London Legman

(See Cover)

On a clear cool afternoon, Tuesday, August 4, 1914, a grave, spare, rather homely North Carolinian entered the courtyard before the massive grey British Foreign Office on Downing Street. He turned to the right, passed the guards, walked down a broad ornate corridor, passed through a large oak door into a spacious room. Its windows looked out on the tranquil lake and lawn and trees of St. James's Park. The clocks of London struck three.

Walter Hines Page, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, turned unsmiling to a tall, worn, pale man who leaned against the mantlepiece, Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary. They sat down, like old friends, and Grey, grim chin propped on folded knuckles, talked:

". . . It is upon . . . solemn compacts . . . that civilization rests. England would be forever contemptible if it should sit by. ... I have therefore asked you to come to tell you that this morning we sent an ultimatum to Germany. . . . There will be war."

That week there were three days when Ambassador Page had no time to take a bath.

On August 21, 1939, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, returned by plane to London, fresh from a month's vacation with his wife and nine children spent at an estate famous for its roses, Domain de Ranguin, five miles from Cannes, on the French Riviera. In the two weeks that followed, the red-faced, red-haired Boston Irishman went many times in the footsteps if not in the mood of Walter Page to the red-draped oak-and-leather office in Downing Street. There he saw a man like him only in that both are deeply religious, an extremely tall, gaunt, bony-faced man, with a sensitive mouth and a talent for gentleness, the Rt. Hon. Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax. The end came on Sunday morning, September 3 when Kennedy sent a triple priority cable to Secretary Hull reporting that the British had moved up their ultimatum deadline to Hitler one hour. There would be war at n a.m.

The St. James's Beat. An Ambassador is a glorified reporter, a legman in a tailcoat. His main job is to interview people, get news, report accurately. To do this he must 1) have the confidence of the people he represents, 2) win the confidence of the people he is assigned to.

Walter Hines Page was an Anglophile, literary, philosophic. No Anglophile is grinning, cussing Joe Kennedy, known and loved by millions of English-speaking men.

From one point of view, Joe Kennedy is a common denominator of the U. S. businessman -- "safe," "middle-of-the-road," a horse-trader at heart, with one sharp eye on the market and one fond eye on his children. But he is a super common denominator, uncommonly commonsensible, stiletto-shrewd, practical as only a former president of a small bank can be. As Ambassador Kennedy his attitude is the same as that of Businessman Kennedy: Where do we get off?

On May 6, 1915, Ambassador Page wrote: "We all have the feeling here that more and more frightful things are about to happen." On May 7, at 4 p. m. an aide handed Page a message: the Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine and 1,198 men, women and children were drowned, 124 of them Americans. With that, Page dropped his last pretense at neutrality. He wrote: "I can see only one proper thing: that all the world should fall to and hunt this wild beast down."

On September 3 last, Ambassador Kennedy ordered his No. 2 Personal Secretary James Seymour to form a small staff for regular night duty. Seymour bought a collapsible cot (by day it is folded up behind the Ambassador's black sofa) and took the first "lobster trick." He had no nap that night or since. By 3 a. m. he phoned Ambassador Kennedy at his country house that the Athenia was sinking, torpedoed by a German submarine, with 1,418 people aboard, some 300 of them Americans (TIME, Sept. 11. Kennedy cabled to Franklin Roosevelt: "All on Athenia rescued except those killed by explosion. The Admiralty advises me survivors picked up by other ships. List of casualties later. Thank God."

Kennedy had worked fast. Hanging to the telephone, he had ordered consulates in Belfast, Dublin and Liverpool--where most Americans embarked--to get the names of passengers. When he arrived that morning at the seven-story red-brick former apartment house that is now the U. S. Embassy, No. 1 Grosvenor Square, he was able to cable the State Department an almost complete list of Americans aboard. Two days later, in tension and in shirt sleeves, Joe Kennedy spent his 51st birthday working at his desk.

Tension. Kneeling before William Henry Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston, on October 7, 1914, Joe Kennedy, Harvard '12, took as his wife Rose Fitzgerald, 22-year-old daughter of former Mayor John Francis Fitzgerald--known as "Honey Fitz" because he charmed voters by crooning Sweet Adeline.

Next he took as his aide Honey Fitz's secretary, Edward Moore. Eddie Moore, Irish as a clay pipe, was the first member of the family Kennedy founded, nurse, comforter, friend, stooge, package-bearer, adviser, who played games with Joe and the children, bought neckties and bonds for Joe, opened doors, wrote letters, investigated investments, saw to it Joe wore his rubbers.

Last week ancient Eddie Moore, still on Kennedy's personal pay roll, was too busy with his boss even to play golf on Sunday. Kennedy sat in shirt sleeves at his desk, grabbing by turns at the three phones at his left, talking to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, to Lord Halifax, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, to Franklin Roosevelt. As he always does, Kennedy worked with windows thrown wide, coat tossed on a rack, vest draped over a chair, the sleeves of his hard-collared shirt rolled over his freckled forearms, tugging his black suspenders, cussing, grumbling incoherently, snapping popgun orders.

On his desk in the blue-walled room stood a vase of roses; on the table behind a vase of gladioli. Signs of stress were an electrically tuned radio on a chair near the fireplace, another radio near Eddie Moore's door, a calendar from which careful Secretary Moore had forgotten to tear off the August sheet.

Last week Joe Kennedy had already shuttered and barred the palatial Embassy house at No. 14 Prince's Gate (donated to the U. S. in 1921 by J. P. Morgan) and moved to a country house away from the terror of bombs. Thence each morning he drove into London in a Chrysler, waved swiftly through traffic by bobbies who spotted the large "CD" disk (Corps Diplomatique) on the radiator-grille. Every day he had to see at least one member of Britain's War Cabinet. Meanwhile, there was the job of sending the nine Kennedy children* back to the U. S., three at a time and arranging to reopen their home at Bronxville, N. Y. (The other Kennedy homes, in Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, Mass., are closed.)

With 9,000 Americans to shepherd in England, with tangible U. S. business interests under his eye, with 150 Americans cabling from the U. S. daily for information on Athenia survivors, with British bigwigs to see, Franklin Roosevelt to keep informed, Joe Kennedy had a bigger job. Twice he had to make hard choices: on Tuesday, whether to get a haircut or have lunch (he chose haircut); on Wednesday, whether to get mad at the State Department or the Maritime Commission for delays in ordering South America-bound cruise ships to head for Europe instead (he chose Maritime Commission).

The Kennedy Way. The Maritime Commission operates today on a pattern Chairman Joe Kennedy laid out for it in 75 16-hour days--even as the Securities and Exchange Commission yet works along the lines he laid down in 431 work-crammed days.

Newsboy, candy-butcher, Harvard athlete--in three summers as a bus-driver he made $5,000--Kennedy's life has gone in the sections and jerks of a fast freight train. He was a bank examiner for 18 months, a bank president for three years (youngest in the U. S., at 25). For 20 months he built ships for Bethlehem Steel and for an Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Roosevelt. For two years, nine months he was president of the Film Booking Offices of America, for five months chairman of Keith-Albee-Orpheum, for six weeks special counsel to First National Pictures, for twelve weeks reorganizer of RCA, for 74 days special adviser to Paramount Pictures. Wherever he was, he was also Joe Kennedy, the Wall Street speculator, who once said: "Anyone can lose his shirt in Wall Street if he has sufficient capital and inside information."

The old libel that the State Department is made up of "cookie-pushers" whose chief concern is the hang of their striped trousers, was just true enough to make many a grave, correct, dry-worded gentleman in the Department dislike the appointment of Joe Kennedy to London. They correctly foresaw such incidents as Kennedy's telling Queen Elizabeth to her face that she was "a cute trick." They did not foresee that Queen Elizabeth would be pleased and flattered beyond words.

Several things spiked State Department guns: 1) Kennedy proved extremely efficient, did things faster and better; 2) he rapidly became closer to the British Government and people than any Ambassador anyone could remember. By Munichtime, a year ago, Kennedy had the Department with him, but he was preparing to resign.

Franklin Roosevelt had heard disturbing reports that Kennedy: 1) had 1940 ambitions, 2) had pleased British conservatives by telling them a "safe" man would be in the White House after 1940. Came the crisis, and Franklin Roosevelt decided not to change horses in midstream. Joe Kennedy had foretold the flood.

In the fall of 1938, Joe Kennedy worked with the appeasers, and although his faith was badly shaken during the Munich crisis, hoped settlement would be made, told Americans there would be no war in 1938. Last winter he changed tunes. With William Christian Bullitt, U. S. Ambassador to France, he became a prophet of doom, a skeleton at the feast. Again & again he croaked warnings that 1939 was a year of war. Certain it was that Kennedy was in Franklin Roosevelt's mind last Easter, when in bidding good-by to the citizens of Warm Springs, the President said: "I'll be back in the fall--if we don't have a war" (TIME, April 17).

Three Aces. In England, France and Poland Franklin Roosevelt last week had three Ambassadors who were doing an unusually good job. And the other two were extraordinary foils to rough-&-ready Joe Kennedy. In Paris William Bullitt, onetime Philadelphia socialite, dilettante left-winger, champagne-gossip of Europe, consistent Hitler alarmist, has the greater fund of pre-War post-War knowledge, has long been the "closest" to Roosevelt. In Poland, ducking German bombs* was Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, another rich young (42) Philadelphian, who had turned serious diplomat./-

Like the Due de Morny, who didn't mind the people as long as they didn't come at him downwind, Biddle and Bullitt have had to learn how to shake hands with the grubby masses without visibly wincing at the thought of a soiled white glove. But long before Joe Kennedy was appointed to London, Bullitt--who in Paris goes everywhere, sees everybody, knows all--had made himself a diplomatic success.

Upon Ambassadors Kennedy & Bullitt will weigh more & more heavily the task of accurately appraising and interpreting events in Europe--with always in their minds as in the minds of all U. S. citizens the mounting question: What do these events mean to the U. S.? What might the U. S. do in a world already war-torn and threatened with chaotic consequences.

No trace of un-neutrality has shown in any Kennedy speech. Whatever his private views of Naziism, he has never sounded them from any platform he mounted as a U. S. official. Repeatedly he warned Great Britain against the easy belief that the U. S. "can be had." In his first speech as Ambassador, at the Pilgrims dinner in London in March 1938, he stated the view he has consistently maintained since, that the U. S. public opposes entangling alliances, that "we are careful and wary in the relationships we establish with foreign countries."

That night he told the British why President Roosevelt had decided to build up the U. S. Navy. Said Kennedy: "People understand battleships. . . . There they are. They can see them; they have to pay for them; their children serve on them. ... If the Nations should again become engulfed in the cataclysm of a general war, we should make ourselves very strong and then pursue whatever course we considered to be best for the United States. The United States desires peace. . . ." And Kennedy the businessman added, "You cannot run down a customer with a bayonet."

*Complete roster: Joseph Jr., 24; John F., 22; Rosemary, 21; Kathleen, 19; Eunice, 18; Patricia, 15; Robert, 13; Jeanne, 11; Edward, 7.

*When their Warsaw villa was bombed, the Biddies moved to a Naleczow hideaway. When the exact street number of their Naleczow house was announced in a Berlin broadcast, they moved on to Sniatyn, near the Rumanian border; slept on hay-filled canvas sacks.

/-Franklin Roosevelt gave Tony Biddle (who had contributed $100,000 to Democratic campaign funds) a chance as Minister to Norway in 1935. Biddle, keenly in earnest--his wife has spent only five days in Paris in the last two years--has done a good job mastering the language, making friends, reporting. In 1931 Biddle was divorced by Mary Duke, $50,000,000 Duke tobacco heiress. Three months later he married Mrs. Margaret Thompson Schulze, $85,000,000 heiress of the Thompson mining fortune.

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