Election Day 1940, Kennedy tenders his
resignation then speaks his mind, a bruising
encounter at Hyde Park.
ON THE MORNING of November 5, general election day, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor, and Franklin’s mother made the short trip to Hyde Park’s miniature town hall to cast their vote. Willkie cast his at Public School 6 on Madison Avenue and 85th Street, New York City. Lindbergh, his wife, and his mother-in-law voted in Englewood, New Jersey.
Although it was not as mighty a victory as before, Roosevelt won handily, with 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million. The electoral college was overwhelmingly in Roosevelt’s favor, 449 to eighty-two, and the states divided thirty-eight to ten. The defeat did not come as a surprise to Willkie. “When I heard the President hang the isolationist votes of Martin, Barton, and Fish on me,” he would later say, “I knew I was licked.”1
Roosevelt’s win was not unexpected, but it was a relief for a president who had staked everything on steering the country through what he thought would be America’s inevitable confrontation with the dictators. The first visitor to the White House when Roosevelt returned to Washington on November 7 was Kennedy, to tender his resignation. It was an awkward affair that spoiled Roosevelt’s day of triumph. The ambassador arrived at lunchtime but was not invited to join the celebratory lunch party with Morgenthau. In the course of his five-minute audience, the ambassador could not bring himself to congratulate the president on his victory. “Well, you’ve got it,” he said. “I certainly don’t begrudge you the next four years.”2 That charmless greeting, if nothing else, ensured there would be no job for him in Roosevelt’s new administration.
Roosevelt asked Kennedy to hold fire in telling of his departure until he could find a replacement for London. Smarting from Roosevelt’s chilly welcome, Kennedy marched to the State Department to see Hull, Welles, and assistant secretary of state Breckinridge Long,3 who were astonished by the ambassador’s pessimism and how out of step he was with their thinking. “He thinks we ought to . . . make some approach to Germany and to Japan which would result in an economic collaboration,” wrote Long. “He does not believe in the continuing of democracy. He thinks we will have to assume a Fascist form of government here.”4
Still furious at being painted into a corner before the election, Kennedy began plotting how to continue his personal campaign for America to stay out of the war. On November 9, he granted a ninety-minute interview to Louis Lyons of the Boston Globe, and Charles K. Edmondson and Ralph Coglan of the St. Louis Post–Dispatch. The outgoing ambassador was in such an expansive mood that he did not clearly express whether the interview was to be on or off the record.
“I know more about the European situation than anybody else,” he said, “and it’s up to me to see that the country gets it.” American involvement in the war was not inevitable. “I say we’re not going in. Only over my dead body. I’m willing to spend all I’ve got left to keep us out of the war,” he declared. “There’s no sense in getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.” He would lead the campaign against intervention and he stressed his close links to the isolationists in Congress. He said he was “buddies” with Wheeler and had contributed to his election campaigns. “Lindbergh’s not so crazy, either.”
He repeated his belief that war would lead to Fascism in Britain, even if the Brits beat Hitler. “Democracy is finished in England,” he said. As Labour leaders had joined Britain’s war coalition, Kennedy predicted that “National socialism is coming.” Asked whether he was just talking about Britain, he said, “If we get into war it will be in this country, too. A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear will be gone.”
Kennedy dismissed Churchill’s words and the courage of the British during the Blitz as misleading. “It isn’t that [Britain’s] fighting for democracy. That’s the bunk. She’s fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us.” There was no question of America sending ships or troops to Britain. “As to ships, we haven’t got any. I know about ships,” he said. “We couldn’t send an army anywhere now. It would be senseless to go in. What would we be fighting for?”5 The reporters gleefully filed the scoop handed to them on a plate.
For isolationists, Kennedy’s candid remarks were evidence they were on the right track. For most Americans, however, who had taken Kennedy’s broadcast in support of Roosevelt at face value, the interview was a bombshell of bitterness and disloyalty directed at a president they had just overwhelmingly elected. One voter wrote to Roosevelt, “I hope you put Joe Kennedy in a bag and pull the string tight.”6
The following day, aware of the damage he was doing to his reputation, Kennedy issued a halfhearted denial that he had ever used such words. “Many statements in the article show [the reporter did not take notes] because they create a different impression entirely than I would want to set forth,” he declared.7 But he could not deny that he had been accurately reported. Overnight came news that Chamberlain had died. When the city editor of the Globe, Joseph Dineen, called Kennedy at home in Bronxville for a quote about his friend’s death, he asked whether the interview was accurate. “I said it,” Kennedy admitted. “He didn’t miss a thing.”8 When the Globe refused to declare the interview fiction, Kennedy canceled the advertising for his whisky import business in the paper.
Kennedy’s enemies were quick to exploit the gaffe. “Joe is out to do whatever damage he can,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “The President said that in his opinion the interview . . . was authentic.”9 Frankfurter piled on, sending Roosevelt a transcript of what he called Kennedy’s “poisonous vapors.”10 “What is printed watered down some of the things Joe said,” he wrote. “[Some of the comments] were so raw the Globe did not want to print them.”11 William Allen White condemned Kennedy, describing him as “an enemy of the democratic way of life.”12 Krock wrote to Kennedy, “If there is anything I can do to dispel the ill effect of that unfortunate interview, I stand ready, as usual, to do it.”13
Kennedy’s tirade was a last swipe at the British, who at first had admired him for his family’s glamour but in time came to despise him for his message of despair. “While he was here his suave, monotonous style, his nine over-photographed children and his hail-fellow-well-met manner concealed a hard-boiled business man’s eagerness to do a profitable business deal with the dictators, and he deceived many decent English people,” wrote A. J. Cummings in the News Chronicle.14 “Perhaps you were always a defeatist and never owned to it in public,” wrote George Murray in the Daily Mail. “We can forgive wrongheadedness, but not bad faith.”15
The Globe interview confirmed what Roosevelt already knew, that in frustration Kennedy had gone on the rampage and would likely use his fame, fortune, and influence to frustrate the administration’s freedom to maneuver. The Globe reported, “He’s started already on a quiet but determined and fighting crusade to ‘keep us out’. He’s just gone to California to see one of America’s influential publishers [Hearst]. He’s already seen others [Howard and Patterson] and he means to see more. . . . He’s talked to Congressmen and Senators and means to see more.”16
Kennedy’s trip to California was partly to discover whether Hearst, by this time preoccupied with a struggle to remain solvent, needed him to fix his broken finances as he had before. But mostly the ambassador discussed with the press baron keeping America out of the war. As Kennedy had told the Globe, “It’s all a question of what we do in the next six months.”17 He set himself a busy schedule to try to prevent Roosevelt from ushering America into war.
On the day after the Globe interview appeared, Armistice Day, November 11, Roosevelt paid tribute before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, to those who had fought in World War One, reminding his audience “that the danger of brutality and the danger of tyranny and slavery to freedom-loving peoples can be real and terrible.”18 It was all part of his long campaign “to talk ‘educationally,’ quietly but effectively with the appeasers and semi-appeasers.”19
Asking rhetorically what World War One had achieved, the president told the audience in the National Cemetery, “The men of France, prisoners in their cities, victims of searches and of seizures without law, hostages for the safety of their masters’ lives, robbed of their harvests, murdered in their prisons . . . know the answer to that question. . . . The Czechs know the answer too. The Poles. The Danes. The Dutch. The Serbs. The Belgians. The Norwegians. The Greeks.” He quoted World War One hero Sergeant York, whose life had recently been made into a pro-democracies Hollywood movie: “Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them.” “The people of America agree with that,” said Roosevelt. “They believe that liberty is worth fighting for. And if they are obliged to fight they will fight eternally to hold it.”20
Two days later, Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles and attended a lunch of about fifty movie people hosted by Hollywood studio moguls Harry Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer.21 The war had placed the studio chiefs in a quandary. Since the declaration of war by Britain and France, Europe was under siege and Hollywood movies could only make a circuitous route to the screens of the once lucrative movie markets of France and Germany. Germany had also banned a great number of Hollywood movies because of their anti-Nazi tone. As a result, all studios, even Walt Disney, whose pictures were ideologically empty, were enduring the loss of 40 percent of their prewar revenue.
American movies were increasingly unsuitable for screening in Axis-held territories as they contained pro-democracy themes and made fun of Hitler and Nazism. Movies like Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released in 1939, starring the ardent anti-Nazi Edward G. Robinson,22 ridiculed the pomposity and brutality of Germans in uniform. In 1940, the stream of movies encouraging audiences to sympathize with the democracies became a torrent, led by The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin’s satire on Hitler, Flight Command, about a new recruit to the navy’s “Hellcats Squadron,” and Escape, in which a young man’s quest for his lost mother leads him to a concentration camp.
Kennedy’s recommendation to Hollywood was to stop making pro-British, anti-German films. According to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., he put “the fear of God” into the three studio heads, all Jewish, telling them they should “stop making anti-Nazi movies or use the film medium to promote the democracies versus the dictators.” He said “the Lindbergh appeasement groups were not so far off the mark when they suggest that this country can reconcile itself to whomever wins the war and adjust our trade accordingly.”23
What Kennedy said was so treacherous that Fairbanks, who headed the Southern California branch of William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies,24 wrote, appalled, to Roosevelt, to say that some in Hollywood felt that because Kennedy appeared to be a loyal Roosevelt ally, the ambassador’s remarks must have been authorized by the president himself. “There are many of us who do not, can not and will not believe that that is so,” said Fairbanks.
Not all of Hollywood agreed. Louis B. Mayer followed Kennedy’s profit-before-principle line and called in anti-Nazi actors like Melvyn Douglas,25 warning them to stop their politicking for fear of frightening off foreign buyers. “Of course, it’s all right for you to think what you please, but surely you see that you don’t do yourself any good at the studio when you offend a lot of people,” Mayer told Douglas. “Consider what happens to our pictures in certain parts of the world because of your activities.”26 Another who put business before morality was Arthur Loew, head of foreign distribution at MGM, who advised Myrna Loy27 not to mix politics with acting. Loy was incensed: “Here I was fighting for the Jews and they’re telling me to lay off because there’s still money to be made in Germany.”28
Roosevelt had already stepped in with government money to compensate studios for the collapse of the European market. On June 5, 1940, the Motion Picture Committee Cooperating for the National Defense29 was formed to help inform American audiences they should start planning for war. It commissioned twenty-five short films and twelve army recruitment films and encouraged movie theaters to show films promoting the purchase of war bonds and the collection of scrap metal. The committee also urged distributors to screen movies made by federal agencies to prepare Americans for war, including the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Power for Defense, the Civilian Conservation Corps’s Army in Overalls, and the Office of Emergency Management’s Bomber.
Having done his best to deter Hollywood from promoting intervention in the war, Kennedy headed to Hearst’s late mother’s Northern California estate, Wyntoon, a half-timbered Bavarian schloss designed by the same architect as his fantasy castle San Simeon. Kennedy wanted to ensure the appeasement campaign he was about to embark upon would receive the backing of Hearst’s papers. A fellow guest for the weekend was the president’s daughter Anna and her husband, John Boettiger, who before long found himself in a heated argument with Kennedy. “What right have you to go against the principles of my father-in-law?” Boettiger asked. “Now, wait a minute,” Kennedy replied. “I have not in any way said I’m not in accord with what your father-in-law says. Let’s not argue now.” When Boettiger persisted, Kennedy said, “I’m not going to stoop to argue with you.” “We let them fight it out,” Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies recalled.30 The following day, Boettiger wrote to the president expressing his anxiety about Kennedy’s “fascist leanings.”31
Ickes, too, was concerned that the ambassador, backed by Hearst, Howard of Scripps–Howard, and Patterson of America’s best-selling daily, the New York Daily News, “would make a powerful combination. Kennedy has lots of money and can probably raise all that he needs. The Hearst chain and the Howard chain together comprise a lot of newspapers.” With the avid support of the News, the Washington Times–Herald, and the Chicago Tribune, Kennedy was, Ickes believed, “out to do whatever damage he can.”32
Roosevelt decided to try his charm on Kennedy once more, and asked Eleanor to invite him to Hyde Park. “Let’s have him down here and see what he has to say,” said the president. Kennedy arrived by train mid-morning on November 23 and Eleanor ferried him to Hyde Park, where the president welcomed him into the parlor. After ten minutes, the president urgently asked an aide to summon Eleanor. “There was Franklin, white as a sheet,” recalled Eleanor. “He asked Mr. Kennedy to step outside and then he said, and his voice was shaking, ‘I never want to see that man again as long as I live.’ ”33
Eleanor reminded him that Kennedy had been invited for the weekend, that there were guests coming for lunch, and that the New York train did not leave Rhinecliff until two. “Then you drive him around Hyde Park and put him on that train,” ordered the president. Over lunch at her cottage at Val-Kill, in what Eleanor later told Gore Vidal was “the most dreadful four hours of my life,”34 the ambassador regaled Eleanor with lurid details of the damage the German air force could wreak on American cities.
On December 1, Kennedy visited Roosevelt in the White House, hoping to be quickly freed from his government position so that he could start to campaign in earnest. There was little time to talk, and Kennedy was squeezed between more pressing appointments with Morgenthau and Welles. The president, apparently recovered from his apoplexy at their previous meeting, was still eager to keep Kennedy sweet and affected to listen with interest to the ambassador’s by now routine assessment that Britain was doomed. “Churchill is keeping this fight going only because he has no alternative,” Kennedy said, “but his real idea is that he’ll get the U.S. in and then the U.S. will share the problems.” In a vain attempt to put the president and prime minister at each other’s throats, he added, “Churchill has no particular love for the U.S. nor in his heart for you.” Roosevelt pretended to agree, telling Kennedy, “I know. He is one of the few men in public life who was rude to me.”
Kennedy insisted that British defeat was imminent and that there was no point in America holding out alone: “With England licked, the party’s over.” In that case, Kennedy said, Roosevelt must either “become greater than Washington or Lincoln or become a horse’s ass.” Roosevelt replied, “I have a third alternative; to be the one responsible for making the U.S. a small and unimportant power.”35
On leaving the White House, Kennedy issued a statement announcing his resignation as ambassador. “My plan is . . . to devote my efforts to what seems to me the greatest cause in the world today, and means, if successful, the preservation of the American form of democracy,” he wrote, before adding, without apparent irony, “That cause is to help the President keep the United States out of the war.”36 Syndicated political gossip columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner wrote, “He really meant he was going to talk appeasement all across the United States.”
When, after the ambassador’s meeting with the president, Early was asked whether Kennedy could expect an appointment in Roosevelt’s cabinet, he gave a faint smile as he said, “I don’t see anything like that in the picture right now.”37 The same day, a report in Knox’s Chicago Daily News alleged that Kennedy was involved in a plot to negotiate a peace with the Axis powers. According to the report, Bernard E. Smith,38 one of Kennedy’s Wall Street speculator friends, made an approach to Hitler via the leaders of Pétain’s collaborationist government in Vichy. An account of the conspiracy relayed the following week by the foreign editor of the News, Carroll Binder,39 said the peace proposal had been intercepted by the American ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, who convinced Pétain’s aides that Smith would be wasting his time.
In light of Kennedy’s unconvincing disavowal of his Boston Globe interview, his denial suggested that he was certainly involved.40