Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (20 page)

Ironically, it was precisely the long-held assumption in British politics that broad acres conferred upon their owners the right to wield political power that had already come under spectacular assault during the run-up to the 1944 West Derbyshire by-election. The left targeted the anachronistic old duke, who had never doubted that the seat in Parliament was his to do with as he wished, as well as the politically callow son and heir with whom he had had the effrontery to seek to fill it. The Common Wealth Party’s Sir Richard Acland, who, in line with Harold Macmillan’s prediction was enthusiastically supporting Alderman Charles White, framed the debate early on by his insistence that the duke regarded the constituency as his preserve. Commenting on Eddy Devonshire’s efforts to rush the election, Acland scathingly accused him of treating the forty-eight thousand people in the constituency as though they were “the goods and chattel” of the Cavendish family.

The by-election quickly emerged as far more than merely a local affair. The rowdy contest became a first significant referendum on what Britons wanted the nation to look like in the postwar era. Curiously, the Marquess of Hartington, aged twenty-six, represented the old order, the upper-class dictatorship in British political life that many electors nationwide apparently wished to forever relegate to the past, while Alderman White, aged sixty-three, who symbolically launched his campaign in the shilling-a-week cottage of his birth, represented the new order that hoped to prevail after the war.

The duchess later called the 1944 West Derbyshire by-election “the worst and dirtiest fight” in all of the elections she had fought. Billy, when he addressed political meetings in village halls throughout the rural constituency, was consistently booed, heckled, and drowned out by loud hissing and foot stamping. As Billy had privately stipulated beforehand that win or lose he intended to return to his regiment after the poll, it stung all the more when White accused him of having accepted the nomination in hopes of evading service.

Billy and his family knew the latter charge to be utterly untrue. White managed to get closer to the bone when he pandered to the wide national antiaristocratic sentiment that had swelled with the controversial recent release from prison of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife, by pointedly reminding electors that Diana Mosley was Debo’s sister. The Mosleys had been let out in November on account of Sir Oswald’s ill health. Churchill sought to justify the decision by arguing that people could not simply be kept in jail indefinitely because they held opinions that were abhorrent to others. That, he argued, was among the very principles that Britain and the U.S. were then fighting for. But the prime minister’s case was undermined by the fact that others who had been jailed during the war for similar reasons remained imprisoned even as the Mosleys went free. The case provoked a national uproar, and many critics charged that the couple had been accorded preferential treatment because they were aristocrats.

Billy responded to White’s efforts to link him to the Mosleys by pointing out that his brother was then fighting in Italy and by emphasizing that both Andrew and Debo were “violently anti-Fascist.” Billy went on, “So am I. In any case, am I my brother’s keeper?” But of course, matters were a good deal more complicated than that, not so much because of ideology as because of Debo’s painfully divided loyalties.

Through all the storms that swirled around the Mosleys, then and in later years, Debo, portraying herself as apolitical, persisted in her devotion to her unashamedly Hitler-worshipping sister Diana. Quite simply, Debo loved Diana. She visited Diana in prison, took an interest in her children, railed against “Cousin Winston” as he allowed Diana to languish in jail, and rejoiced when she was freed. During Diana’s incarceration, her young sons visited Churchdale Hall, where Max Mosley, as outspoken at age three as he would be in later years, instructed Eddy Devonshire not to smoke at the table. Later, Billy was drafted to entertain the Mosley boys, while they were staying with their pregnant aunt Debo at the Rookery. None of which meant that Debo, or Billy for that matter, in any way sympathized with Diana’s reprehensible views. But because of Debo’s intense ongoing relationship with her, Diana would long burden the Cavendishes with no small amount of unwanted moral and political baggage.

Meanwhile, in a measure of all that was perceived to be at stake in the by-election, cabinet ministers came down from London to speak on Billy’s behalf; and even Winston Churchill was heard from, in a public letter addressed to the Conservative candidate: “My dear Hartington,” the prime minister began, “I see that they are attacking you because your family has been identified for about three hundred years with the Parliamentary representation of West Derbyshire. It ought, on the contrary, to be a matter of pride to the constituency to have such long traditions of constancy and fidelity through so many changing scenes and circumstances. Moreover, it is a historical fact that your family and the people of West Derbyshire have acted together on every great occasion in this long period of history on the side of the people’s rights and progress.” But how could Churchill possibly help Billy, when the wartime leader was himself about to fall victim to the very same forces of change that were at work in the West Derbyshire by-election? Indeed, Debo would later describe Billy’s unsuccessful candidature as “the straw in the wind” that foretold Churchill’s electoral defeat in 1945.

Sure enough, the prime minister’s attempt to intervene in the by-election backfired. The people of West Derbyshire—a great many of them anyway—decried Churchill’s public letter as an example of the very paternalism they were seeking to eradicate. Conservative efforts to sell Billy as “the patriotic candidate,” a vote for whom represented a vote of confidence in the wartime coalition government, proved similarly counterproductive. Though Hitler had yet to be defeated, many Britons, weary of wartime stringencies, were already eagerly looking beyond the war to better, more prosperous and egalitarian times.

When Kick joined Billy and his family on the fifteenth, her presence had to be downplayed as much as possible, the duke’s political agents having ruled that a connection to the Kennedy family would do Lord Hartington’s candidature no more good than a connection to the Mitford family. Remaining for the most part in the background, Kick thrilled to Billy’s ability to maintain his poise and good humor despite all the harassment. She marveled at the duchess’s oratorical skills, when on numerous occasions Moucher Devonshire spoke eloquently and forthrightly on her son’s behalf. And she delighted in the family’s marathon nightly strategy sessions.

The adrenaline rush of politics was by no means unfamiliar to Kick. Nor could any Kennedy offspring have failed to be elated by the sight of the many press people, American as well as British, who descended upon the villages and hamlets of the dale to cover this historic and emblematic election. Elizabeth Cavendish’s chestnut pony, Poppet, started back in fright when American journalists leapt out of their automobiles and began snapping pictures and asking questions of anyone they could find. The press invasion proved similarly disconcerting to not a few local residents. By contrast, for Kick, who had finally been permitted to canvass for votes with Billy’s sister in a gig decorated with gaudy campaign posters, the clicking cameras were as a drug.

As Kick later told Richard Wood, the whole experience of the by-election—the press, the crowds, the noise, Billy’s bravery and beauty on the speaker’s platform, the intensity of the feelings on both sides, and the magnitude of all that was at stake—had “the most overwhelming impact” on her.

Had the duchess staged it all, had she constructed sets and hired crowds of extras, with an eye toward beguiling Kick, the older woman could hardly have proven more efficacious.

Strange to say, Kick fell in love with a world and a set of traditions at the very moment when both were in the process of being radically transformed. It was as if she had found exactly what she was searching for, the ideal outlet for her ambitions, only to see it instantly snatched away by history. When, at last, Billy received but 41.5 percent of the vote to Alderman Charles White’s 57.7 percent, Kick could scarcely conceal that she was “hysterically upset”—both for her young man’s sake and for herself.

The duke shared Kick’s sense of desolation. “I don’t know what the people want,” Eddy Devonshire bitterly lamented.

To which his son cheerfully flung back: “I do. They just don’t want the Cavendishes.”

The Common Wealth Party, meanwhile, pointed to Billy’s loss as proof that “Britain will not be content to return to the old 1939 world when we have defeated the enemy.”

Finally, Billy made a short speech to about one thousand local Conservative supporters, who by turns cheered and wept at what he had to say. “It has been a hard fight, and that is the way it goes,” he declared. “I am going now to fight for you at the front. After all, unless we win the war, there can be no home front. Better luck next time.”

Debo, standing in the crowd, heard one old woman beside her remark regarding Billy’s imminent return to the front, “It’s a shame to let him go, a great tall man like he is, he’s such a target.”

At any rate, unlike his father, Billy had emerged from the cut and thrust of the campaign curiously invigorated. That so many of Billy’s long-held assumptions about life had been upended in the Battle of Flanders may have helped him now to accept what Eddy Devonshire still could not bring himself to acknowledge. Billy saw that the centuries-old traditions that he and his father cherished and earnestly believed had always served England best could not possibly survive the war. At the same time, as a West Derbyshire neighbor would later write of Billy, he was “no less determined to play his part in directing the current and not merely to be swept away by it.” Billy’s parting words to supporters, “Better luck next time,” signaled his intention to return to politics after the war.

By the time Billy uttered those words, there was no longer any doubt on Kick’s side that, when he did return to the political fray, she intended to be there with him.

Billy’s father signaled that the time was fast approaching to make the gesture that his son had demanded of her, when, three days after the election, on the occasion of her twenty-fourth birthday, the duke presented Kick with a beautiful old leather volume of the Book of Common Prayer, the book of prayers and services used in the Anglican Church. Kick laughed and thanked him, but the duke’s message to her was clear. Initially, she pinned her hopes on old Joe Kennedy’s being able to obtain a dispensation on her behalf through his contacts in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. In league with Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, old Joe attempted to pull strings at the Vatican.

But in the end, the ambassador and the archbishop were unable to secure the special arrangement that would permit Kick to marry Billy and bring up their children as Protestants while she herself remained in the good graces of the Catholic Church. “Frankly I do not seem to think Dad can do anything,” Rose reported to her daughter. “He feels terribly sympathetic and so do I and I only wish we could offer some suggestions. When both people have been handed something all their lives, how ironic it is that they can not have what they want most.”

Characteristically, given the choices that Rose had made in her own life, she counseled her daughter to find solace for her disappointed hopes in a renewed commitment to her duty. “It is Lent now,” Rose went on, “and I am praying morning, noon and night, so do not be exhausting yourself and running your little legs off going to Church, as your first duty is towards your job. The little verse—‘Do your duty, that is best; leave unto the Lord the rest’ may be Protestant or Catholic, but it really teaches us that our first responsibility is towards our immediate job.”

Rose seemed confident that in the absence of a dispensation, Kick would not dare go forward. The case, as far as the Kennedy matriarch was concerned, was closed.

Kick, however, continued to struggle. She spent two days at Churchdale Hall, where the duchess had arranged for her to confer with her great friend, the Reverend Edward Keble Talbot, who was King George VI’s chaplain. The clergyman reviewed what the Cavendish family stood for in the English Church and reiterated “the impossibilities” of any son of Billy’s being brought up as a Roman Catholic.

He spoke in detail about the significant differences between the Anglican and Roman churches, and expressed the hope that Kick might be able to find “a substitute” in Anglicanism for the faith in which she had been raised. As she later reported to her parents, Kick countered “that something one had been brought up to believe in and which was largely responsible for the character and personality of an individual is a very hard thing for which to find a substitute.” She further told the clergyman that it struck her as “rather cheap and weak” to capitulate in the first real crisis that had presented itself to her in life.

At the same time, as Richard Wood perceived, she had never been more lucid about what she wanted and what she must do to obtain it. At once complicating and clarifying her situation was the fact that Billy’s father had suddenly gone so far as to tell him that were he to give in to Kick on the religious question, the family would not cut him off. On the face of it, this was a huge development. Duke Eddy’s altered position would have seemed to obliterate the obstacles before her. But it quickly became apparent that that was far from the case.

Henceforth, it was Billy alone who saw it as a matter of his own bounden duty to insist that Kick be the one to capitulate. She was not battling the duke anymore; she was battling the man she loved.

Yet for all the anguish Billy’s inflexibility caused her, she also found much to admire in the stance he had taken. “Poor Billy is very, very sad but he sees his duty must come first,” Kick wrote to her parents. “He is a fanatic on this subject and I suppose just such a spirit is what has made England great despite the fact that Englishmen are considered so weak-looking, etc.” Did she intend the latter sentence as a riposte to her father and older brothers, who had often been heard to portray the British as weak?