The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [88]
No, he was a daring prophet and patriot who, once war seemed imminent, sought to extract whatever he could from the dying island empire, holding the British up to repatriate hard currency for Hollywood films, hanging tough in barter deals with the British, and promoting those British leaders who sought peace at almost any price. He had gone into politics to save his own fortune, or a good part of it. If his liquor business benefited from the diminished tariffs he was now helping to negotiate, that was only a fitting compensation for his many contributions as a public servant.
As for the Jews, it pained Joe that they mocked him so when he considered himself practically their best friend in government. He believed that he shared with Chamberlain the attitude that if the world exploded in war, the troublesome Jews would share a good deal of the blame. In his thinking, he had nonetheless worked on several fronts to get some of them out of Germany and accepted in one of the many countries that shunned them. One of the new ambassador’s first tasks was to deal with the Evian conference in France. It was called a “refugee” conference, but that was a euphemism that hid the fact that 90 percent of the refugees were Jewish. The delegates focused on what to do with German “refugees,” but the problem was far broader. The Poles and the Romanians wanted to be rid of their “refugees” too. The British feared that too liberal a solution in Germany would inspire several other European nations to deport their “refugees.”
Joe tried to work out a solution to allow Jews to buy their way out of Germany and into other countries. Joe’s proposal pleased his eldest son. “The baby is tossed right into the laps of the people themselves for the real concern now is money,” Joe Jr. wrote in his diary on November 21, 1938. “If the Jews come through and especially the other people this problem can be cleared up. Dad doesn’t think they will put up the necessary money, but he thinks he has done his part, and the rest is up to the others.”
London was full of rumors that Joe was making a new fortune selling out the British by trading on inside information. There is no evidence of such dealings in the British Foreign Office’s extensive files, and Joe may well not have been taking advantage of his position. But he was a man of such monumental cynicism, who glorified the rudest reaches of self-interest, that those around him often thought the worst of him.
Joe was not cynical, however, about his children. No father cared more for the future of his sons than he did, and when he spoke out of that feeling, he touched what was deep and true. In May 1939, he traveled to Liverpool University to receive an honorary degree. There, as young British faces looked up at him, he spoke of his own children and their futures. “I have a couple of boys, and two or three daughters, who think that they know what’s wrong with the world,” he told his British audience. “They are quite outspoken in their opinion of the way we old folks have been doing things. I shouldn’t want them to know it but I must admit, just between us, that I can’t blame them…. The important thing to remember is that the majority of our difficulties are man-made…. They are the result of human carelessness, human short-sightedness, human greed.”
Joe’s relationship with Roosevelt was by now so full of duplicity that endless scrubbing would not have washed away all the lies. In July, Joe’s friend and journalistic promoter Arthur Krock wrote a column titled “Why Ambassador Kennedy Is Not Coming Home,” in which he said that the president’s militant young New Dealers had set out to destroy the ambassador with a series of lies. It was whispered that he had gone to bed with the British appeasers and was badmouthing the president. “None of these statements was true,” Krock said. “But they were sedulously circulated for quite a while.”
Roosevelt knew the source of this missile, but he was too shrewd to signal that he had spotted his attacker. Instead,