Joseph P. Kennedy

Joseph P. Kennedy is a powerful offstage presence in the novel: the former United States ambassador to Great Britain whose recorded views make the Nazi regime’s diplomatic optimism look less like mere propaganda than an expectation grounded in actual accommodation. His 1938 conversations, discovered among secret documents, connect an earlier American envoy to the later invitation for President Kennedy to meet Adolf Hitler in Berlin. The contrast between public language about peace and the archival evidence about antisemitism gives Kennedy’s brief textual appearance substantial political weight.

Identity and Political Setting

The novel identifies Kennedy in a Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs secret state document as the United States ambassador to Great Britain. The document consists of extracts from reports by the German ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, describing conversations with Kennedy. The first cited report was received in Berlin on June 13, 1938; another followed on October 18. Kennedy is therefore represented not through a scene in which he speaks directly, but through German diplomatic records that preserve and frame his remarks.

That framing matters. The reports are presented as evidence in an investigation of the regime’s history, and their bureaucratic form makes the content difficult to dismiss as a passing rumor. Kennedy’s comments are filtered through von Dirksen’s account, but the documents attribute to him a favorable assessment of the German government and a sympathetic understanding of its treatment of Jews. The novel’s portrayal is consequently both specific and mediated: Kennedy’s importance lies in what the diplomatic record says he told a German ambassador, and in how the regime understood those remarks.

The 1938 Conversations

In the June report, Kennedy is said to have acknowledged that he did not know Germany personally, while claiming to have heard from varied sources that its government had accomplished great things and that Germans were satisfied and living well. The praise depicts him approaching the regime through reports of material conditions and political achievement rather than firsthand knowledge. In the novel’s documentary presentation, that distinction sharpens the significance of his favorable judgment: he is recorded as expressing confidence despite admitting that his view was acquired at a distance.

The same report turns to antisemitism. According to von Dirksen, Kennedy recognized that the Jewish question was important to relations between Germany and the United States, but argued that the damage came less from Germany’s intention to remove Jews than from the loudness with which it pursued that purpose. The report further attributes to Kennedy an assertion that he understood German Jewish policy, citing his own Boston background and the exclusion of Jews from a golf club and other clubs there for fifty years. The comparison places American social discrimination beside German state policy, while the account’s phrasing makes Kennedy appear to distinguish the two chiefly by the way Germany publicized its aims.

Von Dirksen’s October report reinforces the point. He wrote that Kennedy again referred to strong antisemitic tendencies in the United States and to a considerable portion of the American population understanding the German attitude toward Jews. Von Dirksen then offered his own judgment that Kennedy would get on very well with Adolf Hitler. The sentence is not Kennedy’s self-description; it is the German ambassador’s interpretation of the affinity he perceived. Its presence in a secret diplomatic record nevertheless shows how Kennedy’s remarks could be read within the Reich as evidence that its racial policies would not necessarily prevent understanding with influential Americans.

From Private Record to Public Diplomacy

The later political setting gives the old reports a renewed force. In 1964, Reich news announces that President Kennedy has strengthened his prospects of winning a second term, while the German government prepares for a visit by King Edward and Queen Wallis. Separately, a government statement reports that the United States president has accepted an invitation to meet Adolf Hitler in Berlin in September. The announcement presents the proposed encounter as a step toward greater understanding between the two peoples and describes it as following consultations with allies in the European Community.

The invitation is received through a deliberately communal propaganda broadcast. Werderscher-Markt staff are ordered to assemble for a government statement; the regime’s presentation of the news is designed to leave no space for private skepticism. The official language of peace and understanding therefore arrives within a managed political ritual. Kennedy himself is not shown responding to the invitation, and the novel does not establish his personal attitude toward the planned meeting. Instead, the earlier reports of his father’s conversations supply an unsettling historical echo beneath the public performance of reconciliation.

The prospect of the visit also has practical consequences for the police. Back in their office, Max Jaeger complains that the Kennedy visit will add to the burden of securing Führertag, when bombs are already exploding. His response reduces the grand language of diplomacy to the work of managing a security threat. The scene keeps the proposed summit from becoming an abstract symbol: in the regime’s capital, its immediate meaning includes a major police operation amid political violence.

Historical Memory and Significance

The archival material becomes part of a larger body of evidence that Xavier March intends to place before an American official. He tells Henry Nightingale that Martin Luther may be trying to trade documentary proof of what happened to the Jews for a new life in America. March identifies a January 20, 1942 conference called by Reinhard Heydrich to discuss the Final Solution, and argues that the deaths or disappearances of its participants make Luther’s survival a matter of extraordinary consequence. Kennedy is not the recipient in this exchange, but the discussion establishes the American diplomatic and political context in which evidence might be offered and judged.

The novel’s broader account of historical erasure makes the 1938 records especially consequential. Charlotte Maguire describes seeking the former friends of her mother—people who may have been Jewish or homosexual—and finding that they had not simply vanished but seemed never to have existed. Against that obliteration, the old diplomatic reports preserve words that reveal how the regime’s policies could be discussed, rationalized, and made legible to a foreign representative. They do not by themselves tell the whole history, but they challenge any account in which the regime’s crimes were wholly hidden from the world or impossible to recognize.

The contrast reaches its starkest form in the novel’s closing epigraph, which attributes to an SS officer the claim that the victors would destroy both the evidence and the witnesses, then dictate the history of the camps. Kennedy’s archived conversations belong to the opposite, fragile category: a record that survives, carrying uncomfortable evidence about international understanding and accommodation. His narrative role is thus not that of a developed dramatic character but of a historical hinge. Through him, the novel links the regime’s earlier racial policy to its later language of peaceful relations, and asks what official records reveal when public memory has been organized to deny the victims’ existence.