Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (14 page)

For two years, Kick’s sense of her own emergent identity had been tied up with her feelings for Billy. For two years, she had regarded herself as merely marking time until she managed to be reunited with him. For two years, she had used every stratagem and argument that she could devise to persuade her father to allow her to go back to London. Quite often, her efforts had had a quixotic air. Now, just when she finally had what looked to be a viable plan in place, Billy had decided that he could no longer wait for her.

Prior to receiving his letter, she had been wild to reach London. That ceased to be the case after she heard directly from Billy. By the time Kick reported Billy’s change of heart to her father on the twenty-second, she had had a full night to process all that had just occurred. If Billy’s letter had provoked tears, she had given herself ample time to wipe them away. If she had experienced hurt and humiliation, she had since endeavored to armor herself against such feelings. If Billy had proven himself to be weak, she would not allow the same to be said of her. “Rather sad, don’t you think?” Kick commented contemptuously on Billy’s performance.

As if the defection of her first great love meant little to her, she went on to blithely enlighten her father about her busy social schedule in Washington, and about her weekend plans to attend the races and a dance in Middleburg, Virginia—with another of her young men.

Six

Six days after Kick received the terrible news from Billy, Jack Kennedy, aged twenty-four, joined her in Washington, D.C., where he was set to begin active duty in the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the Division of Naval Intelligence. Not surprisingly, Jack had failed his draft physical, but at length his father had arranged for him to pass a specious new exam, in which the second son’s lengthy history of grave medical difficulties was made to disappear, if only on paper, via a notation in his official records that he had suffered nothing in excess of the “usual childhood illnesses.” Jack thereupon received his commission as an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve, with an eye toward being reassigned to sea duty.

For Kick, Jack’s arrival was fortuitous, coming as it did in the wake of Billy’s defection. Now that that relationship was at an end, Kick discovered that she was very grateful indeed to be able to cling to her collective Kennedy identity by again forming a duo with Jack. No sooner did her brother come to town than she and he were constantly dashing in and out of each other’s apartments, dining and entertaining together, attending cocktail and dinner parties, filmgoing, and in other ways diverting themselves in a city she had until only recently intended to use as a mere springboard. From this point on, America’s capital, not England’s, would have to be where her real life and real friends were.

Immediately, she began sending out autographed copies of Jack’s critically well-received, bestselling book
Why England Slept
to all the leading Washington hostesses, in an effort to secure invitations to their tables. The Kennedy Kids, as they came to be affectionately known, soon emerged as popular dinner guests. It was not just their youth, physical attractiveness, high spirits, and intriguing twinlike behavior that made them so appealing to prominent Washingtonians. At a moment when there was much dinner table debate about Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, the war, and whether American interests would be best served by joining the fight against Nazi Germany or by steering clear, Jack’s and Kick’s firsthand experiences of Britain on the eve of the declaration of war had huge appeal. As Joe Kennedy’s children, they also possessed a certain curiosity value; as Kick later recalled, hardly a night would pass that someone did not inquire or make remarks about the old man’s controversial statements and opinions.

Kick, of course, rarely if ever hesitated to speak up, at table or elsewhere. But on these occasions it was Jack in particular who was known to hold forth, more often than not about subjects he had written about in his book, such as Stanley Baldwin’s politically motivated pursuit of a tepid policy of rearmament, and Neville Chamberlain’s dilemma when he encountered Hitler at Munich.

Interestingly, on the matter of potential U.S. intervention in the war, Jack, who had previously sided with their father, had begun to come round to Kick’s way of thinking. At least he affected in public to have done so. Jack now maintained to fellow dinner guests that if a “quick victory” were possible he would be inclined to support an American decision to go in. At evening’s end, when Jack delivered Kick to her one-bedroom apartment on Twenty-first Street, she would change into a bathrobe and sit up late with him, dissecting the various eminences they had met that night, as well as plotting their own next moves on the chessboard of Washington society.

As it happened, there was a third Kennedy sibling residing in Washington at the time, though few people in town were aware of her existence. Rosemary Kennedy, who had been rendered intellectually disabled by a lack of oxygen at the time of her birth, was now twenty-three and confined to a residential facility. Prone to bouts of depression and violent tantrums, she resented being forcibly cut off from her siblings and from the world they inhabited. Many nights, while Jack and Kick were establishing themselves socially in the capital, Rosemary went missing from her room at St. Gertrude’s School and spent hours wandering the dark city streets until the nuns who maintained the facility found her and brought her back. Rosemary’s parents feared that in the course of these perambulations she might be sexually assaulted or otherwise harmed. Late in the fall of 1941, Joe Kennedy permitted doctors at George Washington University Hospital to perform a lobotomy on Rosemary.

The outcome of the procedure was disastrous. Rosemary emerged from the operation unable to walk or talk. Deemed permanently incapacitated, she was removed at once on her father’s orders to Craig House, a psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York, where she lived in secrecy and seclusion for years to come. In the wake of his having moved Rosemary to Craig House, Joe Kennedy sent occasional reports on her to Kick and other of the siblings; but he alone visited the eldest Kennedy daughter there.

Kick, meanwhile, was by no means spending every evening in Washington in her brother’s voluble company. Prior to Jack’s arrival, she had begun to form a friendship with a wild-eyed, tattooed, always sloppily dressed, Harvard-educated feature reporter at the
Washington Times Herald
named John White, who was nine years her senior. Apart from being one of the best and most prolific writers at the paper, he was also the best talker, a freethinker and left-winger who loved few things more than to debate and disagree.

Attracted as Kick tended to be to whatever was most amusing and exciting, she had warmed from the first to the colorful and contrary White. Fellow interventionists in a nest of isolationists, he and she seemed to disagree about almost everything else. Though his fierce combativeness, which bordered at times on obnoxiousness, was rather too pronounced for many people’s tastes, Kick at this stage enjoyed and excelled at the cut and thrust of her encounters with him. And he marveled at what he judged to be her prodigious powers of retort. Quite often in conversation, he took what he described as “the devil’s position,” arguing for argument’s sake, not because he actually believed what he was saying. And she, in turn, frequently struck him as not necessarily speaking her own mind about issues. Rather, it was as if Kathleen—as he insisted on calling her, mainly because everyone else addressed her as “Kick”—was testing her parents’ values and views by laying them out for her iconoclastic colleague to demolish.

For the moment anyway, though White spoke openly about wanting a good deal more from the relationship, passionate argument about such freighted topics as the Pope, birth control, and premarital sex was about as far as matters had progressed. In the early autumn of 1941, Kick believed herself to be on the verge of obtaining a visa, and of being reunited with Billy. As she conspired with Carmel Offie; as she awaited Joe Kennedy’s consent; as she lunched with Dinah Brand; as she reflected on Debo and Andrew’s urgent message; as she desperately appealed to her father anew; and even as she found herself reeling from the letter in which Billy spoke of his engagement to Sally Norton—all the while John White had been preoccupied with what was for her but a minor subplot. As he had done with other of Frank Waldrop’s young, pretty secretaries, White, a self-styled lady-killer, had been intent on adding Kick to his list of sexual conquests.

It was not until the month after Kick received Billy’s game-changing letter that John White was finally able to record a first small but hopeful sign of progress in his at times comical pursuit of her. Given what had been Kick’s resistance to all sexual overtures, he seems to have regarded even the most minimal physical contact as a potential turning point in their sweet and sour relationship. “Tonight for the first time I held the hand of KK,” White exulted in his diary on November 30, 1941, “… and do now wonder what will become of us.”

Kick, when she finally allowed John White to take her hand in his, was of course facing a drastically different future from the glittering one of castles and coronets that had appeared to beckon to her but a few weeks before. Now the struggle to become, in her phrase, a person in her own right shifted to new ground. Like Billy before him, John White offered an alternative to her family’s view of the universe. White was quite simply of greater mental vitality than the Zeke Colemans and George Meads of this world.

To be sure, White was seeking to break down her sexual defenses by patter, debate, and perhaps not a little sophistry. At the same time, by repeatedly and explicitly challenging the religious and moral principles of her Kennedy upbringing, he emerged as a central actor in Kick’s ongoing drama of identity.

White was hardly the first man on earth to flatter himself that, far from trying to seduce a sexually inexperienced young woman, he was really seeking to enlighten and awaken her. Not so much in spite of his efforts to land her in bed as because of them, he viewed himself as a beneficent presence in her life. With typical pomposity, he compared her to a chick that has yet to break out of its shell, and he described it as his role to helpfully nudge the process forward. With characteristic grandeur, he spoke of loosening the bonds that constrained her.

As a socialist, White professed to despise all aristocrats as a matter of principle. He had an especially low opinion of Billy, in part no doubt because Kick herself had been so contemptuous of Billy when she was still dealing with all of the hurt and heartbreak attendant on the end of their relationship. White’s abiding view of Billy as pitifully weak reflected how Kick regarded him, or at least how she affected to regard him, when, in the late fall and winter of 1941, she believed that he was forever lost to her. Further, White viewed with disdain the younger man’s failure to initiate and educate her sexually, as White himself now magnanimously proposed to do.

White was no less critical of Kick’s father, though of course for very different reasons. He was horrified by the degree of control that old Joe exerted over Kick and her siblings. As early as White’s second or third outing with her, she seemed to know all sorts of details about his background as the son of an Episcopal minister in Tarboro, North Carolina, that he was certain he had never mentioned to her. Pressed as to how she suddenly knew so much about him, she disclosed that her father routinely had all of his children’s would-be girlfriends and boyfriends investigated by detectives. What, White demanded to know, had been the finding with regard to him? “Frivolous, but harmless,” she flung back.

As if he were intent on proving the contrary to be the case, White more and more cast himself as the antagonist of Joe Kennedy. Years afterward, he liked to tell the story of finding himself with Kick in a hotel suite, whose outer door she insisted must be left open because her father’s operatives were almost certainly watching. In the narrative that the newspaperman constructed of her life, he saw it as his role to help bring her to the point where she was finally ready to shut that door, with all that might suggest about the diminution of old Joe’s power.

White never actually met Billy; and it would be many months before he finally beheld the other object of his derision, Joe Kennedy. Of the important male figures in Kick’s life, the one with whom White’s relations were most fraught and complex was Jack, whom he had little choice but to meet on a regular basis. From the moment Kick’s favorite brother materialized in Washington, White perceived him to be, in his phrase, “in the way,” and he sensed that Jack felt a similar antipathy to him.

Thus began a strange and uncomfortable relationship that would persist long after Kick was dead, when both John White and Jack Kennedy were, each in his own manner, orbiting the young Jacqueline Bouvier in postwar Washington. The two men would have seemed to have much in common. Both had prodigious sexual appetites (and indeed would later pursue and succeed with many of the same women). Both were voracious readers, with highly refined literary tastes.

But whereas John White took pride in being a free spirit who disdained the personal ambition that drove many, if not most, other men, the Jack Kennedy who arrived in Washington in 1941 was unabashedly ambitious. Jack of course had not always been that way. There had been a time when the second son had had to conceal his desire to displace his older brother as the family front-runner. Now, the critical and commercial success of
Why England Slept
had profoundly altered Jack’s position in the Kennedy hierarchy. In the wake of Jack’s bestsellerdom, Joe Kennedy Sr. had begun to proudly refer to him in public statements, where once he might have referred to Joe Junior; and the patriarch had allowed himself to rely as never before on Jack’s strategic counsel and even on his efforts as a speechwriter and a ghostwriter. Jack’s publishing triumph was supposed to have been young Joe’s, but the firstborn’s tortured literary efforts had come to naught, only one of his many articles and essays (a piece about his travels in Spain) having finally made it to print.