Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (11 page)

For Kick, Churchill’s address had special resonance, frantically worried as she was not just about the fate of Britain’s vast fighting force in general, but about one young soldier in particular. Churchill in his remarks articulated values of honor and courage that she had often heard Billy speak of as well. The broadcast gave voice to the British self-concept that meant so much to Billy, and it put in sharp perspective the claims of money and property that her father had frequently offered as reasons for the U.S. to stay out of this war. Financial interests, Churchill emphasized, were “nothing compared with the struggle for life and honor, for right and freedom, to which we have vowed ourselves.”

The day after the text of the speech had been published in
The New York Times
and other newspapers, Kick wrote a letter to her father that left no doubt that her sympathies remained firmly with the British. Echoing Churchill’s phrasing in the broadcast, she noted: “I still keep telling everyone that the British lose the battles but win the wars.” Kick went on to report that a student vote had been taken the previous week at Finch as to whether the U.S. ought to go into the war. “I and another girl were the two yeses,” she wrote. “All the rest voted no.” Usually careful about showing her parents how much she still felt for Billy, she exhibited no such restraint now. In the aftermath of Churchill’s public acknowledgment of the acute danger in which the British Expeditionary Force then found itself, Kick’s words to her father fairly screamed from the page: “Is Billy alright?”

Kick was by no means the only one frantic to find out about him. At a time when the Germans had driven a wedge between the outmaneuvered British and French armies; when the British Expeditionary Force found itself trapped in a Nazi-devised “sack”; when Allied casualty statistics were running high; and when there was a feeling within the British camp that “nothing but a miracle” could save the Expeditionary Force from annihilation, Billy’s parents and siblings also longed for news. But none was to be had. Eddy and Moucher Devonshire had simply stopped hearing from their son. Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on May 23, 1940, reported that German armor, having reached the English Channel, had entered into fierce fighting with Allied soldiers in the area of Boulogne, some thirty miles from the shores of England. Looking ahead to what he feared might soon emerge as the greatest military disaster in his nation’s history, Churchill warned the House to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.” In a clear sign that the government anticipated an imminent attack on Britain, orders went out for the arrest of Sir Oswald Mosley and other homegrown fascists who might prove all too ready to welcome and aid the Nazi invaders.

Meanwhile, efforts were under way to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force and to return as many men as possible for the defense of the island. However they could manage it, British troops, under orders to pull back, fought their way to the coast, where myriad vessels small and large waited at Dunkirk amid relentless attack from bomb-dropping, machine gun–firing German planes that were sometimes more than a hundred strong in formation. Hitler’s misjudgment that air power alone could prevent the men of the British Expeditionary Force from escaping, and that he could thus judiciously withhold German armor for later use, proved critical to the success of the British rescue operation. Where once it had been hoped in London that perhaps 20,000 or even 30,000 British soldiers might be extracted, instead some 335,000 troops came home, to national jubilation.

But among the tired, tattered, often traumatized soldiers who poured out of bullet-pocked fishing boats, motorboats, steamboats, sailboats, pleasure boats, and other motley craft, many of the men vowing to soon be ready for “another go at Jerry,” there was no sign of Billy. More than a week after Kick had implored her father to learn what he could about Billy’s fate, no report of his safety or survival had yet reached her. No British friend could joyously contact her to say that Billy had come home with the other soldiers, because in fact he had not. Was he dead? Wounded? A German prisoner? There was no information one way or the other. An estimated six thousand British troops had yet to be accounted for when Lord Gort, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, returned to London on June 2, 1940, on Churchill’s orders. Gort came home most reluctantly, even angrily, pledging, like so many returnees before him, to go back and meet the Germans again—“and the next time victory will be with us.”

Two days later, Billy remained among the missing to whom Churchill briefly paid collective tribute when he addressed the House of Commons in a landmark speech that history would remember for its promise that rather than surrender to the German invaders, Britain would fight on the beaches, fight on the landing grounds, fight in the fields and in the streets, fight in the hills, and if necessary fight on alone. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.” In the U.S. there was public rejoicing at the dramatic rescue and return of all those British fighting men, and there was much impassioned response to Churchill’s oratory—but still Kick had had no word about Billy.

Like the young American woman he had once forbidden his son to marry, Eddy Devonshire found it hard to fully participate in the general celebrations. In the course of a house party at Cliveden the weekend after Churchill’s speech, the duke strove to conceal his anguish and anxiety from Lady Astor and her other guests. Despite his best efforts to be stoic, there could be no mistaking his “drawn, miserable” countenance, and the country house weekend proved to be a somber one for all in attendance.

Still, as Nancy Astor was to discover, the duke had lately been given reason to hope that Billy might yet be all right. Eddy Devonshire had learned that Billy had in fact been temporarily left behind in Flanders because of his ability to speak French. Up to that point, anyway, Billy had not been killed or captured. It was what happened in the days that followed that remained agonizingly unknown. Repeatedly his parents wrote to him in France, and repeatedly their letters were returned undelivered. After the gathering at Cliveden, the duke traveled north to Churchdale Hall, hoping that good news might soon reach him there. By the following weekend, however, he and the duchess had yet to hear anything from or about their son.

In the weeks since Jean Ogilvy had last heard from Billy, she had been struggling desperately not to think about the premonition she had had when he was first sent to Belgium: the certainty that the cousin she adored would be killed in the opening days of combat. It had seemed to her not just a dreadful thing to think, but also very odd. She and Billy were both still so young. People their age did not die. At first, she had been immensely relieved when no bad news had reached her. But then, she learned that Billy had gone missing. Had she been right after all? Could it be possible that she would never see or speak with him again?

Jean had been living with those and related questions for weeks when, on the afternoon of June 18, 1940—the day after the fall of France, and the very day Churchill returned to the House of Commons to announce that the Battle of Britain was about to begin—she heard a knock at her front door in London.

When she opened the door, in walked Billy.

His appearance, she would long remember, was jarringly unlike that of the evacuees she had seen in news photographs: men who had not washed in days; men with scraggly, mud-and-blood-encrusted beards; men whose uniforms were ragged and begrimed; men who were missing one or both boots. Billy was attired in meticulously clean and freshly pressed battle dress, his hair carefully combed, his pale skin visibly scrubbed. At that moment, he looked precisely like the man she had last seen months earlier, the Billy who had gone off to war. Kick’s question to her father—“Is Billy alright?”—seemed finally to have an answer.

But things were not as simple as they initially appeared. For as soon as Billy was indoors, as soon as he was sure that he and Jean were alone and unobserved, it became evident that he was far from all right. To Jean’s astonishment, her Cavendish cousin suddenly exploded in emotion of a kind and an intensity that seemed utterly out of character. She had never seen Billy like this before. And she would observe him to burst out in a comparable manner on only one subsequent occasion, in 1943.

Now, palpably upset, almost in tears, Billy would not, perhaps could not, stop talking. Detail after ghastly detail of his ordeal poured out. Billy told her he had seen terrible things. Worst of all, he said, had been that the horrors never stopped. “They just attacked and attacked.” And all he could do was keep running. “We ran away!” he said over and over. “We ran and we ran!” At length, he had commandeered a Baby Austin automobile and had managed to get out of France via St. Nazaire.

Billy spoke of his sense of guilt at having survived when so many others—not just soldiers, but also fleeing French families, innocent men, women, and children—had been killed. Instead of relief that he was safely home at last, all that Billy seemed to care about was how and when he could get back to Europe and complete the job that had been left undone. The next time, he felt certain, the British would get it right. The next time, they would not run. The next time, they would vanquish the forces of evil that had come at them so unexpectedly and overwhelmingly.

Indeed, the German army had set out not just to fight their Allied antagonists in the Battle of Flanders, but also to terrorize them. Hitler’s Stuka dive bombers were designed to overpower and unnerve by their extreme proximity to their targets, and by the eardrum-shattering, anxiety-provoking noise produced by special sirens known as the Trumpets of Jericho that were affixed to the legs of the aircraft. The merciless machine gunning of vast numbers of refugees appalled and disconcerted the enemy army with the massacres’ sheer sadism and gleeful flouting of the codes of warfare. This too was part of the Nazis’ strategy of terror. If they treated innocent civilians so, what would they do to captured Allied troops?

When the British Expeditionary Force came home, not a few returnees were visibly shell-shocked, trembling and staring blankly, the result of having been hunted like animals for days and nights on end, then ceaselessly menaced with bombs and bullets when they reached Dunkirk and later when they attempted to cross the English Channel.

Lest the sight of these physically and psychologically shattered warriors, and the import of the dark tales they had to tell, affect public morale and even incite mass panic on the eve of the German invasion, some traumatized troops were confined to barracks prior to being sent off on leave. Other soldiers were ordered to disclose as little as possible to family and friends about the nightmare they had just lived through in France.

On the day Billy visited his cousin, his impeccable attire was a gesture toward concealing and suppressing all that he had just experienced. Still, in the course of his conversation with Jean, he seemed to make no effort to hide the fact that his whole world had just been upended. He whose life had been shaped since birth by centuries-old rules had encountered a savage enemy for whom there appeared to be no rules. He who had gone off to war motivated by ideals of honor and justice had witnessed the mass killing of French refugees, fields littered with eviscerated corpses and detached body parts, images of unfathomable cruelty and malevolence that seemed to call everything he’d thought and believed into question.

He who had been so lazy and languid had suddenly had to flee for his life, always moving, always tensely watchful, sleepless and hungry, chased without letup by armored tanks and screaming, diving planes. He who, unlike his brother, had been slow to grow up had been abruptly and irrevocably deprived of his innocence in the war zone. He to whom anything like real anger had previously been almost an alien emotion had become consumed with rage at the slaughter of fellow soldiers and innocent civilians, atrocities he had been agonizingly powerless to prevent, deaths he felt strangely compelled to now avenge.

Billy and other veterans of the Battle of Flanders rejoined their units and began intensive preparations for the Battle of Britain. In the meantime, whenever Billy was in London he seemed more than ever to seek Jean out. It was as if he had disclosed to her an aspect of himself that from then on needed to be scrupulously hidden from most other people, but at least Jean knew that it was there. He and his Ogilvy cousin had always been exceptionally close, but their talk that first day formed the basis of a vital new bond.

On June 28, 1940, ten days after that conversation, Billy invited Jean to tea at his family’s home in Carlton House Terrace. Following the declaration of war against Germany, the most valuable paintings and furniture had been removed from the white stucco-faced residence on a cul-de-sac in St. James’s and sent up to Chatsworth for safekeeping. But the London house itself, quite wonderful in its own right, still contained many beautiful things, and Billy told Jean that he wanted to give her a tour of the remaining treasures.

When Jean arrived that afternoon, he seemed to make a point of being very much like the Billy of old, showing her about proudly, pausing every now and again to enthusiastically recite the history of this or that marvelous object. But it seemed to Jean that there was something a little forced, something heartbreakingly sad about the performance. It was, she reflected many years afterward, as if Billy were struggling to recapture, perhaps even to remind himself of, the person he had been before his encounter with evil and killing had changed him forever.

In important ways, the young man whom Kick had left behind in 1939 had ceased to exist.

Five

In Hyannis Port, the anxiety of the past few weeks conferred a new sense of urgency to Kick’s campaign to secure her father’s permission to go to London. If the obstacles had been formidable before, they were well nigh insurmountable now. Between July and September, the Luftwaffe pounded the Royal Air Force in an effort to establish air superiority in preparation for a German invasion of the British mainland.