The House of Kennedy Read online

  Two loud booms shatter the airspace. The sky erupts in flames and swirling black smoke. Aircraft debris plunges toward earth, scattering for more than a mile and a half in each direction.

  “Spade Flush” prove to be Joe’s last words. He and Bud are killed instantly. “Nothing larger than a basketball could have survived the blast,” Commander James Smith observes, based on his vantage point in an observation aircraft.

  Lieutenant David McCarthy of the Eighth Combat Camera Unit witnesses the horror through his airborne camera.

  “[The plane] just exploded in mid-air as we neared it and I was knocked halfway back to the cockpit. A few pieces of the Baby [drone] came through the plexiglass nose and I got hit in the head and caught a lot of fragments in my right arm. I crawled back to the cockpit and lowered the wheels so that [we] could make a quick emergency landing.”

  Another eyewitness, Mick Muttitt, then a local schoolboy, shares his memories with ITV News: “As it passed there was a trail of smoke coming from the weapons bay and then it exploded in an enormous fireball. And I vividly remember the engines continuing in the line of flight with the propellers still turning with trails of smoke from each one. It happened more than a mile and a half away but it still knocked the plaster off our ceiling. The next day my brother and I biked to Five Fingers heath and collected bits of wreckage.”

  The faulty wiring that Lieutenant Olsen detected proves to be the cause of the disaster. Subsequent investigations suggest a camera lacking an electrical shield may have set off an electromagnetic relay that tripped the detonator. One officer who saw the circuit board before the flight describes it as “something you’d make with a number two Erector set and Lincoln Logs.”

  Colonel Elliott Roosevelt—one of FDR’s sons, and younger brother to James Roosevelt—was on board a Mosquito plane in the supporting formation and narrowly escaped the deadly explosion that killed Lieutenants Kennedy and Willy.

  Decades later, in 1986, Elliott Roosevelt’s son gives an interview to the Boston Herald, refuting a German newspaper’s alternate version of Joe’s death. According to Bild am Sonntag, antiaircraft officer Karl Heinz Wehn witnessed Joe Jr. survive the crash and parachute into woods, then be captured by soldiers of the 12th German Panzer Division and shot by SS troopers. During the interrogation, Wehn claims, one of the two captured aviators identified himself as “Joe Kennedy.”

  “If he [Wehn] says he interrogated Joe Kennedy Jr., I think he’s dreaming,” Elliott Roosevelt Jr. says. “He was never shot down. The plane exploded before it left the English coast.”

  Unfortunately for the Allies, not one of the fourteen Aphrodite or Anvil missions ever hit its intended target, and the “program killed more American airmen than it did Nazis.” According to the author and US Air Force veteran Jack Olsen, Joe Jr.’s target in France wouldn’t even have mattered, as it “had been abandoned by Hitler’s missile men three months earlier.” In January 1945, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, US commander of Strategic Air Forces in Europe, orders the operation scrapped.

  Joe Jr. and Lieutenant Willy are posthumously honored for their valor with the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Navy Cross.

  The Cross, with its combat distinction, is a higher honor than the non-combat Navy Marine Corps Medal awarded to Jack.

  Even in death, Joe Jr.’s military accomplishments outshine his brother’s. And Joe Sr. makes sure everyone knows it.

  Chapter 9

  On a Sunday afternoon in August 1944, two priests from the local parish knock on the door of the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port.

  “[My] son was missing in action and presumed lost,” Rose remembers them telling her. Joe Jr.’s plane had gone down the day before.

  Reeling in shock, she runs upstairs to wake Joe Sr. from a nap.

  “We sat with the priests in the smaller room off the living room, and from what they told us we realized there could be no hope…our son was dead.”

  “Joe went out on the porch and told the children. They were stunned. He said they must be brave: that’s what their brother would want from them.”

  Jack corroborates his father’s attitude. “Joe would not want us to stay around here crying, so let’s go sailing,” Rose’s nephew Joe Gargan recalls Jack telling his younger siblings. According to the historian and sailor James W. Graham, they venture out on the family sailboat, Victura.

  Joe Sr. retreats to his bedroom. He plays Beethoven on the turntable, despite his longtime concerns that love of classical music is a sign of weakness in a man. Not now, not at this moment.

  Rose’s only consolation is her Catholic faith. For many weeks, she retreats to her room, with only a rosary for solace.

  Weeks later, a final letter from Joe Jr. arrives at Hyannis Port. The sight of the familiar handwriting plunges his father into the depths of sorrow.

  Then another letter arrives. A naval lieutenant who attended Harvard with Joe Jr. offers comfort and consolation. “Through Joe’s courage and devotion to what he thought was right, a great many lives have been saved.”

  Joe Sr. vows not to let his dream of a Kennedy son rising to the Oval Office die along with Joe Jr.

  Kathleen channels her family identity into coping with the loss of her big brother, best friend, and champion. “Luckily, I am a Kennedy,” she writes. “I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability not to be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”

  * * *

  Six years earlier, when the Kennedys had landed in England, the government called Joe Sr. “Ambassador” and tall Joe Jr. was known to British debutantes as “the Big One.” In that first whirl of the London social season, Kathleen, known as Kick, set her sights on William John Robert Cavendish, the future Duke of Devonshire.

  The outbreak of World War II would eventually separate the pair, as Billy explores a career in politics and Kick works at the Washington Times-Herald. But by 1943, Kick has negotiated a return to London through service in the Red Cross. She makes a late-June crossing to reunite with Billy in early July.

  The pair is in love and determined to marry. Yet despite Billy’s impressive wealth and pedigree—assets Rose’s father once insisted Joe was lacking—Joe and Rose withhold their blessing. Kick’s parents hold hard and fast to the Catholic teaching that marrying outside the Church is a mortal sin. And Billy, a handsome, six-foot-four soldier who would rise to the rank of major in the Cold Stream Guards, is not only an Englishman, but also of Anglican faith.

  Rose dismisses any possibility of compromise. “When both people have been handed something all their lives,” she tells Kick, “how ironic it is that they can not have what they want most.”

  Only one Kennedy supports her decision: Joe Jr. Breaking from his role as one of the like-minded “two Joes,” as Kick and Eunice call father and son, Joe Jr. chastises his hard-hearted parents. Joe says of their condemnation of her so-called sinful marriage, “As far as Kick’s soul is concerned, I wish I had half her chance of seeing the Pearly Gates. As far as what people will say, the hell with them. I think we can all take it.”

  On May 6, 1944, in the midst of the privations of wartime London, the couple forgoes the kind of lavish, formal wedding that could have topped the society pages of every newspaper around the world for a modest civil ceremony at a registrar’s office in Chelsea. Not only is Joe Jr. the sole Kennedy in attendance, but he gives the bride away. Kick loves him even more for that fraternal gesture.

  “MISS KENNEDY A MARCHIONESS” a London paper announces. “THURSDAY—ENGAGED: TO-DAY—MARRIED,” the headline continues somewhat snidely, noting that although the “engagement was announced only on Thursday,” the couple had “a quiet wedding” that Saturday. “The bride’s naval brother, Lieutenant J.P. Kennedy, brought her in, and the ceremony took place in a bare room, brightened only by
three vases of carnations.”

  “MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!” Kick jubilantly reports to her family. But barely five weeks later, on June 13, Billy is ordered to active duty in France.

  He leaves his beloved bride in a flurry of romantic longing. “This love,” Billy writes, “seems to cause nothing but goodbyes.”

  * * *

  Even at twenty-nine, Joe Jr. seems not to be in any rush to marry himself, though there are rumors of a broken engagement to the Broadway actress Athalia Ponsell. (Ponsell is best known in later years for her grisly—and as yet unsolved—murder in January 1974, when she is found decapitated by machete outside her home in St. Augustine, Florida. She later becomes the subject of two true-crime books, as well as lingering questions of the cost of romancing a Kennedy.)

  In the summer of 1944, Alvin Jones Jr. recalls, “Kennedy usually borrowed a quarter from his mechanic, so he could call a girlfriend before takeoff.”

  Those calls are likely to Patricia Wilson, whom he met in 1943 through Kick’s social circles. The twice-divorced, Protestant daughter of a wealthy Australian sheep farmer would likely not have pleased Rose and Joe any more than Billy Cavendish has, and while Joe confides in Kick his growing love for Wilson, no other Kennedy ever knew that she was more than a passing acquaintance. “I had better get a gal while there is some life left in the old boy,” Joe Jr. writes his mother in the last week of July. The family believes that he dies a lonely bachelor.

  * * *

  Kick flies home to Hyannis Port from London to attend Joe Jr.’s memorial mass. As the designated recipient of her brother’s possessions, she then travels on to New York City to receive them via the Personal Effects Distribution Center in Scotia, New York.

  In the city, her sister Eunice plays messenger, summoning Kick to Joe Sr.’s hotel room to receive yet another grim communication. It’s been weeks since Kick has heard from her new husband, Billy. Now she learns that in the German-occupied town of Heppen, Belgium, Billy has been killed by a sniper’s bullet. His sacrifice comes only weeks after Joe Jr. gave his life for his country. Within a month, Kick has lost her beloved brother and her husband.

  For the next several years, Kick’s search for happiness is unfulfilled—until she takes up with the married Earl Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam, some years her senior, who has a reputation for being a womanizing gambler.

  Kick confides in her brother Jack about this latest Kennedy dalliance with a Protestant, down to the cinematic detail that the man looks like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. When Fitzwilliam promises to divorce his wife, Obby, and marry Kick, she once again summons up the courage to tell her estranged parents. Over the scandalous specter of divorce, Rose vows to disown her daughter.

  Despite her mother’s attitude, Kick reaches out to her “Darling Daddy,” and arranges for the two of them to meet Joe Sr. at the Paris Ritz.

  “I’d like to get Dad’s consent,” she tells Joe Jr.’s old friend Tom Schriber before she leaves New York. “He matters. But I’m getting married whether he consents or not.”

  On Thursday, May 13, 1948, Kick and Fitzwilliam fly out of London, stopping outside Paris to refuel their chartered ten-seater de Havilland Dove aircraft en route to the French Riviera before meeting with Joe Sr. During the layover—which includes a boozy lunch with friends—a terrible storm sets in, and the next leg of their route is to cross the storm center. The pilot and the navigator say the flight is too dangerous. But the couple won’t wait.

  They never make it to to their romantic weekend in Cannes. Friday morning, rescuers traverse the mountainous Rhône-Alpes region, some two hundred miles from Cannes, to reach the wreckage of the plane. There are no survivors. Kick’s shoeless corpse is transported in an oxcart to the tiny town center of Privas.

  A heartbroken Joe Sr. identifies Kick, who, in the words of Rose, was his “favorite of all the children.”

  The family decides not to bring Kick’s body home, preferring to remember her in Hyannis Port at the same church where they mourned Joe Jr. four years earlier.

  Billy’s family arranges a memorial service. Rose refuses to fly to England. Jack promises, then fails, to represent the Kennedys.

  Kick is interred in the small Derbyshire cemetery alongside members of the Cavendish family. The last line of her epitaph captures the essence of the vibrant young woman who touched so many lives: “Joy she gave—joy she has found.”

  Joe Sr. later attends a Requiem Mass in Kick’s honor. He stands at her grave, a shattered man in a rumpled blue suit.

  * * *

  Unlike his sister Kick, Joe Jr. has no grave for his family to visit. Since losing his son, Joe Sr. has been focused on mounting a fitting tribute. On July 26, 1945, at a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, Jean Kennedy christens the Navy destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (now part of the Battleship Cove Maritime Museum in Fall River, Massachusetts). But no memorial to his heroic final mission exists in Blythburgh, in spite of calls by local military groups to establish a tribute.

  Huby Fairfield, curator of the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum at Flixton, tells the Times of London, “If someone doesn’t do something soon, he will be forgotten. He gave his life for his country and ours—he didn’t have to take part in the operation. He volunteered.”

  * * *

  In January 1946, according to historian Edward J. Renehan Jr., Joe Sr. has a chance meeting with the former prime minister Winston Churchill at the Hialeah Park Race Track, where Joe has an ownership interest.

  Churchill and Joe were frequently in conflict over Joe’s certainty of Hitler’s invincibility. Yet the former prime minister seems glad to reminisce. “I remember that one of the last times we met we were having dinner during an air raid. It didn’t bother us very much, though, did it?”

  Joe refuses to engage his onetime nemesis.

  “You had a terrible time during the war; your losses were very great.” Churchill continues. “I felt so sad for you and hope you received my messages.”

  “The world seems to be in a frightful condition,” Churchill laments, sipping whiskey and smoking a large cigar.

  “Yes,” Joe at first agrees, then demands, “After all what did we accomplish by this war?”

  “Well, at least, we have our lives,” Churchill answers.

  Joe can no longer contain his fury. “Not all of us.”

  PART FOUR

  The President

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy

  Chapter 10

  The little girl is staring at the man standing in her parents’ living room in Boston. She points at his backside and giggles, “Jack, Jack, your blue underwear is showing through the seat of your pants.”

  Jack Kennedy looks over his shoulder and sees a blue strip of fabric through a split in the seam of his trousers. Jack and the little girl’s father—his and Joe Jr.’s Harvard buddy Tom Bilodeau—break out in laughter over her discovery. In a day of speeches around the city, no one else has dared confront the young Massachusetts politician about his sartorial mishap.

  Their banter draws Bilodeau’s Irish mother-in-law into the room. Treating Jack like her own son, she says, “Jack, take your pants right off and I’ll fix them,” Bilodeau recalls in an interview for the JFK Presidential Library. “And right there in the living room, Jack took his pants off. My mother-in-law got out a needle and thread and sewed them and off he went to his next speaking engagement.”

  When Jack is later elected president, he invites the Bilodeau family to attend the inauguration in January 1961. Jack definitely remembered the ripped pants incident, Bilodeau chuckles, since “an invitation to my mother-in-law [was] addressed to his ‘seamstress.’”

  * * *

  Jack Kennedy enters the Eightieth Congress as a Democratic Representative of the Eleventh District of Massachusetts in January 1947 at the age of twenty-nine, but is often mistaken for a staffer, given his youthful looks and informal, somewhat disheveled attire. “He wore the most godawful suits,” Mary Davis, his secretary during
congressional years 1947–52, would say. “Horrible looking, hanging from his frame.”

  As his mother, Rose, would so often lament, Jack cares nothing for his appearance. But he “had the best sense of humor of anybody I had ever met,” Kirk Le Moyne “Lem” Billings, who first befriended Jack at Choate School, says. “If we were at a show together, he’d somehow manage to sneak backstage to see the leading singer,” Lem recalls. “If we were eating out, he’d be so charming to the waitress that we’d end up with an extra dessert.”

  That charisma may be part natural, part reactive. Joe Sr.’s assessment of his two eldest sons has always been unfavorable to Jack. “Joe never thought Jack would do anything,” Chuck Spalding, who also knew both brothers at Harvard, recalls Joe Sr. “didn’t realize that by all odds, Jack was the most gifted. He thought Joe Jr. was.”

  Even after Joe Jr.’s death, Jack still futilely competes with his older brother. “I am now shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack tells Lem.

  Underscoring the strong correlation the Kennedys assumed between mental ability and physical health is Rose’s belief that Jack had a lower IQ than Joe Jr.—something she insists upon until after Jack’s presidency.

  “Jack never wanted us to talk about this,” Lem Billings says in an oral history for the JFK Library in Boston, but “Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way.”

  As Jack later tells his wife, Jackie, his was a childhood in confinement, “sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history…reading the Knights of the Round Table.”

  And while Jack tests at a “superior” IQ of 116 (today’s assessments might rate it as high as 158) it takes three attempts—and a generous donation from Joe Sr., including two movie projectors—to get Jack through his entrance exams for the exclusive preparatory Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, where his older brother Joe Jr. is achieving academic and athletic success.