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Susan Ronald Portrays a Key Player in the Churchill Drama
Susan Ronald, The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy At The Court of St. James’s, 1938-1940. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2021, 442 pp., $29.99, Amazon $25.11, Kindle $14.99.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy made money, movies, countless women and one president of the United States. With the participation of his wife, Rose Fitzgerald—who, biographer Susan Ronald tells us, after one failed try at rebellion, ignored “mistresses and one-night stands [that] would come and go by the busload”—he sired nine children. Among them were Joe, Jr., who died on a dangerous mission during the war Joe Sr. fought to keep America out of; the priapic John (“Jack”), a senator who became president; Robert (“Bobby”), a senator who might have been en route to the Oval Office when his life was snuffed out by an assassin; Edward (“Teddy”), who despite humiliating and heavy personal baggage became the “liberal lion” of the U.S. Senate; and Kathleen (“Kick”), killed in an airplane crash.
He hobnobbed with Hollywood moguls and the hierarchy of his Catholic Church. He bedded the “delectable” Clare Booth Luce and Hollywood’s top movie star, Gloria Swanson. Joe despised the Protestant brahmins who looked down on him, and blamed Jews for his negative press. Heading two government agencies with a modicum of success, became U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
Ronald focuses on the years of Kennedy’s “rise to the pinnacle of his public service career…and his fall from grace.” A wise decision, given the importance of these crucial years in the run-up to a global conflagration. Indeed, much of what Ronald reports on other years is covered in Fredrik Logevall’s first volume of his JFK biography.
“A very dangerous man”
Of all the positions in all the world, to borrow from Rick in Casablanca, Ambassador was one for which Joe Kennedy lacked the requisite talents: discretion and diplomacy. Those unalterable omissions from his skill set never occurred to the self-confident Kennedy. He saw the ambassadorship a necessary step to his ultimate goal: the Oval Office. “There is no doubt that Kennedy was ill suited for the job,” writes Ronald. She proves that point with a prodigious trolling of all the sources detailing Joe’s performance.
Joe had seen Secretary of the Treasury as the key post, but President Roosevelt feared putting what he characterized as “a very dangerous man” in that job. He put Treasury in the safe hands of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who managed the financing of the New Deal. Roosevelt offered Joe the Department of Commerce, which a livid Kennedy declined. Instead, a long lobbying campaign for the Ambassadorship began by a man for whom winning was the only acceptable conclusion.
Ronald notes that in addition to a shot at the presidency, the post in Britain had two ancillary advantages. Joe could tend to the business of obtaining distribution rights for Scotch whisky. And he would be able to provide more than a few advantages to his family. Joe had “a burning ambition—sometimes bordering on rage—to raise his family above their Irish roots by his acquired wealth and visibility in politics.”
“The sun to their planet”
The Ambassadorship enabled him to do just that. Joe presented an awed, terrified but nevertheless delighted Rose to Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother. Rose found London a short hop to the shops of Paris, which she did her best to deplete. Meanwhile, “for the Kennedy men, Paris always meant hedonism and sex.” The post represented the center of affairs, at that time, of the world. It gave the Kennedy children access to the major players in global affairs. Family was always the core concern of a man who was to watch several offspring follow triumph with tragedy.
“Joe was the sun to their [the family’s] planet.” At Jack’s bedside, he watched more than once as his ailing son was administered last rites. He doted on his impaired daughter Rosemary, although with disastrous results for the poor girl. He arranged superb educations and lavish educational travel for his children. When his own presidential ambitions ended, he managed and funded Jack’s successful congressional and presidential campaigns.
But that was for later. Winning the battle for the Court of St. James’s required what seems to the reader to have been limitless resources. Aside from money, it needed the organizational skills of a man Ronald describes as a “born money-spinner.”
Kennedy deployed substantial assets. In 1936 he had helped FDR corral the Catholic vote. At great expense he wrote and circulated a pamphlet, I’m for Roosevelt, explaining to the business community that this “traitor to their class” was a far superior alternative to communism, which threatened if the benefits of capitalism were not more widely distributed, as the New Deal contemplated. Never above dissembling in his own cause, Kennedy wrote that he had “no political ambitions for myself or my children.”
“Too dangerous to have around here”
As Kennedy campaigned for the London appointment, he relied on Francis Spellman, a Catholic bishop and later cardinal. In exchange, Spellman wanted Kennedy’s support for the appointment by FDR of an ambassador to the Vatican. A hard worker and famed deal-maker, Spellman occasionally rested from his priestly chores at Kennedy’s Florida mansion.
Later Clare Booth Luce tried to persuade Joe to bring the 25-million-strong Catholic vote into the Republican camp in support of Wendell Willkie, who was challenging Roosevelt’s third-term bid. Whether at her insistence or not we do not know, but Henry Luce ordered that a derogatory article in his Fortune magazine be replaced with a laudatory piece, and a color photo to boot, “favorably timed for the next step in his [Joe’s] grand project towards the presidency: his appointment as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.”
He also had in his corner a largely favorable press, for which he made good copy. Taking no chances, he put New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Krock on his payroll at $25,000 annually. (Adjusted for inflation that would be close to $500,000 today.) Krock omitted mentioning this in a column calling Joe “one of the outstanding figures in American life,” FDR’s “miracle man.”
Finally, Joe had on his side FDR’s feeling that “Kennedy is too dangerous to have around here.” Morgenthau and Secretary of the Treasury Harold Ickes wholly concurred. This strategy worked, more or less, for two years, but was overtaken by Roosevelt’s decision to prepare Americans for war.
London, Chamberlain, Churchill
The campaign successful, Kennedy was off to London in March 1938. He had a “benign view of fascism,” as Ronald delicately puts it. His urging that America avoid involvement in the coming war pleased the Nazis. Joe was a hit in the anti-war, anti-Semitic and pro-German set. Charles Lindberg, the American hero who believed the German war machine was invincible, saw Kennedy’s views as “intelligent and interesting.”
Kennedy adored Neville Chamberlain for his appeasement policy, while attacking the “warmongering…ruthless and scheming” Winston Churchill. Britain’s entry into the war was accompanied by the Ambassador’s indiscrete public remark that “There’s no place in the fight for us.” When Churchill became prime minister he initially refused to congratulate him. WSC, he wrote in his diary, would “blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would bring the U.S. in.” He added, in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt, “Maybe I do him an injustice.”
Recalled
The British Empire was soon solely resistant to Hitler and in desperate need of American support. Kennedy, “searching for an exit route” that wouldn’t be seen as flight from dangerous London, checked into the Leahy Clinic. He had his gastroenterologist advise Roosevelt that he needed rest at his Florida home. Back in London, Kennedy persisted in his anti-intervention views. Soon he was frozen out of the flow of information from the White House. He wanted out, and the President obliged him with a letter calling him home for respite “from the increasingly severe strain you have been under.” Like many before and after him, Joe learned that Roosevelt’s support could not be bought—only rented.
Back home Roosevelt persuaded Kennedy to give a radio address supporting his bid for a third term—Willkie was no less willing to go to the aid of Britain than was FDR. Having done FDR’s bidding to avoid an open break, he reverted to the indiscretion that had marked his London years. He told reporters that he would “spend all I’ve got to keep us out of war…. Democracy is finished in England.” Jewish producers in Hollywood, he added, were abusing their power by making films that favored intervention.
This marked the end of the line. Joe returned to doing what he was good at—making millions. A stroke in 1961 left him unable to speak, although aware of his surroundings. He died in 1969 after a life lived to its fullest.
Susan Ronald tells this tale with verve and a hoard of illuminating anecdotes drawn from a large variety of sources. The drama has many players, which makes her dramatis personae useful to readers new to the era’s tumultuous events. All in all, her book is well worth adding to the your reading list.
The author
Dr. Stelzer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and U.S. political and economic correspondent for the Sunday Times (London). His weekly column, “This Week in Economics,” is available by subscription.