As the helicopter flew from Dublin to Galway, Ireland appeared to be a blessed, magical, verdant land far removed from the secret squalor and the ceaseless conflicts. As they soared above the land, Kennedy kept asking about the prices of houses and land. The ambassador sensed that the president was thinking about buying his own place here, a house where he would come occasionally and send his children to learn about their Irish heritage.
The president returned to New Ross and the Kennedy family homestead. As the helicopter headed to County Wexford, Malcolm Kilduff, the deputy press secretary, briefed the president. Kilduff told Kennedy about his experience working with Andrew Minahan, the chairman of the New Ross county council, in advancing the trip. Kilduff had involved the enormous, redheaded chairman in a myriad of details. The press aide told Minahan that the presidential limousine would pull in near the wharf. From there, Kennedy would be able to move easily up to the temporary speaker’s platform. The problem was the massive heap of cow dung waiting to be placed on barges. “You’ll have to move it,” Kilduff told the county chairman. “Christ, no,” Minahan said exasperatedly. “I’m going to pile it high and make that f’er think he’s crossing the Alps.”
When Kennedy’s helicopter set down in freshly mown hay, the backwash sent cow dung flying across the field and speckling the children’s chorus preparing to sing “The Boys of Wexford.” Another president would have berated Kilduff for not planning better, but Kennedy chuckled impishly, amused at this added spectacle. Kennedy could go in a moment from wry ironic amusement to the most heartfelt emotion, and so he did today as soon as the children began to sing a song that touched him so deeply. Then he moved on to greet the various dignitaries. When he came to the chairman of the New Ross county council, he stopped for a special moment. “Mr. Minathan, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Kennedy began, waiting for the man’s chest to swell to twice its normal size. “What I’d like to know is, did you remove the dung or does this f’er have to cross the Alps?”
Kennedy drove out to the old Kennedy house in Dunganstown. In America when a man went to see his old family home, he often discovered that it was torn down long ago, or that it had acquired a new addition, aluminum siding, or at least a different paint job. He often ended up standing there wondering what was left of the past in America, his or anybody else’s. But the thatched house that the president came to along this dirt road was almost exactly what it was 114 years before, when Patrick Kennedy left for America. It was a small place, only forty feet by thirteen feet, with tiny windows no larger than fifteen inches by seventeen inches or the taxes would have been higher. Next to it stood a farmhouse. There was neither indoor plumbing nor a telephone.
The president’s cousin, Mary Ryan, and her two daughters, Mary and Josephine, stood there waiting to greet the president. Mrs. Ryan was a rotund woman who could have been one of the legions of Irish women like his great-grandmother Bridget who had cleaned the Boston Brahmin homes and washed their fine linens. She was the very image of the Irish peasant from whom his father had sought to distance himself. Mrs. Ryan hugged Kennedy and spoke to him with warm familiarity, as if he had grown up just down the road. At some times and in some places, Kennedy might have recoiled from such a gesture, but this time he embraced his cousin. When he talked to his relations, Mrs. Ryan’s daughter Mary was amazed at how well he knew the family tree. “I think he felt back home,” she recalled. Raising his cup of tea, he proposed a toast “to all the Kennedys who went and all the Kennedys who stayed.” Then, almost as suddenly as he had arrived, he was off, flying back to Dublin in his helicopter high above the emerald fields.
As Kennedy left Ireland, he left part of himself and took more of himself than had been there when he arrived. “He had always been moved by its poverty and literature because it told of the tragedy and the desperate courage which he knew lay just under the surface of Irish life,” said Jackie, whose pregnancy prevented her from making the European trip. What Kennedy took from his Irish heritage was neither the calculated buffoonery of the Irish-American politician nor the boozy sentimentality of the saloon, but the dark, ironic wit that was a shield against misfortune. He took also what he considered the indomitable Irish spirit, and its struggle for liberty. He believed that a desire for liberty was one of the essential drives of humankind, and he reasoned that if his forebears had struggled against all assaults, insults, and reprisals, then surely the other oppressed peoples of the world one day would do so too. As he saw it, the Irish had one great song, the song of liberty, and no one had ever been able to still Irish voices.
If heroism in the face of impossible odds is sentimental, then Kennedy at this moment was a sentimental man. He loved this land now as he had not loved it before. He took something else with him as he flew west—a part of his past. He had done here what most Americans do sooner or later: come to terms with his immigrant past, with his humble beginnings. “This is not the land of my birth,” the president said as he was leaving on June 29, 1963, “but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection, and I certainly will come back in the springtime.”
When the president arrived back in America and spent the Fourth of July weekend in Hyannis Port, he invited the entire family to watch his movie of the trip to Ireland. They all came over and watched as Kennedy provided running commentary. The next evening Kennedy invited them back to watch again, and since not only was he president but he so rarely liked watching or doing anything twice, they gladly returned and sat through it all again. Then on the following night he invited them back a third time, and this time they trooped slowly and dutifully into the living room to watch film that they had practically memorized. And he sat and watched as if he were seeing these scenes for the first time.
Kennedy could move within a few moments from the kind of cynical political ripostes that some men called realism to acts of the most rarefied, deeply felt idealism. His idealism was not merely expressed in service of his cynicism but was on a different plane and served nothing but itself. Kennedy had a profound belief in public rituals. He had grown up in a church whose ornate sacraments set its believers apart from the Unitarians and the Congregationalists, to whom simplicity was the mark of true faith. His mother had led her sons and daughters along the Freedom Trail, from Plymouth to Concord to the Old North Church, inculcating in Jack the idea that the patriotic faith of Americans had to be affirmed in shrines and rituals.
As a lover of England and Europe, Kennedy was a lover of history, not as a tedious recitation of the past but in part as a vivid tapestry of rituals. As a young congressman, he had participated in all the rituals of democracy, including Veterans Day. Each year the numbers in the crowds seemed to lessen, the cheers became more muffled, and more and more of the speeches echoed in half-empty auditoriums. He was seeing the beginning of the secularization of American life; Sunday would become just another shopping day, and many national holidays were ripped out of the calendar and set next to Saturday and Sunday so that Americans could have their three-day weekends. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kennedy revered these moments, and in the midst of his tight schedule he penned some ideas for the Fourth of July proclamation. This was usually a boilerplate document put together by a speechwriter, to be released under the president’s name and then forgotten, but not for Kennedy this year.
“Bells mark significant events in modern lives. Birth and death, war and peace are pealed and tolled,” he wrote in his own hand during his European trip. “Bells summon the community to take note of things which affect the life or death of a community…. On the Fourth of July when bells ring again—think back on those who lived and died to make our country and their resolve, achieved with courage and determination, to make it greater in our day and generation.”
To Kennedy, patriotism was a bell that resonated with all the sounds of American history, pealing forth the triumphs and tragedies, the deaths and dramas. It was a bell that had to be tolled repeatedly, and when it rang, those within hearing should stop and liste
n. To him, the heroes of the past, men like Joe Jr., lived on in the continuing history of the nation, their lives resonating in these sounds. “Heroes of the past are watching us,” he said in the proclamation. “If we remember them when the bells ring out … it will help us to live like heroes too.”
For Kennedy and his two brothers, the bell that pealed the loudest sounded out the name of their brother lost in war. They did not salute his name every day, but his life and, more importantly, his death rang through their own lives. To betray their brother’s sacrifice was to betray their country, their faith, their father, and their blood.
In September, seventy middle-aged men and most of their wives gathered in the South Ballroom at the Willard Hotel in Washington. These were the men of Navy Patrol Squadron VB-110, together for the first time since their days at Dunkeswell Airdrome in World War II. Before them stood Jim Reedy, who had been Joe Jr.’s commander and who now was a rear admiral.
“Hello, Admiral,” the president’s voice sounded over an amplified telephone from Hyannis Port, where he and his brothers were all together on their father’s seventy-fifth birthday. They were a family of celebratory occasions, and it was not easy wheeling Joe into the dining room, decking him out in a silly birthday hat, singing songs and telling jokes when he could not respond. It was not easy speaking always in the upbeat idiom that was the preferred language of the Kennedys. It was not easy for the president to stride boldly into the house that fall and then at times take up his crutches to help assuage his pain. It was not easy pretending that life was the way it always had been.
The president was not a man who liked to ponder his past. But the admiral was right in his belief that if the president had been in town, he probably would have been there with his brothers beside him to honor their brother’s memory.
“Admiral, I want to express all of our thanks to you and to send our best wishes to all those who served in 110,” the president began. “I know its record very well. And I know from the letters which my family received during the Second World War how much my brother valued his association with this distinguished squadron which had an outstanding record in the winter, spring, and summer patrolling the Bay of Biscay. I know something about the number of men who were lost in the dangerous service with the coastal patrol.”
Kennedy had braved enemy waters too, and he was speaking to these men with a commonality that only they could fully understand. The condolence letters after Joe Jr.’s death had been a challenge to Kennedy. They were almost a rebuke that he was not the man his brother was. Growing up, he had harbored the most complex feelings toward Joe Jr., but all that was left now was love and reverence and a renewed belief that courage was the ultimate virtue. The only human immortality of which we can be certain is that a person lives on in human memory and that others seek to replicate his or her deeds. In that sense, Joe Jr. lived on in all three of his brothers.
“All of you, Admiral, who are meeting now have happy recollections of those who served in the squadron who did not return,” Kennedy said solemnly. “And I know that my brother and all those others who served with the squadron who are not with you are with you tonight in spirit.”
When the president finished, he gave the phone to his younger brother. Bobby spoke with that same Boston nasal intonation as his brother, but there was softness and a subtle tenderness to his tenor voice, unlike the president’s. Bobby had known Joe Jr. only as a great figure descending on his life for a few brief moments, a brother who had died a hero’s death, leaving a shadow that reached wherever he moved.
“I just know how much our brother Joe liked and respected you,” Bobby said, as always more intimate, more emotionally raw, than the president. “I know how well all of you have served the country in the past and in the present time…. I hope you’re going to meet again so one or all of us can come. I have another brother here that wanted to say hello to you. Can he do that, Admiral?”
“Indeed he can.”
Bobby then passed the phone on to Teddy. “Hello, admiral, this is Ted Kennedy,” Teddy said, making an introduction that his brothers had not found necessary. “Well, admiral, I was the only member of the family who didn’t serve in the navy. I was in the army. And my other brothers never let me forget about it.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Reedy said, over the laughter.
Teddy would always be the kid brother, but he had assumed the confident manner of a public man. He was fast becoming the greatest politician in the family, loving the touch of people and their problems. He had become a professional politician too, in that he thought it was his prerogative to talk too long. In private among friends, he was the most charming of raconteurs. In public, however, when he was not speaking from a prepared speech, his syntax was often so mislaid that he did not speak sentences as much as an endless array of words. This moment may also have been overwhelming to him, thinking of what his brother had sacrificed.
“I think all of us have been tremendously impressed and are cognizant of the many members of your squadron. I think all the brothers met a number of them from the country certainly in the campaigns before, certainly in the different states they have always come up and said hello and I have always been delighted to meet with them and hear their stories,” Teddy said. “I just in the last few weeks have received some notes from some of the sons wanting to come by. Even though I’m the one member of the family who did not serve in the last war we feel tremendous respect and a closeness.”
Teddy was the most distant from Joe Jr. in age, intimacy, knowledge, and experience. He nonetheless saw himself as the proud bearer of a noble legacy and was willing more than his brothers to meet with anyone who had touched Joe Jr.’s life, to invite their children into his office, send them autographed photos, and listen to their reminiscences.
When Teddy finally finished, the veterans returned to their wartime tales, and the three brothers celebrated their father’s birthday.
30
The Adrenaline of Action
Kennedy loved convivial gatherings whose only purpose was the amusement of those fortunate enough, witty enough, or pretty enough to be invited. He and Jackie held a number of dances at the White House. These were elegant soirees, the room festooned with lovely women. There was an ample charge of sexual electricity in the air, and the happy anticipation that something especially memorable would happen, or some unseemly gossip or perhaps a presidential witticism would be uttered, to be repeated across Georgetown the next morning.
At the first dance of the winter of 1962-63, among the ladies in their long, elaborate formal dresses was one guest who was wearing a gossamer, chiffon summer gown. It was clothing that would have seemed out of place on almost anyone else, but one looked at Mary Meyer and thought, yes, it was summer. Meyer was an abstract artist, and she brought her style to whatever she wore, whether it was a vintage dress that she had picked up for five dollars in a secondhand store or a designer gown that she had purchased in Paris. Her daring only began with her clothes. She had an impish, taunting manner unlike anyone else in the room. Once, at Hickory Hill, she had trumped even Bobby and Ethel’s frenetic sense of fun by suggesting that everyone strip naked and plunge into the pool.
For a year Meyer had been seeing the president, always making her private visits when Jackie was away. “I think Jack was in love with Mary Meyer,” reflected Ben Bradlee, who was there that winter evening. “She was a very interesting woman, but she was trouble. With one less chromosome, she would have been a perfect person for Jack to marry.” Bradlee spoke with a certain authority, since until Mary’s divorce from Cord Meyer, a top CIA official, she had been the Newsweek editor’s sister-in-law.
Kennedy had once preferred elegant, educated, fashionable, upper-class women. Since he had begun his pursuit of presidential power, he had often settled for a parade of women who lacked all these attributes. Meyer was different, harking back to the women he had once pursued, women sweetly perfumed with all the allure of money and class. Yet Meye
r represented something exotic too, the new bohemians of the sixties. She smoked marijuana and led him on a journey away from the emotional certitude in which he lived.
The president was host of the evening, seeing everything, and remembering most of it. “Blair, get Teddy to do the twist,” Kennedy directed his old college friend. The junior senator made his entrance to social Washington not in some formal procession but gyrating his hips.
While the dancing proceeded to the sounds of Lester Lanin’s orchestra, Meyer disappeared from the gathering, wandering off somewhere. Hoover had no elaborate dossier on Meyer, for most of her travels were in her head, but she was a dangerously unpredictable woman. That evening Meyer finally arrived back among the dancers. Her long evening gown was wet at the bottom.
“Mary, where have you been?” Blair Clark asked.
“I’ve been out walking around the White House,” she said in her gaily lilting voice.
“In the snow?”
No one else that evening would have even contemplated leaving the party to walk out alone on the White House grounds deep with snow. Clark believed that Meyer might have wandered out there because Kennedy had just told her their affair was over. She may also have been the one contemplating just how far she wanted her relationship with the president to go. Or she may simply have felt like walking in the snow in her summer gown.
“What is the scandal?” Kennedy asked with delicious anticipation.
The president was on the telephone with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who on March 22, 1963, had just returned from England with a precious piece of political tittle-tattle. Kennedy treated gossip like chocolate bonbons, a pleasant little addiction that he enjoyed tasting several times a day. Schlesinger had a particularly sweet item about John Profumo, the British war minister, who had gotten himself into a wicked fix.
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