Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (29 page)

Kick had previously argued with both her father and Jack about the postwar viability of Billy’s Britain. At the time of her marriage she had in effect abandoned “the protecting walls of the convent” for the place and purpose offered to her by that Britain of old. Were that world of rank and entitlement indeed to collapse, as present political trends seemed to suggest that it was about to do in 1945, she had great difficulty perceiving a place for herself in the as yet uncharted new order that must emerge in its stead. To her brother, Kick wrote factually and objectively about the trends and the predictions, but at the same time she acknowledged that she found the massive swing to the left hard to comprehend in light of Churchill’s indisputably effective conduct of the war.

When, on V-E Day, Churchill had cried out to a great crowd gathered beneath his balcony, “This is your victory!” the multitude had answered, “No, it’s yours!” Then at the apex of his glory, Churchill seems to have taken it somewhat for granted that a grateful electorate would want him to remain in office, at least until the war was officially over and until the postwar territorial ambitions of Soviet Russia, still ostensibly Britain’s ally, were quashed.

Though he had previously pledged that there would be a general election as soon as the Germans had been overcome, he now proposed to keep the wartime coalition intact until October. Labor, however, demanded an immediate election. Focused as he was on the Soviet threat, Churchill seems to have underestimated many Britons’ desire to start the work of building a fairer, more prosperous society as soon as possible. On May 23, 1945, he went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the King, who asked him to form an interim administration. Thereafter, Churchill stubbornly cast the British general election of 1945 as a referendum on his conduct of the war.

Churchill scoffed at what he called “those foolish people” who wished to rebuild the world after the war. Informed by a member of his circle that there were two opposing notions about him in Britain at the time—nearly universal gratitude on the one hand, and a sense that he was “not very keen on this brave new world business” on the other—Churchill riposted, “The desire for a new world is nothing like universal; the gratitude is.” The crowds that came out to see Churchill in the course of his thousand-mile electoral tour suggested by their very enthusiasm that there could be no doubt about the outcome of what, in darker moments, he referred to with annoyance and anxiety as “this damned election.”

Kick did ultimately manage to find a role for herself in the 1945 British general election. But instead of assisting her brother-in-law Andrew, she took up the cause of her journalist brother. Jack’s presence in England at the time helped somewhat to mitigate the private pain that the election inevitably caused her. She had once anticipated working on behalf of Billy’s future; now, she dedicated herself to Jack’s. Ostensibly, she focused on his immediate assignment, which was to report on the election to an American audience. Kick provided Jack with important perspective and inside information, as well as with the personal introductions to interview sources, that helped him to perceive what most other American journalists simply could not.

Shortly after he arrived in mid-June, Jack warned newspaper readers in the U.S. to prepare for the unthinkable. “Britishers will go to the polls on July 5th in the first general election in almost ten years,” Jack wrote, “and there is a definite possibility that Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Conservative party may be defeated. This may come as a surprise to most Americans who feel Churchill is as indomitable at the polls as he was in war. However, Churchill is fighting a tide that is surging through Europe, washing away monarchies and conservative governments everywhere, and that tide flows powerfully in England. England is moving toward some form of socialism—if not in this election then surely at the next.”

Crucially, Kick also had an eye on the political career upon which her brother hoped soon to embark in the U.S. In 1938 and 1939, Joe Junior had been the Kennedy brother who was thought to be destined for political greatness. Now Kick made certain that her English friends and family all understood that that torch had been passed on to Jack. She saw Jack’s visit as an important part of his political education. Almost everywhere he and she drove together in Kick’s beat-up Baby Austin automobile, they encountered lively political talk that promised to be helpful and instructive to him.

Though Kick could not possibly have known or suspected it at the time, certain of the personal relationships of Jack’s that were renewed and intensified in this period—most notably his friendship with David Ormsby-Gore, who had become closer than ever to Kick after Billy’s death—would impact on Kennedy’s presidential policies long after his sister, who had done so much to facilitate those relationships, was dead. Without the input of Ormsby-Gore, there might never have been the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets that Kennedy himself regarded as his administration’s signal achievement. In the late 1930s, David and Jack had much enjoyed each other’s company, but in 1945 the “family connection” provided by Kick immeasurably deepened their bond.

When Kick brought her brother to spend the weekend at Compton Place, Jack encountered important evidence of the seismic shift that was taking place in British life. A year had passed since the Duke of Devonshire had been utterly confounded by his son’s defeat in the West Derbyshire by-election. Now, however, Eddy Devonshire well understood what the wrenching loss of the family seat had meant in national terms. By degrees, he had come to see the by-election as a harbinger of Churchill’s unhappy fate in the waning days of the Second World War. Alone among Conservatives whom Jack interviewed in this period, Kick’s father-in-law forthrightly predicted “an overwhelming victory” for Labor.

In matters of politics, Eddy Devonshire continued to be an eighteenth-century Whig at heart. He persisted in the conviction that traditional aristocratic governance was best by far. He never ceased to believe in the supremacy of a social order based on the principles of enlightened and responsible paternalism on the one side and thankful deference on the other. By 1945, however, he also acknowledged that the time had come to face the new reality, unpalatable though that new reality might be. He accepted that, to a majority of the electorate, World War Two had been fought not to preserve the traditional ways, but rather to create the new egalitarian order that the socialists were offering in the person and party of Clement Attlee.

Such was the extremity of class resentment at the time that even a record of heroism in the war offered no shield against the angry jeers of the crowd. This, at any rate, was Andrew Cavendish’s experience when he stood for Chesterfield. During the Italian campaign, “the Mad Lord” had repeatedly risked his own life to protect the lives of his men. He had been awarded a Military Cross for his bravery and selflessness. He had earned the love of the soldiers under his command and the respect of his superiors. But those achievements counted for nothing in Chesterfield, which had long been far from hospitable to Conservative politicians. Andrew and Debo were spat upon, and in one instance a crowd sought to overturn their car. More often than not, the war hero was heckled and booed when he attempted to speak. In one auditorium, Andrew heard a fellow in the rear of the house call out that he wished to shake the candidate’s hand. Gratified by what he mistakenly took for an offer of conciliation, Andrew leapt off the platform. Hardly had he begun to dash up the aisle, however, than an accomplice’s outstretched leg caused him to fall on his face, as the audience roared with malicious laughter.

The working class was by no means alone in seeking to break free from the old verities after the war. Some of the young aristocrats returning from battle also had begun to see the world with new eyes. Obstacles that may have seemed well nigh insurmountable before and during the war appeared a good deal less daunting now. Never perhaps was that clearer than at a picnic that Andrew and Debo hosted at Chatsworth for some of the very same members of the aristocratic cousinhood who had attended Billy’s coming-of-age party there in 1939. Back then, the prospect of Catholic girls such as Kick Kennedy, Sissie Lloyd Thomas, and Veronica Fraser marrying into the great Protestant dynasties had filled the older generation with horror. Robert Cecil, for one, finally had bowed to pressure from his illustrious Tory family and ended his relationship with Veronica. In 1945, however, when Robert, too, was fighting for a hopeless seat, everything struck him as different. When he again encountered Veronica at Andrew and Debo’s picnic, he asked her if she would still like to marry him. The gravely wounded war veteran explained that the religious differences just did not seem to matter anymore. Robert meant what he said, for while his relationship with Veronica never again became what it had once been, he did indeed marry another Catholic girl not long afterward.

Kick was not present at Andrew and Debo’s picnic, but she did visit Chatsworth shortly thereafter to give Jack Kennedy a tour of the house that, had Billy survived the war, would one day have been hers. Also in the course of their visit to the Derbyshire countryside, Kick treated her brother to a display of the speechmaking skills that had previously made such a strong impression on the duke’s political agent. Garbed in her Red Cross uniform, and accompanied once more by Billy’s paternal grandmother the dowager duchess, Kick by her performance that day prompted Jack to write home—half in earnest, half in jest—that his sister was suddenly looking “like a possible candidate” to him. There was no denying that Kick was capable of charming audiences—“by looking extremely girlish and sweet,” as Jack reported with perhaps a dash of brotherly condescension. But whether there would ever be an outlet for her to properly use those abilities remained an open question. That she hoped to find such an outlet is suggested by something she did later. She proposed to her father that, when she visited her family in the early autumn, he arrange for her to deliver “some lectures” to American audiences about the work of the Red Cross in wartime Europe.

When, on Polling Day, July 5, the votes were in, policemen removed the boxes, which were to remain sealed for three weeks to allow time for the service vote to come in from overseas. On the eve of the poll, Jack had privately assured Hugh Fraser that Labor would prevail. By the time his byline next appeared in the American press, however, he was predicting a close vote that was likely to favor the Conservative Party. Churchill, meanwhile, went off to Berlin and the Potsdam Conference, where the British prime minister was eager to confront Joseph Stalin over the Soviet Union’s postwar territorial ambitions in Europe. The last of the great wartime summit meetings was scheduled to take place between the seventeenth of July and the second of August.

At Potsdam on July 25, there was a forty-eight-hour intermission, during which time Churchill returned home to learn his and his party’s political fate. On the aircraft to England with his daughter Mary, his mood was one of confidence that the Conservative Party would triumph and that he would soon be back at the negotiating table to face down Stalin. In London, before he retired for the evening he exulted at the news that even Labor headquarters was anticipating a Conservative victory. Just before dawn, however, Churchill was awakened by a stabbing pain, accompanied by a premonition that all was lost. By the time he joined the family and friends who had assembled to be with him as the numbers poured in, the early poll results seemed to confirm his worst fears.

The situation only grew darker as the day progressed. Eventually, it became evident that there had been a Labor landslide. Churchill himself had prevailed in his constituency Woodford, but otherwise the Conservatives were out. Clement Attlee was to be Britain’s new prime minister. And it was Attlee who went on to represent Britain in his predecessor’s stead during the last leg of the Potsdam Conference.

Such was the magnitude of the Labor victory—they now controlled 146 seats in the House of Commons—that it was widely believed that the party of Winston Churchill could not possibly hope to regain power for a decade at least, perhaps for an entire generation. By that estimate, Churchill, now seventy years of age, would be at least eighty before he could even hope to be prime minister again. Quite simply, the arithmetic was against him.

Kick was attending a dinner party presided over by society hostess Emerald Cunard when it was announced that Churchill had gone to Buckingham Palace to submit his resignation to the King. The Conservative rout held immense personal meaning for Kick, marking as it did the end of a world and of a way of life in which she had once invested all of her hopes, even at the risk of having to break with her family and with her church. Of the young men in Kick’s circle, only Michael Astor and Hugh Fraser won their seats. Andrew Cavendish, Robert Cecil, and the rest had all been vanquished.

Nonetheless, it was at this moment that Kick gave her final answer to the lease terms that had been offered to her for a small, charming redbrick house in Smith Square, near Parliament. Before leaving for Ireland to visit Adele Astaire Cavendish, among others, Kick signed a twenty-five-year lease on the property, which she intended to decorate with, in her phrase, “Chatsworth stuff” until she managed to acquire furnishings of her own. In the early days of Kick’s relationship with Billy, Adele had accompanied the couple to Lady Mountbatten’s party for Sally Norton. During the war, Kick had seen a good deal of Adele when both American women worked for the Red Cross in London. Now Kick and Adele were both widows, Charlie Cavendish having died in 1944. Similarly confronted by the question of where she properly belonged, Adele viewed things in a rather different way from Kick.

When Kick visited Adele at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, she found that her forty-seven-year-old hostess was set on returning to the U.S. Now that she was alone, Adele regarded America as her home and Britain as a place to visit. Unlike Kick when she landed in London in 1938, Adele had been very much a person in her own right, when in 1923, she first appeared on the London stage with her younger brother Fred. The Astaire siblings, who had been dancing together professionally since she was eight and he five, were full-fledged Broadway stars. Until 1932, when she retired from the dance duo in order to marry, Adele had been the more personally popular and lavishly acclaimed member of the act by far. In later years, Adele never quite recovered from the sense of regret provoked by her loss of the limelight, as well as by the immense fame that Fred went on to achieve on his own. Kick’s situation presented itself as the very opposite of Adele’s. As far as Kick was concerned, she had not existed in her own right until she came to England on the eve of the war. In contrast to Adele, it was Britain that Kick intended to make her postwar home base, from which at intervals she would visit the U.S.