Roosevelt, who had every intention of running for an unprecedented third term in 1940, was just as skilled as Kennedy at planting stories. Walter Trohan, the crusty bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, who was known to be close to Kennedy, recalled being summoned to the White House by Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, and given a challenge. “‘You’re a friend of Joe Kennedy’s, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I like Joe.’ He said, ‘You wouldn’t criticize him?’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I would. I’d criticize any New Dealer. What’s Joe done?’” Early then gave Trohan copies of two Kennedy letters. The first, Trohan told me in a 1997 interview for this book, was addressed to Arthur Krock and said, “We ought not to get into the war.” The second, sent to the State Department, “was extremely pro-British and suggested getting along with Britain.” Trohan wrote an account of Kennedy’s gamesmanship for the Tribune. A few weeks later, Kennedy was called to Washington for a meeting. “He ran into me,” Trohan said, “and drew his hand across his throat. Joe knew I got the information from the White House.” The ambassador, Trohan added, “forgave me in the long run.”
FDR reacted to the political and diplomatic dangers posed by Kennedy by keeping him in London and increasingly isolating him from the American public and from all important policy decisions. The president sent a series of personal representatives to Great Britain in mid-1940, after Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway and began his drive into the Netherlands and Belgium toward France, and instructed them to make on-the-scene surveys of British morale and military readiness. Men such as Colonel William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, Colonel Carl Spaatz, General George Strong, and Admiral Robert L. Ghormley arrived in London, did their business, and returned to Washington—with little or no contact with the embassy, to Kennedy’s embarrassment and rage. By that time, too, much more of America’s business with England was being handled directly by the British Foreign Ministry, headed by Lord Halifax, including a highly sensitive proposal to swap long-term American leases on British overseas bases for fifty much-needed American destroyers. With war being waged throughout Europe, American diplomacy in Europe was made the primary responsibility of Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris, a Roosevelt confidant who shared FDR’s contempt for Nazi Germany.*
Kennedy understood that Roosevelt, despite his many public statements to the contrary, was intent on bringing America into the war. The president had begun an intermittent secret correspondence with Winston Churchill in the fall of 1939, nine months before Churchill was named prime minister. The two men were careful, even in their encrypted communications, not to talk openly about taking on Hitler together, but they did agree to work out procedures for sharing, among other intelligence, the location of German submarines and surface ships. Such exchanges would have provoked, at the least, an outcry among the isolationists in Congress and imperiled Roosevelt’s reelection prospects. No copies of the sensitive communications were to be made available to the British Foreign Office; the two leaders communicated via the code room in the American Embassy—Joe Kennedy’s embassy.
* Kennedy remained insensitive, at best, about the Jewish issue through the later war years, when the existence of concentration camps was widely known. In a May 1944 interview with an old friend, Joe Dinneen of the Boston Globe, Kennedy acknowledged, when questioned about his alleged anti-Semitism: “It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I hate all Jews; that I believe they should be wiped off the face of the earth.… Other races have their own problems to solve. They’re glad to give the Jews a lift and help them along the way toward tolerance, but they’re not going to drop everything and solve the problems of the Jews for them. Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much.… Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.” Kennedy’s discussion of anti-Semitism was withheld from publication at the time by the editors of the Globe, but in 1959 Dinneen sought to include a portion of it in a generally flattering precampaign family biography. Advance galleys of the Dinneen book, entitled The Kennedy Family, had been given to Jack Kennedy, who understood how inflammatory his father’s comments would be and had no difficulty in successfully urging Dinneen to delete the offending paragraphs. The incident is described in Richard Whalen’s biography of Joe Kennedy.
* Beck resigned as chief of staff in protest against Hitler’s plan to invade Czechoslovakia, and was involved in a series of plots against Hitler for the next six years. He shot himself after the failure of Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s final attempt to assassinate Hitler, by bomb, on July 20, 1944. Halder, who served as chief of staff until September 1942, was arrested in the Gestapo’s widespread roundup after the 1944 bomb attempt and placed in a concentration camp. He survived the war.
* Even Rose Kennedy knew something was up. In her gossipy memoir, Times to Remember, she described an early 1939 lunch at 10 Downing Street at which she asked Chamberlain “if Hitler died would he be more confident about peace, and he said he would.” Rose defended her husband’s contrary view in her memoir, published in 1974, insisting that “of course, no one knew then that Hitler was criminally insane and had no intention of living by humane standards except his own demented ones, and that his promises meant nothing to him.” In Mrs. Kennedy’s view, presumably, “no one” would not include the millions of Jews who were being systematically persecuted throughout Germany and German-occupied Central Europe by 1939.
* In an interview in 1962 with Richard J. Whalen, Corcoran depicted Kennedy, with grudging admiration, as having staged a “remarkable coup d’état” in putting his son into the presidency. “You have to look at this piece of energy adapting itself to its time,” Corcoran said. “A man not afraid to think in a daring way. He had imperial instinct. He knew what he wanted—money and status for his family. What other end is there but power?” Jack Kennedy’s election in 1960 was a “long-shot risk,” Corcoran added, into which Joe Kennedy “slammed money.… These are not the attributes of the philosopher, the humanitarian, educators or priests. These are the attributes of those in command.”
* Bullitt and the president were briefly put on the defensive in late March 1940, when the German Foreign Office released a series of diplomatic documents that had been found in Polish archives after the seizure of Warsaw the previous September. In a private conversation in November 1938, Bullitt was said by Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to Washington, to have expressed “great vehemence and strong hatred about Germany and Chancellor Hitler. He said only strength, and that at the conclusion of a war, could make an end of the mad expansion of the Germans in the future.” In a talk a few weeks later, Bullitt was said to have