The Kennedy Plan

In 1938, with tensions rising in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy to be the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James with instructions to support efforts to maintain the peace. Kennedy learned that much of the political tension was rooted in Nazi anger over the Treaty of Versailles-- the treaty which twenty years earlier had concluded the Great War. After he assessed the political choices, Kennedy supported Prime Minister Chamberlain's effort...
More Description

In 1938, with tensions rising in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy to be the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James with instructions to support efforts to maintain the peace. Kennedy learned that much of the political tension was rooted in Nazi anger over the Treaty of Versailles-- the treaty which twenty years earlier had concluded the Great War. After he assessed the political choices, Kennedy supported Prime Minister Chamberlain's effort to maintain European peace by allowing the re-unification of the German people of the Sudetenland with Nazi Germany but he realized that the key to long term European peace was to create a mechanism for legal migration of Jews out of Germany. Kennedy lobbied for a plan which had been previously explored by British and American diplomats: allow Jewish migration to multiple different countries. Christened "the Kennedy Plan" by the press, the plan quickly brought condemnation from non-Jews who did not want new Jewish immigration and from Jews who wanted only immigration to Palestine. As Hitler demonstrated the power of his new Luftwaffe and German Panzers, Kennedy urged negotiation and compromise. Voices to maintain peace were overwhelmed by voices for war and we are left to wonder if the Nazi threat was handled properly by the governments of the west. The Kennedy Plan dramatizes the efforts of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy to solve the European conflict with diplomatic tools rather than with an all out war. This play of historical fiction carefully follows the historical record of Kennedy's efforts while he struggled with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Winston Churchill's determination to battle the Nazi threat with military force drove the world into war, but might have a diplomatic solution, as proposed by Joseph Kennedy, have resulted in less loss of life?