Kennedy on Antagonisms

During the recent Czechoslovak crisis the British people scared worse than any other in Europe, and in the panic atmosphere of London scared U. S. citizens found in Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy an envoy who flung his dynamic energies without reserve into the job of getting them home as fast as possible. During the panic period Mr. Kennedy was not perhaps quite as close to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt was to Premier Edouard Daladier, but he unquestionably saw the crisis from the inside. Last week he spoke his mind at the annual Trafalgar Day Dinner of Britain's Navy League while other U. S. crisis-insiders continued to keep mum about Munich.

Jocularly, Mr. Kennedy began by relating that when Mrs. Kennedy first heard what was in his mind as he prepared his Trafalgar Day Speech, she cautioned : "Have you thought how this would sound back home? You know, Dear, our ambassadors are supposed to lose all their powers of resistance when they get to London. You don't want folks to get the idea that you are seeing things through English eyes."

Having thought this over, having submitted the full text of his speech in advance to the State Department, and having emphasized that he was speaking in London for himself, not the Administration, candid Ambassador Kennedy revealed his feelings about the way the crisis was handled and the implications of Munich. Earnestly Mr. Kennedy declared: "It long has been a theory of mine that it is unproductive for both democratic and dictator countries to widen the division now existing between them by emphasizing their differences, which are self-apparent. Instead of hammering away at what are regarded as irreconcilables, they could advantageously bend their energies toward solving their common problems by an attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis.

"It is true that the democratic and dictator countries have important and fundamental divergencies of outlook, which in certain matters go deeper than politics. But there is simply no sense, common or otherwise, in letting these differences grow into unrelenting antagonisms. After all, we have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not."

Ambassador Kennedy, who went to London straight from his Washington job of striving to build up a modern U. S. merchant marine (viewed in Britain as unwelcome competition), tartly told the Navy League: "We try to understand your need for a great merchant fleet. We hope you will try to understand our need for a small one."

After saying the world faces "major disaster" if the rearmament race is not halted, and making what some Navy Leaguers thought was an oblique reference to efforts to get an Anglo-German aerial limitation pact following up the Anglo-German Naval Limitation Pacts of 1935 and 1937, Ambassador Kennedy declared that "the American people look forward to the day when the nations of the world will realize they must agree upon limitation and reduction of armaments."

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