The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [73]
Joe was not a man who liked to dawdle. He had no time or patience for silly posturing and the daily inanities of the diplomatic world. Diplomacy, however, is a game largely of tiny victories, of nuanced rituals in which everyone is a player, both friends and enemies. He seemed hardly to understand that an ambassador is called a “diplomat” for a reason. The refined manners and cautious language of the diplomatic circles are not silly affectations but the very procedures that allow friends to stay friends, enemies to sup with one another, and belligerents to enter into civilized discourse.
Joe’s candor was a gift that he passed out promiscuously. In June he had his first meeting with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador. The Nazi official reported afterward that Joe had expressed his full understanding of the plight of the misunderstood Nazis. The American ambassador had even attempted to advise him on ways to minimize the unfortunate image that much of the world had of the Nazis. The Nazi ambassador said that Joe told him that what was harmful to the Nazis was not that they wanted to get rid of the Jews, “but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely; he was from Boston and there, in one golf club, and in other clubs, no Jews had been admitted for the past … years.” The Nazi diplomat quoted Kennedy as saying that the great things Hitler had done for Germany impressed him. Von Dirksen added that Kennedy believed “there was no widespread anti-German feeling in the United States outside the East Coast where most of America’s 3,500,000 Jews were living.”
Years later Joe denied that he had ever made such a statement, calling it “complete poppycock.” But the words resonated with the harsh tenor of his candor. Joe was not pro-Nazi, but he rationalized the unrationalizable, turning his eyes away from the worst of Hitler’s excesses.
Joe’s anti-Semitism—and there is no more benign word for his beliefs—was common among those of his class and background. The hard center of anti-Semitism in America lay not among the poor but among the rich, perpetuated not by the assaults of street thugs but by genteel whispers. Hoffman Nickerson, in his 1930 book The American Rich, celebrated the fact that the wealthy class had raised barriers so that the Jew lost “his hope of concealing his separateness in order to rise to power within non-Jewish societies, half unseen by those among whom he moves.” The more Joe and his family had risen in society, the more they observed the wages of anti-Semitism.
Joe’s life paralleled the social exclusion of Jews from elite American life, all done without any clamor at all. In 1922, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard gave a graduation address at Harvard in which he proposed quotas limiting Jewish students. In Bronxville, the Kennedys lived in a community proud of not having Jewish residents. In Palm Beach, Jews were not welcome at the premier hotels and were excluded from membership in the most desirable clubs.
Joe believed himself a man of the immutable world of power, part of the elite world. He considered it only natural to point out that America had its “Jewish problem” too. And it was natural that the Germans believed that there were millions of Americans like Joseph P. Kennedy who understood what the Führer was doing. After all, a nation that had systematically excluded Jews from the haunts of its social elite could certainly understand why another nation felt that it had to exclude them from its very precincts.
From his early days in London, Joe was obsessed with the Jews and