The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [91]
Aft er his family returned to America, Joe was alone, and for a man who cherished his family as he did, solitude was like a fog that rolled over his life and stayed there, covering everything with gray. The palette on which Joe painted his picture of the world had only dark colors on it now. His judgment ultimately was based on what political judgment always comes down to, not issues, but men themselves, their strengths and resolution, and he found the British a doomed race. His judgments were sweeping in magnitude. He told the president in a letter that “there are signs of decay, if not decadence, here, both in men and institutions … democracy as we now conceive it in the United States will not exist in France and England after the war, regardless of which side wins or loses.”
Soon after the invasion of Poland, Joe had lunch with Winston Churchill. For years Churchill had been sounding the alarm against the rising forces of fascism, but his warnings had gone unheeded. His champions considered him eloquent and truthful, while his detractors condemned him as a verbose, exaggerating, drunken has-been. Now, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Churchill had become a prophet with honor, and the likely wartime prime minister.
There was an eerie emptiness in the skies. The war against Britain had not yet begun in earnest. Churchill knew that one day the “phony war” would end and that he might look up and see the sky full of German planes flying to bomb English towns. “If the Germans bomb us into subjection,” Churchill remarked to Joe, “one of their terms will certainly be that we hand them over our fleet. If we hand it over, their superiority over you becomes overwhelming and then your troubles will begin.”
Joe considered Churchill’s remark tantamount to blackmail. The old mountebank was daring Washington to be so stupid as not to allow Britain to buy war goods in America. As Joe saw it, Churchill was as bad as the Jews in his determination to suck America into the conflict.
“Maybe I do him an injustice,” Joe wrote in his diary, though he was sure that he was right, “but I just don’t trust him. He always impressed me that he was willing to blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would get the United States in.”
Hitler had possibly burned down the Reichstag in Berlin and blamed the disaster on the Communists. If Churchill was willing to do the same, then the world that Joe prophesied had already arrived. There was no difference between fascism and democracy. Joe did not see that, as desperately as Churchill wanted America to enter the war, there were moral limits on what he would do. He pleaded. He seduced. He manipulated. He threatened. But Churchill would simply not commit an evil act of his own, stage his own Reichstag fire, in order to seduce his erstwhile ally into entering the war.
Joe recalled that it was the day after that luncheon that the first of a series of secret letters from Roosevelt to Churchill arrived by diplomatic pouch at the embassy, the beginning of a historic correspondence. Joe resented the exchange, seeing it rightly as an attempt to bypass him. He had failed Roosevelt as his honest prolocutor, and the president was seeking out another channel.
It was unprecedented for the American president to be sending secret letters to the new first lord of the Admiralty, the most vociferous foe of Chamberlain’s policies. It would have been