JFK
Page 56
There was a legitimate question here, both at the time and among historians afterwards, about whether the Cold War might have been averted before it really began, through imaginative diplomacy on areas of potential East-West agreement.31 But to freshman congressman John F. Kennedy the answer was clear: no such opportunity existed. He was, it may fairly be said, an original Cold Warrior.
No doubt Joe Kennedy had his son in mind when he wrote to a friend, a few months later, “I look to see Communism spread all over the world, and, the horrible part of it is, I don’t think we can do anything about it. However, there are a great many people in this country, based on their own judgment or some form of idealism which they possess, that believe we should continue to help Europe. I would be perfectly willing to gamble five billion dollars for one year’s trial because, if we stop giving money now and Communism spreads, there will always be a great number of people in this country who will think the world could have been saved if we sent money abroad.”32
Even within the realm of domestic politics, Jack often made anti-Communism his leitmotif. When Russ Nixon, a representative of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, appeared before the Education and Labor Committee, Kennedy waited patiently while his colleagues tried in vain to tear the man down over the extent of Communist influence within America’s unions. The intellectually agile Nixon, who held a Ph.D. in economics and had taught Kennedy at Harvard before joining the labor movement (Jack received a B-minus in the class), got the better of each exchange. Then it was Kennedy’s turn. Calmly and methodically and at a brisk pace, he pressed Nixon on the work of the UE, then asked him whether he thought Communism constituted a threat to the American political and economic system. No, Nixon replied, “I think what is a threat is our failure to meet some of the basic economic problems of the people in a democratic way, and also what is a threat is our failure year after year to expand the basic civil rights of our people” and thus address “the problems of the Negro people.”
“Mr. Nixon,” Kennedy replied, “I agree with a great deal that you have said.” But, he continued, wasn’t it a fact that Communists were central in the union’s leadership? He quoted a doctrine stressing the need to “resort to all sorts of artifices, evasion, subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions and remain in them and to carry on Communist work in them, at all costs.”
“I did not teach you that at Harvard, did I?” Nixon replied.
“No, you did not. I am reading from Lenin, in which is described the procedure which should be adopted to get into trade unions and how they conduct themselves once they are in.”
Kennedy’s performance won plaudits from reporters. Though not a lawyer like most of his colleagues, he pierced Russ Nixon’s dominance and put him on the defensive through crisp questioning that was free of sophistry or platitudes. “A freshman House member with the coral dust of Pacific Islands still clinging to his heels stole the show from older colleagues yesterday,” the United Press’s George Reedy reported in a radio broadcast. As a bonus for Jack, Nixon acknowledged after the session that his former pupil was one of the committee’s few pro-labor members.33
On the last day of August, with Congress in recess, Kennedy crossed the Atlantic in order to monitor the progress of the Marshall Plan aid and look into Communist infiltration of labor unions. Or at least that was the official explanation—he also wanted to spend time with sister Kick and reunite with his British pals. Kick, he saw immediately, was flourishing, hobnobbing with the upper-class set, hosting tea parties, and haunting the bars and dining rooms of the House of Commons. Might she have elective politics in her future? Quite possibly. A generation before, Nancy Astor had blazed the path, as an American-born woman who became a member of Parliament. Some speculated that Kick, with her quick wit, phenomenal social intelligence, and expansive contacts among high-placed Tories and Liberals, would follow suit.
Soon after his arrival, Jack joined Kick for a party she hosted at the Duke of Devonshire’s Lismore Castle, in southern Ireland, attended by, among others, Anthony Eden, once and future British foreign secretary and future prime minister. (Eden, separated from his wife and smitten with Kick, though she was barely half his age, would write to Kick a few weeks later while traveling in the Middle East: “I love your letters, especially when you write as you talk, for then I can imagine that you are here. How I wish that you were here….But if one has not the delight of your company it is a joy to imagine it.”) The party was a rousing success, and Kick reported to her father that Jack had gotten along famously with Eden.34
Some days later, Jack, accompanied by Kick’s friend Pamela Churchill, the beautiful and vivacious ex-wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, drove in Kathleen’s new American station wagon to New Ross to find their family ancestors. The four-hour trip took them through the rolling green countryside across the bottom tip of County Kilkenny into County Wexford. Predictably, locals were bemused when Jack introduced himself and said he was looking for his forebears. “Auch now, and which Kennedys will it be that you’ll be wanting? David Kennedys? Jim Kennedys?” Finally, they were directed to a little white house on the edge of town with a thatched roof and chickens, goats, and pigs wandering in and out the front door. Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were friendly but wary. The conversation over tea was pleasant and dignified but yielded no proof of a direct link. Churchill was bored, but Jack, a romantic underneath his cool exterior, loved every minute.* “I spent about an hour there surrounded by chickens, pigs, etc., and left in a flow of nostalgia and sentiment,” he recalled later. It was an alien place to him, but also familiar, magical. He vowed to one day return.35
Kick had little interest in her brother’s genealogical expedition, but she relished spending the better part of a month with him at Lismore. Their mutual affection was as evident as ever—Pamela Churchill and others could see it right away. Kick now revealed to him that she had fallen hard for Peter Fitzwilliam, a fabulously wealthy aristocrat who had been decorated for bravery in the war and who happened to be married. (He had ownership of the Fitzwilliam family seat, Wentworth Woodhouse, a 365-room palace in Yorkshire measuring some 250,000 square feet and said to be the largest private home in the United Kingdom.) Charismatic and charming, Fitzwilliam was also a notorious philanderer—a bit like Kick’s father, some said. She told Jack that in Peter she had found her Rhett Butler, a man’s man who could make her laugh and sweep her along with him. Yes, he was married, and yes, he was Protestant, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that he planned to divorce his wife and marry Kick. Jack delighted in his sister’s radiant happiness, perhaps even envied it, and readily agreed to her plea that he say nothing to their parents for now—could there be any doubt about how Rose in particular would respond to the news?36
Jack’s health, meanwhile, took a nosedive during the trip. Kick insisted he see a local doctor; he said he would but did not follow through. In late September, having arrived in London, he felt worse; he now couldn’t get out of his bed at Claridge’s hotel. His blood pressure plummeted. When Kay Stammers came to see him, he tried to stand up but couldn’t do it. He called Pamela Churchill, who in turn dialed a doctor friend, Dr. Daniel Davis, who promptly had Jack admitted to the London Clinic. Davis diagnosed Addison’s disease, an illness marked by the failure of the adrenal glands that caused extreme weakness, low blood pressure, weight loss, circulatory problems, and a brownish skin cast. When first discovered by physician Thomas Addison, in the mid-1850s, the disease was considered fatal, for it gradually killed the body’s ability to fight off infection. Novelist Jane Austen had succumbed to it at age forty-one. With the development of adrenal hormone therapy in the 1930s, however, the death rate plunged dramatically. Still, Davis was gloomy after diagnosing Kennedy, telling Pamela, “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.”37
The Boston papers, upon learning of the congressman’s travails, accepted
the explanation issued by the congressman’s office, which attributed his hospitalization to a recurrence of the malaria he had contracted during the war. The New York Times and Time followed suit. Behind the scenes, Joe and Rose were beside themselves with worry, and Joe confided to Arthur Krock that he feared Jack was near death. A Kennedy family nurse—Anne McGillicuddy, who had cared for Jack at the Chelsea Naval Hospital in 1944 and whom he had also dated—was flown to London in October with instructions to bring him back to America. On October 13, still in his pajamas, he was carried aboard the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton. He spent the five-day voyage in the sick bay, cared for by Anne and chatting up the economist Barbara Ward, whom he had first met in London two years before. Jack was “flat on his back, yellow as a pot of honey, cheerful as all get-out, and again asking questions,” Ward remembered. “This time it was about the development of the Labour government, about social change in Britain, the medical health scheme [the planned National Health Service]. It was just the same extraordinary intellectual vividness, though coupled in this case with a fever that had him absolutely strapped on his back.”38
He got worse. When the ship reached U.S. shores, his condition was so grave that a priest gave him last rites. Death grazed him. On the evening of October 18 he was carried ashore on a stretcher (through a lower-level hatch on the ship, to avoid detection) to a waiting ambulance, which took him to LaGuardia Airport and a chartered DC-3 to Boston.
There followed weeks of treatment at the Lahey Clinic, during which he was a no-show in the House of Representatives. His attendance record would be among the worst in the Eightieth Congress. Thanks to his superb staff, however, he kept on top of numerous duties sufficiently well. His standing with his constituents might have even risen, as people took pity on him for his “malaria struggle.” On February 1, 1948, The Boston Post, perhaps with an assist from the Ambassador’s public relations team, exulted that Congressman Kennedy was fully on the mend, his political future rosy: “He has overcome the malaria he brought back from the South Pacific with him and he is in better physical condition now than at any time since his discharge from the Navy. In fact, according to his supporters, his health is almost as robust as his political courage.”39
IV
It was a brutal Boston winter, with snowstorm after snowstorm, but by the end of February 1948, all the Kennedys—save Rosemary, who was still institutionalized at her facility in Wisconsin—were lapping up the sun at the family home in Palm Beach. Even Kick was there, having arrived from England for a two-month stay. Jack had kept his promise not to tell their parents about Peter Fitzwilliam, but Kick knew she could not hide the truth much longer. Still, she vacillated, sure of the reaction she’d get. Only on April 22, shortly before her return to England, did she find the courage to tell them of Fitzwilliam and her plan to marry him. Rose responded by vowing to disown her daughter if she married a divorced man. Joe said nothing, suggesting he agreed with his wife.40
The Palm Beach home on North Ocean Boulevard.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps, Kick hoped, her father’s silence meant she could yet bring him around. She was a favorite of his, and she’d often been able to get her way with him in the past. Upon her return to London she convinced Joe, who was visiting Paris, to at least meet Fitzwilliam. The couple planned a brief two-day holiday in Cannes before joining Mr. Kennedy for lunch in the French capital on Saturday, May 15. On May 13, their chartered plane landed at Le Bourget airfield, outside Paris, to refuel. They met friends for a meal and returned midafternoon to reports of inclement weather in the Rhône valley, to the south. Pilot Peter Townshend recommended that they wait out the storm, but Fitzwilliam insisted on flying right away, even after being told that all commercial flights had been grounded.
Flying at ten thousand feet, they entered the storm just north of the Ardèche Mountains. Townshend and his copilot tried desperately to steady the aircraft as violent crosscurrents tossed it from side to side. Visibility was zero. They lost radio contact, and the instruments spun uselessly. The pilots didn’t know if they were descending or climbing. Suddenly the plane emerged from a cloud and they saw a mountain ridge straight ahead. Townshend yanked the controls to avoid a crash, but it was too late. For several seconds all four people aboard would have realized they were going to crash.41
It was Eunice who answered when the phone rang at midnight in Georgetown. A Washington Post reporter introduced himself and said a report indicated that a Lady Hartington had been killed along with three others in a plane crash in France; might this be her sister? Eunice replied that she was not sure, as there was also a second Lady Hartington—Kick’s ex-sister-in-law Debo. To which the reporter offered a crushing detail: a passport found at the crash site, on a mountainside near the tiny village of Privas, showed the victim’s Christian name to be Kathleen. While Eunice spoke on the phone, Jack was on the couch, listening to a recording of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical that had opened on Broadway the previous year. Billy Sutton was there, too. Jack got on the phone and asked the reporter to read the dispatch to him, then hung up and immediately dialed his aide Ted Reardon and instructed him to check the story out; Reardon called back soon thereafter and confirmed the worst. As Jack put down the receiver, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” was playing on the stereo. “She has a sweet voice,” he murmured of the vocalist Ella Logan. Then he turned away and wept.42
The following day, Reardon made arrangements for the two Kennedy siblings to fly to Hyannis Port. Once there, Jack hunkered in a back room, refusing to see anyone and having his meals delivered to him. He was disconsolate, unable to make sense of what had happened. Joe’s death had been awful, but at least it happened in wartime; he had given his life for his country, as had countless others. Kick’s was different. She had died on account of love, and the stifled romantic in Jack had always admired her refusal to repress her affections. More than that, she was his soulmate, the one he could confide in about anything, the one who completed his sentences, his thoughts, the one to whom he didn’t have to explain his feelings, his moods, for she intuited them. She had always believed in him, had always championed his prospects, even more than she had Joe Junior’s, had always prized him for who he was. And now she was gone.
With Kick to be buried in England, Jack sent word that he would come over for the May 20 service, arranged by Kick’s former in-laws, the Devonshires. He arrived in New York City on the eighteenth, with plans to fly across the Atlantic that evening. In his distressed state he had neglected to bring his passport. Hasty arrangements were made to try to secure an emergency replacement that would be rushed to him at the airport. His staff determined it could be done, if barely. Jack, however, suddenly called a halt, as though he could not bear the thought of attending his sister’s funeral. He instead returned to Washington. Among the Kennedys, only a grief-stricken father would be present for the requiem Mass. He cut a solitary figure, in light of his ignominious tenure as ambassador. “He stood there alone,” Alastair Forbes said, “unloved and despised.”43
For weeks Jack had insomnia, telling Lem Billings that when he drifted off he would be jolted awake “by the image of Kathleen sitting up with him late at night talking about their parents and dates. He would try to close his eyes again, but he couldn’t shake the image.” During congressional hearings, his mind would drift to all the things he and Kick had done together and all the friends they had shared, in England as well as at home. To make matters worse, Billings added, “there was no one in the family with whom he could share this loss.” He didn’t feel close enough to any of them. So he kept quiet, saying little that has been recorded, though years later he remarked to campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns that both Kick and Joe had perished just when “everything was moving in their direction.” That made losing them doubly hard to take. “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
, that’s one thing. But for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”44
Kick’s death, coming so soon after his own severe health scare in London, made him acutely aware of his own mortality. Suddenly only he remained of the supposed golden trio of Kennedy children, and they had effectively also lost Rosemary, who was closest to him in age. Could he be far behind, especially considering his alarming recent diagnosis? He thought not, and told acquaintances flatly that he did not expect to live past forty-five. He began to obsess over the mind’s workings in the moments before death—would one think about all the joyous things that had occurred, or would one feel regrets about choices made, things not experienced? On a fishing trip with George Smathers he mused out loud on the topic, then leaned over to Smathers and said, “The point is that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day. That’s what I’m doing.”45