by David Nasaw
On New Year’s Eve, Kennedy wrote to ask if Ford, when he was next in Chicago, could “run up to the school at Jefferson, Wisconsin, and have a talk with Mary Bartholomew. . . . You know just what I have in mind and, after an examination of the place and a talk with the Nuns, I am sure you will be in a position to tell me what to think. I thought I would follow up with a visit myself, possibly in March or April.”35
Sometime that spring, Rosemary was moved from Craig House in Beacon, New York, to the St. Coletta school in Jefferson, Wisconsin. She would remain there for the rest of her life.
The school, as Cushing had said, was the “finest of its kind in the nation.” It was situated on a large, rural campus with rolling fields, parkland, gardens, and a farm that provided residents with fresh vegetables and meat. The buildings were old-fashioned multistory brick ones like the large parochial schools then found in every city in the nation. There was a beautiful church and chapel on the grounds, an auditorium with a stage for live shows and a Hollywood-style projector that Kennedy might very well have contributed, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, playgrounds and recreation facilities, boys’ and girls’ dormitories, and a graveyard for sisters and former residents.
Rosemary lived in her own ranch-style cottage about a mile from the school with two nun caretakers. She visited the main campus often to watch movies on Saturday nights, to go to church, and to take part in special events. According to her sister Jean, Rosemary was content and loved by the nuns and the other residents. “She has remained physically healthy and generally happy,” Rose would write several decades after Rosemary moved to St. Coletta. “She functions on a childlike level but is able to have excursions . . . and to do a little personal shopping for her needs—always with an attendant—and to enjoy life to the limit of her capacities. She is perfectly happy in her own environment and would be confused and disturbed at being anywhere else.”36
Johnnie Ford was charged with communicating with Sister M. Anastasia at St. Coletta. There is no evidence that anyone in the family either visited or was in contact with Rosemary or the nuns for the first ten or so years. Sometime in the late 1950s, after she had married and moved to Chicago, Eunice may have either visited St. Coletta or corresponded with Sister Anastasia.37
The nuns never ceased working with Rosemary to improve her mental and motor skills. In the spring of 1958, Sister Anastasia asked Johnnie Ford to “kindly assure Mr. Kennedy that Rosemary’s doctor will be here soon and we will discuss the possibility of speech improvement. Also, the summer school speech therapist will be here in June and we shall have her work with Rosemary along these lines.” There had, she reported, been a man who had asked to see Rosemary. He had said he was “in the army with Joe,” but “we told him that Rosemary does not wish to see anyone without the parents’ consent.” There had also been, that week alone, “three to four different parties and also children’s folks inquiring about Rosemary.” Rosemary’s presence, Sister Anastasia confided reluctantly, was posing quite a problem for fund-raising. “When we come with our sponsor drive, some folks flatly refuse, telling us we are endowed. One party went as far as to say that the entire estate of Rosemary’s was ours; also that ‘Kennedy’ supports the school.”38
Kennedy answered Sister Anastasia directly. He was “glad to see that you are considering the possibility of a speech therapist. Of course, you have always been authorized to do anything that you think would be of any help to Rosemary. All you have to do is to do it and send me the bill.” He was not surprised “that people are still inquiring about Rosemary. We still have hundreds of people riding down a private road here in Hyannis Port to take a look at our house. Natural curiosity does that.” He had no idea who the visitor had been, “and I do not care who the rest of them were or what their arguments were—your rules still stand.” As for fund-raising efforts, “we certainly do not want to hurt any of your drives, but anyone who knows of the great work which you are doing and looks for the excuses which you cite in your letter, I am afraid would never be of much help to you anyway.” He was, however, going to increase his financial support for the school. He expressed his gratitude for Sister Anastasia’s “persevering kindness” in making a home for Rosemary.39
Given the fact that the results of the lobotomy were irreversible, he was convinced, and probably rightly, that there was no better place for Rosemary than at St. Coletta. The fact that she was well taken care of and content was a godsend for the family, who would no longer have to worry about her and whether they were doing enough to watch out for and care for her.
The question that confounds us in the end is not why Rosemary was sent to live at St. Coletta, but why, once she was there, Kennedy did not attempt to visit her or to encourage his wife and children to do so. The most likely answer is that he thought it best for all of them to effect a permanent separation. It was certainly best for him, especially after the pain inflicted by the death of Kick, not to have to confront, face-to-face, what had become of his Rosie.
Only after Kennedy suffered his debilitating stroke and, like his daughter, lost his ability to speak, write, or communicate in words did his wife and children begin to visit Rosemary in Wisconsin and invite her to their homes. They did so still respecting his wishes and neither reporting back to him about his daughter nor suggesting that he see her again.
Joseph P. Kennedy would die in 1969 not having seen his eldest daughter for a quarter of a century.
Thirty-three
“THE GREAT DEBATE”
My dear Mr. President,” Kennedy wrote Harry Truman on January 31, 1950. “It is with great reluctance that I write you as I know how busy you are in these momentous days. I am writing you not as a Catholic but as the man more responsible than anyone for the suggestion of establishing the so-called Taylor mission at the Vatican.” He was concerned, as were Catholics everywhere, with Truman’s failure to appoint a successor to Myron Taylor, who had resigned in mid-January as the president’s representative to the Vatican. “At the present,” Kennedy informed Truman, “I am living in Palm Beach, Florida, but I could leave on Monday and would be available any day thereafter.”1
Six months later, no plan having been made to replace Taylor, Kennedy set up an appointment to meet with Truman in person. By the time he arrived at the White House at noon on June 30, there were other items of greater importance to discuss.
Five days earlier, the North Korean military had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. The American response had been immediate and dramatic. The United States delegate called for an immediate session of the UN Security Council and introduced a resolution condemning North Korea for its actions and demanding it withdraw all troops. In the absence of the Soviet delegates, who were boycotting the council, the resolution passed. On June 27, the United States introduced a second resolution, which also passed, calling on member nations to provide military assistance to South Korea to repel the attack from the North, That same day, Truman announced that American military forces would come to the defense of South Korea.
Kennedy was ushered in to see Truman at twelve thirty on June 30, just as an emergency cabinet meeting ended. “He told me he had been up since 4:30 that morning and that he was not going to let those sons of bitches push him around. His own impression was that he did not think the Russians would fight on this particular occasion. . . . He realizes that these are horrible times and that the decisions he is making are going to affect all civilization, but he considers it his responsibility and he is taking it on. . . . I said that I felt mentally very much as I did when Chamberlain guaranteed Poland because I felt that was the step that really made it impossible to leave anything further to negotiations.” The implication was that Truman, by coming to the military defense of South Korea, might be precipitating another world war. “If the French and British had stood up to Hitler,” Truman responded, as he was to the Communists in Korea, “the Germans would have retreated. Then he sa
id Chamberlain quit at Munich and he was not going to appease.” Only half in jest, Kennedy asked if Truman “didn’t feel as if he was handling this like a poker game. He looked up very much surprised, but I added there had to be a great deal of bluff in this sort of thing.” Truman, convinced the Russians were behind the North Korean incursion, responded that he had no choice now but “to make a firm gesture and didn’t think the Russians would accept the challenge.”
Kennedy let the issue die for the moment. “We then took up the question of the Vatican, which was my prime reason” for asking for the meeting. Again the president and his visitor disagreed on virtually everything.
On Myron Taylor: “I said I thought Taylor was a horse’s ass. He said he liked him. . . . He said he had received some fine information from Taylor and I said if he did he got it very incidentally.”
On eighty-four-year-old Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia: “He said that Cardinal Dougherty had been down to see him and that he was a great man. I said that I thought he was in his dotage.”
On the closing of Taylor’s office in Rome: “I understood that the American office at the Vatican had been closed without consultation with the Pope, and he said that was not so.”
On the clandestine aid that the United States had funneled through the Vatican to the Christian Democrats to support their election contest with the Communists: “I also told him that the Vatican had not been very well treated on the question of money in the last Italian election. He told me that the United States spent one billion dollars. . . . I said if they did the Vatican did not even get the six million dollars which I understood they had been promised.”
The president was as blunt and plainspoken with Kennedy as Kennedy was with him. “As far as the Vatican is concerned, he is not going to take all the abuse that the Protestants and Oxnam [Garfield Bromley Oxnam, the Methodist bishop of New York who was leading the opposition to American diplomatic relations with the Vatican] have been heaping on him all the time for keeping Taylor there. He is going to let Congress take it from here in.” He would make no recommendations about renewing or discontinuing American representation to the Vatican until after the midterm elections.
After thirty-five minutes, Kennedy withdrew. The president, he recorded in his diary, had been “most agreeable and pleasant and was not the slightest bit rushed in getting me out of the office.”2
In his report to Count Galeazzi on his meeting, Kennedy did not blame Truman for playing politics with the question of American diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The bitter truth was that there were more Protestant voters in America than Catholic ones. If the Catholic minority was to get the respect—and diplomatic representation—it deserved and required, it would have to follow the example of American Jews and organize itself better. “I still believe, as I told the Pope, and as I told you, that until the day comes when the hierarchy of the United States make up their minds that they should have political influence, we are not going to fare well in this country, and unless we do it right away, the opportunity will be lost. A Jewish minority group, well-organized, gets whatever it wants and we get nothing.”3
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On September 27, 1950, in the third month of the war, President Truman authorized Douglas MacArthur to cross the thirty-eighth parallel into North Korea. The invasion was launched on October 9. American troops pushed north along two flanks, one on the eastern coast and the other on the western coast of the peninsula. By late October, the invasion was proceeding so smoothly that the New York Times declared editorially that “we can now be easy in our minds as to the military outcome.” On November 24, the day after Thanksgiving, when his troops were within shouting distance of China, General MacArthur announced his final “home by Christmas” offensive.
The following evening, three hundred thousand Chinese troops crossed the border into North Korea and mounted a full-scale attack on the UN/American troops. “We face an entirely new war,” MacArthur cabled the Joint Chiefs of Staff on November 28.
Truman chose to fight on and so informed the American people at a November 30 press conference. When asked if “use of the atomic bomb [was] under active consideration,” he answered, “Always has been. It is one of our weapons.”4
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On October 2, 1950, Honey Fitz died. Beloved by his grandchildren, tolerated by his son-in-law, he had been a force in all of their lives, but, perhaps, most particularly in Jack’s. No one had been more delighted than Honey Fitz when Jack decided to run for the seat he had held; no one worked harder on his behalf; and no one enjoyed the campaign and the victory more than he had.
A month after his grandfather’s death, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to his third term in Congress.
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In mid-December, Joseph P. Kennedy spoke at the University of Virginia Law School Student Legal Forum at the invitation of its president, Robert F. Kennedy. James Landis had drafted a serviceable, entirely uncontroversial address on lawyers and public service, but Kennedy put it aside in favor of his first major foreign policy speech since leaving government service.
He seized the occasion—and the press coverage he was able to garner for it—to restate and reemphasize his opposition to Truman Doctrine aid to Turkey and Greece, Marshall Plan assistance to Europe, the organization of NATO, and recent congressional appropriations for military assistance overseas. What, he asked, had these billions of dollars accomplished? Nothing. The Truman policy was “suicidal” and “politically and morally” bankrupt. Kennedy called for a complete about-face. He challenged every central tenet of the Cold War consensus: that the Soviets were ideologically and politically committed to expanding their empire; that Moscow controlled Communist parties and regimes everywhere and always would; that the United States was rich enough to police the world against Communist aggression without damaging the domestic economy; that any attempt at negotiation with Communists would embolden them to further aggression as “appeasement” in the 1930s had emboldened the Japanese, Italians, and Germans.
The policy recommendations that followed from these premises were startling in their radicalism, their coherence, and their distance from Truman’s policies. “A first step . . . is to get out of Korea—indeed, to get out of every point in Asia we do not plan realistically to hold in our own defense. . . . The next step . . . is to apply the same principle in Europe.” Communism was neither monolithic nor eternal; Soviet influence might spread into Europe, but only for the short term. Communist parties outside the Soviet Union “will soon develop splinter organizations that will destroy the singleness that today characterizes Russian Communism. Tito in Yugoslavia is already demonstrating this fact. Mao in China is not likely to take his orders too long from Stalin.”
Kennedy recognized that his recommendations would “be criticized as ‘appeasement.’” But he did not run away from the term. “If it is wise in our interest not to make commitments that endanger our security, and this is appeasement, then I am for ‘appeasement.’” His was a realistic foreign policy, one that, unlike Truman’s, was “in accord with our historic traditions. We have never wanted a part of other peoples’ scrapes. . . . What business is it of ours to support French colonial policy in Indo-China or to achieve Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concepts of democracy in Korea. . . . We can do well to mind our business and interfere only where somebody threatens our business and our homes. . . . The suggestions I make . . . would—and I count this most—conserve American lives for American ends, not waste them in the freezing hills of Korea or on the battle-scarred plains of Western Europe.”5
Kennedy made sure that his speech got attention in the papers the next morning by sending out advanced copies. The Hearst papers responded, as he knew they would, with glowing editorials and long excerpts. “We think it offers a clear and hard-headed basis of hope in these times when people’s faces are clouded with fear and sickly anxiety for the future.” Arthur Krock claimed
that “a bipartisan group [was already] veering towards the position stated this week by Joseph P. Kennedy . . . that the United States should build the greatest military power in history, concentrate it in the Western Hemisphere and on our Pacific security line, and let Europe and Asia go Communist in the meantime if that shall be the result.” Even Walter Lippmann found Kennedy’s arguments oddly compelling. The American public, Lippmann wrote in his December 19, 1950, column, had become so out of sympathy with Truman’s thunderous globalism and bombastic rhetoric that it was willing now to give isolationists like Kennedy a hearing. What Lippmann feared was that Kennedy’s brand of extremist isolationism, which would take the nation back “to the positions we occupied in 1939,” would overwhelm more moderate approaches. “A new doctrine which is far short of the globalism of the Truman Doctrine on the one hand and of the isolationism of Mr. Kennedy on the other will have to be formulated if the isolationist sentiment is not to become irresistible and overwhelming.”6
Kennedy would later claim, and with some justification, that his speech launched what Life magazine would on January 8, 1951, refer to as “the great debate.” While Henry Luce—and his magazines—disagreed with almost everything Kennedy espoused, particularly his recommendation that the United States withdraw from Korea (Luce wanted instead to extend the war and liberate China), the editors admitted that the speech had “created a minor stir.” Printing three columns of letters endorsing Kennedy’s speech, the Wall Street Journal explained the omission of critical letters by saying it just hadn’t received any yet.
A week after Kennedy spoke, Herbert Hoover delivered his own heavily promoted and nationally broadcast address. Whether Hoover’s speech was occasioned by Kennedy’s, we do not know, but the similarities in their isolationist sentiments and recommendations were such that they were soon conflated into what James Reston and others began to refer to as the Hoover-Kennedy side of the debate. Kennedy could be dismissed as a quirky, bitter voice of negativity. But when Hoover took up many of the same themes, the Cold Warriors felt obliged to hit back hard. The ex-president and the ex-ambassador were derided as reactionaries, defeatists, isolationists, appeasers, and Communist sympathizers or dupes. A New York Times editorial noted almost gleefully that Pravda had published the full texts of both their speeches.