The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  Rose remembered that her husband’s psyche seemed to shatter when, many days after young Joe’s death, they received the last letter their son had written home from Europe; in it, Joe mentioned his secret mission and gave the assurance that “it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry.”As he finished his son’s letter (with an ending assuring his parents that “the Kennedy clan on this side of the Atlantic is doing OK”), Joe threw the letter down on a table and collapsed into a chair, as if he had suddenly been struck by the awful finality of his son’s death. Though he tried in vain several times, Joe also couldn’t bear to read the book of recollections prepared by Jack, certainly not without crying.“Every night of my life, I say a prayer for him,” he later said of his son’s memory. “Joe is now, and always will be, another part of my life.” So many of his ambitions, his preparation and his drive were rolled into his oldest son. Though he had received the sacraments and followed the traditions of his religion, Joe Kennedy’s faith seemed overwhelmed by his son’s death, a calamity almost incomprehensibly cruel. Krock observed that Joe Kennedy “is, I’m sure, religious. At least we used to go to Sunday Mass together whenever and wherever I was visiting him.” But in this personal crisis, while her husband’s spirit remained lost, only Rose’s “supreme faith,” as her husband almost enviously called it, seemed capable of providing comfort from tragedy. Imbued with Irish charm and luck for most of his life, Joe Kennedy couldn’t find an answer, couldn’t unlock the mystery of why his favored son should be claimed by death. “When young Joe was killed,” he later reflected to a friend,“my faith, even though I am a Catholic, did not seem strong enough to make me understand that after all, he had won his eternal reward without having to go through the grief of life. My faith should have made me realize this and I should not have indulged in great self-pity the way I did.”

  On Labor Day weekend, only a few weeks after Joe’s death, the Kennedys gathered at Hyannis Port, as they had in the past. Jack invited some of his navy friends to share the holiday with them. They had dodged death together, though Jack, home from the hospital again, still suffered from the injuries of war. Throughout the day, Jack’s group of friends played golf and shared laughs; at dinner, they were quizzed by Joe Kennedy about the day’s contests. Throughout the dinner, Rose smiled graciously but without response, as if the jokes about navy life were flying over her head. She remained quiet, with an underlying sadness to her. After dinner, Jack and his friends continued their chatter outside on the porch, telling stories that ended with loud laughs.

  Suddenly, an upstairs window flung open. “Jack, don’t you and your friends have any respect for your dead brother?” Joe yelled in a pained voice.

  Jack and his friends were stunned and stared at the old man in a hushed silence.“You get in here!” his father continued.“You’re making a nuisance of yourself with the neighbors!”

  As if to counter death, Joe Kennedy had instructed his family to stay busy, to keep up their hectic pace of activities, to laugh and not let young Joe’s death subsume their lives. But as his outburst showed, it was an emotionally impossible demand that he couldn’t sustain himself.

  KICK, ALWAYS SPRY AND full of life, spent hours helping her father try to overcome his grief. After hearing the news about her brother, she rushed home from England and decided to stay with her family in the United States until her husband, Billy Hartington, returned from the war. During the Labor Day weekend with Jack’s friends, she chatted with Kate Thom, the wife of one of Jack’s crewmates.“We talked a lot about the war and religion and Joe,” recalled Thom.“She had been the last one to see Joe. I was also married to a non-Catholic and we talked about that.”

  At home for the first time since her marriage,Kick tried to mend fences with her mother and slowly convince her of the wisdom of her decision. She and Billy had spent barely a few weeks together before he was shipped off again to battle. As an officer, Billy Hartington fought valiantly against the Germans during the summer, leading his men through Normandy and into Belgium. With the Allied forces marching across Europe, the war seemed likely to be over soon. Perhaps Billy and his bride could then finally begin their lives together. But in mid-September, Hartington was killed during fierce hand-to-hand combat in a tiny village. A sniper shot him through the heart. When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were informed of their son’s death, they attempted to contact Kathleen in America. It fell upon Joe Kennedy to break the news to his daughter. Kick was devastated. The last vestiges of her lively spirit drained from her. Within two months, her eldest brother and the man she loved had been killed, among the dead in the last stages of the European war. After all the emotional tumult surrounding their wedding and the question of religion, she had hoped and prayed to God that her Billy would be spared. “I can’t believe that the one thing I feared most should have happened,” she confessed to her diary. “Life is so cruel.”

  Kick knew she must return to England, and the British government arranged for a flight back to London. It was difficult to hear the spiritual counseling from her mother, who advised that “God did not give us a burden more than we can handle.” In the name of religion, she had been made to believe that somehow her love for Billy was improper, that she had lost her soul as well as repudiated her Irish Catholic heritage. After Joe’s death, she accompanied her mother to Mass every morning, hoping to heal the rift between them, but to no avail. Billy’s death contained a bitter irony, as though her mother’s wish for her to return to the church had been accommodated.“ I guess God has taken care of the matter in His own way, hasn’t He?” she remarked coldly to a friend.

  Back in America, Rose expanded her morning prayers at Mass to include Billy, as though in death she had finally granted her approval. In a fit of emotional exhaustion, she even sought the sympathy and refuge of the Sacred Heart nuns at Noroton for a night. “I have been to Mass for Billy frequently,” she wrote to her daughter. “After I heard you talk about him and I began to hear about his likes and dislikes, his ideas and ideals, I realized what a wonderful man he was and what happiness would have been yours had God willed that you spend your life with him.” Rose’s letter suggested that her daughter’s romantic love for Billy was temporal, whereas devotion to the church should be eternal. “A first love—a young love—is so wonderful, my dear Kathleen, but, my dearest daughter, I feel we must dry our tears as best we can and bow our heads to God’s wisdom and goodness. We must place our hand in His and trust him.”

  After the funeral for Billy, Kick decided to stay in England, a guest of the Cavendishes, while she grieved; weeks later, she returned to the Red Cross as a volunteer. Kick’s English friends were not only emotionally supportive but aware of the religious difficulties she faced at home in America. “Among Kathleen’s Anglican circle,” wrote her biographer, Lynne McTaggart,“it was rumored that Mrs. Kennedy believed not only that there was a causal relationship between Kathleen’s sacrilege and Billy’s death but that God in His wrath had struck down both Joe and Billy, for plotting the unholy marriage together. By killing Billy, God, in effect, was giving Kick another chance.” Though this view was overly melodramatic, Kick’s close British friends, Lady Nancy Astor among them, did harbor their own suspicions and prejudices. “I know you realize that we who believe in the Christ message can’t really believe in death,” Lady Astor wrote to Rose soon after young Joe’s death. But the following month, Lady Astor refused to attend her own son’s wedding when he married a Catholic. Well aware of the irony, Kick dropped a congratulatory note to the bride “welcoming” her to the “club” of mixed marriages. In her own mind, Kick had never left the church, even though, during her marriage to Billy, she couldn’t receive its sacraments. Only her closest friends knew how much this breach tormented her. During the early summer, before these tragedies shattered her life, Kick attended Mass several times with her friend, Sissy Ormsby-Gore, whose husband, David, drove them to the church but didn’t enter. As Sissy rose from the pew and joined the rest of the congregation in receiv
ing Communion, Kick remained kneeling, mortified and angry with her ostracism. “Every week her exclusion from Communion served as a fresh reminder of her sacrilege, and no amount of prayer, charitable work, or good intentions would alter her state of sin in the eyes of the Church,” McTaggart wrote. “It infuriated Kathleen to be so humiliated.”

  Among the Cavendishes, resentment that Billy had married a Catholic now melted away, replaced with affection for his lonely young widow. Kick spent a quiet Christmas in England with her husband’s family and tried to come to grips with Billy’s death and the war’s destruction. Kick confided to Jack that she felt directionless and asked for advice on what to do next. “I know that there were a lot of difficulties for me if Billy had lived but somehow now none of those things seem to matter,” she explained.“It just seems that the pattern of life for me has been destroyed. At the moment I don’t fit into any design.”To Jack, who came back nearly a cripple, Kick freely expressed her frustration. Her natural wit turned acrid in noting the hypocrisies of war. “I just read in the paper this morning that Archie Spell brought back a tremendously high decoration to Daddy,” she wrote to Jack about the New York prelate.“What was that for? His children’s war record.”

  None was so lost as Joe Kennedy, who tried to remain strong for his family while mourning its shining star, the boy with his name. Just as he had feared, his son was killed while saving England from destruction. Yet to suggest that his son’s death—or any of the events of the war—had ended Joe Kennedy’s faith is as wrong as it is to claim that he had never possessed it to begin with. In his letters and telegrams, there is enough documentary evidence to suggest a deep and thoughtful struggle about God and the greater meaning of tragic events in human lives. Though not as doctrinaire as his wife,Kennedy drew upon his religion enough to provide some comfort to his children. Writing to his widowed daughter just before Christmas, Joe Kennedy sent a telegram summing up his view:“Darling 1944 has been a difficult year for all of us,” he cabled, “but as you have well said we still have lots for which to thank God.”To close friends, however, there was no denying his heartache. “I still find it very difficult to get over Joe’s death,” he wrote a year later to one intimate.“God in His wisdom ordained so well that the young soon forget the sorrow of the death of older people, but I don’t think that the older people ever get over the death of the younger ones.”

  Father Maurice Sheehy, his lost son’s friend and golfing buddy, the priest who had gotten to know the Kennedys so well, realized the depth of Joe Kennedy’s anguish and sent a booklet of Catholic teachings just before Christmas to help lift him from his abyss. Attached was a handwritten note from Sheehy, by then a navy chaplain stationed in San Francisco:

  Dear Joe:

  Enclosed is a little pamphlet which might bring you some consolation. I know that this is a dark Christmas for you—but it is, I believe, young Joe’s first Christmas in heaven; and God has been extravagantly generous to you in surrounding you with people who love you. Others have lost their only son.

  When the day comes that your tragedy can be seen in its greater light, I hope to visit you and Rose again.

  Sincerely yours, Maurice S. Sheehy.

  After the holiday, Joe composed a note of thanks to Father Sheehy. Once again, he invited the priest to visit the Kennedy home in Florida, just like the old days.“We would love to see you,” he wrote, cheerily.“Let me know if there is anything I can do for you out there.” But in this same letter, Joe conceded that “the whole mess of this war and all its attendant troubles just make me sick at heart.” No pamphlet nor catechism was going to help him find a way out of this morass. Though his wife could follow the spiritual path suggested by priests and nuns, he seemed determined to find his own way. As he admitted to Father Sheehy, “Of course, it is inevitable that the day will come when we can regard Joe’s tragedy in, as you say, ‘its greater light,’ but it is still a long way off for me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Lighter Shade of Green

  AFTER WORLD WAR II, the Irish in Boston were ready for a change. The wave of immigrants from Ireland, the haggard unskilled day laborers and maids with brogues desperate for any job, were now two or three generations removed, and their children formed the city’s emerging middle class. Many Irish worked in civil service positions—police officers, firefighters and teachers—and spoke of college for their own children. Still, for Irish Catholics living in places such as Boston, there remained two constants deeply rooted in their culture. “In the old days, your life centered around one or two things,” Congressman Thomas P. O’Neill recalled about the district in which he grew up. “It centered around the Democratic Party or it centered around the Catholic Church. Those were the two organizations where they would run festivals, they would run social affairs, your whole social life was around them.” Politics and the church had helped both P. J. Kennedy in East Boston, and particularly John F. Fitzgerald among the “Dearos” in the north, and these two potent forces were at play in the 11th Congressional District when their grandson, John F. Kennedy, sought election in 1946. Unlike Honey Fitz, twenty-nine-year-old Kennedy ran for Congress not as a stepping-stone to becoming the city’s mayor—the usual prize for ethnic politicians in American cities—but with an eye toward something grander.

  Kennedy’s campaign enlisted the full power of Boston’s Catholic Church in a way that not even his grandfathers could have imagined. In previous elections, Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley had curried favor with the clergy, hoping some favorable mention from the pulpit might pay off at the ballot box. Generally, though, the church hierarchy, in accordance with Vatican directives, did not allow themselves or church-affiliated organizations to become directly involved in such temporal matters as political endorsements. Cardinal O’Connell deliberately distanced himself from both Curley and Fitzgerald when they implicitly sought his support. Even Spellman, for all his courtier intrigue with politicians, still tried to keep church matters from the local Caesars.

  Kennedy’s campaign was different. As other histories have shown, money from the Kennedy family helped buy the support of an influential newspaper and eliminate the only serious competition that Jack Kennedy faced in winning the congressional seat. But unknown to most, Kennedy money also bought the Roman Catholic Church’s support for his 1946 candidacy and subsequent campaigns through a large dispersal of funds donated to Catholic-run organizations. The close working relationship between the Kennedys and key church figures can be found in financial documents and letters. Each donation to a Catholic parish, nursing home or charitable organization was calibrated by Joe Kennedy’s key aides—mostly Irish Catholics themselves—to maximize the church’s support for Jack’s political efforts, to raise his visibility in a place where he had never lived as an adult and to broaden his support among other immigrant Catholic groups.

  In turn, church figures signaled their support of Kennedy. In particular, Archbishop Richard Cushing, far more than any prelate before him, became an active promoter of his candidacy—a financial and emotional investment that would pay dividends throughout Jack Kennedy’s career. Cushing’s enthusiasm for Kennedy not only derived from large donations but, as several letters indicate, also from Joe Kennedy’s clout with powerful figures at the Vatican, particularly Count Enrico Galeazzi, the Pope’s right-hand man. Indeed, Joe Kennedy encouraged the perception that he might be able to affect Cushing’s elevation someday to cardinal.

  Increasingly, the Kennedy campaigns made the transition from patronage machine politics to a new era driven by money and media. Far from keeping a distance between church and state, Jack Kennedy’s early political career relied on church-related donations funneled through Kennedy-controlled charities to bolster and augment his political organization. His first campaign in 1946 was not orchestrated by navy buddies and Harvard roommates, as some early histories have suggested, but by an Irish organization of machine-bred pols much closer to the immigrant experience than Jack. Like Boston itself,K
ennedy’s campaign that year contained the old and the new, serving both as further evidence of Irish Catholic ascendancy in the city, and, more important, as a harbinger of diverse and profound changes taking place in postwar America.

  TO REMEMBER his fallen son, Joe Kennedy planned several memorials. He pushed hard for a Congressional Medal of Honor for his martyred boy, but received instead the Navy Cross in his honor. In a well-publicized ceremony, Jean Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy daughter and Joe Jr.’s godchild, christened a new navy destroyer, the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., upon which Bobby served for a time. At St. Francis Xavier, the small white frame church where the Kennedys worshipped in Hyannis Port, the family donated a new altar. It featured a sky-blue background in which a pair of gold navy wings were depicted between images of England’s St. George and France’s St. Joan of Arc. But the most extensive tribute was the charitable foundation created in young Joe’s name.“My father—still in his grief—decided he wanted to build a memorial to his son,” Eunice later recalled.“He had never believed much in building buildings. He wanted to invest in men. He asked us all at the table one day what could be done to best perpetuate Joe’s memory.” Eventually, they decided that the foundation should focus on mental retardation, an area largely ignored by government and other charities. In an unspoken way, the decision seemed to atone for the Kennedys’ own remorse about daughter, Rosemary Kennedy, whose condition they still did not acknowledge publicly. Over the next several decades, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation built several facilities for retarded children, symbols of the family’s genuine commitment to the cause. But in its early years, the foundation also served another purpose—the intention of helping John F. Kennedy get elected.