by David Nasaw
While stateside, Jack met with journalist John Hersey, whom he had known earlier and remained friendly with even after Hersey had wed a woman, Frances Ann Cannon, he had himself considered marrying. Hersey was so taken with the PT boat story that he proposed to write an article about it. The article was rejected by Life magazine, then accepted by the New Yorker. Kennedy and the navy, hoping for a larger readership, tried to get it published in Reader’s Digest instead. “I’m hopeful I can work it out. It would be a great boost for the Kennedy clan,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. in late May. In the end, the article was published first in the New Yorker and then in condensed form in Reader’s Digest.65
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Kennedy’s pessimism, his sense that the world was spinning out of control, was intertwined with and augmented by his loss of control over his own life and those of his children.
Though Kick had said nothing about marrying Billy Hartington, she was acting more and more as if she intended to. In January 1944, when Billy decided to run for the seat in Parliament that had belonged to his family for almost two centuries, Kick joined him on the campaign trail. She wrote to tell her parents that she had “paid a visit to Bishop Matthew,” the auxiliary bishop of Westminster, to find out what her options might be should she marry a Protestant. “He had nothing to offer me as a possible solution and went so far as to say that in a case like this the Church would have to be very careful so as to avoid all criticism. In fact bend the other way about making any concessions. When I returned home I picked up the paper and found that the Archbishop of York had just made a statement saying that any Anglican who gave in to the Roman Catholic Church at marriage was guilty of a great weakness. He must have gotten wind of something I should think. Well, in any case there is no immediate rush for a solution but I must say it would be a great load off my mind.”66
Had the circumstances been otherwise, Kennedy would have flown to London to be with his daughter. But it was wartime, flights were restricted, and the press would be all over him once he arrived, with the publicity making matters worse for everyone involved. Fortunately, Joe Jr. was now stationed in England. “I do hope you’ll give her the benefit of your counsel and sympathy,” Kennedy wrote him in late February, “because after all she has done a swell job and she’s entitled to the best and with us over here it’s awfully difficult to be as helpful as we’d like to be. As far as I personally am concerned, Kick can do no wrong and whatever she did would be great with me.” It is noteworthy that Kennedy switched from the “we” to “I personally” in declaring his belief that Kick could “do no wrong.” Rose Kennedy was not so sure.67
On February 22, Kick wrote her family about the results of the by-election, which Billy had lost. In the middle of her letter, she drew back from politics to talk about Billy and the Cavendish family, with whom she had celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday on February 20. “Received a lovely old leather book from the Duke for my birthday. The Duchess said she had nothing to do with it, and when I opened it I knew why. It was the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. I laughed and thanked him very much.” The duke, by now as taken with Kick as everyone else in the family, was reconciled to his son marrying her, but only because he expected that she would convert to the Church of England. Kick reported that Billy’s mother, the duchess, with whom she had had a “long chat . . . longs to make things easy. Please try and discover loopholes although I keep feeling that the particular parties involved would make any compromise impossible. The Catholics would say it would give scandal. This situation, Daddy, is a stickler.”68
Kennedy cabled Count Enrico Galeazzi to inquire as to whether there was any way for Kick to get a “dispensation” to marry an Anglican. The news was not encouraging. “Frankly I do not seem to think Dad can do anything,” Rose wrote her daughter on February 24. “He feels terribly sympathetic and so do I and I only wish we could offer some suggestions. When both people have been handed something all their lives, how ironic it is that they cannot have what they want most. I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family tradition.” It was not difficult to read between Rose’s lines. She did not tell Kick, as Kennedy had on several occasions, that she would support her whatever she decided. Instead, she sounded very much as if she took it for granted that her daughter would make the “sacrifice” necessary to maintain “the old family tradition.”69
In early March, Kennedy wrote to thank Kick on her wise and witty letter on Billy’s electoral campaign. Midway through his four-and-a-half-page letter, fearing (rightly) that it would be read by the censors, he referred “to the other problem,” on which he was “working in every way I know. The prominence of the situation makes it most difficult, neither side wishing to look as though it were making concessions. I am afraid the individuals themselves will have to work it out with some give and take on their part and let all the rest of us go jump in the lake.” In true Kennedy fashion, he closed with a bit of dark gallows Irish humor, the joke that arouses the “mirthless laugh,” as Samuel Beckett has written, the laugh “at that which is unhappy.” He had heard from London that Kick had been making “converts” among the American soldiers at her canteen. “Maybe if you made enough of them a couple of them could take your place.” Knowing that Rose would not have appreciated his joking about the church and converts, he added that if she “ever saw that sentence I’d be thrown right out in the street.”70
Kick’s troubles were enough to try any parent’s heart. She had, she told her parents in a March 22 letter, just returned from a visit to Churchdale, the Cavendish estate in Derbyshire, where the duchess had arranged, with Kick’s full approval, for her to meet with the duchess’s “very great friend . . . Father Ted Talbot” of the Church of England, so that he might “explain what the Cavendish family stood for in the English Church, the impossibilities of Billy permitting his son to be brought up a Roman Catholic.” Father Talbot and the duchess asked Kick to at least explore the possibility of converting. Kick was adamant. Almost paraphrasing her mother’s sentiments in her recent letter, she explained that because she had “been blessed with so many of this world’s goods . . . it seemed rather cheap and weak to give in at the first real crisis in my life.” She left Churchdale feeling “most discouraged and rather sad. I want to do the right thing so badly and yet I hope I’m not giving up the most important thing in my life.” She understood now that Billy could neither convert nor allow his children to be raised as Catholics. “Poor Billy is very, very sad but he sees his duty must come first. He is a fanatic on this subject.” If she and Billy were to be married, she would have to be the one to “give in.”71
In the best of circumstances, the choices that Kick faced would have been near debilitating. But this was wartime and every decision was more difficult. It was common knowledge that the second front in Europe would soon be opened and Billy, with tens of thousands of other British soldiers and officers, would be swept across the English Channel and into combat. Kick could not afford the luxury of putting off her choice.
On April 4, she wrote to say that she, Joe Jr., and Billy had visited Bishop Matthew again and learned from him that there would no “dispensations,” no “concessions,” from the church. “The Bishop told me that it would put the Church in a very difficult position for us to get a dispensation and it would be better if we went ahead and got married and then something might possibly be done afterwards. Of course he wouldn’t guarantee that anything could be done.” As a married woman, she could still “go to Church but not Communion. . . . If I do marry Billy within the next two months, please be quite sure that I am going it with the full knowledge of what I am doing and that I’m quite happy about it and feel quite sure that I am doing the right thing.” She added as a postscript that Billy had “called last night and said that there wasn’t much hope of getting any more leave. That’s our latest difficulty. Goodness, when will they ever stop.”72
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Rose and Kennedy did not learn of Kick’s decision until April 29, when she cabled that she and Billy were going to be married in a registry office, not a church, but she did not know precisely when. “Naturally,” Rose wrote in her diary, “I was disturbed horrified—heartbroken.” Kick was setting a bad example for every Catholic girl who was attracted to a Protestant boy. “Every little young girl would say if K. Kennedy can—why can’t I? . . . What a blow to our family prestige.” She recognized that she was overreacting, but that didn’t stop her. “No one seemed to be as excited about that as I & I was sick & supposed to keep from any emotional upset so I prayed with all my heart. . . . Joe told me I had done all that could be done. . . . I would like Joe to fly to her but he seemed to think that was impossible altho’ now I know he should have gone over a month or 2 ago.”74
Frantic and unwilling to trust her husband because he was not frantic, Rose sent another cable to her daughter, then returned to Boston and checked into the New England Baptist Hospital, where, according to the newspapers, she remained for the next “two weeks for a routine physical checkup.” Kennedy, worried that his youngest daughter, Jean, might be distressed by the news from London, visited her at the Sacred Heart Convent. The two went for a long walk and Kennedy told Jean that Kick was going to marry outside the church, but to a good man whom she loved. He was happy for her and Jean should be also. She assured her father that she was not upset and promised to write her sister, as Kennedy had suggested.75
Meanwhile, on Kennedy’s behalf, Archbishop Spellman contacted Archbishop Godfrey in London, who visited Kick and asked her to reconsider, because her mother was “greatly distressed.” “Effort in vain,” Archbishop Godfrey cabled Spellman on May 4. That same day, the engagement of Kathleen Kennedy and Lord Hartington, heir of the Duke of Devonshire, was announced in The Times of London.76
Having heard nothing from her father, Kick cabled him the day before the wedding. “Religion everything to us both. Will always live according to Catholic teaching. Praying that time will heal all wounds. Your support in this as in everything else means so much. Please beseech mother not to worry. Am very happy and quite convinced have taken right step. Love to all.”77
Rose’s distress was predictable, but not Kennedy’s silence. He had supported his daughter from the very beginning, urged her to forget the rest of the world, and told her that “whatever she did would be great” with him. Still, he had never quite believed that she would marry a Protestant. Now that she had, he was momentarily stunned—and speechless. There was no congratulatory cable from him when the engagement was announced or immediately before, or after, the wedding at the Chelsea registry office in London on May 6.
Joe Jr., who was not in the habit of reprimanding or correcting his father, felt obliged to do so. From London, he sent a six-word cable the day after the wedding: “The power of silence is great.” The next morning, Kennedy sent his congratulations to his daughter. There was no message from Rose Kennedy. “Most distressed about mother,” Kick cabled Palm Beach. “Please tell her not to worry. Your cable made my happiest day. . . . Have American papers been bad? All love.”78
When Kennedy responded that Rose was well, Kathleen wrote her directly. “Goodness mother—I owe so much to you and Daddy that nothing in the world could have made me go against your will. However, I felt that you expected the action I took and would judge that it was the course to make under the circumstances. . . . Please don’t take responsibility for an action, which you think bad (and I do not). You did everything in your power to stop it. You did your duty as a Roman Catholic mother. You have not failed. There was nothing lacking in my religious education. Not by any means am I giving up my faith—it is most precious to me. . . . Of course it was too bad that the papers made such an issue of the religious question. However, I must admit that I expected it. I hope they weren’t too bad in Boston.” Kick was filled with gratitude that her big brother, Joe Jr., had not only attended the wedding but had been on her side from day one. In her letter to her mother, she joked that giving his sister away in marriage to a Protestant aristocrat might not have been a terribly wise move politically. Joe Jr. agreed that with “his face plastered all over the papers . . . he was ‘finished in Boston.’”79
Kick and Joe Jr. need not have worried. Kennedy had used all the influence he could muster to make sure that the local papers either ignored or downplayed the wedding of his daughter to an English Protestant aristocrat. “In fact,” Kennedy reassured his son, “Arthur Krock said that in twenty-five years of newspaper work he had never seen such a difficult situation handled so tactfully.” Only “gabby grandfather” had had anything to say to the press. “Naturally, when you get leading questions, such as . . . ‘How do you feel about your daughter renouncing the Catholic Religion?’ . . . and . . . ‘Do you favor the marriage of your daughter outside of the Church?’ it was a very difficult situation. I couldn’t say that I didn’t like it because after all, I think the world of Kick and as I’ve often said, whatever she did would be all right with me, because I feel she’s a girl of great character, great instincts, and great experience, and when she makes up her mind to do anything—then boy, I know she’s got some reason for it and that’s enough for me. But of course with Mother, it’s different.”80
In the end, what troubled Kennedy the most, perhaps, was not that his daughter had married a Protestant, but that, having wed an Englishman, she would not be coming home. “I have lost one of my daughters to England,” he wrote Lord Beaverbrook on May 24. “She was the apple of my eye and I feel the loss because I won’t have her near me all the time, but I’m sure she’s going to be wonderfully happy and I can assure you that England is getting a great girl.”81
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On June 6, 1944, one month after the marriage of William Hartington and Kathleen Kennedy, the Allied invasion of Europe was launched. Two weeks later, Billy Hartington crossed the English Channel. Joe Jr., who could have come home on leave in mid-May, stayed behind to fly support missions for the invading troops.
Kennedy, waiting for the return from the battlefields of his son-in-law and his son, busied himself by giving a few speeches. He spoke in Boston on National Maritime Day, then in May flew to Chicago to address the American Gastroenterological Association at the invitation of its president, his friend and doctor, Sara Jordan, of the Lahey Clinic. Before Pearl Harbor, he had insisted that Americans stay out of European battles and refrain from trying to save the world from tyrannical dictators, even those as evil as Adolf Hitler. Now he repeated his message again and urged his fellow Americans “with all the strength I command” to resist the call “to bear an onerous share of the expenses of world-wide social service, foreign trade and world currencies.” He had no patience with those who claimed that because American cities had not been “devastated and gutted” as London had, Americans “have not suffered from this war.” In a sentence large with foreboding, he declared, “You can’t tell that to the family whose boy is not coming home at the end of the war.”82
On June 11, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was admitted to the Chelsea Naval Hospital, then transferred to New England Baptist for back surgery. “Isn’t it lovel
y,” Clare Boothe Luce wrote his father on June 12, “to have him tucked away safely in a plaster Paris cast for a few months, anyway?” The plan had been to repair a disk, but when the doctors found abnormally soft tissue they removed it. Jack “has had a very hard time,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. on August 9. “He has not recovered nearly as fast as he should have and is now having a great deal of trouble with his leg. Of course, he can’t correct the stomach difficulties until his back gets right. He is back in the Chelsea Naval Hospital, and we are hoping that he may get a little time off to recuperate if another operation is not necessary.”83
Jack at least was safe. Nothing had been heard from Billy since he’d crossed the Channel in late June. “We hear from Kathleen and she is very, very happy,” Kennedy wrote Houghton on July 7, “but a little bit worried about her husband as she hasn’t heard from him for quite a while. You know they stick those Grenadier and Coldstream guards with the Irish guards right out in front.”84
Joe Jr. had still not come home. “Although he’s had a large number of casualties in his squadron,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook, “I’m still hoping and praying we’ll see him around the first of July.”85
The first of July came and went, and no Joe Jr. “No doubt you are surprised that I haven’t arrived home,” he wrote his parents on July 26. “I am going to do something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So probably I won’t be home till sometime in September.”
He had never told a bigger lie. He had volunteered for a dangerous, near suicidal mission. German V-1 flying bombs had been pummeling London since D-Day, causing death, destruction, and constant fear. Even brave Kick, who had been through so much, was, according to her brother, “terrified of the Doodles [the name given the aerial bombs] as is everyone else, and I think she is smart not to work in London.” Joe Jr.’s assignment was to take out a major V-1 launching site in Belgium. The navy had stripped down one of the Liberator bombers that he had been flying so that it could be fully loaded with explosives. His instructions were to fly the overloaded B-24 across the English Channel, turn over control of his plane to the two B-17s flying with him when he reached his target, and parachute to safety.86