I didn't write as often as Dad would have liked. "You and Bobby are the worst correspondents I have in the family," he chided me in September 1940. German bombs were falling on London by then, and Dad's life, like everyone else's in the city, was in danger. It was typical of him to tell me about the bombing in a casual, man-to-man sort of way, as if I were his intrepid chum who just happened to be on the other side of the ocean:
I don't know whether you would have very much excitement during these raids. I am sure, of course, you wouldn't be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety.... I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to make people happy instead of making them miserable as this war does today.
Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren't you?
Love
Dad
With Bobby, who was fourteen then, Dad was more candid:
I thought you might be interested to get my opinion as to the present situation here. There is... a very definite feeling that within the next forty-eight or seventy-two hours Germany will try an invasion. There are evidences that they have accumulated a number of barges and ships to move their forces all along the French Coast. There is also an indication that their guns, which they are firing from the French Coast... will [produce] the sort of rainbow effect over the channel that they will send their fleet under for protection....
The whole problem will finally be dropped in the lap of the United States, because as the manufacturing facilities here are destroyed... we in the United States will have to furnish more supplies... within a very few months we will have the settling of the whole matter right in our own hands.
The "settling of the whole matter" implied almost certain U.S. involvement in the European war. Far from my awareness and even Bobby's, Dad's desire to keep America neutral and his pessimism about Britain's capacity to defeat Germany was costing him the goodwill of the British government and people. His stormy relationship with Franklin Roosevelt was likewise reaching a breaking point. As correspondence was to reveal years afterward, Roosevelt had long considered Joseph Kennedy "dangerous" because of his bluntness and penchant for harsh public criticism, but valued his skill as a negotiator and his keen ear for information.
My childhood self suspected none of these intrigues. But the upshot of them rang clear as a bell to me. I excitedly wrote this letter to Dad, shortly after receiving some good news in the autumn of 1940:
Dear Daddy, I was so glad when you told me today that you were coming home soon. I had my bicycle painted blue and silver, and fixed up, so now I don't need a new one. I hope it didn't cost too much. Are you lonesome at wall hall? How is Rose and Stevens and Mr. Begley? Is he as nice now as he used to be? Does Stevens go fishing anymore? He was awfully nice to take me when I was at wall hall. Are there any fogs now? Or any air raids? Write us again. Love, from Teddy.
My father returned to America from London for the last time as ambassador on October 26, 1940. Letters and diaries show that he was am-bivalent about supporting Franklin Roosevelt for a third term, and preoccupied with resentments about what he saw as a falling away of trust and support from his chief. He poured out his frustrations directly to FDR over dinner at the White House the day after he arrived back home. Yet the next night, less than a week before the election, Dad put all this aside and spoke to the nation as a patriot. Paying for his own airtime, Joe Kennedy delivered an address over 114 radio stations of the Columbia Broadcasting Network urging Americans to reelect their president. He saved his most heartfelt argument--the famous "hostages to fortune" passage--for the last.
FDR won reelection. On December 1, Dad announced his intention to resign as ambassador to the Court of St. James's within a week. He was never again to serve in public life.
In the spring of 1941, I entered the Palm Beach Private School, not far from my parents' Florida house. I was nine then, and was placed in the fourth grade. School life quickly returned to normal for me: my teacher, Mrs. Cochrane, wrote on my first report card, "No foundation for fourth grade." But I liked her, and slowly my grades improved.
Following that glorious summer at the Cape in 1941, the summer of cranberry bogs and horseback riding with my dad, I resumed a pattern that would hold for the next four years: shifting from school to school, south to north and back again, as I followed the sun with my parents.
I put in three stints at the Fessenden School, a forty-one-acre campus in West Newton ten miles west of Boston, in the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and then again in the fall of 1944. I distinguished myself during my first tour at Fessenden by getting paddled fifteen times. I've always joked that my father must have been the inspiration for Federal Express. When the headmaster wrote the parents at the beginning of the year to ask whether to paddle their sons or dock them days from their vacation if they misbehaved, my father's approval to have me paddled seemed to arrive by 10:30 the next morning. I had no resentment about being paddled. It was delivered by Mr. Giles, an elderly instructor who'd lost a leg in the First World War, and although it stung immediately, it didn't hurt so much after a few minutes. Anyway, I deserved it every time. Walking on the roof, for instance, with some of my friends, with water bombs--water inside the fold of a little paper--and dropping them three stories down onto members of the faculty. Not a wise thing to do. Or we would put strips of tape between our cubicles to trip the night watchman and make him fall down. That was not a good thing to do either. These boyhood pranks, more than anything else, were my way of trying to fit in and be one of the guys.
My most incredible escapade was with two brothers who went on to distinguished careers, and they are still good friends of mine. But at Fessenden they had a sort of an outlaw streak. We all did.
One night we thought it would be a good idea to lower one of them down on a rope from the roof to the faculty room window, so the boy could climb through, locate the student files, and find out our grades. I thought that was a good idea myself. So we lowered one of the boys down. Just as he got inside, it began to rain. One of the teachers was trapped outdoors and got rained on. He headed for the faculty room to get his umbrella. The boy heard footsteps and scampered into the closet. The teacher opened the closet door to get his umbrella, and there he was. That was nearly the end for the brothers. They came within a whisker of getting expelled. Luckily for Fessenden, they were allowed to stay and graduate. The last I heard, the brothers had contributed a boatload to the school.
Far from these hijinks in Massachusetts, the war that Dad had tried to keep at bay from his country and his children exploded onto American territory on December 7, 1941. World War II proceeded to draw several of Joseph Kennedy's "hostages to fortune" into its maw.
Joe was the first. He earned his navy aviator wings in May 1942 at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. My father was on hand to pin them on him.
Jack followed our brother a few weeks later. He had faced numerous health challenges growing up, and he was concerned that he wouldn't be allowed into the military. And in fact he had failed the army physical, mostly because of his torturously bad back.
But he would not give up. He threw himself into a rigorous exercise program. Then he prevailed on Dad to help get him in. After some behind-the-scenes prodding by Dad's friend and former naval attache in London, Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk, Jack passed a second physical and joined the navy as an ensign two months before Pearl Harbor. He served in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he socialized with Kick and her friends. In January 1942 he was sent to a South Carolina ONI office, then spent some time recuperating from illnesses in naval hospitals before reporting to the midshipman's school in Chicago in July.
Kick soon put aside the glittering Washington life that suited her so naturally. In July 1943 she resigned her newspaper position and returned to a now devastated London, where she was handed a gas mask and took up the grimy dema
nds of volunteer work for the American Red Cross.
Bobby was chafing to enter the service as soon as he came of age. He followed the war's news intently in that summer of 1941. He would turn seventeen in November of the following year and become eligible to enroll in a training program for the navy.
The summers at the Cape changed as the war went on, with so many of my brothers and sisters absent, and sometimes one or the other of my parents as well. I sailed alone and with Joey Gargan, exhilarated by the freedom and sense of power in my little sloop, at the safe fringes of an ocean where U-boats preyed upon convoys of ships.
The war reached its midpoint in 1943, and that was the moment when Jack was nearly killed and emerged a hero.
Jack got himself assigned to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific theater and arrived as the twenty-six-year-old commander of a patrol torpedo boat, an extremely dangerous assignment that he'd virtually demanded. PTs were small, often badly built, lightly armed craft deployed to prowl combat-zone waters at night in search of Japanese destroyers and cruisers. Jack's boat was numbered 109.
On August 2, as part of a squad of fifteen such craft sent to intercept a Japanese convoy off the island of New Georgia, PT 109 was rammed by an enemy destroyer and sliced in half. Two of the thirteen-man crew were killed. My brother exhorted the survivors to swim toward a flyspeck island, personally towing the badly burned engineer for five hours by clamping the man's lifeboat straps in his mouth. Jack then swam back out into the ocean to try and signal a passing boat, though he'd been without sleep for a day and a half. Unsuccessful, he swam back to his men half unconscious. The ordeal continued for a week, with Jack directing swims to larger islands. The men went days without water. The navy assumed that all of them had been killed, and in fact held a funeral service for them on the small island of Tulagi a few days after the encounter. On August 9, the party made contact with a New Zealanders' camp on Cross Island via a message Jack had scraped into a coconut shell. (That coconut is now in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.) The message made it to an American base, which sent a PT to rescue the men.
I didn't even know my brother was lost and presumed dead until I learned he had been found. Along with my sister and some friends, I rode my bicycle over to the News Shop in Hyannis Port one balmy August night to get the papers for our parents. We stared at the big headlines that confronted us, along with a drawing of a PT boat. We raced home, yelling that our brother was a hero. Dad heard us out, and then told us he had been notified several days earlier that Jack was missing. He'd remained hopeful, he said, and had decided not to worry us with the news.
On furlough the following year, Jack playfully let me share the aura of his "hero" image--which he himself never took seriously. Tanned and rawboned and flashing his great smile, he showed up at the family residence in Palm Beach with his service buddy Paul "Red" Fay Jr. When I ventured inside his room to awaken him on that first morning, he hugged me, then dug some war souvenirs out of his duffel bag and gave them to me: native swords and clubs from the South Pacific.
Then he appointed me courier in a make-believe PT mission. He ordered me to awaken "Red" Fay, down the hall, with the message, "This is PT 109 to Captain Fay, over." I gladly ran off. Red sent me back to Jack's room with, "Romeo Echo Delta A-okay. What is our first mission this morning?" This went on for a while, and the jargon got a little too military for me to understand--but those two found it a great joke. And I was in the clouds.
Better still, Jack escorted me on board an actual PT boat. He was stationed at a shakedown center in Miami Beach, and before sunrise one morning he rousted me out of bed to come along with him. I couldn't believe it. I was barely twelve years old, and my hero brother was going to take me aboard a ship with him. What I didn't know at the time was that civilians, especially little kid civilians like me, weren't really supposed to be aboard navy vessels and certainly weren't supposed to go out to sea on them. But my brother knew how much it would mean to me and all the crew enjoyed being co-conspirators in our adventure.
As we boarded the boat and headed for open water, I had a huge smile plastered across my face until I got drenched by a torpedo-like squirt of tobacco juice from the mouth of the biggest sailor I'd ever seen. It splattered my shirt and hands. The crew loved it, and Jack showed me no mercy whatsoever. After I got over the initial shock, I thought it was pretty funny too. I prowled the coastal waters for a couple of hours that day with my brother and his crew, and I've treasured the memory my entire life.
Jack's back problems prevented him from returning to active duty, but while in a naval hospital, he was awarded four more medals. He was released in October 1944.
* * *
If my brother gave me an imaginative glimpse into World War II that year, another colorful relative whisked me back into the brass-band exuberance of my Boston Irish political roots.
Fessenden was near enough to the city that on autumn Sundays I could board a train on the Boston & Albany Railroad line in West Newton and roll along the few short miles to South Station in the heart of town. From there I would walk up Beacon Hill to the old Bellevue Hotel. Standing as it did next to the State House with its golden dome, the Bellevue is properly remembered as "a political Grand Central Station." I would wait in the lobby until I was summoned up to the suite of the stationmaster, one of Boston's greatest politicians: my maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald. Honey Fitz.
He was eighty then. He was the son of an Irish immigrant family who made it to the top: a Massachusetts state senator from 1892 to 1894, a U.S. representative (1895-1901), and twice mayor of Boston (1906-08 and 1910-14). But those offices hardly begin to describe how much Grampa meant to Boston, and vice versa.
Pay a visit sometime to Franklin Park Zoo, that wonderful seventyacre site down in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. It's one of the oldest zoos in the hemisphere now, built in 1913. That zoo was developed by Grampa.
He played a key part in the shaping of Fenway Park, which was finished in 1912. This was back in the glory years when the Red Sox won six pennants and five World Series from 1903 through 1918. Honey Fitz was right in the middle of it all--a passionate Red Sox fan. He formed the team's first pep club, the Royal Rooters, along with his pal Mike "Nuf Ced" McGreevey, a bartender with a walrus mustache. Every Opening Day, the two of them would put on their silk top hats and cutaway coats, hoist a few frothy pints at the bar, light up their cigars, and then go strutting at the head of a parade through the city to the ballpark, waving their red umbrellas and belting out songs, while a brass band behind them oom-pa-pa'd. Grampa was short and stout, and he had a big, sweet tenor voice. If things were going badly for the Sox, either Grampa or "Nuf Ced" was likely to begin bawling from the stands the words to the sentimental waltz "Tessie," which became the team's unlikely lucky song:
Tessie, you make me feel so badly,
Why don't you turn around?
Tessie, you know I love you madly,
Babe, my heart weighs about a pound.
Don't blame me if I ever doubt you,
You know I couldn't live without you.
Tessie, you are the only, only, only.
"Tessie" may sound a little quaint to today's ears, but Grampa's rendition of it was good enough to cause the great Pittsburgh third baseman Honus Wagner to commit three errors in one inning during a World Series game.
Honey Fitz provided and lit the first civic Christmas tree in the United States, on Boston Common, back in 1912. New Yorkers sometimes like to claim credit for the first public tree, in Madison Square Garden, but an expert researcher named Caroline Kennedy did some digging and figured out that Grampa's tree went up fully thirty minutes before the one in New York.
He was a life force, and that force fueled the life of the city. Many of his ideas came from his travels in European countries. He'd take note of the dynamic civic features in all the European capitals, and he'd say, "There's no reason that Boston can't have these, just like these other great cities!" So he adapted them t
o Boston. And then his innovations were adapted in other cities across the country.
Grampa loved people. And the people he came in contact with felt his warmth and returned it. I think Grampa wished he could get to know every single person in town.
There's no question that I inherited this joy of people from him. I inherited the whole way I approach politics. Being in a crowd, looking into new faces, shaking hands, laughing, swapping stories, singing some of the old songs--I love it all.
Still, Honey Fitz's love of people exceeded anything I've ever seen. He used to board the passenger train at North Station and ride it up the Atlantic coast to Old Orchard Beach in Maine, a distance of about a hundred miles. The trip would take two hours and ten minutes. Once there, he'd board the next train back to Boston. These trains left at intervals of about an hour in those days, and Honey Fitz would take them all, at intervals of about five days. He'd stagger his departures and returns so that each time he would catch a different crowd of commuters. And what would he do on those journeys? Why, he'd walk up and down the aisles of the passenger cars the whole time, tipping his hat and shaking the hands of the people on board. Grampa respected working people, and it's largely because of him that my brothers and I respected and fought for them as well. Grampa would lean down and start chatting with some fellow puffing a stogie and squinting at the racing form, learn his name and opinions, and by the time the train pulled into Old Orchard Beach, Honey Fitz would have fifty or seventy-five new friends. And then he'd get on the train heading back, with a new group of strangers, and do it all over again.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 8