[Joe] Kennedy's rise and fall as an ambassador in London has been often told: a brief honeymoon with the British press and public, much of it revolving around his highly social and photogenic children, and then a relentless fall from grace. Kennedy was reviled for his defeatism. His widely quoted belief was that Great Britain had neither the will nor the armaments to win a war against Nazi Germany. And he was ridiculed for his perceived cowardice during the intensified Luftwaffe bombing of London in 1940, when he chose to spend his nights at a country estate well away from the targeted city center. German Foreign Ministry documents published after World War II show that Kennedy, without State Department approval, repeatedly sought a personal meeting with Hitler on the eve of the Nazi blitzkrieg, “to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany.” His goal was to find a means to keep America out of a war that he was convinced would destroy capitalism.
There was no evidence that Ambassador Kennedy understood in the days before the war that stopping Hitler was a moral imperative. “Individual Jews are all right, Harvey,” Kennedy told Harvey Klemmer, one of his few trusted aides in the American Embassy, “but as a race they stink. They spoiled everything they touch. Look what they did to the movies.” Klemmer, in an interview many years later made available for this book, recalled that Kennedy and his “entourage” generally referred to Jews as “kikes or sheenies.”
Kennedy and his family would later emphatically deny allegations of anti-Semitism stemming from his years as ambassador, but the German diplomatic documents show that Kennedy consistently minimized the Jewish issue in his four-month attempt in the summer and fall of 1938 to obtain an audience with Hitler. On June 13, as the Nazi regime was systematically segregating Jews from German society, Kennedy advised Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, as Dirksen reported to Berlin, that “it was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely.” On October 13, 1938, a few weeks before
Kristallnacht, with its Brown Shirt terror attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses, Kennedy met again with Ambassador Dirksen, who subsequently informed his superiors that “today, too, as during former conversations, Kennedy mentioned that very strong anti-Semitic feelings existed in the United States and that a large portion of the population had an understanding of the German attitude towards the Jews.”
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