The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [117]
On his way to Rochester and Boston, Jack flew down to Palm Beach to spend a weekend with his family and his houseguest, Henry James. Joe had just endeavored to help extricate Jack from what his father considered his romantic debacle. These two days should have been a sentimental respite.
Joe, however, was in a savage mood, and when Jack showed up late for lunch, his father exploded. “For God’s sake!” he yelled as the family quivered at every syllable. “Can’t you even get on time to meals? How do you expect to get anything done in your life if you can’t even arrive on time!”
“Sorry, Dad,” Jack responded, and blamed his tardiness on his friend Henry. Joe prided himself on his punctuality. It irked him that his second son could not even adhere to this basic tenet of manners. Jack’s rudeness bordered on the insulting, but that was not what irritated Joe so much.
As soon as he had heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Joe telegraphed President Roosevelt offering his services. He had received no immediate response, and that only darkened his deep melancholy about the future. At fifty-three, he was a vital, energetic man who could have contributed much to the war effort. The president finally responded with the suggestion that the former chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission “could be of real service in stepping up the great increase in our shipbuilding.” He also had an offer to develop the civil defense program in the eastern United States. Joe turned down the proposals that were suggested to him, however, and told the president that he would “just be a hindrance to the program.”
Joe had not been offered a cabinet-level position, but he had been offered what not all men receive: a second chance. He could have exorcised most of the bad feeling that his ambassadorship had engendered by pitching in and doing what he was asked. He was a man of such overweening pride, however, that he refused. He might merely have been trolling for a better offer, but a message from J. Edgar Hoover that arrived at the White House on April 20 probably ended that possibility.
The FBI director addressed the confidential, hand-delivered letter not to Roosevelt personally but to his secretary, General Edwin M. Watson. This procedure gave the president the option of saying that he had not even seen the letter, for it involved his profligate son, Jimmy, in a matter that, if true, could have sent him to prison. The accuser, described by Hoover as a person of “unknown reliability,” charged that before the war Joe Kennedy and Jimmy Roosevelt had bribed then-Postmaster General James Farley to seek lower liquor tariffs.
Even if the accusation was untrue, it could be enormously embarrassing, and it may well have been the reason that FDR offered Joe no more opportunities. Joe still could have found valuable work to do, but he did nothing. As vitally energetic as he was, Joe largely sat out the war overseeing his investments. His only contributions to the war effort were his complaints and criticisms, and the gift of his sons.
Joe performed what he considered his patriotic duty in 1943 by becoming a “special service contact” for the FBI, passing on whatever information he thought Hoover might find useful. “In the moving picture industry he has many Jewish friends who he believes would furnish him, upon request, with any information in their possession pertaining to Communist infiltration into the industry,” noted the FBI’s Boston field office. He also proved himself useful to the FBI Hyannis agent in a case involving the shipbuilding industry.
Pride was the prison in which Joe lived, such willful, narrow pride that he refused to take a position that would place him beneath his exalted vision of himself. “When I saw Mr. Roosevelt, I was of the opinion that he intended to use me in the shipping situation, but the