The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Teddy complained to Bobby that the bigger boys were picking on him. Bobby was a scrapper, but he had a small boy’s shrewdness. He knew enough not to attempt to take on his brother’s cause, at least not now. “You’ll just have to look out for yourself,” he told Teddy, advice that went against everything his father had taught his boys about family.

  Teddy was still recovering from a serious illness, and he found it hard to look out for himself. “I had been at a boarding school in Riverdale,” Teddy recalled.

  And when I went there, I got whooping cough and pneumonia, and I was very, very sick. I was in the hospital for about four or five weeks and missed a central part of the year. Mother just canceled all of her plans, and just she and I went up to Cape Cod and spent the better part of three and a half months up there. I almost died. And then they said I would need a good deal of rest and attention. So when I first went up there, I was in bed, and it was really sort of the two of us. Someone came in and cleaned up. And Mother would cook breakfast and lunch and dinner and read all afternoon. And then as I got a little stronger we went out for walks, short walks, longer walks, together. And then I had a relapse up there actually, which she blamed herself for. And so we stayed up there. And so my father came up periodically. But she stayed there the whole time.

  Rose had never nurtured Teddy’s older siblings as long and as deeply as she nurtured her Teddy. He was her last child, and she lavished her emotions on him. Her youngest son returned her dedication in kind, with a deep, simple, abiding love. He never berated her, as Jack had, for her lack of physical affection. She had succored him, and he cherished such sweet memories of his early years as Rose each evening coming to his room where “she’d read a Peter Rabbit story and sort of act out the little characters and the voice. And then we’d say prayers and I’d go to bed.”

  Teddy’s brothers and sisters loved their summers at Hyannis Port, but for him the place meant even more. It was a symbol of his mother’s love and his father’s devotion. “The house for us was home,” Teddy said. “I don’t remember in my lifetime ever having strangers to dinner in our house, in my lifetime. Never … I don’t ever remember them having a party at the house. Very rarely they would have someone for lunch. Very rarely, so that house, that home, was there.”

  In the summer at Hyannis Port, Bobby spent more time with his younger brother than many boys would have spent. Nine-year-old Teddy’s closest friendship was not with fifteen-year-old Bobby, however, but with his ten-year-old cousin, Joseph “Joey” Gargan. Rose’s sister, Mary Agnes, had died four years before, leaving Joey and his two sisters motherless. Even with their own large family, Rose and Joe invited the young Gargans each summer to Hyannis Port. As generous as his uncle and aunt were to Joey, there was always a quid pro quo with the Kennedys. Although nothing was said formally, Joey was deputized to watch over little Teddy, to be his guardian and his mentor and his friend. Joey was loyal and vigilant, steering his little friend away from conduct that would have brought a firm rebuke from Teddy’s father. For both youths, summers in Hyannis Port resonated with all the glorious pleasures of boyhood and some of its dangers.

  “Teddy went outside the harbor [in his sailboat] one day, and they got caught in the fog and they got very nervous and hysterical,” Rose recalled. “Some of them started to weep, and after that he understood how important it was not to go out of the harbor when there might be fog.”

  For Teddy, these radiant times were the source of many of his ideals of family. Hyannis Port was the private preserve of family and home to which he would always return. Joe was no longer flying off to Washington or New York. He rarely left this house except for his early morning horseback ride.

  Rose could no longer sail off to Europe on her shopping trips, and she too was omnipresent. “I saw a man and a woman in a relationship which was one of love and affection and respect for one another,” Joey recalled. “I never saw two people who spent that much time together. If I spent as much time with my wife as Joe spent with Rose, she’d be asking me to take a vacation.”

  That was the vision of family love that Teddy carried within, never to be bleached out by the fierce sun of life. Hyannis Port was the home where he had been nestled in his mother’s arms and had sat boldly at the table beside his brothers and sisters. These grounds were hallowed, alive with memories. His grandfather’s songs carried on the wind, and Jack was out there sailing Victura, out there somewhere beyond the last horizon.

  While his big brother learned about flying, Jack was off traveling around Latin America. It had not been the easiest of trips. Jack wrote his Harvard friend, Camman “Cam” Newberry: “I don’t know about the army, my back was snapped several times.”

  The armed forces were not so bereft of fit young men that they would happily take an emaciated-looking recruit of such dubious health that he could not even get life insurance.

  Jack had struggled to play football when he was a sickly wisp of a youth, and now he could not possibly stand on the sidelines as the leaders of his generation donned uniforms to enter the ultimate field of play. His whole conception of manhood was at stake, as well as everything his father had taught him about how he must live. Rightly, then, it was to his father that he went to seek help in getting into the navy, which would probably have rejected him as easily and quickly as it had accepted his brother.

  Joe feared war for his country and himself, but mostly he feared it for his sons. He had ominous premonitions of what war would bring. Although he rarely mentioned his sons in his dark prophecies, he feared that their lives might be part of the terrible wreckage of war. He could have attempted to talk Jack out of his plans to enlist. Joe, however, had wanted sons who were what he considered true men, and now he had them—brave sons who would run toward the cannon’s bright fire.

  Joe contacted his former naval attaché in London, Captain Alan Kirk, the director of Naval Operations of Intelligence in Washington. Kirk wrote Captain C. W. Carr at Chelsea Naval Hospital: “The boy has taken the attitude that he does not wish his father’s position used in any way as a lever to secure him preferment. This is an excellent point of view but, nevertheless, it has occurred to me he might be helped in one way—vis., his physical condition.” The malleable doctor gave Jack a perfunctory enough examination that he passed.

  Kirk was not finished with favors. In October, Jack was appointed an ensign under the chief of Naval Operations of Intelligence in Washington. Joe Jr., who had just been sworn in as an aviation cadet in the U.S. Naval Reserve, had decidedly mixed feelings about his kid brother donning the navy blue.

  After all, Joe Jr. had paid his dues in weeks of rigorous training before he could affix the gold anchors that he was now privileged to wear. Jack had done nothing but pass a fake physical, and now, without a day of military training, he was an ensign, outranking his big brother. But as he told a friend, he was also worried about Jack’s troubled back and felt that his father should have exerted his influence to keep his younger brother out of uniform, not to get him in.

  When Jack arrived in Washington in September, he was not the first Kennedy living in the city. His favorite sister, Kathleen, was working as a secretary at the Washington Times Herald, while Rosemary was living at a convent. Rosemary was so voluptuous, sweetly spoken, and demure that during the summers at Hyannis Port, Jack and Joe Jr. had to ward off young men. All their lives they had been good brothers watching out for their sister, protecting her. Rosemary had the mental age of a fifth- or sixth-grader. She could not keep up with the quick banter around the family dinner table, but to most people she looked like just another young Kennedy.

  From the time she was a little girl and they realized she was “slow,” Joe and Rose had brought up their firstborn daughter as much like their other children as possible. She had special teachers at the convent schools where they sent her, but they tried to keep her life integrated with those of the rest of their children. In London, she had made her debut and been presented to the king and queen; after
spending days learning the elaborate curtsy that other young women picked up in a few hours, she had awkwardly tripped before the monarchs.

  Teddy knew nothing of the difficulties his big sister was facing. He only knew that good Rosemary was his gentle friend. She was not rushing out on dates or off with her friends like his other big sisters. She was there, ready to talk to him and play. To him, she was a dream of what an older sister should be. “I just had the feeling of a sweet older sister … who was enormously cheerful, affectionate, loving perhaps even more so than some of the older ones,” Teddy reflected. “She always seemed to have more time, and was always more available.”

  Rosemary could have handled a menial job, but in 1941 there was no place for her to go. In recent months, she had begun to suffer from terrible mood swings. She had uncontrollable outbursts, her arms flailing and her voice rising to a pitch of anger. In the convent school in Washington the nuns were having a difficult time managing her. She sneaked out at night and returned in the early morning hours, her clothes bedraggled. The nuns feared that she was picking up men and might become pregnant or diseased.

  Joe felt that he had to do something. “Mr. Kennedy was so afraid of her getting in trouble or of being kidnapped,” recalls Luella Hennessey, the family nurse. “It would be better for her not to be exposed to the general public in case she ran away. It would be better to almost ‘close the case.’ Then there wouldn’t be any more trouble.”

  The newspapers and magazines were full of stories about a dramatic new surgical technique, the prefrontal leucotomy. The operation, known in the United States as a “lobotomy,” cut away the prefrontal lobes of the brain and changed the emotional life of the patient forever. In 1941, fewer than five hundred lobotomies had been performed throughout the world. Even its proponents considered the operation experimental.

  In the United States, the medical kings of lobotomy were Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist, and James Watts, a surgeon, who had their practice in Washington, not far from Rosemary’s convent. Joe liked to cut away at a problem, and then move on. Thus, it was perhaps understandable why Joe took Rosemary to Freeman and Watts’s office. What is less understandable is why he was not immediately shown the door.

  Dr. Freeman, a showboating self-promoter, had repeatedly stated that he performed the operation only when all other approaches had failed. The doctors operated on tragically sick individuals, the long-term depressed, lifelong alcoholics, and hopeless schizophrenics. They had performed only one of their eighty operations on a patient younger than Rosemary, and never on an individual with mental retardation.

  It may be that Freeman was drawn to the idea of operating on the daughter of one of the most famous men in America, thereby raising his stature dramatically. It may be that Joe pushed the doctors to do what they knew they should not have done. In any event, Joe gave the go-ahead without getting his wife’s approval, surely knowing what Rose’s opinion would have been.

  On the morning of the operation, Rosemary was wheeled into the operating room fully cognizant of her surroundings. The doctors gave her Novocain, a local anesthetic, and with her fully awake, Dr. Watts drilled two small holes into her cranium. While Dr. Watts employed a tiny spatula to dig out the white matter of the frontal lobe, Dr. Freeman kept up a conversation with Rosemary.

  Dr. Freeman was a charming, outgoing man, and he was good at his job, which was to keep the patient talking, getting her to sing if possible. Rosemary viewed the world around her with trust. The more Rosemary cooperated with the doctor, the more she talked, and the more she sang, the more Dr. Watts cut.

  When Rosemary finally grew quiet, the surgeon knew that he had cut enough. Dr. Watts put in sutures, and she was wheeled back out of the operating room. When she woke up, the doctors found that Rosemary had talked too much and sung too long and that Dr. Watts had cut too deep. She was like an infant, capable of speaking only a few words, staring out into a world she did not know or understand.

  Rosemary loved and trusted her father. She had been isolated, shut off away from her family in a convent. She had good reasons to suffer from what Watts called “agitated depression,” but that was woefully little reason for the radical operation that destroyed everything but her soul.

  There was one other person in the operating room that morning, the nurse who worked for the two doctors. The nurse was so horrified by what she saw happening that she left nursing and never returned to the profession. There were other operations, so many others, but it was Rosemary she mostly remembered.

  Over half a century later it was a horror that still kept coming into her consciousness. She might be sitting in a restaurant with her daughter talking about her childhood, and it would come back to her again, and she would talk about the guilt and sadness that never fully left her.

  The nurse was not the only person haunted by Rosemary’s operation. The lobotomy is the emotional divide in the history of the Kennedy family, an event of transcendent psychological importance. This was the first family tragedy. Unlike all the subsequent deaths and accidents, no mark of patriotism, heroism, daring, or even dread circumstance could be attached to this act.

  In this family where all the important events of the day were discussed over the dinner table, surely it was time to confront Joe with what he had done, to have it out, to discuss, to cry, to ask God’s mercy and forgiveness, and then go on. But it did not happen. And it is here that the Kennedy pattern of denial is implanted in the psyches of the children. The truth becomes a form of betrayal. The mumbling inarticulateness with which many of them discuss personal history has its beginnings here.

  Rosemary was shipped away to a private sanatorium, and for years her siblings simply did not talk about her anymore. Her mother wrote letters to her children in which her name was never mentioned. Rosemary’s name was excised from the family and its history and its aspirations. For little Teddy, already uprooted, shuttled around schools, his own sister, whose sweet gentleness had been one of his few constants, was gone, as far as he knew forever, unmentioned and unmentionable.

  There had been no more vociferous opponent of American entree into war than Joe Jr., but now that he wore the navy blue he turned all his energy toward becoming a pilot. At the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Joe Jr. continued his training. He got up at 5:00 A.M. cursing the bugle and did his jumping jacks as the sun rose. He had no gentleman’s gentleman to pick up after him now, and he received an unhealthy quota of demerits during inspections.

  On one occasion, his wastebasket did not pass muster, and he was handed four demerits and five hours marching. His mother considered this punishment so outrageous that she had to be talked out of writing “the Navy Department and the War Board and some Commanders—and maybe Mr. Roosevelt himself.”

  For all his attributes as a cadet, Joe Jr. was not a natural pilot with the intuitive sensibility in which a man and a plane mesh together as one. In the evenings, he often played a strong game of blackjack or bridge, gleefully sweeping up the winnings.

  Joe Jr. was a popular cadet who, after some shrewd maneuvering, won election as the president of the Cadet Club. He had little time to chat with his new friends at the club, but it was not all a merciless grind. “I am sorry Gunther’s storage department sent Joe’s morning coat instead of his tails down to Jacksonville, but if he had wired back in time, they could have sent his tails by air,” Rose wrote the family.

  Joe Jr.’s mother would have been impressed by one aspect of her eldest son’s life, and that was his faith. Joe Jr. was far more religious than Jack. As a boy, Joe Jr. had met the princes of the church in his own house, and he was comfortable around priests in a way Jack would never be. He was the last one in line for confession on Fridays, but he was always there. The base chaplain, Father Maurice S. Sheehy, heard what passed as sins among these cadets, the carnality, the lies, the blasphemies, and in the end there stood Joe Jr. This moment to the priest was one of the blessings of faith.

  “There is nothing comparable to the beau
ty of the soul of a young man who opens the window of that soul to a priest in confessional, and who reveals, in so doing, the passion for what is honest and decent and good,” Father Sheehy recalled. “The faith in many generations of Kennedys and Fitzgeralds was revealed in the humility of this favorite son of fortune whenever he went to Confession.”

  Young Joe Jr. was a child of fortune. Life’s blessing shone on him. He was a talisman of good cheer.

  Unlike his brother, Jack was in no hurry to thrust himself up in the front lines to be ready when war began. In Washington he put in his hours in the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue, but he took far more interest in his evenings and weekends and his pursuit of a different sort of prey. Washington was full of young single women, and Jack doubtless would have had scores of sexual adventures if one day soon after his arrival his sister Kathleen had not introduced him to Inga Arvad, her colleague on the Washington Times-Herald. “He’s coming to Washington,” Kathleen exulted. “I’m going to give a party at the F Street Club, you will just love him!” And so she did.

  Inga’s ripe, sensual beauty would have been enough to attract Jack for a short-lived affair, but it was not her blonde looks that led him into the deepest relationship of his young life. At the age of twenty-eight, Inga had already lived half a dozen lives, shedding her identities like last year’s fashion.

  There was a mystery about her that Jack could hope to fathom, but in the end he was the one whose mysteries were unraveled, not hers. Of all the women he had ever known, Inga was the one who saw him, with her shimmering blue eyes, not only largely as he was but as what he might become.