The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [98]
When Joe met her in Paris in April 1940, using the excuse that he had traveled across the Channel to visit a sick Eddie Moore, he spent much of his time with Clare at the Ritz Hotel. Clare was a bold writer who rarely employed euphemisms, but this time she noted coyly in her diary that Joe had been “in bedroom all morning.”
Clare was everything Rose was not: a daring, passionate woman who after dinner stayed with the men in the salons of power instead of demurely rising and taking her coffee and brandy with the ladies in another room. Her pillow talk was not simply the cooing words of love but a bold dialogue on great events.
Clare was a woman of hard reactionary views who trumped even Joe in her disdain for the lower classes and the Jews and what she considered the mongrel races of the world. She shared with Joe the belief that America had better quickly rearm, turning itself into a fortress that would be impregnable to the onslaughts of war.
She had a gift for self-dramatization that was a journalist’s common failing, but here Joe bested her. He wrote her on October 1, 1940: “Yesterday a Messerschmitt just missed the house as it crashed. I could see the pilot’s face, his head lolling over one side … headed straight for the ground…. I imagine it will take a long time to get the drone of German motors out of my ears after I get back; and not to hear gunfire nine or ten hours a night will make me rather lonesome for the battlefront. When somebody asks me what I did in the second war I’ll say I lived in London, and that’s a damn sight worse than anything else I can think of, unless it is Dunkerque.”
Beneath the boyish bravado was a shameless quality to Joe’s dissembling. Most of the time he was living well outside London, and he had suffered nothing compared to those who nightly weathered the Nazi bombs.
With Clare and Henry, Joe had begun what Roosevelt could only believe was a treacherous dialogue with his enemies. The ambassador was in frequent contact with the Luces, who were backing the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, in his race against Roosevelt. Willkie campaigned on the theme that Roosevelt was lying in his pledge to keep America out of war. If he was reelected for a third term, American sons would soon be dying on foreign shores.
Joe agreed largely with this thesis and proffered the possibility that he would return to the United States to endorse Willkie, a gesture that, as he wired Luce, would produce “25 million Catholic votes,” enough “to throw Roosevelt out.”
Joe may have been exaggerating the numbers, but his was not an idle boast. Many of his fellow American Catholic voters were reluctant tenants in the house of the New Deal, and as the election neared they seemed to be moving away in droves. Joe was the most powerful Catholic in the administration, and if he left the New Deal in dramatic fashion, the road behind him would be full of Catholics leaving the Roosevelt camp.
Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice and one of the president’s closest advisers, saw that Joe could be a force of great and crucial good if he would return to America and give an impassioned radio address confirming his support for Roosevelt. That would not only stop the flow of Catholics away from Roosevelt but also bring enough of them back to ensure a third term for Roosevelt.
In the United States his own son, Joe Jr., was playing an active role as a youthful isolationist. At Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. became his father’s proud surrogate, one of the leaders of the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. Some of his opponents considered “isolationist” little more than another name for cowardly expediency, but men of principle espoused this cause as well, and Joe Jr. was no coward physically or intellectually.
Joe Jr. took on the internationalists on their turf, talking at Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline among the very people whom his father accused of willfully manipulating America into war. He debated Harvard professors in whose classes