The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty
Matthew Smith Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, h/b, £16.99, 2005
State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair
Bryan Clough Hove: Hideaway Publications, 2005, £15 (US $27.50) <www.statesecrets.co.uk/index.html>
Matthew Smith has written several books covering the tribulations of the Kennedy family and is described on the book jacket as a screenwriter and producer –presumably of TV programmes. A very extensive bibliography is appended to the 40 chapters, each of which is headed with an often portentous literary quotation. In this book he offers a sweeping and magisterial overview of the untimely deaths of Marilyn Monroe, JFK and RFK, as well as the abrupt termination of Edward Kennedy’s presidential aspirations at Chappaquiddick in 1969. He claims to see evidence and proof of linked plots to prevent the Kennedy family having political power in the USA.
This is an interesting point of view. Unfortunately at no stage does he tell us who might have been behind such a project or what their motives were. Instead we have to rely on generalisations of a fairly standard and well worn type (…..the Kennedys threatened the status quo…..the military-industrial complex….pull out from Vietnam…..civil rights etc etc) with some mention, very vaguely, of the roles that might have been played by Lyndon B. Johnson (in JFK’s death) and Thane Caesar (in RFK’s). But these are not probed or brought out into relief against the array of other interesting circumstances in both cases. Perhaps Smith assumes that the reader – like him – will have read all the other books on these subjects.
Chappaquiddick
The most interesting section of the book is actually the part about the events at Chappaquiddick in July 1969. Senator Edward Kennedy and five male companions went on a few days holiday with six female companions. During her husband’s much needed break, Mrs Edward Kennedy was under-going medical treatment as a result of her recent pregnancy. It becomes apparent reading Smith’s account that Kennedy could not have been in the car that plunged off the causeway linking the two small islands at Chappaquiddick. He was clearly elsewhere. His conduct in the 36 hours after the disappearance and drowning of Mary Joe Kopechne suggested very strongly that he was taken completely by surprise by the event. Why then did he admit he was driving the vehicle, exposing himself (theoretically) to severe criminal charges and penalties? Smith speculates that Kennedy had intended to emerge – and was likely to emerge – as the main Democrat presidential candidate for 1972. In order to do this he would have commenced a substantial amount of lobbying and public speaking from 1970 onward. Chappaquiddick, therefore, was designed to end his chances of reaching the Presidency. But how, and by whom?
The former point is easier to answer, albeit with a degree of further speculation. If Kennedy was engaged in adultery at Chappaquiddick (i.e. conduct similar to that of his two elder, deceased brothers), or even if he were not but it looked very much as if he were, then there would be a significant decline of support for him amongst the Irish Catholic and ethnic minority political bloc that the Kennedy family effectively controlled. The solidity of that bloc might even be in jeopardy, with elements of it flaking away to other candidates, or even other political parties. This had to be avoided at all costs. So, rather than completely wrecking his political career by stating clearly what he was really doing and with whom, Kennedy calculated instead that he would admit to being involved in an accident whilst driving a female companion – strenuously denying all the while any inappropriate moral behaviour with that female (which in the case of Kopechne was true) – whilst being prepared to account for his actions before a local court, in an area where the judges were elected by a Democrat majority. Kennedy did this and received a minor fine for his careless driving. He made a substantial financial settlement with the Kopechne family. He knew that the 1972 Democrat nomination was probably beyond him, but he did make efforts in subsequent years to run for the presidency. Unfortunately every time he did so the media republished various accounts of the Chappaquiddick episode which demonstrated, if nothing else, what a strange and unlikely sequence of events the ‘official’ version was. A reasonable conclusion about Chappaquiddick would be that it was expressly designed to put Edward Kennedy between a rock and a hard place and leave a scandal hanging over him for the rest of his political life. This is the best part of Smith’s book.
Unfortunately the latter part of the question (by whose hand did Mary Joe Kopechne meet her untimely end?) is not answered at all by Smith. There are no names, no suggestions, no witnesses saying they saw anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note.
The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO files.
Tyler Kent was a junior clerk – one of 200 employees – at the US Embassy in London in 1939-1940. He worked in the room coding and decoding telegrams and other traffic that passed through and emanated from the London Embassy. When Kent arrived in mid-1939 from the US Embassy in Moscow, the London Ambassador was Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the great clan. Kennedy was the commanding figure within the substantial body of Irish and Italian Catholic Democrat supporters on the US East Coast. When Franklin D. Roosevelt considered whether or not to run for an unprecedented third term as President (the election being due in 1940, campaigning in depth for nominations would have commenced in 1938) he correctly saw Joseph Kennedy as a rival and threat and eased his position by appointing Kennedy ambassador to London. Kennedy often had a different outlook on national and international affairs to those held be Roosevelt. He was inclined to be less interested in European problems and foreign policy commitments than Roosevelt (and, as an Irish Catholic, was certainly much less supportive of Britain), while being more interested in domestic policies and a type of quasi-socialist planning. He was also not from the US patrician elite.
Like Joseph Kennedy, Tyler Kent was an ‘isolationist’. Unlike Kennedy he was prone to conspiracy theories about Jewish-Bolshevism etc. etc. and appears in this account as an irritating little man. Kent began keeping copies of ‘interesting’ US diplomatic cables for his own ‘private collection’. He eventually had over 1500. They included correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill about assistance the US – which was then neutral – could give the UK. Kent had also requested a move to the US Embassy in Berlin and, one presumes, would have taken his collection of secret diplomatic correspondence with him had he been allowed to take up this position.(1)
The Right Club
In March 1940 Kent showed some of his cables to Captain Ramsay MP – the foremost admirer of Hitler in the House of Commons – and to Anna Wolkoff, a member of Ramsay’s cranky Right Club. Ramsay said he wanted to show the material to Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister. It is not clear that he did so. However, a little while later, in an unrelated episode, Wolkoff was asked by an agent MI5 had planted in the Right Club if she would send a message (the text of which had been drafted by MI5) to Germany by giving it to a third party, this third party also being (unknown to her) an MI5 agent. She agreed. She had been set up. It is fairly clear that Wolkoff did not succeed in passing any material to the Axis, though she would have been happy to do so. A few days after this orchestrated event the cabinet – by now Churchill had become prime minister – had a full report on Kent, Wolkoff and others from MI5 and duly agreed to a programme of mass arrests, internments and trials. The pro-fascist debris of Mosley, Ramsay et al was swept up having enjoyed the 1939-1940 period agitating against the Allied war effort. (2)
Kent, too, was arrested in this purge, Ambassador Kennedy quickly waiving Kent’s diplomatic immunity as an employee of the US Embassy to allow this. He was tried and convicted and imprisoned in the UK. His collection of secret diplomatic telegrams was confiscated. Clough shows that it is unlikely that any reached the Axis. Kent was telling the truth when he strenuously denied passing material to any enemy or likely enemy of the UK or US. After 1945 he was released and returned to America where he lived, latterly in a trailer park in Texas, and spoke at gatherings such as the ‘Fourth International Revisionists Conference’. Various inaccurate pamphlets about him, published by the Christian Right in the US in the 1940s, are apparently still in print.
Presidential campaign
The critical part of the Tyler Kent-Anna Wolkoff story, then, was not that they passed secrets to the Axis. The real issue was probably that Roosevelt was beginning his 1940 presidential campaign at the same time that Kent was arrested. Kent had information that, if released into the public domain, could well have cost Roosevelt some support by demonstrating that he was not as inclined to be as scrupulously neutral in foreign policy as Kent and many others like him in the US at that time would have wished. It is also clear that Ambassador Kennedy would have known of this correspondence and could have been a beneficiary within the Democrats had Roosevelt been damaged by material of this type. Once Kent was arrested, Roosevelt could reasonably assume that detailed raising of this issue would not occur prior to November 1940. This turned out to be correct.(3) Roosevelt was re-elected and replaced Joseph Kennedy as London ambassador. Kennedy returned to the US and played no more part in presidential contests. He maintained for many years that he would ‘set the record straight’ on Tyler Kent. He never did so. I suspect that after 1945 setting out his own opinions about Churchill, Roosevelt and US policy pre-1941 would have led to some awkward debate about the priorities of the Kennedy clan and could have detracted from Joseph’s political ambitions for JFK and RFK.
A detailed comparison of how the Kennedys generally wished to balance US domestic and international priorities, versus the balance sought by Nixon, Reagan and others, might well have provided readers of the Matthew Smith book with some material to flesh out his otherwise over simple conclusions.
It is remarkable that a book as good as that written by Bryan Clough should only appear through a minor publisher.
Notes
[1] There is a theory that Kent had begun working for the Soviets in 1938 in Moscow and – this being the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact – wanted to be in Berlin on their behalf. There is no evidence of this.
[2] But not all the pro-Fascists were arrested. None of the Right Club members of the House of Lords, nor the Duke of Bedford, were interned.The operation of a discreet English class system can be detected: those who posed a threat by rabble-rousing the working class were those arrested, tried and punished..
[3] Clough shows that a common denominator amongst many of those arrested in May 1940 was their personal knowledge of Tyler Kent and his connections. Very few people remained at large in the UK after this purge who were able to contradict the ‘official’ account of the Kent trial –that he had passed information to the enemy.