“On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time was the way that everyone stood up to it,” he wrote his parents. “Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s trouble.”
Jack had found a commonality here in these men, no matter their backgrounds. Jack was a man of the Spee Club and the Stork Club, of Palm Beach and London, and they were men mainly from small towns and modest circumstances, and they had come together and worked together as one. He was a man, despite his education and travels, of profoundly limited experience, having gone from one oasis of privilege to the next, hardly even observing the world that lay between. This was the first time in his life that he broke the bread of life with all kinds of people, and much of what he thought of America he extrapolated from this time.
Jack had an authenticity about him now that was forged in the hot blasts of combat. He was an officer, but he had a grunt’s vision of war and could be just another kvetching voice in the mess line. “When I read that we will fight Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must—I always check from where he’s talking—it’s seldom from out here,” he wrote his parents in his anti-heroic mood. Back in Washington, the politicians tossed out words like “sacrifice” and “honor” and “courage” like cheap baubles, but out here he had learned their true meaning. For the most part, there were no flag-waving heroics in this struggle, no awesome acts of self-sacrifice, but good men were doing what they had to do. Jack was a patriot now in a way he had not been before the war. He was a patriot no more or less than most of his comrades, and in a way that Americans would not be again, not in his lifetime.
Jack believed that those who spoke of sacrifice and courage in the distant halls of power had better see to it that the peace was worth the war, “for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.” That was the one worthy road open to him—to help to see that life in the postwar world would be worth all the dread losses of war. His would be an arduous journey in its own right, if only he could take it.
When Joe learned that Jack was missing in action, he did not tell Rose. They treated each other with the courtly reserve of monarchs, civil and gracious in public, circumspect and contained in private. Joe knew that he was terribly complicit in what appeared to be his son’s death. Earlier in the year, he had written Father Sheehy that while he had “pride in … [his] … heart” that his sons had opted for the most dangerous of services, he had “grief in … [his] mind.” His was the pride that his sons were living out his vision of what a true man must be. His grief was an ominous, oppressive sense of impending tragedy that had haunted him since his days at the Court of St. James’s, a grief that never left him. For once in his life his heart had triumphed over his mind. He had not stood back when his sons rushed toward the sound and smoke of combat, but had pushed them ahead.
As for Rose, his wife had the constant solace of faith, believing that if God took their sons, He would only pluck them away to a better place. In her chatty chain letters to her sons and daughters, she treated the dangers of war as if they were no worse than a pickup football game on the lawns at Hyannis Port. “Jack, you know, is a Lieutenant, J.G. and of course he is delighted,” she had written the children a year before. “His whole attitude about the war has changed and he is quite ready to die for the U.S.A…. He also thinks it would be good for Joe’s political career if he died for the grand old flag, although I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.” What was a lighthearted repartee to Rose contained a kernel of truth in the lives of her sons. The field of competition had moved from the fields of play to the fields of war, but Jack and Joe Jr. had set out as if the game were much the same.
Joe could not go to Rose and share his fears. And so he held them within himself for three terrible days, pretending to Rose and to everyone he met that life was as it had always been. On the fourth day, he was driving his car back from his morning horseback ride, listening to the news on the radio. When the announcer said that Jack had been found, Joe drove his car off the side of the road.
When Joe Jr. heard the news and read the stories of his brother’s heroism, he did not share his father’s pure elation. “When I returned home the other day, Mother told me she had finally heard from you,” his father wrote him on August 31, 1943, in a passage that in the lexicon of the Kennedy family was stinging in its rebuke. “We were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you. I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had had any news as to how Jack was.”
Joe Jr. had learned that Jack was missing when a friend wrote him from the Pacific. Three hours later he saw the headlines about his little brother being rescued. Despite that, he could not bring himself to call Hyannis Port to ask about a brother who had won the public praise that he sought so desperately.
All that Joe Jr. wanted in family life was to be first, a condition that he thought was his natural right. His letter to his parents cried out, Look at me, look at your other grown-up son, your first son. “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in the various parts of the world, and the countless number of paper clippings about our young hero, the battler of the wars of Banana River, San Juan, Virginia Beach, New Orleans, San Antonio and San Diego, will now step to the microphone and give out with a few words of his own activities,” Joe Jr. began his letter.
Joe Jr. was struck full in the face by the sheer unfairness of it all, and in his letter he mentioned his brother’s name only once. His words reeked of bitterness that a younger brother whom he considered second in everything but name had supplanted him. Joe Jr. had entered the service while Jack was malingering. He had gone through a merciless gauntlet to win his wings, while Jack had been given yet another free pass. Joe Jr. had not lost a ship to the enemy. He may not have sunk a German U-boat, or even seen one on his endless patrols out over the Atlantic, but it was planes like his that had helped drive the U-boats back from preying on merchant shipping; in the Caribbean arena the Germans had been sinking a ship and a half a day during the first half of 1942. The risks he courted daily had won him not a line in the nation’s papers. He had served his country in a series of posts all over the East Coast and Puerto Rico, and now he was ferrying planes out to San Diego to be heavily armed, an endeavor that in the end would go further to defeat the Axis than anything Jack had done.
“In their long brotherly friendly rivalry, I expect this was the first time Jack had won such an ‘advantage’ by such a clear margin,” Rose wrote in her autobiography. “And I daresay it cheered Jack and must have rankled Joe Jr.” Rose may have believed that Jack reveled in his victory as much as Joe Jr. agonized over his perceived loss, but Jack no longer saw the world as the playing fields of Hyannis Port writ large. Joe Jr., for his part, still lived partially in that boy’s world. He was obsessed not only with his little brother but with the struggle for fame and noble accomplishment. That was the page in the book of life that his father had opened to him and told him was life itself. He was mired in this obsession.
Joe Jr. knew how deeply his father cared for him. When Joe Jr. won his wings in Jacksonville, his father had come up from Palm Beach to address the graduates. Joe had been in the middle of his speech when he looked at his beloved son there in that row of splendid young men, and he had come close to crying. That was a measure of how proud Joe was of his son and of how deeply he feared for his life.
Joe Jr. was a better brother to his siblings than Jack. He thought about them. He wrote them. He cared. He may have been a stickler for regulations, yet when seventeen-year-old Bobby came down to visit
his big brother, Joe Jr. snuck him onto the base and took him out for a patrol, letting his kid brother handle the controls from the co-pilot’s seat. Joe Jr. might have been court-martialed if the brass had found out, but he was willing to chance that to let Bobby feel what it was to fly.
Joe Jr. blocked out much of the world that did not lead him toward high honor. As a pilot, he had no time for pleasantries. He strode across the hot tarmac not even acknowledging the airmen and mechanics with a nod. He had little use for most of his flight instructors, seeing them as little more than means to an end. To his crews, he was a merciless perfectionist who treated them like imperfect machines.
Whatever his detractors thought, Joe Jr. was no brass-polishing sycophant who thought that through social guile he might succeed. He sought action, and he did what he felt he had to do to stand at the front of that line where he believed a man could prove himself. It was not his fault that he was piloting flying boats, lumbering craft ideal for long reconnaissances far from the retort of angry Nazi guns or menacing Luftwaffe fighter planes. On one of his trips to Virginia Beach, where he had rented an apartment, he had a talk with Mark Soden, a fellow officer, about why he felt he must stand one day in the full line of fire. He talked about what it had been like in Madrid at the end with the bullets so near, and how so much was expected of him in this war. He was a child of wealth and privilege, and in this war he felt he had to prove himself worthy of the rich bounty of his life.
Joe Jr. was not all self-absorbed purposefulness. As long as he stood far from the arenas of heroism, he made the most of his leaves, turning his apartment in Virginia Beach into fertile ground for assignations. “He had a special friend in Norfolk, a married woman whose officer husband was away,” recalled Soden. “I think sometimes Joe felt it was safer with a married woman than with a single person, no pressure.”
“Joe was what we liked to call a prime cocks man,” reflected another officer, Robert Duffy. “He was down there in Virginia Beach as often as he could.”
In mid-July, Joe Jr.’s commander, Jim Reedy, called his crews together in a hangar at Norfolk to tell them the dramatic news. Reedy would be heading a new command, Patrol Squadron 110 (VB-110). Their job would be to hunt down Nazi submarines as they left their bases in the southern French ports on the Bay of Biscay and headed out to maim allied shipping. Their weapon would be not the vulnerable flying boat but the B-24 Liberator. The plane, rechristened the PB4Y-1 by the navy, was a squat, four-engine, thirty-ton bomber. “No one is compelled to accept this assignment,” the men were told. “Undoubtedly it will be a dangerous one.” The pilots knew that they faced a double challenge—not only the dangers of combat but the immediate task of learning how to fly the confounded thing. Not a man backed away, and none of the pilots was as gung-ho as Joe Jr.
During the next six weeks, just when Jack was first tasting combat, Joe Jr. was up in the sky above Norfolk learning how to fly the unwieldy monolith. He would probably have been a better PT-boat captain than a pilot of a PB4Y, but he was a dogged trainee who kept his doubts and fears wrapped up tightly in his own psyche. He was a young man in any other world but this one. At twenty-eight, Joe Jr. was older than most of the other pilots. He was persistently upbeat, never letting on to his family the uncertainties that he felt. “They really don’t give us quite enough instruction … before turning us loose, and this has brought about quite a few accidents,” he wrote the family, coming as close to admitting his anxieties as he ever did. Only to one of his father’s friends, John Daly, did he admit the darkest of his doubts. “In my talks with him during his training … I always felt he had a premonition that he would not be one of the fortunate ones to come out of the war,” Daly reflected. “Disregarding this feeling, even though approaching his thirtieth year, he fought hard to excel as a pilot and become as proficient as any of his younger cadet associates.”
Once Joe Jr. checked out in the plane, he flew several of the squadron’s new PB4Ys to San Diego, and then back again with their new bow turrets installed, making five trips cross-country in eight days, a schedule that would have done in a commercial pilot. He would have no second chances flying above the Bay of Biscay, and the navy prepared him and his crew with merciless rigor. Radar. Strafing. Guns. Instrument training. Tactics. Plane recognition. Physical conditioning. Antisubmarine work. Dawn to dusk, day after day, the training continued.
When the regimen finally ended, Joe Jr. got a short leave to travel to Hyannis Port in time for his father’s fifty-fifth birthday. Although the birthday celebration on September 6, 1943, was for his father, Joe Jr. had reason to think that he would be honored that evening as well. In a few days he would be flying off to England to test his mettle against the savagery of Nazi arms. Although he knew himself to be a child of fortune, this might be his last great occasion with his family. He had come through. He had done everything he was supposed to do and more. He had written his father about preparing a will. He wore his navy whites, and as the group sat down, no one could look at young Joe Jr. without thinking at least momentarily of the war.
Judge John Burns stood up to propose a toast. The judge looked down the long table and raised his glass. “To Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” The silence hung in the air like a condemnation. Joe Jr.’s face froze in a smile that was more like a grimace. Then he drank a sip of the bitter wine. Later that evening Police Commissioner Timilty heard Joe Jr. crying in the bed next to him. “By God, I’ll show them,” Joe Jr. said as he clenched and unclenched his fist. “By God, I’ll show them.”
Bobby and Teddy were too young to prove themselves on the fields of battle, and their lives continued much as they had before the war. For years Rose had been complaining that whatever her third son did, be it reading, sailing, or collecting stamps, he did by rote, without the enthusiasm that to Rose’s way of thinking defined a young Kennedy. Bobby hadn’t liked to go to the young people’s dances in Palm Beach, where he would have picked up the social graces that he would need as a young man. He appeared singularly disaffected by the world where his family thought he belonged.
Bobby arrived at Milton Academy as a junior in the fall of 1942. After attending seven schools in little more than a decade, Bobby had never stayed long enough at one school to set his roots deep into the nurturing soil of friendship and place. The students at the Massachusetts prep school were for most part conservative in dress, Republican in politics, and High Church Protestant in faith.
As a Roman Catholic transfer student, Bobby would have done best to slip silently into the school, hoping slowly to win acceptance. Instead, Bobby arrived in a checked coat that looked as if it could have been played as well as worn, gray pants, white socks, and a flamboyantly loud tie. If there was a choice between being viewed as a hapless mediocrity or a self-proclaimed misfit, Bobby had declared that he preferred the latter. Nor did he try to hide the fact that he was one of perhaps half a dozen Catholics at the Massachusetts school. There were no Catholic churches in Milton, but Bobby invited friends like Sam Adams to go with him to Dorchester to worship in a cathedral among people of all ages and classes. Bobby was a youth certain of few things, but one of them was that his church was true and his faith was deep.
His older brothers were handsome men with an ease of manner that helped propel them through the world. Bobby was the least physically appealing of the Kennedy brothers. His teeth were too big, his ears extended out, his body was scrawny, his voice a girlish tenor, his wit savage. The smile that once had marked a boyish cuteness now seemed an embarrassed grimace, emblematic of his shyness.
At Milton, Bobby was as mediocre on the football field as in the classroom. But how he tried on the gridiron, in practice attacking the blocking dummies as if they were glowering opponents, waiting for his chance in a big game. “I played in the football game against St. Marks,” he wrote his father, “but I was quite nervous and did not do very well.”
When Joe answ
ered his son, it was not to send him hustling back onto the field, bloodied or not, to tackle and charge with mad fury. Joe had such a profound impact on his sons because his was a love tempered with insight. To him, each son was a different kind of jewel, and if Joe Jr. and Jack shone brilliantly on their own, Bobby had to be polished until he glittered like his older brothers. He reminded Bobby that his brother Joe had only made the Harvard team his senior year, and that Jack hadn’t made it at all. Bobby was hopelessly behind his big brothers in his social development. That was what Joe sought to bring out, telling his son that the whole idea of football was “the opportunity to meet a lot of nice boys.” These “nice boys” would turn out to be powerful men, and Joe told his son that “the contacts you have made from boyhood on are the things that are important to you in your own life’s development.”
Bobby was far more self-aware than his brothers and fiercely honest. He was nervous about everything that mattered to him, football, studies, faith, and girls. Everything was complicated, endlessly analyzed, pondered over, criticized.
When Bobby arrived at Milton, there was one young man who everyone at the school would have wanted as a friend. His name was David Hackett, and he was the most celebrated football player and athlete at the school. There is no fame like youthful athletic fame, unsullied by compromise and uncomplicated by any motivation other than to play well and fairly. And of all the people who could have become his closest friend, Hackett chose Bobby, the most unlikely of all. Hackett, progeny of a poor family, thought of himself as a misfit as much as his new friend did, and that apparently drew them together.
David Hackett became to Bobby what Lem Billings was to Jack—a coconspirator in all the trials of growing up. When he wasn’t around his best friend, Bobby wrote him letters. Bobby’s writing had none of the grace, wit, and literate detail of his older brother’s frequent missives to Lem, or any of the sheer exuberance. Bobby was blunt, but rarely purposefully vulgar. He was emotionally honest in a way that Jack was not. Jack usually kept Lem at a self-conscious distance, treating even his closest friend as an audience. Bobby’s friendship was as much about the pain and difficulties the two adolescents experienced as any joyful kinship. Bobby was a demanding friend (“if this friend of mine was the Son of a Bitch he seemed to be the world would catch up with him eventually and he would have to live the rest of his life with himself”). For Bobby, everything was a struggle, from studying to making friends, to seeking some measure of control over his future. Whereas Jack led Lem into precocious, bawdy adventures, there was a shy innocence to Bobby’s approach to the opposite sex. While Jack bragged in X-rated detail about his putative conquests, Bobby was delighted merely to have a date. He had a certain moral rectitude that was more than a way to hide his timidity with young women. He couldn’t abide hearing the dirty jokes that the boys swapped back and forth, making it clear to everyone how offensive he found such humor. “He would turn away, with almost a snarl,” Adams recalled.
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