The Ambassador
Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James's 1938-1940
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Narrated by:
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Victor Bevine
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By:
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Susan Ronald
About this listen
Acclaimed biographer Susan Ronald reveals the truth about Joseph P. Kennedy's shockingly controversial tenure as ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of World War II.
On February 18, 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy was sworn in as US Ambassador to the Court of St. James. To say his appointment to the most prestigious and strategic diplomatic post in the world shocked the establishment was an understatement: Known for his profound Irish roots and staunch Catholicism, not to mention his “plain-spoken” opinions and womanizing, he was a curious choice as Europe hurtled toward war.
Initially welcomed by the British, in less than two short years, Kennedy was loathed by the White House, the State Department, and the British Government. Believing firmly that Fascism was the inevitable wave of the future, he consistently misrepresented official US foreign policy internationally as well as direct instructions from FDR himself. The Americans were the first to disown him, and the British and the Nazis used Kennedy to their own ends.
Through meticulous research and many newly available sources, Ronald confirms in impressive detail what has long been believed by many: that Kennedy was a Fascist sympathizer and an anti-Semite whose only loyalty was to his family's advancement. She also reveals the ambitions of the Kennedy dynasty during this period abroad, as they sought to enter the world of high-society London and establish themselves as America’s first family. Thorough and utterly engrossing, The Ambassador explores a darker side of the Kennedy patriarch in an account sure to generate attention and controversy.
©2021 Susan Ronald (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in Eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.
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Bad Melodramatic Reading
- By Tess on 08-18-20
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The Daughters of Yalta
- The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War
- By: Catherine Grace Katz
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. Catherine Grace Katz uncovers the dramatic story of the three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days.
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Engaging
- By Jean on 06-19-21
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The Wise Men
- Six Friends and the World They Made
- By: Evan Thomas, Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Reese
- Length: 33 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Six close friends shaped the role their country would play in the dangerous years following World War II. They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos, and whose strong response to Soviet expansionism would leave a legacy that dominates American policy to this day. In April 1945, they converged to advise an untutored new president, Harry Truman.
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Dull with poor narration
- By KD6161 on 03-31-17
By: Evan Thomas, and others
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The Mantle of Command
- FDR at War, 1941–1942
- By: Nigel Hamilton
- Narrated by: Brad Sanders
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful - and underappreciated - command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes listeners inside FDR’s White House Oval Study - his personal command center - and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.
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Great Book, Terrible Narration
- By Ross Mackey on 04-11-22
By: Nigel Hamilton
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Troublesome Young Men
- The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
- By: Lynne Olson
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons began perhaps the most crucial debate in British parliamentary history. On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government and also of Britain - indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson's fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government's defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe's tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister's resignation.
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Spectacular Narrative History Book
- By Nostromo on 11-30-18
By: Lynne Olson
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Churchill: A Life, Part 2 (1918-1965)
- By: Martin Gilbert
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Churchill: A Life follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and most fascinating political events of our time.
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Sir Martin Gilbert At His Best, Perfected By Christian Rodska
- By History For History’s Sake on 09-15-16
By: Martin Gilbert
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Those Angry Days
- Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
- By: Lynne Olson
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of the debate over American intervention in World War II stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for America's isolationists emerged as the president's most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative.
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Incivility in Politics - A Real Shocker!
- By Carole T. on 04-24-13
By: Lynne Olson
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The Hopkins Touch
- By: David Roll
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hopkins Touch offers the first portrait in over two decades of the most powerful man in Roosevelt's administration. David Roll shows how Harry Hopkins, an Iowa-born social worker who had been an integral part of the New Deal's implementation, became the linchpin in FDR's - and America's - relationships with Churchill and Stalin, and spoke with an authority second only to the president's.
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Hopkins - the glue of the tripartite coalition
- By Chrissie on 05-19-13
By: David Roll
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How Ike Led
- The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
- By: Susan Eisenhower
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne, Susan Eisenhower
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, he was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He tried to be the calmest man in the room, not the loudest.
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A President of the UNITED States
- By Happy Doc on 09-10-20
By: Susan Eisenhower
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Eight Days at Yalta
- How Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World
- By: Diana Preston
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last winter of the Second World War, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin arrived in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast, and intermittent bonhomie, they decided on the conduct of the final stages of the war against Germany, on how a defeated and occupied Germany should be governed, on the constitution of the nascent United Nations, and on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Greece.
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The book has the best female voice narration.
- By Anonymous User on 10-05-24
By: Diana Preston
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Traitor to His Class
- The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 37 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the 20th century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years; his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised; and his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.
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Talented writer and narrator, but too biased/long
- By todd on 01-24-20
By: H. W. Brands
What listeners say about The Ambassador
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark Hull
- 08-25-21
Superb
Exceptionally well-written and equally well-read. Both the story itself and the melodious narration made me anxious to find the time to continue listening. And thinking about what I heard.
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- Mary K. Bohm
- 03-27-22
The most important book about the Kennedy ever written.
Brilliantly written, exhaustively researched, this book explains how and why Kennedy became one of the most powerful names in the history of the United States. There is no way to understand America’s history in the twentieth century since 1938 without reading Ms. Ronald’s book. Riveting.
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- Phyllis Lowry
- 09-08-21
EXCELLENT IN EVERY RESPECT
Well researched. Refreshing honest retrospective. should be required reading for all diplomats, political and trained.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-12-21
An enlightening chapter “on the Kennedy’s”
You may learn more than you might think by listening to this well written and well preformed story about the time Joe Kennedy spent as America’s Ambassador in England.
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- Mike From Mesa
- 09-02-21
Needs a bit of editing
I have been reading books about World War Two since I was in my late teens and I am now familiar with the lead up to the start of the war in both the Pacific and European Theaters. In particular I have become familiar with the period from Hitler’s appointment of Chancellor of Germany through the end of the war in Europe, but in all of that reading I never found much about the actions of Joe Kennedy as US Ambassador to Great Britain other than some basic information that he was perceived as pro-Fascist and a defeatist. Given that Roosevelt was neither of those things I always wondered by he appointed Kennedy in the first place and never replaced him before Britain declared war on Germany. This book explained much of that as well as a lot more.
In my opinion there is much to recommend this book. It is full of details of Kennedy’s actions during his appointment, both those in accordance with US Government policy and opposed and explained to me much that I never knew before - Kennedy was an intimate friend of Chamberlain and privy to a great many government secrets, he met repeatedly with German envoys and did not tell the US State Department or the President of his actions, and he was actively trying to secure the nomination as President or Vice President leading up to the 1940 election. However there are also some things that I found to be issues in this book, and at least one that is an issue for the audio version.
I would have thought that a book about the period from 1938 through 1940 would be devoid of any references to Donald Trump, considering that it is supposed to be a serious book on the period, but instead the author has indulged in some meaningless virtue signaling by commenting that Hitler was attempting to Make Germany Great Again. This kind of silliness should be beneath the author of any serious book andit seems to me that it cheapens the book. In addition the author repeats the claim that if Great Britain had been willing to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union prior to the Munich Agreement then Hitler would have faced a war on two fronts. Since the Soviet Union did not have a common border with Germany and since every Eastern European country that did border on Germany had refused to allow Soviet troops passage it is difficult to see how the Soviet Union could have attacked Germany in any meaningful way. In fact one member of the Polish government, which was Hitler’s next target, had said that losing a war to Hitler would cost Poland its freedom but allowing Soviet troops entry would cost Poland its soul.
The comment about the audio book itself is that I wished that the narrator, who otherwise did a splendid job, had learned how to pronounce Alexander Cadogan’s name and since he was an important member of the British government he was mentioned frequently and the repeated mis-pronunciation was annoying.
Other than those things this is a very good book and I would have given it 5 stars without the issues I mentioned. With them I felt that 3.5 stars was appropriate, but since I can not do that I gave it 4 stars. Even with its flaws the book is very informative.
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- Thom Pierson
- 08-10-21
One entire book
A whole book to confirm that Joe Kennedy was a Hitler sympathizing whoremonger. What a disgusting animal.
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