By early October 1940, there was very bad blood between the president and his reluctant ambassador in England. Kennedy wanted out and he didn’t care who knew it. On October 10, he took advantage of a farewell meeting in London with Foreign Minister Halifax to issue a warning to Roosevelt—correctly anticipating that the British Foreign Office would relay the threat to the State Department via the British Embassy in Washington. “His principal complaint,” Halifax reported to the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, was that
they had not kept him adequately informed of their policy and doings during the last two or three months.… He told me that he had sent an article to the United States to appear on November 1st, if by any accident he was not able to get there, which would be of considerable importance appearing five days before the Presidential election. When I asked him what would be the main burden of his song, he gave me to understand that it would be an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration for having talked a lot and done very little. He is plainly a very disappointed and rather embittered man.
Kennedy was more than embittered; he was in a rage. “I’m going back and tell the truth. I’m going home and tell the American people that that son of a bitch in the White House is going to kill their sons,” he told Harvey Klemmer over lunch on the day before he left London, as Klemmer recounted in the television interview made available for this book.
Arthur Krock, Kennedy’s faithful scribe, provided a detailed account of Kennedy’s blackmail plottings in his Memoirs:
On October 16 Kennedy sent a cablegram to the President insisting that he be allowed to come home.… That same day Kennedy telephoned … and said that if he did not get a favorable reply to his cablegram, he was coming home anyhow; … that he had written a full account of the facts to Edward Moore, his secretary in New York, with instructions to release the story to the press if the Ambassador were not back in New York by a certain date. A few hours after this conversation the cabled permission to return was received.
Kennedy’s “full account” referred to the extensive exchange of cables between Roosevelt and Churchill that had been relayed through the American Embassy. Those secret cables had a secret history known to only a few in America and England in the spring of 1940. Kennedy had been shocked in May when a special unit of British counterintelligence staged a late-night raid on the apartment of Tyler Kent, an American Embassy code clerk, and uncovered a cache of more than 1,500 decoded diplomatic cables that Kent had taken home. Kennedy took the unusual step of immediately revoking Kent’s diplomatic immunity—State Department immunity has never been revoked since—and Kent was secretly tried and convicted in a London court. He spent the war years in an isolated British prison on the Isle of Wight.
Kennedy’s decisive action to keep Kent’s betrayal of his nation—as well as the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence—from becoming public has been credited by historians as high-minded and exemplary. Had this not been done, Kent could have been tried in America; his documents would become part of the court record, triggering anger and resentment in the Congress and among the many Americans opposed to U.S. involvement in the war in Europe. The furor, the historian Michael Beschloss wrote in his Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, published in 1980, “might have eliminated any chance of a third term for the president and made it nearly impossible for him to move public opinion so swiftly toward aid to the Allies.… [Kennedy] was unwilling to influence American policy at the cost of an act that seemed illegitimate and disloyal.”
Kennedy had much more to gain, however, by making private use of the Tyler Kent materials in his war against FDR. American Embassy files show that on May 20, 1940, the day of Kent’s arrest, Ambassador Kennedy arranged to ship a diplomatic pouch full of “personal mail and various packages” to Washington, in the care of a friend in the State Department. On May 23, three days after Kent’s arrest, Kennedy sought and received authorization from the State Department for Edward Moore, his exceedingly faithful personal assistant, to return to New York with Rose Kennedy and their retarded daughter, Rosemary. Moore left London on May 28 and never went back.
Tyler Kent, obsessed with hatred for Kennedy, lived in obscurity after the war as a gentleman farmer in rural Maryland. The FBI files on his case remained secret until 1982, when the British journalist John Costello, an expert on World War II history, obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act. Costello, who died in 1995, also obtained scores of State Department documents on the Kent affair, including many of Ambassador Kennedy’s cables to Washington. Costello approached Kent, who was intrigued by the newly released documents and agreed to a series of detailed interviews. In those interviews, Kent is quoted as explaining that his interest in the secret cables had been aroused only after Kennedy ordered him “to make copies of nonroutine messages that went in and out of the embassy for Kennedy’s personal file.” Kennedy also instructed Kent to retrieve all of Roosevelt’s coded exchanges, dating back to the 1938 Munich accord, with Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris and with the other ambassador widely known to be avidly anti-Hitler, Anthony Drexel Biddle, in Warsaw.*
The Kent matter languished until later in the 1980s, when Robert T. Crowley, a counterintelligence officer who specialized in Soviet penetrations of the West, retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. “There were a couple of guys left over when I retired, and one was Kent,” Crowley recalled in an interview for this book. “I thought the guy was unstable” and a possible Soviet KGB agent. As a former CIA officer, Crowley had connections. Over the next few years he was able to obtain access to previously unavailable government files on Tyler Kent. The Kent-KGB spy story soon petered out, Crowley said: “Tyler never developed into anything we thought. We couldn’t demonstrate that he was working for the Soviets, or the Germans, or the Italians. He was working for Tyler—and he’s trying to save the United States from Roosevelt. He was everybody’s tool. Just a kooky half-wit.” But Crowley did find documentation, he told me, that convinced him that Kennedy had been assembling a political dossier on FDR, and was using Kent to get access to the potentially damaging Roosevelt-Churchill cables.
In Crowley’s view, Kennedy’s refusal of diplomatic immunity to Kent, thus assuring that he would be held without access to the American press, was a brilliant move. Kennedy made another brilliant move, Crowley said; he arranged to ship his copies of the sensitive and politically incriminating Churchill-Roosevelt cablegrams to America. Edward Moore, once in America, could retrieve the copies and prepare for the coming showdown with Roosevelt. The cablegrams, Crowley told me, “put Kennedy in a marvelous position with FDR. He had him in a spot and could possibly deny him his reelection. He had a knife.”
Joe Kennedy declared war on the White House. Historians agree on what happened next: Kennedy arrived in Washington on the evening of October 26, amid much press speculation that he was planning to endorse Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. The election was only ten days away. Kennedy’s flight from London had been delayed for days by poor weather, and en route he received a series of urgent and confidential messages from FDR inviting him to dinner at the White House. The two men talked early on the twenty-sixth—Kennedy was then in Bermuda, on the last leg of his Pan Am Clipper