The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Bobby sought an authentic experience to mark him as a man in the same way that the war marked his brothers. In the summer of 1943, he wanted to work on a fishing boat on Cape Cod. He asked a family friend, the political operative Clem Norton, to get him a job where “nobody would know who he was and he would have to work just as hard as any fisherman.” That was a manly endeavor, but his mother would hear none of it, invoking the names of her two soldier sons. “This boy will have to go soon,” she said of her seventeen-year-old son, “so I want him as long as I can have him around.” Instead, his parents relegated Bobby to a pallid pursuit, working as a clerk in the East Boston bank founded by his grandfather P. J., where Joe had been president. That didn’t take the whole summer, and Bobby invited Sam Adams down to the Cape for a visit. Like so many other visitors, Sam had a splendidly idyllic time at Hyannis Port. He and his friend splattered each other with paint when they worked on Bobby’s boat, ran off for picnics with box lunches ordered up by Rose, and sang show tunes in the evening with Rose playing the piano.

  Bobby’s sister Jean felt that a deep core of sadness resided within her brother. When Bobby returned to Milton for a visit after graduating in 1944, he wrote Hackett of a reunion that was more melancholy than gay. He was hardly the returning hero whose visage conjured up myriad images of athletic success or achievement. “Of course they were overwhelmed with happiness upon seeing me,” he wrote, his words etched in irony, “but I can see if I went back six times in as many weeks that they would get just a little tired of me.” He walked the old haunts, and to him it “all seems so inconsequential changing to blue suits and being on time for chapel and all that sort of thing.” He went on with the kind of emotional candor that Jack would never have exposed. “Things are the same as usual up here and me being my usual moody self I get very sad at times.”

  Little Teddy had ample reason for sadness too. He had been shuttled from one private school to the next, eleven different institutions in all. “I was paddled fifteen times at Fessenden,” Teddy recalled, his one detailed memory of his tenure at the Massachusetts prep school. Through it all, this plump, impish boy remained resolutely good-natured, with an inordinate interest in all things chocolate.

  One night at Fessenden, Teddy decided that he would sneak down in the darkness into the pantry and steal some chocolate. He was there reaching for several of the treats when he felt a hand grasp his neck and hold him tight. The one blind master had been lying in wait to capture the stealthy thief. As punishment, Teddy spent the night sleeping in a bathtub.

  Teddy learned there were other ways to turn a chocolate trick. “Your youngest brother, Teddy, the merchant in the family, is as he says running a black market at Fessenden,” Joe wrote Kathleen. “He goes downtown to his Catechism Class, buys himself some chocolate bars at five cents apiece, comes back and sells them at ten to fifteen cents apiece to the boys who can’t get out…. There is a sneaking suspicion, I imagine, among some of the parents of boys who have done trading with Sir Edward that somewhere in the long dim past there was a little Jewish blood got in with the Irish and it is all coming out in him.”

  Jack had warned Joe Jr. that if he insisted on shipping out to the Pacific, after a week there he would wish he had not been so rash. The warning held equally for the Cornish coast in England’s West Country, where Joe Jr. arrived in September 1943. The region had struck a devil’s bargain—exquisite, verdant landscape in exchange for rain, rain, and more rain. In the nearly daily barrage, Joe Jr. had plenty of time to peck out letters on his portable typewriter. Jack had been transferred to the United States for health reasons, and Joe Jr. wanted little Jackie to know that his big brother was still ahead in the game of sexual conquest. “I succeed in dispersing my first team in such various points that it will be impossible to cover all the territory,” he bragged. “If you ever get around Norfolk, you will get quite a welcome if you mention the magic name of Kennedy so I advise you to go incognito.”

  In his letter to Jack, Joe Jr. didn’t mention that he was doubly grounded, by the miserable weather and by the equally miserable ambiance of south England. The pubs closed at nine, when Joe Jr.’s hunting season was only beginning. The only diversion was dinner at the Imperial Hotel, breaking bread with a dispirited collection of evacuees from London, the room devoid of any of the smart young things who had enlivened Joe Jr.’s time in prewar London.

  Joe Jr. wasn’t about to write a fan letter to little Jack, congratulating him on his heroism. Nor would he even admit that he might have a grudging respect for a brother who had held up the family name so well and so high. “I understand that anyone who was sunk got thirty days’ survivor leave,” he wrote, as if Jack stood to receive a vacation for his ineptness. “How about it? Pappy was rather indignant that they just didn’t send you back right away.” That was the nastiest cut of all. The truth was, as Joe Jr. knew from his father’s letters, that Joe believed Jack had given all that a man should be asked to give and had vowed to try to get Jack out of the war theater for good.

  Joe Jr. managed a flight to London so he could see his sister Kathleen. She was serving with the Red Cross at the Hans Crescent Club in an old hotel in the center of London. The young Kennedys picked up with one another as if all the time between had been desultory nonsense. They headed out to the 400 Club, where before the war Joe Jr. had attended many a glorious soiree. As they descended into the nightclub, Joe Jr. saw that the kind of young gentlemen who had frequented the place in the old days were still there. But now they wore not evening clothes but officer uniforms. The champagne was the same, if far more expensive, but whereas in 1939 pleasure had been an amiable pastime, now it was pursued with no regard for tomorrows that might never come.

  The next evening William Randolph Hearst Jr., a foreign correspondent, invited Joe Jr. and Kathleen to have dinner with him at the Savoy. Hearst had also invited an exquisite brunette, Patricia Wilson, whose husband was a major serving in Libya. Joe Jr. did not let those minor impediments stand in the way as he turned on his inestimable charm. He learned that Patricia was an Australian. She had come to London to make her debut. There the seventeen-year-old debutante married the earl of Jersey, a relationship that lasted six years and brought her a child and endless embarrassment over the activities of her pure rake of a husband. Shortly after their divorce, she had married Robin Filmer Wilson, with whom she had two more children. Now she was doing her bit by working part-time in a factory.

  This woman with the cascading, carefree laughter was in some respects not unlike Jack’s Inga. Patricia was at that age when beauty is exquisitely refined by life. Like Inga, she was married and she was daring, at least daring in the glimpses she gave to Joe Jr., daring in the way she invited him and his friends to her cottage for the weekend in Woking, not far from London.

  Joe accepted Patricia’s invitation and began an affair that on each weekend sojourn, each sweet homey interlude far from the muck and cold of duty, became more passionate and intense.

  Joe Jr. had cursed the mud and rain of St. Eval, but that had been a sweet oasis compared to Dunkeswell, where his unit was now stationed permanently during the wettest season in memory. It would have been miserable enough if the squadron had been billeted in town, but they were out on a barren flat. The airdrome was nothing but a bunch of big hangars and oval Nissen huts set there to serve as offices, the rain beating a steady tattoo on the metal. To protect themselves from enemy attack, the 64 officers and 106 enlisted men of VB-110 lived a good distance away. “Mudville Heights” they called it, a pathetic group of Nissen sheds set in an ever-deepening pit of mud that appeared likely one rain-soaked night to swallow up the sheds and the men forever.

  Joe Jr. had been deputized the squadron secretary, keeper of the diary. He wrote about the mud with the passionate detail that he had never mustered in his articles about the Spanish Civil War. “During the winter months an intermittent drizzle, occasionally whipped into a solid wall of water by the capricious winds, made it almost impossib
le to stay dry,” he wrote, as if he were preparing a prosecutor’s brief against the weather. “Inadequate heat—miniature coke stoves sparsely scattered around the base—made it almost impossible to get either dry or warm. Plumbing was early stone age and even more widely dispersed than the living sites or aircraft. There was no toilet paper, although rolls of what seemed to be laminated woods were provided plainly stamped with ‘Government Property.’ Ablutions were located near the officers’ mess which, unfortunately, was about a half mile, as the herd grazes, from Site one.”

  Mudville Heights was the squadron’s main place of repose after their often debilitating, frigid, twelve-hour flights in search of German submarines. The U-boat men called the Bay of Biscay the “Valley of Death,” and so it had become. As Joe Jr. flew his plane at fifteen hundred feet, scanning the ocean for the telltale sign of a periscope, he knew that this water was a graveyard not only for submarines but for allied planes as well. He traveled alone, without a fighter escort. He could easily have become bored, sweeping the empty ocean hour after hour. But at any moment a pack of Nazi fighters might appear from above, falling upon the slower-moving plane with their deadly sting.

  Joe Jr. had hardly begun flying his patrols when Commander Reedy spotted six German JU-88s on the horizon and had to lumber up into cloud cover before the Germans got close enough to fire. The next day Lieutenant W. E. Grumbles broke radio silence to say that he was being attacked. He called again and again, his poignant messages heard by the other planes, and when he called no more the pilots knew the squadron had lost its first plane.

  The very next day Joe Jr. was approaching Junkers Junction, the Atlantic waters off the coast of northwestern Spain, his head hunkered down over the radarscope. He spotted a blip and looked up. He knew immediately that it was a German plane a little over seven miles away and closing. This was a moment to curse the cloudless sky and wish for all the fog and drizzle of Mudville Heights. The German fighter drew within eyesight and tried to shepherd Joe Jr. coastward, further away from any help, like a wolf separating a deer from the herd. A second plane joined its comrade, near enough now that Joe Jr. recognized them as Messerschmitt 210s. One fighter moved in for the kill, now no more than six hundred yards astern.

  “Commence firing,” Joe Jr. shouted. The gunner whirled his bow turret toward the streaking plane and fired a devastating barrage at the oncoming plane. The ME-210 dove on, homed onto Joe Jr.’s plane, and at the last moment peeled off and retreated up into the sky. The pilot could have downed Joe Jr.’s plane, but his guns must have jammed, for he never fired. On this day the blue sky had conspired against Joe Jr., but he had reason to believe that he was still that child of fortune.

  When Joe Jr. got back to the base, he had the next day off. He wrote letters, read, and in the evening headed off to the only diversion within leagues, the Royal Oak, a pub where many of his colleagues attempted to see how many pints they could down before the closing bell sounded. Joe Jr. had a politician’s calculated gregariousness and an intuitive understanding of just when and with whom to turn on his blazing charm. The Royal Oak was not such a place that merited his charm, and since he drank hardly at all, he was not always the most convivial companion at one of the battered, dark oak tables.

  After that day of so-called rest came a day of briefings, and then the following morning he went up into the gray skies once again. As often as not, Joe Jr.’s most implacable foe was not the Germans but the confounded climate of southern England. He would return after ten hours of fruitless searching to find the airfield socked in. Low on fuel, tired and cold, he would have to find somewhere else to land. At its best, landing was a hairy business, and it had gotten some of his colleagues killed. The worst of it had occurred a couple of weeks before Christmas, when they had been sent out even though the weather reports said that the airport would be closed by the time they got back. When he reached the base, dark clouds blanketed the airport, and he was ordered on to Beaulieu Airdrome outside Southampton. He headed east in the black, rainy night and found himself in the midst of the Southampton barrage balloons, a weapon against his plane as much as they were against the Germans. He descended beneath the five-hundred-foot ceiling. Later he noted in his report that “the wind at the time made it doubly hazardous and trying to watch the field and make a two-needle-width turn at 500 feet in the rain made it quite difficult. I made a short circle and came in.”

  Sooner or later the Dunkeswell dampness got through not just to the bones but also to the souls of everyone on the base. Joe Jr. was a man of matchless high spirits, fueled by his incomparable Kennedy energy, but his letters home sounded wistful and melancholy. He wrote about the weather because that was the reason he was sitting in his dank quarters writing his family instead of flying. He had only been there a few months, but he was already talking of going off on another assignment. “My love life is still negligible,” he complained to his parents in a letter written at the end of January. “Around here, I am taking out a Waff [sic] who is very cute but nothing very exciting. There seems to be quite a little talent around the town, but it’s such a bother to get in and out, and the added difficulty of obtaining reservations. It’s really not much fun unless you know someone.”

  This was not the boastful Joe Jr. of a few months before who had bragged at the wide swath he had cut through the young ladies of Norfolk. This was a Joe Jr. who, when he opened his letters from home, discovered inevitably that Jack was the big news—Jack’s sickness, Jack’s appearances, Jack’s publicity, Jack’s future. His little brother was such a phenomenon that the New Yorker ran an article about him and PT-109 by John Hersey; later in 1944 it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest. Joe Jr. could hardly bring himself to mention his little brother without inserting at least a small dig. “Several people have called my attention to my dear brother’s portrait in News week [sic], and my apologies for his appearance have been profuse. Who hates him on that paper?” It wasn’t enough just to put Jack down; he had to push himself forward in the next sentence. “There have been some articles written over here on our work which I shall send you.” Joe Jr.’s problem was a simple one. “I have done nothing to make myself outstanding, but manage to get back, which I suppose is the important thing.”

  Even in the muck and the cold, Joe Jr. still had his vision of a political ascent ahead of him in America. “What you gonna do when you get back to Delaware?” he asked Duffy one day.

  “Got no idea, Joe,” Duffy shrugged, looking at what he considered “a big amiable Irishman.”

  “Politics! That’s the game, Bob,” Joe Jr. enthused. “We gotta go back and run this country.”

  Although Joe Jr. still fancied himself as a candidate for high office, he confided to Angela Laycock on one of his trips to London that a Kennedy would be president one day, but that it would be Jack, not him. He declared that Jack was simply smarter, and now with all the glamour and honor that he had won as spoils of war, Jack stood far ahead on the road the two brothers had for so long been traveling.

  Among Joe Jr.’s meager effects in the Nissen hut was no creased, much-read letter from his father telling his son that he was a hero too, and that when he returned to Hyannis Port, they would all stand and toast his honor. That was the letter that he needed, some paternal notice that he had done right and good. His father had nearly cried when Joe Jr. won his wings, and his love for his sons was the deepest passion of the man’s life. He did not see, though, that Joe Jr. needed, if not a letter then at least a paragraph, or if not a paragraph then one simple line telling him that his father was as proud of him as he was of Jack.

  Joe Jr. was not a man who thought that irony was a worthy lens through which to look at the world, but he was full of irony these days. Jack had not courted danger to win a hero’s medal. Danger had come to him in the shape of a black destroyer slicing through a blue-black sea. Jack and his men had survived, and for that he was sung a hero’s song. Unlike Jack, Joe Jr. was wooing heroism, stalking it as if it were something that
a man had to pursue. He had done what he had been asked to do, and he had done it well. He had won no singular medal, but he had been one of a few hundred men who had turned the Bay of Biscay into killing grounds, dropping Nazi submarines into the deep waters so they could not go forth to disrupt shipping, prolong the war, and kill hundreds of merchant marines and sailors. It did not matter that Joe Jr. had no notch on his belt for a sunken submarine or a plane that he had sent down. He was doing his share, if only he could see it.

  In May, a New York Sun reporter showed up to write about the squadron and said that he wanted to interview the best pilot. He was shown into the officers’ hut, where Joe Jr. sat before a warming fire. That was a singular honor to be so chosen, but Joe Jr. was obsessed by what he had not done. “I’ll still take carrier duty with a fighter,” he said, bemoaning the fact that he had seen no submarines. “Things happen. You don’t fly 1,700 hours and see nothing. You don’t make twenty-nine trips, ten to twelve hours each, and see nothing. Yeah, I’ve made twenty-nine. The next one is my thirtieth. Know what happens after you’ve made your thirtieth? You go out on your thirty-first.”