The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “That is,” the reporter concluded his article, “if, like a guy named Joe you just don’t have any luck.”

  Whatever solace Joe Jr. received was in the tender arms of Pat Wilson whenever he could get away from Dunkeswell. Her cottage was one of those rustic redoubts favored by the nature-adoring British upper class. She had chickens on her tennis court, a chauffeur whose duties included milking the cow, and an ever-evolving set of smartly attired weekend guests that often included not only Joe Jr. but Kathleen and her beau, Billy Hartington.

  The war had led some to wenching and boozing and mindless games, but gave others the strength to cut through all the silly proprieties and narrow moralisms to live as they wanted to. Joe Jr. was having an affair with a married woman. She had not seen her husband for over two years, and she might not see him until war’s end or perhaps never again. Hearts were the least of the things being broken in this war, and no one condemned the couple for their adulterous affair. Kathleen had fallen in love with Billy Hartington before the war. He was a man worthy of love, a combat officer in the Cold Springs Guards, a good and gentle man, bearing one of the great names of England, and he would be the next duke of Devonshire. His only flaw, as Kathleen saw it, was that he was a Protestant, from a family known over the centuries for its hatred of the Catholic Church. In a different time, Kathleen would have fled from his heretical embrace, but she hurried toward him now. Not settling for a paltry affair, she was contemplating marrying the man outside the Church.

  The possible marriage risked splitting the Kennedys. Rose stood on one side, a mother who had forfeited much for her family and her faith. For her, the matter had already been decided because it was simply unthinkable. “I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family tradition,” she wrote Kathleen in February in a sentence that could have been Rose’s own epitaph. As the weeks passed, Rose’s entreaties ranged from shrewd arguments to near hysteria.

  Kathleen’s father adored his daughter and valued her happiness more than all the proprieties of faith, but on this of all matters he dared not stand against his wife. In February, he wrote Joe Jr. that his sister was “entitled to the best and with us over here it’s awfully difficult to be as helpful as we’d like to be. As far as I personally am concerned, Kick can do no wrong and whatever she did would be great with me.” Joe always cut through the externalities, be they of politics or faith, and he was all for his daughter getting on with her life and happiness, but he could not be seen confronting his wife. As far as he was concerned, he wrote Kathleen, she and Billy should work it out together and “let all the rest of us go jump in the lake.” He had heard that his daughter was making converts to the Church, surely a mark of her deep and honest faith. “Maybe if you make enough of them a couple of them could take your place,” he wrote his daughter in March 1944. “If Mother ever saw that sentence I’d be thrown right out on the street…. I’m still working for you so keep up your courage.”

  Kathleen endlessly pondered the question of whether she dared to turn away from a Catholic religion that would cast her out of its sanctuary of certainty if she married this good man. Billy had come back to run for the House of Commons in his family’s bailiwick. His defeat had brought the question of duty and happiness even more to the fore.

  Joe Jr., a man of deep Catholic faith and natural conservatism, might once have sided with his mother. Now, with the tacit blessings of his own father, he stood with Kathleen. “Never did anyone have such a pillar of strength,” she reflected later. Joe Jr. had always accepted the dogma of his church, but on this matter he stood up to it, and to his own mother. His was a courage that others outside the family would not see or understand. It was a courage that merited him nothing but the deep gratitude of his sister, and a private satisfaction that he had helped to contribute to what might be Kathleen’s happiness.

  Rose thought that Kathleen, like all women, was susceptible to the evil blandishments of men, seducers of mind and body. Kathleen astutely realized that her own brother “might be held largely responsible for my decision.” Indeed, when she announced her engagement, Rose cabled Kathleen from the hospital bed where she had gone in distress: “HEARTBROKEN. FEEL YOU HAVE BEEN WRONGLY INFLUENCED.” On May 6, 1944, Joe Jr. stood next to his beloved sister at the Chelsea Register Office, where he gave her away in marriage to Billy Hartington. He joked that by doing so he had ruined his political future, losing the votes of Boston’s Irish. But on this day he hardly seemed to care.

  As the firstborn Kennedy son, Joe Jr. had always assumed that he belonged nowhere but at the mountainous heights of life, celebrated for his courage and applauded for his awesome accomplishments. The war had convinced him, though, that human happiness was a worthy goal, not a shameful avoidance of life’s high struggles. First, he must complete what he had come here to do, to win a high and noble honor.

  “I have finished my missions and was due to start back in about two weeks,” Joe Jr. wrote his parents two days after the wedding, “but volunteered to stay another month. I persuaded my crew to do it, which pleased me very much. We are the only crew which has done so.”

  That was a lie. Perhaps Joe Jr. was trying to reassure his family, but he had not asked his crew to stay on after their thirty-five missions. Joe Jr., however, wanted to be there for D-Day, when he might have his moment of heroism. And so, on June 6, he flew as part of a massive grid protecting the invading forces from German submarines that might work their way into the midst of the mightiest armada in history, wreaking havoc and death and threatening the whole operation. His orders were to fly at fifteen hundred feet near Cherbourg, a city in northwest France far from the Normandy beaches, but the flotilla was so enormous that he could spot some of the ships far out on the horizon. He saw no submarines that day or on the many sorties that followed during the invasion month. On one sortie he spotted five German torpedo boats. He could easily have swooped down and destroyed them. He was just one square in the gigantic grid, however, and his orders were to keep to his patrol and leave it to other planes. He did what he was told, as did the other pilots, and in the end not one ship out of the entire invading force was lost to the German submarines. Joe Jr.’s month was coming to a close, and on his final flights he treated danger as his mistress. On his last mission he flew his plane so near the German guns at Guernsey that he arrived back at Dunkeswell with bullet holes in the fuselage as his souvenir.

  Joe Jr. usually had letters from his family to help relieve the tedium of waiting for the next flight. But back home everyone expected his imminent arrival in time for his birthday on July 25, and the family had largely stopped writing him. His father had even stopped sending him the candy that was Joe Jr.’s only addiction. On July 19, his father decided that maybe Joe Jr. wouldn’t be home so soon, and he wrote another letter. The major news was that Jack was in the hospital. “He seems to be getting along better, although he has had his ups and downs,” Joe wrote. “Rumor hath it that you are very much in love, but we have not had any of the details…. Anyway, let us hope you are on your way and we shall see you very soon.”

  Joe Jr. knew that he would not be returning a hero, not in the exalted way he defined the word. He had lost that sprightly step that he felt would lead him to the highest reaches of political office, and yet his father expected so much of him. “I think at this point you are about the only one of us many that has the good graces of the head of the family but I give you about 4 days after your arrival in this country before you’ll join the rest of us,” Bobby wrote his brother, warning Joe Jr. of what would face him in America.

  Joe Jr. was already packing up his gear when he was called into the squadron office and told about an extraordinary secret mission code-named “Anvil.” The allies faced a terrible danger, the Nazis’ newest weapon, the V-l rocket. Since the week after D-Day the V-ls had been slamming into London by the hundreds, wreaking death and destruction and, worse yet, generating a new kind of fear. In Fr
ance the Nazis bunkered their rocket bases in defenses that so far had proved impregnable to allied bombs. Out in a hangar sat a specially fitted PB4Y bomber that the navy hoped would end all that. This plane that had just been flown over from Philadelphia would be filled with explosives. The pilot would fly the craft up to two thousand feet and then switch the piloting over to one of the two mother ships trailing behind. Then he and his co-pilot would parachute out, while the deadly cargo flew on, to be guided directly toward one of the Nazi V-l bases.

  Joe Jr. volunteered immediately for the assignment, without a moment’s reflection and with boyish enthusiasm. In raising his hand high, he was making the kind of choice envisioned by the men of Harvard half a century before. Life was a journey of character through time. A man was true and strong and brave, and one day, if life was as it was supposed to be, he would have a chance to test those virtues on a great and bloody field of combat, and what was important was not whether he lived or died, but that he proved true.

  Joe Jr. had finally found the mission that he had sought since entering combat. This was his last great chance. He was going to be thirty years old. He had his first tufts of gray hair. As he saw the world, he was not yet a true man until he had fulfilled his one transcendent heroic act. He figured that he had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, and those odds were good enough.

  Some would argue later, from the safe distance of time and place, that Joe Jr.’s act was not heroic but mindless bravado, a twisted working out of the Kennedy family drama. What must be said, though, of the other officers who volunteered? Would these young men have been held to the same merciless scrutiny? What monsters lay in their childhoods? What demons dogged them? How could they come forward so boldly when they shared neither Joe Jr.’s blood nor his heritage?

  Great and noble acts of heroism are born of complicated, ambiguous motives. It is best to use restraint in analyzing them, lest one make cowards of heroes and heroes of cowards. There was perhaps no one better suited to ponder the nature of Joe Jr.’s heroism than his own brother. Years later, when scribbling notes for a letter to Ernest Hemingway, Jack had deep, telling insights into the nature of such self-conscious acts of heroism as his brother’s. Jack had lived too long and seen too much to imagine that heroism was a simple, idealistic act. A hero’s courage came from “pride—his sense of individuality—his desire to maintain his reputation for manliness which may be more important to him than office—the desire to maintain his reputation among his colleagues as a man of courage, his conscience, his personal standards of ethics—morality—his need to maintain his own respect for himself which may be more important than his regard of others—his desire to win or maintain the opinion of friends or constituents.” Even after all the motivations were duly noted, it remained a mystery why in World War II many men lay huddled, shivering in their foxholes, not even firing their weapons, while a few brave men stood up and rushed forward through a ring of fire. That was a mystery that lay at Joe Jr.’s core, a mystery to those who sought to understand him, and a mystery perhaps even to Joe Jr. himself.

  Joe Jr. transferred immediately to the base at Fersfield, where the U.S. Navy was preparing Anvil. The immense dangers of the project were not just theoretical. The Army Air Corps had already lost one man, and two others were seriously wounded in developing a similar program. The navy, which thought itself better, smarter, and quicker than its sister service, was forging ahead, hoping to be the first to strike a fatal blow at the Nazi bases.

  During the day Joe Jr. flew the new plane, empty of its deadly cargo, on testing missions. In the evenings he cycled off the base to a phone booth and talked to Pat for twenty minutes or more. Before he went to bed, he got down on his knees in his room full of other men and said his prayers. If another officer had done that, somebody would probably have made a dismissive aside, but no one said anything. And one night, when the other men were still playing cards at two in the morning, and Joe Jr. got up and told them enough was enough, no one told him to buzz off. Some of them outranked him, but they went somewhere else to play their game.

  Two of the other officers confided to each other that Joe Jr. was their model of what a man should be. He did not wear his life on his sleeve, spewing out all the details like a tour guide to his own autobiography. At times he would venture a word or two, saying that his father wanted him to enter politics after the war, but he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do. One night, as he lay half asleep in his bunk, he mumbled a few words about getting married and heading off to Scotland on his honeymoon. But these were just snippets of dreams, memories floating through the night.

  Another man would have written letters to his family and friends to be delivered only if he died. Joe Jr. was not a man to take ominous precautions. He wrote a letter to Jack that he knew would not be delivered until after the mission, a letter full of untruths.

  The brothers communicated in only one idiom, a jocular bonhomie more appropriate for boys at Choate than for brothers in a war-torn, tragic world. This was the only emotional language among men that Joe Jr. knew. He told Jack that he thought the New Yorker article was “excellent” and that “the whole squadron got to read it, and were much impressed by your intestinal fortitude.” But he gave that niggardly spoonful of praise only to set Jack up for another merciless put-down. “What I really want to know, is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar.”

  Often Joe Jr. found that the only way to deal with fears and emotional truths was to say the opposite of what he meant. “Tell the family not to get excited about my staying over here,” he wrote. “I am not repeat not contemplating marriage nor intending to risk my fine neck (covered in the back with a few fine silk black hairs) in any crazy venture.”

  Joe Jr. was at the start of his adult life and career, but he had an overwhelming sense of his own mortality and age. All the letters from America were full of stories of Jack and his health problems. Joe Jr. might have contrasted his own vibrant health with the ill health of his brother. But he saw Jack as youth and vitality and sexual vigor. He figured he’d be back in the States around the first of September, and then maybe, if Jack had the time, he “will be able to fix your old brother up with something good.” Jack would have to get on his stick, for his big brother had “graying hair,” and he would have to come up with “something that really wants a tired old aviator.”

  Jack was the winner in all the competitions that mattered, from the honors of war to the spoils of women. “My congrats on the Medal,” Joe Jr. concluded his letter. “It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.” Joe Jr. knew that was not true. If he succeeded, he would fly home to America not only with the medal given to all who had served in the campaign but with the navy’s highest honor, the Navy Cross, and he would once again be ahead of Jack on that road on which he believed they both traveled.

  If Joe Jr. could only have seen Jack, he would have realized that his younger brother was no longer trudging manfully up the road their father had paved for his sons. Jack sat at the side, dazed, looking out on a world that hurried on without him. The previous winter he had suffered relapses of malaria, his body shaking uncontrollably, his face peaked and yellow, his condition so perilous that his father’s friend Joe Timilty thought that he would die. The malaria, however, was nothing more than a sweet souvenir of the South Pacific compared to Jack’s back problems.

  Chronic back pain is not only a physical condition but a philosophical assault that turns even Pollyannas into doomsayers. In June 1944, Jack’s back had been operated upon at the New England Baptist Hospital, where the surgeon from the Lahey Clinic achieved a “thorough removal of the degenerative portion of the cartilage.” But that seemed only to worsen matters. “He … is obviously incapacitated by pain in low back and down L. (left) leg,” Jack’s August 1944 medical report stated. “He cannot bend forward supporting weight of trunk. Lat and post, bending limite
d…. This is a high-strung individual … who has been through much combat strain. He may have recurrent disc or incomplete removal but better bet is that there is some other cause for his neuritis.” This is the only place in Jack’s long medical history where there is a suggestion that there may have been a relationship between his psychological condition and his health. Another possible contributing factor was impending Addison’s disease, a potentially deadly malady that would not be diagnosed for several years.

  As Jack lay in his bed, a group of his old PT-boat mates burst into his room at Boston’s Baptist Hospital with a basketload of good cheer and endless stories of life in the Pacific. Jack was heartened at the sight of Joe and Lennie and Johnny and Al and by their enthusiasms. But as consummately as Jack could portray himself as far healthier than he was, now he was so weak that he could do little except lie there. Lenny had brought his bride, Kate, along. She was a nurse, and she found it ominous that Jack’s bed had not been cranked up and that he lay there perfectly flat. The visitors had hardly been in Jack’s room a few minutes before a nurse walked in and told them that they would have to leave. Jack was so tired, so terribly spent, that he did not protest, but bid them adieu.

  For Joe Jr., these last two weeks in August 1944 had been full of baleful signs. Training flights had gone astray. The project was raked with silly bureaucratic ineptitude. Serious warnings about the faulty electrical system had been smothered by the command. The whole project reeked of the military’s institutional stupidity and sterile arrogance that had made Jack so despairing of the war efforts. On the evening before the mission, one of the men, Earl Olsen, tried to warn Joe Jr. that the arming panel and so-called safety pin might blow up the plane. Joe Jr. cut him dead. He did not want to listen to the man. When the mission was delayed a day, Olsen had another chance to talk to Joe Jr. and tell him explicitly about the problem. Joe Jr. might have asked some more questions, but he turned from the man and his menacing truths. Joe Jr. admitted to another officer that he was sorry he had volunteered, but he believed that it was too late to do anything but go on.