The Dark Side of Camelot Page 9
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, and he thought the monetary system in the United States needed revising and ... one of his ambitions was to revise the whole monetary system." Kennedy spent much time masterminding a campaign---transparent to the men in the White House---for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1940. The Kennedy claque of newspaper sycophants, headed by Arthur Krock, repeatedly planted stories about a possible Kennedy candidacy. Krock's columns in the New York Times made the men in the White House gag. In a diary entry dated May 22, 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau described how Thomas G. Corcoran, one of Roosevelt's senior political advisers, "got really violent" while discussing Kennedy and Krock. "He said that Krock was running a campaign to put Joe Kennedy over for President."* Krock was further described as "the number one Poison at the White House." Harold Ickes had earlier expressed concern about Kennedy's qualifications, and his ambitions, in his diary: "At a time when we should be sending the best that we have to Great Britain, we have not done so. We have sent a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity hound and who is apparently ambitious to be the first Catholic President of the United States."
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 193
9 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 given the Poles "moral assurance that the United States will leave its isolationist policy and be prepared in the event of war to participate actively on the side of France and Britain." The White House quickly characterized the documents as propaganda and put out a statement, in Roosevelt's name, urging that they "be taken with several grains of salt." Over the next few days, however, reporters in Berlin were shown the documents in question and found them to have all the appearance of being genuine. One set of the Polish papers released by the Germans dealt with an interview with Joseph Kennedy, who, in a June 1939 talk with Jan Wszelaki, a Polish trade official, was quoted as boasting that his two eldest sons, Joseph and John, had recently traveled all over Europe and "intended to make a series of lectures on the European situation ... after their return to the United States, at Harvard University ... 'You have no idea,'" Wszelaki further quoted Kennedy as telling him, "'to what extent my oldest boy ... has the President's ear. I might say that the President believes him more than me.'"
6
TAKING ON FDR
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."