The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

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  His pessimism was unshakable—though it is not clear he ever tried to shake it. He worried that the president and his cabinet were not up to mobilizing to fight effectively on two fronts, that the war would go on forever, that the economy would be devastated, that prosperity would never return. Clare Boothe Luce cautioned him not to infect his children, Jack especially, with his overpowering sense that their future was doomed. “It alarms him . . . and dispirits him, and I do think that you . . . and I have no right to add the burden of doubt to the other burdens that he, and a million like him, must carry from here out.” Kennedy trusted Clare’s judgment and was disturbed enough by her warning to forward her letter to Jack. “This is Clare’s letter. After you’ve read it, send it back because I’d like to keep it for my files. Heaven knows, I don’t want any pessimism of mine to have any effect on you, but I don’t know how to tell you what I think unless I tell you what I think.”18

  To keep himself occupied for at least part of the spring and summer of 1942 and to reestablish credibility as a political force in Massachusetts, he got behind a quixotic effort to send his father-in-law to Washington. “We are considering Grandpa going into the fight for the Senate,” he wrote Joe Jr. on July 6, 1942. “Whether he’ll go or not we don’t know, but at least we’ll have some fun.” A victory for Honey Fitz in the primary, whether or not he beat Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in the general election, would weaken the hold of the Roosevelt camp in the state, strengthen the Fitzgerald-Kennedy power base, and pave the way for a Kennedy to run for the Senate when the seventy-nine-year-old Honey Fitz stepped aside.19

  From Hyannis Port and Boston, Kennedy lined up support for “Grandpa,” solicited the endorsement of the local Hearst papers, reviewed campaign literature, and contributed money. It was not easy to run a seventy-nine-year-old who had been out of office for more than two decades against a Democratic Party primary opponent who had been endorsed by every elected official in the state, and every newspaper save those owned by Hearst. Fortunately, there were scandals brewing that Kennedy hoped might boost his father-in-law’s candidacy. The Republicans, Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. in mid-July, had begun a whispering campaign against Joseph Casey, Honey Fitz’s primary opponent, “on the ground that he married a Protestant and had a baby five months after his marriage. Politics is a great game! You better be sure to marry yourself a nice Irish Catholic girl,” Kennedy warned his son, knowing full well that he was dating a Protestant girl in Florida, where he was stationed. To hammer the lesson home, Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. again three weeks later. “One thing that impresses me very much that I pass on to you is that there is a great deal of criticism by the Catholic women that Casey married a Protestant. You wouldn’t think this was important but it definitely is, and I am thoroughly convinced that an Irish Catholic with a name like yours and with your record, married to an Irish Catholic girl, would be a pushover in this State for a political office. They just wouldn’t have anything to fight about. It seems like a silly thing, but I can’t impress it on you too strongly.”20

  To no great surprise, Honey Fitz was defeated in the primary. Joe Jr. sent his condolences from Florida, adding that “maybe I’ll get a shot at Casey, when this thing is over.” In one of her round-robin letters to the children, Rose wrote that Jack, acknowledging his brother’s ambition, had joked that he thought “it would be good for Joe’s political career if he died for the grand old flag, although I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”21

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  Joe Jr. was in the last phase of what he hoped would be his final training before combat. His father had advised him that spring to make out his will. “You still have quite a substantial amount of cash due you out of the Trust, so your will has to be carefully drawn. If I can help you with any suggestions, let me know.”22

  Jack had graduated from naval training school in Chicago and, with his father’s help, had been accepted into the newly organized and elite PT (patrol torpedo) boat school at Melville, Rhode Island. Though Kennedy had helped his son get the assignment at Melville, he was aghast at the thought of Jack spending the war on tiny boats at sea.

  Jack’s health problems had grown steadily worse since 1940. Now, in addition to a chronically bad stomach, he was afflicted with a chronically bad back. As with his other ailments, his back problems resisted diagnosis. The doctors he had visited in the spring of 1940 suggested back surgery, but he had resisted. By the fall of 1942, the pain had become so debilitating that he could no longer endure it. “What he wants to do,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. on October 1, 1942, “is to be operated on and then have me fix it so he can go back in that service when he gets better. This will require considerable manipulation and I have given up the idea of going to California with mother to see if I can be of any help to him.”23

  Rose was on her way to Palo Alto and Stanford to live, eat, and go to class with Eunice, who she feared was too unhealthy and far too skinny to be on her own. Not for the first time, Kennedy assured his wife that he had everything under control and she could stay away as long as she pleased. “Don’t go bothering your head about anything around here,” he wrote her in California. “Everything is moving along and it is certainly no bother for me. I’m not giving it your thorough handling, but we’ll be all right.”24

  Jean and Pat were in Philadelphia, Jean at Eden Hall, a Sacred Heart Convent school, Pat at Rosemont College just eleven miles from the city center. Teddy and Bobby were outside Boston starting over at new schools, Ted in West Newton at Fessenden, Bobby at Milton Academy, where he had been moved because his father worried that without better grades from an established prep school he would never get into Harvard.

  In mid-October, Kennedy left Hyannis Port and moved into his hotel suite at the Waldorf Towers. Almost every weekend he entertained another contingent of children. “I have had a talk with Pat about Stanford,” he wrote his wife, “and she really doesn’t want to go. I have had her up here practically every weekend since I have been here and I have had lots of talks with her. I still find a great deal of difficulty in getting close to her, and yet she seems to be perfectly sweet and nice about everything. . . . Of course, I thoroughly understand our talks that children of eighteen don’t know what is good for themselves, but I don’t think you could force her to go out there and get any results at all.”25

  He traveled to Beacon, New York, just after election day to visit Rosemary at Craig House. She was, he wrote Rose, “getting along very nicely” and looked well. He continued on to Washington, where he saw Kick and “all the important people” in town, including Lord Halifax, now British ambassador to Washington. After he reported to Halifax that he was thinking “of making a speech which . . . might be expected to have considerable influence with such sections as Roman Catholics, Irish, and some others,” Halifax confided in his diary that he didn’t “fancy Joe Kennedy has as much influence as he thinks.” Kennedy, perhaps recognizing as much, never drafted or gave the speech.26

  From Washington, it was off to Boston “to see Teddy play football. He was a riot, as usual,” he wrote Rose in California. “Mr. Fessenden [the founder and headmaster of Teddy’s new school] arranged a meeting in a room with all of his teachers . . . and I should think that the consensus of opinion was that he had a fine head, is getting along much better with boys than he did when he first started, that he goes off half-cocked when anybody asks any questions and he gives them an answer even though most times it is wrong. . . . I am convinced, however, that the school is good for him.”27

  He also visited Bobby at Milton Academy. Understandably worried about starting over at a new school and making new friends, Bobby had been advised by Jack “to sort of sit back and let the boys come to you rather than for you to go to the boys.” Kennedy wrote Bobby that he thought Jack’s advice “a big mistake. . . . I think as a matter of general policy, it is much better to be sociable with everyone and make your intimate friends after yo
u have appraised their various values, but for goodness sake don’t stand off. Try to cultivate as many people as you can and know as many people as you can. That’s all life is—whether it’s in business or a profession or anything. . . . You have a lot on the ball and you have a personality that will make friends, so by all means hop in there and meet everybody, be pleasant to everyone, and don’t stand off. That’s much more likely to make a bad impression. Go to games with your friends in the school, arrange to take some to luncheon when you go out to lunch, etc., etc. But for the next two years that’s probably going to be your life and you might as well have as many friends as you can.”28

  His major concern was that Bobby, perhaps the most independent-minded of his sons, was hell-bent on getting out of school as soon as he possibly could and following his brothers into the military. Kennedy thought this a dreadful idea, but because he knew his son was set on it, he made inquiries in Washington about getting Bobby into officer candidate school when he graduated from Milton Academy in the spring.

  While at Milton, he met with the headmaster and told him of Bobby’s plans. It was decided to change “Bobby over from chemistry to physics because that will help him in the Army.” After meeting with the headmaster, Kennedy “went to Harvard and had a talk with the Dean of Admissions about Bobby’s position. . . . He’ll be eighteen next November and will not have finished Milton, and if he has to go in the Army then he will be between the devil and the deep blue sea—he will not have graduated from his secondary school and he will not be entered at college. However,” he wrote Rose, “I think I got an agreement with the Dean out there that if Bobby does good work this year they will give him an Aptitude Test and if he is well recommended by Milton, I think I may be able to get him admitted to Harvard. At any rate, I think I made real developments in this matter.”29

  The ironies were overwhelming. Kennedy had done everything he possibly could to prevent this war. Now he was doing everything he possibly could to assist and prepare his three sons to fight in it. “Young Jack has gone to the Motor Torpedo Division and that is causing his mother and me plenty of anxiety,” he wrote Father Maurice Sheehy, Joe Jr.’s chaplain in Florida. “And now with Bobby going next, he is begging and pleading to be permitted to enlist so that he can get into the Navy Aviation. I suppose that I should be proud that my sons should pick the most hazardous branches of the service in this war and, of course, there is pride in my heart but quite a measure of grief in my mind.”30

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  On December 7, 1942, Bobby Kennedy, who had already developed a wit as mordant as that of any of his brothers or sisters, casually informed his mother that “Dad just phoned from N.Y. and said he was going down to Washington with Jack to see the president tomorrow which sounds pretty exciting for the president, but I suppose there are other almost as exciting things happening in his life now.” Aside from idle chatter and a few encouraging words, Roosevelt had nothing to offer Kennedy. Kennedy reminded the president that he “hadn’t appointed a Catholic to any important post since election 1940. He seemed stunned at this, actually, and said ‘I must have,’” but the only name he could come up with was historian Carlton Hayes, whom he had made his ambassador to Spain. “He then paused and said nobody had brought that to his attention ever before and he would look into it.”31

  In mid-January 1943, James Byrnes, who had left the Supreme Court in October to accept the directorship of the newly created Office of Economic Stabilization, called Palm Beach with yet another job offer for Kennedy, “to take charge of the small business situation.” Kennedy pointed out that the job made no sense, as every small business in the country had a different set of problems and there was no way of designing one policy to assist them all. As he later wrote his friend and lawyer in Boston, Bart Brickley, “Jimmie acted rather shamefaced about offering me this job, and although he argued with me for forty-five minutes . . . he said he understood my position and would tell the President that I didn’t think I could get him the results he wanted. . . . I told Jimmie that he had a hell of a gall to offer me this stinking job. . . . Also, that there were countless other positions, and although they were very difficult, they offered one an opportunity for getting results. I told him I wanted a job to do, not to just have a number put on my back. I have stayed out this long, so I might just as hold out now for something better or get nothing at all.” Byrnes, who had been one of Kennedy’s few remaining friends and supporters in Washington, protested but got nowhere.32

  Two months later, after yet another call and another job offer, this one from Sidney Weinberg, the assistant to Donald Nelson, director of the War Production Board, Kennedy informed the president that he was not only turning down the job, but was “withdrawing myself from consideration of any position from now on. . . . I’ve made up my mind that as long as I stay here I become more critical of the Administration and I don’t know what percentage of it is instinctive and what part of it is just criticism and so for that reason I think I’ll go to South America . . . stay there for a couple of months and see what that will do to my viewpoint.” The president thought that was a good idea, then chattered on until it was time for his next appointment.33

  Later that spring, at a meeting in New York City with his friend Lord Beaverbrook, Kennedy insisted that he was not only out of government for good, but had no intention of playing any role in the 1944 elections. When Beaverbrook suggested that he might consider running “for an elective office,” Kennedy responded directly and emphatically that he had “no desire to return to public life. The political career of my two sons, if that is what they want to follow, is the only concern of mine now. . . . I could get all the thrills and excitement watching the careers of my children. I do not have to have it centered on me anymore, I have had mine.”34

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  Jack was the first to leave the country. On completing PT boat school, he was assigned to a noncombat training squadron in Jacksonville, Florida. He and his friends considered himself so “shafted” by the stateside noncombat assignment that from this point on, he would be known among his PT boat buddies as “Shafty,” to the horror of his mother, who asked pointedly not to be told what it stood for. Devastated at the thought he might never get to see combat, Jack got in touch with his grandfather Honey Fitz, who was on good terms with Massachusetts senator David Walsh, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh arranged for Jack’s transfer. In February 1943, he left Florida for San Francisco. In early March, he boarded a troopship for the New Hebrides, en route to Tulagi, a small island in the Solomons. His father sent his “Amphogel [antacid] Tablets” to San Francisco, hoping they’d be forwarded across the Pacific.35

  The next to depart was Kick, twenty-three, who intended to follow her big brothers into public service. She enlisted in the Red Cross and requested assignment to one of the many canteens for American servicemen in Great Britain, Australia, and North Africa. Given her and her father’s connections, she hoped to be assigned to London to be with Billy Hartington, who had long since broken off his engagement. Lord Halifax, on hearing from Kennedy that Kick was “going over to England with the Red Cross,” noted in his diary that he imagined “this will not give any particular pleasure to Eddy Devonshire,” Billy’s father.36

  Kennedy would have preferred to have his daughter remain in Washington, but as with the boys, once she had made up her mind to leave, he supported her decision, though not without warning her of what she might encounter.

  “Don’t get too upset if you hear the British talking about your Dad,” he wrote her as soon as he received the telegram that she had landed safely in London. “After all, the only crime I can be accused of is that I was pro-American instead of pro-English. I don’t blame them for being mad at me for not wanting America to go into the war to help them out, but that wasn’t my job, any more than I could be critical of Churchill for having such a terrific influence in our affairs. I resent him as an American, but I don’t blame him
as an Englishman. But oftentimes the British aren’t that tolerant. I don’t care what they say, so don’t you let it bother you. You have your own life to live and you needn’t answer any of my problems, responsibilities or difficulties—so just smile and say ‘Fight with him; he can take care of himself.’ After all, no one has been more sympathetic to the British cause than you, so you shouldn’t have to take any of the criticism, but I’m just saying this to you so that you’ll be prepared for it. I don’t mind it; don’t you.”37

  When Kick had last been in London, the Kennedys had been treated as a mixture of American royalty and Hollywood celebrity, loved, admired, obsessed over. A great deal had happened since then. “Everyone is very surprised & I do mean surprised to see me,” she wrote Jack on arriving in London. There was “much more anti-Kennedy feeling than I imagined and I am determined to get my stories straight as I think I’ll get it on all sides.” Fortunately, the British she met were too polite to say anything about her father. “No one with the exception of Mr. [Aneurin] Bevan, [Independent Labour] MP from Wales has mentioned a thing about Pop’s views which fact has quite amazed me. In Washington hardly a night would pass that someone didn’t ask about them, make remarks etc. and they were Americans. Now here are the British who are directly concerned and not a peep out of them.”38

  Kick worked days and occasionally nights at the Red Cross greeting center and canteen but managed to lead a full social life. She dined with Americans stationed in London, including the Biddles and the Harrimans, visited family friends like the Beaverbrooks and the Astors, and saw as much as she could of Billy Hartington. “Billy and I went out together for the first time in London last Saturday,” she wrote the family on July 14. “It really is funny to see people put their heads together the minute we arrive any place. There’s heavy betting on when we are going to announce it. Some people have gotten the idea that I’m going to give in. Little do they know.”39