The Patriarch (73 page)

Kick’s troubles were enough to try any parent’s heart. She had, she told her parents in a March 22 letter, just returned from a visit to Churchdale, the Cavendish estate in Derbyshire, where the duchess had arranged, with Kick’s full approval, for her to meet with the duchess’s “very great friend . . . Father Ted Talbot” of the Church of England, so that he might “explain what the Cavendish family stood for in the English Church, the impossibilities of Billy permitting his son to be brought up a Roman Catholic.” Father Talbot and the duchess asked Kick to at least explore the possibility of converting. Kick was adamant. Almost paraphrasing her mother’s sentiments in her recent letter, she explained that because she had “been blessed with so many of this world’s goods . . . it seemed rather cheap and weak to give in at the first real crisis in my life.” She left Churchdale feeling “most discouraged and rather sad. I want to do the right thing so badly and yet I hope I’m not giving up the most important thing in my life.” She understood now that Billy could neither convert nor allow his children to be raised as Catholics. “Poor Billy is very, very sad but he sees his duty must come first. He is a fanatic on this subject.” If she and Billy were to be married, she would have to be the one to “give in.”
⁷¹

In the best of circumstances, the choices that Kick faced would have been near debilitating. But this was wartime and every decision was more difficult. It was common knowledge that the second front in Europe would soon be opened and Billy, with tens of thousands of other British soldiers and officers, would be swept across the English Channel and into combat. Kick could not afford the luxury of putting off her choice.

On April 4, she wrote to say that she, Joe Jr., and Billy had visited Bishop Matthew again and learned from him that there would no “dispensations,” no “concessions,” from the church. “The Bishop told me that it would put the Church in a very difficult position for us to get a dispensation and it would be better if we went ahead and got married and then something might possibly be done afterwards. Of course he wouldn’t guarantee that anything could be done.” As a married woman, she could still “go to Church but not Communion. . . . If I do marry Billy within the next two months, please be quite sure that I am going it with the full knowledge of what I am doing and that I’m quite happy about it and feel quite sure that I am doing the right thing.” She added as a postscript that Billy had “called last night and said that there wasn’t much hope of getting any more leave. That’s our latest difficulty. Goodness, when will they ever stop.”
⁷²

Kennedy held out hope that some sort of compromise could be reached. “Jack,” he wrote on April 27, “much to my amazement because I am not particularly impressed with the depth of his Catholic faith, feels that some kind of concession should be made on the part of Billy. . . . In the meantime, I want you to know that I feel for you very deeply. . . . When I think of you alone over there, even though I am sure you are with people you like to be with, I am also conceited enough to know that you would value the counsel of Mother and I. . . . Now none of this means that I am attempting to tell you how you should handle your life. You are the one that has to live it and it is a long one and also quite a difficult one, but as I have said to you before you are ‘tops’ with me and you always will be.”
⁷³

—

R
ose and Kennedy did not learn of Kick’s decision until April 29, when she cabled that she and Billy were going to be married in a registry office, not a church, but she did not know precisely when. “Naturally,” Rose wrote in her diary, “I was disturbed horrified—heartbroken.” Kick was setting a bad example for every Catholic girl who was attracted to a Protestant boy. “Every little young girl would say if K. Kennedy can—why can’t I? . . . What a blow to our family prestige.” She recognized that she was overreacting, but that didn’t stop her. “No one seemed to be as excited about that as I & I was sick & supposed to keep from any emotional upset so I prayed with all my heart. . . . Joe told me I had done all that could be done. . . . I would like Joe to fly to her but he seemed to think that was impossible altho’ now I know he should have gone over a month or 2 ago.”
⁷⁴

Frantic and unwilling to trust her husband because he was not frantic, Rose sent another cable to her daughter, then returned to Boston and checked into the New England Baptist Hospital, where, according to the newspapers, she remained for the next “two weeks for a routine physical checkup.” Kennedy, worried that his youngest daughter, Jean, might be distressed by the news from London, visited her at the Sacred Heart Convent. The two went for a long walk and Kennedy told Jean that Kick was going to marry outside the church, but to a good man whom she loved. He was happy for her and Jean should be also. She assured her father that she was not upset and promised to write her sister, as Kennedy had suggested.
⁷⁵

Meanwhile, on Kennedy’s behalf, Archbishop Spellman contacted Archbishop Godfrey in London, who visited Kick and asked her to reconsider, because her mother was “greatly distressed.” “Effort in vain,” Archbishop Godfrey cabled Spellman on May 4. That same day, the engagement of Kathleen Kennedy and Lord Hartington, heir of the Duke of Devonshire, was announced in
The Times
of London.
⁷⁶

Having heard nothing from her father, Kick cabled him the day before the wedding. “Religion everything to us both. Will always live according to Catholic teaching. Praying that time will heal all wounds. Your support in this as in everything else means so much. Please beseech mother not to worry. Am very happy and quite convinced have taken right step. Love to all.”
⁷⁷

Rose’s distress was predictable, but not Kennedy’s silence. He had supported his daughter from the very beginning, urged her to forget the rest of the world, and told her that “whatever she did would be great” with him. Still, he had never quite believed that she would marry a Protestant. Now that she had, he was momentarily stunned—and speechless. There was no congratulatory cable from him when the engagement was announced or immediately before, or after, the wedding at the Chelsea registry office in London on May 6.

Joe Jr., who was not in the habit of reprimanding or correcting his father, felt obliged to do so. From London, he sent a six-word cable the day after the wedding: “The power of silence is great.” The next morning, Kennedy sent his congratulations to his daughter. There was no message from Rose Kennedy. “Most distressed about mother,” Kick cabled Palm Beach. “Please tell her not to worry. Your cable made my happiest day. . . . Have American papers been bad? All love.”
⁷⁸

When Kennedy responded that Rose was well, Kathleen wrote her directly. “Goodness mother—I owe so much to you and Daddy that nothing in the world could have made me go against your will. However, I felt that you expected the action I took and would judge that it was the course to make under the circumstances. . . . Please don’t take responsibility for an action, which you think bad (and I do not). You did everything in your power to stop it. You did your duty as a Roman Catholic mother. You have not failed. There was nothing lacking in my religious education. Not by any means am I giving up my faith—it is most precious to me. . . . Of course it was too bad that the papers made such an issue of the religious question. However, I must admit that I expected it. I hope they weren’t too bad in Boston.” Kick was filled with gratitude that her big brother, Joe Jr., had not only attended the wedding but had been on her side from day one. In her letter to her mother, she joked that giving his sister away in marriage to a Protestant aristocrat might not have been a terribly wise move politically. Joe Jr. agreed that with “his face plastered all over the papers . . . he was ‘finished in Boston.’”
⁷⁹

Kick and Joe Jr. need not have worried. Kennedy had used all the influence he could muster to make sure that the local papers either ignored or downplayed the wedding of his daughter to an English Protestant aristocrat. “In fact,” Kennedy reassured his son, “Arthur Krock said that in twenty-five years of newspaper work he had never seen such a difficult situation handled so tactfully.” Only “gabby grandfather” had had anything to say to the press. “Naturally, when you get leading questions, such as . . . ‘How do you feel about your daughter renouncing the Catholic Religion?’ . . . and . . . ‘Do you favor the marriage of your daughter outside of the Church?’ it was a very difficult situation. I couldn’t say that I didn’t like it because after all, I think the world of Kick and as I’ve often said, whatever she did would be all right with me, because I feel she’s a girl of great character, great instincts, and great experience, and when she makes up her mind to do anything—then boy, I know she’s got some reason for it and that’s enough for me. But of course with Mother, it’s different.”
⁸⁰

In the end, what troubled Kennedy the most, perhaps, was not that his daughter had married a Protestant, but that, having wed an Englishman, she would not be coming home. “I have lost one of my daughters to England,” he wrote Lord Beaverbrook on May 24. “She was the apple of my eye and I feel the loss because I won’t have her near me all the time, but I’m sure she’s going to be wonderfully happy and I can assure you that England is getting a great girl.”
⁸¹

—

O
n June 6, 1944, one month after the marriage of William Hartington and Kathleen Kennedy, the Allied invasion of Europe was launched. Two weeks later, Billy Hartington crossed the English Channel. Joe Jr., who could have come home on leave in mid-May, stayed behind to fly support missions for the invading troops.

Kennedy, waiting for the return from the battlefields of his son-in-law and his son, busied himself by giving a few speeches. He spoke in Boston on National Maritime Day, then in May flew to Chicago to address the American Gastroenterological Association at the invitation of its president, his friend and doctor, Sara Jordan, of the Lahey Clinic. Before Pearl Harbor, he had insisted that Americans stay out of European battles and refrain from trying to save the world from tyrannical dictators, even those as evil as Adolf Hitler. Now he repeated his message again and urged his fellow Americans “with all the strength I command” to resist the call “to bear an onerous share of the expenses of world-wide social service, foreign trade and world currencies.” He had no patience with those who claimed that because American cities had not been “devastated and gutted” as London had, Americans “have not suffered from this war.” In a sentence large with foreboding, he declared, “You can’t tell that to the family whose boy is not coming home at the end of the war.”
⁸²

On June 11, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was admitted to the Chelsea Naval Hospital, then transferred to New England Baptist for back surgery. “Isn’t it lovely,” Clare Boothe Luce wrote his father on June 12, “to have him tucked away safely in a plaster Paris cast for a few months, anyway?” The plan had been to repair a disk, but when the doctors found abnormally soft tissue they removed it. Jack “has had a very hard time,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. on August 9. “He has not recovered nearly as fast as he should have and is now having a great deal of trouble with his leg. Of course, he can’t correct the stomach difficulties until his back gets right. He is back in the Chelsea Naval Hospital, and we are hoping that he may get a little time off to recuperate if another operation is not necessary.”
⁸³

Jack at least was safe. Nothing had been heard from Billy since he’d crossed the Channel in late June. “We hear from Kathleen and she is very, very happy,” Kennedy wrote Houghton on July 7, “but a little bit worried about her husband as she hasn’t heard from him for quite a while. You know they stick those Grenadier and Coldstream guards with the Irish guards right out in front.”
⁸⁴

Joe Jr. had still not come home. “Although he’s had a large number of casualties in his squadron,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook, “I’m still hoping and praying we’ll see him around the first of July.”
⁸⁵

The first of July came and went, and no Joe Jr. “No doubt you are surprised that I haven’t arrived home,” he wrote his parents on July 26. “I am going to do something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So probably I won’t be home till sometime in September.”

He had never told a bigger lie. He had volunteered for a dangerous, near suicidal mission. German V-1 flying bombs had been pummeling London since D-Day, causing death, destruction, and constant fear. Even brave Kick, who had been through so much, was, according to her brother, “terrified of the Doodles [the name given the aerial bombs] as is everyone else, and I think she is smart not to work in London.” Joe Jr.’s assignment was to take out a major V-1 launching site in Belgium. The navy had stripped down one of the Liberator bombers that he had been flying so that it could be fully loaded with explosives. His instructions were to fly the overloaded B-24 across the English Channel, turn over control of his plane to the two B-17s flying with him when he reached his target, and parachute to safety.
⁸⁶

Kennedy hid his disappointment and fears as best he could. “The reason I haven’t been writing you is that I have been expecting to hear the telephone ring any time and to hear that you were in Norfolk and were on your way home. Not until we got your letter night before last did we know that you were not likely to make it until September. I can quite understand how you feel about staying there because the worst of it is certainly better than anything in the Pacific, but don’t force your luck too much.”
⁸⁷

Thirty

“A
M
ELANCHOLY
B
USINESS”

I
t was a warm, pleasant Sunday in Hyannis Port; the date was August 13, 1944, the time about two o’clock in the afternoon. Jack was home from the hospital, still in pain, neither his back nor his stomach problems resolved. He and his sisters Jean and Eunice and his little brother Teddy were sitting on the porch after a long, leisurely picnic-style lunch. Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” was playing on the phonograph. Rose was reading the Sunday paper. Kennedy had gone upstairs for an afternoon nap.

A dark car drove down the street and into the driveway in front of the house. “Two naval chaplains got out, walked up the steps to the porch, and knocked on the screen door,” Ted recalled a half century later. They told Rose that they had come to speak to her husband. There was nothing unusual here, no reason to be frightened. “Priests and nuns fairly often came to call, wanting to talk with Joe about some charity or other matter,” Rose would later write in her memoirs. “So I invited them to come into the living room and join us comfortably until Joe finished his nap. One of the priests said no, that the reason for calling was urgent. That there was a message both Joe and I must hear. Our son was missing in action and presumed lost.”

Ted and the other children heard only “a few words: ‘missing—lost.’ All of us froze.”

Rose raced upstairs to wake her husband. “Moments later, the two of them came back down. They took the clergymen into another room and talked briefly. When they emerged, Dad’s face was twisted. He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead. . . . Suddenly the sunroom was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guest, myself—everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.” Sixteen-year-old Jean got on her bicycle and rode off by herself to church. Jack turned to his little brother. “‘Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying,’ my brother said. ‘He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.’ . . . And that was what we did. We went sailing.”
¹

Kick was called in London. On Wednesday, August 16, she flew home on an army transport plane. Billy did not accompany her; he was somewhere in France with his regiment, she didn’t know where, not having heard from him in weeks.

The Kennedys remained at Hyannis Port through Labor Day, trying to live their lives. The children sailed, played tennis, entertained their friends, ate dinner around the big table on the porch; Jack rested and recuperated; Eunice and Ted raced competitively. Each Kennedy grieved in his or her own way. Jean, who had had a very special relationship with Joe Jr., who was her godfather, who taught her how to dance, who listened to her jokes and reassured her that she would pass her exams, suffered quietly and worried about her father.
²

Joseph P. Kennedy would never recover from the death of his oldest son and namesake, the handsome, charming, charismatic young man who believed—with his father—that he could do anything he set his mind to. Kennedy mourned privately, out of public view. For the first time in his life, he feared he had lost his faith. Years later, in a letter to his friend Walter Howey, whose wife had died after a debilitating illness, Kennedy would marvel at the different ways he and Rose had responded to their son’s death. “When young Joe was killed, my faith, even though I am a Catholic did not seem strong enough to make me understand that . . . he had won his eternal reward. . . . My faith should have made me realize this and I should not have indulged in the great self-pity the way I did. . . . Rose, on the other hand, with her supreme faith has just gone on and prayed for him and has not let it affect her life. I am sure that you are more in my class than either of us are in hers; so we are going to be unhappy at the loss of those we love until we die.”
³

The horror he had most dreaded had come to pass. The war in Europe he had done so much to oppose had taken his son. “Joe’s death has shocked me beyond belief,” he wrote James Forrestal, now secretary of the navy, on September 5. The letter was handwritten because he did not want to share its contents with a secretary or typist. “All of my children are equally dear to me, but there is something about the first born that sets him a little apart—he is for always a bit of a miracle. . . . He represents our youth, its joys & problems.”
⁴

He busied himself by responding to the hundreds of condolence notes the family had received, from the president, the prime minister, government officials and private citizens, family friends, Joe Jr.’s classmates and service mates. For the first time in his life, he was stuck in time, unable to see past the present moment. Joe Jr. had been his future, and now he was gone. To his cousin Joe Kane, the family’s political representative in Boston, he apologized that he just couldn’t “get in the mood to write letters about young Joe. You more than anyone else know how much I had tied my whole life up to his from here on. You know what great things I saw in the future for him, and now it’s all over.” To Arthur Houghton, he confided that he was “considering a proposition with [producer] Mike Todd but not too seriously. I think I probably have to interest myself in something because all my plans for my future were all tied up with young Joe, and that has gone smash.”
⁵

—

A
fter Labor Day, still adhering to his regular routines, he left Hyannis Port for his suite at the Waldorf Towers. Rose, as was her custom, moved into the Plaza, where she was joined by her daughters. On September 16, a month and four days after Joe Jr.’s death, a telegram arrived for Joseph P. Kennedy at the Waldorf. Kick’s husband, Billy Hartington, had been killed in action in France. Eunice was with her father when the telegram arrived. Kennedy sent her to find Kick, who was shopping at Bonwit Teller. She did not tell her sister what had happened, only that “Dad” wanted to see her at once. The two returned to the Waldorf, where Kennedy told Kick that her husband of four months—only one of which she had spent with him—was dead.

That night, the family went to dinner at Le Pavillon. Jean Kennedy remembers that she, Pat, and Eunice tried their best to cheer up their sister. There was little or no talk of Billy. The Kennedy family did not mourn the dead by speaking of or telling stories about them.
⁶

The next day or the day after, Kick called Lord Halifax at the British embassy in London. “I told her that the War Office had confirmed her bad news. She seemed very good and brave on the telephone. . . . She is going up to Quebec tomorrow to fly home. . . . It is a melancholy business.”
⁷

Kennedy retreated further into himself. He had not really known Billy Hartington, but he grieved for him and his parents and for his daughter Kick, who returned to England to be with Billy’s family and friends. He saw no one, gave no speeches, wrote fewer letters.

—

I
n late October, Kennedy was visited at the Waldorf Towers by Morton Downey, one of his Palm Beach friends, who brought with him Bob Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Kennedy, who had always enjoyed being courted by men in high places, was not surprised that the Democrats had come calling as election day drew near.

“Hannegan admitted, starting off, that he had heard a great deal about my difficulties with the group behind Roosevelt and made no bones about the matter that he despised the group also. . . . He insinuated that Roosevelt was not as well as they thought and that it was extremely likely that Truman [Roosevelt’s running mate] would be President, would throw that gang out bodily, and would want fellows like myself to come back into the Government and make it work. He asked me if I would be willing to see Roosevelt, and I said, ‘Of course, if Roosevelt asked me to go there, I would go.’” The fact that he was willing to visit the White House did not, he made clear to Hannegan, mean that he was going to endorse the president. On the contrary, he was “seriously contemplating making a speech for Dewey [Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate]. . . . With one son in the hospital, one son dead, and my son-in-law killed,” Kennedy told Hannegan, he didn’t think any speech he might make “would be very helpful to Roosevelt.”

On October 26, Kennedy visited Washington for the first time in more than a year and the White House for the first time since the spring of 1943. He found Roosevelt looking “very badly,” sicker than he had ever seen him. “His face was as gray as his hair,” he wrote later. “He is thin, he has an unhealthy color. His hands shake violently when he tries to take a drink of water.” They made small talk, as they always did, Roosevelt “speaking of Kathleen’s husband” but getting his name wrong. Roosevelt then launched into a discussion of current politics, the upcoming election, and the forecasts for Massachusetts and New Jersey. Kennedy recalled in his notes of the meeting that he told the president that the 5 percentage undecided vote in those states was “not the independent vote, but . . . the old line Democrats—the Irish, and the Italians—all of whom should be in the Democratic columns but this year were off for two or three good reasons. First, they felt that Roosevelt was Jew controlled. Second, they felt that the Communists were coming into control. . . . Third, that this group, along with many others, felt that there were more incompetents in Roosevelt’s cabinet than you could possibly stand in this country.” Kennedy paused to add that he agreed “with the group who felt that the Hopkins, Rosenmans [Samuel Rosenman was one of Roosevelt’s chief advisers], and Frankfurters, and the rest of the incompetents would rob Roosevelt of the place in history that he hoped, I am sure, to have. . . . Roosevelt went on to say ‘Why, I don’t see Frankfurter twice a year.’ And I said to him, ‘You see him twenty times a day but you don’t know it because he works through all these other groups of people without your knowing it.’”

Kennedy kept on, his rage and bitterness tumbling out, his complaints mounting one on top of the other, most of them old ones, some new. “I am sore and indignant because of the way I have been treated,” he told the president. “The last blow was when Jack was recommended for a medal by all his officers in direct command which was two degrees higher than what he finally received. He was reduced . . . for reasons unknown to me, but which I suspect were because I was persona non grata to the powers that be in Washington.”

The president tried to change the subject to conditions in Italy, which were deplorable, then to de Gaulle, whom he thought a buffoon. Kennedy would not be deterred. Though the war was coming to an end—and that was good—he was consumed with fear about the postwar world. “I told Roosevelt that I didn’t take much stock in any plans I had seen for post-war peace because I thought that Stalin was, after all, the dominating influence in the world.” Roosevelt could only reply, “Well, he doesn’t always get what he wants.”

Whatever topic Roosevelt brought up, whatever he said, Kennedy argued with him. When Roosevelt mentioned that he thought he had made the right decision in responding to recent Republican attacks on him and his family “in a very light manner,” Kennedy “disagreed completely by saying that so many families had lost boys in the war that they didn’t want such light treatment.”
⁸

Roosevelt was not the only one Kennedy spoke with that day in Washington. Just before his appointment at the White House, he had called up Lord Halifax, now the British ambassador, to see if he could come by “to shake us by the hand.” In his diary entry, Halifax recalled that Kennedy “was in his usual unsatisfactory mood and I really did not begin to know what he thinks or wants.” As with the president, then afterward with James Byrnes and Archbishop Spellman, Kennedy complained nonstop about Roosevelt and the outlook for a postwar world dominated in Europe, at least, by Stalin. “His attitude,” Halifax recalled, “seemed to be a compound of a surviving and quite futile feeling that America ought never to have gotten into the war . . . and unhappiness at the consequences of the war on people like himself who used to have a lot of money.” Halifax had little sympathy with Kennedy, having lost one son in Europe and a second return from combat in Africa with both legs amputated. On the contrary, he was rather disgusted. “I am afraid,” he concluded his diary entry, “I think he is a rotten fellow.”
⁹

On October 28, Kennedy flew to Boston to meet with Democratic National Committee chairman Hannegan and vice-presidential candidate Harry Truman. According to Kennedy’s notes of the meeting, Truman “begged me to make a speech” for the Democratic ticket. He and Hannegan reiterated that Roosevelt was not well and would most likely not live out his term. And in that event, Truman declared, confirming what Hannegan had earlier told Kennedy, he would “kick all these incompetents and Jews out of Washington and ask fellows like myself and others to come back and run the government.” Though this was precisely what Kennedy wanted to hear, it was not enough to win him back. He could not, he repeated to Truman, endorse Roosevelt. “Knowing my experience,” Truman and Hannegan told Kennedy, “they didn’t blame me a bit, but they still hoped I would come out for him.”
¹⁰

Twenty-five years later, in a conversation with writer Merle Miller, Truman offered a different version of the meeting: “Old man Kennedy started throwing rocks at Roosevelt, saying he’d caused the war and so on. And then he said, ‘Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son, Joe?’ I’d stood it just as long as I could, and I said, ‘If you say another word about Roosevelt, I’m going to throw you out that window. . . . I haven’t seen [Kennedy] since.” Some (but not all) of this account rings true. Truman might, in retrospect, have wished that he had defended Roosevelt, as he claimed he had, instead of nodding silently as Kennedy excoriated him. Ten days before the election, he was not about to antagonize the country’s most prominent Irish Catholic on his home turf. Hannegan and Truman bit their tongues, heard Kennedy out, and accepted the campaign donation he offered them.
¹¹