meet Francis Keelon, a financier and Roman Catholic whom Coughlin hoped would fund his National Union for Social Justice and a national weekly newspaper, Social Justice. Meanwhile, Roosevelt asked the Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, James Farley, to investigate Coughlin’s finances and explore how the Canadian had become a US citizen.
Despite the Hyde Park powwow, Coughlin’s attacks on the president and the New Deal continued. The priest began flirting with the Republicans, claiming that “a renovated Republican Party possessing a contrite heart for its former misdeeds and an honest standard-bearer in whom I could repose complete confidence are all that are necessary to convert this nation from Rooseveltism.”24 Coughlin began discreet negotiations with Hoover, whom, when president, he had castigated as “the banker’s friend, the Holy Ghost of the rich, the protective angel of Wall Street,” with a view to an electoral pact between the Republicans and his National Union for Social Justice.
The priest’s broadcasts increasingly criticized Roosevelt himself. In one, Coughlin boasted, “As I was instrumental in removing Herbert Hoover from the White House, so help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist foe [Roosevelt] from the chair once occupied by Washington.”25 One time he described the president as the “anti-God,” at another, as “a liar and a betrayer.” He kept up the accusation that Roosevelt was a closet Communist. “The New Deal is surrounded by atheists,” he said. “Surrounded by red and pink Communists and by ‘frankfurters of destruction’ ”26—a thinly veiled allusion to Roosevelt’s Treasury chief, Felix Frankfurter.27
Roosevelt and Coughlin met again in the White House on January 8, 1936, and parted without agreement. Again Roosevelt turned to Kennedy to counter the venom emanating from the Shrine of the Little Flower and shore up the Catholic vote. Coughlin asked Kennedy to ask the president to appoint one of his protégés to a federal judgeship in Detroit. Kennedy passed on the name to James Roosevelt with a note saying that “the President will decide whether it is worthwhile to make a gesture to Father Coughlin.” No gesture was forthcoming.
Coughlin went back on the attack. As the general election neared, his National Union, under the name Union Party, began nominating candidates and selected a presidential hopeful, William Lemke,28 a Republican supporter of the New Deal who had not forgiven Roosevelt for opposing his Frazier–Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, which would have obliged the federal government to refinance delinquent farm mortgages.
Coughlin went on the stump and vilified the president at every turn, dubbing him “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt,” a “liar,” and a “great betrayer.” “When an upstart dictator in the United States succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, when the ballot is useless, I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets,” he said.29
With the election only a month away, Kennedy decided to intervene. On October 5, 1936, on Coughlin’s old network, CBS, he declared, “I resent the efforts which are now being made for low, political purposes to confuse a Christian program of social justice with a Godless program of Communism.” The reference to “social justice” was not lost on the radio audience. If Roosevelt was the dictator some had suggested, Kennedy said, he would surely have closed down free speech. “We could have had a dictatorship in the twinkling of an eye—President Roosevelt’s eye. . . . If there were any semblance of Communism or dictatorship or regimentation in this country, the words liar and betrayer would have been uttered only once.” He ended by announcing, “I’m for Roosevelt.”
Come election day, Roosevelt enjoyed the greatest landslide in America’s history: 28 million votes against Republican candidate Alfred Landon’s30 17 million, and a near-sweep of the electoral college, losing only two small states.31 Lemke won less than 2 percent of the vote and the Union Party did not win a single seat in the House or Senate.
The day after the election, Coughlin told his supporters, “We have a one-party system now.”32 The priest promised to abandon public life, telling his listeners, “I hereby withdraw from all radio activity in the best interest of the people . . . It is better, both for you and for me, for the country I serve and the Church I love, for me to be forgotten for the moment.”33 Kennedy could claim again that his timely intervention had contributed to the president’s victory and the demise of one of his principal enemies, for which he deserved to be suitably rewarded. He still had his eye on the Treasury.
After the election, Roosevelt abruptly discovered the limits of his powers. The year 1937 proved an annus horribilis, as a succession of interrelated events combined to frustrate him. He told assistant attorney general Robert H. Jackson,34 “I’m sick of sitting here kissing people’s asses to get them to do what they ought to be volunteering for the Republic.”35 The trouble stemmed from the Supreme Court striking down key parts of the New Deal legislation as unconstitutional. The president found the defiance of the justices hard to bear and determined he would punish them by curtailing their powers.
Under the guise of helping older judges cope with advancing age, Roosevelt cooked up a plan with the attorney general, Homer Cummings,36 to have his revenge on the recalcitrant Supreme Court. He would create six new young justices to supplement those aged over seventy, leaving him free to rescind the ruling that parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. The president assumed, as did the press and most lawmakers, that Congress would cooperate in executing this vengeful plan.
When, the previous year, Roosevelt had floated the idea of “increasing the number of justices so as to permit the appointment of men in tune with the spirit of the age,”37 there had been little hostility. Before long, however, Roosevelt was cast as an aspirant dictator undermining the separation of powers guaranteed in the Constitution. There was also stern opposition from the justices; James McReynolds38 swore that he would “never resign as long as that crippled son-of-a-bitch is in the White House.”39
Roosevelt persisted, justifying his plan by declaring that the justices were perpetuating the Depression. “The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body,” he told Americans in a radio “fireside chat.” But Roosevelt had not counted on the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Henry Ashurst of Arizona,40 a colorful frontiersman whose contorted utterances in the Senate had earned him the title “Five-Syllable Henry” and the “Silver-Tongued Sunbeam of the Painted Desert.” But it was his other nickname, the “Dean of Inconsistency,” that pointed to the undoing of Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Court. After being against it, then for it, then against it, it became clear that the wobbling Ashurst’s committee would not recommend the legislation to the full Senate. The president had been defeated.
Roosevelt’s attempt to curb the Court yielded some benefit for the administration, as from then on the justices trod more carefully when deeming new legislation unconstitutional. Nor was Roosevelt’s popularity much affected; the issue proved too technical to capture the public imagination. But the whole affair demonstrated, for the first time, that Roosevelt was not omnipotent. Speculation over who might follow him into the White House in 1940 increased.
The second crisis of the administration in 1937 was also of Roosevelt’s making and arose from his decision to wind down federal government efforts to bolster the faltering economy. When, in the spring of 1937, production, profits, and wages returned to their pre-1929 levels, and unemployment dropped to 14.3 percent from 16.9 percent the previous year, Marriner Eccles,41 the Federal Reserve chairman, suggested to the president that the New Deal had worked and it was time to return to more orthodox ways of managing the economy. Spending cuts, tax increases, and a credit squeeze were announced as job creation schemes began to be wound up.
By the fall of 1937, however, the economy was heading back into recession and what came to be known as “the Roosevelt Recession” took hold. Industrial production slumped by a third, prices fell by 3.5 percent, and unemployment climbed to 19 percent, or 46 million Americans, through 1938.42 One day in mid-October, stock prices suffered the worst single-day fall since 1932. Despite attempts by Roosevelt to blame the return to recession on businessmen—the attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, suggested that the New Deal had “set out a breakfast for the canary and let the cat steal it”43—the president had made a profound error.
Watching Roosevelt’s discomfort was Joe Kennedy. The president had given no indication of his intentions about running again in 1940, but it was assumed he would abide by the convention laid down by Washington, and confirmed by Jefferson, that two presidential terms were the maximum.44 Kennedy believed the presidency was within his grasp. “He thought he was about the most qualified individual on earth to be President,” recalled his aide Harvey Klemmer.45 “He thought his services had so impressed the country. And there was money behind [a presidential bid] for a gigantic propaganda machine.”46
There was one significant drawback: Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism. There remained widespread prejudice against Catholics, particularly among Democratic voters in the South. In his Diplomatic Memoir, not published until after his death, Kennedy went some way toward explaining why he was considering a presidential run. “No one can lightly turn away a serious suggestion from his friends that he is worthy of succeeding to the presidency of the United States,” he wrote. “There were many reasons that militated against my candidacy for that office, including my Catholic faith, but even these might be overcome.”
Central to his appeal, he felt, was his isolationism. A sincere promise to keep America out of war might, he thought, be popular enough across both parties to compensate for the prejudice against his Catholicism in the Democratic South. Kennedy was also prepared to spend a large portion of his fortune to win the White House. All would depend on whether Roosevelt decided to run.
Kennedy knew that if he were to make a run for the presidency, he needed to remain on good terms with Roosevelt. That is why, in the run-up to the 1936 election, Kennedy had used his money, influence, and personal capital to court favor with Roosevelt and help ensure the president remained in the White House. To have the support of the incumbent would be important if he mounted a presidential bid. In pursuit of that aim, Kennedy had volunteered for the campaign in order to mollify the businessmen who believed the administration was anti-business. He had said he could think “of no more definite symptom of this danger [to democracy] than the unreasoning malicious ill-will displayed by the rich and powerful against their common leader.”47
Kennedy had asked Krock to ghost-write a pamphlet, “I Am For Roosevelt: A Business Man’s Estimate of the New Deal.”48 The president pronounced it “splendid,” “of real service,” and “a distinct step in sane education of the country” that “will bear good fruit for many years to come.”49 To remind the president that supporting his reelection came at a high personal cost, Kennedy told him, “Some of my friends in the business and financial world have told me . . . I have had my last job from anyone in the business world once the book is published.”50 Kennedy had won praise for the tract, the New York Daily News declaring it “the best answer we have yet seen to those who blindly hate President Roosevelt for having saved their shirts and possibly their skins.”51
Shortly after Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, Kennedy was offered his just reward. The president asked Kennedy to take a wholly unexpected job. Roosevelt was aware that if the increasingly bellicose behavior of the dictators in Germany and Italy led to war that threatened British shipping, America would need a large merchant fleet of its own. In 1936 he had encouraged the passing of the Merchant Marine Act, revamping the inefficient web of federal subsidies that encouraged the building of new merchant ships. Recalling Kennedy’s knowledge of shipyard management, in February 1937 the president approached him to chair a new body, the Maritime Commission, to oversee the construction drive.
When the job was offered, Kennedy feigned a lack of interest, suggesting it was Roosevelt’s charm, not his own ambition, that led him to accept: “I can say no to that fellow on the telephone, but face to face he gets me.”52 But there was also a selfish motive. If he were to stand for president, Kennedy would need to display more experience in government than simply the SEC chairmanship. “I felt I was through with the Government service,” Kennedy wrote Roosevelt in his acceptance letter, “but if you feel that I can be of any help at all in the present situation, of course, I am delighted to serve.”53
Kennedy negotiated a new lease on Marwood and resumed his old Washington routine. While he had acquired a reputation for competence and courage at the SEC, it soon became clear that the Maritime Commission was a cursed chalice. There was an urgent need for America to build ships fast, if the new merchant fleet was to be ready before war broke out in Europe. And the current US merchant fleet was in such bad shape that 85 percent of its ships would have to be replaced within five years.
Yet Kennedy soon discovered that the recently passed legislation was inadequate and perhaps unworkable. Both shipowners and the trade union representing merchant seamen were populated by small-minded men so caught up in their own worlds that they did not grasp the national emergency they were expected to meet. Kennedy was unhappy. For once, his dynamism was met with inertia. When an obstructionist union leader questioned his right to manage the industry, Kennedy called up Frances Perkins,54 Roosevelt’s labor secretary, and told her “not to send any more bums like that in here trying to tell me what my authority is.”55
With Roosevelt’s friend Morgenthau running the economy, the Treasury still seemed beyond Kennedy’s reach, but in the fall of 1937 news arrived that the American ambassador in London, Robert Worth Bingham, was profoundly ill and likely to resign. Bingham was suffering from abdominal Hodgkin’s disease, a pernicious form of lymph-node cancer. Kennedy lost little time in recruiting James Roosevelt to suggest him for the London job.
At first, Roosevelt did not take the request seriously. “When I passed [Kennedy’s request] on to Father, he laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair,” recalled James.56 After sleeping on the idea, Roosevelt appeared to change his mind. First Kennedy was summoned to the Oval Office to show off his knees, then he was called back to talk with Roosevelt and the starchy secretary of state Cordell Hull, who was far from convinced that an Irish American multimillionaire known for his isolationist views was a good fit for such a sensitive job.
Roosevelt spoke to Kennedy about a recent event in the news: a new member of the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, had failed to reveal that he had been a Ku Klux Klan member. Asked about the propriety of hiding such damning information, Kennedy offered a disarming response. “If Marlene Dietrich asked you to make love to her,” he said, “would you tell her you weren’t much good at making love?”57 While the president laughed out loud at Kennedy’s vulgar candor, the straight-laced Hull was aghast.
After the meeting, the president had all but made up his mind that it would be good politics to send Kennedy to London when he alighted on an alternative post he thought would suit Kennedy just as well, that of commerce secretary. James put the idea to Kennedy but was told it was the ambassadorship or nothing. There was method in Kennedy’s thinking.
His enormous wealth meant he could fund his own presidential bid,58 and he believed that the combination of his service to the Democratic Party and his high-level federal government posts qualified him to succeed the president. He had spent his time in Washington cultivating congressmen and the press. Despite his public displays of loyalty to Roosevelt, he had taken the precaution of maintaining good relations with the president’s enemies, such as Hearst and Coughlin, in the event that they might prove useful. Even when Coughlin had roasted the president in the summer, Kennedy had written thanking the priest “for all the kind things you are saying about me. I feel like the fellow on his vacation who sends the postal card back to his friends saying, ‘Wish you were here’.”59
Kennedy’s résumé was missing foreign policy experience, which is why the London ambassadorship was so appealing. As ambassador to the Court of St. James, Kennedy could acquire foreign expertise by dealing with the world’s leaders at a turning point in history. He could express his isolationist viewpoint from within the administration, which would demonstrate an independent turn of mind.
Kennedy’s isolationism was more than opportunism. A businessman before all else, he believed that America should remain aloof from the world’s conflicts the better to benefit from the profitable opportunities presented by war. As an Irish American, he was reluctant to bolster Britain’s efforts to appease the dictators. As he explained, he “could not forgive those who had been responsible for sending the infamous Black and Tans into rebellious Ireland.”60 Above all, Kennedy was aware that the vast majority of American voters were anxious to keep out of war. Who better to represent isolationists in the administration than an arch-isolationist?
The key to Kennedy’s ambition at this stage was to keep his presidential ambitions to himself. Interviewed at the time of “Why I’m for Roosevelt,” he declared, “I have no political ambitions for myself or for my children.”61 Few believed him. Kennedy’s coyness on the issue certainly did not fool Roosevelt, who was also obliged to disguise his own intentions about a third term lest he set off an alarm that would limit his options. He, too, obfuscated when asked whether he would run in 1940, though there was widespread speculation that he would. In September 1937, Liberty magazine asked commentators who the Democratic candidate in 1940 would be. Roosevelt’s aide Stephen Early62 reported to the president, “The survey shows a surprising and overwhelming belief that you will be the nominee and the first third-term President.”63
Whether to send Kennedy to London was therefore part of a broader calculation by Roosevelt about leaving his options open for contesting the 1940 election, second only to his assessment of how soon, as seemed likely, the dictators would drag the democracies into war. The president mostly kept his own counsel. To maximize his room for maneuver, he rarely touched on fundamental political matters with anyone. But in the interstices of his private letters to his dearest friends, Roosevelt’s views were becoming clear.
In a cryptic observation to Colonel House on Germany’s secret rearmament program, Roosevelt wrote in June 1937, “In all foreign relations the ‘prognosis’ is better than a few months ago but the patient will die of the ‘armament disease’ in a few years unless a major operation is performed.”64
In the “quarantine” speech in Chicago on October 5, 1937, Roosevelt tested public opinion. “The peace of the world and the welfare and security of every nation, including our own, is today being threatened,” he declared.65 While there was little opposition to his pessimistic tour d’horizon, Roosevelt played down the speech. As expected, his words were well received in London, Paris, and Moscow and greeted with disdain in Tokyo and Berlin. The response from the isolationists was as swift as it was predictable.
Reminding readers that Roosevelt was the true heir of Wilson, Hearst’s Boston Herald trumpeted, “Americans will not be stampeded into going 3,000 miles across water to save [the democracies]. Crusade, if you must, but for the sake of several millions of American mothers, confine your crusading to the continental limits of America!”66 Six leading pacifist groups accused the president of wanting to draw America into war.
Roosevelt expressed surprise to House, Woodrow Wilson’s foreign affairs adviser, that the “quarantine” speech had not elicited more criticism. “I verily believe that as time goes by we can slowly but surely make people realize that war will be a greater danger to us if we close all the doors and windows than if we go out in the street and use our influence to curb the riot,” he wrote.67
Another friend Roosevelt felt he could confide in was his old Groton headmaster, Endicott Peabody.68 Roosevelt wrote:
I am fighting against a public psychology of long standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying, “Peace at any price.” I have felt, however, that there will be a growing response to the ideal that when a few nations fail to maintain certain fundamental rules of conduct, the most practical and most peaceful thing to do in the long run is to “quarantine” them. I am inclined to think that this is more Christian, as well as more practical, than that the world should go to war with them.69
Ambassador Bingham sailed home from Britain at the end of November for urgent surgery in New York and resigned the ambassadorship on December 8. The same day, the White House leaked the Kennedy appointment to the New York Times. Still, the president kept Kennedy waiting. By unhappy coincidence, Kennedy was that evening entertaining White House correspondents and their spouses to dinner. His response to their persistent enquiries was, “It sounds like just one of those things.”70 He ordered the waiters to keep everyone’s glasses full, while sticking to water himself lest he become indiscreet.
But he confided to the Hollywood censor, Joseph Breen,71 that the ambassadorship was in the bag and complained in advance that “London is cold, dreary and foggy.”72 He wrote to Woodrow Wilson’s former secretary, Joseph Tumulty,73 “Although I have not received the appointment . . . I would like to tell you that under the law of inherent probability I may.”74
When Roosevelt finally announced the appointment, it was not universally welcomed. Senator James F. Byrnes,75 a fellow Irish American, objected because the international situation was so delicate with “wars and rumors of wars” that “I do not believe you can promote peace on earth by sending an Irishman to London.” Then Byrnes changed his mind, joking that he would send the new ambassador a copy of a book on etiquette by Emily Post “to assist him in qualifying for service at Saint James and for entrance to the sacred portals of Claridge’s.”76
Kennedy wrote to Byrnes, “I haven’t any idea how well I will get along abroad, either from the point of view of doing very much for the country, or doing a job of which my friends will feel proud, but if I don’t get the results that I feel are necessary I would get out at once.” To maintain the fiction that the London appointment was no more than an opportunity to serve the nation, he assured Byrnes, “I have never had political ambitions and have none now. I am only vitally concerned with where we are headed.”77
For the president, Kennedy’s appointment was a canny ruse. Removing the slippery, super-rich Bostonian from the domestic scene would hamper Kennedy’s plans for a presidential run, so long as he stayed put in London. Once there, he would need the president’s consent to return. It was little wonder that when Dorothy Schiff,78 owner of the liberal New York Post, dined privately at Hyde Park with Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara Roosevelt, the president merely shook his head when his wife referred to “that awful Joe Kennedy.”79 Exiling Kennedy to London, Roosevelt thought, was “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world.”80