The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (38 page)

Mudville Heights was the squadron’s main place of repose after their often debilitating, frigid, twelve-hour flights in search of German submarines. The U-boat men called the Bay of Biscay the “Valley of Death,” and so it had become. As Joe Jr. flew his plane at fifteen hundred feet, scanning the ocean for the telltale sign of a periscope, he knew that this water was a graveyard not only for submarines but for allied planes as well. He traveled alone, without a fighter escort. He could easily have become bored, sweeping the empty ocean hour after hour. But at any moment a pack of Nazi fighters might appear from above, falling upon the slower-moving plane with their deadly sting.

Joe Jr. had hardly begun flying his patrols when Commander Reedy spotted six German JU-88s on the horizon and had to lumber up into cloud cover before the Germans got close enough to fire. The next day Lieutenant W. E. Grumbles broke radio silence to say that he was being attacked. He called again and again, his poignant messages heard by the
other planes, and when he called no more the pilots knew the squadron had lost its first plane.

The very next day Joe Jr. was approaching Junkers Junction, the Atlantic waters off the coast of northwestern Spain, his head hunkered down over the radarscope. He spotted a blip and looked up. He knew immediately that it was a German plane a little over seven miles away and closing. This was a moment to curse the cloudless sky and wish for all the fog and drizzle of Mudville Heights. The German fighter drew within eyesight and tried to shepherd Joe Jr. coastward, further away from any help, like a wolf separating a deer from the herd. A second plane joined its comrade, near enough now that Joe Jr. recognized them as Messerschmitt 210s. One fighter moved in for the kill, now no more than six hundred yards astern.

“Commence firing,” Joe Jr. shouted. The gunner whirled his bow turret toward the streaking plane and fired a devastating barrage at the oncoming plane. The ME-210 dove on, homed onto Joe Jr.’s plane, and at the last moment peeled off and retreated up into the sky. The pilot could have downed Joe Jr.’s plane, but his guns must have jammed, for he never fired. On this day the blue sky had conspired against Joe Jr., but he had reason to believe that he was still that child of fortune.

When Joe Jr. got back to the base, he had the next day off. He wrote letters, read, and in the evening headed off to the only diversion within leagues, the Royal Oak, a pub where many of his colleagues attempted to see how many pints they could down before the closing bell sounded. Joe Jr. had a politician’s calculated gregariousness and an intuitive understanding of just when and with whom to turn on his blazing charm. The Royal Oak was not such a place that merited his charm, and since he drank hardly at all, he was not always the most convivial companion at one of the battered, dark oak tables.

After that day of so-called rest came a day of briefings, and then the following morning he went up into the gray skies once again. As often as not, Joe Jr.’s most implacable foe was not the Germans but the confounded climate of southern England. He would return after ten hours of fruitless searching to find the airfield socked in. Low on fuel, tired and cold, he would have to find somewhere else to land. At its best, landing was a hairy business, and it had gotten some of his colleagues killed. The worst of it had occurred a couple of weeks before Christmas, when they had been sent out even though the weather reports said that the airport would be closed by the time they got back. When he reached the base, dark clouds blanketed the airport, and he was ordered on to Beaulieu Airdrome outside Southampton. He headed east in the black, rainy night and found himself in the midst of the Southampton barrage balloons, a weapon against his plane as much as they
were against the Germans. He descended beneath the five-hundred-foot ceiling. Later he noted in his report that “the wind at the time made it doubly hazardous and trying to watch the field and make a two-needle-width turn at 500 feet in the rain made it quite difficult. I made a short circle and came in.”

Sooner or later the Dunkeswell dampness got through not just to the bones but also to the souls of everyone on the base. Joe Jr. was a man of matchless high spirits, fueled by his incomparable Kennedy energy, but his letters home sounded wistful and melancholy. He wrote about the weather because that was the reason he was sitting in his dank quarters writing his family instead of flying. He had only been there a few months, but he was already talking of going off on another assignment. “My love life is still negligible,” he complained to his parents in a letter written at the end of January. “Around here, I am taking out a Waff
[sic]
who is very cute but nothing very exciting. There seems to be quite a little talent around the town, but it’s such a bother to get in and out, and the added difficulty of obtaining reservations. It’s really not much fun unless you know someone.”

This was not the boastful Joe Jr. of a few months before who had bragged at the wide swath he had cut through the young ladies of Norfolk. This was a Joe Jr. who, when he opened his letters from home, discovered inevitably that Jack was the big news—Jack’s sickness, Jack’s appearances, Jack’s publicity, Jack’s future. His little brother was such a phenomenon that the
New Yorker
ran an article about him and PT-109 by John Hersey; later in 1944 it was reprinted in
Reader’s Digest.
Joe Jr. could hardly bring himself to mention his little brother without inserting at least a small dig. “Several people have called my attention to my dear brother’s portrait in News week
[sic],
and my apologies for his appearance have been profuse. Who hates him on that paper?” It wasn’t enough just to put Jack down; he had to push himself forward in the next sentence. “There have been some articles written over here on our work which I shall send you.” Joe Jr.’s problem was a simple one. “I have done nothing to make myself outstanding, but manage to get back, which I suppose is the important thing.”

Even in the muck and the cold, Joe Jr. still had his vision of a political ascent ahead of him in America. “What you gonna do when you get back to Delaware?” he asked Duffy one day.

“Got no idea, Joe,” Duffy shrugged, looking at what he considered “a big amiable Irishman.”

“Politics! That’s the game, Bob,” Joe Jr. enthused. “We gotta go back and run this country.”

Although Joe Jr. still fancied himself as a candidate for high office, he confided to Angela Laycock on one of his trips to London that a Kennedy would be president one day, but that it would be Jack, not him. He declared
that Jack was simply smarter, and now with all the glamour and honor that he had won as spoils of war, Jack stood far ahead on the road the two brothers had for so long been traveling.

A
mong Joe Jr.’s meager effects in the Nissen hut was no creased, much-read letter from his father telling his son that he was a hero too, and that when he returned to Hyannis Port, they would all stand and toast his honor. That was the letter that he needed, some paternal notice that he had done right and good. His father had nearly cried when Joe Jr. won his wings, and his love for his sons was the deepest passion of the man’s life. He did not see, though, that Joe Jr. needed, if not a letter then at least a paragraph, or if not a paragraph then one simple line telling him that his father was as proud of him as he was of Jack.

Joe Jr. was not a man who thought that irony was a worthy lens through which to look at the world, but he was full of irony these days. Jack had not courted danger to win a hero’s medal. Danger had come to him in the shape of a black destroyer slicing through a blue-black sea. Jack and his men had survived, and for that he was sung a hero’s song. Unlike Jack, Joe Jr. was wooing heroism, stalking it as if it were something that a man had to pursue. He had done what he had been asked to do, and he had done it well. He had won no singular medal, but he had been one of a few hundred men who had turned the Bay of Biscay into killing grounds, dropping Nazi submarines into the deep waters so they could not go forth to disrupt shipping, prolong the war, and kill hundreds of merchant marines and sailors. It did not matter that Joe Jr. had no notch on his belt for a sunken submarine or a plane that he had sent down. He was doing his share, if only he could see it.

In May, a
New York Sun
reporter showed up to write about the squadron and said that he wanted to interview the best pilot. He was shown into the officers’ hut, where Joe Jr. sat before a warming fire. That was a singular honor to be so chosen, but Joe Jr. was obsessed by what he had not done. “I’ll still take carrier duty with a fighter,” he said, bemoaning the fact that he had seen no submarines. “Things happen. You don’t fly 1,700 hours and see nothing. You don’t make twenty-nine trips, ten to twelve hours each, and see nothing. Yeah, I’ve made twenty-nine. The next one is my thirtieth. Know what happens after you’ve made your thirtieth? You go out on your thirty-first.”

“That is,” the reporter concluded his article, “if, like a guy named Joe you just don’t have any luck.”

W
hatever solace Joe Jr. received was in the tender arms of Pat Wilson whenever he could get away from Dunkeswell. Her cottage was one of those rustic
redoubts favored by the nature-adoring British upper class. She had chickens on her tennis court, a chauffeur whose duties included milking the cow, and an ever-evolving set of smartly attired weekend guests that often included not only Joe Jr. but Kathleen and her beau, Billy Hartington.

The war had led some to wenching and boozing and mindless games, but gave others the strength to cut through all the silly proprieties and narrow moralisms to live as they wanted to. Joe Jr. was having an affair with a married woman. She had not seen her husband for over two years, and she might not see him until war’s end or perhaps never again. Hearts were the least of the things being broken in this war, and no one condemned the couple for their adulterous affair. Kathleen had fallen in love with Billy Hartington before the war. He was a man worthy of love, a combat officer in the Cold Springs Guards, a good and gentle man, bearing one of the great names of England, and he would be the next duke of Devonshire. His only flaw, as Kathleen saw it, was that he was a Protestant, from a family known over the centuries for its hatred of the Catholic Church. In a different time, Kathleen would have fled from his heretical embrace, but she hurried toward him now. Not settling for a paltry affair, she was contemplating marrying the man outside the Church.

The possible marriage risked splitting the Kennedys. Rose stood on one side, a mother who had forfeited much for her family and her faith. For her, the matter had already been decided because it was simply unthinkable. “I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family tradition,” she wrote Kathleen in February in a sentence that could have been Rose’s own epitaph. As the weeks passed, Rose’s entreaties ranged from shrewd arguments to near hysteria.

Kathleen’s father adored his daughter and valued her happiness more than all the proprieties of faith, but on this of all matters he dared not stand against his wife. In February, he wrote Joe Jr. that his sister was “entitled to the best and with us over here it’s awfully difficult to be as helpful as we’d like to be. As far as I personally am concerned, Kick can do no wrong and whatever she did would be great with me.” Joe always cut through the externalities, be they of politics or faith, and he was all for his daughter getting on with her life and happiness, but he could not be seen confronting his wife. As far as he was concerned, he wrote Kathleen, she and Billy should work it out together and “let all the rest of us go jump in the lake.” He had heard that his daughter was making converts to the Church, surely a mark of her deep and honest faith. “Maybe if you make enough of them a couple of them could take your place,” he wrote his daughter in March 1944. “If Mother ever saw that sentence I’d be thrown right out on the street…. I’m still working for you so keep up your courage.”

Kathleen endlessly pondered the question of whether she dared to turn away from a Catholic religion that would cast her out of its sanctuary of certainty if she married this good man. Billy had come back to run for the House of Commons in his family’s bailiwick. His defeat had brought the question of duty and happiness even more to the fore.

Joe Jr., a man of deep Catholic faith and natural conservatism, might once have sided with his mother. Now, with the tacit blessings of his own father, he stood with Kathleen. “Never did anyone have such a pillar of strength,” she reflected later. Joe Jr. had always accepted the dogma of his church, but on this matter he stood up to it, and to his own mother. His was a courage that others outside the family would not see or understand. It was a courage that merited him nothing but the deep gratitude of his sister, and a private satisfaction that he had helped to contribute to what might be Kathleen’s happiness.

Rose thought that Kathleen, like all women, was susceptible to the evil blandishments of men, seducers of mind and body. Kathleen astutely realized that her own brother “might be held largely responsible for my decision.” Indeed, when she announced her engagement, Rose cabled Kathleen from the hospital bed where she had gone in distress: “HEARTBROKEN. FEEL YOU HAVE BEEN WRONGLY INFLUENCED.” On May 6, 1944, Joe Jr. stood next to his beloved sister at the Chelsea Register Office, where he gave her away in marriage to Billy Hartington. He joked that by doing so he had ruined his political future, losing the votes of Boston’s Irish. But on this day he hardly seemed to care.

A
s the firstborn Kennedy son, Joe Jr. had always assumed that he belonged nowhere but at the mountainous heights of life, celebrated for his courage and applauded for his awesome accomplishments. The war had convinced him, though, that human happiness was a worthy goal, not a shameful avoidance of life’s high struggles. First, he must complete what he had come here to do, to win a high and noble honor.

“I have finished my missions and was due to start back in about two weeks,” Joe Jr. wrote his parents two days after the wedding, “but volunteered to stay another month. I persuaded my crew to do it, which pleased me very much. We are the only crew which has done so.”