The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  Billy’s family provided their own version of the nuptials. In a long dispatch about the wedding, the New York Times described the new marchioness’s “frock of pink suede beneath a short jacket of brown mink and a small hat of blue and pink feathers” and then made reference to her future religion.“Within the next day or so it was learned tonight from acquaintances of the Marquess, a private religious ceremony will be held in the drawing room of Compton Place,” the Times reported.“The family has not yet confirmed this report. The nature of the ceremony could not be learned but it was assumed that it would be Protestant.”The erroneous suggestion of religious conversion was based more on wishful thinking by Billy’s father than by any concrete promise from Kick or her brother. There was never a religious ceremony after the marriage contract was signed. News to the contrary, however, spread rapidly.

  After the wedding, the Kennedys were bombarded with questions about Kathleen’s future as a Catholic and whether she was renouncing her faith— inquiries that landed like stones on her mother’s psyche.“May the Blessed Mother give her the necessary grace to see the error of her ways before many weeks have passed,” one priest friendly with the family wrote to Rose. On the afternoon after her daughter’s wedding, the Kennedy matriarch, dressed in black, funereal clothing, took an airplane to New York on her way to a “much-needed rest” in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Rose spent a few days “under medical care” at the New England Baptist Hospital, more for her frayed nerves than a physical ailment. When reporters at the airport asked her to share a good word about her daughter, she declined to say anything, citing ill health. “I’m sorry it has to be this way,” she muttered.

  WITHIN DAYS after the wedding, the Kennedys began slowly to repair the internal turmoil caused by Kick’s marriage. After standing up for his sister, Joe Jr. sent a bold but eloquent rebuke to his family.“THE POWER OF SILENCE IS GREAT,” he cabled to his father. Never before had Joe Jr. expressed such disagreement to his parents. “As far as Kick’s soul is concerned, I wish I had half her chance of seeing the pearly gates,” Joe wrote home.“As far as what people will say, the hell with them. I think we can all take it. It will be hardest on Mother and I do know how you feel Mother, but I do think it will be alright.”

  Alarmed by reports of her mother’s illness, Kick assumed her decision was the cause. Three days after her ceremony, Kick wrote that she “was very worried” that her marriage had prompted Rose’s illness, and pleaded with her mother not to be too upset.“Please don’t take any responsibility for an action which you think bad (and I don’t).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.” She expressed hope that the church might sanction her marriage at some later date.“Until that time I shall go on praying and living like a Roman Catholic and hoping. Please, please do the same,” she urged. Aware of her mother’s unspoken social sensibilities, Kick knew that her decision could bring some scorn from the McDonnells and other “First Irish” families.“My very best love to Mother and pray just like I do every morning and evening and no matter what the McDonnells think just tell them not to judge anybody,” she implored. “God does that.” Kick also gave a glimpse of the hate mail and emotional battering she had received for her decision to marry a Protestant, a response perhaps fueled by the Kennedys own taciturnity. “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,” she said. “Letters continue to pour in from irate Catholics saying I have sold my soul for a title. Billy is very busy answering them all.”

  The transatlantic dialogue between mother and daughter continued through their letters that spring and summer. In one exchange, Kick described talking with a local Catholic priest near her hotel who expressed sympathy for her situation. “He confessed that he was unorthodox, but he said he admired my courage and he sympathized with my stand,” Kick recounted. “He went on to say that I would be amazed at the number of people who felt the same way. He told me not to worry and he was quite sure that prayer and trust in God’s holy will would bring everything right.” In her correspondences, Kick offered her own form of confession, not for some terrible sin in marrying Billy but for a graver transgression among the Kennedys—upsetting their family dynamic. “I knew you would be upset, but I felt sure you would see the ultimate good,” Kick explained to Rose in a letter for her birthday that July. “I knew you would never forbid anything if you felt it meant my happiness. It must have been hard for you to resign yourself to the idea of my doing something quite against all your principles—I repeat, the one thing I don’t want you ever to think is that my religious or moral education has been lacking. You have done more than enough to show me the gateway to Heaven. Please God I can do half as well for the little Cavendishes.” From her new home in England, Kick could view her happy youth more appreciatively than ever before, and gave thanks to her mother in a way that undoubtedly healed some wounds.“You are the most unselfish woman in the world,” she praised.“Any house where we have all been has been difficult to run and you have always put us before any of your own desires or pleasures. We all have happy personalities and get along with people far easier than most people—This is due to the happy atmosphere which has always surrounded us. When I see some homes I marvel at you more and more.”

  Despite its storybook overtones, Kick conceded that her new life in Great Britain would be troublesome. The shock of marrying an Irish Catholic reverberated in the old English castles and estates of Billy’s family. “All the old relatives and servants continue to give me the eye, but now I feel I can stand anything,” she wrote after a weekend with Grandmother Salisbury and Billy’s uncle, Lord Robert Cecil. In her own bemused style, Kick tried to present the best picture possible of her young marriage to a man about to return to the war after their honeymoon, and a father-in-law who remained “very difficult in ways” and viewed her with a certain suspicion.“ The funny thing is that he thinks Billy has given in as the one thing he has always dreaded is that one of his sons should marry an R.C.,” admitted Kick, surprised and hurt that such an attitude could extend after their wedding. “Even though his present daughter-in-law has acquiesced to his demands he always sees within me a sort of evil influence. I shall just have to prove myself over a period of years, I suppose.”

  More than a month after the wedding, Rose composed a letter from the family’s summer home in Hyannis Port. It reflected her acceptance of what had happened, even if the results were not to her liking. The idea that her daughter would marry a Cavendish, with all their history of hatred toward Irish Catholics, had seemed unthinkable. Some of Rose’s doubts were assuaged with the personal kindness found in the letters to her from the Duchess of Devonshire, who tried to bridge the gap created by her husband’s bigotry with a gentle understanding for the young couple’s moral dilemma and a genuine fondness for Kick. In a letter written shortly after the D-Day invasion that June,Rose assured her daughter that both she and Billy would be embraced by the Kennedys and that she longed for the day when the newlyweds could visit America. As war raged across the world, which undoubtedly added to the tensions leading up to her daughter’s marriage, Rose looked to the future and wished happiness for both families. She had no idea how much more suffering they would still endure.

  “It was all quite a surprise and a shock,” Rose conceded.“I really didn’t expect that you would be married until after the invasion or at least until I knew more definitely of your plans. However, that is all over now, dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will all receive him with open arms.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hero Worship

  AS AN IRISH-AMERICAN, John Fitzgerald Kennedy seemed far different, temperamentally rooted on the other end of the emotional spectrum, than his namesake. Grandfather John F. Fitzgerald, the avuncular “
Honey Fitz,” the spreader of blarney and a product of the Irish Catholic immigrant machine in Boston, could bloviate and entertain, a true artist in the theater of politics. He was a master of the “Irish switch”—the ability to shake the hand of one voter, smile at another and look to queue up a third—all expertly executed with the seemingly utmost sincerity. Honey Fitz truly loved crowds, the press of flesh, the telling of a good story or joke. Irish to the core, Fitzgerald brought his ethnicity to bear in all forms of life, and even death. In the middle of World War II, Honey Fitz interrupted an otherwise sensible letter to his grandchildren to make this observation: “Reading through the names of the boys who have been injured or killed, the Catholic element in New England is standing up admirably.”

  If Honey Fitz’s parochial absurdities annoyed Joe Kennedy (perhaps because they cut too close to the bone), they amused his grandson. John Kennedy, educated and trained at the finest Brahmin schools, was removed enough from the immigrant experience that he could appreciate his grandfather with almost historical perspective, as if he were an artifact from a bygone era. Yet, in their own ways, both grandfather and grandson succumbed to the allure of Ireland.

  IN THE EARLY 1940S, Jack Kennedy seemed destined for the life of a writer. Jack dashed off several articles as a newspaper foreign correspondent and turned his Harvard senior thesis into a book called Why England Slept, which became a bestseller partly because of the bundles of copies bought by his father. In 1941, Jack wrote an analysis for the New York Journal American, and other Hearst newspapers with a large Catholic audience. His position was sympathetic to Ireland’s wartime neutrality and the Free State’s position regarding Great Britain’s use of its naval bases. Jack understood Ireland’s unique history far better than most Irish-Americans. “In Ireland’s long struggle, the aid that poured from America has been decisive and the ties that bind the two countries together are as strong now as ever,” he began. As if it had been explained to him by a Dunganstown forebear, Kennedy recognized the deep roots of Ireland’s bitterness toward England and the wariness with which such heroes as Winston Churchill were viewed by the Irish. “It must be remembered that the British quarrel with Ireland has been going on for over six hundred years, while the German- British fight is a comparatively modern one,” he explained. Kennedy’s point of view was hardly that of an Anglophile:

  Ireland has bitter memories of the last war. England made large promises to Ireland at that time in return for her support and Ireland paid a tragic price—she sent a greater number of soldiers in proportion to her population than any other unit of the British Empire. And except for France, this army suffered a greater percentage of killed and wounded than any other country in the war. For this great sacrifice the Irish received nothing. Instead the Lloyd George Government, in which Winston Churchill was Minister of War, dispatched the Black and Tans who scourged Ireland for three years. Ireland has not forgotten this, and remembers further that in 1938 Mr. Churchill also led the group who opposed the return of the ports to Ireland. They do not feel they can depend on him to restore them once the war is over.

  After reading Jack’s dispatch, his old Harvard roommate, Torby Macdonald, a fellow Irish Catholic, wrote back his approval. “Your article on Ireland got rather less play than I anticipated,” he observed. “It seemed to me that you gave Ireland a little of the better of it, but perhaps that is due to fact that actually their view has the best reasons behind it.”

  JACK’S WAY OF LOOKING at the world, his intellectual bent and fondness for the written word, could be easily misunderstood. His sense of humor, his ironic outlook on the twists and foibles of human existence, were distinctly rooted in that Gaelic black humor, a combination of natural wit and fatalism, as much as any young Irish writer might claim. Though overt gestures and the political rostrum didn’t seem to be his forte, the blood of an Irish pol still flowed in his veins. When Honey Fitz, for elaborate political reasons, endorsed his old Boston adversary in 1938, Jack could only comment with pluck:“Tonight is a big night in Boston as the Honorable John F. Fitzgerald is making a speech for his good friend James Michael Curley,” he wrote bemusedly to his father, then in England.“Politics makes strange bedfellows.” Usually, their grandfather railed against his old adversary.

  Because of his casual air, Jack became a family favorite. Joe Jr. and Jack kidded each other in constant, if always competitive, banter. Kick loved her brother’s charming honesty in a world of humbugs and protocol.“Jack just returned to Harvard after being home a week,” Kathleen wrote to her parents. “He really is the funniest boy alive. He had the Irish maid in fits the whole time. Every time he’d talk to her he’d put on a tremendous Irish brogue.” After receiving one of his mother’s round-robin letters to the entire family, Jack wrote back,“Thank you for your latest chapter on the ‘9 little Kennedys and How They Grew’ by Rose of Old Boston. Never in history have so many owed so much to such a one—or is that quite correct?” Jack’s comments to his mother could be jocular and, as a later generation might term it, condescendingly sexist, but they were also affectionate and sophomorically humorous.“My health is excellent—I look like hell but my stomach is a thing of beauty—as you are, Ma—and you, unlike my stomach— will be a joy forever,” he penned in 1941, shortly before America’s entry into the war.

  After Pearl Harbor, Jack took a dim view of what war might mean for the world’s future, particularly for the British Empire. During his time in London, Kennedy enjoyed the social entree that his father’s position brought them. Several historians, when not fashioning Kennedy into a Boston Brahmin, have made much of Kennedy’s interest in British manners. These scribes seemed unaware of the dour note he wrote to Kathleen, the only real Anglophile in the clan, when he predicted in 1942 that it was “time to write the obituary of the British Empire.” Like the fall of the Roman Empire, “When a nation finally reaches the point that its primary aim is to preserve the status quo, it’s approaching old age,” he commented. “When it reaches the point where it is willing to sacrifice part of that status quo to keep the rest, it’s gone beyond being old, it’s dying—and that is the state of mind England reached some time ago.”

  Despite his mild English affectations and sharp Harvard accent, Jack still retained a bit of the green, even a sense of Irish roguishness, to those who knew him well. Soon after entering the navy, Jack was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he met Inga Arvad, a beautiful Danish woman who had been friends with Kathleen when they worked together at the Washington Times-Herald. For several weeks, Jack engaged in an affair with this non-Catholic divorcee who, much to his father’s chagrin, was under investigation as a Nazi spy. When rumors of the affair reached the navy brass and nearly became public, Jack was quickly shipped out of Washington. He reported first to a naval station in South Carolina and eventually to officer’s training school in the Midwest before heading to the Pacific. (Ever the dissembler, Joe claimed in a letter to his oldest son that Jack had “become disgusted with the desk jobs and all the Jews,” without mentioning any other factors in his transfer.) Arvad, whom Jack affectionately called “Inga Binga,” had learned enough about her paramour to kid him about his secret desire for the White House. She predicted success for Jack because he was “brainy and Irish-shrewd.” As she quipped, “You have more than even your ancestors and yet you haven’t lost the tough hide of the Irish potato.”

  During his first weeks in the Pacific, Kennedy detected a certain standoffishness from fellow Ivy League officers because of his Irish background. One of these officers, recalling how he had heard the Ambassador Joseph Kennedy on the radio, said he “was surprised that he didn’t speak like the rest of the Irish trash from Boston.” Furious over the comment, Kennedy confided to a friend that he had wanted to punch the oaf right in the nose. Jack’s first letters from the Pacific were matter-of-fact, stuffed with details of a navy man’s everyday life. As the correspondence developed, and as he saw more action, Kennedy’s letters became more
thoughtful and aware of the fragility of life. One of the first shocks was the death of George Mead, scion of an Ohio paper manufacturer and an old friend from their days of socializing in Washington with Kick. At Guadalcanal, Meade died trying to rescue one of his men. Jack later wrote home after visiting his friend’s grave: “He is buried near the beach where he fell—it was extremely sad.” In most of his letters from the Pacific, however, young Jack Kennedy tried not to break a sweat, not to loose his cool observant humor as he sought to make sense of the destruction he was witnessing. Though he might be loath to admit it directly, Jack’s Catholicism remained a touchstone in his letters from the Pacific. Some were self-mocking, while others hinted at a genuine spiritual struggle.

  “May I first express my appreciation for the manner in which you have kept in contact with your broken-down brother & to know that all nuns and priests along the Atlantic Coast are putting in a lot of praying time on my behalf is certainly comforting,” he began one letter home. “Kathleen reports that even a fortune-teller says that I’m coming back in one piece. I hope it won’t be taken [as] a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.” Like his siblings, Jack never failed to mention to his mother his steadfast church attendance, the most obvious indicator of his faith: “P.S. Mother—Got to Church Easter—they had in a native hut—and aside from having a condition red ‘enemy air-craft in the vicinity’—it went on as well as St. Pat’s,” he wrote in May 1943, an apparent reference to the majestic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the home base of the Kennedy family’s diocese in New York.