Greatly more handicapped—that is to say, more infantilized than she’d previously been—Rosemary now was unable to speak or walk. Even personality had been taken from her. From then on, only her father was allowed to see her. For her brothers and sisters, it was as if she’d stepped off the face of the earth. Joe Kennedy never told them the truth of what he’d done.
Rosemary’s surgery had been performed in November 1941. It was on Sunday, December 7, that the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor naval base brought the war Joseph Kennedy had so feared and so struggled against to America. Joe Kennedy, Jr., and his brother Jack were both already naval officers when the Japanese struck that Sunday morning. Joe was down in Jacksonville taking flight training. Jack was assigned to Naval Intelligence in Washington.
Playing touch football along with Lem Billings on the Washington Mall, Jack got the word on the car radio on their way to his apartment. Up at Portsmouth Priory, Bobby soon caught a glimpse at the coming war when the USS Ranger, an American aircraft carrier, headed into Narragansett Bay. Its presence provided him and other students the thrill of watching American planes in their dive-bombing practice. Bobby stayed intent on what was happening in the world beyond his school walls if only to keep up to date for possible conversations with his father. His roommates would quiz him at his request on the latest stories in The New York Times.
For the same reason—caring what his father would think—he worried about his grades. “If he got a 77 he would argue for a 78 and not give up,” a priest recalled. “He was remembered for that quality more than any other student in the history of this school.” Another way Bobby would likely be recalled by fellow students had to do with his mother’s visits. When she came to see him—Portsmouth, after all, had been her choice—he’d courteously introduce her around. But then, once she’d left, he’d have to endure hearing himself mockingly tagged as “Mrs. Kennedy’s little boy Bobby.”
With the war only a few months old, in the spring of 1942 suddenly Portsmouth Priory joined the list of schools Bobby Kennedy no longer attended. Once again he had no choice in the matter. But this time it was different. Desperate to escape a failing grade, he’d peeked at a stolen exam being shared around the dormitory; he was caught and quickly confessed. Now came a dire warning from his father. It concerned his future. “Don’t, I beg you, waste any time.” It summed up the senior Kennedy’s way of looking at life. For Joe, it was a race, you against the other guy. The earlier you began, the better your chances of winning.
His next stop would be Milton Academy—which, thankfully, would be the last school to go on the list. In November 1942, he transferred there, and the effects, over the next two years, were positive. Founded in 1798, Milton had been established originally as a Massachusetts land-grant coeducational school. But at the turn of the last century, it divided itself into two schools, with boys and girls separate. Though it would later change back, in Bobby’s era it remained the traditional New England boys prep school it had become. There he was able to settle and be himself in a way he had not before.
Bobby Kennedy wasn’t clever or bookish like Jack, nor did he have that brother’s ready charm. He wasn’t a classically well-rounded young specimen like his oldest brother, Joe. He lacked his brothers’ gift for easy camaraderie, for athletics, for scholastic attainment, for impressing girls. What he had instead was a gut determination to hang in there, to overcome whatever stood in his way. Here’s how one teammate described him: “Bobby ran every practice play and tackled and blocked dummies as if he were in a hard-fought game.”
At the same time, he seemed to have no interest at all in whether his efforts were approved or not by his classmates. His sense of humor was caustic rather than wry. He had a chip on his shoulder and a short fuse. He was, and liked playing, “the Mick,” embracing his Irish rebelliousness.
Most crucially at Milton, Bobby, as Jack had done at Choate with Lem Billings, would forge a lifelong friendship. The new pal’s name was Dave Hackett, who lived in Dedham, a neighboring town. Hackett was both a legendary football and hockey star at Milton, in his own day and afterward. He would be a literary legend as well. That’s because, having met him one year at summer school, writer John Knowles later used him as a model for “Finny,” the prep school golden boy in his classic 1957 novel, A Separate Peace.
“I think we became friends right away,” Hackett recalled of his first encounter with Bobby. “I think, maybe, my first impression of him was that we were both, in a way, misfits. I think he was a bit of a misfit because of coming in both late and also because of who he was, and so he didn’t fit into Milton easily at that time. I think that was because his name was Kennedy and he was an Irish Catholic and Milton was basically an Anglo-Saxon, WASP school.” Hackett could have added the father’s notoriety, Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation as a “bootlegger.”
What impressed Dave about Bobby was his impulsive fearlessness. Hackett couldn’t believe it when he saw his new friend—who’d invited him one Sunday to join him at a nearby Catholic church—dart up to the altar. Kennedy was seventeen at the time. “There was no altar boy, and the priest said he needed somebody. So Bobby just got up and became an altar boy.” It was this readiness to do what others would be afraid to do that Hackett so admired. “From the moment I met him I knew he would embarrass his friends,” Hackett said.
“He would move into those situations where most of us would not. I think if anybody got into trouble he would just instinctively move right into it, whereas most people are too afraid to be embarrassed.” He appreciated, too, the fact that Bobby refused to compromise in order to win acceptance, that he refused to tell or listen to dirty jokes, how he would step in when a bigger student was pushing around someone from a younger class.
Bobby loved that Hackett could see all this in him. His father certainly hadn’t. He had once asked him if something could be done for the poor people they saw from a train window. The senior Kennedy simply dismissed the question. Dave Hackett, on the other hand, clearly liked what he saw in Bobby. “I think what he did have was always compassion for other people who had problems. I think part of this was that he did not find anything easy. Things did not come easy to him, so he was very sympathetic to other people who did not have it easy. I think what he never had compassion for was . . . wealth that was not used properly by the privileged. He had very little compassion for that.”
Looking back to their time together at Milton, Hackett would recall the under-the-radar profile Bobby Kennedy kept there. “I think if you talked to most people who knew him at that time, there would be very few who would have said that he’d be a remarkable person.” But if others didn’t take notice of Bobby’s soul, Hackett did. “I think that his basic character and characteristics were there that made him what he was later on.” Here was a friend who valued Bobby’s natural human charity and desire to intervene on behalf of the less favored, traits his father couldn’t—and wouldn’t—ever appreciate or respect.
The two would talk about how they’d never come in contact with people—the poor, especially—who faced lives without the same privileges they had. They also agreed how lucky they were to go to a school like Milton.
The bond held. As Bobby’s younger sister, Jean, put it, “Once a person was his friend, Bobby was loyal for life.”
Bobby with football teammates on the steps of the Harvard Varsity Club, 1946.
CHAPTER FOUR
RITES OF PASSAGE
“After every charge and thud of the footballers . . . he felt his body small and weak among the throng of players.”
—JAMES JOYCE, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
During his two years at Milton, Bobby’s thoughts were never far from the war and his brothers who were fighting it. Eager to get into action, Jack had asked to be transferred from Naval Intelligence to the PT boats. He was now on his maiden voyage as a skipper, headed down to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Joe Jr. was a naval aviator anxious to get overseas. “I want to go over th
ere and bomb the hell out of those Nazis,” he told one of his Choate classmates. It was a marked shift from the antiwar attitudes he’d shared with his father.
His mother, taking her husband’s lead, played into this wartime rivalry between Jack and his older brother. She did this by conspicuously wearing Joe Jr.’s gold wings, which he’d given her, the recognition of his new status as a naval aviator. The fact that she never went anywhere without it prompted Jack to seek equal billing: he had her turn his PT boat silver tie clip into a brooch.
Meanwhile, the third brother was showing his spirited independence. In a letter to his mother he described talking to his father and hearing his latest scheme to have FDR call him into action. Since Joe’s pre–December 7, 1941, posture on U.S. intervention had drawn wide scorn, Bobby couldn’t resist a shot at the old man. “Dad just phoned from N.Y. and said he was going down to Washington . . . to see the president tomorrow which sounds pretty exciting for the president, but I suppose there are other almost as exciting things happening in life right now.”
In February, Bobby’s second semester at his new school, Jack shipped out for the South Pacific. While still aboard the transport USS Rochambeau, he had his first glimpse at the war he was about to enter. A Japanese pilot, shot down while attacking their vessel, now was floating off the side. Suddenly he threw off his life jacket, pulled out his gun, and started shooting up at the bridge, clearly attempting to kill the captain and other officers. For the first time, it sank into Jack that with enemies like this, the war was going to be a long one.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Kennedy and his twelve-man crew were assigned to the Russell Islands at the end of May 1943. Their dangerous job was to attack the Japanese convoys regularly passing through. In the dark early morning hours of August 2, an enemy destroyer cut Jack’s wooden-hulled boat in half, killing two of his men. Kennedy then led his crew to a tiny deserted island nearly four miles distant. Their endurance reaching it was remarkable, his own even more so—for he swam four hours in enemy waters while pulling a badly injured crewman, Patrick McMahon, by a strap clenched in his teeth. For six days, Jack held his men together, on two different islands, towing engineer McMahon a second time, never quitting his duty to signal possible rescuers. He would later downplay his extraordinary heroism, saying, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” But no one believed it.
Thrilled by his brother’s courage at sea, Bobby was now eager to join Jack in the South Pacific. This struck Jack as a horrible idea and he let his parents know it.
I don’t think he should. By the time he’s ready to get out here the usefulness of the boats will be done, I think. I think he should go into that V-12 [the naval officers training program] and stay there for a good long time. He’s too young to be out here for a while. When he has at least a year of college he’ll be more effective and he will be better able to handle a job. The war will last long enough for him. . . . Try to come steaming out here at 18 is no good. It’s just that the fun goes out of war in a fairly short time and I don’t think Bobby is ready yet to come out.
That October, about to turn eighteen, Bobby went on his own and enlisted in the Naval Reserve as an apprentice seaman. It was what he wanted most to do. His father, however, had other ideas. Through the senior Kennedy’s hasty intervention, Bobby was quickly released from active duty and ordered to enter the officers training program as Jack had recommended.
In March 1944, leaving Milton early, Bobby began the V-12 officers training program at Harvard. In a letter to Dave Hackett, he wrote: “We haven’t really had too much action here on Harvard Square, but we’re on the alert at every moment. Wishing I were still back at Milton where, although I might not have any friends, I had a radio I could listen to and had pictures of my family I could look at.” He also joked “the hope still remains in the family that the navy will make a man out of me.”
Then he added mischievously, his tribalism coming to the fore: “Say hello to all the Irish Catholics for me and tell ’em that next to John F. Fitzgerald and J. P. Kennedy, I’m the toughest Irishman that lives which makes me the toughest man that lives.” It was a boast about his grandfathers they both could enjoy, since Milton’s “Mick” population was quite small.
In the summer of 1944, Bobby was on the Cape. Jack, returned to the U.S., was still laid up in Boston’s Chelsea Naval Hospital recovering from back surgery. That June he had been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. It cited him for “extremely heroic conduct as Commanding Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 109.” Strangers, seeing Bobby in Hyannis and mistaking him for Jack, would stop him on the street to offer their congratulations. He loved it!
Brother Joe, however, had a more conflicted response to Jack’s “outstanding courage, endurance, and leadership.” At a farewell dinner in his honor—he was heading off to Britain to start duty as a naval aviator—he had to listen to the following toast: “To Ambassador Joe Kennedy,” a guest proposed, “the father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.”
The tribute the guest intended and what Joe heard were two different things. His father repeatedly told his children, “We don’t have any losers around here. In this family we want winners—and don’t come in second or third—that doesn’t count.” How could the younger Joe feel any different?
Later that night, Joe was seen lying in his bed, clenching and unclenching his fists, saying loudly to himself, “By God, I’ll show them.” It wasn’t an idle boast. By that August, he’d already completed his designated number of missions, along the way losing a copilot as well as a number of other close friends. Yet he’d kept refusing to accept the leave due him. Instead, he’d obstinately continued to fly combat missions through June and July. When his crew took leave and headed for home, he stayed behind.
One reason he remained was the news he’d heard of an upcoming mission both secret and highly dangerous. “He had already written us a letter telling us that he was on his way home,” Jean recalled. “But then another letter arrived. He’d volunteered for just one more assignment before coming home.”
Joseph Kennedy associate Arthur Krock was one of those who believed the motive driving his eldest son to further risk was a desire to rescue the family name. “I share the opinion of some,” Krock wrote, “that Joe had been influenced to undertake his fatal final mission—after having completed all his scheduled flights and well knowing the hazard—to disprove a slander, common among the British of that time of their resentment against the Ambassador’s Boston interview, that the Kennedys were ‘yellow.’ ”
The lieutenant’s assigned target was a V-2 rocket-launching site in Normandy. When approaching it, the mission called for him to bail out, leaving his plane filled with high explosives over to the remote control of a pair of bombers flying alongside. Before he could do this, his plane exploded.
In his last letter to his son in Britain, Joe told him that he’d figured out why he kept delaying his departure from Europe. “I can quite understand how you feel about staying there because the worst of it is certainly better than anything in the Pacific.” Grotesquely, he was telling his son, who was facing the most terrifying mission of his life, that it was all his way to avoid the real fighting.
Jean remembered that when the tragic news arrived in Hyannis Port that Sunday the voice of Bing Crosby was rising from the phonograph, crooning the wartime standard “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was after the arrival of two priests at the house that Joe Kennedy made the announcement all had been dreading. “Children, your brother Joe has been lost. He died flying a volunteer mission. I want you all to be particularly good to your mother.” He then told his surviving children that they must proceed with their plans for the day. Since they intended to go sailing, they did, Bobby obeying along with the others. Jack, never one to take orders, went for a walk alone on the beach.
Here now was mortality in their midst. “Success was so assured and inevitable,” Jack reflected, “that his death seems to have c
ut into the natural order of things.”
He understood instantly that buried in the announcement they’d just heard was news addressed to him personally. The torch had been passed.
In November of 1944, Bobby found himself transferred from Harvard’s V-12 group to the one at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. During this period, Dave Hackett—who’d left Milton Academy during his junior year to become an army paratrooper—received an update from him, confessing that he felt his “usual moody self.” Bobby went on: “I get very sad at times. If I don’t get the hell out of here soon, I’ll die.”
In Europe, with the Allied forces having reached into Germany, his concern over missing out on wartime action was real. Hearing stories of their Milton classmates’ exploits overseas, he told Dave, made him feel “more and more like a draft dodger. I suppose somebody has to be in the V-12, but the attitudes of some of these guys really makes me mad, especially after Joe being killed.”
One night at supper, a fellow trainee declared, “I won’t be the last man killed.” Bobby couldn’t let it pass: “That’s not the right attitude to have. My brother didn’t feel that way.” “Your brother is a jerk,” the man said, causing Bobby to leap from the table and grab ahold of him by the neck. A witness said it took a group of them to pry Kennedy off.
In March of the following year, 1945, Bobby wrote Hackett again about how much he hated the whole setup at Bates, or as he called it, “this G. D. place.” Keeping up his morale was the hope he would soon be a naval aviator like Joe. “It looks like I will fly like a bird and attempt to get my wings of gold. That all sounds very grand, but you know me. . . . I wish to hell there weren’t so many problems and that people would have let me alone to do as I wished. But I suppose I simply must be an officer.” What he really wanted to do was jettison all the protective family advice, quit all the training, and get into the war, pronto.
Bobby Kennedy Page 5