The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe Jr. could have gone to his superior and asked that the mission be postponed until the plane was properly checked out. That would have required a different kind of courage: if he had done so, some men might have wondered whether Joe Jr. was a coward, and that was an appellation that he would allow no man to connect with him. A brave man is often as fearful as a coward. It pains him to be called a coward, for he knows what lies within himself and fears what he might have been or might well be.

  August 12, 1944, dawned a cloudless day, and Joe Jr. knew that his mission would be delayed no longer. Late that afternoon he and his co-pilot, Wilford Willy, boarded the shiny new PB4Y drone loaded with 23,562 pounds of Torpex, an explosive nearly twice as powerful as TNT. This was a mission to be chronicled to the last detail and to be celebrated as one of the triumphs of the war. It was so important that Eliot Roosevelt, the president’s son, was on hand taking photos of the men before they took off, then flying off himself in a Mosquito plane to memorialize the flight even further.

  They were a mini-armada, with Joe Jr. at the center of it all, piloting his silver PB4Y, the two mother ships, Roosevelt’s plane, sixteen Mustang fighters as fighter protection, plus a B-17 ready to fly to another airport to pick up the parachuting navy men. Joe Jr. took the plane up to two thousand feet and leveled off. The first step was to let the mother ship take control of the drone and run through a few maneuvers. Once that was over, Joe Jr. and Willy would bail out. It was as simple as that.

  The mother ship gently guided the robot plane into a left turn. At that moment, Joe Jr.’s plane exploded in an immense yellow circle of flame, like the sun blazing in the evening sky. Then the light was gone, leaving the sky filled with black smoke and small fires in the woods below.

  Book Two

  12

  A New Generation Offers a Leader

  On the second Sunday in August 1944, Joe lay upstairs in his bedroom in Hyannis Port taking his afternoon nap. For a man whose sons were the unmitigated joy of his life, this weekend was a blessed time, almost the way it had been before the war. Jack had come home on leave from Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston. Bobby had made it to the Cape for a couple of days. He was wearing navy blue, but as Joe saw it, Bobby was still blessedly thousands of miles from combat. Little Teddy was his irascible self, running around the grounds, he and Joey Gargan filling the house with a joyous youthful tenor. Best of all, Joe Jr. would be home in a few days too, charging into the house with hugs and hollers, belittling his father’s morbid fear that he would lose at least one son in the war. Eunice, Pat, and Jean were there too, and they adored their father and showed their love in demonstrative ways that their brothers could not.

  Rose woke up her husband and said that there were priests downstairs who insisted on talking only to him. Joe went downstairs and led the priests to an anteroom. Joe queried them again and again until he knew that Joe Jr. was gone, gone forever. Then he came out of the closed room and with his arm around Rose told his three surviving sons and his daughters that Joe Jr. was dead.

  “Children, your brother Joe has been lost,” he said, looking at Jack, Bobby, Teddy, and their sisters, his eyes gleaming with tears. “He died flying a volunteer mission. I want you all to be particularly good to your mother.”

  Rose turned to her church and found the solace available only to a woman of profound faith. As for Joe, he had no such faith and could offer his children nothing but cliches. The most profound tenets of faith and philosophy were to him just mindless platitudes, propping up the soul. “We’ve got to carry on,” he told his children. “We must take care of the living. There is a lot of work to be done.”

  There is no device calibrated to judge the magnitude of a father’s mourning over his lost son, but those who saw Joe said they had never seen a man suffer more and feel more deeply. When Joe called his sister, Mary Loretta, his mournful sobs were so deep that she feared he would never stop.

  “Joe’s death has shocked me beyond belief,” Joe wrote James Forrestal, the secretary of the navy, responding to his letter of condolence. “All of my children are equally dear to me, but there is something about the first born that sets him a little apart—he is for always a bit of a miracle and never quite cut off from his mother’s heart. He represents our youth, its joys and problems.”

  “He was a real man,” Joe wrote Forrestal. Joe had brought his sons up to be true men, to pursue lives of courage, and his eldest son had lived as his father had wanted him to live. Joe could have manipulated his sons’ military careers so that they would have been away from the cannons’ roar. He had not done so, and he allowed them to fight in a war in which he did not believe. And what did he have for his misbegotten nobility but a dead son, and a second son who was half dead, a pallid invalid?

  “And so the story of young Joe, some may think is at an end,” Joe wrote the official. “But is it? I cannot but believe, as you so nicely said in your letter, that ‘his character and extraordinary personality’ will be a legacy to others.” Joe would found a foundation in Joe Jr.’s name. He would have a ship named after his firstborn son. But the memorial he cared about was flesh and blood, Joe Jr.’s life of true manhood living on, memorialized in the lives of others.

  Jack wandered the beach at Hyannis Port that Sunday afternoon and then returned to his hospital bed in Boston. Jack was the sickly brother. As he saw it, his own death would have been far easier to bear. “It came at a time when I was really awfully, you know, I was weighed at 122 or 123 and sick as hell, gray and green and yellow,” he recalled years later. “If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, but anybody who is really living at the top of the peak, then to get cut off, it is always more of a shock.”

  Jack had time now to contemplate his brother’s loss and to puzzle out his own uncertain fate. Gone was all his ambivalence toward his big brother. He remembered him first of all as a man who “enjoyed great health.” It was a characterization that would occur only to a brother who was himself sick. Jack saw that Joe Jr.’s health was the mother of his other traits, his “great physical courage and stamina, [and] a complete confidence in himself which never faltered.” Jack believed, rightly, that Joe Jr.’s virtues “were in the end his undoing.” The physical courage, stamina, confidence, verve, and gusto had led him to stay on in England and to fly that last fateful mission.

  As Jack lay in his hospital bed, his father did not stand outside the door with Joe Jr.’s fallen banner, waiting to thrust it into Jack’s unwilling hands as soon as he was able to walk unaided. Joe surely wanted his oldest surviving son to continue on the pathway set out on by his brother, but there were other pressures on Jack as intense as his father’s expectations. One of them was the profound question that every surviving combat soldier asks: Why me? Why was I saved?

  Jack received many deeply felt letters of condolence, futile attempts to ponder the imponderable. “You are the Kennedy fame,” Mike Grace wrote him, “but it becomes all too plain that Joe was the heart behind your name.” The friend meant to honor Joe Jr., not to demean Jack, but there was the devastating reality that he faced.

  Jack thought that “the best ones seem to go first,” and that there was “a completeness to Joe’s life, and that is the completeness of perfection.” It was part of the solace of war to believe that the bravest died young, their virtue confirmed by their deaths. “There must be a reason why the good are called upon while the bad are left to rot,” his old flame Harriet Price wrote him.

  There in its starkest form was the psychological reality that Jack faced. He had not volunteered for a hero’s role. He was a man of intellectual honesty and saw that there was a profound distinction between what he had done to live and his brother’s actions that had led to his death. As sick as Jack might be, he was alive. No matter how he had suffered, how bravely he had acted, he dared not think of himself as being as good as his brother who was gone. And now he had the additi
onal burden of picking up a banner that he felt he could hardly lift. “You will have some of your brother’s unfinished business to do during the long years that face you, so get thoroughly well before you start,” Barbara Ellen Spencer wrote him.

  The night turned even darker a month later in September 1944 when a friend, Kathleen’s new husband, Billy Hartington, died leading his company in a fight against the retreating Germans in Belgium. That October, as Joe sat in Hyannis Port thinking of Joe Jr.’s death and Billy’s death and of poor Jack lying in the hospital in Boston, he wrote his friend Lord Beaverbrook that he was writing with his “natural cynicism.”

  That was as close to a moment of psychological insight as he would allow himself. He would never say that he was “depressed”; the emotional lexicon of the Kennedys did not contain this word. “To have boys like ours killed for a futile effort would be the greatest reflection on us all,” he wrote Beaverbrook. “Yet, if you would ask me what I am doing to help, I would tell you nothing. However, I assure you it is not by choice but rather by circumstances.”

  “Why does no one come to see me?” Joe asked his first cousin Joe Kane, a shrewd political operative close to the family.

  “Who’d you ever go to see?” replied Kane. A man’s goodness and generosity are his capital, and Joe had spread precious little of it beyond the precincts of his home. All he seemed to have left was his cynicism, and that he had in bountiful supply. He was an old sailor adrift on a lifeless sea.

  Joe had let it be known that he was thinking of “making a speech for [Governor Thomas] Dewey,” Roosevelt’s putative Republican opponent in the 1944 election. That was surely high on the list of reasons that the president called his former ambassador at the Waldorf on October 24 and invited him down to Washington for a visit two days later. When Joe walked into the Oval Office, he was shocked at the aged man who put his hand out and waved him to a seat. The president had always had a splendid memory, but now events seemed to be lost in a fog of memory, names half-remembered, numbers skewed.

  As Joe sat there realizing that the president was ill, he had a dreadful premonition that “the Hopkins, Rosenmans, and Frankfurters could run the country now without much of an objection from him.” Joe was still obsessed with the Jews and what he took to be the conniving, unscrupulous way they rose to power and wealth. He told Arthur Krock afterward that he warned the president he could not abide “the crowd around you—Niles, Hopkins, Rosenman, etc. They will write you down in history, if you don’t get rid of them, as incompetent, and they will open the way for the Communist line. They have surrounded you with Jews and Communists and alienated the Catholics.” Joe warned the president, as he wrote in his diary, that the old-line Democratic voters “felt that Roosevelt was Jew-controlled.”

  Those who defended Joe’s attitudes pointed at Krock and Baruch and argued that a man with Jewish friends couldn’t be anti-Semitic. He had his Jewish friends and associates—journalists, lawyers, doctors, and political advisers—but only because he considered them smart and useful. He played golf at the Palm Beach Country Club, a Jewish club, not because he chose to make some kind of statement, but because it was close to his home.

  His children listened to their father long and well, and Kathleen shared her father’s keen ability to spot a Jew. Six million European Jews had died in the Holocaust, but after the war, Kathleen found them to be ubiquitous in Paris. “The people one sees at the collection aren’t a bit chic and the shops complain the people who buy now are black market profiteers,” Kathleen wrote the family on September 15, 1946. “The Jews are in evidence in all the shops and restaurants.”

  For Jack, the pain and illness never seemed to end. He had been back in the States for over a year now, shuttled between hospital beds, cut open and shot up with drugs, and he appeared no closer to good health than when he had arrived. The doctors tried procaine, and while that made his back and leg pain tolerable, he was still in pain. In addition, in November 1944, they diagnosed him as having “Colitis chronic.” The doctors had tried everything they knew to try, and in the end they let him go, telling him that his convalescence might last another year.

  Writing in a hospital bed from which he had good reason to believe he would never rise to full health and well-being, he sent a letter to his friend from the Pacific, Paul “Red” Fay Jr. He did not tell Red of the despair that he surely must have felt but covered his emotions with joking bravado.

  “Sometime in the next month I am going to be paying full price at the local Loews,” he wrote. “I will no longer [be] getting the forty-per-cent off for servicemen—for the simple reason that I’m going to be in mufti. This I learned yesterday—as they have given up on fixing me up O.K. From here I’m going to go home for Christmas, and then go to Arizona for about a year, and try to get back in shape again.”

  Jack headed out to the mountains of Arizona to see whether the western air could do what scalpels and medicines had not done. In his old navy fatigue pants and shoes, he was hardly the East Coast dandy. To a new friend, J. Patrick Lannan, Jack looked “yellow as saffron and thin as a rail,” and he gently bemoaned the fact that he could not digest much food. He was not much of a horseman, but he galloped through the high desert as if he thought he could outrace his illness and his own uncertain future.

  His beloved sister Kathleen had written him: “It just seems that the pattern of life for me has been destroyed. At the moment I don’t fit into a design.” He could have replied to her in much the same way.

  Jack worked on a memorial book for Joe Jr., patterned in part on his favorite book, John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way. Since Jack’s work on the book primarily involved editing the reminiscences of others, he had plenty of time for other pursuits. He talked to his cottage mate, Pat Lannan, about world affairs. Jack told his new friend that he was thinking of running for Congress from Massachusetts. He probably knew that his father was attempting to provide financial incentives to Congressman James Michael Curley sweet enough that the indicted politician would retire, opening up his Boston seat to Jack. “I am returning to Law School at Harvard in the Fall, and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it,” he wrote Lem rather cryptically. “I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.”

  Jack told Lannan that he hoped to enter public service. “Oh, you mean politics,” Lannan said, but Jack treated the word as if it were an epithet. “Politics” still had that immigrant stigma to it. It was the pathway upward. At Choate and Harvard he had heard the understated disdain for the motley business of politics, and he was not yet ready to shout out the name of his intended profession. Men of the upper class might go into the State Department or OSS, but they did not for the most part run for office. They did not choose to have their careers depend on the will and whim of people they neither knew nor, for the most part, wanted to know.

  Every afternoon at five, Jack made sure that he was in the cottage waiting for a call from his father. Joe sent him books that he thought his son should read, as well as steaks and chops to bolster his strength. In their daily conversations, Joe tried to decipher the truth filtered through Jack’s cheery dialogue.

  “Frankly, don’t think it [his health] is any too good,” Joe admitted in a letter in March 1945 to Red Fay, Jack’s friend. “On the phone he is still his gay self so it is very difficult to give you any more definite information from this.”

  Jack didn’t have to depend solely on his father to learn what was happening in Hyannis Port. Bobby wrote his big brother, providing Jack with intelligence about life back home. Bobby did not lace his letters with the joshing put-downs that had run through Joe Jr.’s correspondence but wrote with simple sincerity. Bobby knew that he and his brother shared the mixed blessings of a mother and father who hovered over them, egging them on more like coaches than traditional parents. “Everyone evidently thinks you’re doing a singularly fine job out there, except mother who was a little upset that you still mixed ‘who’ and ‘whom’ up. Get o
n to yourself…. I suggest you stay out there for as long as possible. That staying away will also be good for keeping you a fair headed boy around the house, for I know it takes you almost as short a time as it does me to finish yourself off when you’re home.”

  Even though Jack’s back troubled him so much that he thought he might have to return to the Lahey Clinic in Boston, when he drove into Phoenix to stay at the Arizona Biltmore, the sight of attractive women, including one of Hollywood’s leading stars, made him forget his pain. “Anyways their [sic] was some pumping which interested me,” he wrote Lem, “and I did take Veronica Lake [for] a ride in my car…. I don’t mean by all this that I pumped her or that if you should ever see her you should get a big hello…. I am heading out of here to Palm Springs where I expect to tangle tonsils with Inga Binga among others.” He was not without his conquests: he bragged to Lem that he had slept with forty-three-year-old Lili Damita, a former film star and Errol Flynn’s recent wife. “I took a piece out of Lili Damita just for the sake of Auld Errol Flynn,” he wrote Lem, “but did not come back for a second helping.”

  Jack ended up in Los Angeles. Since he was a little boy, and his father had returned from Hollywood with Tom Mix cowboy suits and wondrous tales, Jack had been fascinated with the movie world. On the Hollywood screen the sick were made whole, the barnacles of age removed, and cares exorcised. Some of these illusions were so powerful that nothing erased them, no merciless houselights, no rude truth-sayers, nothing.