The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Kennedy hid his disappointment and fears as best he could. “The reason I haven’t been writing you is that I have been expecting to hear the telephone ring any time and to hear that you were in Norfolk and were on your way home. Not until we got your letter night before last did we know that you were not likely to make it until September. I can quite understand how you feel about staying there because the worst of it is certainly better than anything in the Pacific, but don’t force your luck too much.”87

  Thirty

  “A MELANCHOLY BUSINESS”

  It was a warm, pleasant Sunday in Hyannis Port; the date was August 13, 1944, the time about two o’clock in the afternoon. Jack was home from the hospital, still in pain, neither his back nor his stomach problems resolved. He and his sisters Jean and Eunice and his little brother Teddy were sitting on the porch after a long, leisurely picnic-style lunch. Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” was playing on the phonograph. Rose was reading the Sunday paper. Kennedy had gone upstairs for an afternoon nap.

  A dark car drove down the street and into the driveway in front of the house. “Two naval chaplains got out, walked up the steps to the porch, and knocked on the screen door,” Ted recalled a half century later. They told Rose that they had come to speak to her husband. There was nothing unusual here, no reason to be frightened. “Priests and nuns fairly often came to call, wanting to talk with Joe about some charity or other matter,” Rose would later write in her memoirs. “So I invited them to come into the living room and join us comfortably until Joe finished his nap. One of the priests said no, that the reason for calling was urgent. That there was a message both Joe and I must hear. Our son was missing in action and presumed lost.”

  Ted and the other children heard only “a few words: ‘missing—lost.’ All of us froze.”

  Rose raced upstairs to wake her husband. “Moments later, the two of them came back down. They took the clergymen into another room and talked briefly. When they emerged, Dad’s face was twisted. He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead. . . . Suddenly the sunroom was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guest, myself—everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.” Sixteen-year-old Jean got on her bicycle and rode off by herself to church. Jack turned to his little brother. “‘Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying,’ my brother said. ‘He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.’ . . . And that was what we did. We went sailing.”1

  Kick was called in London. On Wednesday, August 16, she flew home on an army transport plane. Billy did not accompany her; he was somewhere in France with his regiment, she didn’t know where, not having heard from him in weeks.

  The Kennedys remained at Hyannis Port through Labor Day, trying to live their lives. The children sailed, played tennis, entertained their friends, ate dinner around the big table on the porch; Jack rested and recuperated; Eunice and Ted raced competitively. Each Kennedy grieved in his or her own way. Jean, who had had a very special relationship with Joe Jr., who was her godfather, who taught her how to dance, who listened to her jokes and reassured her that she would pass her exams, suffered quietly and worried about her father.2

  Joseph P. Kennedy would never recover from the death of his oldest son and namesake, the handsome, charming, charismatic young man who believed—with his father—that he could do anything he set his mind to. Kennedy mourned privately, out of public view. For the first time in his life, he feared he had lost his faith. Years later, in a letter to his friend Walter Howey, whose wife had died after a debilitating illness, Kennedy would marvel at the different ways he and Rose had responded to their son’s death. “When young Joe was killed, my faith, even though I am a Catholic did not seem strong enough to make me understand that . . . he had won his eternal reward. . . . My faith should have made me realize this and I should not have indulged in the great self-pity the way I did. . . . Rose, on the other hand, with her supreme faith has just gone on and prayed for him and has not let it affect her life. I am sure that you are more in my class than either of us are in hers; so we are going to be unhappy at the loss of those we love until we die.”3

  The horror he had most dreaded had come to pass. The war in Europe he had done so much to oppose had taken his son. “Joe’s death has shocked me beyond belief,” he wrote James Forrestal, now secretary of the navy, on September 5. The letter was handwritten because he did not want to share its contents with a secretary or typist. “All of my children are equally dear to me, but there is something about the first born that sets him a little apart—he is for always a bit of a miracle. . . . He represents our youth, its joys & problems.”4

  He busied himself by responding to the hundreds of condolence notes the family had received, from the president, the prime minister, government officials and private citizens, family friends, Joe Jr.’s classmates and service mates. For the first time in his life, he was stuck in time, unable to see past the present moment. Joe Jr. had been his future, and now he was gone. To his cousin Joe Kane, the family’s political representative in Boston, he apologized that he just couldn’t “get in the mood to write letters about young Joe. You more than anyone else know how much I had tied my whole life up to his from here on. You know what great things I saw in the future for him, and now it’s all over.” To Arthur Houghton, he confided that he was “considering a proposition with [producer] Mike Todd but not too seriously. I think I probably have to interest myself in something because all my plans for my future were all tied up with young Joe, and that has gone smash.”5

  —

  After Labor Day, still adhering to his regular routines, he left Hyannis Port for his suite at the Waldorf Towers. Rose, as was her custom, moved into the Plaza, where she was joined by her daughters. On September 16, a month and four days after Joe Jr.’s death, a telegram arrived for Joseph P. Kennedy at the Waldorf. Kick’s husband, Billy Hartington, had been killed in action in France. Eunice was with her father when the telegram arrived. Kennedy sent her to find Kick, who was shopping at Bonwit Teller. She did not tell her sister what had happened, only that “Dad” wanted to see her at once. The two returned to the Waldorf, where Kennedy told Kick that her husband of four months—only one of which she had spent with him—was dead.

  That night, the family went to dinner at Le Pavillon. Jean Kennedy remembers that she, Pat, and Eunice tried their best to cheer up their sister. There was little or no talk of Billy. The Kennedy family did not mourn the dead by speaking of or telling stories about them.6

  The next day or the day after, Kick called Lord Halifax at the British embassy in London. “I told her that the War Office had confirmed her bad news. She seemed very good and brave on the telephone. . . . She is going up to Quebec tomorrow to fly home. . . . It is a melancholy business.”7

  Kennedy retreated further into himself. He had not really known Billy Hartington, but he grieved for him and his parents and for his daughter Kick, who returned to England to be with Billy’s family and friends. He saw no one, gave no speeches, wrote fewer letters.

  —

  In late October, Kennedy was visited at the Waldorf Towers by Morton Downey, one of his Palm Beach friends, who brought with him Bob Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Kennedy, who had always enjoyed being courted by men in high places, was not surprised that the Democrats had come calling as election day drew near.

  “Hannegan admitted, starting off, that he had heard a great deal about my difficulties with the group behind Roosevelt and made no bones about the matter that he despised the group also. . . . He insinuated that Roosevelt was not as well as they thought and that it was extremely likely that Truman [Roosevelt’s running mate] would be President, would throw that gang out bodily, and would want fellows like myself to come back into the Government and make it work. He asked me if I would be wil
ling to see Roosevelt, and I said, ‘Of course, if Roosevelt asked me to go there, I would go.’” The fact that he was willing to visit the White House did not, he made clear to Hannegan, mean that he was going to endorse the president. On the contrary, he was “seriously contemplating making a speech for Dewey [Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate]. . . . With one son in the hospital, one son dead, and my son-in-law killed,” Kennedy told Hannegan, he didn’t think any speech he might make “would be very helpful to Roosevelt.”

  On October 26, Kennedy visited Washington for the first time in more than a year and the White House for the first time since the spring of 1943. He found Roosevelt looking “very badly,” sicker than he had ever seen him. “His face was as gray as his hair,” he wrote later. “He is thin, he has an unhealthy color. His hands shake violently when he tries to take a drink of water.” They made small talk, as they always did, Roosevelt “speaking of Kathleen’s husband” but getting his name wrong. Roosevelt then launched into a discussion of current politics, the upcoming election, and the forecasts for Massachusetts and New Jersey. Kennedy recalled in his notes of the meeting that he told the president that the 5 percentage undecided vote in those states was “not the independent vote, but . . . the old line Democrats—the Irish, and the Italians—all of whom should be in the Democratic columns but this year were off for two or three good reasons. First, they felt that Roosevelt was Jew controlled. Second, they felt that the Communists were coming into control. . . . Third, that this group, along with many others, felt that there were more incompetents in Roosevelt’s cabinet than you could possibly stand in this country.” Kennedy paused to add that he agreed “with the group who felt that the Hopkins, Rosenmans [Samuel Rosenman was one of Roosevelt’s chief advisers], and Frankfurters, and the rest of the incompetents would rob Roosevelt of the place in history that he hoped, I am sure, to have. . . . Roosevelt went on to say ‘Why, I don’t see Frankfurter twice a year.’ And I said to him, ‘You see him twenty times a day but you don’t know it because he works through all these other groups of people without your knowing it.’”

  Kennedy kept on, his rage and bitterness tumbling out, his complaints mounting one on top of the other, most of them old ones, some new. “I am sore and indignant because of the way I have been treated,” he told the president. “The last blow was when Jack was recommended for a medal by all his officers in direct command which was two degrees higher than what he finally received. He was reduced . . . for reasons unknown to me, but which I suspect were because I was persona non grata to the powers that be in Washington.”

  The president tried to change the subject to conditions in Italy, which were deplorable, then to de Gaulle, whom he thought a buffoon. Kennedy would not be deterred. Though the war was coming to an end—and that was good—he was consumed with fear about the postwar world. “I told Roosevelt that I didn’t take much stock in any plans I had seen for post-war peace because I thought that Stalin was, after all, the dominating influence in the world.” Roosevelt could only reply, “Well, he doesn’t always get what he wants.”

  Whatever topic Roosevelt brought up, whatever he said, Kennedy argued with him. When Roosevelt mentioned that he thought he had made the right decision in responding to recent Republican attacks on him and his family “in a very light manner,” Kennedy “disagreed completely by saying that so many families had lost boys in the war that they didn’t want such light treatment.”8

  Roosevelt was not the only one Kennedy spoke with that day in Washington. Just before his appointment at the White House, he had called up Lord Halifax, now the British ambassador, to see if he could come by “to shake us by the hand.” In his diary entry, Halifax recalled that Kennedy “was in his usual unsatisfactory mood and I really did not begin to know what he thinks or wants.” As with the president, then afterward with James Byrnes and Archbishop Spellman, Kennedy complained nonstop about Roosevelt and the outlook for a postwar world dominated in Europe, at least, by Stalin. “His attitude,” Halifax recalled, “seemed to be a compound of a surviving and quite futile feeling that America ought never to have gotten into the war . . . and unhappiness at the consequences of the war on people like himself who used to have a lot of money.” Halifax had little sympathy with Kennedy, having lost one son in Europe and a second return from combat in Africa with both legs amputated. On the contrary, he was rather disgusted. “I am afraid,” he concluded his diary entry, “I think he is a rotten fellow.”9

  On October 28, Kennedy flew to Boston to meet with Democratic National Committee chairman Hannegan and vice-presidential candidate Harry Truman. According to Kennedy’s notes of the meeting, Truman “begged me to make a speech” for the Democratic ticket. He and Hannegan reiterated that Roosevelt was not well and would most likely not live out his term. And in that event, Truman declared, confirming what Hannegan had earlier told Kennedy, he would “kick all these incompetents and Jews out of Washington and ask fellows like myself and others to come back and run the government.” Though this was precisely what Kennedy wanted to hear, it was not enough to win him back. He could not, he repeated to Truman, endorse Roosevelt. “Knowing my experience,” Truman and Hannegan told Kennedy, “they didn’t blame me a bit, but they still hoped I would come out for him.”10

  Twenty-five years later, in a conversation with writer Merle Miller, Truman offered a different version of the meeting: “Old man Kennedy started throwing rocks at Roosevelt, saying he’d caused the war and so on. And then he said, ‘Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son, Joe?’ I’d stood it just as long as I could, and I said, ‘If you say another word about Roosevelt, I’m going to throw you out that window. . . . I haven’t seen [Kennedy] since.” Some (but not all) of this account rings true. Truman might, in retrospect, have wished that he had defended Roosevelt, as he claimed he had, instead of nodding silently as Kennedy excoriated him. Ten days before the election, he was not about to antagonize the country’s most prominent Irish Catholic on his home turf. Hannegan and Truman bit their tongues, heard Kennedy out, and accepted the campaign donation he offered them.11

  By courting Kennedy directly, asking for his support, making him feel wanted again, and inferring that he would have a place of importance in the upcoming Truman administration, Hannegan and Truman—with an assist from the president, who had invited Kennedy to the White House—had accomplished what they’d set out to do. Kennedy did not make any speeches for the Democratic ticket as he had four, eight, and twelve years earlier, but neither did he endorse Dewey nor say a word in his favor. Irish Catholics voted for the president in the same proportions they had in earlier elections. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president for a fourth term on November 7, 1944.

  —

  In Europe and the Pacific, the killing of young men continued without pause. The war was not yet over, nor did its end appear imminent. Through the autumn and early winter of 1944, more and more soldiers—and millions of civilians—died as the Russians drove west, reoccupying the Ukraine, moving into Poland and toward East Prussia, while the British and Americans pushed east, their momentum stalled as the Germans, instead of surrendering as they had in World War I, pushed back relentlessly and with some success. In the Pacific, the Japanese fleet had been defeated at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, but the war continued.

  The passage of time healed no wounds. On the contrary, the hurt became worse as the months passed, and for Kennedy, at least, the problems that would have to be faced after the war became larger and more unmanageable. “For a fellow who didn’t want this war to touch your country or mine,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook in late October 1944, “I have had rather a bad dose—Joe dead, Billy Hartington dead, my son in the Naval Hospital. . . . As I sit here and write you this letter with the natural cynicism that I know you and I share about a great many things, I wonder if this war will do anything for the world. No matter what peace out
line I read, looking behind it, I see the problems of living standards, economics, stability, and national pride are all still standing on shaky ground. . . . To have boys like ours killed for a futile effort would be the greatest reflection on us all. Yet, if you would ask me what I am doing to help, I would tell you nothing. However, I assure you it is not by choice rather by circumstances.”12

  Six weeks later, Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder, another old friend, to thank him for his condolence letter. Only to a friend on the other side of the Atlantic whom he did not expect to encounter in person could Kennedy reveal the depth of his pain. “I am trying to reconcile myself to your magnificent spiritual outlook but I, very frankly, haven’t arrived at it yet. I think Jack’s illness and the death of the two boys along with the horrible conditions in the world have left me rather a long road to travel back to arrive at the spiritual point of view. It will come, I know, but it just hasn’t come yet.”13

  In May 1945, Kennedy heard from Arthur Houghton that his son, Andy, had been killed in the Pacific. Kennedy tried to find words that might console Houghton but could not. “I don’t think you ever get over the shock. . . . I won’t offer you that hocus-pocus that some people offer—that he died for a great cause—I don’t believe he did. I believe he died like young Joe as a result of the stupidity of our generation. The one thing he did die a martyr to was his own conscience. He wanted to do the right thing because it was his idea of the thing to do, and for that—and that alone—he died. This is the satisfaction which you and I will always have.”