The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [101]
Years later Joe told Clare Luce that Roosevelt offered him an irresistible deal that evening: if Joe would endorse Roosevelt in 1940, “then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.” Even if Roosevelt did not make such an explicit offer, the implications were clear that if Joe cared about his sons’ futures, he had best be quiet. A year and a half later Jack declared in a conversation that “his father’s greatest mistake was not talking enough; that he stopped too quickly and was accused of being an appeaser. He stated that the reason his father stopped talking and didn’t go on and present his side of the question fully was due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in politics.”
The evening had not changed Joe’s belief that Roosevelt was slowly manipulating the country into war. Joe could have walked out of the White House that evening, flown back to New York to meet the Luces, and cast his lot with Willkie. If the Republican won, Joe would be the man who had dared to stand up and say what had to be said.
Roosevelt had just promised that he would get rid of Joe’s enemies, and if momentarily Joe had believed him, upon reflection he was too shrewd to think that the president would change. But his love for his sons outweighed even his own ambition for power and position. He was not going to give them a tainted name as their inheritance or hobble them in the race of life.
What he was about to do was as noble and selfless as anything he would do in his life. His sons were not unaware of the sacrifice their father made that evening. Afterward Jack discussed his father with his friend Torby Macdonald. Torby wrote Jack that few people realized that “self-success” was more important than “worldly success,” and that Jack’s father was one of the few who had done so by “putting family over Ambassadorship.”
“All right,” Joe finally said that night, giving in to Roosevelt’s request that he make a radio speech. “I will. But I will pay for it myself, show it to nobody in advance, and say what I wish.”
Joe spoke Tuesday evening on CBS Radio like the bearer of truth from the bloody fields of war. For months he had been saying privately that Roosevelt was leading America into war; now he stated that “such a charge is false.”
Joe knew that many of those listening across the nation had heard of his disagreements with Roosevelt, and he did not deny them but asked how many employees agreed completely with their employer. “In my years of service for the government, both at home and abroad, I have sought to have honest judgment as my goal,” he said. “After all, I have a great stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world.”
Joe had touched the deepest chord within his own life, a chord that resonated in the lives of most Americans. His speech was a triumph, lauded in the press and applauded by Democratic politicians. In the end Roosevelt won in an electoral landslide, and Joe’s speech was not the seminal event that it would have seemed in a close election. Joe, however, in one great public moment, had proved his fealty to Roosevelt. He had good reason to believe that his sons would be rewarded for their father’s loyalty.
Roosevelt saluted him, but the Luces and the Willkie forces considered Joe a betrayer. “There was that radio address when everyone thought he was going to come out for Willie,” Henry Luce recalled. “We thought he was and Clare tried to get hold of him and he wouldn’t answer the phone. We were appalled when he came out for FDR as the man to keep us out of war.”
On Saturday after the election, Joe’s secretary showed Louis Lyons of the Boston Globe and two reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch into his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Joe was in suspenders, eating