by Thomas Maier
With one son rescued in the Pacific and the war winding down in Europe for the other, Joe Kennedy felt remarkably fortunate, as though some heavenly light that had guided him to a fortune also enveloped his sons and protected them from harm. By February 1944, he could extend his condolences to another father with the impression that the worst was over for his family.“I have just heard today of the loss of your boy,” he wrote to one friend, Harry Hogan. “As one father to another, who, although he has not had the total loss, has had his boys missing in action, I can feel in a small way how you must be suffering,” Joe began.“Regardless of what some of us older fellows feel about the war, the reasons for it, and what it is to accomplish,we all know that our youngsters have had a firm determination to make the world a better place. It is small satisfaction for you, but God in his justice, will soften the blow.”
THE FAMILY celebrated Jack’s return from the Pacific with immense gratitude and pride. In Hyannis Port, Bobby, nearly of age to enter the military himself, received an overflow of congratulations from neighbors who thought he was Jack. They “rushed up to him with effusive words of praise,” recalled their mother, and “Bobby was so bowled over that he didn’t have time to explain.” For a while, Jack rested in Florida and then flew to Boston to attend a testimonial for Honey Fitz, who didn’t know of his grandson’s plans. By then, the well-publicized story of Kennedy’s PT-109 travail was known to virtually all Bostonians. The highlight of the Parker House reception, marking the former mayor’s eighty-first birthday, featured a noticeably gaunt but gleaming Jack Kennedy,who walked into the room as a surprise. The mayor, with tears in his eyes, embraced his namesake while the crowd stood and applauded.“I haven’t seen this boy for more than a year,” Honey Fitz told everyone,“and he’s been through hell since that time.” In the span of a few years, Jack had become both a best-selling author and a war hero. In her round-robin letters, Rose told the rest of her children that “we have all been terribly excited about Jack’s feat of glory in the Pacific.” Later that summer, she wrote that “we still meet people every day who congratulate us on Jack’s achievement, and we receive letters from all over the country, and of course,we are more proud and more thankful than words can tell to have him such a hero and still safe and sound.”
At this point in the war, however, Rose didn’t make lighthearted comments about the political future of her sons. The war in Europe would soon be over, and she didn’t want to see her family run any more risks. In her letter, she recalled an encounter with two long-time family friends who 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.” But Rose didn’t encourage such talk. As she admitted:“I believe I would be just as happy though if Joe did not have to risk his life in such a fashion.”
Chapter Fourteen
Blood Brothers
THE KENNEDYS WERE collectors of priests. The clergy who were friends with Joe and Rose Kennedy and their clan were scattered across the eastern seaboard from New England to Florida. Joe Kennedy’s roll call of monks, nuns, priests, monsignors, bishops and cardinals reached as far as distant Rome. In her memoir, Rose specifically named eleven clergy members, and mentioned many more in her letters and diary.
Joe Jr., a more orthodox and conscientious Catholic than his younger brother Jack, followed in his parent’s footsteps. While serving as a cadet at the Jacksonville Naval Station, a huge and stifling-hot base in northern Florida, Joe became buddies with Father Maurice Sheehy, a gregarious priest; the two cemented their friendship by playing several rounds of golf together. Sheehy was already known to Joe Sr. While he was working as assistant to the rector of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., Father Sheehy, a broad-shouldered man with a full, jowly face and engaging manner, had been friendly with President Roosevelt, helping smooth out problems between the Catholic community and the administration. Privately, he provided information and advice to Joe Kennedy about other politicians. He soon became another priest embraced by the family.
With the outbreak of war, Sheehy was appointed chaplain of the navy compound at Jacksonville. A man of demonstrable faith, Sheehy nevertheless knew how to relax and have a good time at a restaurant or nightclub. “Father Sheehy seemed to get a great kick out of all the entertainment,” Rose recalled.“He’s very interesting and full of anecdotes and made a great hit with everyone. Of course, he wore his uniform and so fitted in very nicely in the party.” In Washington, Kathleen shared the family enthusiasm for this gregarious priest. “Father Sheehy called me yesterday with all the news on the golf games of Brother Joe and Daddy,” she wrote. As she did with any close family friend, Rose extended a standing invitation to the priest to come by on future holidays. During a 1942 New Year’s visit to the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach, Sheehy explained that their eldest son had passed successfully through the most dangerous part of cadet training and earned himself other distinctions. “Joe seems to be sailing along now quite happily,” Rose wrote after her debriefing by Sheehy.“His father is delighted that he is the President of the Cadets’ Club and says he is probably the only Catholic in the country to hold that honor.”
Joe Jr., an equally handsome young man both taller and stronger than Jack, didn’t hide his religion. As president of the Holy Name Society on the base, he took upon the responsibility of waking up the Catholics for early Mass. Sometimes he extended that morning call beyond his faith. When some of the Jewish servicemen in the barracks complained of Kennedy’s antics, Sheehy spoke with him.
“Don’t they have souls?” young Kennedy asked about the Jews in his ranks.“Aren’t you interested in saving them?”
Sheehy didn’t appreciate Kennedy’s attempt at sophomoric humor. “I don’t think you’re making friends for the Church by dousing them with water at five in the morning.”
With his gleaming white teeth,Kennedy smiled like a zealot.“The trouble with you, Father, is you’re anti-Semitic,” he countered.
The thread of anti-Semitism shared by many co-religionists was only a part of young Kennedy’s Catholicism, a more parochial variety than his brother Jack’s. Rather than compose thoughtful letters home about the strictures of the church as Jack did, Joe’s narrow interpretation of his religion didn’t venture very far into the shadow of doubt. Typical of Joe Jr.was his arcane, almost childish inquiry to his mother about whether the church frowned on eating candy during Lent. “My suggestion would be that you say a Rosary occasionally or stop a Coca-Cola or two,” his mother recommended. On a visit to Rome in the late 1930s, Joe went to the Vatican and met with the Pope thanks to his father’s connections. He later wrote that he had “climbed the holy stairs on my knees,” a reference to the famous Scala Sancta, the twenty-eight marble steps shipped to Rome that, according to tradition, were climbed by Jesus before being crucified by Pontius Pilate. Joe Jr. was one of many pilgrims who prayed a Hail Mary as they ascended each step as a sign of their devotion. It was the sort of intense, out- ward religiosity that Jack studiously avoided. If his brother’s liberalism reflected the American church of the future, Joe Jr.’s faith remained firmly ensconced in the church of the moment, conservative in doctrine and its application. He was deeply devoted to the church and made no secret of his desire to become the first Catholic elected president.
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. became his ambitious father’s great political hope. The ambassador envisioned his eldest riding to glory on votes from the Irish and other immigrant descendants. Although they disagreed at the 1940 Democratic Convention, Joe Sr. respected his son’s decision to back James A. Farley, the darling of Irish Catholic voters in Massachusetts. When his father pushed Honey Fitz, then seventy-nine, to run once more for the U.S. Senate in 1942, it was part of a Machiavellian plan to keep a potential rival, Joseph Casey, another Irish Catholic candidate backed by Roosevelt, from possibly blocking Joe Jr.’s future political path. This strategy required calling attention to Casey’s personal life.“Honey Fitz has throw
n his hat into the ring,” Jack wrote to Lem Billings.“It seems his opponent—Casey by name—had a baby six months after he got married and Mrs. Greene and the Catholic women . . . are busy giving him the black-ball for it.” Joe Sr. sent a similar message to his eldest son, noting that the woman Casey had married was also a Protestant.“Politics is a great game!” Kennedy advised his oldest son in July 1942.“You better be sure to marry yourself a nice Irish Catholic girl.”
Around that time, Joe and Rose heard rumors of Joe’s interest in a young Protestant woman. Father Sheehy, whose friendship with Joe involved keeping his wealthy parents informed of his activities, discounted the seriousness of the romance. As if determined to firm up his faith, however, Rose quickly put his name on a year’s subscription to the Catholic Digest. Papa wasn’t taking any chances with his prized son, either. In a letter that summer, the senior Kennedy advised: “You wouldn’t think this was very important but it definitely is, and I am thoroughly convinced that an Irish Catholic with a name like yours and with your record, married to an Irish Catholic girl,would be a pushover in this State for political office.” He even enlisted Father Sheehy in the cause and asked him to help find a Catholic girl for his son. Sheehy, hoping to obtain a baptismal font for his local church, hinted that the Kennedys might give him one, all in the name of friendship. “Father Sheehy wrote me that you defeated him at golf and he is very chagrined,” Joe Sr. began one letter. “He also said that you didn’t respond very eagerly to his suggestion about the Baptismal Font on the ground that you have no girls in view, but mother thinks if you give it to him you may have good luck with the girls.”
No one ever feared Joe Jr.would become an apostate. At Harvard, when a fellow student made a snide comment about Honey Fitz, his Irish temper flared and he swung at the offending student. Joe and his siblings adored their grandfather, his songs and stories, and relished his legacy. “To Boston’s best Mayor, and the next Mayor of Heaven, on his 73rd birthday, from his grandsons, Joe and Jack” they engraved on a silver bonbon dish for the occasion. Joe Jr.’s religiosity was guided by his own sense of family, the expectation by his parents that he would lead his younger siblings by example.“I wish you could make First Fridays like your father did for years,” Rose urged, referring to the practice among devout Catholics of attending Mass on each initial Friday of the month as well as on Sundays.
In her letters, Rose seemed to bring her oldest sons into the decision-making about the education of the two younger ones, Bobby and Teddy. As an adolescent, Bobby started out at St. Paul’s, an Episcopalian-run school in Concord, New Hampshire, its headmaster a former Harvard classmate of Joe Sr.’s at Harvard. But by 1939, Rose was worried about her son’s religious education. That year, Joe Sr.was still in London, and he supported his wife’s decision to switch Bobby to the Catholic Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island. After three unsatisfactory years at Priory, however, Bobby was sent to the Milton Academy, near Boston. Rose’s letter in late 1942 to her sons in the military, Joe and Jack, showed the ambivalence she felt about Catholic education for her sons—a view heavily influenced by the opposition of her husband and far different from her own unequivocal support of Catholic schools for her daughters.
Catholic education had transformed Rose’s own life. As she later recalled,“ When I had children of my own I wanted to pass those beliefs and values on to them as they had been passed to me.” She didn’t consider herself particularly religious but “just an ordinary, staunch believing Irish Roman Catholic.” All the Kennedy girls, without exception, attended church-affiliated schools as part of their education. But the decision to pull Bobby out of Priory was “a wise one,” Rose explained to her older sons, because Bobby didn’t like the headmaster and because he “did not show any particular effort according to the reports from all the different masters.” Though Rose liked the exposure to Catholic faith and training for her most devout son, Priory seemed to suffer from the chronic lack of funds endured by most parochial and private schools. In education, as in many other facets of life in America, the separatism of the Irish was beginning to wane. Though many Irish Catholics in Boston, New York and Chicago sent their children to parish schools or diocesan high schools, an increasing number of Catholic parents didn’t heed the call of their bishops and chose instead to send their children to public schools or, if they could afford it, to private schools such as Milton Academy. Parents like Rose Kennedy were torn increasingly between their loyalties to the Catholic culture and their obligation to seek the best possible education for their children.“They were always rather handicapped at the Priory on account of lack of money and I felt that this year the food and the accommodations might be even less good than other years,”Rose wrote. “I also felt that he had had the advantage of a Catholic school training for three years and as he had reached the age of seventeen under those circumstances he ought to be able to hold his own as far as his religion is concerned.”This is a rather odd comment to be made to her eldest sons, who spent even less time in a Catholic school. But it reflects a certain rationalization by Rose with a decision that carried her husband’s imprint.
Joe Sr. believed that “a child learned faith and morals at home” and was better prepared for life in America by meeting children from other religious backgrounds at an early age. Young Teddy was shipped off at an early age to the Fessenden School in the greater Boston area.“There does not seem to be any good Catholic boarding school for young boys,” she explained. “I plan to send him to a Catholic school when he is about thirteen.”Teddy later spent a short time at a Jesuit school in western Massachusetts, but most of his education came from outside the Catholic school realm. For his confirmation as a Catholic,Teddy favored taking the name Anthony, but was talked out of it by his mother and siblings. “Much to our surprise and embarrassment, the Priest asked them confirmation questions at the ceremonies in the church before the assembled congregation,” Rose recounted in an March 1942 letter to her elder children.“He gave Teddy rather a hard one—‘What is the Church?’Teddy faltered a little but he said he knew most of it.”
IN THE KENNEDY FAMILY, all the children looked up to Joe Jr., his father’s favorite. As the dutiful eldest son, Joe Jr. shared his parents’ emotional bonds between church and family. Only his familial loyalty to his sister Kathleen could allow him to see beyond the dictates of church law and to support her marriage to Billy. Because of his closeness in age to Jack, Joe felt a perpetual tug from his brother, a contest heightened by their parents’ expectations. At times, Rose could foster the rivalry between her two eldest boys as much as her husband. “Jack brought me a miniature Torpedo Boat done in silver in the form of a tie clip,” she wrote. “He is really terrifically jealous of the fact that I wear Joe’s gold wings all the time and is bound that I have one of his insignias, and so I am to turn this tie clip into a pin some way or other.” As the chronically thin, often sickly younger sibling, Jack grew up watching the exploits of his brother with a mix of pride and awe, usually from an emotional distance. The family competitiveness probably cost him any real closeness with his elder brother.“I suppose I knew Joe as well as anyone and yet I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him,” reflected Jack afterward. “He was very human and most certainly had his faults: a hot temper, intolerance for the slower pace of lesser men, and a way of looking—with a somewhat sardonic half smile—which could cut and prod more sharply than words. But these defects—if defects they were— were becoming smoothed with the passage of time.”
After enlisting in the navy rather than finishing his last year at Harvard Law, Joe’s service in the war quickly became dangerous. He shared his father’s isolationist politics, but also felt the swell of patriotism traditionally shown by Irish-Americans when America entered wars. The young Kennedy’s gung ho attitude and fearlessness (recklessness, some crew members suggested privately) seemed a way of answering his family’s critics. As if to prove himself, Joe flew dozens of missions in Europe, his planes repeatedly hit by flak fro
m the enemy. Although Joe’s military assignments were more dangerous than his brother’s maneuvers in the Pacific, Jack walked away with a medal. His younger brother, who’d been often ill, lackluster and seemingly without direction, was now a figure of considerable esteem. It didn’t seem fair, but Joe could only resolve to try harder. Before leaving for England after a short training stay in America, Joe traveled to Hyannis for his father’s fifty-fifth birthday celebration, where Jack’s exploits were the talk of the evening. A prominent judge at the affair rose to make a toast:“To Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” Seated at the dais in uniform, Joe Jr. smiled faintly but seethed with fury. Recalling that night, former Boston Police Commissioner Joseph Frances Timilty, a family friend who drove down for the occasion and stayed at the Kennedy home, remembered that Joe was terribly upset before falling asleep. As Timilty recalled, the young man sat on a nearby bed, clenching and unclenching his fists, and, as if cursing his fate, said,“By God, I’ll show them.”
DIVINE INTERVENTION, the vagaries of fate and their own survival were nagging thoughts for the Kennedys during this time, as their letters indicate. The emotional tumult from Kathleen’s wedding reminded them all of what it meant to be a Catholic, and the war underlined how uncontrollable their lives had become. For Joe Jr. each flight held the risk of sudden death. He remained a devout Catholic, regularly serving Mass for Father Gallery, the Catholic chaplain at Dunkeswell Airdrome, the English air base for Joe and his crew. Each night, he dropped to his knees in prayer, an act so conspicuous and yet so sincere that it never drew a remark from his fellow aviators. His parents, greatly upset by Jack’s ordeal in the Pacific,worried about their eldest son’s fate as well.“We were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you,” his father chastised. “I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had had any news as to how Jack was.”