Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (106 page)

“I
T IS STILL
too early to judge the implications of this new coup,” the
New York Times
remarked on the day of the announcement, echoing a sentiment shared by observers across the planet. “But one immediate significance revealed itself when German quarters spread the rumor that Herr Hitler was also determined to force a solution this week of the German-Polish conflict…. A German solution will be sought by diplomacy if possible; if not, by the German Army.”

Roosevelt did what he could to encourage the diplomatic solution. Hitler had never responded—other than in his scathing Reichstag speech—to the president’s letter of the previous April urging a promise of nonaggression against Germany’s neighbors. At a loss as to what else to do, Roosevelt wrote another letter. “I am again addressing myself to you with the hope that the war which impends, and the consequent disaster to all peoples everywhere, may yet be averted,” he told Hitler. Without presuming to judge between the claims of Germany and Poland, Roosevelt called upon the German government—and the Polish government: he wrote a similar letter to Poland’s president—to engage in direct negotiations, to submit their dispute to arbitration, or to appoint an impartial mediator. “I appeal to you in the name of the people of the United States, and I believe in the name of peace-loving men and women everywhere, to agree to the solution of the controversies existing between your government and that of Poland through the adoption of one of the alternative methods I have proposed.”

Poland predictably accepted Roosevelt’s offer. Hitler, equally predictably, ignored it. The dictator likewise brushed aside efforts by Britain and France for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He delivered an ultimatum to the Polish government that, if accepted, would have dismembered the Polish state. But even this demand wasn’t serious, for rather than await a reply, he gave his army the order to march. On September 1, a million German troops poured east, and the second European war in a generation began.

“I
T IS AN
eerie experience walking through a darkened London,” Kathleen Kennedy wrote.

You literally feel your way, and with groping finger make sudden contact with a lamp post against which leans a steel-helmeted figure with his gas mask slung at his side. You cross the road in obedience to little green crosses winking in the murk above your head. You pause to watch the few cars, which with blackened lampsmove through the streets. With but a glimmer you trace their ghostly progress. You look, and see no more, the scintillating signs of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, the glittering announcements of smokes and soaps. Gone are the gaily-lit hotels and nightclubs; now in their place are somber buildings surrounded by sandbags. You wander through Kensington Garden in search of beauty and solitude and find only trenches and groups of ghostly figures working sound machines and searchlights to locate the enemy. Gone from the parks are the soapbox orators and the nightly strollers. But yet the moon shines through and one can see new beauties in the silent, deserted city of London. It is a new London, a London that looks like Barcelona before the bombs fell.

Kathleen Kennedy was the nineteen-year-old daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador to Britain. Joe Kennedy was an odd choice for the post, being Irish by descent and a bootlegger and stock market speculator by profession. His Irish blood inclined him to think ill of the British, while his bootlegging and speculation caused many respectable Democrats to think ill of
him
. But he had opened his wallet to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and was rewarded with appointment as founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. More than a few observers wondered that Roosevelt had set this fox to guard the henhouse, but the appointment paid off with high marks for both Kennedy and the SEC. Kennedy endeared himself further to Roosevelt by taking on Father Coughlin and demonstrating that the radio priest didn’t command the allegiance of all American Catholics. Kennedy revealed a soft spot for fascism during the Spanish civil war, when he reminded Roosevelt that American Catholics wanted no truck with the Communist-backed Loyalists. Roosevelt didn’t want to intervene in Spain, either, although for different reasons, and in 1938 he sent Kennedy to London as American ambassador.

The Court of St. James’s was the stuffiest assignment for any American diplomat, and it gratified Roosevelt’s sense of humor to think of Kennedy causing the toffs to choke on their toddies. Yet Kennedy got on famously with the government of Neville Chamberlain, in fact becoming the prime minister’s staunchest defender against those who criticized his policy of appeasement. And when the policy apparently failed—when the war began in 1939—he continued to defend it, saying that it hadn’t failed at all but bought Britain precious time. “It is a terrible thing to contemplate,” he wrote in his diary on September 3, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, “but the war will prove to the world what a great service Chamberlain did to the world and especially for Britain.” If the prime minister had let Hitler start a war at the time of the Munich conference, Kennedy said, he would not have had public opinion behind him. “A great many people in England and especially in the dominions were not at all convinced that Hitler’s demands on Sudetenland were not fairly reasonable.” Moreover, Britain might have had to go to war alone, as France wasn’t eager to fight. Finally, Britain had been utterly unready for war. “England’s condition to meet an air raid attack was almost pathetic. They couldn’t have licked a good police force attack in the air. Anti-aircraft guns and organization was pathetic. The Germans would have come over and slaughtered the people.”

England’s anti-aircraft capacity still left much to be desired, which was why Kathleen Kennedy and her siblings had to stumble about in the dark of blacked-out London. “Joe returned from an exploring trip with a very swollen, black eye,” she wrote of her eldest brother. “No one believed his story of walking into a lamp post until we read in the next morning’s paper of hundreds bumping into trees, falling on the curb, and being hit by autos with such results as broken legs, fractures, even death. Thus now one hears tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward.”

Kathleen’s comments were for herself and her family; her father’s were for Roosevelt. “High Government officials are depressed beyond words that it has become necessary for the United States to revert to its old Neutrality Law,” the ambassador wrote. Chamberlain and the others wanted the opportunity to purchase American equipment, on a cash-and-carry basis. But they felt Washington was letting them down. “America has talked a lot about her sympathies but, when called on for action, has only given assistance to Britain’s enemies.” All the same, London would continue to look to Washington and would lay plans accordingly. “The English are going to think of every way of maintaining favorable public opinion in the United States, figuring that sooner or later they can obtain real help from America.”

Kennedy warned against trusting Britain’s capacity to tend to anything but its self-interest, however sweet its words might be. “As long as we are out of the war and the possibility is still present that we might ever come in, England will be as considerate as she can not to upset us too much. Because of course she wants to drag us in.” Kennedy related a story from his days in business. Charles Schwab, the steel man, had told him during the First World War that labor always seemed to get the better of negotiations with management. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘Joe, because that’s their problem 365 days of the year.’” The British were in a similar position with respect to the United States, Kennedy told Roosevelt. “It is their problem now twenty-four hours a day.”

R
OOSEVELT RARELY
confined himself to a single view on any subject, and for a counterpoint to Kennedy’s warnings about Britain he cultivated the current incarnation of John Bull himself. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had communicated only once since their 1918 encounter, and only in one direction. In 1933 Churchill sent Roosevelt a copy of his biography of Marlborough—a Churchill ancestor—containing an inscription endorsing the New Deal: “With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.” This sentiment might have read oddly, coming from a Tory, but Churchill’s politics were unpredictable on various subjects other than the British empire, which he defended with unwavering determination. Churchill had been railing against Hitler for years and decrying the appeasement policies of Chamberlain only slightly less long; as those policies came a cropper with the German invasion of Poland, Churchill appeared a possible, even likely, successor to Chamberlain. The prime minister felt obliged to bring Churchill into the cabinet, as First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he had held during the First World War.

Churchill’s appointment provided Roosevelt a pretext for striking up a correspondence. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill on September 11, 1939. “Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors, but the essential is not very different…. I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.” The president invited Churchill to bypass the normal channels of the American State Department and the British Foreign Office. “You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” (Lest this invitation cause trouble with Chamberlain, Roosevelt wrote the prime minister on the same day: “I hope you will at all times feel free to write me personally and outside of diplomatic procedure about any problems as they arise.”)

Roosevelt’s letter to Churchill arrived in early October, the mails having been slowed by the outbreak of the war and the concern it raised for the security of shipping. Churchill responded almost at once with a telephone call taking Roosevelt at his word that he would welcome personal exchanges. The American naval attaché in Berlin had been informed by a German admiral that the British were planning to blow up an American passenger ship, the
Iroquois,
sailing from Ireland to America with more than five hundred Americans evacuating the war zone and to try to pin responsibility on the Germans. The attaché reported the information to Washington, where the administration queried British officials, who naturally threw the blame—for disinformation—back on the Germans. Churchill raised the subject in his telephone conversation with Roosevelt. He warned the president that the Germans might be intending to destroy the ship themselves and blame the British. The danger from submarines was nonexistent in the part of the Atlantic the
Iroquois
had reached. “The only method can be a time-bomb planted at Queenstown,” Churchill said. “We think this not inconceivable.” Churchill went on to urge Roosevelt to publicize the German deception. “Full exposure” of all the facts known to the American government, he said, was the “only way of frustrating the plot.” Action was “urgent.”