On the evening Joe Jr. arrived in London after graduating from Harvard in June 1938, he headed out to a favorite haunt of the sophisticated upper class, the 400 Club. He was the ambassador’s son, and he sat that evening at a table with a Turkish pasha, an Argentine polo player, a Dutch baron and his beauteous wife, and the daughter of American humorist Will Rogers. Night after night during those summer months Joe Jr. was either there at ringside or off with some of the most attractive women in the kingdom.
Joe Jr. could have gone on for months spending his evenings as one of the playboys of the city, putting in a few desultory hours during the day as his father’s aide. He was, however, a young man who would have grown bored measuring out his days in champagne bottles. He had always been a child of fortune, and he looked out on the troubled seas of Europe like a sailor who takes his craft out only in high seas.
Joe Jr. set out for Paris, where for two months he worked as an attaché to William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador. From there he traveled with a diplomatic passport to Prague, Warsaw, Leningrad, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Like his father, he believed that strength created, if not its own morality, then its own imperative. “Germany is still bustling,” he wrote a Harvard classmate. “They are really a marvelous people and it is going to be an awful tough time to keep them from getting what they want.”
After his journey across Europe, Joe Jr. arrived in Saint Moritz for a Christmas vacation with his family. His father was in the United States, but if Joe had been there he would have seen a son who was the exquisite perfection of what he thought a man should be.
Joe Jr. had hardly arrived when he was arm in arm with Megan Taylor, the beautiful eighteen-year-old world figure-skating champion. They made the most stunning of couples as they skated together across the rink. Despite his romance, Joe Jr. cherished his time with his younger siblings. Unlike his mother, he was demonstrative in showing his love, running up the stairs to greet the six-year-old he called “Teddy Boy,” spinning the child in his arms. Ted, whose eyes grew bright as stars, worshiped his big brother.
Joe Jr. took to the winter sports of Saint Moritz as if they were no more difficult to learn than checkers. He jumped on a one-man bobsled and, zooming down the run at seventy-five miles an hour, came close to setting a world record. On the ski slopes there were no records to challenge, but if there had been a trophy for speed and daring, he would have been a finalist.
On one spectacular spill he fell on his arm, cutting his skin. He skied the rest of the way down and called the family nurse: “Luella, I need a Band-Aid.” Luella took one look at the injury and sent Joe Jr. off on a sleigh to the hospital, where he was treated for a broken arm. In her years as a nurse, Luella had seen how pain that drove one man to scream would cause nary a whimper in another, but she had rarely seen a person who seemed entirely immune to pain, who almost enjoyed it, like a tonic. Joe Jr. laughed at the injury, as if he had nicked himself shaving. Sure enough, he was immediately out skating again with Megan Taylor.
His younger brothers applauded Joe Jr. by imitating him, with results that were only slightly less harsh. Bobby sprained his ankle on the nursery slope, while Teddy suffered a wrenched knee. Little Teddy enlivened his enforced convalescence by playing with matches in his room at the Palace Hotel before coming down to the lobby. “Eddie Moore came in and found the whole wastebasket on fire,” Ted recalled. “My father being outraged, I think I got another spanking for that.”
Teddy had his defender in Luella. “Joe Jr. used to tease Teddy terribly,” the nurse recalled. “It was all in fun, but he was the only one who did it. If he was teasing Teddy or saying, ‘Why don’t you do this,’ or, ‘You’re too old to act that way,’ I’d say, ‘Now don’t be teasing. He’s my Edward.’ Teddy was my favorite, a happy little fellow. I just loved Teddy.”
For Joe Jr., his vacation in Saint Moritz had been a glorious winter adventure, but it was also inevitable that a young man of his passion, political ambition, and daring would want to be a witness to the Spanish Civil War. As Joe Jr. headed south, he was an anomaly among the young men of America and Europe who had gone to Spain. Most of them had arrived to fight with or support the loyalist Republican troops. Among them were a number of the greatest writers of the time. Ernest Hemingway. George Orwell. André Malraux. Stephen Spender. W. H. Auden. Langston Hughes.
Unlike these men, Joe Jr. was naturally sympathetic to the reactionary General Franco and his German and Italian Fascist allies. In church Joe Jr. had heard the priests talking in menacing detail of the godless hordes who burned churches and killed priests and nuns. His own father had protested when the president had contemplated lifting America’s embargo on arms to the belligerents. At Harvard, Joe Jr. wrote his thesis on “Intervention in Spain,” a document that perhaps was destroyed so that the Kennedys would not have to explain Joe Jr.’s enthusiastic support for Franco. As Catholics, not only Joe Jr. but his whole family saw Mussolini and Franco as bulwarks against atheistic communism.
In early 1939, Franco and his allies were in the ascendancy. Hemingway had already left Madrid to write his great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. George Orwell was gone too, after fighting in the trenches and writing his classic book Homage to Catalonia, documenting the deceit of the Communists and their role in destroying Republican idealism.
Joe Jr. was not a rightist ideologue who reveled in the Republican defeat. He was a man who felt as much as he thought. Even before he entered Spain, he had visited a camp in France along the border where members of the International Brigade were interned. They had come from all over the world to fight for the Loyalist cause. He was shocked at the conditions in which they lived, and he listened to their tales with empathy.
“The last few weeks, before they got across into France, were terrible,” Joe Jr. noted. “Without arms and with no idea just where they were, as they retreated they expected at any moment to find themselves surrounded by Franco’s men…. Most of them were Communists, whose families at home were being supported by the various trade unions.”
Joe Jr. understood the universal language of valor. He saw that these men were brave and true. He was sorry that their adventure had ended in the squalor of a camp, where they were reduced to squabbling over crusts of bread. He traveled into Spain, arriving in Barcelona in February only a week after its fall to Franco. The area around the harbor was a charred ruin, but gleaming steel Italian and German warships sat proudly in the port.
From Barcelona, Joe Jr. sailed on a British destroyer to Valencia, one of the last strongholds of the Loyalists. Joe Jr. had what Orwell would have called a soldier’s vision of the war; that is, he was no jingoistic cheerleader viewing the destruction as God’s revenge on a heathen people. German bombs had leveled the area around the port, but back a short way from the rubble children played as children always play. “It made me sick,” Joe Jr. wrote in a letter published in the Atlantic Monthly. “The sound of those little kids’ voices.”
Joe Jr. was not only an American but a Kennedy; his father was an enemy of the Loyalists. Joe Jr. had turned in his diplomatic passport for ordinary documents, but he was peculiarly vulnerable. He was an uninvited guest in a society that stood on the edge of panic and paranoia over what measure of blood Franco would consider his just revenge.
The story of the civil war lay not among the orange fields of Valencia, however, but in Madrid, held by the Republicans. It was here that the war had begun and it was here that it would end. Joe Jr. talked his way onto a military bus traveling to the besieged city, rationing out cigarettes to his new friends on the bus as it bounced northward along ravaged roads. Joe Jr. didn’t speak much Spanish, but his smile and his backslapping good cheer served him well, and doubtless his new comrades thought that Joe Jr. was one of them.
The Madrid that Joe Jr. entered was a beggar city; its boulevards had been stripped of trees, chopped down for firewood, and its sidewalks were full of shuffling, hungry, bewildered people. Stray dogs and cats had long since been eaten, and
the meat on sale in the Plaza Mayor was rat. Foreign journalists and most other observers had fled the city as well, and Joe Jr. was a unique witness to the last days of the Spanish Republic.
He staked out a room at the abandoned American embassy and set out to imbibe the full flavor of the beleaguered city. He could hear Franco’s artillery sounding in the distance. Down the street lay savage fighting between the Communists and their erstwhile allies, the Socialists and anarchists. Thus sounded the death knell for the republic: the soldiers who had fought years together against an implacable foe were now dispensing the last ounces of their resolve against each other.
Joe Jr. was perhaps the only nonresident American in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He had proved his bravery just by being there, but he had an even more daring idea. He wanted to find the Franco underground. He was told that he should go to a certain address, 19 Castelló Street. There he saw affixed to the door an American flag and a certificate stating that the house was a diplomatic enclave.
Joe Jr. met Antonio Garrigues y Díaz Canabate and his American wife, Helen Anne. And he saw basement quarters where the couple sheltered nuns and others. They were not passive recipients of Catholic refugees; they were running operations in a city that verged on anarchy.
Joe Jr. asked to join them. He squeezed into Garrigues’s small car with three others, and they headed out into the Madrid streets. The Spaniard carried several sets of documents with which he played his own peculiar form of Russian roulette. When the vehicle was stopped, he had to decide whether the soldiers were Communists or Republican Loyalists. If he chose wrong, he and his passengers might be arrested or summarily executed. At a roadblock at Calle del Esse, Garrigues decided to show the soldiers his Red Cross credentials. The soldiers ordered the men out of the car and lined them up against a wall. Joe Jr. took out his passport, a document that, shown to the wrong soldiers, would have been greeted with the firing squad. This time the soldiers shrugged and waved the group on.
Joe Jr. was there in March, when the city fell, not in some great battle, or with Franco marching proudly and dramatically into Madrid, but in a strangely desultory manner. Joe Jr. saw a car rushing through the city, the Nationalist flag waving from its window, then a second car, a truck full of gesticulating young men shouting, “Franco is coming!” The once-banned scarlet and gold Nationalist colors were everywhere, hanging in windows, worn on scarves, draped in restaurants. “We were touched by the expressiveness in their voices and the look in their eyes,” he wrote his father, “by occasional sad faces, by a woman in black holding two children with a bitter look on her face.”
Joe Jr. flew to London to greet a father full of immense pride at his son’s daring and resolve. While his son was in Spain, Joe had read some of Joe Jr.’s letters to Chamberlain at a dinner one evening. Joe had not wanted to inflict too much of this on the prime minister, but Chamberlain had asked him to read on, and so he had.
Joe wanted not only for his sons to experience life in all its rich manifestations, but for their adventures to be trumpeted in newspapers and magazines, spreading the glory of the family name. That was the approach to everything they did. Win a sailing race. Triumph in a football game. Travel to war-torn Spain. Then make sure that your achievement is widely known and richly celebrated.
Joe Jr. had written a letter to the Atlantic Monthly about Valencia for which he received twenty-five dollars, but his ambitions were greater now. He had had an experience that he could weave into a book, and he began by writing a series of six articles.
For weeks Joe Jr. had gone through events in Spain that should have been burned into his consciousness. Yet there was a distant quality to much of the writing, as if he were remembering events of twenty years before. A passage would be full of vividly observed detail, followed by pages with no more verve than a legal brief. What was missing was a sense of politics, without which the events he had seen were largely meaningless, and his account merely a travelogue of adventure.
Joe Jr. was a highly opinionated young man. Whatever the issue, he had his stance, strongly argued and strongly felt. He also had political ambitions, and he may well have felt that he should position himself as an honest observer and keep his political views to himself, confining them to private letters and memos to his father. In doing so, however, he stood back from his own sense of truth and wrote a paltry outline of what he had seen and felt, leaving out what he believed. In the end, none of these articles saw publication, and Joe Jr.’s journey was celebrated more within his own family than in the greater world.
Joe thought that his sons were never too young to learn to be the public men he wanted them to be. Joe’s sons felt the need not simply to emulate their father but to defend him. Even young Bobby got into the fray. In November 1938, Walter Lippmann wrote a thoughtful column rightfully criticizing Joe as one of those “amateur and temporary diplomats [who] take their speeches very seriously. Ambassadors of this type soon tend to become each a little state department with a little foreign policy of their own.” Twelve-year-old Bobby wrote a tedious rebuttal that was little more than a regurgitation of some of his father’s more extreme views. There was a slovenly quality to the letter, with myriad typos, including a misspelling of Lippmann’s name.
Although Bobby would presumably have found it offensive if others had suggested that his father believed as he did simply because he was an Irish-American Catholic, he was perfectly willing to condemn Lippmann’s writing as the rationalizations of a Jew seeking to protect “his” people, and not his nation. Bobby dismissed Lippmann’s thoughtful, reasoned critique as nothing more than “the natural Jewish reaction.”
For one so young, Bobby had a deeply offensive arrogance, much like his father’s. He lectured Jews that they had better accept the realities of making accommodations with Hitler. “I know this is extremely hard for the Jewish community in the US to sto mach, [sic],” he wrote with all the wisdom of his years, “nbut [sic] they should see by now that the fcourse [sic] which they have followed the last few years has brought them nothing but additional hard ship [sic].”
In April 1939, thirteen-year-old Bobby was invited to be one of a group of children laying a stone at the Clubland Temple of Youth in Camberwell. Joe, the subtle mastermind of his sons’ journeys into manhood, had the event scripted with all the detail of a major diplomatic meeting. As ambassador, Joe had been asked to preside, but this was his son’s first important public appearance, and he wanted the spotlight to shine unabashedly only on Bobby.
The press attaché notified news organizations that the ambassador’s son would be making a short speech. James Seymour, the ambassador’s aide, prepared elaborate notes for the event, including Bobby’s little speech (“All the temples I’ve read about in history books are very old … but this ‘Temple of Youth’ is awfully young”). On the appointed evening, Bobby pulled a crumpled, penciled note out of his pocket and read what appears to have been his own remarks, not Seymour’s version of what a boy scarcely a teenager should say (“Many years from now, when we are very old, this Temple of Youth will still be standing to bring happiness to many English children”).
Young Bobby already understood that part of his role in life was to take the work of others and by his own subtle infusions make it his own. He was a boyish mixture of shyness and confidence. When the seventeen-year-old Japanese representative found herself next to the eleven-year-old daughter of the Chinese ambassador, there was deadly quiet, and the event risked becoming not a celebration of the commonality of children but a minor diplomatic incident between children of the two warring Asian nations. “I wonder shall we all be here to see Her Majesty perform the opening on May 20?” Bobby asked, his innocent query giving the two young women a neutral matter to discuss.
Even six-year-old Teddy realized that he was not just a boy. His parents told him that wherever he went he had to remember that he was the son of the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. That was a burden his older brothers had not had.
The little boy was living two lives, his own and his father’s glorified idea of him. He came home from school one day and asked his mother for permission to punch a classmate. “Why?” Rose asked, believing that in the pantheon of virtues, civility stood below only godliness. “Well, he’s been hitting me every day, and you tell me I can’t get into fights because Dad is the ambassador.” After a family discussion, Ted was told that this once he could strike back at his tormentor.
In what would prove to be the last summer of peace, Joe Jr. headed out once again across Europe, a footloose, privileged witness to his times. He was frequently an insightful, prophetic observer. In Germany he saw that the people were largely united behind Hitler and that “there is only one thing that the Germans understand and that is force. All attempts at conciliation are taken as signs of weakness, and furthermore are used as propaganda by the Germans to convince the smaller countries that the English won’t fight.”
Joe Jr. may have been his father’s son, but in these dispatches he did not simply parrot his father’s isolationist views. He had a young man’s rage at the hypocrisies of the world, and he pointed them out in passionate detail. Europe was full of ethnic loathing. Hitler was the primary architect of malevolence, but there were others building their bonfires of hate across the ancient landscape. This world might suck America into all its malice and complexities.
Joe Jr. raged against Roosevelt’s hypocrisy, egging Britain on from a safe distance. He was not, however, the cocksure, often arrogant young man of two years before. He was even willing to consider a policy unthinkable to the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe Jr. concluded one dispatch: “I had always thought that we should stay out of war and that being a rich nation we can live by ourselves … but if we can’t … then I think we should have a real policy in Europe entirely fitting for the greatest power in the world rather than a half-hearted, namby pamby policy skipping one way then to the other so no one knows what will happen if their [sic] is a war.”
The Kennedy Men Page 18
