The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  In late July, she wrote Jack after “a day and a half spent in the country with Billy. . . . For 24 hours I forgot all about the war. Billy is just the same, a bit older, a bit more ducal, but we get on as well as ever. It is queer as he is so unlike anyone I have ever known at home or any place really. Of course I know he would never give in about the religion and he knows I never would. . . . It’s really too bad because I’m sure I would be a most efficient Duchess of Devonshire in the postwar world and as I’d have a castle in Ireland, one in Scotland, one in Yorkshire and one in Sussex I could keep my old nautical brothers in their old age. But that’s the way it goes. Everyone in London is buzzing with rumors and no matter what happens we’ve given them something to talk about.”40

  Without saying anything about her intentions—in large part because she had no idea where her romance with Billy was going to take her—Kick wrote regularly about Billy. “Billy came down from Yorkshire and had to sleep on the floor,” she informed her parents after a “bank holiday” weekend in August at Cliveden. “I wish his father could have seen him. It really is funny how much worried and how much talking is being done, by all those old Cecil and Devonshire spooks. Of course on Sunday morning there was the great problem of my going to church. They all told me that the church was miles away and I couldn’t possibly go. I think they would have considered it a moral triumph if I hadn’t so I was determined to get there no matter how far away it was. Had a chat with the priest who said it was about four miles each way and it was just according to my conscience whether I should attend mass. Finally hopped on a bike and was there in twenty-five minutes.”41

  Wherever she went now, the press remained hard on her heels. “Someone rings up every morning and wants to know who I am announcing my engagement to. Each time it’s a different person.”42

  Kennedy responded to her letters and cables with long newsy letters about her siblings, her friends, her co-workers at the Washington paper, and the political situation back home. He offered no advice, other than to repeat that he trusted her and would support her in whatever she decided to do. He said nothing about Rose, who was adamantly opposed to any of her children marrying outside the church. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll gamble with your judgment. The best is none too good for you, baby, but if you decide it’s a Chinaman, it’s okay with me. That’s how much I think of you.” The church was important to him, but not more so than his daughter’s happiness.43

  —

  Like every parent of draft-age children, Kennedy was suspended in time, holding his breath until the war was over and his children out of harm’s way. The summer before, he had busied himself by running his father-in-law’s primary campaign. In 1943, he sought refuge from his worries in two very different ventures: farming and show business.

  He had earlier bought the Osterville farm, where he kept his horses and where he and the children had ridden for years along the bridle paths through “wet, peaty terrain” that was perfect for cranberry growing. Now, with the war on and rationing in place, he converted it into a working farm to supply the family with fresh vegetables, dairy products, and beef.

  “Your father is nuts about the farm,” Rose wrote the children in late August 1943, “and is reading farm reports assiduously and discussing the merits of having registered cattle. He is also busy preserving everything from string beans to steers.” No one was as shocked as he was by his newfound vocation. The farm had become so much a part of his life that he included regular progress reports on it in his letters to his children overseas. “Our little farm down here is still doing very well,” he wrote Jack in the South Pacific in November 1943. “We’ve got four cows and three steers. We’re killing four pigs on Saturday and three lambs in a couple of weeks. I hope to keep it going until two or three years after the war, at least, and possibly as long as we stay at the Cape.”44

  His adventures in show business did not go nearly as well. An acquaintance of sorts, the English playwright Frederick Lonsdale (who, Kennedy wrote Arthur Houghton, had “had a very hard time with the Jewish boys and has had plenty of guts to stand up and fight for no war”), had written a play, Another Love Story, which Kennedy had volunteered to produce. “After all, I need something to keep my mind active.” The problem was that it wasn’t a very good play. Kennedy tried but failed to get Lonsdale to consult first with Eddie Goulding, then with Clare Boothe Luce. When Lonsdale refused, Kennedy, more bemused than angry, walked away. The play opened on Broadway on October 12, 1943, and ran for 104 performances. Kennedy got back most of his investment, but not enough to inspire him to produce or invest in any more Broadway shows.45

  The farming and the Broadway play provided some distraction that summer and fall. But they were no substitute for news from the war zones where his children were stationed. He heard regularly from Kick, but not nearly enough from either Joe Jr., who was on his way to fly “Liberator bombers—B-24’s” from an air base in England, or Jack, who was in the Pacific.

  “We haven’t heard from Jack since the battle started in the Pacific, around the 27th of June,” he wrote Tim McInerny, a former Boston editor and friend, in August. “I wish to God he was back here with me—and that goes for every man or woman who is in the war. . . . Bobby has joined the Navy, but will finish out the next four or five months of his last year at Milton Academy. I’ve threatened Teddy—age 11—to punch him in the nose if I find him around any recruiting station, even though it is against the law to threaten anybody against any enlistment.”46

  He followed events in the newspapers as assiduously as every other parent with a son in the military, but with the knowledge that the news that got into the papers was already heavily censored. “Well, we spent the last five days reading about the battle [for two of the Trobriand Islands, which was widely reported in the press that summer],” he wrote Jack in the Pacific, “and they don’t tell us very much. . . . We hope and pray that this wasn’t the time for the back and stomach to go bad on you so that at least you had a chance to do your stuff.”47

  There was no answer from Jack and would be none through July and August. Kennedy, growing increasingly frantic about his son, called Clare Boothe Luce, who had won election to Congress in 1942 and sat on the Military Affairs Committee. “Clare Luce,” Kennedy wrote Kick on August 7, “checked with the Navy Department and apparently everything was all right.” Jack’s unit had been engaged in battle on Munda, the island just north of Rendova, where he was stationed. “After [M]unda,” Kennedy continued in his letter to Kick, “the battle in his section will probably quiet down again and maybe he’ll be content—with his bad back and his bad stomach—to come back home and lead a normal life, but I don’t know my children very well I guess.”48

  That same day, Kennedy wrote Jack again. “We haven’t heard from you since the 24th of June and naturally we’ve been concerned with all the battles going on there as to just how you are making out. . . . I talked with Angela Green [an actress whom Jack had been dating in New York before his departure]. . . . I told her we hadn’t heard anything from you and she seemed quite concerned. She says you are still her favorite boy friend.”49

  Kennedy’s letter, and a second one written four days later, were acts of faith—and desperation. Though he had written to reassure Kick that “everything” was “all right,” it was far from that. Kennedy, who would later boast that he had his “sleuths . . . on the job in Guadalcanal as well as at the Stork Club,” had learned from his contacts in the South Pacific that Jack had gone “missing.” More than that he did not know.

  In the early morning of August 2, 1943, PT 109, which Jack commanded, had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer while on patrol in the Blackett Strait in the mid-Solomons. The boat’s plywood hull had been ripped in two. Its gasoline tanks exploded in flames. Two members of the thirteen-member crew were killed instantly, several others badly injured. The commanders of the nearby PT boats, witnessing the collision and explosion,
concluded that all hands on PT 109 had been lost and after a cursory search for survivors returned to base with the news that Lieutenant Kennedy and his crew had been killed. “They believed us lost for a week,” Jack later wrote a friend, “but luckily thank God—they did not send the telegrams.” The decision not to send the “telegrams” had kept the news from Rose and the rest of the family, but not, as we have seen, from Kennedy.50

  Jack and his crew stayed afloat in the water until the fire was out, then swam back to the remaining piece of the hull, which they held on to as long as they could before swimming another four hours to the nearest island, Lieutenant Kennedy towing one of the injured men behind him. After several days on the tiny island, they were discovered by two natives, whom Jack asked to take a message, carved inside a coconut (there was no paper on the island), to the naval station at Rendova. The next morning, he awoke to the sight of a canoe with eight locals landing on the island, with a stove, food, and a message from a British officer that he was sending a rescue party.51

  From the “tent” hospital where he and his crewmates were put in sick bay after their rescue, Jack wrote his family “a short note to tell you that I am alive—and not kicking—in spite of any reports that you may happen to hear. It was believed otherwise for a few days—so reports or rumors may have gotten back to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy—and am back at the base now and am O.K. As soon as possible I shall try to give you the whole story.” The note was postmarked August 13, San Francisco. We have no idea when it reached Hyannis Port.52

  In a letter to the children, Rose claimed that she first heard about the rescue on August 19. “The Globe called me up about 8:20 in the morning . . . when I was in your father’s room waiting to hear the morning radio news. Of course, I was very much surprised and excited and I told them I would contact your father, who had gone over to the farm for his early morning ride. . . . Dad knew he was missing for two weeks, although he gave no sign—for which I am very thankful—as I know we should all have been terribly worried. He just complained about his arthritis and I said it was funny he was nervous now, little knowing what he had to be nervous about.”53

  Kennedy later told his son Ted and nephew Joey Gargan that he had heard about Jack’s rescue on the radio when he was driving back from his early morning horseback ride at the Osterville farm. “He said that he was so excited that he drove the car off the road and into a field.”54

  The news of Lieutenant Kennedy’s heroism burst onto the front pages on August 20. KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT, the New York Times reported on page one, in a story datelined “Aug. 8 (delayed).” The family was besieged by congratulatory telegrams from all over the country. “Several people,” Rose wrote the children in her round-robin letter of August 25, “have said they always knew Jack would do it and they always felt that Joe had the same sort of stuff, which is all very wonderful for a mother to hear. I believe I would be just as happy though if Joe did not have to risk his life in such a fashion.”55

  Kennedy tried to answer every telegram and letter the family received. “I’ve been a little lax in writing you recently,” he wrote Tim McInerny in London, “but Jack’s exploits in the South Pacific have kept me pretty well tied up. It is the consensus of the newspaper men here that there hasn’t been a better story since the war started than the one of young Jack. He really came through with flying colors.” Convinced that his son’s heroism should not go unrewarded, he began a quiet lobbying campaign with his friends in Washington and in the press to get him a “decoration” of some sort.56

  As exhilarated as he was by the good news from the South Pacific, Kennedy’s relief from his fears was only partial—and temporary. He was sick with worry about Jack’s health (how could a dangerously underweight man with a bad stomach have survived on coconuts for a week?), furious with the navy for not sending the boy home, and angry with Jack (though he would never tell him) for not demanding to be repatriated. To a friend whose son was also in the military, he confided, only partly in jest, that he thought “the ones that really suffer in this war are the parents. The boys love it and they have a great time, particularly those that are flying or on PT boats.”57

  He was desperate to see Jack in the flesh. In the fall, he left Hyannis Port for New York City, still with no word as to when Jack would return home. “We have not heard from Jack for a couple of weeks,” Rose wrote the children on October 27 from Hyannis Port, “and I think Dad worries a bit as he telephones from New York every day. We rather think he is in the midst of the fighting again as we got one report that he volunteered for all the hazardous assignments. I am hoping he will surprise us by suddenly telling us he is on his way home, as he really hoped and believed he would be here by Christmas.”58

  When Kennedy did hear again from his son, the news was not good. “They will not send anyone back while there is fighting in this area—when its over—I’ll get back,” Jack wrote from his island base in the South Pacific. “As a matter of fact—I am in a bad spot for getting out as am now Capt. of a gunboat— It’s the first one they’ve ever had of its type—it’s a former P.T. and is very interesting. . . . It was a sort of a dubious honor to be given the first—so I will have to stick around & try to make a go of it. . . . Don’t worry at all about me—I’ve learned to duck—and have learned the wisdom of the old naval doctrine of keeping your bowels—your mouth shut—and never volunteering.”59

  “If you are going to be out there until we clean up that area,” Kennedy wrote back on November 4, “I should think it would be Teddy who would relieve you instead of Bobby. I’m told by some of the group here that roughly a year is the limit so that at least puts an outside time of around February for you. Of course I know you’d hate to have anybody mix into your schedule so I’m leaving it at that until I hear from you further.”60

  —

  Sometime that summer or fall of 1943, while awaiting word from his boys in the war zones, Kennedy contacted the local FBI office and volunteered “to assist the Bureau in any way possible should his services be needed.” Why he did so at this time, we don’t know. It might have been to belatedly thank J. Edgar Hoover for alerting him about Jack’s involvement with Inga Arvad.

  After a cursory investigation in Washington, Kennedy was enlisted as a “special service contact.” In discussions that fall with Special Agent William H. Carpenter, his FBI liaison in Hyannis Port, Kennedy offered to use his connections in the liquor business in New York and the moving picture industry in California and in South America to “benefit the Bureau.” According to Special Agent Carpenter, he volunteered that he had “many Jewish friends in the moving picture industry who would furnish him, upon request, with any information in their possession pertaining to Communist infiltration. . . . He feels also that he is in a position to secure any information the Bureau may desire from his contacts in the industry with reference to any individuals who have Communistic sympathies.”61

  Though Kennedy would remain a fawning, outspoken admirer of J. Edgar Hoover and his bureau in the years to come, there is no evidence that he ever offered the FBI tips on Communist infiltrators or individuals who might have “Communistic sympathies.” His communications consisted almost entirely of flattering letters to the director, complaints about articles and columnists critical of the FBI, and invitations to Hoover and his companion, Clyde Tolson, to join him in Palm Beach or at Hialeah. His ceaseless flattery of and attention to Hoover was multipurposed. It gave him access, as we shall see, to the FBI and to J. Edgar Hoover’s assistance whenever he or anyone else in the family needed it.

  —

  Another presidential election was approaching and Kennedy was going to sit it out. He had little faith in Roosevelt, but less in the opponents the Republicans might put up against him. “I am beginning to be courted very strongly by both sides now,” he wrote Sir James Calder on December 20, 1943, “because the
y are starting to think of the election next year, but I am minding my own business and praying that the war will be over and I’ll get my children back. That’s the thing that concerns me at the minute—not who’s going to be the candidate.”62

  With the “courting” came a new set of rumors that he was going to be named secretary of commerce. “So that you’ll be all straightened out on the common gossip regarding your Dad’s future,” he wrote Pat on March 8, 1944, “I am not considering an offer to be Secretary of Commerce and wouldn’t if it were offered to me. They’ve got to do better than that ‘to get papa back into this awful mess.’”63

  —

  In January 1944, Jack finally returned to the United States, five months after his PT boat had been sunk. His medical condition, as his father had feared, was so poor that even before seeing his family, he flew to the Mayo Clinic, where he was told that he would have to have an operation on his back. He suffered as well from an early duodenal ulcer and a still undiagnosed case of malaria. The photographs of the lieutenant in his disheveled navy uniform reveal a tanned, smiling, but unhealthy-looking, frightfully thin young man. “He got back,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. in late February, “having lost about twenty odd pounds, with his stomach in pretty poor shape. . . . His back, however, was in very bad shape and finally, after spending three weeks here getting in reasonable condition, he is now in the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston where he’s having pictures taken of his back and at the same time having his stomach treated. He expects to get an assignment to Miami for about six weeks, and then if his back isn’t right he’s going to have it operated on. How serious that is they are not really able to tell me until they start to do the job. His future depends on how his back turns out. If it isn’t going to be all right, I imagine he’ll be through with the Navy; if he gets fixed up, I imagine he’ll be on his way again, without too much enthusiasm.”64