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Joe listened to his wife’s counsel and afterward admitted that she had “softened” him up. He did not care about what he considered the dubious honor of the ambassadorship any longer; most likely what rang deepest and truest to him were his sons’ possible fates. By his actions in London he was hoping to save their lives, but he was not doing so in order to destroy their futures.

Roosevelt had alerted his secretary, Grace Tully, to “be sure and butter up Joe when you see him” before she showed him into the private quarters. Joe, who was planning a bold, merciless confrontation with the president, found Roosevelt seated over a cocktail shaker mixing drinks for his close friend Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Mrs. Byrnes.

Over a Sunday dinner of scrambled eggs and sausages, Joe was at his civil best, relating tales of life in beleaguered London. “I’ve got a great idea, Joe!” Byrnes said, as if a glowing lightbulb had appeared above his head. “Why don’t you make a radio speech on the lines of what you have said here tonight and urge the president’s reelection?”

At the level that Roosevelt was playing politics, and for the stakes that were on the table, not a moment of this evening was unscripted. Joe was not for a moment taken in by Byrnes “acting as though a wonderful idea had just struck him.” Roosevelt, for his part, surely knew that Joe was not fooled and realized also that his angry ambassador would not dare call the president’s bluff. They were like two men sitting across a game board from each other, but while Joe was playing checkers, Roosevelt was playing a master’s game of chess.

Joe did not respond to the senator’s “great idea” but sat and fumed quietly. Roosevelt had already felt Joe’s anger in other meetings, and he had staged this modest dinner in part so that with other guests present, his ambassador would not dare show his venom. Despite the staging, Joe was not about to spend the evening in chitchat and meaningless pleasantries.

“Since it doesn’t seem possible for me to see the president alone, I guess I’ll just have to say what I am going to say in front of everybody,” Kennedy said suddenly. As Joe went through the litany of abuses he felt he had suffered, Rose noticed that Roosevelt’s eyes snapped nervously, the only sign of emotion the president allowed himself.

“I am damn sore at the way I have been treated,” Joe went on, like a prosecutor making his final arguments. Joe was not so bold as to attack the president, whom he considered the architect of his abuse. Instead, Joe trashed State Department officials, such as Sumner Welles, who had bypassed their ambassador, humiliating him. Welles and his subordinates had only been the honest messengers of Roosevelt’s policy, but Joe berated them in fiery assault.

Roosevelt was not interested in speaking the truth now, but only in placating this enraged and dangerous man. So the president started attacking the State Department with ferocity even greater than Joe’s. After the election the president would have “a real housecleaning,” throwing out these officials who had so wronged the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe would suffer no longer. There were many words of untruth in Roosevelt’s harangue, but his words did what they were supposed to do. They calmed Joe down and made him and Roosevelt momentary allies against their common foe.

Joe was an angry, cynical man who still might lash out in vitriol against Roosevelt and his third term. His greatest vulnerability lay not in the many things he hated but in the few things he loved. The man loved his sons, and it was of his sons that Roosevelt spoke now.

“I stand in awe of your relationship with your children,” Roosevelt said in his first words of the evening that rang with some semblance of truth. “For a man as busy as you are, it is a rare achievement. And I for one will do all I can to help you if your boys should ever run for political office.”

A promise is sometimes only another name for a threat. According to Roosevelt’s son James, the president