True Compass: A Memoir
Page 6
Three days earlier, the happy insularity of my early childhood ended. Along with my mother, the other four younger siblings, Miss Dunne, and Luella Hennessey, I marched up the gangplank of the USS Washington to join Dad in London. (Joe Jr. and Jack remained at Harvard.) This would be my first time on the open sea. More important, the voyage would mark a transition in my understanding of the world, at a moment in history when the world was careening nearly beyond all understanding.
CHAPTER THREE
Wartime London
1938-1939
My first ocean voyage opened up many facts about the sea that I'd never before suspected. One such fact was that it could make you seasick. Our six-day crossing from New York Harbor to London took us through the North Atlantic at the height of the winter storm season, and my stomach felt every one of the thirty-foot waves that daily lifted and rolled our ship. I loved the water, but this was more water than I really wanted.
The American ambassador's residence then was 14 Prince's Gate, on Kensington Road across from Hyde Park. I later learned that this four-story Victorian building had once been the London home of the banker J. P. Morgan. I was more interested, at the time, in the Indian chief in full headdress sculpted above the main entrance.
Kathleen, Rosemary, Bobby, and I lived at No. 14 with our parents, while Eunice, Pat, and Jean boarded at a nearby convent. Our bedrooms were on the third floor. "Bedroom" hardly does them justice. Luella Hennessey later recalled mine as being almost as big as a schoolroom. She noted the twin beds, the big fireplace, a desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers, a chaise lounge, and a breakfast table with two chairs. A caged elevator got us to the main floor and back. I loved to race ahead of everyone else and push its activating button and hear the machinery start to clank.
At age six, I could tell that Dad was on an extremely important mission in London, but its nature was a mystery. Important visitors came to our residence: the king and queen of Great Britain, for instance.
It took more than a year, but George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid a call on Ambassador Kennedy in May 1939. We children were fixed up, cleaned up, and gussied up for this occasion. I seem to recall being told that they were the most important people in the world, and that this was the most important event that was ever going to happen.
My involvement in it all was rather brief. I have blurry memories of the king in a scarlet tunic, his chest covered with braids and medals. And I remember that I practiced for hours to perfect my bow. Bobby and I later met Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Windsor Castle. We danced with each other. I doubt that any of us children made a huge impression on any other.
The London press and public seemed taken with us. Everyone was curious about my dad, of course--what news and assurances this new ambassador might bring from America to a nation bracing for a massive Nazi assault, and how sympathetic this Irish Catholic would prove to British interests. I knew nothing of all this; just that a lot of adults with serious expressions wanted to talk to him. As for my sisters, Bobby, and me, we submitted to scrubbing and hair-combing, marched out to watch the Changing of the Guard, and smiled. My mother certainly never forgot the "spontaneous outpouring of human warmth," as she put it. She later wrote, "I almost began to feel that we had been adopted, as a family, by the whole British people."
Life in London held its dangers. I found this out when a zebra decided to have me for lunch. He'd made a good start on my arm before a rescuer managed to get his mouth open.
It happened during ceremonies reopening the Royal Children's Zoo in Regent's Park. The great British biologist Julian Huxley himself handed me the shears to cut the ribbon as the photographers pressed in, Bobby and Jean watched (representing little children everywhere, I suppose), and nice British ladies beamed.
I cut the ribbon and handed the shears back, and then a zebra in a nearby cage caught my eye. I'd never before seen a real zebra. He looked friendly. I wandered over and reached through the bars to hand him a peanut. In the next instant he had my arm in his mouth all the way up to my elbow.
I screamed. The more I pulled away, the deeper the zebra's teeth took hold. Luckily I had a thick coat on, and a jacket underneath it, and a shirt underneath the jacket, so the animal wasn't able to bite deeply into my flesh. Still, he wouldn't let go. I screamed and pulled and hauled, and the zebra kept angling for a better fix. Some guards came running and tried to help, but they didn't quite have the drill down on how to extract an arm from a zebra's mouth. So someone summoned a very special zebra keeper--that's how I thought of him, anyway--and he arrived and snapped a whip across the zebra's tailbone, and the animal sort of gagged and let me go.
I wasn't seriously injured, but I did cause an incredible commotion that took a bit away from the occasion. There was Julian Huxley, and the nice ladies, and the pretty ribbon, and all the cookies and crackers, and all the little cups of juice that we were going to have--and suddenly there was this kid screaming at the top of his lungs that he was getting eaten by a zebra. And the kid happened to be the ambassador's son.
I recall all the grown-ups in the vicinity calling out to me to "keep a stiff upper lip." It wasn't my upper lip that I was concerned about.
My sisters performed their ceremonial roles with a great deal more poise. Rosemary, then nineteen, and Kick, eighteen, made their social debuts just weeks after we arrived. The setting was Buckingham Palace, where they were to be presented to the queen, and the event required endless drilling and preparation. My mother took them across the Channel to Paris on several weekends to select gowns for their debuts and the long string of social events that would follow.
The evening arrived, and when their names were called Kathleen and Rosemary made their march together in their shimmering white gowns from the antechamber up the red carpet toward the queen. My sisters curtsied perfectly. Kick danced especially brilliantly through all of the debutante balls that season, the Kennedy ball included, and her smiling beauty attracted partners from the British Isles, Europe, and Russia.
For Bobby and me, the pageantry grew familiar in time, along with the peculiar diesel smell of London's streets and the accents and the left-side driving. The demands of schoolwork took hold; and, for me at least, a certain loneliness as well.
The Gibbs School on Sloane Street near the square inaugurated my long and somewhat unhappy years of school life in Britain and then America: an endless succession of institutions, each of which had its own rules, cliques, standards and punishment systems (I was to become something of an expert in punishment systems), and obstacles to being liked. I liked to be liked, and up until my school years I'd taken my likability for granted. After all, I was the youngest, used to being doted on by everyone. I am by nature and disposition a happy person. I like to laugh and have people laugh with me. If my siblings found themselves in trouble with Dad, they would sometimes send me into his room ahead of them to "soften him up" before the reckoning began.
The world of strangers proved different.
Bobby and I were driven to Gibbs in an embassy car at first, but before long we were confident enough to make our way by bus and Underground.
Bobby was thirteen then, older than most of the Gibbs boys. He had little trouble with the curriculum. I was younger than most, and had trouble with the curriculum and with everything else. I struggled to learn my lessons; I struggled to learn cricket. When I broke the rules, I was invited into the headmaster's office, where he made me hold my palms up and then whacked them with a ruler until they were bright red.
One rule that I'd learned from my parents was the need for politeness, especially given my high visibility as a diplomat's son. And so when a young British schoolmate named Cecil took to pounding on me every day, I handled the problem with perfect tact. I politely secured my father's permission before flattening Cecil.
The loneliness I felt was obvious to those around me. Bobby tried to keep me company, but he'd joined a circle of friends his age. Dad spent as much time with me as he could--an amazing
amount, given the obligations that preoccupied him. He came to my cricket games at school. He invited me with him on morning horseback rides along the centuries-old Rotten Row in Hyde Park, or at the lovely stables in Roehampton. In the evenings, before leaving the house with Mother for a dinner or the theater, he would come into my bedroom and read to me, sometimes for forty-five minutes or an hour.
I couldn't then fathom, of course, the burdens on his mind as he shared those moments with me. Only as a grown man myself, after the London days had passed into a bygone era and I began to look through its history and our family's archives, did I begin to understand my father's anguished role in prewar diplomacy: his passionate wish for American neutrality; his belief that neither America nor Britain was prepared militarily to engage Hitler's forces; the streams of letters he was writing back to President Roosevelt, senators, and journalists analyzing the international situation; and the speeches he delivered, blunt to the point of provoking outrage, that led to the foreshortening of his diplomatic career.
Nor could I have suspected that, even as he poured out those unvarnished dispatches and speeches, Dad was dooming a possibility for himself that he must have known about and desired. The 1940 presidential campaign in America lay not far ahead. Franklin Roosevelt had already served two terms, and no president had ever served more. No one then knew for sure whether he would try to break the precedent--but, as I learned much later, my father's name was among those being prominently circulated as his successor.
I never asked my father about these things. I've often wished I had. But they belonged, like other elements of his life, to a part of him that existed beyond our personal relationship. In my family, we did not press one another beyond these boundaries. Nor did we discuss with one another or the world the details of private behavior. It was a matter of respect.
The Munich Conference of September 1938 (which he did not attend) had given my father some hope that war might be averted. His friend and ally, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, along with the French prime minister, yielded to Adolf Hitler's demand to occupy the Sudetenland, part of the famous "appeasement" strategy that in hindsight was catastrophic. German troops invaded Czechoslovakia the following March, and the frenzy of futile diplomacy intensified.
As this latest barrier to peace was falling, our family journeyed from London to Rome to witness the coronation of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli as Pope Pius XII. Dad was President Roosevelt's representative to the ceremony. We viewed the ceremony from the front row of a stand in a portico outside St. Peter's Basilica on Sunday, March 12, 1939. I later learned that the Kennedy entourage had created a minor diplomatic crisis for the Vatican: official delegations were limited to seven persons, and our group, including the governess, numbered eleven (Joe Jr. was in Spain). But the problem was handled in the usual suave Roman manner: new seats were added, and everything was just fine.
On the following day, Dad had an audience with the new pope, and on Wednesday, March 15, I received my First Holy Communion from the pope himself at the Vatican. I wore a blue suit and had a white rosette on my left arm. As he blessed me, he said, "I hope you always be good and pious as you are today." It caused a great deal of a stir in some circles--a seven-year-old American boy given his First Communion by the pope, who himself was giving that honor for the first time as pope and to a non-Italian to boot. But it was among the greatest moments of my life. I received a beautiful rosary blessed by the pontiff on that occasion, which I later gave to my stepdaughter Caroline Raclin on the day of her First Holy Communion some sixty-odd years later.
Our last family interlude of prewar leisure was a monthlong holiday in a villa Dad rented at Cannes, on the French Riviera. Joe and Jack were on hand, and they gave me some sailing lessons and also taught me how to dive, using a cliff above the Mediterranean at the Eden Roc as the instruction site. That I had not yet learned how to swim well did not strike them as relevant to the exercise--one or the other would fish me out after I hit the water. All three of us kept this activity a secret from our father.
Our interlude was cut short on August 24. Germany and the Soviet Union informed the world that they had signed a mutual nonaggression agreement. The implications were massive. Poland in particular appeared to lie in the path of destruction.
Dad left for London as soon as he heard the news. After meeting with a shattered Chamberlain, he contacted Mother and told her that she and we children must leave Europe.
Our mother needed no convincing. The dread of a Luftwaffe assault over London had been running rampant since spring, when air raid drills grew common. Bobby and I witnessed the city's preparations for civil defense on our way to school and back: the sandbags, the barrage balloons, the scaffolding for gun emplacements. We'd participated in air raid drills, joining the flow of schoolchildren into bunkers, strapping on foul-smelling gas masks. We returned to classes clutching emergency rations. I have the strangest and most vivid memory of seeing human blood on the streets. Given that the bombing of London would not commence for a year, when I was safely out of the country, this memory is all but inexplicable--unless it was blood from an accident or an incident that I had seen. Perhaps my "memory" is of a dream, fueled by the growing terror I saw and heard and felt every day.
Whatever it was, the blood of Europe began to flow soon enough. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain gave up the pretense and declared war on Germany, along with France. My parents, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen sat in the Strangers Gallery in the House of Commons that Sunday afternoon to listen to Neville Chamberlain issue the declaration that broke his heart, and to speeches in support of the declaration. Afterward, hysteria seized the city. Keepers killed all the poisonous snakes in the London Zoo, lest they be freed to slither about the city when their cages were shattered by Nazi bombs. That night the city was blacked out and air raid warnings sounded throughout London, but no attacks came.
On September 5, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation of American neutrality.
Poland surrendered on September 27. By the end of 1939, artillery duels were erupting along the Western front.
By this time, most of the Kennedys were back in the United States. Dad took precautions in booking several of us on two different ships, not wishing to lose all of us in a torpedo attack by one of the U-boats that now prowled the North Atlantic's depths. Joe sailed several days later on the Mauretania, surrounded by a convoy, and Jack flew westward aboard the new Pan American airship the Yankee Clipper. The two of them reentered Harvard; Joe began making preparations for the Democratic convention in Chicago the following summer. Dad and Rosemary remained in England. Rosemary was enrolled at a Montessori school in Hertfordshire, well away from the bombers' likely targets: a school where she was showing signs of learning improvement. My father continued his duties and began planning for a December visit to the States, where he would meet with Roosevelt and then celebrate Christmas with us in Palm Beach.
Kathleen, who loved London, and who would soon return, described our final night at No. 14 in a brief essay, "Lamps in a Blackout." She lamented the absence of "the scintillating signs of Piccadilly and Leicester Square... the gaily-lit nightclubs.... But yet the moon shines through and one can see new beauties in the silent, deserted city of London."
She described vignettes of our family's fumbling attempts to cope with the blackout regulations:
Young Ted ripped the black curtain... to prevent the last ray of light from shining through. Within five minutes three air-raid wardens called to complain of great streaks of light shining through the window.... Jean sprained her ankle in falling downstairs. Joe returned from an exploring trip with a very swollen eye. No one believed his story of walking into a lamp post, until we read in the next morning's paper, of hundreds bumping into trees, falling on the curb and being hit by autos.... Thus, now one hears [the] tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns, but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward.
She concluded:
I lacked my sister's eloquence and perception of what was happening. But I missed my father, worried about him, and wrote to him from Bronxville:
Dear Daddy,
It snowd on Friday and give my love to Rose I hope not many bombs have drop near you sir james come on Sunday. we have bot some pansies flowers and I am takeing care of them. my reading is beter in school
love Teddy
CHAPTER FOUR
Boarding School Boy
1940-1950
Back home in America at the end of 1939, I began my preparatory school years on a note of great expectation. Yet these did not prove to be happy, joyous years.
I was very young, nearly always younger than my grade level. And nearly always a stranger: counting kindergarten at Pondfield and Gibbs in London, I attended ten schools between 1937 and 1950, nine of them before high school. That kind of transience was not a recipe for academic success. In those years, as the family shuttled seasonally between Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, I was essentially without a central home as well, although Cape Cod felt most like one. My father met with Roosevelt in Washington on December 8, 1939. We all celebrated a Christmas reunion at the Palm Beach house, and not long afterward my father sailed back to London. In January 1940 we all began to fan out.
Pat, Eunice, and Jean returned to their pre-London schools. Kathleen, almost twenty-one now, completed her studies at Finch College in New York. Early in 1941 she took her writing talents to the Washington Times-Herald, working as a research assistant before she was promoted to reviewing plays and movies. In the spring, Rosemary flew home from England, in the care of Dad's close friends Edward and Mary Moore.