“Now that I look back,” he ended, “it has been a hell of a letter.” He promised to visit her in L.A. when he got relieved of duty.
• • •
Jack Kennedy had endured an extraordinary rite of passage. Now there was a kinship with those he admired that went beyond just reading about them on the printed page—Churchill, for example, as a young man had escaped from the Boers, and then there was Hemingway, who’d been badly wounded driving an ambulance for the Italians—and so, in a real way, this linked him with them.
He was a young man who’d “proven himself on foreign soil,” as an excited booster would soon declare. But for all that his courage and fortitude came to mean to others, it counted most with Jack himself. No other challenge he might face, he knew, would ever be as hard as had getting his men back to safety. He had met fear head-on, and it had changed him.
“On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time,” he wrote his parents, “was the way that everyone stood up to it. Previous to that I had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and layout out here. 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 the trouble.”
And in a letter to Lem that downplayed his individual heroism, he said: “We have been having a difficult time for the past two months—lost our boat a month ago when a Jap cut us in two + lost some of our boys. We had a bad time—a week on a Jap island—but finally got picked up—and have got another boat. It really makes me wonder if most success is merely a great deal of fortuitous accidents. I imagine I would agree with you that it was lucky the whole thing happened—if the two fellows had not been killed which rather spoils the whole thing for me.”
At the same time he got off a letter to Lem’s mother. He expressed his pride in what her son was doing with the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in North Africa.
• • •
Before leaving the South Pacific, Jack Kennedy made it his final task to ensure that all his crew members got back to the States. When he arrived there, too, he quickly found himself in familiar surroundings: another hospital room. The physical harm that had been done to him was immeasurable. Not only had he contracted tropical malaria, but the orthopedic diagnosis of “chronic disc disease of the lumbar area” was followed by the first of what would be many back operations. There was a second back surgery also that year, but neither that nor any subsequent one would provide the relief he sought.
Those who visited Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston saw him lying there wracked, alternately, by chills and fever. Torby Macdonald offered his impression of Jack’s case: “His skin had turned yellow. His weight had dropped from 160 pounds to about 125 pounds. When I came into his room, he raised a bony hand and gave me a shaky wave.” Jack insisted he felt “great.” When Torby refused to believe him, the patient amended it to, “Great, considering the shape I’m in.”
In June 1944, while still in Chelsea Naval Hospital, Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Medal for “extremely heroic conduct.” But medals don’t mend bodies. Chuck Spalding, who visited him a little later after he’d gone down to Palm Beach to rest in the sunshine, gave this graphic account: “That wound was a savage wound, a big wound. It went maybe eight inches or so down his back. It would never heal and it was open and painful. He had to fight to get his back healed and I would walk up and down the beach with him with the back still open and he’d say ‘How is it now?’ or ‘Is any stuff running out of it?’ It was severe pain.”
Spalding, who was himself a navy pilot, said, “I’ll never forget Jack sitting at our table watching the ‘home front.’ All he felt was cynicism—everybody dancing, the lights, the women. It was the only time I ever saw him reacting like a real soldier. It was the rapidity of his move from the Pacific to Palm Beach, the juxtaposition.”
That August, Joe Jr. was killed. He and his copilot had accepted a mission to fly a plane packed with 20,000 pounds of TNT toward a V3 site on the French coast, then parachute out before reaching the target. The idea was to create a guided missile, but before the two men could bail to safety, the deadly cargo detonated.
Jack, up at Hyannis Port when the telegram came, went out walking alone on the beach right after he heard. His brother had been the family standard-bearer and, in matters of politics, the prospective heir. The rivalry between the brothers, especially for the father’s colors, had always been a part of their lives and endured right to the end.
There was a revealing story Jack heard about a farewell dinner for Joe, occurring just before Joe was sent to Britain as a naval aviator. It had taken place soon after accounts of Jack’s Pacific ordeal were splashed across the front pages. One of the guests at the party, trying to do the right thing, had raised a glass to toast “Ambassador Joe Kennedy, the father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” However, Jack was absent. Joe was very much there.
Later that night, as it was reported to Jack, Joe was seen on his cot “clenching and unclenching his fists,” saying to himself aloud, “By God, I’ll show them.” Jack understood that it had been his brother’s desire to match, or even top, his own courage in the South Pacific that drove him to volunteer for the high-risk mission over Europe. In fact, when Joe Jr. perished in the line of duty, he’d already flown twenty-five combat missions, enough to permit him, honorably, to fly no more, but his fraternal competitive spirit was too deeply rooted: he simply couldn’t stop trying to beat the younger brother who’d managed to pull ahead of him.
A month later, another terrible blow was dealt the Kennedys. In the spring, Jack’s sister Kathleen, his beloved Kick, had married Billy Hartington, the elder son of the Duke of Devonshire and a major in the Coldstream Guards. Now he was declared a casualty in Belgium, causing Jack to write his grieving sister that Billy’s death reminded him of Raymond Asquith, that other privileged Englishman whose promise was cut short on the battlefield.
Despite Jack’s own triumph, the loss of a brother and a brother-in-law, each an aspirant to a career in the public arena, of necessity pushed his celebrated heroism into the background, at least for a time. It would soon be again prominent, however, for Joe’s and Billy’s deaths left him a legacy he was ready now to accept and the public would be ready to endorse. As one of Jack’s supporters, himself a veteran, would later observe, World War II was Kennedy’s “greatest campaign manager.”
Jack fixed his sights on the 1946 U.S. congressional election. In this race, as in the British “khaki election” of 1900, civilians got the chance to reward the gallant service of the returning soldiers and sailors with their votes. The man who’d made his reputation saving men in wartime was about to test his mettle in a different theater—equally demanding but entirely different, one that would call on all the democratizing experience he’d gained in uniform.
The fun-loving Jack and the serious Jack would now find a mutual pursuit: politics.
13. Billy Sutton
14. Charlie Bartlett
15. Bunker Hill Day, 1946, with Dave Powers
CHAPTER FOUR
WAR HERO
It has been a strange experience and I shall never forget the succession of great halls packed with excited people until there was no room for a single person more, speech after speech, meeting after meeting—three, even four in a night—intermittent flashes of heat and light and enthusiasm with cold air and the rattle of the carriage in between: a great experience. And I improve every time. I have hardly repeated myself at all.
—Winston Churchill, from a
letter to Pamela Plowden, 1899
The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important. With the physical courage of which he’d shown himself to be capable, Jack Kennedy had turned his years of frailty and private suffering into a personal
and public confidence that would take him forward. In mythic terms, he’d also challenged his father’s point of view on the war and bent it to his own. He’d experienced the loss not only of comrades in arms, but of the family’s prince, his brother. Now, ahead of him loomed new ways for him to demonstrate the man he was becoming—and the leader he would be.
If Jack Kennedy didn’t see at first the change he was undergoing when he was discharged from the navy in 1944 and then directly afterward, many around him certainly did. “It was written all over the sky that he was going to be something big,” recalled one of his fellow officers.
Yet, as he was starting to look to the future, he couldn’t let go of what he’d witnessed and what he’d learned. War marks you forever, and so there was one crucial idea he had grasped, which was that it was wrong. In conversations with other officers, he urged them to take the life of their country seriously when they got home, to prevent another war.
For his own part, he spoke as if he, himself, was on the brink of coming to grips with big decisions, of preparing to face them. His commanding officer, for one, commented on the changes in Lieutenant Kennedy that started to be evident at this point: “I think there was probably a serious side to Kennedy that started evolving at that time that had not existed before.”
Now came the fortuitous: his secret illnesses could now be worn as public honors. His chronic bad back would from this era on be attributed to his war injuries. When the noted writer John Hersey, who chronicled Jack’s South Pacific exploits for the New Yorker, made the assumption it was the result of the PT 109 collision and all those hours spent hauling a helpless man through the water, Kennedy let it pass.
All of the other old troubles continued to plague him, especially his serious stomach problems, but they were now morphing into part of his new biography, or new image, just as the bad back was. Scarily thin and still sallow of complexion, Jack met new people and made new acquaintances who immediately chalked up his strange appearance to the malaria and other lingering effects of the PT-boat ordeal. What had been the hidden facts of life were now a statement to the man on the street—especially those meeting him face-to-face for the first time, as soon they would—of his very real heroism.
• • •
Everyone has written that Jack Kennedy needed to be dragooned into running for Congress in 1946. Everyone, that is, except the people who really knew him. The solitary walk he took on the beach at Hyannis after getting the news about Joe Jr. must have involved, along with the grief, recognition of a coming swerve on his life’s path. The personal landscape he’d long taken for granted had rearranged itself around him, and so, too, had the expected demands. He was ready, it turned out, to welcome them.
Many aspects of the man were coming together. Jack had run for student office, majored in government. The reading interests that he’d maintained so steadily—memoirs and history, news stories and political currents, world affairs—had culminated in Why England Slept, his thesis-turned-best-seller. It had shown his skills as a firsthand observer of history. He’d been planning to go to law school, specializing in international law.
I should add that he liked poetry—Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was a favorite, as were the poems sent from the front in World War I by a fellow Harvard man, Alan Seeger, who died on a French battlefield. Yet Jack, despite his childhood built on books, resisted the artistic sensibility. Though he was comfortable with the arts, the poetry that drew him was about mission and dedication, courage and overcoming obstacles. A great example are these several lines from “Ulysses”—
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Even in the far-off Solomon Islands—where, like Ulysses, he’d “suffer’d greatly” on a “dim sea”—he’d kept up lively conversations with his messmates about all the subjects that most fascinated him: indeed, “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments.”
When he returned stateside and was required to put in more hospital time, with everything else on hold, the idea of attending law school continued to be his operative plan right up through early 1945. “I’m returning to law school at Harvard in the fall,” he wrote Lem Billings, “and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it. I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.” That “something good” may well have been the seat for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, a district that included Cambridge.
In the pre–Civil War nineteenth century, that seat had been held by John Quincy Adams, also a Harvard man, and the country’s sixth president; it was the only time a president had served in the House after leaving the White House. At the moment, the seat was occupied by the old-style Irish pol James Michael Curley, now nearing the end of a legendary career that would, by its close, include not just four terms as Boston’s mayor but also two stints in prison.
Curley, now, was about to abandon his congressional post to run again for mayor. Jack knew this because Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., freshly involved in local political matters, was bankrolling the rascal. His son knew it but he kept it to himself, as he took one last try at another career possibility.
His father wrangled him a job stringing for the Chicago Herald-American, a Hearst paper. His assignment was to cover the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He’d be reporting the historic event “from the point of view of the ordinary GI.”
The city was hopping when he got there, with men and women on hand from all over the world. Fifty nations sent delegates to the conference, which began in late April 1945 and lasted two months. FDR had just died, leaving his vice president, Harry Truman, in the White House. Everyone knew World War II was nearing its close. Out in San Francisco the politically connected of every stripe were there to see and be seen, to hobnob and network amid the carnival-like atmosphere.
For Jack Kennedy, the U.N. Conference was the right place at the right moment, offering as it did an irresistible mix of high ideals and high life. It gave him a view of the political arena that now beckoned him. The atmosphere he found himself immersed in was electric with the sounds and sights of a new world being born.
Wherever he went, Kennedy worked contacts both old and new, honing his skills at making professional allies out of social friends, and vice versa. You never knew where you’d see him, but he seemed to be everywhere. For instance, when he hosted a briefing on Russia by the diplomat and Soviet scholar Charles “Chip” Bohlen, he found himself in distinguished company that included the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman.
Along for the ride in San Francisco were two of Jack’s pals: Red Fay and Chuck Spalding. For the former he’d wangled the boon-doggle of acting as his aide at the conference, while Chuck Spalding somehow was hanging out on the strength of a best-selling book he’d cowritten, Love at First Flight, a memoir of his wartime training experience. Young men home from the front, they managed to share laughs despite all the speeches and earnestness, including one memorable moment that occurred in the midst of Bohlen’s deadly serious analysis of Soviet intentions.
It was Jack who first noticed the elegant Harriman had slipped away from the room in the Palace Hotel where the briefing was taking place, and out onto the balcony with a young woman. “I give him about two more minutes, and then he’s going to hang himself,” Jack whispered to Fay. Focused on Bohlen, Fay wondered why his pal would say such a thing.
“I’m not talking about Bohlen,” Kennedy shot back. “I’m talking about Harriman!”
Also in the group with whom Jack socialized at the conference were Cord Meyer, another
young veteran with big political hopes, and his attractive, vivacious wife, Mary. Meyer, at this time, was an aide to the Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen, but would go on to join the CIA.
For Kennedy, the business at hand was not just about filing stories or making the scene. As always, it was his curiosity that drove and excited him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the Soviet delegation, led by the coldly robotic Vyacheslav Molotov.
Along with the rest of the world, he’d seen President Roosevelt concede the territories of Eastern Europe to Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that February, only weeks before his death. Critics saw this concession of important strategic and autonomous lands to the Soviets as an unconscionable giveaway to a soon-to-be enemy.
FDR’s failing health might have been a factor in the outcome at Yalta; there on the shore of the Black Sea, he was pushing himself hard and losing the battle with his own body. But equally at play were other factors that Kennedy, with his growing fascination with the way nations behaved, saw and grasped.
But if he didn’t like the agreement Roosevelt had signed off on, he was able to assess it from more than one perspective. He knew his history, and saw clearly the unyielding strength of Russian nationalism. Napolean had invaded her in 1812. To repel the Grand Army, the Russians had been forced to burn Moscow. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Russians, once again invaded, were facing the harsh fact that they’d lost 20 million people fighting the Germans mostly on Russian soil, with their Allies slow to open a second front.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 46