Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. - Ambassador To Britain

Ambassador To Britain

In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (the United Kingdom) in London. Kennedy hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London high society, which stood in stark contrast to his relative outsider status in Boston. His daughter Kathleen married the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the head of one of England's grandest aristocratic families. Kennedy rejected the warnings of the prominent Member of Parliament Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, Kennedy supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's apparent policy of appeasement.

Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi aerial bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler, again without the approval of the Department of State, "to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany". It has been surmised that Kennedy also had personal reasons for wanting to avoid war; "He feared for the lives of his three eldest sons, Joe, Jack and Bobby, all of whom were or soon would be eligible to serve."

Kennedy also argued strongly against giving military and economic aid to the United Kingdom. "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here," he stated in the Boston Sunday Globe of November 10, 1940. With Nazi German troops having overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and with bombs falling daily on Great Britain, Kennedy unambiguously and repeatedly stated his belief that this war was not about saving democracy from National Socialism (Nazism) or from Fascism. In an interview with two newspaper journalists, Louis M. Lyons, of The Boston Globe, and Ralph Coghlan, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennedy said:

It's all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time ... As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us ... I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it's up to me to see that the country gets it.

His views were becoming inconsistent and increasingly isolationist; British MP Josiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood, who had himself opposed the British Government's earlier appeasement policy, said of Kennedy:

We have a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity seeker and who apparently is ambitious to be the first Catholic president of the U.S.

In British government circles during the Blitz, Kennedy was widely disparaged as a defeatist. He retreated to the countryside during the bombings of London by German aircraft, at a time when the British Royal Family, Prime Minister, government ministers, and other ambassadors chose to stay in London. When the American public and Roosevelt Administration officials read his quotes on democracy being "finished", and his belief that the Battle of Britain was not about "fighting for democracy", all of it being just "bunk", they realized that Kennedy could not be trusted to represent the United States. In the face of national public outcry, and pressure from the Roosevelt Department of State, which no longer wanted him, Kennedy submitted his resignation late in November 1940.