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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."