WAR HERO
It has been a strange experience and I shall never forget the succession of great halls packed with excited people until there was no room for a single person more, speech after speech, meeting after meeting—three, even four in a night—intermittent flashes of heat and light and enthusiasm with cold air and the rattle of the carriage in between: a great experience. And I improve every time. I have hardly repeated myself at all.
—Winston Churchill, from a
letter to Pamela Plowden, 1899
The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important. With the physical courage of which he’d shown himself to be capable, Jack Kennedy had turned his years of frailty and private suffering into a personal and public confidence that would take him forward. In mythic terms, he’d also challenged his father’s point of view on the war and bent it to his own. He’d experienced the loss not only of comrades in arms, but of the family’s prince, his brother. Now, ahead of him loomed new ways for him to demonstrate the man he was becoming—and the leader he would be.
If Jack Kennedy didn’t see at first the change he was undergoing when he was discharged from the navy in 1944 and then directly afterward, many around him certainly did. “It was written all over the sky that he was going to be something big,” recalled one of his fellow officers.
Yet, as he was starting to look to the future, he couldn’t let go of what he’d witnessed and what he’d learned. War marks you forever, and so there was one crucial idea he had grasped, which was that it was wrong. In conversations with other officers, he urged them to take the life of their country seriously when they got home, to prevent another war.
For his own part, he spoke as if he, himself, was on the brink of coming to grips with big decisions, of preparing to face them. His commanding officer, for one, commented on the changes in Lieutenant Kennedy that started to be evident at this point: “I think there was probably a serious side to Kennedy that started evolving at that time that had not existed before.”
Now came the fortuitous: his secret illnesses could now be worn as public honors. His chronic bad back would from this era on be attributed to his war injuries. When the noted writer John Hersey, who chronicled Jack’s South Pacific exploits for the New Yorker, made the assumption it was the result of the PT 109 collision and all those hours spent hauling a helpless man through the water, Kennedy let it pass.
All of the other old troubles continued to plague him, especially his serious stomach problems, but they were now morphing into part of his new biography, or new image, just as the bad back was. Scarily thin and still sallow of complexion, Jack met new people and made new acquaintances who immediately chalked up his strange appearance to the malaria and other lingering effects of the PT-boat ordeal. What had been the hidden facts of life were now a statement to the man on the street—especially those meeting him face-to-face for the first time, as soon they would—of his very real heroism.
Everyone has written that Jack Kennedy needed to be dragooned into running for Congress in 1946. Everyone, that is, except the people who really knew him. The solitary walk he took on the beach at Hyannis after getting the news about Joe Jr. must have involved, along with the grief, recognition of a coming swerve on his life’s path. The personal landscape he’d long taken for granted had rearranged itself around him, and so, too, had the expected demands. He was ready, it turned out, to welcome them.
Many aspects of the man were coming together. Jack had run for student office, majored in government. The reading interests that he’d maintained so steadily—memoirs and history, news stories and political currents, world affairs—had culminated in Why England Slept, his thesis-turned-best-seller. It had shown his skills as a firsthand observer of history. He’d been planning to go to law school, specializing in international law.
I should add that he liked poetry—Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was a favorite, as were the poems sent from the front in World War I by a fellow Harvard man, Alan Seeger, who died on a French battlefield. Yet Jack, despite his childhood built on books, resisted the artistic sensibility. Though he was comfortable with the arts, the poetry that drew him was about mission and dedication, courage and overcoming obstacles. A great example are these several lines from “Ulysses”—
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Even in the far-off Solomon Islands—where, like Ulysses, he’d “suffer’d greatly” on a “dim sea”—he’d kept up lively conversations with his messmates about all the subjects that most fascinated him: indeed, “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments.”
When he returned stateside and was required to put in more hospital time, with everything else on hold, the idea of attending law school continued to be his operative plan right up through early 1945. “I’m returning to law school at Harvard in the fall,” he wrote Lem Billings, “and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it. I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.” That “something good” may well have been the seat for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, a district that included Cambridge.
In the pre–Civil War nineteenth century, that seat had been held by John Quincy Adams, also a Harvard man, and the country’s sixth president; it was the only time a president had served in the House after leaving the White House. At the moment, the seat was occupied by the old-style Irish pol James Michael Curley, now nearing the end of a legendary career that would, by its close, include not just four terms as Boston’s mayor but also two stints in prison.
Curley, now, was about to abandon his congressional post to run again for mayor. Jack knew this because Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., freshly involved in local political matters, was bankrolling the rascal. His son knew it but he kept it to himself, as he took one last try at another career possibility.
His father wrangled him a job stringing for the Chicago Herald-American, a Hearst paper. His assignment was to cover the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He’d be reporting the historic event “from the point of view of the ordinary GI.”
The city was hopping when he got there, with men and women on hand from all over the world. Fifty nations sent delegates to the conference, which began in late April 1945 and lasted two months. FDR had just died, leaving his vice president, Harry Truman, in the White House. Everyone knew World War II was nearing its close. Out in San Francisco the politically connected of every stripe were there to see and be seen, to hobnob and network amid the carnival-like atmosphere.
For Jack Kennedy, the U.N. Conference was the right place at the right moment, offering as it did an irresistible mix of high ideals and high life. It gave him a view of the political arena that now beckoned him. The atmosphere he found himself immersed in was electric with the sounds and sights of a new world being born.
Wherever he went, Kennedy worked contacts both old and new, honing his skills at making professional allies out of social friends, and vice versa. You never knew where you’d see him, but he seemed to be everywhere. For instance, when he hosted a briefing on Russia by the diplomat and Soviet scholar Charles “Chip” Bohlen, he found himself in distinguished company that included the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman.
Along for the ride in San Francisco were two of Jack’s pals: Red Fay and Chuck Spalding. For the former he’d wangled the boondoggle of acting as his aide at the conference, while Chuck Spalding somehow was hanging out on the strength of a best-selling book he’d cowritten, Love at First Flight, a memoir of his wartime training experience.
Young men home from the front, they managed to share laughs despite all the speeches and earnestness, including one memorable moment that occurred in the midst of Bohlen’s deadly serious analysis of Soviet intentions.
It was Jack who first noticed the elegant Harriman had slipped away from the room in the Palace Hotel where the briefing was taking place, and out onto the balcony with a young woman. “I give him about two more minutes, and then he’s going to hang himself,” Jack whispered to Fay. Focused on Bohlen, Fay wondered why his pal would say such a thing.
“I’m not talking about Bohlen,” Kennedy shot back. “I’m talking about Harriman!”
Also in the group with whom Jack socialized at the conference were Cord Meyer, another young veteran with big political hopes, and his attractive, vivacious wife, Mary. Meyer, at this time, was an aide to the Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen, but would go on to join the CIA.
For Kennedy, the business at hand was not just about filing stories or making the scene. As always, it was his curiosity that drove and excited him. He seemed particularly intrigued by the Soviet delegation, led by the coldly robotic Vyacheslav Molotov.
Along with the rest of the world, he’d seen President Roosevelt concede the territories of Eastern Europe to Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that February, only weeks before his death. Critics saw this concession of important strategic and autonomous lands to the Soviets as an unconscionable giveaway to a soon-to-be enemy.
FDR’s failing health might have been a factor in the outcome at Yalta; there on the shore of the Black Sea, he was pushing himself hard and losing the battle with his own body. But equally at play were other factors that Kennedy, with his growing fascination with the way nations behaved, saw and grasped.
But if he didn’t like the agreement Roosevelt had signed off on, he was able to assess it from more than one perspective. He knew his history, and saw clearly the unyielding strength of Russian nationalism. Napolean had invaded her in 1812. To repel the Grand Army, the Russians had been forced to burn Moscow. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Russians, once again invaded, were facing the harsh fact that they’d lost 20 million people fighting the Germans mostly on Russian soil, with their Allies slow to open a second front.
Jack Kennedy was displaying an ability to regard an adversary’s situation without emotion. In one of the pieces that ran in the Herald-American under his byline, he offered his own take on how the Soviets thought, and he ended it by reminding his readers of “the heritage of 25 years of distrust between Russia and the rest of the world that cannot be overcome completely for a good many years.”
Also, true to his mission, he held the perspective of the fighting American home from the front.
When Victory in Europe Day came—on May 8, during the conference’s second week—Jack responded by writing eloquently in the Herald-American: “Any man who had risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good will it do. It is perhaps normal that they would be disappointed with what they have seen in San Francisco. I suppose that this is inevitable. Youth is a time for direct action and simplification. To come from battlefields where sacrifice is the order of the day—to come from there to here—it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”
In a letter to one of his war buddies, he phrased his message more bluntly: “We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war.”
Chuck Spalding, keeping an eye on his friend as well as on the tone of his articles, was starting to draw his own conclusions. “Either wittingly or unwittingly, he began to write as a politician.” Just as in the South Pacific, he was acting more as a leader than as an observer. “The war makes less sense to me now,” Jack wrote, “than it ever made and that was little enough—and I would really like—as my life’s goal—in some way at home or at some time to do something to help prevent another.”
While still on the job in San Francisco, Jack learned his next assignment was to be London. There he’d be reporting on the fierce political struggle taking place as the British home-front coalition broke down. The opposition Labour Party was going all out to contest Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s Conservative government in the first postwar British general election. For Jack, it was a chance to see his most enduring hero fight for his political life, and yet he was stunned. How could Churchill, whose indomitable leadership had meant so much to his nation in wartime, now be in such serious trouble?
What Jack was about to learn is how quickly economic concerns replaced wartime loyalties. The war had been hard on the British working class and, suddenly, voters were remembering how the Conservatives had supported appeasement of the Germans before the war. The same Tories were now clinging to power with warnings of socialist dictatorship. But, more to the point in the postwar climate, the Tories were preaching belt-tightening. Just when the people were looking for a break from the depressed economy—the rationing, the empty cupboards—they were being promised more of the same.
Unfortunately, when the votes were counted, both Jack’s front-row position and his empathy didn’t help his critical judgment. Unable to imagine a Labour victory, he filed a wrap-up election piece predicting a close Tory win. He wasn’t alone; Churchill’s overwhelming defeat was a shock to many.
While in England, Jack took advantage of the opportunity to catch up with old friends. One of them, Alistair Forbes, registered this impression: “He struck me then that he was more intellectual than any other member of the family. He read more. He had a fantastically good instinct, once his attention was aroused to a problem, for getting the gist of it and coming to a mature judgment about it. He had a detachment which reminded me very much of Winston Churchill in the sense that his life had been protected by money.”
Another friend, Hugh Fraser, who was running for Parliament himself at the time, saw him similarly. “He was always a great questioner. He always asked an enormous number of questions. He was very interested in things. For every one question I asked him he asked two at least.”
“Political to his fingertips” is how the British economist Barbara Ward recalled him. “He asked every sort of question of what were the pressures, what were the forces at work, who supported what.” Such curiosity, such a need to inform himself and to sift carefully through what he was learning, would always form part of his m.o.
During this period, when he was pounding out stories for afternoon newspaper readers in Chicago, Kennedy also kept a personal diary. The entries in it further reveal him as unable to move past the idea of war’s deadliness: “We have suffered the loss of nearly 8 hundred thousand young men—many of whom might become the leadership we will so desperately need.”
What’s more, he wrote presciently—somehow intuiting the existence of the atomic bomb, which wasn’t yet publicly known—of what he saw in the future. “The clash may be finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it. Thus science, which has contributed to much of the horror of war, will still be the means of bringing it to an end.”
When it came to the ideological currents back home, he was critical of FDR. “Mr. Roosevelt has contributed greatly to the end of Capitalism in our own country, although he would probably argue the point at some point. He has done this, not through the laws which he sponsored or were passed during his Presidency, but rather through the emphasis he put on rights rather than responsibilities.”
In Europe, Kennedy saw the brutality of the Russians to the vanquished Germans. “People did not realize what was going on in the concentration camps. In many ways, the ‘SS’ were as bad as the Russians.” But he predicted the Red Army’s treatment of defeated Berlin, especially its women, would leave a lasting mark.
> As he was returning home from Europe—stopping briefly in London—he became alarmingly sick. His traveling companion at the time reported that it had “scared the hell out” of him, and that he’d never before seen anyone run such a high fever. It lasted for several days. When it was over, Jack claimed it had just been his malaria acting up.
Around Thanksgiving, his health improved, and he was back with his family at Hyannis Port. Rip Horton remembers watching him as he practiced with a tape recorder. “He made me speak into it and then played back the tape . . . and your voice always sounds awful to you. That was the first indication as to where his inclinations were then leading him.”
Soon, though, Jack was being up front with his close friends about his intentions. “I’ve made up my mind,” he told Chuck Spalding. “I’m going into politics.”
“Geez, that’s terrific,” Spalding replied. “You can go all the way!” Taken aback by such confidence from a close friend, Kennedy asked, “Really?”
“All the way!” Spalding recalls repeating.
Years later, Spalding explained that he’d believed Jack was one of those who’d come out of the war experience whole. “He was never pushed off this hard, sensible center of his being. I think he was beginning to get a kind of picture of himself. I think the picture of a public figure interested and capable in this area added to the dim outline of a successful politician.”
Lem Billings, who by then was in the navy—he had used new contact lenses to get past the physical—took a similar view. “A lot of stories have been written and said about it. I think a lot of people say that if Joe hadn’t died, Jack might never have gone into politics. I don’t believe this. Nothing could have kept Jack out of politics. I think this is what he had in him, and it just would have come out, no matter what. Somewhere along the line, he would have been in politics. Knowing his abilities, interests, and background, I firmly believe he would have entered politics even had he had three older brothers like Joe.”
Jack Kennedy Page 7
