The Coconut Corps

Call them the Coconut Corps, the bumper crop of Palm Beach–adjacent presidential appointments to head foreign embassies for the next four years. Among them are billionaire businessman John Arrigo (the new United States Ambassador to Portugal); investment banker Warren Stephens, our envoy to the Court of St. James; Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has added ambassador to Greece to an already crowded resume (former prosecutor, TV news personality, First Lady of San Francisco, Trump fundraiser, and Don Jr.’s ex); real estate developer Charles Kushner (Palm Beach–adjacent by way of his son and daughter-in-law, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), our new Ambassador to France, and Somers Farkas, the willowy Society figure the President described as a “model, philanthropist, documentary producer, and very successful businesswoman,” who at press time was awaiting confirmation as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Malta.

They are the inheritors of a great American political tradition that rewards foreign policy expertise, influence, and personal connections with ambassadorial appointments. Palm Beach County’s Gold Coast has been seeding foreign lands with American envoys for more than a century, almost as long as the enclave has existed. In fact, over the years more than 50 residents have been bestowed the honor, including Duke Buchan, Ruth Farkas, Raymond Guest, Eric M. Javits, Robert “Woody” Johnson, Ronald Lauder, John Loeb, Jamie McCourt, Jean Kennedy Smith, Vernon Walter, and John Hay Whitney. After a brief interregnum under Joe Biden, when only one local, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, previously Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Portugal, brought a bit of Worth Avenue to our station in Brazil, Gold Coast diplomats are again popping up everywhere, like mushrooms after a spring rain.

The current administration has a clear Palm Beach bias. In the president’s first term, the Coconut Corps numbered nine. Of the 61 current ambassadorial nominees, more than 10 percent boast local connections. As Ambassador Stanton Griffis, who called himself “a diplomatic trouble- shooter accredited to dictatorships,” including Communist Poland, King Farouk’s Egypt, Juan Peron’s Argentina, and Francisco Franco’s Spain, for presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, observed at a 1971 Everglades Club gala, “Palm Beach is just lousy with ambassadors.”

What does it take to win a top foreign posting? Traditionally, Palm Beach embassy heads have been political appointees, as opposed to merit-based career diplomats (though some of the former have grown in their jobs). Only five percent of Trump’s second term nominees are career diplomats; the remainder are political, according to a tally by the American Foreign Service Association. In that, the norm-busting chief executive is following in the footsteps of a long line of presidents, both Democrats like John F. Kennedy, who named his own brother Attorney-General, to Ronald Reagan, who surrounded himself with friends from California. So, it’s no surprise that familiarity with Mar-a-Lago breeds anointment these days.

“Usually, an ambassador has helped the party or the president, and it’s payback,” says a Palm Beach–based former ambassador who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “Smart people are appointed to important countries, but some are so weak, uninformed, and unworthy, they’re laughable. Good presidents make good appointments.” What qualifies one candidate over another? “It all comes down to having the money to buy influence,” the ex-diplomat continues. “Influence runs through the veins of Palm Beach. It’s not entirely about the money.” There is a pause. “But it’s about the money.”

To help orient the latest Coconut Corps crop, Palmer took a look back at some of their notable plenipotentiary predecessors.

 

Joseph Patrick Kennedy
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom

 

 

Joseph P. Kennedy, the second of Franklin Roosevelt’s three ambassadors to the United Kingdom’s Court of St. James, is surely the best-known American Chief of Mission. Kennedy, also the father of a president and two Senators and a forebear of multiple other electeds and ambassadors, wasn’t the first Palm Beach–associated figure to occupy an embassy, but he was arguably the most iconic—and certainly a model for the many who followed him across the seas. For both good and ill. A millionaire many times over, Kennedy had conquered Hollywood and Wall Street before supporting Roosevelt in 1932, winning jobs as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, and then the chairman of Roosevelt’s Maritime Commission. Next, FDR named him the first Irish-American ambassador to the United Kingdom as a reward for services rendered, and Kennedy was sure he’d succeed as he always had before. “He was wrong,” his biographer, David Nasaw wrote in The Patriarch, and “returned to Washington in disgrace.”

A patron of Palm Beach founder Henry Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel, in 1933, Kennedy bought a Palm Beach home designed by Addison Mizner shortly after Roosevelt moved into the White House. The two, who had a fraught relationship, were best characterized as frenemies. Kennedy was known to criticize Roosevelt behind his back, but he also sought and deserved some recognition.

“We’ve got to do something for old Joe,” FDR told his son James. “There must be something we can give him.” Kennedy proposed two posts: Treasury secretary or Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Offered Commerce, instead, he angrily turned it down. Though Roosevelt distrusted Kennedy, he also feared him as a loose cannon and potential political rival, so he sent him to London to keep him far from Washington but still under the presidential thumb. Kennedy moved into the London ambassadorial residence—donated to the government by J. Pierpont Morgan—in March 1938, just as Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler began sending his European neighbors overt signals of malign martial intentions.

Kennedy’s obsession was not the sanctity of European borders but the protection of American capitalism, which had made him a wealthy man. When Hitler annexed Austria just days after the new ambassador started his job, Kennedy, already inclined toward isolationism, agreed with Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his supporters in what was called the Cliveden Set, aristocratic political conservatives led by Lady Nancy Astor, the American-born first woman member of Britain’s parliament. They were, if not uniformly pro-Nazi, then at least inclined to appease rather than oppose Germany’s aggressive leaders.

For his part, Kennedy feared that war with Germany would damage or destroy capitalism, and that stance alarmed Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who effectively declared war against Kennedy, even as the new ambassador won both Cliveden’s favor and gobs of publicity, entertaining grandly, mouthing off regularly, and flaunting his large, attractive family and glamorous connections to America’s Wall Street and Hollywood elites. Kennedy alienated FDR, too, by expressing his admiration for aspects of Germany and its ally Italy’s fascism, particularly its economic policy of centralized control. FDR was also infuriated by powerful Kennedy boosters positioning the ambassador to run for president in 1940 at the end of Roosevelt’s second term. At the time, presidents were not term-limited.

When it grew clear that the Nazis would next seek to take over Czechoslovakia, and Kennedy, like Chamberlain, argued against intervention, FDR decided that the ambassador “needs his wrists slapped rather hard,” and considered recalling him. The high point of Kennedy’s tenure in London coincided with the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which handed Czech territory to the Nazis, and inspired Chamberlain’s deluded declaration of “peace for our time.” He—and his fervent supporter Kennedy—could not have been more wrong. The following March, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, and the ambassador’s tone-deaf response—through unofficial channels—was to unilaterally offer more concessions to Hitler.

By May 1939, Kennedy’s breach with FDR was widely known, and the ambassador took to whining that the president treated him as “a glorified errand boy,” rather than heeding his call for, in Nasaw’s words, “rewarding Hitler for past aggressions and preventing future ones” with even more magnificent appeasement. The Nazi invasion of Poland that September set off World War II, Cordell Hull’s dismissal of Kennedy as an abject defeatist, and his futile response: a direct, last-ditch plea to Roosevelt to “save the world” by cutting a deal with Hitler.

In May 1940, Chamberlain resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister, replaced by the resolutely anti-Nazi Winston Churchill, who Kennedy considered a belligerent, blood-thirsty drunk. Though by all rights, Kennedy should have been immediately sacked and dragged back home, with a presidential election only six months away, Roosevelt decided to leave his envoy in London but sideline him entirely. Demonstrating the virtue of consistency, at least, Kennedy railed on about German invincibility and Great Britain’s inevitable defeat.

Kennedy may have briefly felt vindicated in the summer of 1940, when the Battle of Britain—large scale bombing attacks by the Nazis—began. But British resilience inspired Roosevelt to offer Churchill more American support, and early that fall, Kennedy begged FDR to let him resign. He left London in October, still officially an ambassador but with no intention of returning, and a few weeks after Roosevelt’s second re-election, the president finally agreed to cut him loose in December. Kennedy’s reputation never recovered, even as his offspring evolved into a flawed if fascinating American version of a royal family.

 

Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr.
Envoy and Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Norway, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, and Spain

 

 

The diplomatic career of this second overtly political Roosevelt appointment followed a very different trajectory; he was much-admired. Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. was a product of the merger of two great American families, the old money Biddles, and the Drexels, whose banker forebear was a driving force behind the development of modern global finance. Biddle Jr.’s first wife added a third glittery name to his family narrative; a Duke, she was part of the North Carolina farming family that created the American Tobacco Company and later gave their name to Duke University.

Tony had long been an underachiever. After graduating from St. Paul’s School, he’d skipped college and dabbled in shipping before enlisting in the World War I army, and then settling into the indolent life of a wealthy clubman. The couple maintained a presence in Palm Beach, where they had their own Mizner-designed oceanfront villa. Soon, the Biddle-Duke merger grew troubled and the marriage ended in 1931. But Tony quickly recovered, marrying a copper mining heiress. Apparently aware that he was a less than stellar businessman (a Central Park nightclub he founded failed and a subsequent business venture ended in bankruptcy and litigation), his new wife suggested he dabble in politics. Contributions to Democratic candidates added to the luster of his social skills and her fortune, and in 1935, Roosevelt named him Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Norway.

After impressing Cordell Hull’s State Department with high quality reports, Biddle was transferred to Poland in 1937. Two years later, his residence, a Warsaw palace once occupied by Napoleon, was bombed in the latest Nazi invasion. The Polish government fled Warsaw and encouraged diplomats to do the same, and the Biddles left for Ukraine. Nazi war planes fired on their car, and German radio tracked their narrow escape. Biddle’s report to the State Department on the terror caused by the invasion, less than two weeks later, inspired the Nazis to publicly brand him as Kennedy’s opposite, a patrician war-monger trying to drag America into the conflict.

By the end of September 1939, Biddle was in France, and Roosevelt named him America’s Envoy Extraordinary there. In that capacity, he followed the French govern- ment as it fled Paris and another Nazi invasion, settling near Bordeaux, where Biddle, his wife, and their Labrador Chad moved into the Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion. By that time, he’d established himself as a trusted envoy for Roosevelt, and as the war continued and America joined the fight, he moved to a posting in London, and added the exiled governments of Belgium, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands to his ministerial portfolio. In 1941, he took on Greece, too, and in 1943, Luxembourg. Jocular friends accused him of being an embassy collector.

To be continued in PALMER Vol. 9. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.