It was clear even before Churchill became prime minister that Joe Kennedy, with his access to Roosevelt, his desire to meet personally with Adolf Hitler, and his eagerness to avoid American involvement in the war at all costs, had become a national security risk to England. Historians are in agreement that Kennedy was a priority target of Britain’s famed MI5, its counterintelligence service, and was subjected to physical surveillance as well as extensive wiretapping. No such files have been declassified and released by the British government, despite repeated requests.
Harvey Klemmer knew firsthand, though, about MI5’s close surveillance. Kennedy was seeing a wealthy English divorcée who was in touch with Sir Oswald Mosley, a leading British fascist. The woman, Klemmer said in his interview, “told me that Joe had asked her to initiate … contact with Mosley,” in the mistaken belief that the fascists in England were more numerous than they were. “So one day [Kennedy] asked me to take her home and it was in one of her cars. So I did. And on the way back I was stopped by a man in uniform who said there was an air raid or invasion drill in progress. I would have to leave my car for a while and take refuge with them in a nearby country home.… I wondered if there was something going on, and so I arranged my gloves on the seat in a certain way, and I arranged some of the papers in the glove compartment.” After an hour, when Klemmer was given the all-clear sign, “I looked and I could see the car had been searched.… I knew I was under suspicion” by British intelligence, Klemmer said, “because of my association with him. My files at the embassy were searched,” as was, he believed, his London apartment. He and others at the embassy did learn later, Klemmer told Whitehead, that “the British had Kennedy’s telephone tapped.”
Given his precarious position in London, some of Kennedy’s actions seem stupefying.
In the spring of 1939, shortly after Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, Kennedy—despite being instructed not to do so by Washington—encouraged a bizarre and little-known scheme being actively promoted by a naive American automobile executive who had been told in Berlin that the Nazi regime would agree to peace concessions and a general disarmament in return for an Anglo-American gold loan totaling between $500 million and $1 billion. The American, James D. Mooney, president of General Motors Overseas, flew to London to discuss the German proposal with an equally impressed Kennedy at the American Embassy. According to Mooney’s unpublished memoir, made available for this book, Kennedy urged Mooney to return to Berlin and inform the Germans that he would “certainly like to have a talk with them, quietly and privately.” Mooney’s papers reveal that it was agreed that Kennedy would meet secretly in Paris with Dr. Helmut Wohltat, a high-level Nazi official who was a deputy to Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Only after Kennedy made the commitment to Mooney did he send a vaguely worded cable to the State Department, wondering whether there would be “any objections” to his flying to Paris to meet with Mooney and “a personal friend of Hitler.” He was emphatically denied permission to make the trip by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Mooney, still eager to involve Kennedy, returned to London and presented the ambassador with the list of the promised German concessions that would result from the gold loan. “What a wonderful speech could be built up from these points back home!” Kennedy exclaimed, according to Mooney’s notes. Kennedy then took his case for a meeting directly to President Roosevelt, and was told once again to have nothing to do with the proposal.
Nonetheless, Kennedy met in secret with Mooney and Wohltat at a hotel in London on May 9, 1939. “Each man made an excellent impression on the other,” Mooney recorded in his unpublished memoir. “It was heartening to sit there and witness the exertion of real effort to reach something constructive.” Within days, London’s Daily Express blew everyone’s cover by reporting on its front page, under the headline “Goering’s Mystery Man Is Here,” that Wohltat had arrived in London “on a special mission.” Neither Kennedy nor Mooney was named in the article, but a few days later Kennedy was singled out for censure in The Week, a radical weekly newsletter. Its editor, Claud Cockburn, wrote that Kennedy, in his talks with Germans, “uses language which is not merely defeatist, but anti-Rooseveltian.… Mr. Kennedy goes so far as to insinuate that the democratic policy of the United States is a Jewish production, but that Roosevelt will fall in 1940.” The article was reprinted in the New York Post and eventually brought to Roosevelt’s attention by Harold Ickes. In his diaries, Ickes noted that “the President read this and said to me: ‘It is true.’”
Kennedy’s indiscretion knew no limits. After Munich he had summoned a group of American journalists to the embassy and, among other things, briefed them off the record about a most secret plot by a group of dissident German generals to overthrow Hitler. James Reston of the New York Times summarized the briefing in Deadline, his 1991 memoir: “It was known in London on the eve of Munich that … a group of German officers led by Generals Halder and Beck had a plan to overthrow the Führer. Fearing war on three fronts, these conspirators informed officials in Westminster [the British Foreign Office]—so Ambassador Kennedy told us—that they would arrest Hitler if the British and French took military action to block the invasion of Czechoslovakia.” It would not become publicly known until after the war that the plotters, General Ludwig Beck, then chief of the German General Staff, and his deputy, Franz Halder—their lives very much at stake—had approached the British Foreign Ministry. The Beck-Halder partnership was the most serious early resistance to Hitler and also involved, by some accounts, a plan to assassinate Hitler.*
It is impossible to assess what was in Kennedy’s mind when he chose to casually brief American correspondents about the plot—and to provide the names of those involved. His blabbing can be seen most innocently as the actions of an ambitious man, eager to seem an insider, who would let nothing block his efforts to ingratiate himself with the press. But there is a far darker interpretation. The British Foreign Office’s Kennediana files, which were made public after the war, show that Kennedy was opposed to any policy based on the assassination of Adolf Hitler, in fear that Hitler’s death would leave Soviet communism unchecked. In late September of 1939, three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Kennedy directly raised his concerns in a conference with Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary. Halifax quoted Kennedy as stating that he
himself was disposed to deprecate perpetual reference to the personal elimination of Hitler. How could we be sure that it would not have precisely the opposite effect on German feeling? … According to Mr. Kennedy, United States opinion thought that Russia was a much greater potential disturber of world peace through Communist doctrine than was Germany. He thought that American opinion would inevitably be greatly disturbed if and when it came to think that the result of the present struggle was a greater extension of bolshevism in Europe.… He appreciated the strength of British opinion about Hitler and the Nazi system, but, if the end of it all was to be universal bankruptcy, the outlook was very black.
Halifax, according to his Foreign Office note, did not respond to Kennedy’s comment about Hitler’s assassination.*
During his years in London, Joe Kennedy compounded his political and personal problems with FDR and his senior advisers through his overriding presidential ambition and his clumsy attempts to mask it. “He thought he was about the most qualified individual on earth to be president,” Klemmer said in his 1992 television interview. “He had supreme self-confidence, of course, as everybody knows,