The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (37 page)

B
obby and Teddy were too young to prove themselves on the fields of battle, and their lives continued much as they had before the war. For years Rose had been complaining that whatever her third son did, be it reading, sailing, or collecting stamps, he did by rote, without the enthusiasm that to Rose’s way of thinking defined a young Kennedy. Bobby hadn’t liked to go to the young people’s dances in Palm Beach, where he would have picked up the social graces that he would need as a young man. He appeared singularly disaffected by the world where his family thought he belonged.

Bobby arrived at Milton Academy as a junior in the fall of 1942. After attending seven schools in little more than a decade, Bobby had never stayed long enough at one school to set his roots deep into the nurturing soil of friendship and place. The students at the Massachusetts prep school were for most part conservative in dress, Republican in politics, and High Church Protestant in faith.

As a Roman Catholic transfer student, Bobby would have done best to slip silently into the school, hoping slowly to win acceptance. Instead, Bobby arrived in a checked coat that looked as if it could have been played as well as worn, gray pants, white socks, and a flamboyantly loud tie. If there was a choice between being viewed as a hapless mediocrity or a self-proclaimed misfit, Bobby had declared that he preferred the latter. Nor did he try to hide the fact that he was one of perhaps half a dozen Catholics at the Massachusetts school. There were no Catholic churches in Milton, but Bobby invited friends like Sam Adams to go with him to Dorchester to worship in a cathedral among people of all ages and classes. Bobby was a youth certain of few things, but one of them was that his church was true and his faith was deep.

His older brothers were handsome men with an ease of manner that helped propel them through the world. Bobby was the least physically appealing of the Kennedy brothers. His teeth were too big, his ears extended out, his body was scrawny, his voice a girlish tenor, his wit savage. The smile that once had marked a boyish cuteness now seemed an embarrassed grimace, emblematic of his shyness.

At Milton, Bobby was as mediocre on the football field as in the classroom. But how he tried on the gridiron, in practice attacking the blocking dummies as if they were glowering opponents, waiting for his chance in a big game. “I played in the football game against St. Marks,” he wrote his father, “but I was quite nervous and did not do very well.”

When Joe answered his son, it was not to send him hustling back onto the field, bloodied or not, to tackle and charge with mad fury. Joe had such a profound impact on his sons because his was a love tempered with insight. To him, each son was a different kind of jewel, and if Joe Jr. and Jack shone brilliantly on their own, Bobby had to be polished until he glittered like his older brothers. He reminded Bobby that his brother Joe had only made the Harvard team his senior year, and that Jack hadn’t made it at all. Bobby was hopelessly behind his big brothers in his social development. That was what Joe sought to bring out, telling his son that the whole idea of football was “the opportunity to meet a lot of nice boys.” These “nice boys” would turn out to be powerful men, and Joe told his son that “the contacts you have made from boyhood on are the things that are important to you in your own life’s development.”

B
obby was far more self-aware than his brothers and fiercely honest. He was nervous about everything that mattered to him, football, studies, faith, and girls. Everything was complicated, endlessly analyzed, pondered over, criticized.

When Bobby arrived at Milton, there was one young man who everyone at the school would have wanted as a friend. His name was David Hackett, and he was the most celebrated football player and athlete at the school. There is no fame like youthful athletic fame, unsullied by compromise and uncomplicated by any motivation other than to play well and fairly. And of all the people who could have become his closest friend, Hackett chose Bobby, the most unlikely of all. Hackett, progeny of a poor family, thought of himself as a misfit as much as his new friend did, and that apparently drew them together.

David Hackett became to Bobby what Lem Billings was to Jack—a coconspirator in all the trials of growing up. When he wasn’t around his best friend, Bobby wrote him letters. Bobby’s writing had none of the grace, wit, and literate detail of his older brother’s frequent missives to Lem, or any of the sheer exuberance. Bobby was blunt, but rarely purposefully vulgar. He was emotionally honest in a way that Jack was not. Jack usually kept Lem at a self-conscious distance, treating even his closest friend as an audience. Bobby’s friendship was as much about the pain and difficulties the two
adolescents experienced as any joyful kinship. Bobby was a demanding friend (“if this
friend
of mine was the Son of a Bitch he seemed to be the world would catch up with him eventually and he would have to live the rest of his life with himself”). For Bobby, everything was a struggle, from studying to making friends, to seeking some measure of control over his future. Whereas Jack led Lem into precocious, bawdy adventures, there was a shy innocence to Bobby’s approach to the opposite sex. While Jack bragged in X-rated detail about his putative conquests, Bobby was delighted merely to have a date. He had a certain moral rectitude that was more than a way to hide his timidity with young women. He couldn’t abide hearing the dirty jokes that the boys swapped back and forth, making it clear to everyone how offensive he found such humor. “He would turn away, with almost a snarl,” Adams recalled.

Bobby sought an authentic experience to mark him as a man in the same way that the war marked his brothers. In the summer of 1943, he wanted to work on a fishing boat on Cape Cod. He asked a family friend, the political operative Clem Norton, to get him a job where “nobody would know who he was and he would have to work just as hard as any fisherman.” That was a manly endeavor, but his mother would hear none of it, invoking the names of her two soldier sons. “This boy will have to go soon,” she said of her seventeen-year-old son, “so I want him as long as I can have him around.” Instead, his parents relegated Bobby to a pallid pursuit, working as a clerk in the East Boston bank founded by his grandfather P. J., where Joe had been president. That didn’t take the whole summer, and Bobby invited Sam Adams down to the Cape for a visit. Like so many other visitors, Sam had a splendidly idyllic time at Hyannis Port. He and his friend splattered each other with paint when they worked on Bobby’s boat, ran off for picnics with box lunches ordered up by Rose, and sang show tunes in the evening with Rose playing the piano.

Bobby’s sister Jean felt that a deep core of sadness resided within her brother. When Bobby returned to Milton for a visit after graduating in 1944, he wrote Hackett of a reunion that was more melancholy than gay. He was hardly the returning hero whose visage conjured up myriad images of athletic success or achievement. “Of course they were overwhelmed with happiness upon seeing me,” he wrote, his words etched in irony, “but I can see if I went back six times in as many weeks that they would get just a little tired of me.” He walked the old haunts, and to him it “all seems so inconsequential changing to blue suits and being on time for chapel and all that sort of thing.” He went on with the kind of emotional candor that Jack would never have exposed. “Things are the same as usual up here and me being my usual moody self I get very sad at times.”

Little Teddy had ample reason for sadness too. He had been shuttled from one private school to the next, eleven different institutions in all. “I was paddled fifteen times at Fessenden,” Teddy recalled, his one detailed memory of his tenure at the Massachusetts prep school. Through it all, this plump, impish boy remained resolutely good-natured, with an inordinate interest in all things chocolate.

One night at Fessenden, Teddy decided that he would sneak down in the darkness into the pantry and steal some chocolate. He was there reaching for several of the treats when he felt a hand grasp his neck and hold him tight. The one blind master had been lying in wait to capture the stealthy thief. As punishment, Teddy spent the night sleeping in a bathtub.

Teddy learned there were other ways to turn a chocolate trick. “Your youngest brother, Teddy, the merchant in the family, is as he says running a black market at Fessenden,” Joe wrote Kathleen. “He goes downtown to his Catechism Class, buys himself some chocolate bars at five cents apiece, comes back and sells them at ten to fifteen cents apiece to the boys who can’t get out…. There is a sneaking suspicion, I imagine, among some of the parents of boys who have done trading with Sir Edward that somewhere in the long dim past there was a little Jewish blood got in with the Irish and it is all coming out in him.”

J
ack had warned Joe Jr. that if he insisted on shipping out to the Pacific, after a week there he would wish he had not been so rash. The warning held equally for the Cornish coast in England’s West Country, where Joe Jr. arrived in September 1943. The region had struck a devil’s bargain—exquisite, verdant landscape in exchange for rain, rain, and more rain. In the nearly daily barrage, Joe Jr. had plenty of time to peck out letters on his portable typewriter. Jack had been transferred to the United States for health reasons, and Joe Jr. wanted little Jackie to know that his big brother was still ahead in the game of sexual conquest. “I succeed in dispersing my first team in such various points that it will be impossible to cover all the territory,” he bragged. “If you ever get around Norfolk, you will get quite a welcome if you mention the magic name of Kennedy so I advise you to go incognito.”

In his letter to Jack, Joe Jr. didn’t mention that he was doubly grounded, by the miserable weather and by the equally miserable ambiance of south England. The pubs closed at nine, when Joe Jr.’s hunting season was only beginning. The only diversion was dinner at the Imperial Hotel, breaking bread with a dispirited collection of evacuees from London, the room devoid of any of the smart young things who had enlivened Joe Jr.’s time in prewar London.

Joe Jr. wasn’t about to write a fan letter to little Jack, congratulating him on his heroism. Nor would he even admit that he might have a grudging respect for a brother who had held up the family name so well and so high. “I understand that anyone who was sunk got thirty days’ survivor leave,” he wrote, as if Jack stood to receive a vacation for his ineptness. “How about it? Pappy was rather indignant that they just didn’t send you back right away.” That was the nastiest cut of all. The truth was, as Joe Jr. knew from his father’s letters, that Joe believed Jack had given all that a man should be asked to give and had vowed to try to get Jack out of the war theater for good.

Joe Jr. managed a flight to London so he could see his sister Kathleen. She was serving with the Red Cross at the Hans Crescent Club in an old hotel in the center of London. The young Kennedys picked up with one another as if all the time between had been desultory nonsense. They headed out to the 400 Club, where before the war Joe Jr. had attended many a glorious soiree. As they descended into the nightclub, Joe Jr. saw that the kind of young gentlemen who had frequented the place in the old days were still there. But now they wore not evening clothes but officer uniforms. The champagne was the same, if far more expensive, but whereas in 1939 pleasure had been an amiable pastime, now it was pursued with no regard for tomorrows that might never come.

The next evening William Randolph Hearst Jr., a foreign correspondent, invited Joe Jr. and Kathleen to have dinner with him at the Savoy. Hearst had also invited an exquisite brunette, Patricia Wilson, whose husband was a major serving in Libya. Joe Jr. did not let those minor impediments stand in the way as he turned on his inestimable charm. He learned that Patricia was an Australian. She had come to London to make her debut. There the seventeen-year-old debutante married the earl of Jersey, a relationship that lasted six years and brought her a child and endless embarrassment over the activities of her pure rake of a husband. Shortly after their divorce, she had married Robin Filmer Wilson, with whom she had two more children. Now she was doing her bit by working part-time in a factory.

This woman with the cascading, carefree laughter was in some respects not unlike Jack’s Inga. Patricia was at that age when beauty is exquisitely refined by life. Like Inga, she was married and she was daring, at least daring in the glimpses she gave to Joe Jr., daring in the way she invited him and his friends to her cottage for the weekend in Woking, not far from London.

Joe accepted Patricia’s invitation and began an affair that on each weekend sojourn, each sweet homey interlude far from the muck and cold of duty, became more passionate and intense.

J
oe Jr. had cursed the mud and rain of St. Eval, but that had been a sweet oasis compared to Dunkeswell, where his unit was now stationed permanently during the wettest season in memory. It would have been miserable enough if the squadron had been billeted in town, but they were out on a barren flat. The airdrome was nothing but a bunch of big hangars and oval Nissen huts set there to serve as offices, the rain beating a steady tattoo on the metal. To protect themselves from enemy attack, the 64 officers and 106 enlisted men of VB-110 lived a good distance away. “Mudville Heights” they called it, a pathetic group of Nissen sheds set in an ever-deepening pit of mud that appeared likely one rain-soaked night to swallow up the sheds and the men forever.

Joe Jr. had been deputized the squadron secretary, keeper of the diary. He wrote about the mud with the passionate detail that he had never mustered in his articles about the Spanish Civil War. “During the winter months an intermittent drizzle, occasionally whipped into a solid wall of water by the capricious winds, made it almost impossible to stay dry,” he wrote, as if he were preparing a prosecutor’s brief against the weather. “Inadequate heat—miniature coke stoves sparsely scattered around the base—made it almost impossible to get either dry or warm. Plumbing was early stone age and even more widely dispersed than the living sites or aircraft. There was no toilet paper, although rolls of what seemed to be laminated woods were provided plainly stamped with ‘Government Property.’ Ablutions were located near the officers’ mess which, unfortunately, was about a half mile, as the herd grazes, from Site one.”