Will Swift
The Kennedys
Amidst the Gathering Storm
A Thousand Days in London, 1938–1940
For my granddaughter EMERSON ELLE SWIFT,
who was born a few days after I finished this book.
AND
for KEVIN JACOBS
who was steadfast throughout.
Only those who dare to fail greatly
can ever achieve greatly.
ROBERT KENNEDY
Contents
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue Twisting the Lion’s Tail
1938
1 Into the Lion’s Mouth
2 A Hole-in-One
3 Pilgrims from the New World
4 A Season of Unprecedented Abandon
5 Honor and Humiliation
6 “Grave Danger in the Air”
7 Jubilation and Shame
8 Outrage
9 Praying for Peace
1939
10 A Jittery Winter
Photographic Insert 1
11 Blitzkrieg Against Denial
12 Encirclement
13 The Last Whirl
14 The Glittering Twilight
15 The Party Is On
16 “A Damned Disagreeable Life”
1940
17 Shutting Down the Pipeline
18 Missing the Bus
19 “Tumbled to Bits in a Moment”
20 Narrow Escapes
21 “Waiting for the Curtain to Go Up”
Photographic Insert 2
22 “There’s Hell to Pay Here Tonight”
23 “Telling the World of Our Hopes”
Epilogue “The Crowns of Suffering”
Source Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Will Swift
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
OVER A FOUR-YEAR PERIOD, I spent countless hours in the John F. Kennedy Library research room,
with its magnificent view of Dorchester Bay. I am grateful to the Joseph P. Kennedy Papers Donors
Committee for granting me permission to study Joseph P. Kennedy’s restricted papers and to the John
F. Kennedy Library Foundation for permission to publish private photographs of the Kennedy family.
Megan Desnoyers was extremely helpful in guiding me through the Rose Kennedy papers,
showing me Rose Kennedy’s marvelously detailed London diaries (with newspaper cuttings pasted
in); Kathleen Kennedy’s London diaries, which have never been drawn upon before; and newly
available family letters. Stephen Plotkin, Sharon Kelly, Michael Desmond, and Frank Rigg were
friendly, efficient, and resourceful in solving problems for me (and they tried to help me curtail my
bad habit of licking my fingers while thumbing through piles of documents). Mary Rose Grossman
went beyond the call of duty in helping me choose a rich selection of photographs and track down
their copyrights. Allan Goodrich was able to identify the copyrights of some of the most obscure
pictures. Jennifer Quan helped me obtain approval from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for
photographs and research materials.
Deborah Mitford, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, kindly invited me to Chatsworth, and
spoke to me at length on several occasions about the Kennedys during the years when the Mitfords
lived around the corner from them. Her assistant Helen Marchant was also very thoughtful; they
assisted me in finding photographs from that era. The countess of Sutherland shared her memories
over lunch at her London townhouse, and Lady Sarah Baring Astor talked to me about her mother-inlaw, Nancy Astor, and the Kennedys. Page Huidekoper Wilson, Joe’s young assistant at the U.S.
embassy in London, who has completed her own memoir, Shot in the Tail with Luck, regaled me over
tea at her Georgetown home with lively stories from her book.
The community of Kennedy scholars was extremely welcoming and supportive. I could not have
written this book without Amanda Smith’s brilliantly edited Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of
Joseph P. Kennedy as a touchstone. Her essay on the ambassadorial period was invaluable. She was
exceedingly generous with her time and knowledge. Senator Ted Kennedy was kind enough to take the
time out of his extraordinarily busy schedule to talk with me, and sent me a wonderful photograph of
himself and his father in London. Melissa Wagoner in his office is one of those delightful people who
seems to make everything flow easily. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen graciously spoke to me
about President Kennedy. His comments about the effect of Joe Kennedy’s ambassadorship on Jack
Kennedy’s presidency were extraordinarily helpful. Robert Kennedy, Jr., gave me permission to look
at the Lem Billings papers.
David Nasaw, who is writing a Kennedy family–authorized biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, was
unfailingly generous and helped me arrange important interviews. Sally Bedell Smith gave me crucial
assistance and emotional support along the way, and also inspired me with her books on Pamela
Harriman (Reflected Glory) and the Kennedys (Grace and Power). Discussing the Kennedy family and
twentieth-century history with Lance Morrow was a marvelous experience. Charles Higham provided
many useful leads and significant encouragement throughout this project. He opened his papers to my
assistants and directed me to researchers in England. Bob Self was extraordinarily good-hearted and
thoughtful; he answered several difficult research questions for me and painstakingly reviewed the
manuscript for minor errors. His superb biography of Neville Chamberlain provided an essential
background for this book. Michigan State historian Jane Vieth, who is writing her own book on the
Kennedy ambassadorship, kindly read the manuscript and gave me feedback. Anne de Courcy caught
several key errors in the text. Allen Packwood of the Churchill archives pointed me to the unpublished
correspondence of Unity Mitford and Winston Churchill, helped me shape my early ideas about
Churchill, and also read the manuscript. Blanche Weisen Cook was particularly helpful regarding
matters related to Jewish refugees. Conrad Black provided insights along the way, and Doris Kearns
Goodwin also gave me assistance.
Robert Holmes Tuttle, President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s,
spoke with me at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square about the responsibilities and challenges an
American ambassador faces in London. His assistant Maureen Malloy was particularly obliging. Peter
Hilton arranged for me to have a tour of Prince’s Gate, which I greatly enjoyed. Claire Jackson, the
college archivist at the Royal College of General Practitioners at Prince’s Gate, assisted me with
photographs.
I am grateful for conversations and communications with Robert Dallek; James McGregor Burns;
Evan Thomas; Stephen Wise’s grandson Steve Tulin; Jane Ormsby-Gore Rainey; Burton Hersh;
Andrew Roberts; Ed Klein; Laurence Leamer; Ed Renehan; Sylvia Morris; Lynne McTaggart; Angela
Lambert; Nigel West; Andrew Parker-Bowles; Christopher Sykes; Sir Ronald Grierson; Pamela, Lady
Harlech; Victoria Ormsby-Gore Lloyd; Lady Anne Tree; Lady Elizabeth Cavendish; Katherine
MacMillan; Shaul Ferraro at Yad Vashem; Richard Whalen; Lord Astor; William Shawcross; Gore
Vidal; Sarah Bradford; Hugo Vickers; and Kenneth Rose. I received valuable assistance from the staff
at Cliveden, at the Astor archives, at the Beaverbrook archives at the House of Commons, and from
the Department of Special Collections, SUNY Library, Stony Brook, New York. Marvin Russell at the
National Archives in Maryland; Christine Kitto at the Krock Papers in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript
Library in Princeton, New Jersey; Nicholas Scheetz and Scott Taylor at the Special Collections
Division of the Georgetown University Library; Lynn Duchez at the Cleveland Public Library Special
Collections; and Nancy Fulford at the Astor Archives all went out of their way to help me. Philip
Parkinson did research for me in London. And my local librarians Jean Pallis (in Valatie) and Julie
Johnson (in Kinderhook) were unfailingly generous to me.
I hope that any contributors I have forgotten to mention will understand how much I appreciate
their help despite my temporary memory lapse.
Researching a book is always an adventure: Some uninspiring avenues bear unexpected
dividends, while other more promising paths suddenly stop cold. Amanda Smith told me that Joe
Kennedy’s journalist friend George Bilainkin had written a private memoir about the ambassadorship,
Joseph P. Kennedy: A Fateful Embassy. Excited about reading this firsthand account, I hired the
talented British researcher Philip Adriaan, on Charles Higham’s advice, to track down Bilainkin’s
descendents and recover the manuscript. Working with obituaries, he determined that George was a
member of the Royal Commonwealth Society and searched their files for information. He also made
use of ancestry websites, and finally located Bilainkin’s granddaughter Jan Dziewulski. She told him
that her parents had, indeed, found George’s manuscript while they were going through his
possessions after he died. Jan’s mother told her that the manuscript “wasn’t finished and since he was
getting ultra-paranoid by that time, the manuscript was rambling and incoherent so she binned it.”
Tantalizingly, she also told her that her father’s intimacy with the Kennedys would have made the
manuscript very interesting “if he had still had his marbles while he was writing it.” I found it painful
that this potentially important document has been lost to history.
I would like to thank Howard Berman; Harold Brown; Jim Wilcox; David Forer; Pamela and
David Strousse; Marty Sloane; Jeffrey Young; Ralph Blair; Michael First; Leslee Snyder; Cathy
Flanagan; John Locke; Jed, Dianne, Anna, Naomi, and Sara Swift; Paul Swift and Jane Stasz; Anne
Schomaker; Rod and DeGuerre Blackburn; Alyne Model; Leslie, Lucas, and Sawyer Maher; Gay and
Katie Hendricks; Jacqueline Pomeranz; Brittany Lauer; and Dylan Swift for their support. I am
particularly grateful to my intrepid cousins Bill and Betty Swift for making a number of long trips to
Charles Higham’s archives in California. Betty Swift, a retired librarian, used her considerable skills
to plow through mountains of documents. Ruth Randall offered terrific suggestions after reading a
first draft of my book proposal. David Groff encouraged me to take on this project, and, with his
knowledge of politics and history and his superb judgment, made invaluable contributions along the
way.
My thoughtful and resourceful agent Judith Riven found an excellent house for this book. I have
thoroughly enjoyed working with Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my editor at Smithsonian Press, and her
assistant Kate Antony. I particularly appreciate Elisabeth Dyssegaard’s prompt and efficient style, and
I respect her outstanding editorial judgment.
My partner Kevin Jacobs, who is working on his own book, proofread every chapter as it came
along. His extraordinary love and support made it possible for me to spend these past years happily
recapturing that mesmerizing era, three-quarters of a century ago, when the Kennedys were
transformed by their time in London.
Will Swift
Valatie, New York
July 2, 2007
Introduction
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliber ate, contrived and
dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the
comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
“History is argument without end.”
DUTCH HISTORIAN PEITER GEYL
THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY in Grosvenor Square is heavily fortified. Armed guards with machine
guns patrol concrete barriers. To enter, I had to go through a series of intense security checks. Eleven
months earlier, Islamic terrorists had coordinated two bomb blasts in the London transportation
system. Once again, as in 1940, America and Britain were confronting a dictatorial threat from
ideologues bent on attacking us. The danger no longer has the visage of fascism; now it emerges from
religious fanaticism.
Meeting on June 1, 2006 with U.S. ambassador Robert Holmes Tuttle, President George W.
Bush’s representative to the Court of St. James’s, I was struck by another major difference between
then and now. Back then, in a less suspicious era, unbelievably, residents not connected to the
embassy lived in apartments on the top floors of the U.S. embassy.
As was Irish-Catholic businessman Joseph Kennedy, who served as the American ambassador to
Britain from 1938 to 1940, Ambassador Tuttle is an outsider by birth to the prevailing American
establishment: His father was a member of the Chickasaw Indian Tribe. Kennedy served at a defining
moment in the histories of the United States, Great Britain, and the West; Tuttle is serving at a
similarly historic time. Neither man’s ancestry mirrored that of the British elite; both were challenged
to fit into the intricate British social and diplomatic mores, while enacting what Tuttle calls “the
never-ending responsibilities” of the American representative in London—duties intensified in a time
of crisis when there are constant consultations with British and U.S. government officials and
unrelenting requests for intelligence gathering. It is a demanding job at the best of times—despite the
fact that today the official U.S. representative, even more so than in Kennedy’s era, is a goodwill
ambassador rather than a policy enactor.
THE KENNEDYS AMIDST THE GATHERING STORM explores the vital role of America’s most enduringly
important political family as Britain, and then America, edged into war. At this time when democracy
was on the defensive and totalitarian regimes were on the rise, history had its pivotal point in London,
where fascist, democratic, and socialist ideologies clashed openly and where the Kennedy family
emerged as a political dynasty. It was during this time that future president John F. Kennedy came of
age, Rose Kennedy conquered British society, and Joseph Kennedy fought on his own contrarian terms
to ally with Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill and so safeguard America and protect both
the United States and Britain from fascist tyranny. From 1938 to 1940, the Kennedy family served as
America’s dazzling and bold ambassadors not just to Britain but to the world; they were witnesses and
players in a drama involving astonishing upheaval and change.
Threatened by the gathering storm of war, Britain—as experienced by the Kennedy family at the
close of the 1930s—was a romantic, anxious, and decadent place of spectacular weekend house parties
at grand country estates, nightly debutante balls and dinners amid the floodlit gardens of London
townhouses, extravagant charity events, and court presentations at Buckingham Palace. In three of the
most tumultuous years of the century, a catastrophic war loomed menacingly on the horizon and
slowly but inexorably commandeered this world, culminating with all the fury of the Blitz and the
Battle of Britain.
Central to this turbulent era were the intricate and shifting relationships among Kennedy and
British prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill and their personal and political
interactions with Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, at a time when the fate of
freedom was in doubt.
THE KENNEDYS AMIDST THE GATHERING STORM endeavors to present a fully rounded and empathetic
portrait of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, a man who has become a favorite whipping boy of
twentieth-century historians. His story has too often been told from the perspectives of Roosevelt and
Churchill, men whose ambitions clashed with Kennedy’s own goals. Kennedy’s troubled relationships
with two of the twentieth century’s most venerated leaders have led many of their biographers to cast
him in the worst possible light. In his recent magisterial biography Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
Champion of Freedom, Conrad Black points out that Kennedy was “ultimately widely reckoned to be
one of the worst diplomatic appointments in the history of the United States.” Was Kennedy really
such a bad representative of his country? One of his weaknesses was to see things in black and white,
but many of those who have written about him, including authors Ted Schwarz and Laurence Leamer,
have fallen into the same trap. In my previous book, The Roosevelts and the Royals, I, too, portrayed
Kennedy from the Roosevelt point of view, shortchanging him as an opportunistic thorn in the
president’s side.
The Kennedys came to London at a time when the bruising financial commitments and loss of
life during the First World War had not secured a democratic Europe and the American people stood
firmly against sending U.S. soldiers into another catastrophic European war. President Roosevelt and
the State Department had not yet developed a coherent philosophy of statecraft and diplomacy to deal
with the menace of fascism. They failed to provide Kennedy with an agenda to advance or a vision to
propound.
Joseph Kennedy and Britain’s ill-fated prime minister Neville Chamberlain are easy targets for
historians. The myths about Kennedy abound. He has been portrayed as a completely self-centered,
anti-Semitic, Nazi-loving defeatist, just as his ally Chamberlain has been depicted as a foolhardy,
myopic appeaser. Churchill himself contributed to Chamberlain’s negative image by dubbing him “an
old town clerk looking at European affairs from the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.”
There is no question that the willingness of Kennedy and Chamberlain to allow Germany to
swallow up Czechoslovakia and Austria falls on the wrong side of history. But they have frequently
been caricatured by historians and biographers, and the two men’s geopolitical motives and
philosophies—understandable, and existing within the mainstream of their era—have been denigrated
or ignored. Both Neville Chamberlain and Joseph Kennedy deserve fair and comprehensive portrayals
of their perspectives and of their exhaustive diplomatic efforts, in the context of the turbulent years
from 1938 to 1940. In this book, I will consider Joseph Kennedy in light of recent revisionist
scholarship about Neville Chamberlain—most notably Robert Self’s 2006 biography and David
Dutton’s book reviewing Chamberlain’s reputation. These authors carefully delineate the military,
political, economic, and diplomatic factors that created the context for the Munich agreement.
Like these scholars, I believe we must study and assess Kennedy’s and Chamberlain’s intentions
and decisions in view of what they knew and believed in 1938 and 1939, not just in the context of what
we now know about Hitler and the goals of all of Europe’s emerging totalitarian regimes. The
circumstances of the late 1930s offered a great deal of justification for the arguments made by
Kennedy, Chamberlain, and many others that Hitler’s territorial ambitions could be appeased and
contained, thus avoiding or delaying another calamitous war. They cited the widely presumed
superiority of the German war machine, the reluctance of the British dominions to join in the fight,
British foreign policy traditions of offering limited concessions when necessary to preserve European
peace (a higher priority than maintaining the status quo in Europe), the straits that Europe and
America confronted amid the world’s worst depression ever, and—especially for Joe Kennedy—the
belief, born of the aftermath of World War I, that going to war would economically devastate the
West and destroy the very system of democracy that war sought to save.
This book will attempt to do justice to an extremely complex man. Joe Kennedy embodied many
contradictions. While raised in an anti-Semitic environment, he did more than FDR’s other European
ambassadors to assist Jewish refugees. Though shrewd and extremely aggressive in the business
world, as a diplomat Kennedy was a tenacious proponent of accommodation with Britain’s and
America’s adversaries. Proud of his realistic approach, he was also a highly emotional man who
misread Hitler and Nazism until it was too late. Blunt and outspoken, he could also be extremely
secretive. He was optimistic about his personal power to accomplish his aims, yet he would be gloomy
about Britain and America’s fate in war. At times selfish, he was, nonetheless, often generous, even
tenderhearted.
THERE WERE IN ESSENCE three different Kennedy ambassadorships, corresponding roughly to the three
years Joe held the post. Two of them were astonishingly successful. In 1938 he was an ebullient,
energetic, creative, and amazingly well-connected envoy, providing useful, up-to-date information to
the U.S. government. That first year, he appeared to observers to be pro-British in his attitudes in a
way that some thought meant he had denigrated his own country and “gone native,” but in truth he
allied with Chamberlain because his accommodationist policies seemed to offer the best protection for
the United States. During 1939 he was perceived both publicly and by the British government to be a
pro-American nationalist, as well as a disillusioned pacifist, a maverick who would try almost
anything to avert war. By 1940, once Chamberlain’s negotiations failed and war had erupted, Kennedy
moved painfully but steadily toward advocating limited aid and intervention by the United States,
while he vehemently opposed direct American involvement in the conflict. As events overtook him, he
would become marginalized, ignored, angry, depressed, and pessimistic. His ambassadorship is
remembered like a marriage gone bad—mainly for the last and deteriorating phase. I seek to evaluate
it as a more variegated tenure during which Kennedy served his country with a dedication and a
conviction that was honestly felt if at times misguided, until he became embittered by the strains of
war and diplomatic isolation.
It is time to hear in more depth Kennedy’s own words, from his London diaries and his
diplomatic memoir, which he never published because he feared, with justification, that it would harm
his sons’ political careers. Of course, any historian has to approach Kennedy’s writing with caution.
Joe was, after all, one of the great innovators of political public relations, once declaring, “It is not
what you are that counts, but what people think you are.” The memoir was revised over fifteen years
with several ghostwriters, and it can resemble a hall of mirrors. In fact, it begins with a
misrepresentation: Kennedy proclaims that he never thought about becoming an ambassador (“The
president’s suggestion was a complete surprise. Diplomatic service had not suggested itself to me.”),
but other accounts make clear that he sought out the position.
As revealed in his letters, diary, and memoir, Ambassador Kennedy’s flaws were substantial,
even tragic. Among them were his failure to see the implications of Nazi ideology; his overemphasis
on an economic view of international relations; his failure—very typical of Americans of his era—to
acknowledge the importance of maintaining a balance of power in European politics in order to
prevent a country like Germany from dominating the continent; his inability to recognize the
intangible aspects of spirit that would allow Britain and democracy to triumph in war; his tendency, at
times, to confuse his own point of view with that of the United States; and a propensity for reckless
behavior in both his professional and personal life, which included some highly publicized
extramarital affairs. Joe was more of a tactician than a strategist. A vehement advocate of democracy,
he prided himself on being a practical, no-nonsense American businessman who barreled ahead and
got things done. Such an attitude had fostered his own fortune. As a diplomat, he based his policy
advocacy on the exigencies of the constantly changing conditions he observed. But he was so hyperrealistic that he could not project idealism in an era that demanded vision. He lacked an overarching
political view of how to transform America’s relations with the world.
Yet without denying his flaws, The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm shows Joe Kennedy’s
genuine patriotism, his desire to serve the United States and safeguard its interests as he understood
them, his diligent efforts to forge far-ranging contacts in politics, the press, business, and society and
so ferret out the freshest and most acute information for the president and the State Department, his
work in fostering British-American relations, his prescience about the economic fate of the British
Empire, his compassion for refugees and Americans stranded abroad, his considerable organizational
skills, and his personal qualities of generosity, warmth, kindness, and consideration. Kennedy
maintained a personal and professional commitment to excellence, which he passed on to all of his
children, particularly to his son Jack. Joseph Kennedy was a fiercely protective father, and, as
ambassador, he often treated America as if it were another child he needed to shield from harm.
One key to Joe Kennedy’s personality was his fierce loyalty, a virtue taught by his father, Patrick,
whom he deeply loved. His loyalty was a product of his own insecure identity. Forever the outsider, he
could never feel assured of his place in the world. His stubborn loyalty to his own beliefs got him in
trouble when he took it to extremes, as he did with his staunch advocacy of U.S. isolationism. During
his ambassadorship, his relationship with the president deteriorated, but he stayed in the job when
others might have quit. When Franklin Roosevelt circumvented him in the last year of his
ambassadorship, Kennedy was deeply wounded. He felt caught between his need to remain loyal to his
president and his desire to lash out and break free.
THE KENNEDYS’ TIME IN LONDON solidified in America’s imagination the story of a family dynasty as
compelling as that of the Roosevelts. From 1938 to 1940, the Kennedy family crystallized their own
identity as protagonists on the world stage, making public the competitive and clannish intra-family
dynamics that would fuel their mythic rise to power. One of the many reasons Kennedy wanted the job
in London was to satisfy Rose, an adventurous and highly intelligent woman who longed for the
opportunities accorded the wife of an ambassador. Highly social, the daughter of Boston mayor John
“Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Rose loved traveling and feeling like an actor in the drama of history. In her
early twenties, during Honey Fitz’s mayoralty, she had substituted for her socially retiring mother as
her father’s hostess. Now, after a quarter century out of the limelight, she would delight in mingling
with the aristocratic, royal, and political leaders of Britain. Rose was an astute diplomat whose advice
her husband too often ignored. She later said that had she been born in a different era, she might have
become a politician herself.
Rose was a biographer’s delight; she took great care to paste into her London diary correctly
dated newspaper clippings about significant current events or family outings. In England she would
relish the opportunity to teach her children about British and European culture and was eager to
witness with them history in action, but she was also often preoccupied by making the right social
connections and attending fashionable parties and weekends at grand houses—all events that would
enhance her own social status. At times she would leave Joe in charge of the family while she traveled
or shopped abroad.
In the privately printed family memoir about their mother, Her Grace Above Gold, Ted Kennedy
summarized the roles he saw Rose and Joe Kennedy playing in their children’s lives: “He was our
greatest fan and she was our greatest teacher. We have had our father’s drive and our mother’s grace,
our father’s love of action and our mother’s love of history and scholarship, our father’s gift of
athletics and our mother’s gift of politics. Dad was our greatest booster, expecting much from us in
return. Mother supplied the gentleness, support and encouragement that made Dad’s standards
reachable.”
When the Kennedys arrived in London, they had been married for almost twenty-four years.
Eight years before, Joe had cabled Rose, on her fortieth birthday, that she was the Eighth Wonder of
the World. By the time of the ambassadorship, Rose and Joe had created a respectful and appreciative
partnership focused on raising their children, advancing Joe’s political career, and the family’s
dynastic ambitions. Joe’s philandering had become more discreet, and he had long since given up his
midlife crisis, a time when he thought of divorcing Rose and marrying actress Gloria Swanson. Rose
maintained a willful blindness to her husband’s adultery, which would continue during his
ambassadorship, when he would have a brief but politically entangling affair with Clare Boothe Luce,
the writer and wife of Time magazine founder and prominent Republican Henry Luce, and begin a
nearly seven-year alliance with the showgirl Daye Eliot, a friend of the entertainment correspondent
and author Doris Lilly. Over seventeen years, from 1915 to 1932, Rose Kennedy had borne her
husband nine children, who at the start of his ambassadorship ranged in age from twenty-three-yearold Joe Jr. to Teddy, who was nearly six. Their second son, Jack, was twenty-one. Of the middle
children, Rosemary was nineteen, Kathleen seventeen, Eunice sixteen, Patricia thirteen, Robert twelve,
Jean nine, and Teddy six. In London they would take on a strikingly public presence, projecting a
clamoring, headlong vigor to a British people who would become increasingly eager to embrace all
things American.
Before joining the family in London, Joe Jr. would first finish his senior year at Harvard, his
father’s alma mater, and his younger brother Jack would complete his sophomore year there as well.
Dashing and bold, Joe Jr. was temperamentally similar to his father and shared many of his political
views. Both Kennedy père and fils opposed U.S. military engagement in Europe; they believed
Americans should stay at home and build up the United States as a fortress against world conflict.
Father and son perceived Hitler’s Germany as a possible bulwark against the spread of the Soviet
system they loathed. But as fascist aggression outran the isolationist effort to curtail it, Joe Jr. would
be trapped by his need to defend his family’s reputation; he would ultimately come to a tragic end
trying to prove his mettle as a combatant in the war he and his father had so vehemently fought to
avoid.
Joe and Rose saw their oldest son as a model child and gave him responsibility for helping to
raise his younger siblings. Having too well absorbed his father’s lessons in competitiveness, Joe
bullied his thin and sickly younger brother Jack to the point of physical sadism. Joe Jr. must have
sensed from early on that Jack’s lively intelligence and razor wit made him a serious contender for
attention in a large family. The Kennedys’ second son would suffer feelings of inferiority after having
been so dominated by his older brother. He would handle them by competing with his aggressive and
sometimes sarcastic Casanova of a brother to conquer women and be socially brilliant.
Joe and Rose’s third child and eldest daughter, Rosemary, consumed much of her mother’s
attention. She was mildly mentally retarded, just enough to be painfully aware of her inability to keep
pace with even her younger siblings. Her frustration led to frequent rages. Pretty, with striking green
eyes, she would have been a magnet for men had she not been carefully chaperoned in England, where
she would dance with exuberance at London’s debutante balls.
The leading light among the girls was seventeen-year-old Kathleen, known as Kick. Petite and
dainty like her mother, she was not conventionally pretty, but she was possessed of brilliant blue eyes,
perfect skin, ebullience, and a self-deprecating sense of humor, a characteristic she shared with Jack.
Kick would be named by London’s social press as the “most exciting debutante of 1938.” She would
remain an American star in the English firmament even after her father departed his post, until
tragedy struck her down a decade after she first appeared in London. Bobby, the third son, was the
least sociable of the Kennedy boys, and he would have trouble making friends his own age. He could
be aggressive and tenacious, but he was also kind and thoughtful. Eunice, gawky and thin, prone to
sleepless nights, had a more nervous temperament than her siblings. She and her brother Bobby
inherited their father’s intensity and, like their mother, were deeply religious. Compassionate and
conscientious, taking special care of her retarded older sister, Eunice was the leader of the younger
group of children—beautiful and shrewd Patricia; Jean, a bright, reserved, and pudgy late bloomer;
and Teddy, who was the most outgoing of them all.
JOE KENNEDY’S AMBASSADORSHIP is a classic American immigrant tragedy. It reveals how the powerful
effects of damaging prejudice endured in childhood can reverberate throughout a life and lead, at
times unconsciously, to self-destruction. Kennedy, a second-generation Irish-American and a Catholic
in a pervasively Protestant nation where immigration remained a volatile political issue, was deeply
wounded by the youthful social rejection he suffered at the hands of the WASP establishment in
Boston and beyond, and thus was never secure about his place in the world. He labored for thirty years
to win a position of prominence from which he could fulfill his dreams of social acceptance and
economic and psychic security. His triumphant arrival in London accompanied by his dynamic family
promised to defuse his profound sense of being a second-class citizen. For a while, as the Kennedys
were welcomed by politicians, aristocrats, and intellectuals, all eager to court America, his dream was
realized. In the end, however, Kennedy’s adherence to the idea of peace at all costs, his staunch
advocacy of American isolationism, and his rebellious behavior cost him the friendship of the British
and the admiration of his colleagues at home. As ambassador he would ultimately sabotage himself,
painfully consigning himself to the role of outsider that would endure even to the time his son won the
presidency.
John F. Kennedy’s path to the White House began in London. His father’s political fortunes
dimmed in those years, as his own star rose. In 1938, Joe Kennedy was widely mentioned as a
potential candidate in the 1940 presidential elections; by the end of 1940 he was exiled from
government life. During this time Jack was the author of a best-selling book, Why England Slept,
about the reasons Britain failed to prepare for war; his political career was on the ascendant. The
Kennedy children were profoundly affected by their father’s ambassadorship; they spent the next half
century reacting to his downfall and endeavoring to avoid being tarred by it. Jack carefully studied his
father’s diplomatic triumphs and failures in London and developed his own independent worldview
and a political philosophy that would shape his character, his career, and his presidency. Considering
himself an idealist without illusions, Jack surveyed the international political scene and emerged as a
man who would balance power with negotiation, brilliant public relations with a complicated private
life, and heroic rhetoric with pragmatic action.
Like George W. Bush, the Kennedy sons had to figure out a response to the legacy of a father
who was perceived as weak and lacking an optimistic political vision, and who thus had humiliatingly
failed. Jack Kennedy used his father’s tenure in Europe to travel widely and satisfy his enormous
curiosity about other political systems and cultures, which would inspire his book and help him create
an identity as an internationalist American.
The father’s thousand days as ambassador in London would hover over the son’s thousand-day
tenure in the White House. Learning from his father’s mistakes, Jack would embody hope, flexibility,
strength, and visionary optimism. Moving beyond his father’s focus on keeping the world secure, Jack
Kennedy felt secure enough in himself that he could focus on transforming it. His extraordinary place
in our nation’s psyche is the greatest legacy of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s tenure in London.
Joe Kennedy’s ambassadorship may offer some positive lessons for our own time. In an era when
it is clear that hasty interventionism can have disastrous consequences, Kennedy’s emphasis on using
economic incentives and negotiation with dictators can be seen in a slightly kinder light. Might he be
remembered a little less as an appeaser, with all the negative connotations the word now carries, and
more as someone who, though he failed to articulate a clear moral vision, did explore every reasonable
avenue for peace? As Kennedy said in December 1950, “Is it appeasement to withdraw from unwise
commitments, to arm yourself to the teeth to make clear just exactly how and for what you will fight?
…If it is wise in our interest not to make commitments that endanger our security, and this is
‘appeasement,’ then I am for appeasement.’”
PROLOGUE
Twisting the Lion’s Tail
June to December 1937
IN MID-JUNE, Joseph Patrick Kennedy awoke early at his grand Maryland château and dashed nude into
his swimming pool to do brisk laps. As usual, he was at his desk at Marwood before 7:30 A.M.,
working at his job as chairman of the federal Maritime Commission and calling press barons,
politicians, and reporters to trade favors and exchange the latest Washington news and Hollywood
gossip.
On this mild June morning, he was also preparing for one of the biggest negotiations of his
hugely successful and controversial career. If all went as he was planning, he and his family would be
propelled onto the international stage where, as Irish-Catholics, they could finally earn the acceptance
and respect Joe had long sought from America’s Protestant establishment. Despite being one of the
most hospitable and sought-after figures in Washington political and media circles, Joe Kennedy was
privately weary of feeling unacceptable to those who mattered. Now he thought he could change all
that.
Three years earlier, Joe had come to Washington as Franklin Roosevelt’s first chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission, which terminated corrupt trading practices and regulated the
stock exchanges amid the financial uproar of the depression and New Deal. A forty-eight-year-old
Irish-American who had made his fortune over the past two decades by investing in the stock market,
real estate, movie theaters, a film production company, and a liquor franchise, he had signaled his
higher ambitions by renting this French Renaissance estate on 125 wooded acres, complete with an
underground movie theater, a vaulted dining hall—copied after the dining room of England’s King
James I—and twelve bedrooms. The château had been built by a Chicago real-estate mogul to impress
his showgirl bride; Joe would use it to court President Franklin Roosevelt and his powerful cronies. He
had installed a private elevator to entice the disabled president to leave the White House for a swim,
cocktails, dinner, and the latest Hollywood movie, flown in for the occasion. FDR had, indeed,
enjoyed bringing his entourage to Joe’s launching pad, socializing with the mogul’s pals and amusing
them with his ribald and jocular stories, all the while keeping his eye on his friend, whom he knew to
be ambitious and mercurial.
Joe left his office in the late afternoon and went into the château’s dining room to await the
arrival of the president’s eldest son, James Roosevelt, known as Jimmy, with whom he had an
avuncular and arguably exploitative relationship. Jimmy’s father had appointed Joe to the
chairmanship of the Maritime Commission only last February, but the job of revamping the