The Patriarch (71 page)

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J
ack was the first to leave the country. On completing PT boat school, he was assigned to a noncombat training squadron in Jacksonville, Florida. He and his friends considered himself so “shafted” by the stateside noncombat assignment that from this point on, he would be known among his PT boat buddies as “Shafty,” to the horror of his mother, who asked pointedly not to be told what it stood for. Devastated at the thought he might never get to see combat, Jack got in touch with his grandfather Honey Fitz, who was on good terms with Massachusetts senator David Walsh, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh arranged for Jack’s transfer. In February 1943, he left Florida for San Francisco. In early March, he boarded a troopship for the New Hebrides, en route to Tulagi, a small island in the Solomons. His father sent his “Amphogel [antacid] Tablets” to San Francisco, hoping they’d be forwarded across the Pacific.
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The next to depart was Kick, twenty-three, who intended to follow her big brothers into public service. She enlisted in the Red Cross and requested assignment to one of the many canteens for American servicemen in Great Britain, Australia, and North Africa. Given her and her father’s connections, she hoped to be assigned to London to be with Billy Hartington, who had long since broken off his engagement. Lord Halifax, on hearing from Kennedy that Kick was “going over to England with the Red Cross,” noted in his diary that he imagined “this will not give any particular pleasure to Eddy Devonshire,” Billy’s father.
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Kennedy would have preferred to have his daughter remain in Washington, but as with the boys, once she had made up her mind to leave, he supported her decision, though not without warning her of what she might encounter.

“Don’t get too upset if you hear the British talking about your Dad,” he wrote her as soon as he received the telegram that she had landed safely in London. “After all, the only crime I can be accused of is that I was pro-American instead of pro-English. I don’t blame them for being mad at me for not wanting America to go into the war to help them out, but that wasn’t my job, any more than I could be critical of Churchill for having such a terrific influence in our affairs. I resent him as an American, but I don’t blame him as an Englishman. But oftentimes the British aren’t that tolerant. I don’t care what they say, so don’t you let it bother you. You have your own life to live and you needn’t answer any of my problems, responsibilities or difficulties—so just smile and say ‘Fight with him; he can take care of himself.’ After all, no one has been more sympathetic to the British cause than you, so you shouldn’t have to take any of the criticism, but I’m just saying this to you so that you’ll be prepared for it. I don’t mind it; don’t you.”
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When Kick had last been in London, the Kennedys had been treated as a mixture of American royalty and Hollywood celebrity, loved, admired, obsessed over. A great deal had happened since then. “Everyone is very surprised & I do mean surprised to see me,” she wrote Jack on arriving in London. There was “much more anti-Kennedy feeling than I imagined and I am determined to get my stories straight as I think I’ll get it on all sides.” Fortunately, the British she met were too polite to say anything about her father. “No one with the exception of Mr. [Aneurin] Bevan, [Independent Labour] MP from Wales has mentioned a thing about Pop’s views which fact has quite amazed me. In Washington hardly a night would pass that someone didn’t ask about them, make remarks etc. and they were Americans. Now here are the British who are directly concerned and not a peep out of them.”
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Kick worked days and occasionally nights at the Red Cross greeting center and canteen but managed to lead a full social life. She dined with Americans stationed in London, including the Biddles and the Harrimans, visited family friends like the Beaverbrooks and the Astors, and saw as much as she could of Billy Hartington. “Billy and I went out together for the first time in London last Saturday,” she wrote the family on July 14. “It really is funny to see people put their heads together the minute we arrive any place. There’s heavy betting on when we are going to announce it. Some people have gotten the idea that I’m going to give in. Little do they know.”
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In late July, she wrote Jack after “a day and a half spent in the country with Billy. . . . For 24 hours I forgot all about the war. Billy is just the same, a bit older, a bit more ducal, but we get on as well as ever. It is queer as he is so unlike anyone I have ever known at home or any place really. Of course I know he would never give in about the religion and he knows I never would. . . . It’s really too bad because I’m sure I would be a most efficient Duchess of Devonshire in the postwar world and as I’d have a castle in Ireland, one in Scotland, one in Yorkshire and one in Sussex I could keep my old nautical brothers in their old age. But that’s the way it goes. Everyone in London is buzzing with rumors and no matter what happens we’ve given them something to talk about.”
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Without saying anything about her intentions—in large part because she had no idea where her romance with Billy was going to take her—Kick wrote regularly about Billy. “Billy came down from Yorkshire and had to sleep on the floor,” she informed her parents after a “bank holiday” weekend in August at Cliveden. “I wish his father could have seen him. It really is funny how much worried and how much talking is being done, by all those old Cecil and Devonshire spooks. Of course on Sunday morning there was the great problem of my going to church. They all told me that the church was miles away and I couldn’t possibly go. I think they would have considered it a moral triumph if I hadn’t so I was determined to get there no matter how far away it was. Had a chat with the priest who said it was about four miles each way and it was just according to my conscience whether I should attend mass. Finally hopped on a bike and was there in twenty-five minutes.”
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Wherever she went now, the press remained hard on her heels. “Someone rings up every morning and wants to know who I am announcing my engagement to. Each time it’s a different person.”
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Kennedy responded to her letters and cables with long newsy letters about her siblings, her friends, her co-workers at the Washington paper, and the political situation back home. He offered no advice, other than to repeat that he trusted her and would support her in whatever she decided to do. He said nothing about Rose, who was adamantly opposed to any of her children marrying outside the church. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll gamble with your judgment. The best is none too good for you, baby, but if you decide it’s a Chinaman, it’s okay with me. That’s how much I think of you.” The church was important to him, but not more so than his daughter’s happiness.
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L
ike every parent of draft-age children, Kennedy was suspended in time, holding his breath until the war was over and his children out of harm’s way. The summer before, he had busied himself by running his father-in-law’s primary campaign. In 1943, he sought refuge from his worries in two very different ventures: farming and show business.

He had earlier bought the Osterville farm, where he kept his horses and where he and the children had ridden for years along the bridle paths through “wet, peaty terrain” that was perfect for cranberry growing. Now, with the war on and rationing in place, he converted it into a working farm to supply the family with fresh vegetables, dairy products, and beef.

“Your father is nuts about the farm,” Rose wrote the children in late August 1943, “and is reading farm reports assiduously and discussing the merits of having registered cattle. He is also busy preserving everything from string beans to steers.” No one was as shocked as he was by his newfound vocation. The farm had become so much a part of his life that he included regular progress reports on it in his letters to his children overseas. “Our little farm down here is still doing very well,” he wrote Jack in the South Pacific in November 1943. “We’ve got four cows and three steers. We’re killing four pigs on Saturday and three lambs in a couple of weeks. I hope to keep it going until two or three years after the war, at least, and possibly as long as we stay at the Cape.”
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His adventures in show business did not go nearly as well. An acquaintance of sorts, the English playwright Frederick Lonsdale (who, Kennedy wrote Arthur Houghton, had “had a very hard time with the Jewish boys and has had plenty of guts to stand up and fight for no war”), had written a play,
Another Love Story,
which Kennedy had volunteered to produce. “After all, I need something to keep my mind active.” The problem was that it wasn’t a very good play. Kennedy tried but failed to get Lonsdale to consult first with Eddie Goulding, then with Clare Boothe Luce. When Lonsdale refused, Kennedy, more bemused than angry, walked away. The play opened on Broadway on October 12, 1943, and ran for 104 performances. Kennedy got back most of his investment, but not enough to inspire him to produce or invest in any more Broadway shows.
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The farming and the Broadway play provided some distraction that summer and fall. But they were no substitute for news from the war zones where his children were stationed. He heard regularly from Kick, but not nearly enough from either Joe Jr., who was on his way to fly “Liberator bombers—B-24’s” from an air base in England, or Jack, who was in the Pacific.

“We haven’t heard from Jack since the battle started in the Pacific, around the 27th of June,” he wrote Tim McInerny, a former Boston editor and friend, in August. “I wish to God he was back here with me—and that goes for every man or woman who is in the war. . . . Bobby has joined the Navy, but will finish out the next four or five months of his last year at Milton Academy. I’ve threatened Teddy—age 11—to punch him in the nose if I find him around any recruiting station, even though it is against the law to threaten anybody against any enlistment.”
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He followed events in the newspapers as assiduously as every other parent with a son in the military, but with the knowledge that the news that got into the papers was already heavily censored. “Well, we spent the last five days reading about the battle [for two of the Trobriand Islands, which was widely reported in the press that summer],” he wrote Jack in the Pacific, “and they don’t tell us very much. . . . We hope and pray that this wasn’t the time for the back and stomach to go bad on you so that at least you had a chance to do your stuff.”
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There was no answer from Jack and would be none through July and August. Kennedy, growing increasingly frantic about his son, called Clare Boothe Luce, who had won election to Congress in 1942 and sat on the Military Affairs Committee. “Clare Luce,” Kennedy wrote Kick on August 7, “checked with the Navy Department and apparently everything was all right.” Jack’s unit had been engaged in battle on Munda, the island just north of Rendova, where he was stationed. “After [M]unda,” Kennedy continued in his letter to Kick, “the battle in his section will probably quiet down again and maybe he’ll be content—with his bad back and his bad stomach—to come back home and lead a normal life, but I don’t know my children very well I guess.”
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That same day, Kennedy wrote Jack again. “We haven’t heard from you since the 24th of June and naturally we’ve been concerned with all the battles going on there as to just how you are making out. . . . I talked with Angela Green [an actress whom Jack had been dating in New York before his departure]. . . . I told her we hadn’t heard anything from you and she seemed quite concerned. She says you are still her favorite boy friend.”
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Kennedy’s letter, and a second one written four days later, were acts of faith—and desperation. Though he had written to reassure Kick that “everything” was “all right,” it was far from that. Kennedy, who would later boast that he had his “sleuths . . . on the job in Guadalcanal as well as at the Stork Club,” had learned from his contacts in the South Pacific that Jack had gone “missing.” More than that he did not know.

In the early morning of August 2, 1943, PT 109, which Jack commanded, had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer while on patrol in the Blackett Strait in the mid-Solomons. The boat’s plywood hull had been ripped in two. Its gasoline tanks exploded in flames. Two members of the thirteen-member crew were killed instantly, several others badly injured. The commanders of the nearby PT boats, witnessing the collision and explosion, concluded that all hands on PT 109 had been lost and after a cursory search for survivors returned to base with the news that Lieutenant Kennedy and his crew had been killed. “They believed us lost for a week,” Jack later wrote a friend, “but luckily thank God—they did not send the telegrams.” The decision not to send the “telegrams” had kept the news from Rose and the rest of the family, but not, as we have seen, from Kennedy.
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Jack and his crew stayed afloat in the water until the fire was out, then swam back to the remaining piece of the hull, which they held on to as long as they could before swimming another four hours to the nearest island, Lieutenant Kennedy towing one of the injured men behind him. After several days on the tiny island, they were discovered by two natives, whom Jack asked to take a message, carved inside a coconut (there was no paper on the island), to the naval station at Rendova. The next morning, he awoke to the sight of a canoe with eight locals landing on the island, with a stove, food, and a message from a British officer that he was sending a rescue party.
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From the “tent” hospital where he and his crewmates were put in sick bay after their rescue, Jack wrote his family “a short note to tell you that I am alive—and
not
kicking—in spite of any reports that you may happen to hear. It was believed otherwise for a few days—so reports or rumors may have gotten back to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy
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and am back at the base now and am O.K. As soon as possible I shall try to give you the whole story.” The note was postmarked August 13, San Francisco. We have no idea when it reached Hyannis Port.
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