The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [72]
The forty-nine-year-old ambassador arrived in London on March 1, 1938, to assume one of the most crucial assignments in American diplomatic history. Joe had not even presented his credentials when he was confronted with the darkening dilemma of Europe and the transcendent question of what America’s role should be in the growing conflict. That month German armies marched into Vienna and Adolf Hitler pronounced the Anschluss, the uniting of the two countries. From the Austrian capital, Hitler cast his predatory eye on Czechoslovakia. In Germany itself, those Hitler considered his enemies—Jews, Communists, pacifists, and democrats—were being herded into camps with names such as Dachau and Buchenwald. In Spain, the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco, aided by their German and Italian allies, moved forward in Catalonia, driving the Republican armies back.
Joe’s first speech was the traditional one given by each new American ambassador to London’s Pilgrim Club, a prestigious gathering of leaders in business and politics as well as ranking diplomats. It was a fitting venue for a modest address by an ambassador new both to diplomacy and to Britain. Joe wanted to say something substantial, however, “thereby breaking a precedent of many years’ standing,” as he wrote in his diary. The new ambassador imagined himself a fearless man who would serve up healthy platters of unparsed reality to an audience unused to such simple fare. He drafted a preachy discourse that sought to push American foreign policy up the road of isolationism, away from Britain and the struggle against Nazism. Joe put a far higher value on candor than it deserved, for truths and policies changed, and it was a fool’s game proudly to state the obvious, rubbing British noses in the face of American policies that offended many of them. Joe was full of arrogant self-assurance and his idée fixe that America had to stay out of the sordid, dangerous, deadly strife of Europe.
As much as Joe despised and feared communism, he shared with Marxists the belief that economics was the bedrock reality beneath politics. People were a largely mediocre, self-serving lot whose most important organ was not their head but their stomach. “An unemployed man with a hungry family is the same fellow, whether the swastika or some other flag floats over his head,” he wrote Kent. Joe made the same sort of cynical assertions in his draft speech. “I think it is not too much to say that the great bulk of the people is not now convinced that any common interest exists between them and any other country.”
When Joe sent his proposed address back to the State Department, Secretary of State Cordell Hull needed to use a full measure of his diplomatic skills to get his newest ambassador to cut the most offensive passages without taking his changes as a rebuke. As tactful as Hull tried to be, he played his trump card, ending his lengthy telegram: “I have shown this to the President and he heartily approves.”
Joe’s agenda, as he wrote Bernard Baruch, was to “reassure my friends and critics alike that I have not as yet been taken into the British camp.” Since he had just arrived in London, it is hard to see how he could have already become a fifth columnist, seeking to seduce an innocent America into a marriage of inconvenience with a declining, troubled Britain. As Joe looked