by Paula Byrne
Kick, who loved to tease Jack, wrote to him: ‘Dear Twinkle-toes . . . Inga returned with an infected throat. Torb and I want to know what you do to girls that causes T.B. or infected throats or causes them to marry someone else.’10 Though she was putting on a brave face, that autumn she had heard the news that she had been dreading: Billy was engaged to another woman.
In October, she wrote to her father asking for his consent to travel to England: ‘I have just had lunch with Dinah Brand (Lady Astor’s niece) and I am nearly going mad. She said that everyone she say [saw] sent all sorts of messages to me and that there just never been such a missed girl as I am. I am so anxious to go back that I can hardly sit still.’11
Always closer to her father than her mother, and especially in romantic matters, she confided in him her fears about Billy Cavendish: ‘I received a letter from Andrew and Debo pleading with me to come back and save Billy from Sally Norton who apparently has got him in the bag. No one wants him to marry her and all told [me] to come back and save him. Apparently they are going to announce it in Jan. I haven’t heard from him for simply ages and that no doubt is the reason.’12
Her panic at not hearing from Billy was partly assuaged but partly increased by a letter from him announcing that he was engaged to Sally. He had told Kick that his parents were not happy about the match and did not think the Nortons ‘respectable enough’. She told her father, ‘The Duchess and Mrs. Norton had a tremendous fight but things have settled down and they are going to announce it in Dec.’13
Reading between the lines, Billy was still reaching out to Kick, and almost telling her that he thought he had made a mistake. She repeated back to Joe some of Billy’s quotes, ‘I have never been engaged before, thanks to you’; ‘It was a very long time before I gave up all hope of marrying you’; ‘what sense of humour I have I owe to you’ and ‘Please keep writing’.
She was clearly relieved that she still had a hold on him. ‘Rather sad, don’t you think?’ But there was nothing she could do. Her father would not let her return to England. She also told him that she was going to the races and to a dance with Jack’s Harvard friend George Mead. There was no mention of the man she was spending most of her time with, John White.
Anxious about the Billy and Sally situation, Kick wrote to her father that she had a plan. Her idea was to ask John G. Winant, the new American Ambassador in London, to get her a passport: ‘The only thing that remains is your consent,’ she wrote. ‘I have a lot of great friends that I should really like to see.’ She told her father that she wasn’t worried about his unpopularity among the British: her real friends would not blame her and, as for the rest, ‘the hell with them’. She added that her chances of being hit by a London bomb were the same as being hit by a car in Washington. Joe would not give his consent.
In the face of her father’s intransigence, Kick finally accepted defeat. Billy was lost to her. He was tired of waiting for her and felt that the relationship was doomed. At least Kick now had Jack to distract her. With his bestselling book about England, he was a rising man in Washington. There were rumours that he might one day run for President. Kick’s Washington set had a party game called ‘Jack’s future’. Inga remembered that they talked politics constantly. Kick helped Jack to send out signed copies of his book to important people. The directionless second son had found his way.14
31
Lobotomy
Rosemary’s was the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.
Rose Kennedy
Kick was enjoying her time in Washington. Most evenings, she and Jack, together with his Harvard friends and Inga, would have dinner (‘always the same menu: steak, peas, carrots and ice cream’). Inga was amused by the games of touch football played in the living room of Kick’s apartment.
In the meantime, Kick was growing closer to John White. Their first encounters had been inauspicious. He teased her mercilessly and she retaliated, calling him ‘a big bag of wind’. He was instantly intrigued by her feisty nature, her unwillingness to be intimidated by his age and experience, his self-confidence and swagger. It seemed that every time they were together in the office an argument would break out. Having discovered that she was a strict Catholic who had been convent educated, he simply couldn’t resist teasing her about her beliefs. Kick was unused to defending her faith and her upbringing. Even when she was in England, away from her Catholic friends, it was unthinkable that she would have been teased or challenged about her religion. Her English friends respected her strong faith. Her tentative talks with Billy about their respective faiths had been careful and considerate. Often the subject was best avoided. With John, it was entirely different.
He loved to goad her. He knew that religion and sex were sensitive issues, so he delighted in pouring ridicule on Catholic teaching on contraception. One day at the office they had argued about the church. Later that evening, she couldn’t resist carrying on the argument. She telephoned him, yelling, ‘Birth control is murder.’ Undaunted, he yelled back, ‘It’s the Catholic church’s way of keeping membership.’1
John had a chip on his shoulder. Though Ivy League, he was the son of an Episcopalian minister, and had not had the advantages of many of the men Kick had met. He was the direct opposite of Billy. Billy was the perfect English gentleman, shy, self-effacing, polite and gentle. Courteous and kind, he would never force or expect even a kiss if he felt Kick wasn’t ready. John White was rude, funny, irreverent, and despite his bravado and seeming detachment he truly loved her. Living in her own flat meant that Kick had freedom to develop her romance with John. She was too ambitious to take him seriously as a potential husband, but she liked him. He treated her like an equal. He understood her.
John scorned social skills and etiquette and fine dining and wealth. He was notorious for wearing shabby clothes. He once came into the office wearing a threadbare sweater that unravelled through the day.2 Kick stood for everything he hated. She was rich, well travelled, socially adept, had led a life of privilege and luxury with holiday homes in Cape Cod and Palm Beach. But he couldn’t get enough of her. Also, she had been raised arguing, and learning not to take it personally. Debating was meat and drink to her. John had never met a woman quite like her. Being so vivacious and clever, how could she be so thoroughly unspoilt? They began dating.
On their third date, he invited her back to his ‘cave’, a basement room in a Georgetown house which belonged to his married sister, Patsy. They spent most of the evening indulging in their usual banter and battle-of-wills. Suddenly, he pounced and tried to kiss her. Kick was horrified: ‘I don’t want any of this, John. You must understand. Please don’t try. I don’t want to do the thing the priest says not to do.’3
In an interview he recalled his surprise that this lively girl could somehow be sexually repressed. He told her that he wanted some physical affection, even if just hugs and kisses. At the same time, he was drawn to her innocence. He was shocked that she could not even say the word ‘sex’.4 But he could not give her up. Kick had confided in him that her father knew about her brother’s sexual affair with the married Inga, and that Joe had encouraged the relationship. Her father thought it was good to have the sexual experience. There was nothing said about ‘adultery’ or ‘fornication’, as she had been taught by her faith. This sent such a confusing message. It was fine for her brother to be sexually active, fine for him to be having an affair with an older married woman, but not for her to have an affair.
One day that autumn, White remembered Kick showing an especial interest in a series of articles he was preparing about mental illness and ‘retardation’. She probed him about the latest treatments and asked to accompany him on a research trip to a home for the ‘retarded’. As White recalled:
Kick would draw me out on the details – not just draw me out but absolutely drain me, although never saying why. This went on for a long time. One day we were walking in the park and she was, as usual, interviewing me to find out what new things I’d discovered
. . . she finally admitted why she was so interested. It was because of Rosemary. She spoke slowly and sadly about it, as though she was confessing something quite embarrassing, almost shameful. I got the feeling that her family viewed Rosemary as a beloved failure, perhaps a disgrace.5
Rosemary was now twenty-three, and her problems had worsened. As she grew older, the gap between her and the rest of the family was widening, and she was becoming increasingly aggressive and frustrated. She had improved immeasurably at her school in England, where she had felt needed and useful, but since returning to America she had become isolated and her behaviour more erratic. In her memoirs, Rose talked of her eldest daughter’s tantrums and rages, when she struck out at people and threw things, and there were convulsive episodes.
There was another troubling aspect to her conduct. As she reached sexual maturity, she couldn’t understand why she didn’t have boyfriends like her sisters. And there were embarrassing incidents when she had wandered out of the school at night and been found with strange men who did not realize her condition and tried to take advantage. She was still beautiful and voluptuous. She was at St Gertrude’s Convent in the heart of Washington, not far from Kick and Jack. When she got out, the school would call to say that she was missing and the family would have to go out and find her before someone took advantage.
Fearful of the effect she would have on the lives and careers of the other siblings, the Ambassador decided to take matters in hand.
John White had investigated neurosurgical techniques such as the pre-frontal lobotomy. He was writing a six-piece series on St Elizabeth’s, Washington’s federal mental hospital. When John told Kick that the results of the pre-frontal lobotomy were ‘just not good’ and that afterwards the patient would be ‘gone as a person, just gone’, Kick was relieved and told her mother that this wouldn’t do for Rosemary.6 But Joe had other ideas.
John White had learnt about the work of Dr Walter Freeman, who worked at George Washington Hospital as well as St Elizabeth’s. He also had his own private practice.7 Joe went to consult him about his daughter. He was the leading doctor of psychosurgery and had performed eighty lobotomies with his partner James Watts. Freeman was a charismatic, articulate character who required little time to persuade Joe that the operation would be a success. The hope was that the operation would calm her mood swings. What was highly unusual about Rosemary’s case was that she was only mildly retarded. Most of the lobotomies Freeman had performed were on patients with severe developmental disabilities, who were brought to him as a very last resort.
On a cold day in November 1941, Rosemary was wheeled into the operating theatre of George Washington Hospital. She was given a local anaesthetic, because it was vital for her to be awake during the operation. Watts, who performed alongside Freeman, described what happened: ‘We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch.’ The instrument Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. As Watts cut, Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer or sing God Bless America or count backwards.8
The operation involved severing neural connections between the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus. Rosemary was sent to Craig House to convalesce. No one knew whether she would regain mobility and speech. She did eventually recover her motor skills, but not her memory or her speech. She was left with the mind of a two-year-old child, unable to communicate or to walk, and almost certainly incontinent. Eunice, who was always closest to her, wasn’t even told her whereabouts.
Rosemary and the botched lobotomy were seen as a failure that could barely be mentioned in a family where success was all. The Kennedys were masters at the power of denial. It was a survival strategy. Joe never referred to the operation or kept a written record, nor did Dr Freeman. In her 1942 round-robin letter to all the other children, Rose never mentioned Rosemary. In her memoirs, she wrote of the beloved daughter whom she had spent so many years nurturing, and how the neurosurgery had been such a failure: ‘she lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts for her’.9 Rose never even told her friends; Joe lied and told his friends that Rosemary was teaching out in the Midwest.10 Kick was quietly devastated, knowing her own small part in the sorry saga.
Rose was eventually sent to a convent in Wisconsin, St Coletta’s. She was able to walk again, but her mental powers were gone. Joe built a private cottage for her in the grounds of St Coletta’s. Rose later wrote, ‘Rosemary’s was the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.’11
In late November, shortly after Rosemary’s operation, Rose shut up the family home in Brookline. The older children had gone for good, the younger ones were in boarding school. Family gatherings would now be confined to holidays in the Palm Beach house and at Hyannis Port.
Kick drew ever closer to John White in the wake of the Rosemary disaster. He would read to her from his favourite books and take her to the movies. On 30 November, he wrote in his diary, ‘I held the hand of Kathleen Kennedy . . . feel very friendly towards her and do now wonder what will become of us.’12
He had little idea that she was still thinking of Billy Cavendish and how to extricate him from Sally Norton while she was so far away from him – still plotting ways to return to England. Kick loved John, but in many respects, they had a fraternal relationship. He would tuck her up in bed at night, with Kick wearing a long nightgown. She didn’t care that he saw her with her hair in pin curls, her face cleansed of make-up, slathered in cold cream. He would rub her back until she fell asleep, or he would read to her before returning home to his apartment.13
White said that after two or three dates Kick dropped hints about things she knew that she shouldn’t know about him. For instance, once they were talking and she slipped in a reference to North Carolina, the place where he was from. He was simply astonished until she said that her father was doing a background check on him. She said, ‘every time one of us goes out with somebody new, we have to call our father’.14 She told him that her father had been investigating his past and concluded that he was ‘aimless but harmless’.15 She also told him that he did the same with the other children.
John chronicled their life in his diary. It reads a bit like a screwball comedy. She would call him a ‘shrunken, bald-headed, irritable old man’, and he would call her ‘an ignorant, thickheaded Mick’ or the ‘Irish Catholic stupid fool’.16 She would love this because it was so unlike the hero worship that she was used to. He would rise early to take her to work in his old car (nicknamed ‘The Broken and Contrite Heart’), and they would quarrel incessantly. Once they even quarrelled about his height.17 Despite his exasperation, he loved her ability to debate. He knew that her apparently wholesome and innocent exterior masked her keen intelligence and ability to manipulate and win an argument. He conceded that, despite his own prowess and skill in debate, she was ‘a damn sight better than he was’.18
John White remembered that Kick loved coming to Patsy’s house, mainly because of the family atmosphere, which she greatly missed. She liked his family because they were ‘freethinkers’.19 He remembered how ‘she’d sit and talk about anything. She just loved to talk. She was like Jack in this regard – she had an insatiable curiosity about people.’20 He continued to probe Kick’s religious beliefs, her father’s isolationist politics and her social views. ‘It delighted her to see people somehow careless of appearances who were still not bad people . . . it was as though we were breaking the rules and not being thrown out.’ He felt that he was the one who got her to challenge her faith, and claimed that Eunice later blamed him for it, accused him of ‘talking my sister out of her religion’. This wasn’t true, but he did sow the seeds of doubt.21
Her friends were surprised by the romance, amazed that she was so keen
on this belligerent, scruffy man with a chip on his shoulder. They didn’t understand that in his love of argument and debate he was like a Kennedy, and she felt extremely comfortable with him, despite the volatility of the relationship. There was also an undercurrent of sexual tension and excitement that was new to her. He also said ‘she loved to cuddle. I don’t think that there had been too much of that sort of thing when they were kids. But that had to take place apart from sex.’22 Rubbing her back one night, he thought to himself that their relationship mostly resembled that of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. He was taking on the role of protector. As usual he would tuck her into bed before leaving. He was always amazed that whatever kind of day she had had, even if she were feeling sad or stressed, she would instantly fall fast asleep. But this one night was different. On the cusp of drifting off, she suddenly turned to John and said, in a tearful voice: ‘Listen, the thing about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack – incapable of deep affection.’23
On Sunday, 7 December, Kick had lunch with John White and his sister Patsy in a Hot Shoppes restaurant. An announcement was suddenly made that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. All eight US Navy battleships had been damaged, with four being sunk. Thousands had been killed or injured. There had been no warning, no declaration of war.
Thick smoke billowed from the Japanese Embassy in Washington as the diplomatic staff burnt their papers and documents. The next day, the President addressed Congress with the words that America was at war with Japan: ‘a day that will live in infamy’. On 11 December, Hitler declared that Germany would unite with Japan in hostilities against the United States.