FOREIGN RELATIONS: Off the Record?

Lounging in Boston’s Ritz-Carlton this week. Ambassador Joseph Patrick Kennedy talked to Louis M. Lyons of the Boston Globe, two other newsmen, was mightily wroth when he saw Reporter Lyons’ bylined story of the interview. Excerpt: “Democracy [said Kennedy] is finished in England. . . . It’s all an economic question. I told the President in the White House last Sunday, ‘Don’t send me 50 admirals and generals, send me a dozen real economists.’ . . . It’s all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time. … It isn’t that she’s fighting for democracy. That’s the bunk. She’s fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us. …

“[Eleanor Roosevelt] is . . .a wonderful woman. And marvelously helpful and full of sympathy. . . . She bothered us more on our jobs in Washington to take care of the poor little nobodies . . . than all the rest of the people down there put together. She’s always sending me a note to have some little Susie Glotz to tea at the Embassy.”

Quick was Joe Kennedy to try to square himself with the Administration, his British friends for undiplomatic garrulity. His principal explanation in a formal statement given the press: the interview was supposed to be off the record; Reporter Lyons’ story “creates a different impression entirely than I would want to set forth.” Moaned the U. S.’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s: “Mr. Lyons made no notes during the visit. . . . Many of [his statements] were inaccurate.”