The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [77]
Roosevelt was dismayed when he saw the speech. “The young man needs his wrists slapped rather hard,” he told Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., a curious choice of words since Joe was only six years younger than the president. Roosevelt had come to believe that the defeatist group in England had taken in Joe. So, Roosevelt believed, had Chamberlain. Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “The president called him [Chamberlain] ‘slippery’ and added, with some bitterness, that he was ‘interested in peace at any price if he could get away with it and save his face.’”
That was a searing judgment. But it was Chamberlain whose nation was poised to go to war, not Roosevelt’s, and given the temper of America and the strictures of the Neutrality Act, if Chamberlain did go to war, all that the president would be able to offer was a toast to the intrepid British.
In early September, Joe called Rose where she was vacationing on the French Riviera and told her that she had to return to London immediately. Hitler was tired of waiting and was about to send his armies into Czechoslovakia to claim the Sudetenland as his own. The acrid smell of war was in the air, and Joe was afraid, not for himself so much as for Rose and his sons and daughters. He was, as he wrote a friend, “trying to keep up my contacts so we would know what really was going on before it actually happened so that we would not be caught unprepared contemplating the possibility of the bombing of London with eight children as prospective victims.” Joe personalized politics, seeing every event in terms of his own fortune and family. That gave immediacy and passion to his every move and now, as war appeared imminent, an increasingly desperate urgency.
Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, asked Joe how America would react if Hitler ran over Czechoslovakia. “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Joe replied, “except that we want to keep out of war.” This led the British diplomat to ask why his country should defend all the ideals and values of democracy by itself. “The British made the Czechoslovak incident part of their business … and where we should be involved, the American people failed to see.”
Joe paraded before the British his friend Charles Lindbergh, with his terrifying tales of the awesome arsenal of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, the strongest in the world. As Chamberlain attempted to negotiate with Hitler, Joe seemed incapable of realizing that language itself—a word, a phrase, a subtle interpretation—had become the very stuff of life and death, peace and war. He gave an interview with the Hearst papers in which he said that Americans must “not lose our heads.”
Roosevelt was aghast at the idea of Joe spouting off once again and told Hull that he would have to take his ambassador to task. In the end he thought better of risking a confrontation. Instead, he wrote Joe a letter in the grammar of political Washington, in which words meant the opposite of what they said: “I know what difficult days you are going through and I can assure you that it is not much easier at this end!”
The president was attempting to support morally those who stood up against the menace of Hitler while not making promises of aid he could not keep and in proffering would only give solace and strength to his enemies and set back even further what he considered the common cause. In London he needed a loyal ambassador with a subtle mind and a nuanced character, an ambassador who worked for Roosevelt, not for himself.
Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler once again and returned with empty-hands and a heavy heart. Rose noted in her diary: “Everyone unutterably shocked and depressed.” Those who had taken Hitler’s measure may have been saddened and disheartened, but they were not shocked that the man had acted