by David Nasaw
Though it was Rose who made the decisions as to where the younger children went to school, Kennedy was becoming more active as a parent now that he was home from London and unemployed. When Rose left for her extended tour of Latin America, Kennedy became not only “housekeeper,” as he wrote Hearst, but was put in charge of finding a companion to accompany Rosemary to Wyonegonic Camps in Denmark, Maine, that summer. He monitored Teddy’s schooling, arranged for Pat to “take the [Wellesley] entrance examinations” now that she was about to graduate from the Sacred Heart Convent in the Bronx, and worked with his contacts in the military to secure the right placements for his boys, who had decided to enlist instead of waiting to be drafted.6
Joe Jr., athletic, healthy, and now in his second year at Harvard Law School, was going to have no trouble getting a plum assignment in whatever branch or unit he chose, but Jack, almost grotesquely underweight and with a slew of unresolved health problems, needed all the help his father could give him. That spring of 1941, Kennedy wrote George McDonald at the “Office of the Chief of the Air Corps” on Jack’s behalf. An army air corps unit was being organized at Harvard, and Kennedy wondered whether Jack should apply in Boston, from Palm Beach (where he was now residing), or from California, where he had registered for the draft. “To be perfectly honest with you I am more confused as to what my two sons are going to do than I have ever been on any job I have ever tackled in my life. Joe is planning on entering the Air Corps, but if Jack goes into the Army Air Corps, I understand that Joe is entering the Naval branch of the service. I hope they know what they’re doing because I am frank to say that I don’t. I get dizzier and dizzier.”7
In June 1941, after his second year at law school, Joe Jr. enlisted in a special unit of the U.S. Naval Air Corps that was being organized at Harvard. He would spend his summer training at Squantum, a stone’s throw from the Fore River shipbuilding plant where his father had done his service in the Great War.
Jack, on returning from Latin America, went to work as an intern in the East Boston bank his grandfather had founded and in which his father had served as president. Kennedy, knowing how anxious his second son was to follow his brother into the military and how impossible it would be for him to pass his physical, got in touch with Captain Alan Kirk, whom he had met in London. Kirk pulled whatever strings he had to and arranged for Jack to take and pass his physical in Boston in early August. Jack then filled in some questionnaires, sat for an interview, received his security clearance, and was commissioned an officer in the navy and ordered to report in the fall to Captain Kirk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington. For the time being, both Kennedy boys were where they wanted to be: in uniform in Uncle Sam’s peacetime military.
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With the children scattered across the country, Rose traveling, and Kennedy in Palm Beach, there was no need to hold on to the Bronxville mansion. Kennedy had put it on the market while he was in London and kept it there awaiting a reasonable offer. He certainly didn’t need the money from the sale. Whatever happened, he was confident that the family trust funds would keep growing and the cash flow from Somerset Importers remain large enough to fund the family’s living expenses. The British needed dollars and would continue to export Scotch to ever-thirsty Americans. To protect himself against the unlikely possibility that the Germans might close down transatlantic trade, Kennedy had, while still in London, pulled all the strings he could to secure precious cargo space for his Scotch. He now had enough of it stockpiled in American warehouses to last the war.8
He had feared that war in Europe would further depress the American economy, but the opposite seemed to have been the case. As government funds for military spending poured into the industrial sector, the domestic economy showed signs of heating up. The most likely short-term effect would be inflation, but a shrewd investor such as Kennedy could adjust for that.
He was going to play it safe from now on. The world economy remained too shaky, the equity markets too volatile, and the rules he had written and enforced at the SEC too restrictive for him to return to the trading patterns that had served him so well in the 1920s. Whatever spare capital he had would go into real estate and oil, the soundest of investments in an inflationary economy. When Honey Fitz asked him to take a position in Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, a fairly safe stock, Kennedy turned him down. “It probably is all that you say that it is, but I have made up my mind that my day of buying securities is over and it looks like I will have to live on my capital until I pass out of the picture.” “I don’t feel much like putting any capital into anything at this time,” he wrote a Boston associate who had inquired about his interest in buying the Boston Post. “I think if I do any work at all, I will furnish my brain as my capital from now on.”9
He was, he wrote his friends, tongue only partly in cheek, “developing my career as a first-class bum” in Palm Beach, watching “the idle rich enjoy their last fling” in Hot Springs, and making “arrangements to join the ‘Fishermen’s Union’” in Hyannis Port.10
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The spring of 1941 had been a dreadful one for the British. They had done well against the Italians in Greece but were no match for the Germans, who had invaded Yugoslavia and then cut through Greece and Crete. The same scenario played out in North Africa, where the British had held their own against Italian troops but were pushed onto the defensive with the arrival of General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps. In the Atlantic, they were losing more shipping to German U-boats and battle cruisers than they could replace. The question asked on both sides of the Atlantic was where would Hitler strike next. Would he move his troops from Greece and the Balkans into Turkey, solidify his control of the Mediterranean, and move on to conquer the Middle East and take over the Suez Canal? Or would he prepare for a 1941 invasion of Great Britain?
In late spring, Kennedy accepted invitations to give commencement addresses and receive honorary degrees at Oglethorpe University and Notre Dame. While he reemphasized his hatred for the Nazis, “their philosophy, their silly racism and their nightmare of world domination,” he repeated in his Oglethorpe speech what he had said in his January radio address, that it was “nonsense to say that an Axis victory spells ruin for us.” Ignoring the consequences for European Jews or, in fact, for any of the peoples or nations that were or might be brought under Nazi rule should the British lose the war, he argued that whatever happened across the ocean, the United States would survive and endure. “From 90 to 95% of our trade is internal. We depend less on foreign markets than any great nation. If worse came to worst, we could gear ourselves to an intelligent self-contained national economy and still enjoy a fair degree of prosperity.” That such a reconfiguration in the direction of a “self-contained national economy” would entail increased centralization of decision making in Washington and an end to free market capitalism, as he had earlier predicted, no longer appeared to bother him.11
On May 27, three days after Kennedy’s Oglethorpe speech, the president delivered his first radio address since the “Arsenal of Democracy” talk five months earlier. Directly contradicting everything Kennedy had said about the United States surviving a totalitarian victory in Europe, Roosevelt described in detail the catastrophic consequences that would follow. Quislings would arise to destroy American democracy and freedom from the inside. “The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world.” Tariff walls would descend against American goods. “The whole fabric of working life as we know it . . . could be mangled and crippled. . . . Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened.” After cataloging the dangers facing America should Great Britain be conquered, Roosevelt “issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.” What he didn’t do was even hint that the United States might consider going to war to save the British from defeat.12
> On the Sunday following the president’s speech, Kennedy delivered his commencement address at Notre Dame. He began by acknowledging the president’s proclamation of an unlimited emergency, one that, he told his audience, demanded “unlimited loyalty” from all Americans. The rest of the speech was stuffed with emptied-out, high-toned platitudes that sounded as if they had been lifted directly from papal encyclicals. The president having declared that America was not going to war, there was no necessity for Kennedy to say anything more, especially at Notre Dame, where political speeches were frowned upon.13
Three weeks later, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The danger of British defeat had been deterred, at least until the Germans could turn west again.
Ten days after the invasion, Herbert Hoover invited Kennedy to join former governor Alf Landon of Kansas, President Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, and “some ten or fifteen men . . . outside of the Congress and outside of the America First group” in putting his name to an anti-intervention statement. Kennedy declined. When he was asked a second time, he declined again. “As I have said to you before I much prefer to go my way alone. I can then take my position on any subject and at any time as the occasion demands without consultation with anyone. I am well aware of the magnificent work you have done to keep us out of war. . . . Nevertheless I feel so strongly about pursuing my course alone that I feel that I would like to stick to this decision.”14
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He visited Washington that fall to see Jack, who was working for naval intelligence, and Kick, whom he had gotten a job at the Washington Times-Herald as secretary to associate editor Frank Waldrop. Kick enjoyed the work, the social life in the nation’s capital, and the opportunity to spend time with her brother, but what she wanted more than anything else was to return to London and her friends there, especially Billy Hartington. In October 1941, she wrote her father with a plan she had worked out with Carmel Offie, Bullitt’s former assistant in France and Kennedy’s friend. Offie would ask Tony Biddle, whom Roosevelt had dispatched to London as ambassador to the European governments in exile, “to give me a passport. . . . Tony will do anything for him. The only thing that remains is your consent. . . . I have a lot of great friends that I should really like to see and even if the British feel a little embittered about your opinion in the present struggle I don’t think any real friends such as I have would let that bother them. And even if it does as Offie says ‘the hell with them.’” She knew bombs were still falling in London but figured her chance of being hit by one was about the same as her getting hit by a car in Washington. Two weeks later, not having been given the go-ahead, she wrote her father again. “I am so anxious to go back that I can hardly sit still. I received a letter from Andrew and Debo [Billy’s brother and his wife, Deborah, the future Duchess of Devonshire] 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.”15
Kick never did get to London that fall. It would be another year and a half before she was able to return to London and to Billy Hartington.
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The continuing war in Europe made it impossible for Rosemary as well to return to England and Mother Isabel’s Convent of the Assumption. She was marooned at St. Gertrude’s and terribly discontent there. “In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose wrote in her memoirs, “disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave way increasingly to tension and irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also there were convulsive episodes.”16
In July 1941, Kennedy contacted Monsignor Casey at St. Patrick’s in New York with a list of convents, hoping that the monsignor would “institute inquiries through the channels we talked about.” The monsignor failed to find an alternative institution, and Rosemary was enrolled at St. Gertrude’s for a second year. Kennedy kept in touch with her by telephone and mail.
“Well, how is my old darling today?” he wrote on October 10, 1941. “I just got an idea I thought you might think about. Do you think Dr. Moore and the Nuns would like to have a picture show sometime this fall and also do you think the children would like it? If they would, what kind of a picture do you think they’d like. . . . Incidentally, Mother and I will be down there in a couple of weeks or so and Eddie and Mary [Moore] are coming down and they were thinking perhaps that they might take you for a trip up to Philadelphia to look the situation [and a possible place for her to live] over up there.” In late October, Kennedy asked Father John Cavanaugh, his friend and now a vice president at Notre Dame, for tickets to the November 8 Notre Dame–Navy game at Municipal Park in Baltimore for himself and his “three children in Washington,” Jack, Kick, and Rosemary.17
The change in Rosemary’s behavior, which Rose had noticed on her daughter’s return from Europe, got worse that fall, not better. At twenty-three, Rosemary was frustrated, angry, and disturbed at being confined at St. Gertrude’s. Father Moore, worried about her welfare and the effect of her behavior on others at St. Gertrude’s, brought in a Miss Slavin to assist. “I trust,” he reported to Kennedy, “that she will be able to help a great deal.” He then asked Kennedy for a loan or gift of $25,000 for a new building.18
The problem at St. Gertrude’s was much the same, if more aggravated than it had been at the Residence School in Manhattan. These schools were not shuttered cloisters with closed gates. St. Gertrude’s was located in the heart of Washington. There was no way short of locking her in at night to keep Rosemary from wandering the streets. “She was a beautiful girl,” remembered her cousin Ann Gargan, who had spent most summers and vacations with the Kennedys since 1936. The thought that she was incapable of making the proper judgments or protecting herself from strangers was simply “horrifying.” “Many nights,” Ann Gargan told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “the school would call to say she was missing, only to find her out walking around the streets at 2 A.M. Can you imagine what it must have been like to know your daughter was walking the streets in the darkness of the night, the perfect prey for an unsuspecting male?”19
Her father, Jean Kennedy Smith recalled, believed that Rosemary’s irritability, which her teachers and tutors had been commenting on for years now, might have had something to do with her “mind.” Her mother also was beginning to believe, as she put it in her memoirs, that “there were other factors at work besides retardation. A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.”20
As he did whenever there was a medical problem to be diagnosed and solved, Kennedy consulted the leading practitioners. He probably did so alone, though Rose, in her memoirs, claimed that she took part. The children’s medical problems had always been his responsibility, not his wife’s. In the case of their daughter Rosemary, there was an additional reason he may have proceeded to seek a medical solution without involving his wife. As historian Janice Brockley has written, mental health professionals in midcentury “urged parents to be ‘realistic’ about their disabled children” and believed that in the final analysis, only fathers had the capacity to do so. “The job of maintaining objectivity was often given to fathers, who supposedly had the skills, emotional detachment, and rational judgment that mothers lacked. Mothers were the caregivers, however flawed; fathers were the ultimate decision makers about major issues such as institutionalization. . . . Fathers were often expected to take the burden of decision making from their wives.”21
This was precisely what Kennedy did. At some point in the late fall of 1941, he met with Dr. Walter Freeman, t
he chair of the Department of Neurology at George Washington University Medical School, and perhaps with his colleague James Watts, a Yale-trained neurosurgeon. Freeman and Watts had five years earlier performed their first psychosurgery at George Washington University, borrowing from the techniques of and with instruments invented by a Portuguese doctor, Egas Moniz, who in 1949 would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “his invention of a surgical treatment for mental illness.”22
By 1941, Freeman and Watts had performed hundreds of lobotomies. The operation was relatively simple. A tubelike surgical instrument with a sharp blade was inserted into the frontal lobe of the brain through two entry holes at the top of the skull and then used to cut away brain tissue. The intent was to sever the connections between the frontal lobes, the cognitive regions of the brain, and the thalamus, the emotional center, the hypothesis being that after the operation, lobotomized patients would no longer experience emotional distress, depression, anxiety, or tension. The operation was controversial and not indicated for patients with mental retardation. Freeman, a master salesman who had written and lectured widely on the procedure, had by 1941 succeeded in convincing large numbers of well-placed medical experts that it was relatively harmless, with few side effects, and of great benefit to depressed and agitated patients, especially women. “Between 1937 and the end of World War II,” medical historian Jack D. Pressman had written, “a consensus emerged among many American physicians that psychosurgery was a treatment that indeed offered certain benefit.”23
Because Joseph P. Kennedy never wrote or talked about his communications with Dr. Freeman, we can only speculate what he asked or what the doctor told him. It is likely that Freeman repeated what he had said to others in consultations, that the operation, if successful—and there was no reason to believe it would not be—would treat Rosemary’s agitated depression and reduce, if not eliminate, the tantrums, irritation, and violence. In the book on psychosurgery he published in 1941, Freeman claimed that follow-up data on the operations he had performed with Watts demonstrated that “63% of their patients had improved, 23 percent had not changed, and 14 percent were in poorer condition.” He no doubt shared these results with Kennedy.24