JFK
Page 47
It was not to be. On the afternoon of August 13, a warm and pleasant Sunday, the Kennedys gathered for a picnic-style lunch in the sunroom of the Hyannis Port home. Jack was there on weekend leave from the Chelsea hospital, as were the other children, save Kick (due to arrive from London soon) and Rosemary (institutionalized in Wisconsin). After the meal, Joe Kennedy went upstairs for an afternoon nap. At about 2:00 P.M., as Bing Crosby’s chart-topping “I’ll Be Seeing You” was playing on the phonograph, a dark car pulled up in front of the house. Two priests stepped out. Rose, thinking it could be a routine visit regarding church matters or the solicitation of funds for a charity (such visits were not uncommon at the home), invited the men to join the family in the living room while her husband completed his nap. No, one of the priests replied, the matter could not wait. Her son, he informed her, was missing in action “and presumed lost.” Rose raced upstairs and woke her husband. She was barely coherent, and Joe leaped out of bed and hurried downstairs, his wife close behind. “We sat with the priests in a smaller room off the living room,” she later wrote, “and from what they told us we realized there could be no hope, and that our son was dead.”41
The children were still in the sunroom. They sensed that something bad had occurred. Their father appeared, his face ashen, and told them the news. He said he wanted them to be brave, to remember their brother but also that life is for the living, and to be “particularly good to your mother.” Then he went upstairs to his bedroom and locked the door.42
Joe Junior had told his parents about a new, final mission he was undertaking before returning home to America, but he had lied about its nature. To them he had said it was “far more interesting than patrolling over the bay,” but also that they shouldn’t worry, as “there is practically no danger.”43 In actuality, he had volunteered for an operation that was dangerous almost to the point of suicidal. Code-named Project Anvil, the mission was a response to the terrifying new German weapon, the V-1 rocket, a kind of early cruise missile that had been pummeling London since soon after D-Day. In France, the Nazi command bunkered their rocket bases in sites that had proved seemingly impervious to Allied bombers. The U.S. Navy stripped down some of the Liberators that Joe had been flying so that they could be packed with explosives. Two pilots would take each plane up to two thousand feet, set it on its course, then parachute to safety. Two B-17s following behind would then guide the “flying bomb” by radio control to its target in coastal France.44
Joe Junior at the Fersfield RAF base, England, in August 1944, not long before his death.
Later, after the fighting had ceased, some would say Joe’s mission was nothing but foolish bravado, a senseless attempt to match Jack’s exploits in the Pacific and a desperate plea for fatherly approval. Perhaps, but what, then, of the other fliers who volunteered for Project Anvil? Did the same demons drive them? Would they have been held to the same unsparing scrutiny for their decision to step forward? Joe’s fellow officers at his base noted his gambler’s nature, his unrestrained eagerness to sign on to anything and everything, but they also respected him for his sense of commitment, his piloting skills, his bravery. They liked that he didn’t wear his virtue on his sleeve and that he refrained from indulging in the name-dropping that his family name and history afforded him. Nor did he pontificate about his postwar plans, being content merely to say that politics was likely in his future, partly on account of his father’s wishes, and to leave it at that.45
Still, one wonders about his brusque dismissal of warning signs in the days before his mission. The entire Anvil project seemed half-baked at best, with test flights that went awry and logistical and tactical uncertainties. Twice a fellow pilot cautioned Joe that the electronic circuitry was not functioning as it should, that the arming panel and so-called safety pin could blow up the aircraft. Joe waved him off both times, forgoing the sensible option of asking his commanding officer that the mission be put off until the plane was fully examined. On the morning of August 12, with the operation definitely on for that evening, he left a message at Kick’s flat, asking her to inform his current girlfriend, Pat Wilson, that he’d be a day late joining her in Yorkshire. “I’m about to go into my final act,” he said. “If I don’t come back, tell my dad—despite our differences [over Kick’s wedding, presumably]—that I love him very much.”46 No mention of Mom; just Dad.
Late that afternoon, Joe and his copilot, Wilford J. Willy, a thirty-five-year-old Navy regular and father of three from Fort Worth, Texas, slid behind the controls of the stripped-down Liberator, which was loaded with 23,562 pounds of explosives. They took off without a hitch from Fersfield Aerodrome. Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, flew behind them in a special Mosquito photoreconnaissance plane to take pictures of the mission and thereby memorialize it. (Which suggests another possible motivation for the mission: that Joe wanted to remove once and for all any lingering suspicion that the Kennedys were “yellow.”47) Some twenty minutes in, Joe switched over to remote guidance, and he and Willy prepared to bail. Suddenly, with Roosevelt snapping photos from behind, Joe Junior’s plane exploded in a giant yellow circle of flame. Pieces of wreckage were scattered over a mile-wide area in coastal Suffolk, and more than fifty homes were damaged. So immense was the blast that not a trace of either pilot was ever found.
In due course it would be determined that Kennedy and Willy’s act of ultimate self-sacrifice had been completely unnecessary. The specific target of their mission was Mimoyecques, a fortress in the Pas-de-Calais region where an underground military complex was being built to house Germany’s latest “V” weapon, the V-3 cannon, which would be aimed at London, one hundred miles away. Unbeknownst to Allied planners, work on the site had been suspended because of the disruptions caused by conventional British and U.S. bombers. Even had the work been completed, there would have been no V-3s to install, the weapon having proved to be thoroughly defective in trials. In a final irony, less than three weeks after Joe’s fateful flight, the empty site at Mimoyecques would be overrun by Canadian troops.48
V
In Ted Kennedy’s recollection of that awful Sunday on the Cape, Jack turned to him after the priests had left and said, “ ‘Joe wouldn’t want us to sit here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.’…And that’s what we did. We went sailing.” Afterwards, Jack wandered the beach alone before returning to his hospital bed in Boston. He had time now to think about his brother’s death and the strangeness of it all: Joe, with his robust good health, was gone, while he, laid up in a sick bed, got to live. Jack commented in writing a few months afterwards 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.” Jack was proud of his actions in Blackett Strait one year before, but he knew there was a sharp distinction between his experience and the top-secret mission that led to his brother’s death. It surprised him not at all when Joe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross “for extraordinary heroism and courage.”49
His father’s demeanor in the weeks following the tragedy only confirmed the sense that the best one had gone first. Joe Senior was bereft, his grief all-consuming. He withdrew inside himself, spending hours alone listening to classical musical and avoiding social interactions. Young Joe, his firstborn and namesake, had been the embodiment of his dreams and ambitions, of his determination to take the Kennedys to the pinnacle of American public life. He was the crown prince, and now he was dead. “It was as though Joe Kennedy had mounted,” one observer later said, “with painstaking attention to the smallest detail, a drama intended to be long and triumphant, only to see the curtain rung down with cruel finality after the prologue.” To a friend Kennedy confessed, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him. Now it’s all over.”50
An enveloping sense of guilt may have deepened the sorrow. Arthur Krock, who knew his man
well, later confided that the fatherly despair at the death was among the most severe “that I’ve ever seen registered on a human being.” He speculated that there was a specific reason for Joe Kennedy’s extreme reaction: “Joe Jr. when he volunteered on this final mission which was beyond his duty, beyond everything, was seeking to prove by its very danger that the Kennedys were not yellow. That’s what killed that boy. That’s why he died. And his father realized it. He never admitted it, but he realized it.”51
For Rose, the early weeks after the tragedy were the darkest time she had ever known. Joe had always been her great joy, ever since he smiled up at her from his crib in the little house in Brookline three decades before. She couldn’t sleep at night as she pictured the terror he must have experienced in his final moments of life. She kept seeing him as a young boy, “running into my arms and snuggling into my lap,” and thought about the steady presence he had always been in the Kennedy household, as a kind of surrogate parent and consummate role model for his siblings. Then, as letters poured in from near and far, Rose’s anguish began, ever so slowly, to lift as she willed herself to acknowledge that Joe’s death was part of God’s mysterious plan, a plan she did not have to understand in order to accept it.52
On August 16, Jack was on hand at Boston’s Logan Airport as Kathleen arrived from England. She collapsed into his arms, weeping. From there the two siblings went to little St. Francis Xavier Church, in Hyannis Port, for some quiet time together. According to her biographer, Kick was shocked by Jack’s appearance: “He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His cheek and jaw bones jutted out prominently, and his skin had a terrible yellow cast to it.”53 But she relished being with him, and he with her, and they saw each other frequently in the weeks that followed. Then, only a month later, on September 19, another stunning blow: news arrived that Kick’s husband, Billy Cavendish, had been killed in action in Belgium nine days earlier, shot through the heart by a German sniper. “So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” she wrote in her diary as she prepared to return to England for the memorial service. “Yesterday the final word came. I can’t believe that the one thing that I felt might happen should have happened. Billy is dead—killed in action in France Sept 10th. Life is so cruel.”54
Jack, reflecting on Joe’s and Billy’s deaths while laid up in the hospital that fall, filled a notebook with fragments about them—a letter from Kick about her husband’s passing, condolence notes from Billy’s fellow Coldstream officers, a Washington Post editorial about Joe as well as his posthumous citation. Jack’s thoughts went back to two accounts he had read of Raymond Asquith’s death in 1916, one in Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way, the other in Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. He inserted both in the notebook:
Buchan: “He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of the immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”
Churchill: “The War which found the measure of many men never got to the bottom of him, and, when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate, cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.”55
An idea took root in Jack’s mind: he would honor his brother by putting together a memorial book, made up of recollections and reminiscences from family and friends. He would serve as editor and pen the introduction. The undertaking became bigger than he anticipated—“The book on Joe is going slower than I had hoped,” he wrote Lem Billings in early 1945, “but it should be out in another month or so and I think will be pretty good”—but he took it seriously, spending long hours, in sister Eunice’s recollection, making calls and writing letters and gathering the collected pieces that made up the finished work, a slim but moving book titled As We Remember Joe. Three hundred and sixty copies were printed and privately distributed, mostly to friends and relatives and service colleagues.56
“The book, I am afraid—may make you sad,” he wrote his parents upon publication. “I hope that the sadness will be mitigated by the realization—clearly brought out in the book—of what an extraordinarily full and varied life Joe had.” (Mr. Kennedy was not willing to take the chance; for the rest of his days he could never bring himself to read more than a few pages of the volume.57) In his introduction, Jack wrote of his brother’s early acquisition of a “sense of responsibility towards his brothers and sisters, and I do not think that he ever forgot it. Towards me who was nearly his own age, this responsibility consisted in setting a standard that was uniformly high.” Touching ever so lightly on Joe’s shortcomings—his short fuse, his unwillingness to suffer fools—Jack said he would be forever grateful for the way his brother always led by example, and he left no doubt that the ill-fated mission on August 12, 1944, cut short a life destined for greatness: “His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things.”58
More than a few commentators would later say the same thing: that Joe was the Kennedy child marked for political stardom. These observers in effect embrace the narrative constructed with painstaking care by Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, which put their eldest son above the others in the brood, not merely in God-given talent and worldly accomplishments but in future potential. The reality was different, as Joe Junior himself seemed to grasp near the end. Alongside his leading-man looks, his work ethic, his loyalty, his physical courage, and his ebullience stood other qualities. He was hot-tempered and domineering, and often socially aggressive. Relentlessly argumentative, he struggled to dial this tendency back in debates, his need to win all-consuming. His humor tilted to the belittling, sarcastic variety, and his writing lacked subtlety and grace.
Above all, Joe’s policy misjudgments, not a few of which flowed from his unshakable determination to do his father’s bidding, would have posed obstacles to any future hope of political prominence in the Democratic Party—here one thinks, for example, of the admiration for Hitler’s Germany, expressed at various points through the 1930s; the stubborn vote against FDR’s nomination at the 1940 party convention; the hard Lindbergh-like anti-interventionism, more extreme even than his father’s and held long past the time most of the country had moved away from it; and the founding role in the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. The pro-Franco sentiments in Joe’s senior thesis and in his post-graduation reports from Spain likewise would have elicited uncomfortable questions, particularly as the fascistic policies of Franco’s regime became more widely known. (All copies of the thesis seem to have vanished in the years following his graduation, suggesting the family perceived the problem.59)
Nor should we necessarily accept the corollary judgment, even more widely held, that John F. Kennedy chose politics for a career only because of his brother’s passing and because his father commanded him. Jack had ample time to ponder his options that fall and winter of 1944–45, and there can be no doubt that Joe’s death factored into his thinking. It’s even possible to endorse historian Herbert Parmet’s subsequent assertion that Jack’s political career began with “an explosion high over the English coast.” His father certainly wanted it to be so, and he began nudging Jack hard in that direction in Palm Beach as early as Christmas 1944. (“I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” Jack confided to Red Fay that holiday season.60)
But Jack had his own reasons for selecting his path. His youth had been imbued by the political legend of his grandfather John F. Fitzgerald, and he had been reared in a household that revered public service and preached the obligation to do something worthwhile with one’s life. More than that, he had long been fascinated by politics, and his flirtation with law school was at least in part an expression of that interest. Professors and fellow students at Harvard who knew both brothers believed Jack had the greater interest in, and knowledge of, contemporary politics and political history.61 Already with Inga Arvad in early 1942, he had mused at length about running for office—the tw
o of them even joked about the highest office in the land—and his subsequent war experience deepened his understanding of world affairs and of what made people tick. At the nightly bull sessions he conducted in the South Pacific, politics was a frequent topic of discussion. And in the late winter of 1944, several months before Joe’s death, Jack met with veteran Boston political operative Joe Kane to discuss potential political opportunities he might seek.62 Jack also had more publicized achievements than did his brother, meaning that in popular terms he, rather than Joe, had the advantage (as Joe himself sensed). The most that can be said is that his brother’s passing opened up an arena Jack might well have entered at some point anyway, not in order to take Joe’s place but in order to express his own ideals and aspirations. In the recollection of Theodore Sorensen, later a top aide, “His entry [into politics] was neither involuntary nor illogical.”63
In any event, nothing had been decided that December. Jack had not been released from the Navy, and his precarious health did not allow for firm planning. He also was not yet willing to commit himself to politics as a profession. He had other options. He liked writing, and moreover it was the only occupation for which he had some training and credentials. Plus his success with Why England Slept convinced him he could be good at it. To Chuck Spalding and others, he said he might make writing his career, perhaps as a journalist. Academia also held appeal for him, but not the years of additional study it would require. Business enticed him not at all.
VI
But first things first: he needed to get his health in order before committing to any particular path. In December 1944 he appeared before the Retirement Board in Washington, D.C., where it was determined that he would be transferred to the retired list at the rank of lieutenant, “by reason of physical disability,” bringing an end to John F. Kennedy’s military career. (His official release would be March 1, 1945.) In January 1945 he went to Arizona to try to recover his health in the warm sunshine, renting a room at the Castle Hot Springs Hotel, in the Bradshaw Mountains. On February 20 he reported to Billings that recovery was slow, and that he would return yet again to the Mayo Clinic if he did not feel improvements soon. Still, he was well enough to pay a visit to Phoenix: “Their [sic] was some pumping which interested me, and I did take [actress] 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. You would get the usual blank stare you get under similar circumstances.”64