The Patriarch (87 page)

The wedding was scheduled for September. Jack planned to spend his last summer as a bachelor traveling in Europe with his friend Torb Macdonald. His father did everything he could to stop him. He urged Macdonald not to accompany Jack, then relented but begged him to do what he could to protect Jack’s health—and reputation.

“Jack needs a rest. Unquestionably he has the best time with you. I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married. Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others. As I told you, I am hoping that he will take a rest and not jump from place to place, and be especially mindful of whom he sees. Certainly one can’t take anything for granted since he has become a United States Senator. That is a price he should be willing to pay and gladly. I understand your love and devotion to Jack and I know you wish him nothing but the best and I hope you both will have a good vacation.”
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Jack returned home, his reputation intact, to marry Jacqueline Bouvier on September 12, 1953, at Newport, Rhode Island, where her mother and stepfather lived, before hundreds of guests, hundreds more gawking onlookers, and dozens of newsreel cameramen and still photographers. Archbishop Cushing officiated. Kennedy, who had been uncharacteristically camera-shy through his son’s 1952 campaign for the Senate, came out of hiding to smile broadly for the cameras as he arrived at the church, then danced with his daughter-in-law at the reception and presented her with a stack of congratulatory telegrams.

Patricia was the next to marry, to British actor Peter Lawford, who though not a Catholic promised to raise their children as Catholics. In April, Patricia and Peter were married at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City by Father Cavanaugh. The newsreel cameras were out in force again, and Joseph P. Kennedy looked perfectly regal in his formal wear. There would be stories, the most persuasive ones from Patricia and Peter Lawford’s son, Christopher, that Kennedy was disturbed at the prospect of his daughter marrying a Englishman, an actor, and a Protestant, but if he was, he never said so in public or in correspondence with family or friends.
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By the summer of 1954, the rapid expansion of the Kennedy family, with two sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren, had resulted in a “housing crisis” at Hyannis Port, as Rose would later put it. Bobby and Ethel would soon rent and then buy a house next door to the main house; Jack and Jackie would a few years later purchase their own just in back, followed by Sarge and Eunice, and Jean and Steve Smith, whom she would marry in 1956. But that was in the future.

Kennedy loved his children, warmly welcomed their husbands and wives into the family, and adored his grandchildren. But there were now a great many of them, and they all wanted to spend their summers at Hyannis Port. He enjoyed being a grandfather—but he also enjoyed a bit of solitude to read his mysteries and listen to his music in the evening. He had never been much of a disciplinarian and certainly didn’t want to become one now. “He didn’t want to have to tell them to be quiet—but couldn’t take the bedlam on a steady basis.” His solution was to hand over the big house to the children and spend the summer in a villa in the South of France.
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To his friend Morton Downey, he proudly explained that he had “no relatives anywhere in the world now except in my house this summer. Well. That’s the way life is!” “Grandpa is staying in Europe,” he cabled his oldest grandson, Bobby and Ethel’s boy, Joseph II, on his second birthday, “so he will live long enough to celebrate your 21st with you.”
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W
e arrive on the 13th of July,” he wrote Albert Champion, whom he had asked to make the arrangements for the visit and hire a staff for the villa he had rented in Èze, six miles east of Nice. “Mr. Houghton and Mr. Reisman will be with me and my secretary, Miss Des Rosiers, and my masseur, Mr. Thomas Mushyn, who will need a room—not necessarily an important one—either in the same hotel or in the general neighborhood. I certainly would like to see your smiling face at Le Havre on our arrival and as we are bringing along a Cadillac car, maybe we should hire a chauffeur to pick it up and drive it to Paris, and then we could decide whether we wanted to hire him permanently or not.”
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As had become his standard routine, his first stop after Paris was Rome to see Galeazzi and get the latest gossip about the new list of cardinals and Vatican intrigues. He was fascinated by the ins and outs of Italian politics, the machinations of the Communists, the maneuverings of the Christian Democrats, the back-channel influence of the Vatican. As a former diplomat, the father of a U.S. senator, and now a member of a federal commission, he was welcomed—or at least tolerated—wherever he went. On this trip, he spent a full day in Versailles at NATO military headquarters, where he was briefed by General Alfred Gruenther, the supreme Allied commander, Europe. He also made plans to meet with President Éamon de Valera in Ireland, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in England, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Bonn, and General Francisco Franco in Spain.

His fact-finding excursions were the bookends to his summer abroad, most of which was spent at his marvelous villa. Even Rose, who visited for a brief time, was impressed. “Here I am in the Cote d’Azur,” she wrote her children in early August, “and it is beautiful, as you know, and as you have seen in all the travel catalogues. Your father and his confreres picked out a very beautiful house for us all. It is a villa on the water and is terraced in the front with 5 or 6 terraces of beautiful flowers, all very lovely and all very different. The same is true on the sides and all around are very lovely little garden paths where, if I was not a three-mile walker, I would be quite content to wander.” Albert Champion had staffed the villa with butlers, cooks, gardeners, chauffeurs, and even a lady’s maid who, when there were no ladies present, which was most of the time, did the “washing and sewing and what not.” The chef, Kennedy bragged to son Ted and daughter Jean, was the best “in all of France” and had worked for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for ten years. “He can even make American ice cream as good as Pavillon.”
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To stave off boredom (and loneliness), Kennedy brought with him to the South of France a large staff, including his secretary, Janet des Rosiers, who would later claim to have been his mistress since around 1948. He surrounded himself as well with his buddies Houghton, Reisman, “the Commish,” Morton Downey, Bart Brickley, and Fathers Theodore Hesburgh and John Cavanaugh, whom he imported in groups of two and three. “I get the boys all up in the morning at 6:45,” he wrote Ted. “I have a swim and we all have breakfast at 7:40; leave for the golf course at 8 o’clock, and then after the golf game three days a week we swim at Eden Roc and come home for lunch, have a sleep, dictate my mail when I wake up, have a rub at 6:15, and then have a little cold soup, cheese and red wine for supper at 7:30; then we sit on the veranda and listen to the radio until 10:30. We go out Friday nights to the Monte Carlo Galas. This isn’t the kind of existence that should appeal to anybody under 65, but . . . it seems to fill the bill. . . . I haven’t seen all those beautiful girls that everybody talks about being here in the South of France, but maybe when Jack arrives here next week he’ll find them.”
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He and his buddies were older now, more conscious of their weight and their hairlines, but with their wives left behind in the States, they felt obligated to at least tease one another and self-mockingly refer to their sexual appetites and attractiveness. “Houghton has lost the sight of both eyes,” he wrote Tim McInerny in August, “and twisted his neck out of position gaping at the young Marilyn Monroes, of which he tells me there are millions! As he repeatedly says—oh! If I were only 70 again I would spend the next 25 years on the Riviera!”
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For most of the summer, Èze was a bachelor’s paradise. Rose never stayed for long even when Kennedy assured her, as he did in July 1955, that he was not expecting any more guests, “except Bart Brickley and possibly Morton Downey and his wife for ten days or so. . . . You won’t have to see Houghton except for possibly one meal and they [the chauffeurs] can drive you over to play golf . . . whenever you want to. So, for heaven’s sake please don’t think that we can’t have any fun if you’re here because that is utter nonsense. It’s merely a question whether you like the place well enough and whether you get bored with so few things to do. We never go out at night except on Friday night to the Gala but sit up above and listen to the radio. Up to date nobody has arrived here whom you would know.” All in all, he was not making the best possible case for Rose to visit. In any event, she preferred to vacation on her own. Kennedy consulted with “the best hotel man in France,” who recommended that “if you do not want to stay on the Riviera, Switzerland is by far the best place to go unless you want to go to the musical festival in Salzburg.” Rose took the suggestion and spent her summer and fall vacations at a resort in Lausanne.
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There was nothing new or out of the ordinary here, as Jack, Eunice, and Jean acknowledged in their fortieth anniversary cable to their father:

Forty years you are wed to Rose

Where she goes nobody knows

But why she goes we are all aware

Because you are a great big bear

But this is all said in jest

After Houghton she loves you the best.
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As on previous trips to Europe, Kennedy intended to write about his findings when he returned to the States. “I expect when I get home,” Kennedy wrote Morton Downey on August 23, 1954, “I will have enough material for one good speech or article.” He had decided that as long as he didn’t speak in Massachusetts, he wouldn’t get in his son’s way or cause him any particular political problems.
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By mid-August, he had come up with an outline for the article or speech he would complete when he returned to the United States. “From my preliminary talks and my observations, I have come to the conclusion that there are three basic courses for the United States to follow in its foreign policy. One, to accept any of the challenges of the Russians or Chinese and drop the bombs or the guided missiles. . . . The Second alternative is really a continuation of our present policy—talking about the Communists all the time . . . and continue our efforts to maintain a cold war. . . . The Third alternative is to find out on what basis we can live in peace with the Russians.” Option three, he had concluded, was the only reasonable one. Fighting an endless cold war made no sense. The notion of deterrence was an absurdity. It was worse than futile to pile “up bombs we will never use except for defensive purposes, which unfortunately must come second after an attack.” Now was the time to negotiate, when the United States enjoyed military superiority.
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He still worried a bit about drawing attention away from his son or, worse yet, forcing Jack to have to distance himself or apologize for his father’s intemperance. Fortunately, the Senate would not convene in 1954 until after election day, in part to spare senators from having to publicly declare for or against a resolution to censure Senator McCarthy. “I have made quite a few observations on our foreign policy,” he wrote Tim McInerny in late August, “and I think if I get these various interviews and some others I am planning, I will have a very interesting story when I get back and, since the Senate is not in session, I can say what I want without hurting Jack.”
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J
ohn Fitzgerald Kennedy celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in May 1954. For thirty-four of those thirty-seven years, his father had worried about his health—and longevity. The steady dose of cortisone he took for his Addison’s disease had calmed his stomach, but his back was no better, perhaps worse, than it had ever been. By the spring of 1954, the pain had become so intense that he was using crutches everywhere, even in the Senate chambers, in the mistaken belief that taking pressure off his back would help it heal. In April, he visited the Lahey Clinic. In July, he checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital, looking for relief but finding none. His father knew he was ailing but believed that with a bit of rest he would feel better. “I hope that you will take care of yourself for the next two or three months,” he wrote him on August 19, the day before the Senate went into a recess that would last until November 8, “and see if you can get in good shape before you have to go back to Washington.”
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In August, Jack was visited in Hyannis Port by the team from the Lahey Clinic that had examined him earlier in the spring. They recommended that he undergo surgery to fuse his spinal disks. If he did not do so, they warned, there was a good chance that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. If he went ahead, however, there was a high risk of infection because of his Addison’s disease. Jackie visited Kennedy in the South of France at the end of the month and brought with her the news of Jack’s decision to have the operation. Jack remained in Hyannis Port. He should have been resting his back but instead had accepted a number of speaking engagements.
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Kennedy returned from Europe that fall with every intention of making headlines again for himself and his ideas. On visiting Hyannis Port and finding Jack more seriously debilitated than he had imagined and about to submit to major and highly risky surgery, he put everything aside and, as he had thirty-five years ago when Jack’s life was threatened with scarlet fever, focused his attention entirely on his son.

Having lost one child to an operation that went terribly wrong, and knowing the risks entailed in this one, Kennedy advised against surgery. “Joe first tried to convince Jack that even confined to a wheelchair he could lead a full and rich life,” Rose recalled in a later interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin. “After all, he argued, one need only look at the incredible life FDR had managed to lead despite his physical incapacity. But even as Joe spoke, seeing that Jack was determined to go ahead, he finally told his son he’d do everything he could to help. ‘Don’t worry, dad,’ Jack replied. ‘I’ll make it through.’” Her husband didn’t sleep at all that first night at Hyannis Port. “His mind kept wandering back to the last letter he received from Joe Junior, the letter written right before his death, assuring his father that there was no danger involved and that he would be sure to return. The memory was so painful that Joe actually cried out in the darkness with a sound so loud that I was awakened from sleep.”
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