The Cedar, the War & the Kennedys

Of all the faces that make up the memory of the Imperial Cedar, none is quite as novelistic as that of Aimée Sotto Mayor de Heeren. Born in Brazil in 1903 and living until 2006, she is said to have made the tree at Meudon a private anchorage — at the very moment the world was tipping into war.

A Brazilian in the turmoil of the century

She came to Europe in the 1930s and settled in a Paris that was still carefree, where her beauty and her intelligence opened the most tightly closed drawing rooms in the city. The gathering danger changed everything. When war broke out, this woman who spoke several languages and knew Rio as well as Washington, London as well as Paris, became a discreet link in the Allied intelligence networks.

Her ground was not the battlefield but the drawing room: conversations, dinners, confidences drawn out and messages passed to the right person.

The cedar and the Brazilian question

Here the oral tradition attached to the tree takes over from documented history, and it is worth saying so plainly: what follows was passed down by word of mouth, not established in the archives. The story goes that the good energy of the cedar went with Aimée de Heeren through the most delicate undertaking of her life — keeping the Brazilian president, Getúlio Vargas, from swinging his country behind the Axis powers.

The stakes were real enough. Brazil at the end of the 1930s was hesitating, its regime looking with interest towards Berlin and Rome, and the country's Atlantic seaboard was of great strategic value. According to a tradition passed down at Meudon, she found at the foot of the tree the calm she needed before each of her approaches.

Aimée Sotto Mayor de Heeren

1903 – 2006 · Brazilian, intelligence agent

A dazzling figure in pre-war Paris, she put her international connections at the service of the Allies during the Second World War, and lived to the age of a hundred and three.

Joe Kennedy Jr, Roosevelt and a brother lost

It is said that, in that same undertaking, she could count on the support of Joe Kennedy Jr, the eldest son of an Irish-American family destined for the highest political fortunes, and that the two worked together to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to weigh in on the course of events. Here too caution is in order: no archive supports what the memory of the cedar has preserved, and it should be read as family legend rather than textbook history.

What is certain comes down to a single date. In 1944, Joe Kennedy Jr was killed on an air mission of extreme daring. The eldest brother, the one his father intended for the White House, died at twenty-nine, and the torch passed to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

1. 1938

   Vargas's Brazil hesitates between the Allies and the Axis; Aimée de Heeren moves between Paris, London and Rio.

2. 1939 – 1944

   According to the tradition passed down, she comes to the Cedar of Meudon to draw strength for her intelligence work.

3. 1944

   Joe Kennedy Jr, elder brother of John F. Kennedy, is killed during an air mission.

4. 1950s

   Aimée de Heeren and Coco Chanel go to see the tree together — chapter 3.

5. 1960s

   A young friend, the future publisher of the Phone Book of the World, drives her to the cedar; Ted Kennedy joins them once.

6. 1960s

   The wrought-iron gate at no. 15 rue de la République is taken down; a substantial section survives at no. 11.

Meudon in the 1960s, and the afternoon Ted Kennedy came

The war ended, but the bond did not. Through the 1960s, Aimée de Heeren, by then living between New York and Paris, regularly asked a young friend — the future publisher of the Phone Book of the World, and the subject of chapter 5 — to drive her out to Meudon. The journey was short and the ritual unvarying: park the car, walk up to the tree, stay a while.

On one of those visits a third passenger made the trip: Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the brothers and a former companion of Aimée's. The future senator for Massachusetts spent an afternoon at the foot of a cedar planted under the Empire, on the heights of a Paris suburb. Two Kennedy brothers, twenty years apart and through the same woman, thus crossed the history of this tree. Nor was she the only one to make the journey: she also came with Coco Chanel, whose story the previous chapter tells.

The street was changing around them: in the same decade the fine wrought-iron gate at no. 15 rue de la République was taken down, though a substantial section of it survives a few doors along at no. 11, within a few paces of the cedar. Should we believe these stories? What the chain of testimony establishes is that a tree at Meudon counted, concretely, in the lives of men and women whose names crossed the century. That alone makes it heritage.