The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [78]
Joe was not only morose and depressed but full of self-pity. He felt no comparable sympathy, however, for the several hundred thousand opponents of Hitler living in the Sudetenland, whose risk was somewhat more imminent than his own. “I’m feeling very blue myself today,” he wrote Krock, “because I am starting to think about sending Rose and the children back to America and stay here alone for how long God only knows. Maybe never see them again.”
Chamberlain made a final dramatic trip to Munich, where he reached a settlement with Hitler. The Anglo-German agreement, the Munich Pact, was not so much a compromise as a capitulation, giving Hitler the Sudetenland in return for a promise that he would stop there and respect what was left of Czechoslovakia. With this agreement, Chamberlain flew back to England and announced, “I believe it is peace for our time.” The church bells rang out, peeling a joyful timbre. The streets were full of Londoners shouting their approval.
Joe fought his way through the crowds to the embassy, as exuberant and exhilarated as any of the celebrants. Later he happened to meet Jan Masaryk, the despondent Czech minister to London. The Czech diplomat knew that all Chamberlain had done was to throw a sacrificial lamb to the Nazi beast. Once Hitler had digested his meal, he would move on to the rest of Czechoslovakia. “I hope this doesn’t mean they are going to cut us up and sell us out,” Joe recalled the Czech leader saying. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Joe exclaimed, as Masaryk remembered. “Now I can get to Palm Beach after all.”
Joe was a truthmonger who shouted his truths so loudly that all could hear them. Three weeks after Munich on October 19, 1938, Joe spoke at the Navy League’s Trafalgar Day dinner. He told his audience that it was foolish to emphasize the difference between democracies and dictatorship when, “after all, we have to live together in the same world whether we like it or not.”
This was the same little drum Joe had been beating on since he arrived in England, but it had begun to sound hollow and thin. The audience in that room was full of navy officers, some of whom had fought against the Germans in World War I. The larger audience was hardly more receptive. America was slowly waking up to the stark menace of Hitler, and Joe’s words set off a firestorm of criticism across America. Joe had been used to laudatory press treatment; now, as he wrote later, he was “hardly prepared, despite years in public office, for the viciousness of this onslaught.”
Joe had his own fervent supporters, including Jack, who from Harvard wrote him a comforting letter: “The Navy Day speech while it seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc. was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn’t bitterly anti-Fascist.”
Jack was echoing his father’s sentiment that the tedious, troublesome Jews had the audacity to object when their brethren in Germany were either shipped off to camps or stripped of their belongings and thrown out of their native land. As both Kennedys saw it, the Jews could not seem to understand that there were geopolitical considerations far more important than the survival of some of their people.
In mid-December 1938, Joe returned to the United States for a vacation and consultations. In Washington, as Joe recalled in his unpublished memoirs, Roosevelt told him that “he would be a bitter isolationist, help with arms and money, and later, depending on the state of affairs, get into the fight.” Joe was utterly opposed to such a plan, and by rights he should have resigned or Roosevelt should have fired him. Instead, the two men chatted amiably in a discussion that was nothing if not duplicitous.
“I have never made a public statement criticizing you,” Joe told the president. “As to what I say privately, you know perfectly well that I will never say anything that I have not said to you face to face. But you know the way I feel about you and I won’t be any good to you unless we are on good terms.”
Roosevelt knew indeed what Joe felt about him, but this was not the moment