The House of Kennedy Read online

  Besides, the Kennedy children are a rough-and-tumble brood, prone to intense physical rivalries. When the siblings “would play, they would knock each other down and gouge each other’s eyes out with toys.”

  Rose sets up safety gates to protect the younger kids from the older ones, but the sounds of their roughhousing cannot be contained. According to biographer Evan Thomas, young Bobby “used to lie in [his] bed at night sometimes and hear the sound of Joe banging Jack’s head against the wall.”

  The exception to such violence is Rosemary, a gentle child. “She loved music, and my mother used to play the piano and sing to her,” younger sister Eunice recalls.

  Throughout another full decade of dutiful procreation—Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean, and Ted, all born between 1921 and 1932—Rose polishes her presentation on motherhood. In 1936, she records in her calendar, “I looked upon child rearing as a profession and decided it was just as interesting and just as challenging as anything else and that it did not have to keep a woman tied down and make her dull or out of touch. She did not have to become an emaciated, worn-out old hag.”

  She proves herself the antithesis of an “old hag” when prominent fashion designers name Rose one of the best dressed women of the 1930s. “Joe always wanted me to dress well,” Rose writes in her memoir. “It pleased him, in fact it delighted him, to have me turn up in something quite special.”

  Rose holds her family to the same fashionable and elegant standards she herself maintains. Thus her frustration when Jack looks less than his best, as at his Harvard graduation, “in his black academic gown, with a suitably serious expression, but with his feet in a pair of worn brown-and-white saddle shoes.”

  As the Kennedy family’s public profile begins to rise, Rose oversees the upkeep of appearances among her photogenic family. “Mother is a perfectionist,” Ted Kennedy says. She monitors the children’s food intake and weighs them regularly. She also invests in cosmetic dentistry, encouraging the display of the toothy trademark Kennedy smile in all family portraits. A Choate School classmate noting, “When Jack flashed his smile, he could charm a bird off a tree,” rates Rose’s regimen a success.

  Each summer, the Kennedys gather at Hyannis Port, where the siblings share time and activities. Sailing is a family favorite. In 1935, calculates biographer Laurence Leamer in The Kennedy Women, “the young Kennedys, led by Eunice, Kathleen, and Pat…plus Rosemary, Jack and Joe Jr., came away with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts” from the Hyannis Port Yacht Club.

  The Kennedy children are largely educated at boarding schools—convents for the girls, secular schools for the boys. For a time, Rosemary is homeschooled, but when she is in her early teens, Joe and Rose decide that Rosemary, too, is ready to live and study away from home. She does well academically, but she writes to Joe, “I get lonesome everyday,” asking him, “Come to see me very soon.”

  The physical act of writing is difficult for Rosemary, but she perseveres, penning in blocky print affectionate letters to her father. “I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to Disapoint [sic] you in anyway.” But Rose and Joe’s feelings go deeper than disappointment in Rosemary. They are fearful of being shunned in elite social circles for having a “defective child.”

  Yet Rosemary is easy to please. “She loved compliments,” Eunice recalls. “Every time I would say, ‘Rosemary, you have the best teeth and smile in the family,’ she would smile for hours. She liked to dress up, wear pretty clothes, have her hair fixed and her fingernails polished. When she was asked out by a friend of the family, she would be thrilled.”

  Rosemary’s happiest years may be those the family spends in England during Joe’s service as ambassador. On May 11, 1938, she is presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, looking radiant in a white gown embellished with silver piping alongside her parents and sister Kathleen.

  But the timing of the family’s return to America upon Joe’s abrupt resignation and the eruption of World War II unfortunately parallels an inner conflict in Rosemary, whose behavior noticeably regresses at age twenty-one.

  Back in the States by 1940, Rose and Joe are concerned that a “neurological disturbance” is the cause of their daughter’s emotional state, depression punctuated by violent verbal and physical outbursts. Eunice tells of the family being “terribly serious about the problem,” yet at the same time her parents continue to wonder whether Rosemary might simply try harder to assimilate into mainstream society.

  With Joe Jr. departing for naval training, “the summer of 1941 would be the last one our family would ever have together,” Rose Kennedy poignantly recalls.

  That autumn, Rosemary’s two closest-in-age siblings, Jack and Kick, are both living in Washington, DC. Kick is assisting an editor for the Washington Times-Herald, and Jack is a new ensign in the Naval Reserve, assigned to stateside intelligence work.

  Rosemary is enrolled at Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, a convent school in DC catering to girls with developmental delays. She is known to sneak out at night, often for hours.

  “I was always worried,” Rose explains, “that she would run away from home someday or that she would go off with someone who would flatter her or kidnap her.” Though past the typical pubescent age range, some doctors attribute Rosemary’s behavior to delayed hormonal changes. The real, unspoken fear is that she may have a sexual encounter with a man and become unwittingly pregnant.

  “My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically, and mentally as perfect as possible,” Rose states. But Rosemary’s uncontrolled behavior could publicly topple that lofty standard.

  Joe Sr. learns of a treatment he thinks can cure Rosemary: a lobotomy.

  * * *

  On June 5, 1941, the American Medical Association holds its annual session in Cleveland, Ohio. A panel discussion by the Section on Nervous and Mental Diseases examines lobotomy, warning against the imprecise surgical procedure intended to treat disruptive behavior. Separating the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain, in effect destroying it, cannot “restore the person to a wholly normal state.”

  Through her connections at the Washington Times-Herald, Kick investigates the procedure and alerts her parents to its dangers. “Oh, Mother, no, it’s nothing we want done for Rosie,” Kick reports.

  Even so, in the fall of 1941, as Ronald Kessler recounts in The Sins of the Father, Joe authorizes twenty-three-year-old Rosemary’s admission to George Washington University Hospital, where Dr. Walter J. Freeman is a professor of neurology.

  Freeman and his partner, neurosurgeon Dr. James Watts, are American pioneers of lobotomy.

  Rosemary will be strapped to the operating table and anesthetized—just enough to numb the entry site at her temples, where her skull will be pierced by two holes, through which a blunt metal rod will be inserted.

  As Dr. Watts performs the surgery, the supervising Dr. Freeman interacts with their patient to chart the changes in her condition. Rosemary performs simple recitations of prayers and songs. “We went through the top of the head. I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer,” Watts recounts to Kessler. “We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded,” he explains.

  When she stops talking, the operation is complete.

  “They knew right away that it wasn’t successful. You could see by looking at her that something was wrong, for her head was tilted and her capacity to speak was almost entirely gone,” Kennedy cousin Ann Gargan tells Doris Kearns Goodwin.

  From that point on, Rosemary’s mental capacity is irreversibly reduced to that of a preschooler. She will live out most of her life watched over by the nuns at St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional Children in Wisconsin.

  “I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar [coin] and another one dull,” Joe later tells John Siegenthaler, a journalist who joins the presidential campaign of 1960. “I guess it’s the hand of God.” />
  Rose would never forget the preventable tragedy that Joe brings on their eldest daughter. She dedicates her memoir, “To my daughter Rosemary and others like her—retarded in mind but blessed in spirit.”

  There are two Roses, but only one continues to bloom.

  PART THREE

  The Favorites

  Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. and

  Kathleen “Kick” Agnes Kennedy

  Chapter 7

  On August 12, 1944, the roar of propellers cuts through the silence in the English countryside surrounding Royal Air Force (RAF) Fersfield air base in Norwich. The airfield is newly constructed to Class-A bomber specifications for the Eighth US Army Air Force, commanded by Lieutenant General James Doolittle. It’s a remote site intended to shield the operations of highly secret missions.

  This one is just days old. On August 4, the combined operations “Aphrodite” (Army Air Force) and “Anvil” (Navy) had begun a series of planned attacks on German-controlled weapon complexes. With the program’s reliance on the earliest stages of autopilot technology, the risk factor is high and the pressure to succeed higher still.

  The first six Aphrodite missions have already failed.

  Now Anvil makes its first attempt.

  Navy lieutenant Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. looks through the caged cockpit of his battle-weary PB4Y-1—the navy designation of the Army Air Force’s B-24 Liberator. The cargo load totals 374 fifty-five-pound boxes distributed throughout the plane. Together, they contain eleven tons of Torpex, or “torpedo explosive,” a powerful combination of RDX, TNT, and powdered aluminum.

  On board with the twenty-nine-year-old pilot is radio operator and copilot Lieutenant Wilford John “Bud” Willy. He is new to Joe Jr.’s second seat, outranking and replacing Ensign James Simpson, who sends Joe off with a handshake and parting words, “So long and good luck, Joe. I only wish I were going with you.”

  Surrounded by a unique protective formation of a dozen aircraft, the unmanned bomber is to be flown like a modern-day drone, continuing on a crash course over France to its target, the Fortress of Mimoyecques.

  The fortress is an underground military complex that houses two dozen German V-3 superguns, long-range cannons known as the “London gun,” primed to inflict even more damage than the thirty-six thousand bomb strikes of Unternehmen Loge, the German code name for the fifty-seven-day Blitz of 1940.

  The plane takes off from the airfield’s six-thousand-foot runway, leveling at an altitude of two thousand feet. The crew then must perform two crucial tasks: arm the detonators, then turn over radio navigation control to a mother PV-1 aircraft flying at twenty thousand feet. Over the English Channel, the men will bail out and await a rescue boat.

  At least, that’s the plan.

  * * *

  The “star of our family,” is what Joe Sr. calls his eldest son. It’s no surprise that the slender, handsome, athletic, blue-eyed Harvard student—accustomed to elite education and international travel—boasts among friends about the certainty of his destiny. After graduation from Harvard College in 1938, but before starting at Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. (and later Jack) undertakes an intensive tutorial with London School of Economics professor Harold Laski.

  Laski, a socialist and a Jew who instructs via the exacting Socratic method, is a seemingly unconventional mentor for Joe Sr. to choose, but when questioned on it, he says, “My opinion has always been that you don’t have to worry about the other side. We’ve got all the arguments on our side.” It’s also a test of his sons’ mettle.

  Together, Joe Jr. and Laski travel to Moscow to observe in person the regime of Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party, whose name means “man of steel.” While there, Laski poses intricate questions to his pupil on world leaders and their philosophies, demanding, “What will you do about this when you are president?”

  Joe Jr. had already encountered the powerful and persistent leadership style of Adolf Hitler on a 1934 trip to Munich, after which the impressionable eighteen-year-old interprets for his father a rationale for inverse power dynamics: “Hitler is building a spirit in his men that would be envied in any country…This spirit would very quickly be turned into a war spirit, but Hitler has things well under control.” Joe Jr. went on to describe the “excellent psychology”—perhaps intuited from Joe Sr.’s own anti-Semitic stance—of Hitler’s vision for “the need of the common enemy…the Jews,” though he added, “It is extremely sad, that noted professors, scientists, artists, etc. should have to suffer, but as you can see, it would be practically impossible to throw out only a part of them, from both the practical and psychological point of view.”

  Six years later, however, as Joe Jr. begins his second year at Harvard Law in September 1940, America seems on the brink of war with Hitler. On the fourteenth of that month, President Roosevelt signs into law the Selective Service and Training Act, a peacetime measure to provide military instruction for up to nine hundred thousand male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six.

  Joe Jr., who is ranked near the middle of his law school class of five hundred, writes to a friend about his enlistment as “one of Roosevelt’s several million numbers,” adding, “I’ve always fancied the idea of flying and I’ve never fancied the idea of crawling with rifle and bayonet through European mud.”

  Concerned about the risks of airborne warfare, Joe Sr. pressures his typically obedient son to accept a desk assignment arranged through his government connections.

  Joe Jr. refuses. The rebellious streak that inspires him to seek his aviator’s wings in the Navy Air Corps rather than sit safely behind a desk alarms his father, who has spent years—including while ambassador to Great Britain—railing against America joining the war.

  Now Joe Jr. is on the other side.

  In his seventeenth fireside chat, recorded on May 27, 1941, Roosevelt makes his case for the impending necessity of war. “It is unmistakably apparent to all of us, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.”

  In May 1942, Joe Jr. is awarded his wings.

  In September 1943, he travels with his squadron to England, where they serve alongside the British Naval Command.

  “Kennedy was such a good pilot that we would have flown with him anywhere,” states Alvin T. Jones, an aviation machinist’s mate who performed many of Joe Jr.’s preflight inspections.

  By that summer of 1944, Joe Jr. has successfully completed well over the twenty-five bombing missions required to complete his tour. He pushes on through D-Day, then seeks out a special assignment requiring what his brother Jack would later describe as “the most dangerous type of flying.”

  Joe Jr. has been preparing for this daring flight all his life.

  In the last week of July 1944, Joe pens a cryptic letter to his father. “I am going to do something different for the next three weeks,” he writes. “It is a secret and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry.”

  “Joe, don’t tempt the fates,” his father replies. “Just come home.”

  Chapter 8

  Ensign John Demlein, pilot of the PV-1 mother ship, tries for a light moment on the tarmac, asking Joe if he’s all caught up with his life insurance payments.

  Joe flashes a toothy Kennedy grin. “I’ve got twice as much as I need,” he says.

  The day before, the lieutenant had a completely different conversation with electronics officer Lieutenant Earl Olsen. Olsen warns that faulty detonator wiring may spark an airborne explosion—and pleads with Joe to abort the mission.

  “There was never an occasion for a mission that meant extra hazard that Joe did not volunteer [for],” recalls Joe Jr.’s squadron roommate, Louis Papas. “He had everyone’s unlimited admiration and respect for his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous missions.”

  By his brother Jack’s calculations, Joe Jr. has flown “probably more combat m
issions in heavy bombers than any other pilot of his rank in the Navy.” Yet he’s fighting an internal war on two fronts.

  Jack, who joined the navy himself in September 1941, proudly declares, “Any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction, ‘I served in the United States Navy.’”

  Though his first duty is deskside in a Washington, DC, intelligence post arranged by his sister Kathleen, by August 1943 Jack Kennedy is a naval war hero.

  In a sibling rivalry marked by one-upmanship, by Joe’s calculations, he has fallen behind. “My congrats on the [navy and marine] medal,” he writes his younger brother after Jack is honored for facing down enemy combatants. Joe can’t resist taking a dig at the same time, adding, “To get anything out of the Navy is deserving of a campaign medal in itself.”

  “It was involuntary. They sank my boat,” Jack says self-deprecatingly of his heroics in saving the surviving crew after his gunship PT-109 was rammed by Japanese destroyer Amagiri in the South Pacific.

  Yet despite all of Joe Jr.’s heroic airborne missions, not once has he ever directly engaged the German foe. He’ll have little to show for his risk-taking, Joe concludes. “It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.”

  * * *

  The August 12, 1944, mission proceeds according to plan. Eighteen minutes in, the autopilot is set and the plane makes its first remote-controlled turn. Willy removes the safety, and the explosive goes live. Joe radios the code phrase “Spade Flush,” signaling that the final task before bailout is complete. The aircraft formation passes over New Delight Wood, near the town of Blythburgh, a hundred miles north of London and four miles from the North Sea.