The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  After realizing how close they had come to losing a son, the Kennedys employed every method possible to ensure their other son’s safety. Joe Kennedy drew upon the conventions of his church for comfort and the protection that money couldn’t buy. “Enclosed is a medal which your Mother bought here in Hyannis, and which has been blessed,” Joe wrote to his eldest. “This is an inexpensive medal and is being sent to you only because the gold medal, which was ordered from Boston, was late in arriving here. . . . In the event the gold medal and chain doesn’t reach you before you leave, I’m sure this silver medal and chain—while not as attractive as the other will give you just as much protection. Good luck to you— and may God protect you and bring you home safely.”

  Joe Jr. was hell-bent not to leave the conflict.“Theoretically, I have only two more missions to go, but it still looks like it will be about the first of July before my handsome face is seen around Hyannis Port,” he dispatched in March 1944. Back in a hospital bed for further treatment, Jack urged his brother to return home with the rest of his crewmates, as he was entitled to do. But young Joe insisted on pushing ahead, accepting even more assignments. By June, when most of his old crew had opted to depart, Joe decided that “after staying over here this long, it would be foolish to return home.” Somberly, he described his crew’s part in the massive D-Day invasion into France, admitting that “though we haven’t played a very sensational part, I guess we have done what was expected of us.”The comparisons to Jack—the family’s new yardstick of achievement—were implicit in Joe Jr.’s comments about his exploits. “I now have 39 missions and will probably have about fifty by the time I leave,” he wrote.“It is far more than anyone else on the base, but it doesn’t prove a hell of a lot.” In a late July 1944 letter, with still more to prove to himself and to his family, Joe mentioned an ominous new assignment. “I am going to be doing something different for the next few weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So probably I won’t be home till sometime in September. I imagine you are a bit disappointed that I haven’t gone home, but I think when I tell you the whole story, you will agree with me.”

  With the war in Europe rapidly drawing to a close, Joe Kennedy Jr. seemed desperate to become a war hero.“When news came about Brother John’s PT-boat activities I think it inspired him to try harder,” Jack Degman, chief of their squadron, later told biographer Hank Searls. “I don’t think anyone was any more intent on seeking out the enemy and meeting him than Joe Kennedy.” A day or two before this special mission, Joe told his friend and occasional racetrack companion, Frank Moore O’Ferrall, that his odds of returning safely were no better than fifty-fifty.“And that’s a darned sight better than most of the horses you gave me,” he added. As he walked back to camp after Sunday Mass with O’Ferrall, a friendly dark-haired horse breeder serving in the Irish Guards, Joe reminisced about his family and plans for the future. Just before leaving on his mission, Joe seemed intent on righting things at home, especially any hard feelings about his role in supporting Kick’s marriage. His parents would later became aware of their son’s relationship with Pat Wilson, a married woman with three children, whom he talked of marrying after the war. Shortly before departing, Joe called a friend and asked her to pass along a message.“I’m about to go into my act,” Joe said, “and if I don’t come back tell my dad—despite our differences—that I love him very much.” He seemed to realize this mission bordered on the suicidal.

  By late in the afternoon on August 12, 1944, the sky had become cloudless. There was no further threat of delay or thought of turning back. Joe Kennedy’s plane, loaded with explosives, climbed into the air shortly before six that evening. His supersecret mission, called Project Aphrodite, required that Kennedy and his copilot transform their plane into a flying bomb; it was aimed directly at the bunkers in Belgium where the Nazis launched the V-1 buzz rockets that so terrorized Britain. For many months, the bunkers had survived repeated Allied bombing attacks, and a similar air force mission had failed only a week before. The navy plan called for Kennedy to fly the craft near the target and then, at a synchronized point, bail out with his crew after handing off control of the craft to a nearby mother ship; the plane would then be guided into the target by way of remote control in the aircraft’s nose. Kennedy managed to fly the heavy plane without interruption over the English Channel. Within moments of the hand-off, however, a flash ignited the sky. The shock was so powerful that those in accompanying planes suffered concussions. There was no doubt of the outcome about the first plane. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. was dead.

  After Mass on a hot Sunday morning, Father Francis O’Leary returned to his room in Boston and received a message to report to navy headquarters downtown. A gruff heavyset Irish priest who had served as a chaplain in the Pacific aboard the USS Brooklyn, O’Leary received a particularly tough assignment that day, under direct orders from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. As the highest-ranking Catholic chaplain in the area, O’Leary was instructed to travel by small plane out to Cape Cod and inform Ambassador Kennedy that his beloved oldest son was missing in action.

  Inside the house at Hyannis, the Kennedy family was nearly all together. They had finished a picnic-style lunch on the porch, and Teddy and his cousin Joe Gargan were playing quietly. Rose was reading the Sunday newspaper, and the younger girls, Jean and Pat, attended to their own affairs. Bobby, a seventeen-year-old anxious himself to see military action like his brothers, had come home on a short leave from the navy R.O.T.C. And Jack, still yellowish with jaundice from his bout with malaria, had returned to convalesce after his stay at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, where he had endured an agonizing back operation to relieve the pain from his war injuries. When the bell rang at the summer house, a butler answered and summoned Rose Kennedy. Father O’Leary asked to speak with Joe Sr., but Rose, thinking that he and an accompanying priest wanted to discuss another charitable gift to the church, asked him whether the matter could wait because her husband was taking an afternoon nap.

  “This cannot wait,”O’Leary said, indicating the matter concerned their oldest son.

  Rose rushed upstairs and shook her husband awake. At first, she just hovered over him, unable to say anything, and then she blurted out the message from the priests. Joe leaped out of the bed and hurried downstairs. He ushered the two priests into an anteroom and quizzed them about the circumstances. He hoped their “missing in action” description for Joe’s flight might somehow turn out as miraculously as Jack’s fate in the Pacific. The details of the secret mission were still quite sketchy, but O’Leary and the other priest made it clear that there was no hope, that their son most certainly did not survive.

  As the priests expressed their condolences and departed, the children realized that something awful had happened. Joe and Rose gathered them on the porch, away from their fun and frolicking of that summer afternoon, to let them know about their oldest brother’s death. With his arm around Rose, Joe fought back tears. He explained what he knew about the accident, that Joe Jr. had volunteered for the assignment. He urged the children to follow through with their plans for sailing that afternoon, just as their brother undoubtedly would’ve want them to do, and most of them dutifully complied. “We’ve got to carry on,” Joe declared stoically. “We must take care of the living. There is a lot of work to be done.” This response couldn’t have been more Irish in nature. And then he added, “I want you all to be particularly good to your mother.”

  Jack chose not to set out upon the water, and instead walked aimlessly along the shoreline near the house, lost in thought about his brother. Jack couldn’t bring himself to believe his vibrant, energetic older brother was dead; later, he said he didn’t fully grasp that finality until he saw the black-inked newspaper headlines. Inside the house, Joe and Rose sat together, holding each other close, and “wept inwardly, silently” for a few minutes. As Rose later recalled, her tears were shed for “the death of our first born who ha
d shown such promise and had always been such a joy to us and the other children.” As the afternoon passed, Rose prayed with her rosaries for her lost son while Joe made a series of telephone calls. Eventually, he reached the widow of Joe’s copilot, Lieutenant Wilford “Bud”Willy, left in Fort Worth,Texas, with three small children. He offered whatever financial assistance she might need. (She declined, but over the years accepted his generous offer to send two of her sons to college.) Joe also called his sister, Loretta, and wept uncontrollably. He later retreated alone to his room and listened to symphony music on the radio.

  Young Joe’s death forever added tragedy into the family’s equation of success, money and achievement. The golden aura of the Kennedys, the air of invincibility that had permeated their lives in London and New York, seemed no longer to exist with Joe gone. In the past, they had endured other tragedies, such as the early death of Rose’s young sister Eunice and, more recently, the botched frontal lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest and mildly retarded daughter whose condition worsened as a result of her father’s mistaken medical intervention. In Rosemary’s case, he played God and it failed horribly. Because Joe Kennedy was alarmed by Rosemary’s budding sexuality (“the thing the priest says not to do” as Kick called it), and her frustrated rages, he sought to control her behavior,much as he did other aspects of his children’s lives. For the rest of her life, Rose harbored regrets about Rosemary’s risky and unnecessary operation, which had resulted in her being placed in various institutions. Among the Kennedys, Rosemary faded from the everyday thoughts in their letters and conversations as though she were no longer alive. But Joe’s sudden, violent death was different, a sorrow never felt before by the family. It was the event by which all future tragedies would be measured.

  In the first few moments, Rose said she couldn’t stop thinking of the boy she loved and had nurtured into adulthood, the son who had died in the sky “splintering into a thousand pieces.”While she was consumed in grief, her husband acted as the strong one, making all the funeral arrangements. But after days of prayer, after supportive letters and calls from friends, several of them nuns and priests, Rose discovered in herself a transcendent faith that somehow bolstered their collective spirits and lent a kind of moral courage when her family most needed it. She rededicated herself to the daily activities of life and maintained an almost undaunted cheerfulness in her round-robin letters to her family. (“We are having some little prayer cards made out for Joe which we will send along to you as soon as they arrive,” she wrote a few weeks afterwards to her children.) Some chroniclers later suggested that, after Joe’s death, Rose fled unthinkingly into the shelter of her religion, barely showing emotion. In her own memoir, though, Rose indicated that she never fully got over her eldest son’s death. “It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don’t agree,” she wrote.“The wound remains. Time—the mind, protecting its sanity—covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.”Years later, during a campaign appearance for Jack, she mentioned her own son’s death as she commiserated with the mothers of soldiers killed in the Korean War. Then she lost her composure and left the platform in tears.

  THE FAMILY’S most tangible attempt to make sense of Joe’s death came from Jack. He put together a small volume of reminiscences about his brother titled As We Remember Joe. Threads of Joe’s Irish Catholic background were woven throughout these recollections, particularly by family members, as they sorted through matters of life and death.“It is God’s will— He knows best,” declared Honey Fitz, a veteran of numerous wakes among the Dearos, his Irish immigrant constituents in Boston.“Joe is gone—and we shall never look again on that dear face or hear that laugh or see that wonderful smile.” In her essay, Kick recalled her brother’s leadership as the oldest sibling and his “moral courage” in the days before her wedding when he had acted as a “pillar of strength” in supporting her decision.“Without Joe there will be always a gap in the Kennedy family circle, but we are far, far luckier than most because there are so many of us,” she wrote. “One thing Joe would never want is that we should feel sad and gloomy about life without him. Instead he’d laugh with that wonderful twinkle out of his Irish eyes and say,‘Gee, can’t you all learn to get along without me.’”

  Father Sheehy, the navy chaplain who became Joe’s friend and golfing buddy, underlined how much church and family were tied together for young Joe. “The faith of many generations of Kennedy’s and Fitzgerald’s was revealed in the humility of this favorite son of fortune whenever he went to Confession,” Sheehy wrote. In the introductory essay, Jack Kennedy recalled his brother’s commitment to his younger siblings’ development.“If the Kennedy children amount to anything now or ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor,” wrote Jack.“Through it all, he had a deep and abiding Faith—he was never far from God—and so, I cannot help but feel that on that August day, high in the summer skies, ‘death to him was less a setting forth than a returning.’” At Kick’s suggestion, he ended the book with a verse from a British poet who had converted to Catholicism, someone with whom they were both familiar—Maurice Baring, who captured the sense of loss among the young in the previous world war.

  When Spring shall wake the earth,

  And quicken the scarred fields to the new birth.

  Our grief shall grow. For what can Spring renew

  More fiercely for us than the need of you?

  The private letters sent to Jack from so many Kennedy friends and family were filled with religious references, and undoubtedly they reflected some of his own difficulties in reconciling his brother’s fate with any sense of God. “Death like that just doesn’t seem anything but a nightmare, but God is good and will give you all the strength and courage needed at this dark hour in your lives,” assured the sister of Torby Macdonald, one of Jack’s best friends. Some letters expressed the hope that young Joe might still be found alive.“I am saying prayers to the Lady of the Miraculous Medal that they will find out that Joe bailed out to safety,” wrote one family friend. John “Mac” Maguire, one of the survivors of PT-109, arranged for a Mass to be said in Joe’s name.“Words seem so futile,” wrote Dick Flood, a friend and roommate of Joe’s at Harvard Law School, who had lost his own brother a year earlier.“I know that great things were awaiting Joe, but God must have a still greater mission for him.” For the living still in their twenties, not only was coming to grips with death an extraordinarily difficult task but it also made them nostalgic for earlier days before the war.“It seems such a short time ago, Jack, we were all happy and this terrible thing was such a long way off,” sighed one friend.“It is inevitable that some of us have to be hurt and we can only pray for the strength and courage to carry on.” Another college friend decried:“Each day I learn of some new boy becom- ing a casualty from the Harvard group and it makes me feel bad to think how few of the old faces will be present at the future class days after this is all over.” When Kick flew home after the news of Joe’s death, she was stunned at the airport by Jack’s haggard and sickly appearance. Later, before returning to the hospital for corrective treatment on his back, Jack asked Kick to go with him to St. Francis Xavier, the local church in Hyannis Port, to talk with the pastor and soothe their ailing souls.

  Jack’s new status within the family was mentioned subtly in bereavement letters and recollections. In expressing sympathy and prayers for Joe, Owen Hanley, Jack’s teacher at the Catholic-run Canterbury School, mentioned his pride in his former student’s accomplishments. “What changes since those—your care-free days,” Hanley wrote.“You certainly have made good in all your endeavors.” Kick’s essay referred to the family’s pecking order.“I know Joe would always feel that Jack could easily take over the responsibility of being the oldest,” she said. The dream of an Irish Catholic elected to the U.S. presidency—the great ambition of Joe Kennedy for his eldest son—now seemed passed along to a successor. A family
friend, Max O’Rell Truitt, after speaking twice with Joe Kennedy following Joe Jr.’s death, sent a sympathy note to Jack when he was in the hospital that made reference to his father’s intent. “And for you, Jack, may you soon be healed of your own afflictions so that you may be able to carry on—yes, carry on with some of those parental hopes and aspirations which had, with great affection and care, been planned for Joe.”After making a biblical reference to the mystery of God’s intervention in life, Mike Grace, another friend from Harvard, put it even more bluntly: “Joe has left behind to you a great responsibility for when God calls one of us away from a job it is so another can do it alone.”

  The pain in the senior Kennedy was visible, palpable, for all to see.“The death of Joe Jr. was the first break in this circle of nine children nearly all extraordinary in some way: handsome, intelligent, with a father and mother to whom they were devoted and who were devoted to them,” wrote Arthur Krock, a Kennedy ally and Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, in his memoir. “It was one of the most severe shocks to the father that I’ve ever seen registered on a human being.” Because Joe kept busy with the logistical details surrounding his son’s death, the hard reality took weeks to seep in fully.“Joe’s death has shocked me beyond belief,” he confided in a private note to Jim Farley after receiving 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. For this reason, the shock of Joe’s death and the effect it has had on his mother have caused me real grief.”