A month after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London and father of a future president, expressed grave doubts about “this war for idealism” against Hitler.

“I can’t see any use in everybody in Europe going busted and having Communism run riot,” Kennedy wrote to Marguerite LeHand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal secretary. “My own belief is that the economics of Germany would have taken care of Hitler long ago before this if he didn’t have a chance to wave that flag every once in a while.”

Kennedy’s letter is one of nine documents released Wednesday by the National Archives in Washington, part of a forthcoming cache of letters, drafts and notes related to Roosevelt’s presidency. David Ferriero, the national archivist, said the rest of the archive, which had been in the possession of Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s last personal secretary, was expected in November.

The documents include a shopping list of vital recovery legislation; a recommendation to promote Col. George Marshall to brigadier general before the war; a congratulatory note from Mussolini after Roosevelt’s 1932 election; and a letter from Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, with whom Roosevelt had an affair, arranging to visit the president in Warm Springs, Ga., a week before his death. (“I am terribly worried,” she wrote.)

‘FDR’s thought process’

“You actually see FDR’s thought process,” said Robert Clark, supervisory archivist of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., who is reviewing the documents. “He never wrote memoirs, he wasn’t a reflective kind of guy. This shows him instinctively making decisions that he knew would be for the betterment of the country and the world.”

When Roosevelt solicited the advice about Marshall from Gen. John Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, “he’s essentially headhunting, so when the time is necessary he has access to this guy,” Clark said. “A chit to Harry Hopkins about public works programs shows the interconnectiveness of everything he’s doing.

“It’s history in rough draft,” Clark said.

After five years of negotiation and special legislation, all 5,000 Tully papers were donated to the Roosevelt Library at the National Archives by the Sun-Times Media Group, a successor to Hollinger International, whose chief executive, Conrad Black, bought the documents in 2002.

Kennedy’s letter presaged his further public disparagement of the war and the future of democracy — comments that, along with his efforts to arrange a conciliatory meeting with Hitler, forced him to resign as ambassador in 1940.

“The British are going about this war hating it, but with the determination to fight it out,” Kennedy wrote. “I still don’t know what they are fighting for that is possible of accomplishment.”

In a 1933 handwritten letter, Mussolini expressed admiration for Roosevelt and hope that they might meet to “discuss the outstanding world problems in which the United States and Italy are mutually interested.”