Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (4 page)

“And you had no regrets?” her interlocutor asked fifty years later.

“No,” she replied.

“Whatever happened to the young man? Did you ever follow through?”

“He was killed in the war,” she explained. “He was a pilot.”

6

Rosemary

The last of many nails in Joe’s political coffin were the com
ments he made—off the record, he thought—to
Boston Globe
reporter Louis M. Lyon in November of 1940, shortly after tendering his resignation as ambassador.

“Democracy is finished in England,” he said. “It may be here, too.” Given Joe’s aspirations to higher office and the patriotic sensitivities of the body politic as the United States stood at the brink of war, it was a mind-bogglingly reckless thing for Joe to say to a reporter, on the record or not.

Over the next several months, Joe tried to back off these remarks and paint himself as a supporter of the president and neither an appeaser nor defeatist with regard to England’s troubles—through radio addresses, interviews, and, most importantly, in disastrously muddled congressional testimony in ambivalent favor of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease proposal. Lend-Lease sought to arm our allies in their fight against Hitler—to provide planes, tanks, guns, and freighters­—without committing a single American troop. Kennedy agreed to support the proposal in a radio address and congressional testimony but did so, according to David Nasaw, “in such a desultory, confused, conflicted manner that it was near impossible to know whether he opposed or supported it.” The press savaged him, and when they were done, stopped covering what he said and did. His public life was over.

He and Rose settled into their version of a retirement. Not wanting to worry about three estates, Joe put the Bronxville mansion on the market in late 1941. Ever after, he and Rose would split their time between
Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. Rose allowed herself a moment of wistfulness, remembering the happy locus of her children’s childhoods, before her pragmatic side took over. “I am relieved too to have one less house to worry about,” she wrote in a round-robin letter to the kids. “With none of you there, the house was no longer a necessity.” The round-robin letters were one of Rose’s signatures: she’d write a letter and send it to one of the children; he or she would add a response and send it on to one of the others until it made its way back to Rose.

All of the children were either away at school, working, or in the service. Despite his strong antiwar sentiment, Joe accepted his two eldest sons’ desire to join the military. Joe Jr., just finishing his second year of Harvard Law School, enlisted in a special unit of the US Naval Air Corps that recruited straight from Harvard. Knowing that Jack wanted to follow his brother, the perennial golden boy, into the service, Joe pulled strings with a military contact to see that Jack would pass the physical. Given Jack’s raft of ailments, from his incipient back trouble to his stomach problems to his yet undiagnosed Addison’s disease, passing the physical would have been an impossibility without his father’s intervention. Jack was ordered to report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, in Washington, that fall.

Rose, now an empty nester and seemingly uninterested in sitting around in Palm Beach while Joe played golf, planned another trip. In the late spring of 1941, she and Eunice took a five-week trip through South America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.

With Rose away, Joe continued as the primary parent of Rosemary. Unfortunately, the gains she had made in England seemed to be evaporating, and the war prevented her return to Mother Isabel’s convent. She was placed in St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, in Washington, DC, a school for “retarded” girls that was staffed by Benedictine nuns.

“In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose later wrote in her memoirs,

disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave way increasingly to tension and
irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also there were convulsive episodes.

Further, Rosemary was frequently wandering away from St. Gertrude’s, which was located in the heart of urban Washington. The nuns had trouble keeping track of her, especially at night, and the Kennedys were terrified that she would make an easy target for predators. Both Joe and Rose were becoming convinced that Rosemary’s problems went beyond simple cognitive deficits; they feared that her behavior was being affected by some other neurological degeneration.

Joe consulted with experts in the field about a promising new procedure, developed by Portuguese physician António Egas Moniz and performed in the United States at George Washington University Hospital by Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts. The procedure was never promoted as a cure for cognitive disabilities or even mental illness; it was seen as a last resort that would relieve the agitating symptoms of certain psychiatric disorders by severing neural connections between the brain’s prefrontal lobes. It was seen as groundbreaking, and would be for years to come: In fact, Moniz received a Nobel Prize for its invention in 1949. For Joe Kennedy, it promised to flatten Rosemary’s affect, take away the anger and frustration that tormented her, and offer her some hope of contentment.

Sometime in November, apparently without the approval of Rose, Joe had the procedure—commonly known as a prefrontal lobotomy—performed on Rosemary. She emerged from the operation unable to walk or speak and was moved to Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital in New York, to recuperate. She recovered some of her motor skills at Craig House, but never her ability to speak or her memory. In 1948 Joe moved her to the St. Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin, and never saw her again. Rose and the children wouldn’t visit her there either, until after Joe’s 1961 stroke left him confined to a wheelchair; even then, they visited without his knowledge.

It’s unknown what Joe told Rose or the other children, but it would be twenty years before Rose again used Rosemary’s name in a letter to the
kids. Reflecting on the time in undated diary notes, Rose wrote of Rosemary’s “deteriorating”: “It was then we decided that she would be better off for her own sake and for ours if she went to a home where she would be with people of her own mental capacity.”

She makes no mention there of the botched lobotomy, but by the time she wrote her memoirs in the 1970s, she was able to speak less euphemistically about what happened to her daughter. She would write:

The operation eliminated the violence and seizures, but it also had the effect of leaving Rosemary permanently incapacitated. She lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts for her. She had no possibility of ever again being able to function in a viable way in the world at large.

Sometime after Joe’s death, Rose addressed the other major issue regarding Rosemary: Joe’s unilateral decision to have her lobomotized. “I will never forgive Joe for that awful operation he had performed on Rosemary,” Rose confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It is the only thing I have ever felt bitter toward him about.”

While Rose was the undisputed ruler of her domestic domain, Joe had always made the larger medical decisions for the children, starting with Jack’s hospitalization for scarlet fever at age two. His sense of responsibility for Rosemary in particular had only increased since the fall of 1938, when she had been the only child to remain in England with her father. Rose took his single-minded decision as a betrayal, but it was not out of character with their marriage’s already established division of labor.

The betrayal, for Rose, was not that Joe acted without letting her weigh in. It was that he had acted, as he had so many times before, on one of their children’s behalf, and for the first time the results had been disastrous.

It was only the first tragedy in what would be a very tragic decade.

7

The Marchioness and the War Heroes

As the United States entered the war, Rose became the hub
of family correspondence, writing round-robin letters to Kennedy children scattered across the country and the globe. From her perch in Palm Beach or Hyannis Port, she could worry after Jack’s stomach, Bobby’s grades, Eunice’s health, Joe Jr.’s prayer life, and Kathleen’s grammar. Since returning from England, Kick had worked her way up from a secretarial position to society columnist at the
Washington Times-Herald
, and Rose sent her qualified congratulations: “I can see improvement in your column,” Rose wrote her in 1942, unable to resist noting that the columns contained errors. “Probably typographical,” Rose granted.

American soldiers were fighting and dying, both in Europe and in the South Pacific; three of the Kennedy children were called overseas. Jack went from training in Charleston, South Carolina, to commanding a PT boat in the South Pacific in mid-1943; Kathleen sailed to England around the same time as a volunteer for the Red Cross; and Joe Jr., after a post in Puerto Rico, was sent to London in September.

Wisecracking slacker Jack Kennedy showed a valor few would have expected late that summer when he helped save the lives of eleven men in the aftermath of an ill-advised naval battle in the Solomon Islands. His vessel, PT 109, was part of a squadron sent in pitch-blackness to intercept a convoy of Japanese supply ships on August 1. The attack was a disaster, and Kennedy’s boat was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer. Two of Kennedy’s crew members were killed, and the other eleven were set adrift.
After clinging to the hull of the ship for nine hours, Kennedy organized the survivors for a swim to a nearby deserted island. (He carried one badly burned man, Pat McMahon, on his back.) The swim took five hours. The men were rescued seven days later, after scavenging for food and surviving mostly on the water they could catch in their mouths during rainstorms. Jack organized an expedition to a neighboring island; there he found a native who took a coconut, into which Kennedy had carved a plea for help, to an Australian naval base. Jack’s endurance and heroism are even more impressive in light of his poor health. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the military. His perennial back and stomach troubles would have kept him out had Joe not called in favors from his military contacts.

The incident and rescue were picked up by the media worldwide, and Jack, already well-known for being the wealthy son of the former US ambassador to England, became a media darling. Asked later how he became a war hero, he replied with characteristic wryness: “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.”

Rose found out that Jack had been missing in action only after his rescue; Joe, notified by the navy, had kept the news from her and the other Kennedy children while he awaited more information. Joe often kept worrying news from Rose, not wishing to upset her, and it seems that she did not begrudge him his decision not to worry her with Jack’s disappearance. Rose wrote, “We are more proud and thankful than words can tell to have him such a hero and still safe and sound.”

Joe Jr., still based in Puerto Rico at the time of the rescue, had a more complicated response. Joe Jr. had been the Kennedys’ golden boy his entire life: He’d been healthier, more athletic, a better student, and better looking than his sly, sickly, underachieving brother. Especially since the collapse of Joe Sr.’s political career, Joe Jr. had become the repository of all of the ambassador’s political hopes and family ambitions. For the favorite son in a clan that thrived on competition, Jack’s sudden shift into the limelight was a shock, and Joe craved more than ever what so many young men of the time craved: to prove himself through wartime heroics. After a brief visit in Hyannis Port for his father’s birthday, he piloted his VB-110 across the Atlantic to England, carrying his crew, gear, and a carton of fresh eggs for his sister Kick, whom he’d visit shortly in London.
Stationed in Cornwall, he received a letter from his mother containing a silver religious medal to protect him during his service far away.

While in London, Joe Jr. visited Kick when he could. Despite the hazards of bombing raids and the privations of wartime rationing, Kathleen couldn’t be more excited to be back there. She missed it terribly and kept in touch with many of her London friends after her departure with the family in 1939, and now that she was back she spent as much time on the town and at country homes with friends as she did at her tony assignment as program assistant at Hans Crescent, an officers’ club in a Victorian hotel in the Knightsbridge section of London. Kathleen wasn’t nursing to wounded soldiers as a Red Cross volunteer; she was, she wrote to a friend, exhausted from “jitter-bugging, gin rummy, ping-pong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1500 doughboys a long way from home.”

Two weeks after her arrival, she ran into Billy Hartington (aka William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington) for the first time since her departure four years earlier. They’d met in 1938 at the king and queen’s annual Buckingham Palace garden party, just as London’s social set was opening its arms for her. He was widely considered the most eligible bachelor in England: polite, self-effacing, funny in a gentle way, he behaved with none of the pompousness of a man set to become the Duke of Devonshire. It was a title held by members of the Cavendish family since 1694 and would make Billy one of the wealthiest men in England upon his father’s death. He and Kick had hit it off immediately.

Now, in 1943, it was love at first sight all over again. They spent increasing amounts of time together, and soon enough there was talk of marriage. There was only one problem: Billy was a Protestant, and Kick was Catholic. Billy’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, saw how clearly besotted their son was, and they begged Kathleen to convert to Anglicanism. But Kick argued that she couldn’t convert. Catholicism, so deeply ingrained by her upbringing, was central to her life. Billy was similarly steadfast in his faith. Though Rose liked Billy very much and was no doubt impressed by his place in the peerage, his Protestantism rendered him, in her eyes, an utterly unacceptable husband for her daughter.

Jack finally returned to the United States in January 1944, barely five months after the PT 109 incident, his health so poor that he flew to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, even before heading home to see his family. He was told he’d need surgery on his back and was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer and malaria. When Jack finally arrived in Palm Beach, even normally undemonstrative Rose could not contain herself. “The mere feel of his coat brought her joy,” Barbara Perry wrote. “Incredulous at his homecoming, she touched his arms to convince herself that he was really there.” Her prayers had been answered: Her “elf” was home safe.

In England meanwhile, Kick became engaged to Billy, and the future Marchioness of Hartington. As far as the difference in their faith went, Joe refused to get up in arms about a difference he didn’t see as terribly important. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll gamble with your judgment,” he wrote Kick. Rose, however, was mortified at the thought of any of her children marrying outside the faith. And not just embarrassed; literally sickened. After Kick announced that she would indeed marry Billy, Rose wrote in her diary that she was “horrified—heartbroken.” She made herself so sick with worry that she ended up spending several days in New England Baptist Hospital.

As stubborn as her mother, Kick cabled Joe. “Religion everything to us both,” she wrote to her father. “Will always live according to Catholic teaching. Praying that time will heal all wounds. . . . Please beseech Mother not to worry. Am very happy and quite convinced have taken the right step.” On May 6, 1944, Kick married Billy in a civil ceremony attended by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and Joe Jr., among others, but not the bride’s parents. The eldest Kennedy child sent an icy, six-word cable to his absent parents later that day: “The power of silence is great.”

A month later, on June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces invaded Europe. Billy Hartington was called into active duty and two weeks later crossed the English Channel. Joe Jr. delayed his leave to fly support missions for the invading Allies. That summer, while waiting for her son to return on his planned leave, Rose softened. She wrote to Kathleen expressing her
wish that she and Billy could accompany Joe Jr. when he visited. She regretted the things she’d said in opposition to the marriage. “However, that is all over now, dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will receive you with open arms.”

Joe Jr. wrote home at the end of July to explain his further delay:

No doubt you are surprised that I haven’t arrived home. I am going to do something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So I probably won’t be home until sometime in September.

In truth, Joe Kennedy Jr. had volunteered for a near-suicidal mission—to take out a V-1 launching pad in Belgium. The navy had stripped down a Liberator bomber so that it could be fully packed with explosives. His mission was to get the bomber to the target, turn over control of his plane to two B-17s that were accompanying him, and parachute to safety.

On August 13, 1944, two naval chaplains knocked on the door of the house at Hyannis Port and delivered the news Rose and Joe had dreaded to hear. Joe’s plane, they said, had exploded before even reaching its target.

“Dad’s face was twisted,” Teddy would write in his memoirs.

He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead. . . . Suddenly the room was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guest, myself—everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.

Tellingly, Rose’s memoirs painted a more stoic picture: “There were no tears from Joe and me, not then. We sat awhile, holding each other close, and wept inwardly, silently.” Kick flew home and joined them on August 16. Though devastated, they attempted to stick to their routines and move on stoically. They stayed at Hyannis Port through Labor Day, and the Kennedys continued to have dinner on the front porch, play tennis, and go sailing as if it were a normal summer. In this way, they each grieved privately. After Labor Day, Joe moved into a suite at the Waldorf
Towers in Manhattan, and Rose moved nearby with her daughters into New York’s Plaza Hotel, as was becoming her post–Labor Day custom. It was in New York that, on September 16, Kick was informed that Billy Hartington, her husband of only four months, had been shot dead in Belgium by a German sniper. She quickly returned to England, a widow at the age of twenty-four.

Subsequently, Rose wrote to Kathleen about how, after hearing about Billy’s personality and ideals,

I realized what a wonderful man he was and what happiness would have been yours had God willed that you spend your life with him. A first love—a young love—is so wonderful, my dear Kathleen, but, my dearest daughter, I feel we must dry our tears as best we can and bow our heads to God’s wisdom and goodness
.

It seems that Rose dealt with her own grief over the loss of her eldest child, Joe Jr., in a similar way. Joseph P. Kennedy wrote about her to a bereaved friend years later. “With her supreme faith [Rose] has just gone on and prayed for him and has not let it affect her life.” Rose mourned, quietly, privately, and with the poise that would come to typify, again and again, the Kennedy approach to grief.

When the war ended Joe Kennedy busied himself with a new venture. In July 1945 he purchased Chicago’s Merchandise Mart for thirteen million dollars. At the time, it was the world’s largest commercial space, and it would prove to be hugely profitable. Just a few months later, he established the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, named in memory of his son, and gave it a 25 percent ownership in the Mart. The foundation would become the charitable vehicle for the Kennedys’ wealth, and over the years it would come to fund research and treatment for persons with intellectual disabilities. On the second anniversary of Joe Jr.’s death, the Kennedy family contributed $600,000—the equivalent of $7.8 million in 2014—to a group of Franciscan nuns to start a convalescent home for “crippled and mentally deficient children.”