by David Nasaw
To heal his own wounds, Jack Kennedy had solicited essays from Joe Jr.’s school and navy buddies, some family friends, and Honey Fitz, Kathleen, and Ted for a privately published tribute to his brother, As We Remember Joe. Kennedy was able to read only one “article at a time,” and that with much difficulty. He sent Houghton a copy of the book, and Houghton responded by forwarding “the little tribute” he had written about Andy. Again Kennedy tried to find words that might help his friend come to grips with his loss. “You’ll never get it out of your mind no matter what you think or what you do. Everyday interests naturally relieve the strain, but the thought will always be there. . . . It is things like this that darken the few years that we have left, and for that reason I am now telling you that we must get what happiness we can out of the time that we have left to enjoy it.”14
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not survive to greet the peace in Europe or in Asia. He died on April 12, 1945, exactly eight months after Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s bomber had gone down in flames. “The news hit America like nothing since Pearl Harbor,” wrote Roosevelt biographer H. W. Brands. Restaurants, bars, theaters, concert halls, and nightclubs closed for the night. The first baseball games of the year were canceled. The radio networks suspended commercial programming. The New York Stock Exchange announced that it would be closed on the following day. The nation grieved. Joseph P. Kennedy did not.15
“Evidently he’d been slipping very badly,” he wrote Kick in London, “and it becomes more and more apparent to all of us that Hopkins and the rest of them were really running this country for the last year and a half, and, if I do say so, damn near ran it into the ground.” He admitted that there had been “real sorrow on the announcement of his death and for two or three days after.” But now, two weeks later, “you rarely, if ever hear his name mentioned, and there is also no doubt that it was a great thing for the country. He had stirred up a hatred in the minds of at least half the country, and no matter whether he proposed anything good or bad, half the country would be against it and half for it.” Roosevelt had lost control of Congress to the point where the federal government was nearly paralyzed. And he had not laid the foundation for a peaceful postwar. “It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, with the death of all these boys and with the world economically and socially in chaos, that we haven’t anything to look forward to in the line of peace for the world as the pay-off for everyone’s sacrifices.”16
His anger was unbounded at those he held accountable for bringing on the war that had led to Joe Jr.’s death and Jack’s near fatal illnesses. On April 19, a week after the president’s death, he told former president Herbert Hoover, according to Hoover’s notes, that he had dozens of diplomatic dispatches in his possession that fully documented Roosevelt’s role in pushing the British toward war. On May 15, at a second meeting with Hoover, he elaborated on his theory, insisting that in the spring of 1939, Roosevelt had encouraged Chamberlain to guarantee Polish sovereignty and provide British military support in the event of German aggression. “Kennedy said that if it had not been for Roosevelt the British would not have made this, the most gigantic blunder in history.”17
Kennedy’s conspiracy theory of the origins of the war was clearly incendiary, but that did not stop him from repeating it, always in private, usually to those he believed might agree with him. In his diary, James Forrestal recounted a discussion he had on December 27, 1945, while golfing with Kennedy in Palm Beach; almost to the word, it mirrored the one Kennedy had had with Hoover seven months earlier. Kennedy declared unequivocally that there would have been no war in Western Europe had Roosevelt not forced Chamberlain to face down the Germans over Poland. Left to his own devices, Kennedy insisted, Hitler would have turned east toward Russia. There were two separate claims here: one was defensible, that Hitler preferred to move east rather than west; the other, that Roosevelt was somehow responsible for the war, was preposterous.18
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On May 7, 1945, a little more than three weeks after Roosevelt’s death and almost a year after the landings on Normandy, the German military, with Hitler dead by suicide, agreed to the only terms the British and Americans would accept, unconditional surrender. The American people celebrated briefly before turning their attention to the war in the Pacific. Three months later, that war, too, came to an end. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. President Harry Truman demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender and threatened a further “rain of ruin from the sky.” On August 8, the Soviet Union, as promised at Yalta, entered the war, its armies marching south the next day into Manchuria.
Kennedy, who had opposed unconditional surrender in Europe, was appalled at the American attempt to secure it in Japan by dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations. On August 8, he and Harry Luce visited Archbishop Spellman and implored him to request of the president a few days’ truce to give Japan’s leaders the opportunity to formally surrender. We do not know whether Spellman ever contacted Truman. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 14, Emperor Hirohito agreed to American terms.19
While others basked in the glory of unconditional victory, Kennedy’s anger at the results of the war washed away any sense of relief that the bloodshed might now be at an end. “It does seem ironical that somebody who opposed the war as bitterly as I did should lose his oldest son, his son-in-law, and have his second son badly banged up,” he wrote Cissy Patterson on November 26, 1945. “At the minute it does seem that it is rather too much to hope for that the world will be any better as a result of the sacrifices of all these fine young men—but then again, I never thought it would be.”20
He tried to control his rage and succeeded for the most part, certainly with his children. But the anger within him was such that it sprang out, unbidden, at rather inappropriate moments: at lunch with President Hoover, golf with Secretary Forrestal, on the telephone and in letters to friends. In January 1946, he was invited to have “a chat” with Winston Churchill at Hialeah during the ex–prime minister’s post-election, post-defeat tour of the United States. Churchill offered his condolences for Kennedy’s losses. Kennedy thanked him. Churchill, making small talk with a man he knew despised him and might hold him accountable in some way for his son’s death, remarked almost casually that “the world seems to be in a frightful condition.” Kennedy agreed, then added, “After all, what did we accomplish by this war?”
Churchill had to have been momentarily stunned. The war had accomplished a great deal from his perspective: the destruction of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan, the restoration of the Western European republics, the rescue of Great Britain. Instead of confronting Kennedy and launching into a debate at the Hialeah racetrack, Churchill tried to defuse the situation. “He turned sharply, saying, ‘Well, at least, we have our lives [to which Kennedy] replied, ‘Not all of us.’ With that,” Kennedy recalled, Churchill “dropped the subject at once.”21
He did not dispute the reality that the world war had saved Europe from Nazi domination and much of Asia from Japanese domination. But had it made the world a safer or more tolerant place? Had it brought the American people any added measure of security? In Europe, one enemy, Germany, had been replaced by another, the Soviet Union; one alien, un-Christian, freedom-denying, authoritarian ideology, nazism, by another, communism. To those who argued that the war had eliminated a great evil from the world, Kennedy countered in a June 1946 commencement address at Colby Junior College for Women in New Hampshire that “evil forces there will always be . . . if not Hitler and his gang, then their prototype.” War, he insisted, was not the answer to evil in the world; it solved nothing, protected no one.22
Knowing as we do today the full extent of Hitler’s murderous intent, it is difficult for us, as it was difficult for those who greeted victory in 1945, not to celebrate World War II as a triumph of good over evil. From Kennedy’s perspective, the victory o
ver Hitler had cost much and accomplished little. It would not bring back his son or the millions of young men murdered on the battlefields of Europe. And it would most certainly not bring back to life the six million Jews who had perished. Their fate, he believed, had been determined long before American troops set off across the ocean. As he had argued in 1938 and 1939, there was only one way the Jews of Europe might have been protected: through a comprehensive agreement with Hitler that provided for their rescue and resettlement. Once that effort failed and was abandoned, the future of European Jewry was left in the hands of one man, Adolf Hitler.
Unlike his friend Frank Murphy, who in early January 1944 announced that he would serve as chairman of the National Committee Against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews, Kennedy said nothing, wrote nothing, voiced no concern over the fate of European Jews, no outrage at anti-Semitism abroad or at home. As he told Boston reporter Joseph Dinneen in an unpublished interview in May 1944, “Anti-Semitism is their fight—just as anti-Irishism was my fight and the fight of my fathers in this country. . . . I have never discussed anti-Semitism in public, because I could never see how it would be helpful. Whenever I have been asked for a statement condemning anti-Semitism, I have answered: ‘What good would it do?’ If the Jews themselves would pay less attention to advertising their racial problem, and more attention to solving it, the whole thing would recede into its proper perspective. It’s entirely out of focus now, and that is chiefly their fault. . . . Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.”23
As far as he had journeyed from East Boston “outsider” to “insider,” Kennedy still divided the worlds he inhabited between “us” and “them,” Irish Catholics and everyone else. Though Protestants constituted the bulk of the “them” category, the Jews remained the quintessential “other” for him, as they did for most Catholics and Protestants alike. He had several close Jewish friends, Arthur Goldsmith and later in life Carroll Rosenbloom, the Baltimore businessman and future National Football League owner who lived in Palm Beach. As much as he enjoyed their company, he could never look past the fact that they were Jews. His letters to them were filled with joking references to their Jewishness. He meant no harm in this—and none was taken, but it was symptomatic of his worldview. The Jews were a different people with different values, talents, and objectives. Like Irish Catholics, they looked after their own, but with unparalleled intensity, dedication, and success. And that was what made them dangerous. He understood and sympathized with Jewish attempts to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but he remained convinced that such loyalties had biased their judgment and made them unfit for government service.
All through the war, he had privately criticized Roosevelt for his reliance on Jewish advisers like Felix Frankfurter. Now, in 1945, after the world had learned of the death camps, he complained once again at what he still believed was the overrepresentation of Jews in high positions. As always, he disguised his criticism as concern.
In March 1945, he told his cousin Joe Kane that he had warned Arthur Krock, who happened to be Jewish, that he “couldn’t think of anything worse for the Jewish people” than that so many of them had been appointed by Roosevelt to postwar planning positions. A month later, in April, he complained about Bernard Baruch, whose trip to Europe as the president’s “special economic adviser,” he claimed, “makes a perfect answer for the German charge that the Jews control the situation.”24
His relief was almost palpable when Truman took office in mid-April 1945 and, as he had promised, dismissed Henry Morgenthau as treasury secretary, removed Samuel Rosenman from the White House, and sidelined Felix Frankfurter as presidential adviser. “The Jews are crying that they’ve lost their greatest friend and benefactor,” Kennedy wrote Kick soon after Roosevelt’s death. “It’s again a clear indication of the serious mistake that the Jews had in spite of their marvelous organizing capacity. They made all their bets on one man rather than on some real social improvement. Then the man dies, and their hope for social improvement dies with him. . . . Fundamentally, what has happened in this country is that the people believe that the day of free spending and the power of certain groups to control the future life of this country are finished.”25
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Kennedy was temporarily invigorated by the accession of the new president and would not have been surprised, he told Kick, if Truman offered him a position. “If it’s anything I can do, I’ll probably take it on the basis that everybody should help if they can.”
Still, he preferred sticking to his plan of retiring from public life in favor of his children. If Truman did get around to offering him a job, he was “seriously considering . . . whether I might not say to him that I’d like to help any way I can; but if he’s going to give me a job, I’d rather have him give it to Jack and maybe make him the minister to some country or Assistant Secretary of State or Assistant Secretary of the Navy, or something of that sort. I haven’t mentioned it to Jack yet, but I’m thinking it over.”26
For a brief moment that spring, it was almost as if the old days had returned and his advice, friendship, and support were again valued in Washington. On May 15, he met with Herbert Hoover, who had heard that Truman wanted to see him but didn’t think it appropriate for a Republican ex-president to request an appointment with the Democratic president. Kennedy agreed that the invitation should come from Truman and called a contact at the White House to suggest as much. When Truman subsequently invited Hoover to the White House, Kennedy took it as a sign that he was a Washington insider again. “My observation to Rose . . . was that it is a strange thing that a little fellow from East Boston, who had been out with the Administration for four or five years because of his war position, should be called upon to bring an Ex-President of the United States and the new President of the United States together for the first time.”27
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Joe Jr. was gone, Jack was an invalid, and Rosemary was still at Craig House, able to walk but unable to speak, write, or perform the simplest tasks, and in need of twenty-four-hour custodial care. Kick had decided that she was going to remain in England and was attempting now to build a life for herself. Her father wrote her long letters every week. There was little more he could do for his oldest children. But he had five others who were approaching adulthood and needed his guidance.
Bobby had enlisted in the navy and was in training in Lewiston, Maine. In January 1945, put off because he was nineteen and his father still wrote to him as if he were a child, he asked him to “write me a letter as you used to Joe & Jack about what you think about the different political events and the war as I’d like to understand what’s going on better than I now do.” Kennedy was only too happy to oblige. The main point of tension between father and son remained Bobby’s burning desire to get into the war. Kennedy was able to delay that moment by convincing Bobby to go to officer candidate school, as his brothers had. “I should like to have him get as far along in his school as possible and then get him out as reasonably soon after the war as I can,” Kennedy wrote Joe Kane on March 19, 1945. “I want Bobby to have a college education and then really get busy. With Joe gone and Jack still a long way from being well, there is plenty of slack for Bobby to take up.”28
Ted, at thirteen years of age, was too young to even contemplate military service, but not too young, his father believed, to think seriously about his future. “When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, Dad called me into his room for a chat. I must have done something that prompted the conversation, but I don’t remember what it was.” He had expected some sort of reprimand. Instead, he got a gentle lecture on what it meant to be a Kennedy. “There are a lot of children in this family and they are all trying to do useful things. If you don’t want to do important and useful things, that’s your choice, but I don’t have time to waste. If you want to do something imp
ortant and useful, then I’ll help you out.” Ted left the room, ecstatic that instead of scolding him, his father had offered his assistance.29
He held his daughters to the same standard. At a time when most American parents, particularly those who were rich and Irish Catholic, pushed their daughters to find husbands, Kennedy encouraged and assisted his in finding work. Although the median age at which women married in the 1940s and 1950s was twenty, the three youngest Kennedy daughters would go into the workplace first, then marry later: Eunice at thirty-two, Pat at thirty, and Jean at twenty-eight.30
Eunice’s first job, secured for her by her father, was at the State Department working with returning POWs in the Special War Problems Division. Her next job, which her father also got for her, was with the Justice Department. If she wasn’t happy with it, he advised her, she should “have no hesitancy in dropping it. Don’t stick it out just because you think you should. The important thing is to be happy with your job.” When Eunice, as Bobby had, asked her father to send his thoughts on politics and the economic situation, he happily complied, answered her questions, and sent her a copy of a recent speech he had given in Boston.31
Because Patricia was particularly good with numbers, when she graduated, Kennedy found a place for her at the Bache firm on Wall Street. When she decided not to take it, he found her work with Father Patrick Peyton, “the Rosary Priest,” who staged radio, television, and live theater performances to promote the praying of the family rosary.32
After Jean, the youngest of his daughters, confided to her father that she had no idea what she wanted to do when she graduated, he suggested that she start out in public relations and see if that kind of work suited her. She agreed and he found jobs at the Merchandise Mart, which he now owned, and a place for her and a friend to live in Chicago. After two years in public relations, Jean took a position with Father James Keller on his weekly television show, The Christophers.33