The Patriarch (72 page)

In a letter to the children, Rose claimed that she first heard about the rescue on August 19. “The
Globe
called me up about 8:20 in the morning . . . when I was in your father’s room waiting to hear the morning radio news. Of course, I was very much surprised and excited and I told them I would contact your father, who had gone over to the farm for his early morning ride. . . . Dad knew he was missing for two weeks, although he gave no sign—for which I am very thankful—as I know we should all have been terribly worried. He just complained about his arthritis and I said it was funny he was nervous now, little knowing what he had to be nervous about.”
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Kennedy later told his son Ted and nephew Joey Gargan that he had heard about Jack’s rescue on the radio when he was driving back from his early morning horseback ride at the Osterville farm. “He said that he was so excited that he drove the car off the road and into a field.”
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The news of Lieutenant Kennedy’s heroism burst onto the front pages on August 20.
KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT,
the
New York Times
reported on page one, in a story datelined “Aug. 8 (delayed).” The family was besieged by congratulatory telegrams from all over the country. “Several people,” Rose wrote the children in her round-robin letter of August 25, “have said they always knew Jack would do it and they always felt that Joe had the same sort of stuff, which is all very wonderful for a mother to hear. I believe I would be just as happy though if Joe did not have to risk his life in such a fashion.”
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Kennedy tried to answer every telegram and letter the family received. “I’ve been a little lax in writing you recently,” he wrote Tim McInerny in London, “but Jack’s exploits in the South Pacific have kept me pretty well tied up. It is the consensus of the newspaper men here that there hasn’t been a better story since the war started than the one of young Jack. He really came through with flying colors.” Convinced that his son’s heroism should not go unrewarded, he began a quiet lobbying campaign with his friends in Washington and in the press to get him a “decoration” of some sort.
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As exhilarated as he was by the good news from the South Pacific, Kennedy’s relief from his fears was only partial—and temporary. He was sick with worry about Jack’s health (how could a dangerously underweight man with a bad stomach have survived on coconuts for a week?), furious with the navy for not sending the boy home, and angry with Jack (though he would never tell him) for not demanding to be repatriated. To a friend whose son was also in the military, he confided, only partly in jest, that he thought “the ones that really suffer in this war are the parents. The boys love it and they have a great time, particularly those that are flying or on PT boats.”
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He was desperate to see Jack in the flesh. In the fall, he left Hyannis Port for New York City, still with no word as to when Jack would return home. “We have not heard from Jack for a couple of weeks,” Rose wrote the children on October 27 from Hyannis Port, “and I think Dad worries a bit as he telephones from New York every day. We rather think he is in the midst of the fighting again as we got one report that he volunteered for all the hazardous assignments. I am hoping he will surprise us by suddenly telling us he is on his way home, as he really hoped and believed he would be here by Christmas.”
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When Kennedy did hear again from his son, the news was not good. “They will not send anyone back while there is fighting in this area—when its over—I’ll get back,” Jack wrote from his island base in the South Pacific. “As a matter of fact—I am in a bad spot for getting out as am now Capt. of a gunboat— It’s the first one they’ve ever had of its type—it’s a former P.T. and is very interesting. . . . It was a sort of a dubious honor to be given the first—so I will have to stick around & try to make a go of it. . . . Don’t worry at all about me—I’ve learned to duck—and have learned the wisdom of the old naval doctrine of keeping your bowels—your mouth shut—and never volunteering.”
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“If you are going to be out there until we clean up that area,” Kennedy wrote back on November 4, “I should think it would be Teddy who would relieve you instead of Bobby. I’m told by some of the group here that roughly a year is the limit so that at least puts an outside time of around February for you. Of course I know you’d hate to have anybody mix into your schedule so I’m leaving it at that until I hear from you further.”
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S
ometime that summer or fall of 1943, while awaiting word from his boys in the war zones, Kennedy contacted the local FBI office and volunteered “to assist the Bureau in any way possible should his services be needed.” Why he did so at this time, we don’t know. It might have been to belatedly thank J. Edgar Hoover for alerting him about Jack’s involvement with Inga Arvad.

After a cursory investigation in Washington, Kennedy was enlisted as a “special service contact.” In discussions that fall with Special Agent William H. Carpenter, his FBI liaison in Hyannis Port, Kennedy offered to use his connections in the liquor business in New York and the moving picture industry in California and in South America to “benefit the Bureau.” According to Special Agent Carpenter, he volunteered that he had “many Jewish friends in the moving picture industry who would furnish him, upon request, with any information in their possession pertaining to Communist infiltration. . . . He feels also that he is in a position to secure any information the Bureau may desire from his contacts in the industry with reference to any individuals who have Communistic sympathies.”
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Though Kennedy would remain a fawning, outspoken admirer of J. Edgar Hoover and his bureau in the years to come, there is no evidence that he ever offered the FBI tips on Communist infiltrators or individuals who might have “Communistic sympathies.” His communications consisted almost entirely of flattering letters to the director, complaints about articles and columnists critical of the FBI, and invitations to Hoover and his companion, Clyde Tolson, to join him in Palm Beach or at Hialeah. His ceaseless flattery of and attention to Hoover was multipurposed. It gave him access, as we shall see, to the FBI and to J. Edgar Hoover’s assistance whenever he or anyone else in the family needed it.

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A
nother presidential election was approaching and Kennedy was going to sit it out. He had little faith in Roosevelt, but less in the opponents the Republicans might put up against him. “I am beginning to be courted very strongly by both sides now,” he wrote Sir James Calder on December 20, 1943, “because they are starting to think of the election next year, but I am minding my own business and praying that the war will be over and I’ll get my children back. That’s the thing that concerns me at the minute—not who’s going to be the candidate.”
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With the “courting” came a new set of rumors that he was going to be named secretary of commerce. “So that you’ll be all straightened out on the common gossip regarding your Dad’s future,” he wrote Pat on March 8, 1944, “I am not considering an offer to be Secretary of Commerce and wouldn’t if it were offered to me. They’ve got to do better than that ‘to get papa back into this awful mess.’”
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I
n January 1944, Jack finally returned to the United States, five months after his PT boat had been sunk. His medical condition, as his father had feared, was so poor that even before seeing his family, he flew to the Mayo Clinic, where he was told that he would have to have an operation on his back. He suffered as well from an early duodenal ulcer and a still undiagnosed case of malaria. The photographs of the lieutenant in his disheveled navy uniform reveal a tanned, smiling, but unhealthy-looking, frightfully thin young man. “He got back,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. in late February, “having lost about twenty odd pounds, with his stomach in pretty poor shape. . . . His back, however, was in very bad shape and finally, after spending three weeks here getting in reasonable condition, he is now in the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston where he’s having pictures taken of his back and at the same time having his stomach treated. He expects to get an assignment to Miami for about six weeks, and then if his back isn’t right he’s going to have it operated on. How serious that is they are not really able to tell me until they start to do the job. His future depends on how his back turns out. If it isn’t going to be all right, I imagine he’ll be through with the Navy; if he gets fixed up, I imagine he’ll be on his way again, without too much enthusiasm.”
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While stateside, Jack met with journalist John Hersey, whom he had known earlier and remained friendly with even after Hersey had wed a woman, Frances Ann Cannon, he had himself considered marrying. Hersey was so taken with the PT boat story that he proposed to write an article about it. The article was rejected by
Life
magazine, then accepted by the
New Yorker
. Kennedy and the navy, hoping for a larger readership, tried to get it published in
Reader’s Digest
instead. “I’m hopeful I can work it out. It would be a great boost for the Kennedy clan,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. in late May. In the end, the article was published first in the
New Yorker
and then in condensed form in
Reader’s Digest.
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K
ennedy’s pessimism, his sense that the world was spinning out of control, was intertwined with and augmented by his loss of control over his own life and those of his children.

Though Kick had said nothing about marrying Billy Hartington, she was acting more and more as if she intended to. In January 1944, when Billy decided to run for the seat in Parliament that had belonged to his family for almost two centuries, Kick joined him on the campaign trail. She wrote to tell her parents that she had “paid a visit to Bishop Matthew,” the auxiliary bishop of Westminster, to find out what her options might be should she marry a Protestant. “He had nothing to offer me as a possible solution and went so far as to say that in a case like this the Church would have to be very careful so as to avoid all criticism. In fact bend the other way about making any concessions. When I returned home I picked up the paper and found that the Archbishop of York had just made a statement saying that any Anglican who gave in to the Roman Catholic Church at marriage was guilty of a great weakness. He must have gotten wind of something I should think. Well, in any case there is no immediate rush for a solution but I must say it would be a great load off my mind.”
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Had the circumstances been otherwise, Kennedy would have flown to London to be with his daughter. But it was wartime, flights were restricted, and the press would be all over him once he arrived, with the publicity making matters worse for everyone involved. Fortunately, Joe Jr. was now stationed in England. “I do hope you’ll give her the benefit of your counsel and sympathy,” Kennedy wrote him in late February, “because after all she has done a swell job and she’s entitled to the best and with us over here it’s awfully difficult to be as helpful as we’d like to be. As far as I personally am concerned, Kick can do no wrong and whatever she did would be great with me.” It is noteworthy that Kennedy switched from the “we” to “I personally” in declaring his belief that Kick could “do no wrong.” Rose Kennedy was not so sure.
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On February 22, Kick wrote her family about the results of the by-election, which Billy had lost. In the middle of her letter, she drew back from politics to talk about Billy and the Cavendish family, with whom she had celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday on February 20. “Received a lovely old leather book from the Duke for my birthday. The Duchess said she had nothing to do with it, and when I opened it I knew why. It was the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. I laughed and thanked him very much.” The duke, by now as taken with Kick as everyone else in the family, was reconciled to his son marrying her, but only because he expected that she would convert to the Church of England. Kick reported that Billy’s mother, the duchess, with whom she had had a “long chat . . . longs to make things easy. Please try and discover loopholes although I keep feeling that the particular parties involved would make any compromise impossible. The Catholics would say it would give scandal. This situation, Daddy, is a stickler.”
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Kennedy cabled Count Enrico Galeazzi to inquire as to whether there was any way for Kick to get a “dispensation” to marry an Anglican. The news was not encouraging. “Frankly I do not seem to think Dad can do anything,” Rose wrote her daughter on February 24. “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 cannot have what they want most. I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family tradition.” It was not difficult to read between Rose’s lines. She did not tell Kick, as Kennedy had on several occasions, that she would support her whatever she decided. Instead, she sounded very much as if she took it for granted that her daughter would make the “sacrifice” necessary to maintain “the old family tradition.”
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In early March, Kennedy wrote to thank Kick on her wise and witty letter on Billy’s electoral campaign. Midway through his four-and-a-half-page letter, fearing (rightly) that it would be read by the censors, he referred “to the other problem,” on which he was “working in every way I know. The prominence of the situation makes it most difficult, neither side wishing to look as though it were making concessions. I am afraid the individuals themselves will have to work it out with some give and take on their part and let all the rest of us go jump in the lake.” In true Kennedy fashion, he closed with a bit of dark gallows Irish humor, the joke that arouses the “mirthless laugh,” as Samuel Beckett has written, the laugh “at that which is unhappy.” He had heard from London that Kick had been making “converts” among the American soldiers at her canteen. “Maybe if you made enough of them a couple of them could take your place.” Knowing that Rose would not have appreciated his joking about the church and converts, he added that if she “ever saw that sentence I’d be thrown right out in the street.”
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