The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [95]
“People particularly resent the fact that he has been a popular figure in London and court life, that they did overlook his childish Prairie County, Ohio, mannerisms and now feel that if they had been more severe with him from the beginning, he would not have let them down,” Von Hofmannsthal wrote. “When he had the king and queen to dinner, he had had the awesome nerve to have photographers there so that the evening would be well publicized, a rudeness to the extreme.” Joe’s worst faux pas, as von Hofmannsthal related it, was at the last Court Ball, where Joe, the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, had walked blithely up to Queen Elizabeth and asked her to dance. “Actually the incident was only known to a few people and to this day has not got into the press,” von Hofmannsthal noted.
“His behavior as ambassador was outrageous,” said Henry Luce, the Time publisher. “It was outrageous because he said that England was bound to get beaten. Oh, he had a lot of courage. But there he was sitting there in the middle of the blitz phoning to me on the open transatlantic phone saying the jig was up for England. You just don’t do that kind of thing. The British never forgave him for that.”
Joe was roundly detested not because of his views, which were not that unknown in Britain and not uncommon in America, but because of the way he professed them. He seemed to take pleasure in his proclamations of doom. His defeatism was dangerous to the British because it was like an infectious disease that he was attempting to spread. They saw him as peppering the air with germs of despair that could become a plague. London was a city of spies, and the British Foreign Office was deluged with reports of Joe’s comments on the weakness of British manhood and the impossibility that the island nation could stand up to the onslaught of German steel and might.
Some observers attributed Joe’s stream of comments to ineptness, cowardice, or sheer bullheaded Americanism. Victor Perowne of the British Foreign Office astutely concluded “that Mr. Kennedy’s perpetual ‘spilling’ of these views is not out of naivete, but very much on purpose and the effect on … our interests is regrettable.” The fear was not that Joe’s words would affect British morale. Instead, the British Foreign Office worried that Joe’s words would do the most damage in the smaller neutral countries in Europe and in the United States.
In February 1940, while he was in America, Joe sent a telegram to the American embassy in London asking staff to RUSH PACIFIST LITERATURE. To the British, who intercepted the message, it was a further example of what seemed treacherous behavior. In reality, Joe was only trying to help Jack research his Harvard thesis, but the climate of duplicity was such that the British suspected the worst.
The Foreign Office had information that Joe was “quite unpopular with his own staff and the American press correspondents here,” whose distaste for him was so immense that “they wax indignant at the mere mention of his name.” Joe’s belief that the war would radically diminish Britain’s place in the world and bring an end to the British Empire was prophetic. It was nonetheless a businessman’s view of the world, in which nothing mattered but the tallies of economic power. He was, as T. North Whitehead wrote in a Foreign Office note, “playing off his own lot in his stupid private conversations and uncalled for remarks to the press.”
Joe’s obsession with economics as the fundamental bedrock of foreign policy was, if anything, accentuated by the onslaught of war. America’s greatest problem with the British, he told Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the European bureau chief at the State