by Paula Byrne
Kick socialized with her brothers Jack and Joe and, as usual, their male friends flocked around her in what Jack began to call her ‘boys club’. Peter Grace, Zeke Coleman, George Mead, Lem Billings, Torby Macdonald: they all loved her company as they frequented the Stork Club and the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel. The Kennedy trio got a new nickname: the ‘personality kids’.6
Kick loved big-band music. Ambrose and his Band had been her favourite in London, and now she danced to Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and the Dorsey Brothers. She was seen on casual dates with Jack’s friend George Mead and the press even speculated that she was engaged to Winthrop Rockefeller.7 Winthrop had been spotted buying her an expensive ski jacket for Christmas, and the gossip columnists went wild at the thought of a Kennedy–Rockefeller union.
At one point, Jack flew into a fury with her for flirting with his friends, and railed at her for her ‘insincerity’. ‘Gosh Kid, that’s too close to a knuckle,’ she replied, twirling her hair round her finger, and just carried on.8 The truth was that her heart was in England and with Billy. Nancy Astor wrote to her to say that the Cavendish brothers were bemoaning her absence. Kick wrote to her friends in London and to her father for news of the expected bombing and invasion, but still nothing was happening as the Phoney War stretched out. The press joked that Hitler was trying to bore the British into peace.
Joe, desperately missing the family and dependent upon family letters and a precious brief weekly phone call, only had one daughter left in England for company. Rose and Joe were celebrating twenty-five years of marriage and he wrote her a loving, affectionate letter: ‘to say they have been great years is understatement. They’ve been the happy years the poets write about. I would like to live every day of them over with you again, but wouldn’t want to live one more without you.’9
Rose threw herself back into Bronxville life, and began making speeches for women’s groups about her life in England. She recalled one day encountering some hostility from a Boston group of predominantly Irish Catholics when she said, ‘Now, of course, you’re all familiar with Windsor Castle.’ She was careful not to make that mistake again.10
While Rose raved about her time in London, Joe remained adamant that England was a lost cause. He wrote to the President in September, ‘I personally am convinced that, win or lose, England will never be the England that she was and no one can help her to be.’11 England didn’t stand a ‘Chinaman’s chance’. The President was disgusted by Joe’s defeatism, but still wanted him in England out of the way.12
Jack was now back at Harvard, and was romantically interested in Kick’s friend Charlotte McDonnell. He wrote to his father that it was his ‘first taste of a Catholic girl so will be interested to see how it goes’.13 He was completing his thesis on ‘England’s Foreign Policy since 1931’; in an interview recorded after his death, Rose suggested that his decision to choose this subject was shaped by his affinity for the British and his exposure to government circles in England’s great homes. It was Kick who had facilitated all this, since it was through her friends that Jack had been given access to English high society.
Joe managed to get home for Christmas, and the family, as ever, headed off to Palm Beach. Kick was delighted to see her father and hear the news about London and her friends. He was still refusing to allow her to return to England. He told Jack that going back would undo all of her happy memories. She would have to be content with sending jazz records and presents when he returned to London in the new year.
27
Operation Ariel
Daddy . . . Is Billy all right?
Kick Kennedy
In late February 1940, the Ambassador was recalled to London, where he took up residence in a mansion outside Windsor called St Leonard’s. The English press were less than enamoured by his extended leave of absence in time of war. He had spent the first two months of the year in Palm Beach recuperating from his recurring stomach ailments. Once back, in letters home, he tried to explain his unpopularity amongst the British: ‘The things they say about me from the fact that I’ve sent my family home because they were afraid, to the fact that I live in the country because I am afraid of being bombed etc etc. All rotten stuff but all the favorite dinner parties at Mayfair go right to work hauling the US Ambassador down. It’s for that reason it would be silly for you or the children to come over. It might spoil your pleasant impressions.’1 What he didn’t know was that the British Foreign Office had opened a secret ‘Kennedyiana’ file to monitor his ‘defeatist’ views.2 His isolationism and defeatism were put down to his fear of losing his vast wealth: ‘He only thinks of his wealth and how capitalism will suffer if the war should last long.’ In reality it was as much his fear for his children that was his motivating sentiment.
Rose, ever the politician, advised moderation: ‘Joe, dear, I have a definite idea that it would be a wonderful feat if you could put over the idea that although you are against America’s entering the war – still you are encouraging help to England in some way. It seems to me most people in America would be sympathetic to the idea, & it would endear you to the hearts of the British.’3 As so often, he refused to listen to his wife’s sage advice.
The family spent Easter at Palm Beach. Kick was ever more desperate to return to England. She persuaded Jack to intervene on her behalf, so he wrote to his father: ‘Kick is very keen to go over – and I wouldn’t think the anti-American feeling might hurt her like it might do us – due to her being a girl – especially as it would show that we hadn’t merely left England when it got unpleasant.’4 But still Joe would not relent.
In the first week of May, Kick and Jack and a few friends attended the Maryland Hunt Cup in Baltimore. After the races, they attended the Hunt Ball, Kick beautifully dressed in a flowing gown, and Jack in tails.5 Her old admirer Zeke Coleman told Kick he was still in love with her and Eunice told her father that he was the ‘first boy completely approved of by all the Kennedys’.6 The only problem was that Kick was in love with someone else, and that someone would soon be fighting the Germans. Kick wanted to do her bit for England and wanted to be back with her friends, helping with the war effort, not dancing at balls in America.
She continued to badger her father, but he was still adamant: ‘I am more convinced than ever that the children should not come over here. I quite understand Kathleen’s interest, but she can take my word for it that she would have the dullest time she ever had in her life. All the young fellows are being shuttled off to war.’7 She told him that a vote had been taken at Finch College in a debate about whether or not America should enter the war. Only two had voted in favour, and she was one of them.
Norway fell to Hitler, then Holland and Luxembourg. Kick was told that Billy was heading for the renowned Maginot Line, of which the French were so proud and in which they had invested billions of francs. It was supposed to be an impenetrable fortification against attack from Germany, an intricate system of shelters, barricades, communications systems, obstacles, bunkers, observation posts, supply depots, strong houses and anti-tank barrier systems. Kick believed that he was there, but she had no need to fear, because everyone knew that the Maginot Line was impenetrable . . .
In fact, the Coldstream Guards were on the Franco-Belgian border in an area not encompassed by the Maginot Line. In the early-morning darkness of 10 May 1940, the Germans unleashed their Blitzkrieg, artillery and heavy armour on the ground, Stuka dive-bombers terrifying from the air. A German decoy army sat outside the Maginot Line, while a second army cut through Belgium and the Ardennes Forest. French and British troops were caught in the retreat and pushed back. Within five days, the Germans were well into France.
The day before the attack through the Low Countries Chamberlain decided to resign as a result of the disastrous failed attempt by British forces to prevent the fall of Norway. Winston Churchill’s hour had come. Ambassador Kennedy was now faced with a very different Prime Minister. As German forces continued to advance, Kick, in a panic made all the worse
because she was so far away, wrote to her father: ‘At the moment it looks as if the Germans will be in England before you receive this letter. In fact from the reports here they are just about taking over Claridges now. I still keep telling everyone “the British lose the battles but they win the wars”.’8 Despite her jokey bravado, and her digs at her father’s defeatism, Kick was worried about her London friends, and especially Billy. She wrote on 21 May, ‘I have received some rather gloomy letters from Jane and Billy. Billy’s letter was written from the Maginot Line. Daddy, I must know exactly what has happened to them. Is Billy all right?’9
She tried to lighten the tone, telling Joe that the Bronxville house was looking beautiful (‘all the trees and the flowers are out’) and describing Jack’s high spirits on a week’s vacation from Harvard: ‘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.’ But Billy was very much on her mind. He was in serious fighting in France and by 24 May his unit had retreated to Dunkirk. For the Allied forces, surrounded on all sides by the Germans, it seemed that they would perish or be captured. It was, in Churchill’s words, a ‘colossal military disaster’. On 26 May the War Office made the final decision to evacuate the troops across the English Channel.
Billy’s fellow soldiers were among the thousands evacuated from the beaches between 27 May and 4 June. By the ninth day of the evacuation, more than 300,000 soldiers had been rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 boats: British destroyers, fishing boats, ferries and lifeboats. What had seemed a disaster had turned into a triumph. That, at least, was how Churchill spun it. Hailing the rescue as a ‘miracle of deliverance’, he made his greatest speech: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’10 Joe, by contrast, wrote to Rose to say that ‘the jig is up’ and that ‘the finish may come quite quickly’.11 As far as France was concerned, he was right. Paris fell on 14 June. But he was totally out of tune with the spirit of Britain.
The Cavendish family was in despair when they heard about Dunkirk because there had been no news of Billy. News eventually reached the Duke that Billy had been left in Flanders, since he could speak French. Yet every time the Duke wrote to his son, the letters came back unopened. During a weekend spent at Cliveden, the Duke tried to hide his concern from Nancy Astor and her guests, but his sad face fooled nobody. It was now a fortnight since Dunkirk and still nothing from Billy.12 The Duke and Duchess returned to Churchdale Hall in Derbyshire, their residence during the war. Another week of waiting passed.
Then on 18 June Jean Ogilvy, who was in London, was amazed to see Billy walking through the door of her mews house. He told her that he had got out of France by hiring a small car and driving all the way to Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast, from where more Allied forces were evacuated in an operation called Ariel, which began on 15 June. Billy was lucky to escape. The Luftwaffe attacked the evacuation ships the day after he got out. A converted Cunard liner, the Lancastria, was sunk with thousands of troops and civilians on board. It was the worst ever loss of life on a British ship. Churchill ordered a news blackout.
Though Billy looked well, Jean soon realized that he was deeply troubled by the retreat. He felt that the British had acted dishonourably: ‘We ran away!’13 He believed that they should have fought to the death. Some of his family members believed that Billy never got over Dunkirk.
Kick, now in Hyannis Port for the summer, was overjoyed when she heard that Billy was safe. She was maid of honour at the wedding of her old Noroton friend Anne McDonnell in Long Island, where she married Henry Ford II. Henry had converted to Catholicism in order to wed her. It was heralded as ‘the wedding of the century’. Marriage was much on Kick’s mind; so many of her London friends were marrying quickly because of the war.
It was a glorious summer on the Cape, and the family threw themselves into their usual sports and games. Jack graduated from Harvard and in July published his thesis, Why England Slept, to wide acclaim. His praise of Churchill as a hero strayed far from the Kennedy line.
Young Joe wrote to his father on 12 June: ‘The country has gone through the most amazing change of public opinion . . . There is a feeling around here that we are going to have to get in before very long.’14 He planned to join the navy or the air force. Back in Cape Cod, the other children found their own ways of helping the war effort: Jean was attending the Red Cross and making bandages, while Kick knitted a scarf for Billy.15
A summer visitor remembered a huge pile of Jack’s book on the floor. ‘They’re going like hot cakes,’ the young author said. At dinner – a vast spread – that evening they all argued about the Federal Reserve System and then watched a movie. Their visitor looked back on the day: ‘a sailing race, an aggregate of twenty-three sets of tennis, a debate on the forces involved in the Spanish Revolution . . . a paper contributed by the girls listing the qualities that should be present in an ideal husband, the daily game of touch football, and, finally, a local war that broke out after the movie over the issue – would Ingrid Bergman go to fat’. There was, he sensed, a ‘feeling shared by everybody that anything was possible and the only recognized problem was that there would never be enough time’. The Kennedys were, he recalled, ‘the most heightened group of people, much less one family. I thought to myself – that’s the best I’ve seen.’16
28
The Fourth Hostage
It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world.
New Yorker, 29 June 1940
The Luftwaffe launched its first attack on Britain on 10 July 1940, bombing the south coast. On 13 August, German bombers attacked airfields, factories and the London docks. On the 25th, a bomb fell 300 yards from the Ambassador’s weekend residence near Windsor. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, wrote in his diary: ‘everyone is no doubt inclined to think a judgment on Joe for feeling he was likely to be safer there than in London’.1
Then on 7 September 1940 the air-raid sirens wailed as more than 300 bombers filled the skies over London. This was the beginning of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing. The British public pulled together and got involved with the war effort. Many civilians became members of the Home Guard, the ARP (Air Raid Precautions service) and the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service). The Boy Scout Association guided fire engines, the boys becoming known as the ‘Blitz Scouts’. And women were playing their part. Kick’s friends were all joining in. Sally Norton and Osla Benning had jobs in an aeroplane factory.2 Debo Mitford worked in a canteen for servicemen at St Pancras station. Her sister Nancy had a (short-lived) job driving for the ARP, before helping out with evacuees and then getting war work at a first-aid post. ‘I enjoyed the war very much, I’m ashamed to say,’ she later recalled. ‘Everyone was in a very good temper. Nice and jolly.’3 As the Battle of Britain raged on, there was a sense of purpose, of excitement. For aristocratic women like Kick’s friends, it was a time of great liberation, both social and sexual.
There was certainly plenty of glitz in the Blitz. Without the need for chaperones, the girls worked by day and played at night. The West End was full of live music, crooners, cocktails and big bands. The most popular nightclub was the Café de Paris in Piccadilly, whose doors had stayed open not least because, being subterranean, it acted like an air-raid shelter, of a kind much preferable to an Anderson in the bottom of your garden. Wartime London was a place of danger, but also of excitement and reckless passion. Proximity to death meant feeling intensely alive, and illicit sex abounded. Making love was a way of defying death.4
Kick was feeling isolated and bored in school, and heard the news that many of her friends, swept up in war panic, were getting engaged. Sissy Lloyd Thomas was now married to David Ormsby Gore, with Billy as best man. She wished she could have been there. Janey Ken
yon-Slaney was engaged to Peter Lindsay and Debo Mitford to Billy’s younger brother, Andrew. She also heard that Billy was back with her old rival, Irene Haig.5 But she was still writing to him, telling him that she was desperate to come to England but being prevented by her father.
In September, Kick holidayed in Montana for a month with her old friend Nancy Tenney. Two other friends, newlyweds Francis and Cynthia McAdoo, went too. They stayed at the Flying Ranch at Wise River. The Old West was an eye-opener for Kick, full of handsome cowboys. She walked around with her hair in curlers, laughing and joking as if she didn’t have a care in the world. But, despite her laughter, she was plotting to return to England. That October, she arranged a lunch and fashion show in aid of the Allied Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to providing aid for British sailors disabled in the war.6
Back in England, Joe knew that he was perceived as a loose cannon and a troublemaker. Aware that the President was sidelining him by communicating directly with Churchill, and hating being ignored, he became more and more angry and frustrated. He wrote to Rose on the last day of September to tell her that he intended to come home, ‘either for consultation or to resign – that is entirely dependent on Mr. Roosevelt. Frankly, I don’t care which.’7 Rose herself saw exactly what was going on in Washington: ‘They think the Pres[ident] does not want you home before the election due to your explosive–defeatist point of view, as you might so easily throw a bomb which would explode sufficiently to upset his chances.’8 She meant his chances of winning a third term in the upcoming election.
Rose was right. But the President was wary of alienating Joe altogether and finally recalled him for ‘consultation’ in October. He told the Ambassador not to talk to the press and to come straight to the White House. Joe made his goodbyes in London, knowing that he would not be returning, and anxious to protect his reputation. He saw his old friend Neville Chamberlain, who was seriously ill and dying from cancer. Joe noted in his diary: ‘Clasped my hand in his two and said, “This is Goodbye, we will never see each other again.” Terrible Feeling.’9