The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [74]
When Joe’s aide Harvey Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany, he told the ambassador of the horrendous things he had seen as he wandered through the streets. Nazi storm troopers molesting Jews in the streets, painting swastikas on windows, and trashing the merchandise in Jewish-owned stores. Joe listened to this newest witness to the Fascist savagery. Then, as Klemmer recalled, he turned to his aide and said, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”
Joe was certain of his own judgment, and deeply suspicious of Roosevelt. The new ambassador began sending a series of essaylike letters to a select group of influential friends in the United States, each one marked “Private and Confidential,” as if the letter had only one recipient. It was a foolish, needlessly provocative thing to be doing. He was supposed to be the eyes and ears of his government. Yet in one of these often-weekly missives he wrote that he had “been to no great pains thus far in reporting to the State Department the various bits of information and gossip which have come my way, because they don’t mean anything as far as we are concerned.”
Joe considered himself smarter than most of those around him, able to read the self-serving motives that propelled society along. That was his most dangerous illusion, for there was often a transparency to his manipulations that made even those he called his friends suspicious of him. His associates may have been flattered to receive these candid memos. But they were less flattered when they realized that they were simply names on a list. Kent, his irony perfectly in place, wrote another recipient, Baruch: “Just had another of Ambassador Kennedy’s syndicated ‘Private and Confidential’ letters.”
One of those not on the list who was less than amused by Joe’s machinations was Roosevelt. The president was contemplating running for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and was inordinately sensitive to any Democrat who would dare to think of challenging him. Joe’s letters seemed an attempt to curry favor with some of the most important opinion makers in America. “Will Kennedy Run for President?” asked Liberty magazine in May 1938, a question that many were beginning to ask, no one more seriously than Roosevelt himself.
Roosevelt was worried in part because Joe had told him that America would have to “come to some form of fascism here.” Joe believed that only an authoritarian government would be able to contain social unrest, hold down the grasping masses, and build a strong economy. It was a foolish thing to tell Roosevelt and only exacerbated the president’s growing distaste for his new ambassador. Roosevelt could have recalled Joe, but that would have brought him back to America with two full years to create mischief before the presidential election. Joe probably would have been able to pry away several million Catholics from the unwieldy New Deal coalition. Roosevelt decided that he would cauterize this little wound before it became serious.
Steve Early, the president’s press secretary, called in Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune was the most consistently anti-New Deal major paper in America, and it was a measure of the subtlety of FDR’s chicanery that Trohan should be the vehicle that he chose. Trohan was Joe’s supposed friend, but he said that he was ready to “write a story against any New Dealer.”
“The boss thought you would,” Early replied. “Joe wants to run for president and is dealing behind the boss’s back.” The press secretary tossed a bunch of letters toward the reporter, a collection of the “Private and Confidential” letters Joe had written Krock. The New York Times reporter had sent the correspondence to the White House as evidence of his patron