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The Kennedys
W
HEN JOSEPH P. Kennedy arrived in England on 1 March 1938 to take up the post of United States Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, it was not Joe who grabbed the headlines but his wife, Rose, mother of nine, whose youthful appearance and figure were the subject of much attention from the press and the envy of her English contemporaries. Mrs Kennedy, her eldest daughter Rosemary, and second daughter, Kick, were presented at Court on 11 May, heralding the start of their London season, which was also mine. Rosemary was mentally retarded and not able to join in the round of dances and other entertainments, but she did manage the curtsey at Buckingham Palace. The Kennedys were masters of entertainment and the dinner-dance they gave on 2 June was one of the very best. Joe Jr and Jack Kennedy were not there as they did not arrive in England until the Fourth of July, just in time for a dinner given at the embassy on that important date in the American calendar. The two brothers were thrown in at the deep end but they soon mastered the routine, making friends as easily as Kick had. Twenty-three-year-old Joe Jr was as attractive and full of vitality as the rest of the family and made an immediate impact. He was his father’s chosen one to go into politics and make a name for himself. I was always aware of his presence but hardly knew him as he preferred the company of more sophisticated women to eighteen-year-old debutantes. Jack was two years younger and a shadow of his brother. He suffered from poor health and it showed.
Towards the end of July 1938, Andrew and I went to the races with Kick, Jack, Jean and Margaret Ogilvy, Hugh Fraser and David Ormsby Gore. There was no particular significance to this outing except that it was the start of the friendship between Jack and David, which was to play such an important part when, twenty-three years later, Jack became President and David was appointed Ambassador to the US.
David was a first cousin of Andrew and a lifelong friend. When he was up at Oxford, all he liked was jazz, racing and his future wife, the beautiful Sylvia (Sissie) Lloyd Thomas. Learning and lectures were not on his list and he spent his university days lying on the sofa in his St Aldate’s lodgings, tapping a foot in time to Nat Gonella on a wind-up gramophone. He did no work and to his father’s dismay managed a dismal Third. It was run-of-the-mill to all of us, who were used to our friends just scraping through or failing altogether when the crunch came with exams. David, who with Andrew and the Astor boys was the best company going, was quick to prick any balloon of pomposity, a trait that never deserted him, even in the important Foreign Office roles he played so well in later life. Like his elder brother, Gerard, and Sissie before him, he was killed in a car accident and I mourn them to this day. Years later Jack reminded me of that outing to the races – I had quite forgotten about it. Perhaps he remembered it better than so many other enjoyable days that summer because it was when he first met David.
From their arrival in England, Ambassador Kennedy kept his sons busy with the serious side of life and made sure they learned something of British politics and politicians, industry and the City. As well as sampling the delights of the Côte d’Azur, they also did a whistle-stop tour of European capital cities, gaining a greater knowledge of Europe than most American politicians, storing away these experiences for future use. Jack’s time in England at an impressionable age must have influenced the ‘special relationship’ that he fostered during his years in office. He told me that when he was in hospital as a teenager he read widely and that after reading John Buchan’s biography of the seventeenth-century Scottish general, his hero became the great Montrose.
Joe Kennedy Sr was pessimistic about England and France’s chances of defeating Hitler and was viscerally opposed to America entering the war. His isolationism cost him his English friends. Joe Jr adopted his father’s attitude while Jack remained more detached, but both brothers enlisted before Pearl Harbor. In spite of back pain and general poor health, Jack somehow passed fit into the US Navy. In March 1943 he was in the Pacific when the boat he was in was rammed and cut in half by an enemy destroyer. After clinging to the wreckage for many hours, the survivors, commanded by Jack, reached a small island. It was not until five days later that they were rescued, and for his heroism Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.
Joe Jr was an officer in the US Navy Air Corps. He volunteered for a perilous mission to attack a flying-bomb launch site near Calais and was killed on 12 August 1944 when his plane blew up before reaching its target. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the highest decoration. His death added to the list of catastrophes that took so many of our friends and family during July and August that year. On receiving the news, Kick, who had been married to Billy for just three months, left for America to attend his memorial service. Wartime journeys across the Atlantic were difficult to arrange, but as the daughter of the US Ambassador she managed it. Three weeks later, Billy was killed and Kick immediately returned to England.
In his letter of condolence to Moucher, Jack wrote that the news of Billy’s death was:
about the saddest I have ever had. I have always been so fond of Kick that I couldn’t help but feel some of her great sorrow. Her great happiness when she came home which even shone through her sadness over Joe’s death was so manifest and so infectious that it did much to ease the grief of our mother and father. It was so obvious what he meant to Kick and what a really wonderful fellow he must have been that we all became devoted to him, and now know what a really great loss his is. When I read Captain Waterhouse’s letter about the cool and gallant way Billy died, I couldn’t help but think of what John Buchan had written about Raymond Asquith ‘Our roll of honour is long, but it holds no nobler figure. He will stand to those of us who are left as an incarnation of the spirit of the land he loved . . . He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.’ I think that those words could be so well applied to Billy. I feel extremely proud that he was my sister’s husband.
After Billy’s death Kick, who was devoted to Eddy and Moucher and to her sisters-in-law, Anne and Elizabeth, wanted to be among the friends in England that she had known since she was eighteen. She bought a house in London, No. 2 Smith Square, Westminster, and for the next four years divided her time between England and America. Her old suitors returned: William Douglas Home was still enamoured of her, Anthony Eden was a friend, as were Richard Wood and Hugh Fraser (who had also been particularly fond of her sister Eunice), but as soon as Kick met Peter, Eighth Earl Fitzwilliam, he became the only contender. But there was a serious obstacle: Peter was married.
Kick had already made a major concession when marrying Billy and agreeing that any sons of theirs would be brought up as Protestants. She knew that her parents would never condone marriage to a divorcee and, indeed, Kick’s mother warned her that she would be banished from the family if she went ahead. Hoping to talk her father round, Kick made a plan to meet Ambassador Kennedy in Paris on her way back from a few days with Peter on the Côte d’Azur. The pair set off for Cannes in a chartered plane on 13 May 1948. They hit a violent thunderstorm over the Rhône Valley and after being buffeted in the air for thirty minutes, the plane crashed into a mountainside, killing all on board.
Kick’s body was brought to England and she was buried in the Cavendish plot at St Peter’s Church in Edensor. I had never been to a funeral before and the solemn words affected me profoundly. She and I were both twenty-eight, not the time of life when you think about death, yet that most vital of human beings had been taken from us. Bert Link, the head gardener, lined her grave with pale mauve wisteria – the sweet-smelling, short-lived flowers so fitting for a life cut short so tragically. Ambassador Kennedy was the only member of her family able to get to the funeral. He wore a bright-blue crumpled suit, which was all he had with him, and this surprising colour accentuated the anguished misery of his face, an image engraved for ever on my mind.
We kept in touch with the Kenn
edys. When they came to England they always telephoned and we sometimes met in London, but we did not see much of them until 1961 when, to our surprise, Andrew and I were invited to Jack’s presidential inauguration. Andrew was intrigued by the invitation and realized what an honour it was to be asked. I did not want to go. There were engagements I was looking forward to at home, including the last shoot of the season. But it was so good of them to think of us that we accepted.
We stayed with the British Ambassador, Sir Harold Caccia, and his wife, Nancy, and those three days we spent in Washington were among the most extraordinary of our lives. The warmth of the welcome from the Kennedy family, now happy and glorious, was something Andrew and I never forgot. We were given the best seats at all the events, far above anything we expected, and the bitter cold and unrelenting snow made it all the more dramatic. I realized these were events of historic importance and jotted down some notes at the time, which cover the sublime and the ridiculous about equally. These appeared in my book Home to Roost, and are reprinted here as an appendix.
Back at Chatsworth, before the week was out, Andrew got a handwritten letter from Jack thanking us both for being present at ‘the changing of the guard’. ‘I was grateful for the kind letter from the Prime Minister,’ he continued, ‘I wish you success in your service with him and I hope very much that you and Debo can both come here soon again. Best, Jack.’ When you think of the number of letters he had to write thanking his political supporters, to include us seemed incredible. Two weeks later Jack wrote to me suggesting that I accompany the Prime Minister (Uncle Harold) when he went to Washington in the spring to ‘cement Anglo-American relations’. I was immensely flattered, but had things planned that I could not change and proposed a date later in the year, which seemed to suit him.
It was at their first meeting in March 1961 that Uncle Harold and Jack decided on David Ormsby Gore for the post of British Ambassador to Washington. David’s sister, Katherine, was married to the Macmillans’ only son, Maurice, and Uncle Harold had known David for years. David was duly appointed on 26 October 1961. The relationship between ambassador and president was a much closer one than usual and Jack and David met frequently on an informal basis. David was the link between Jack and Uncle Harold, who also struck up a close friendship, and Jack was soon referring to the Prime Minister as Uncle Harold like the rest of us. The friendship surprised some of their aides, but it seemed obvious that the much older, more experienced man, with his classical education and great intellect (who nevertheless always saw the joke), would make a good ally for the young President.
I went to Washington in December 1961 and stayed with David and Sissie in the embassy. The evening after my arrival I dined at the White House for the first time. There were Jack, two men friends of his and me. We sat in the gallery for drinks and when dinner was announced, being the only woman and a foreigner, I went without thinking to the open door. On the threshold Jack threw out his arm and said, ‘No, not you. I go first, I’m Head of State.’ ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘so you are,’ and we sat down to dinner.
The Washington round was hectic: lunches and dinners here and there, including enjoyable ones at our embassy. I dined one night with Joe and Susan Mary Alsop before a gala reception at the National Gallery of Art. Joe, a distinguished political journalist, was friends with all at the White House. Twenty people had sat down to dinner when the door opened and in walked the President, unexpected. Joe Alsop got a chair, sat him down and we went on as if nothing had happened. To please its director, Johnny Walker, who was a friend of mine, Jack agreed to make a quick visit to the National Gallery; he had never been there before. I went with him in his car and it was raining when we arrived. As Jack got out to shake hands with the welcoming party, he turned to me and whispered, ‘They think I like art. I hate it.’ One of our delegates to the United Nations was Lady Tweedsmuir. She found an unexpected opportunity to buttonhole the President on some (to her) pressing matter. ‘Not now,’ he replied, ‘it’s your turn tomorrow.’ He had got rid of her, but in such a good-natured way that she could not take offence.
From Washington I flew to New York on the same day as Jack (‘I go presidential, you go commercial,’ he said, putting me in my place). He gathered up various friends and relations in New York to see that I was not left alone for long and they did his bidding, however inconvenient it must have been for them.
Jack added enormously to any entertainment. He was such good company, so funny and straightforward – a mixture of schoolboy and statesman, and you never knew which was coming next. He was the only politician I have ever known who could laugh at himself and did. He never spoke of the posts he had held – as in my experience English politicians always do, starting conversations with, ‘When I was Home Secretary . . .’ or ‘When I was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Health . . .’ so that your attention immediately wanders. Jack could say ‘I don’t know’ (which our politicians never do) and in answer to questions he was direct, instead of beating round the bush. The atmosphere was refreshing after London officialdom. When the Shah of Persia was on a state visit to Washington, the press asked those present at Jack’s welcoming speech what they thought of the visiting sovereign. One man, who was not a politician but a friend of Jack’s, thought for a bit and said, ‘Well, he’s my kind of Shah.’ It was this sort of remark that made Jack’s White House so enjoyable and surprising. All the Kennedys had a trait of irreverence and fun. Some years ago when Eunice was in London, she fancied a ride in Rotten Row. Not caring that she had no riding clothes, she hired a horse and off she went in a full-length mink coat and sandals with two-inch heels over her nylon tights – an apparition – without a nod to convention.
In October 1962 Andrew and I went to America for the opening of an exhibition of Old Master drawings from Chatsworth at the Washington National Gallery. Again, we stayed at the embassy. Johnny Walker saw to it that we were fêted in the hospitable way of American museums. Francis Thompson, keeper of the collection at Chatsworth, was not well enough to travel so Tom Wragg, his deputy, oversaw the hanging of the drawings. The Cuban missile crisis was at its height and the world on the brink of nuclear war, but this did not deter the art lovers of Washington and its neighbourhood from flocking to the Gallery. Jackie Kennedy was not able to attend the official opening reception but came during the first day of the exhibition.
We dined at the White House on 21 October, the night before Jack’s address to the nation when he told Americans about the situation in Cuba and called on Russia to remove the missiles or face retaliation. He was his usual self, showing no outward signs of the strain he must have felt. In the room where we met for drinks before dinner, photographs of the now infamous missiles (rhymed with ‘thistles’) were lying on a table and were being picked up and put down by the dinner guests as though they were holiday snaps. I suppose some of us did not realize how near to a world disaster we were; certainly the atmosphere in the White House was unchanged from the previous year – a tribute to steady nerves.
At one point Jack suggested, ‘Why don’t you call your sister in California?’ He asked his switchboard to put me through and wandered off to do something more important. Decca and I talked for a bit but, brought up as we were not to use the telephone for long chats, Decca suddenly became aware of the cost of this long-distance call and said, ‘Hen, are you on your own phone?’ I had to admit I was not and we went on chatting. Over dinner Jack and I talked about his family’s years in London before the war and about old friends. I described how Vice-President Johnson had tried to upstage Princess Margaret at the independence ceremonies in Jamaica and told Jack that Hugh Fraser had been at the head of our delegation. ‘Not our Hugh Fraser?’ he said. ‘Yes, of course it was our Hugh Fraser,’ I replied. He roared with laughter at the idea, just as Hugh would have laughed at Jack’s elevated position.
On another evening in Crisis Week, Jack and I were sitting talking and laughing about the old days, about his sisters Kick and Eunice, and the girl
s he had met twenty-four years before. He asked about the home life of various politicians, Bobbety Salisbury, for instance. We moved on to war heroes and he wanted to know about Paddy Leigh Fermor and his capture of the German General on Crete in 1944. Suddenly he said, ‘Tell me about Perceval.’ ‘Perceval?’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about him except that he was the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated.’ Jack stayed quiet for a while and then we went back to chit-chat. I knew what he was thinking, and our conversation came back to me when I heard the news on 22 November 1963.
Towards the end of our stay, knowing that he would be interested, Jack found time to show Andrew the White House garden. The only event cancelled during the whole week was a dance that was to have been held at the White House on 22 October, the night of Jack’s address to the nation. Uncle Harold and the President were in constant touch by telephone about the situation. It was evident that Jack was seeking advice from the old boy and the fact that they were by now such friends made a difference. As the crisis deepened so the night-time calls became more frequent. In the past, references to SEATO and NATO had often been followed by, ‘How’s DEBO?’ then back to the serious stuff. This time there were no jokes.
At the end of that week of knife-edge diplomacy, Andrew went home on the Sunday night. On the Monday morning the President asked me to go for a last swim at the White House pool, where he swam every day to help his back. Again we talked of old times and especially of Kick. Afterwards I lunched with Eunice, Jean and Ethel before leaving for New York, where there was a festive atmosphere and everyone was breathing a sigh of relief.
When I got home, Jack sometimes telephoned with a question about Uncle Harold or another member of the government or just for a chat, usually in the early hours of the morning. It was a convenient time for him but I was dead asleep when the telephone rang at 3 a.m. ‘Do you know it’s the Fourth of July?’ he began one of these calls. ‘Is it?’ I said, barely conscious. ‘Have you got all your loved ones with you?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’ and so on. On another occasion he sounded exasperated. ‘I was put through to a tavern called the Devonshire Arms. It was closed.’ He was always full of Uncle Harold and ready for any stories I could tell about him.
Wait for Me! Page 25