The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [75]
“The guy’s working both sides of the street,” Early said.
Joe was in the United States for an official visit when he was confronted with the Tribune’s front-page headline—” Kennedy’s 1940 Ambition Open Roosevelt Rift.” Trohan wrote that “the chilling shadow of 1940 has fallen across the friendship of President Roosevelt and his two-fisted trouble-shooter, Joseph Patrick Kennedy.” The story said that Joe had “besought a prominent Washington correspondent to direct his presidential boom from London.” For Joe’s career, the most ominous words were that inside the administration he was being called “the soul of selfishness” in words “crisp with oaths.”
Joe was in Washington on June 25, 1938, when he learned of the story that had run two days earlier. “It was a true Irish anger that swept me,” Joe noted in his diary, the first time in years he had acknowledged that he might have some of his forebears’ more dubious qualities. Joe talked to Roosevelt, who did a superb job of pretending innocence. Joe was proud that he did not “mince words,” but berating the president was an indulgence of the worst sort. An enemy will do you ten times the harm that a friend will do you good, and President Roosevelt was the worst enemy of all. For all Joe’s proud bluster and Early’s “half hearted denial,” the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s realized “that something had happened.”
Roosevelt held his diverse New Deal coalition together in part with the glue of manipulativeness. He nodded approvingly to one subordinate’s ideas, then nodded approvingly to another who suggested quite the opposite. Joe represented many of the twenty-one million Roman Catholic Americans, a crucial if uncertain part of Roosevelt’s coalition. Roosevelt needed Joe, even if he neither liked nor trusted him. He needed him to pull back fully within the parameters of the administration, and to do in London what he had been sent there to do. It was a message as clear in its delivery as it was impossible for a man of Joe’s character to carry out.
As disdainful as Joe was of the often tedious work of diplomacy, he reveled in the more pleasurable rituals of life at the Court of St. James’s. In the evenings, the palatial thirty-six-room ambassadorial residence at 15 Prince’s Gate often resounded with gay laughter and spirited discussions as members of the British elite took their measure of this irrepressible, irreverent new ambassador; many of them were no more interested in taking on the Nazis than he was. Rose was usually there beside him in a splendid Parisian gown.
Joe introduced his happy brood and had his older children sitting at the dinner table, imbibing the sophisticated conversation. Kathleen was making her debut that season, and she was full of exuberance and wit, her laughter cascading across any gathering. She was a triumphant success, pursued by several of the most desirable young men in the kingdom. Eunice, Pat, and Jean were studying at the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton, where many of their classmates were from the titled families of Europe.
Bobby and Teddy attended the Gibbs Preparatory Boy’s School on Sloane Street, within walking distance of the ambassadorial residence. Bobby took the school’s rigid discipline in stride, but Teddy took umbrage at being whacked on the fingers with a ruler for some silly infraction. Rosemary was sent the farthest away, to a Montessori school in Hertfordshire.
Luella Hennessey, an ebullient, warmhearted nurse, had come over from Boston to watch over the Kennedy children. She saw that Joe was extraordinarily busy with his diplomatic duties while Rose had a more leisurely existence, her days lightly punctuated by social events and fittings. And yet Joe told her: “Any problems you have with the children, Luella, you are to bring them to me, not to my wife.” Joe dominated his children’s lives with an often mysterious presence. He investigated any young man so bold as to date one of his daughters and even went so far as to check out the men whom Luella was dating.
Joe applied true diplomatic