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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.