by David Nasaw
Kennedy had given money earlier to Catholic charities and institutions and expected to do the same with the foundation’s funds. He had asked nothing in return for his earlier gifts, but he wanted those given by the foundation to be named for and to serve as memorials to his son. Buildings were a poor substitute for a living body, but they would, he hoped, sustain the memory of his firstborn. There was less vanity here than a genuine and desperate desire of a father to keep his son’s name alive.
The foundation would serve other purposes as well, at least in its early years. It would solidify the family’s political base in Boston and Massachusetts and, by calling attention to Kennedy beneficence, subtly shift the conversation away from the source and size of his fortune to the uses he intended to make of it on behalf of the community. The first foundation gift had been the $600,000 check that Jack had presented to Archbishop Cushing just before election day in 1946. In his second year of giving and thereafter, Kennedy maximized the political impact of the donations by giving money not only to Irish Catholic institutions, but to Italian Catholic and Polish Catholic and a few Jewish and nonsectarian ones as well.7
Kennedy appointed as foundation directors four of the men closest to him: Eddie Moore, Johnnie Ford, Paul Murphy, and James Fayne, whom Kennedy had worked with at Hayden, Stone, brought to the SEC, and would hire full-time to work in the New York office in 1949. Jack was the fifth director and the first president. (In 1947, Ford would be replaced on the board by Eunice; in 1953, after Jack’s election to the Senate, he would be replaced as president by Bobby.)
So as not to waste money on unnecessary infrastructure, the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation had no program officers, accountants, evaluators, or staff of any sort. It was run out of Kennedy’s New York office. As foundation president, Jack did little more than sign letters and appear at ceremonies.
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Kennedy had surrounded himself with an extraordinary group of business executives, accountants, researchers, tax men, and real estate experts who he had no doubt could run a foundation in addition to overseeing his investments. A large number of them had worked with him in Boston, New York, Washington, and London. Several, after leaving his employment, had returned. Paul Murphy was in operational control of the office; Johnnie Ford oversaw the New England concerns, including Kennedy’s theater business; John Reynolds ran the real estate operation; John Burns, the former Harvard Law School professor and superior court justice whom Kennedy had brought to the SEC as general counsel and who had remained a close friend and business associate ever since, was now in private practice. He continued to work on retainer for Kennedy, who insisted that his business concerns be given precedence over those of Burns’s other clients.
Sometime after the war, Burns, who had taken on several important clients, including Hearst and the New York Archdiocese, informed Kennedy that he needed more time for them. He was weary of being on constant call and of having to work on whatever Kennedy threw him, no matter how trivial it might be (“I didn’t go to Harvard Law School to spend my life disputing Rose’s bills at Bergdorf’s”). Kennedy threatened that if Burns left, he would tell everyone who mattered that he had been fired. Burns responded that he knew enough to sink Kennedy and that if Kennedy dared do anything to threaten his livelihood and interfere with his capacity to provide for his family, he would open doors that Kennedy needed closed and locked. Burns left Kennedy’s employment, but neither man ever said anything about the circumstances under which he departed. Remarkably, while their fathers remained estranged, the Burns and Kennedy children would remain closely connected for the rest of their lives.8
James Landis, former Harvard Law School dean, chair of the SEC and the Civil Aeronautics Board, and as distinguished a jurist as Burns, stepped into the role that he had occupied. In December 1947, Tommy Corcoran called Kennedy in Palm Beach to say that he had learned that President Truman was not going to reappoint Landis as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Kennedy contacted Landis to offer him a job. “Come on down to Palm Beach and just announce that ‘I’m associated with the Kennedy enterprises.’ . . . I’ll get hold of Arthur Krock and see to it that the Times carries that story, that you are leaving in order to take a job with the Kennedy enterprises.” When Landis asked what he would be doing in this job, Kennedy responded, “We’ll figure that out after you’re down here. You’ll need a rest for a while.” Kennedy’s intervention saved Landis “from a great deal of embarrassment,” financial and personal, at having been ousted from his Washington position.9
Kennedy quickly found work for Landis, most of it far beneath his capacities. Landis drafted letters, wrote speeches, reviewed legal contracts, and when Clare Boothe Luce decided to run for Congress, undertook a “racial and religious makeup of Fairfield County” for her. He also served as Kennedy’s research assistant and coauthor for an article in Life magazine and a pamphlet, The Surrender of King Leopold, which refuted Churchill’s claim that because the Belgian king had not notified the Allies in advance, his surrender to the Germans in May 1940 had had dire effects on the course of the fighting in Europe and the evacuation of the British troops at Dunkirk.
Landis’s primary task, however, was trying to put Kennedy’s diplomatic memoirs into publishable order. Since returning from London ten years earlier, Kennedy had been working on the project with help from a variety of editors, researchers, and several of his children. With Elizabeth Walsh, who also worked full-time for Kennedy, and for a time Jean Kennedy, Landis did the historical research that was required to fill in the narrative, fact-checked the manuscript, contacted men cited in the document (such as Sumner Welles and Arthur Krock) to check their recollections, organized and redrafted and rewrote. Several drafts and many years later, a readable, rather accurate, but insensately ponderous history of the prewar years, with Kennedy at its center, was completed. The book was never published—not, as would later be charged, because Kennedy’s analysis of American diplomacy from 1938 to 1940 might cause difficulties for his boys’ political careers, but because it was too boring for a general audience and too light for a specialized academic readership. “As I look at the book,” Kennedy reluctantly concluded in a letter to publisher Paul Palmer in March 1955, “I am not dead sure that there are very many things that are of any great import.”10
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Six and a half years after his resignation as ambassador, in July 1947, Kennedy accepted another government appointment, this one unpaid and part-time, on the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, which, chaired by former president Herbert Hoover, would become known as the Hoover Commission. The legislation establishing the commission provided for a membership of twelve, half government officials, half private citizens, appointed in equal portions by the president; Joe Martin, the Republican Speaker of the House; and the Republican president pro tempore of the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Kennedy accepted appointment out of respect for Hoover and only after being assured that he would not have to attend any meetings. Instead, he met occasionally with Hoover at his Waldorf Towers suite. Though Dean Acheson and James Forrestal, representing the Truman administration, did their best to influence the course of the deliberations, Hoover controlled the proceedings, the staffing of task forces, and the flow of information to commission members. Kennedy had no difficulties with any of this, as he trusted and respected former president Hoover much more than he did President Truman or any of his advisers.
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As Kennedy had predicted, President Truman’s proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to save Greece and Turkey from communism was followed by even larger requests.
In June 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall, speaking at the Harvard commencement, invited the nations of Europe to design a comprehensive economic recovery plan that the United States would fund. The proposal, which would be known as the Marshall Plan, had several objectives: to provide dollars to European nations to p
ay for American imports, to stabilize the European economies, and, most important, to forestall the economic crises that, it was widely feared, local Communist parties would capitalize on to win elections and seize power. When Kennedy wrote Kick that spring that he was sure “Italy and France will be definitely in the Communist orbit before the end of this year,” he was voicing what had become the accepted wisdom among Washington’s wise men.11
While Kennedy did not relish the idea of Communist-dominated governments and economies in Europe, he doubted that spending millions of American dollars was going to succeed in preserving democracy and capitalism abroad. On the contrary, he feared, it would exacerbate tensions with the Soviets and bring the world a step closer to war. He, of course, had the luxury of carefully balancing the pros and cons of Marshall’s plan before coming out for or against it. His son, the congressman from Massachusetts, did not. The voters in the eleventh district were staunchly anti-Communist and more than willing to spend American dollars to defeat or push back the Red menace.
Jack not only enthusiastically backed the Marshall Plan, but in the fall of 1947, undertook a fact-finding trip to Europe with two other congressman, one of them Richard Nixon, to investigate Communist influence on French and Italian labor. His first stop was Ireland, where he visited Kick at a castle owned by her in-laws. He was ill most of the time, though he did manage a visit to Dunganstown to meet his Irish cousins, the first of his family to do so.
On September 21, he returned to London en route to the continent and his fact-finding investigation. Arriving in London, he became so ill that he placed an emergency call to Kick’s friend Pamela Churchill. A doctor was located, examined Jack, and put him into the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease. He was flown home at once and admitted to a Boston hospital. The public was told that he suffered from a recurrence of his wartime malaria. For the rest of his life, Jack Kennedy would suffer and be treated for Addison’s disease while publicly declaring that he did not have it.
Jack had earlier agreed to be the keynote speaker at the fiftieth anniversary of the Cambridge Knights of Columbus on October 23. He was too ill to do so now and asked his father to pinch-hit. Though Kennedy’s views on the British loan, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan were out of line with his son’s, he remained enough of a political asset to serve as the congressman’s stand-in.
“I suppose a father is primarily interested more in his family than in any honor that can possibly come to him no matter how great it may be,” Kennedy began that evening in Cambridge. “My oldest boy ran for office here for the first time and became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.” The next line was going to be about Jack, but, Mark Dalton recalled, “the tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke of Joe and it took him about two minutes to get the grip.”12
Kennedy gathered himself and continued. He had, he reminded his audience, “opposed very bitterly the Truman Plan,” which, he did not add, his son had voted for. “I thought it was pouring money down the rathole.” He thought much the same about the Marshall Plan. Still, because the European nations were in dire economic distress, he was willing to “loan them five or six billion dollars or give it to them,” but only for a year. If, after that year, productivity was still low and organized labor uncooperative, or if any of the nations receiving American aid voted Socialists or Communists into their governments, the loans or gifts would not be renewed. He was not an anti-Communist hard-liner—and he made this clear. “I do not think it is the spread of Communism that is dangerous. . . . People are not embracing Communism as Communism, but they are discontented, insecure and unsettled and they embrace anything that looks like it might be better than what they have to endure. . . . It is very easy for anybody who has a job and is getting along all right to cry for democracy . . . but if you cannot feed your children and you do not know where the next meal is coming from, nobody knows what kind of freak you will follow.”13
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In the spring of 1948, Kennedy returned to Europe for his first extended visit since he had left seven and a half years before. He was on a personal fact-finding mission of sorts, looking for material to use as ammunition in his fight against the Marshall Plan. He sailed on the America on April 14 and took “the Commish,” Joe Timilty, with him. Although he commanded far less press and attention than he once had, the Boston papers kept track of his trip and his pronouncements. While he was in Paris, on April 18, the Christian Democrats in Italy, with the assistance of millions of dollars provided clandestinely by the CIA, defeated the Popular Front coalition of Socialists and Communists by nearly two to one. When the Boston Post contacted Kennedy for his reaction, he responded, consistent with his undying pessimism, that the results of the election, with 35 percent of the electorate voting Communist [in reality, the vote was 31 percent for the coalition of Socialists and Communists], were “more alarming than reassuring.”14
Interviewed in Paris by Bill Cunningham of the Boston Herald about his aspirations for his children, he declared: “In two words, it’s Public Service.” Bobby had graduated from Harvard and was “traveling through Europe, and even down into Greece, Turkey and such troublous districts.” Travel abroad, Kennedy told Cunningham, had been instrumental in interesting and equipping Jack “for a career of public service.” He hoped and expected “the same for Robert, in fact, for all his children. Cunningham asked about the girls, and Kennedy cited the instance of “daughter Eunice, who’s in Washington as a special assistant to Atty.-Gen. Tom Clark, working particularly upon the problem of juvenile delinquency.” “What we need now is selfless, informed, sincere representation and service at home and abroad. . . . Please don’t misunderstand me as trying to imply that my children are any smarter, or any better qualified than anybody else’s children. But we chance to be in a position in which they can be spared the necessity of supporting themselves. Spared that, why shouldn’t they better try to qualify to serve their country in some needed capacity, great or small, as they can prove themselves worthy?” He had, he insisted, “no copyright on the idea,” but he hoped nonetheless that it “spread widely. There are many other young men and women in the United States whose families could easily afford to make the same decision, and who are possibly better qualified than my own children for great service to America and to the world. . . . That has been our family plan for our children from the first. If it doesn’t work out with them, it could work out with some others.”15
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In May, Kennedy took the train to Rome for an audience with the pope, then returned to Paris to meet up with Kick, who was flying in with her fiancé, Peter Fitzwilliam. Only a few weeks earlier, Kick, at the tail end of her winter vacation in the United States, had informed the family that she intended to marry Fitzwilliam, an immensely wealthy, titled British Protestant, like Billy Hartington, but married, considerably older than Kick, and widely known as something of a bounder.
Kathleen Kennedy Hartington was, at age twenty-eight, three and a half years a widow and ready to move on. The year before, she had contemplated marriage to another “notorious ladies’ man,” also a Protestant, but her father had talked her out of it and she had been grateful to him for doing so. “Any ideas about that particular southern gentleman were passing fancies!” she had written him on her return to Great Britain. “You told me what you thought. I listened. The rest was up to me and in the cold light of morning after having the life I have had one doesn’t waste it going from El Morocco to the Stork Club. Not if one has any sense, one doesn’t.”16
She wasn’t going to be talked out of this marriage. Fitzwilliam was simply too charming, too rich, too gallant, too much fun. He had promised to divorce his wife to marry Kick. Jack had been the first to learn about Fitzwilliam during his trip to Ireland in August 1947, but he’d said nothing to his parents. When Rose heard about him that winter, she was so distraught at the prospect of her daughter besmirching her family’s good name
by marrying a Protestant divorcé that she threatened to sever all ties with her and cut off her allowance. Kennedy was crushed into silence by the news, though he agreed, to his daughter’s surprise and joy, to meet with her and Fitzwilliam in Paris, perhaps to try one final time to convince them to back away from their marriage plans.
Fitzwilliam had planned to spend a few days with Kick in Cannes before they met Kennedy in Paris. He chartered a private two-engine, eight-seat plane for the trip. When they stopped over to refuel in Paris, he decided to have lunch with a few of his friends rather than fly at once to Cannes. By the time he and Kick were ready to proceed, a thunderstorm was developing over the Rhone Valley and all commercial flights had been grounded. Fitzwilliam argued with the pilot until he agreed to fly. Their plane took off at 3:20 P.M. It never arrived.
Eunice Kennedy, who was working in Washington and shared a town house with Jack, was called to the phone at midnight by a Washington Post reporter who asked if the Lady Hartington reported killed in an airplane crash in France was her sister. She replied that there were two Lady Hartingtons. The reporter said that a passport had been found with the name Kathleen on it. Jack was reclining on a sofa listening to a recording of Finian’s Rainbow when Eunice told him what the reporter had said. He got in touch with Ted Reardon, his congressional assistant, and asked him to check on the story. Reardon phoned an hour later to confirm that it was indeed Kathleen who had died in the crash, along with Peter Fitzwilliam, and the plane’s pilot and co-pilot.