20. Kennedy became isolated when Great Britain declared war on Germany
On September 3, 1939, Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany and Winston Churchill was appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he had held during World War I. Churchill began, with the knowledge of Chamberlain’s War Cabinet, a correspondence with FDR which eventually ran to over 2,000 letters and telegrams. The future Prime Minister had by then developed a profound distrust in the American Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy. Churchill considered Kennedy a Nazi sympathizer and anti-British. Kennedy began sending reports to the United States which expressed growing doubt in Britain’s ability to defeat the Germans.
In May, 1940, as the Germans swept into France and the Low Countries, the Chamberlain government fell and after negotiations between political factions designated Churchill as most likely to be able to form a government, King George VI asked him to do so. Churchill began a campaign to have Kennedy removed in response to the latter’s continued speeches and interviews which both discouraged excessive American aid to Britain and were pessimistic regarding Great Britain prevailing in the war. He was also negative about the British war effort in private correspondence, which grew considerably worse as the war shifted to the skies over Great Britain.