The House of Kennedy Read online

  In Jack’s junior year, with Joe Jr. now enrolled at Harvard, Jack is the only Kennedy at Choate. He’s also the only student on campus to subscribe to the New York Times. Jack’s English teacher spots “a very definite flair for writing” and encourages him to pursue it professionally. But a bout of hepatitis and various mysterious ailments end Jack’s school term and his participation in athletics early.

  While recuperating in New Haven Hospital, the indignant teenager writes his classmate Lem a humorously crass account of the invasive medical procedures he’s forced to undergo. “No one is able to figure out what’s wrong with me. They give me enemas until it comes out like drinking water which they all take a sip of. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled suggestively and I rolled ’em in the aisles by saying ‘you have good motion’!”

  When Jack returns to Choate in winter 1935, his mischievous streak erupts. “What makes the whole problem more difficult,” says the Choate housemaster Earl Leinbach, who has to contend with nuisances such as pillows bursting from dorm rooms, “is Jack’s winning smile and charming personality.” (Years later, in 1942, his eventual bride Jackie’s own gifts as a mimic also land her in trouble at the exclusive Holton-Arms School in Washington, DC, when she is caught mid-parody by the teacher she is mocking, though nothing on the level of mayhem that Jack and Lem wreak with “the Muckers,” their secret society of pranksters.)

  But when Jack goes too far and sets off contraband firecrackers in the bathroom, destroying a toilet seat, he faces expulsion. Headmaster George St. John fumes, “I couldn’t see how two boys from the same family as were Joe and Jack could be so different.”

  Joe Sr. is called to St. John’s office, saving Jack from expulsion, but not from judgment. “Don’t let me lose confidence in you again,” he writes in a letter following the incident, “because it will be a nearly impossible task to restore it.”

  Jack graduates sixty-fifth in a class of 110. And he pulls off one last prank, persuading classmates to trade votes so that he’s named “Most Likely to Succeed”—in a rigged election.

  Chapter 11

  In 1934, Jack Kennedy and Lem Billings, both seventeen years old, dress in formalwear for a night in Harlem, New York City. They tell their cabdriver to bypass the famous Cotton Club where the great Cab Calloway performs. On this night, the boys have in mind only one experience they want to enjoy: losing their virginity.

  Ralph Horton, another school friend, escorts them to a brothel. First, they watch a pornographic movie for a pricey three dollars. Then Jack accompanies a prostitute into a room, where the deed is quickly done.

  “They were frightened to death they’d get VD,” says Horton. “So, I went with them to the hospital…where they got these salves and creams and a thing to shove up their penis to clean it out.”

  Sex is always on Jack’s mind. Throughout his life, Jack will follow the Kennedy male tradition of coming on to any attractive woman—and succeeding. “Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him,” the New York Times columnist James Reston would write of Jack as a presidential candidate.

  Attendance at Harvard is another rite of passage for Kennedy men. Joe Sr. is class of 1912; Joe Jr. graduates cum laude in the class of 1938, and Jack joins the class of 1940. Younger brothers Bobby and Ted will follow.

  In college, Jack earns the same middling grades as he did at Choate. “He could do what he wanted,” the Harvard Crimson reports one of his professors as saying, “but he did not waste time on what did not interest him.”

  Instead, he pursues athletics, excelling at swimming, tennis, and football. Even though the six-footer is underweight at 156 pounds, he’s a standout end for the freshman and junior varsity football teams, playing through the pain of a serious spinal injury he sustains in a game during his sophomore season.

  Jack is a junior when FDR names his father ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. Though he remains at Harvard, he visits his expat family often during school breaks—he’s even there in Britain when they declare war on Germany on September 3, 1939.

  That same day, the German submarine U-30 commits a war crime—torpedoing the SS Athenia, an unarmed transatlantic passenger liner bound for Canada, killing more than a hundred of the nearly fourteen hundred on board, including twenty-eight Americans.

  Jack travels to Scotland as an impromptu junior ambassador to visit with American survivors of the sunken ship.

  “Young John Kennedy came up from London and assured us that we were all the nearest things to the [American] nation’s heart and would be looked after,” Mildred Finley, a teacher who boarded a lifeboat and then a British destroyer on her way to safety in Glasgow, tells Scotland’s Daily Record.

  “I, and several other of the most battered-looking survivors and children had pictures taken with him.”

  Some Americans demand an immediate escort home, telling “young Kennedy that [if] the whole American Navy had gone after Amelia Earhart, why couldn’t a destroyer or two come for us. He smiled patiently and said he would tell his father. The group, of course, was somewhat hysterical: most of us were thankful for one ship.”

  A report in the London Evening News lauds his efforts, “Mr. Kennedy displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.”

  Citing to school officials the same “lack of transportation” that the Athenia survivors experience, Jack is late returning to Harvard to join his senior class. But the experience abroad cements a thesis he goes on to write called “Appeasement at Munich,” a firsthand critique of England’s inaction against Hitler and those (like Joe Sr.) who felt remaining neutral was an option. It goes on to be published in the United States in 1940, as the bestselling—due in part to Joe Sr. buying copies in bulk—Why England Slept, an allusion to Churchill’s own 1938 book, While England Slept.

  Kennedy graduates cum laude from Harvard in the spring of 1940 with a BA in government and international affairs. That fall he’s back on campus—in California—auditing classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

  In 1941, after Joe Jr. enlists as one of “Roosevelt’s Millions,” Jack changes course.

  At a dock in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, he tours a navy display of a PT—torpedo patrol—and becomes transfixed by the vessel. As America inches closer to war, he decides to follow his older brother’s example and enlist.

  But his dubious medical history disqualifies him for service. He is rejected, twice, by both the army and the navy.

  Eventually, Joe Sr.’s powerful connections override Jack’s poor health records, and he’s given a place as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, writing weekly reports for the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Washington, DC.

  Joe Sr. hopes to keep him out of trouble at home, but Jack keeps finding ways to wreak havoc.

  Chapter 12

  In wartime Washington, DC, Jack Kennedy falls in love—with a twice-married Danish journalist suspected of being a Nazi spy.

  Inga Arvad—a former film actress and Miss Denmark whom Hitler once called “the most perfect example of Nordic beauty”—is hired by the Washington Times-Herald as a columnist. Jack’s sister Kick also works for the Times-Herald, although she pines for England and her future husband Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.

  At Kick’s suggestion, Arvad interviews Jack for her weekly social column, “Did You Happen to See?” touting him to Washington in November 1941 as “a boy with a future.”

  The blond, blue-eyed international sophisticate beguiles the younger man—twenty-four to her twenty-eight—who cuts a handsome figure in his navy dress whites.

  Inga Arvad’s already on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar as a possible Nazi spy. Her FBI file would eventually grow to over twelve hundred pages. But although in the 1930s the columnist had written flattering pieces about Nazi leaders—like Hermann Goering, whose 1935 wedding she attended, and Hitler, who invited her to his private box at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin
and gave her an autographed photo signed “To Inga Arvad, in friendly memory of Adolf Hitler”—the only secrets she reveals to her willing young lover involve pleasing a woman in bed. She has “gooey eyes” for Jack, and he calls her “Inga Binga.” “He had the charm that makes the birds come out of their trees,” she writes in a private letter. “When he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism.”

  They spend hours making love in her Washington apartment, which the FBI has bugged, and Hoover documents the encounters. The bugs make it a threesome of sorts. If the espionage accusations against Arvad hold true, Inga Arvad could be the Mata Hari of the Second World War.

  As FBI investigations into Inga’s background continue, with even her Washington Times-Herald colleagues questioning her loyalties (one approaching Jack’s sister to ask, “Kick, do you think it is possible Inga could be a spy?”), Hoover warns Joe Sr. that Jack is “in big trouble and that he should get his son out of Washington immediately.” He orders his agents to break in to Arvad’s apartment, where no evidence discrediting Arvad is found—but plenty of salacious material regarding Jack comes to light.

  As Kick would tell her journalist suitor, John White, when Jack informs Joe Sr. of his plans to marry the Protestant Arvad—once she is officially divorced from her jealous second husband, the Hungarian film director Paul Fejos—Joe was “getting ready to drag up the big guns” to end the affair.

  But the navy is a step ahead, ordering a precautionary transfer to the Charleston Naval Shipyard, where Jack lectures factory munitions workers on safety procedures. The FBI comes, too, all the way to South Carolina.

  Bugs in a Charleston hotel room reveal Arvad was never a spy, and Hoover closes his file on her. In March 1942, Jack does the same. (But the wartime confidences Jack exchanged with Arvad would never leave him. When Jack is elected president, Hoover reveals that he’s preserved the intimate wiretap recordings. The master spy’s hint at blackmail keeps him atop the ranks of the FBI.)

  The breakup, in the end, is mutual, as their relationship seems doomed. As Arvad writes, her love for Jack overshadows her “reason. It took the FBI, the US Navy, nasty gossip, envy, hatred and big Joe” before she could see past it. “There is one thing I don’t want to do, and that is harm you,” she tells Jack. “You belong so whole-heartedly to the Kennedy clan, and I don’t want you to ever get into an argument with your father on account of me.”

  Jack’s friend Torbert MacDonald observes, “The breakup with Inga helped install a certain, ‘I don’t give a damn’ mentality that made Jack want to go to the Pacific.” It was the kind of attitude that could end in a serviceman sacrificing his life for his country.

  Jack enrolls in an officer training course in Chicago. Having spent his childhood racing sailboats for the Kennedy “Cape Cod Navy,” Jack honed his competitive instincts on the water.

  Thomas Bilodeau, a frequent guest at the three-acre Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, recalls the extreme measures Jack would take to win a race. “We were coming down to the finish line, and the winds let up…the boat was slowing down with my weight [215 pounds],” Bilodeau says, “and Jack turned to me and said, ‘Over the side, boy. We’ve got to relieve ourselves of some weight.’ So right out there in open water, I proceeded to just go over the side and he ran on to win the race.”

  Lem Billings also commented about his old friend, “Jack always had something to prove, physically.” Given his lifelong poor health, he would “overcompensate and prove he was fit when he really wasn’t. So, he turns into this killer football player and he turns into a voracious womanizer, a stud. Then what’s next? Well, of course he turns into a voracious warrior, hungry for a fight. It was the logical next step given the times.”

  Jack’s wartime hero is Lieutenant John Duncan “Sea Wolf” Bulkeley, winner of the Medal of Honor. Bulkeley, who from PT-41 led Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, performed a daring two-day rescue in March 1942, bringing to safety General Douglas MacArthur, commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East safely from Corregidor Island in the Philippines in advance of the nearby island of Bataan’s fall to the Japanese.

  Bulkeley embarks on a promotional tour touting the success of the PT boat program. More than five hundred vessels—forty-three PT squadrons each with twelve boats—would be commissioned for the war effort. A fleet of two hundred is soon to be dispatched to the Pacific theater.

  In the sumptuous privacy of Kennedy’s suite at the Plaza Hotel, Joe Sr. meets with the newly ranked lieutenant commander. The patriarch pitches the decorated veteran “Sea Wolf” on the navy neophyte Jack and his qualifications as skipper. Although Joe’s motivations on behalf of his son—the postwar veterans’ vote—are transparent to Bulkeley, he moves Jack into active duty in the Pacific.

  In April 1943, Jack is in command of a PT boat.

  “Without PT-109,” presidential aide Dave Powers boldly declares, “you have no President John F. Kennedy.”

  Chapter 13

  Ship at two o’clock!” the lookout shouts to Lieutenant Junior Grade Jack Kennedy, skipper of PT-109. He’s silenced the radios and powered down the eighty-foot craft to a single, idling engine to avoid detection by the advancing Japanese fleet.

  Light, fast, and heavily armed but not heavily armored, PT boats are designed to attack in great numbers as the “Mosquito Fleet.” On August 2, 1943, there are only three—PT-109, PT-162, and PT-169, in picket formation—on the Blackett Strait, south of Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands.

  At 2:30 a.m., the ships are patrolling in total darkness. It’s impossible for Jack to get his bearings on the open water, and his vessel is not equipped with radar. He doesn’t have time to turn the boat, with its diminished thrust, out of the line of attack. At a speed of over thirty knots, a 1,750-ton Fubuki-class Japanese destroyer called the Amagiri collides with them, severing the fifty-ton PT-109 in half.

  On impact, Jack smashes into the helm. And the gas tank ruptures.

  The crew sustains immediate and widespread casualties. Motor Machinist Mate Second Class (MM2) Harold William Marney and Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class (TM2) Andrew Jackson Kirksey are killed instantly. The water’s surface is coated with a slick of engine oil and fuel. The eleven survivors’ eyes are burning as they choke on the fumes—all the while clinging to pieces of wreckage floating in the shark-infested waters.

  Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class (MM1) Patrick Henry “Pappy” McMahon is blasted from his post in the engine room. He’s severely burned and struggling to swim. Acting on instinct, Jack supports the injured man across his own back and uses the strap of the machinist’s life preserver as a towline, pulling McMahon’s weight with his teeth.

  McMahon’s stepson, William H. Kelly, later tells the Associated Press, “Dad was burnt so bad. He thought he was holding [Kennedy] up, so he asked the [future] president, ‘Just leave me. I’ll be all right by myself.’ But of course, he would not think of it.”

  Hoping for rescue, the crew clings to the hull of the boat for a dozen hours, but it begins to take on water. Creating a makeshift flotilla from the debris of PT-109 and loading it with salvaged supplies, the strongest among the surviving crew push the injured for three or four miles toward the closest safe land they can find, Kasolo Island, nicknamed Plum Pudding Island.

  Though Kick later writes home from England, “The news about Jack is the most exciting I’ve ever heard,” only Joe Sr. knew—and he kept the message from Rose—that Jack is declared “missing in action” by the Navy Department.

  Plum Pudding Island is uninhabited and without food or drinkable water, so after two days, Kennedy braves his injuries and leads the search for help, assisted by Ensign George H. R. “Barney” Ross. The two of them swim between Olasana Island and Nauro Island, where they startle “Coastwatchers”—Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana—aiding the Allied forces. The native Pacific islanders don’t initially trust the men, but upon discovering the stranded survivors of PT-109, th
ey decide it’s safe to help Kennedy.

  The islander scout Gasa helps Jack use a jackknife to scratch a distress message onto a green coconut—“NAURO ISL…COMMANDER…NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT…HE CAN PILOT…11 ALIVE…NEED SMALL BOAT…KENNEDY”—that Gasa and Kumana deliver to Australian Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans, a fellow Coastwatcher on yet another island, who sends rescue.

  The next morning, Jack awakens to four islanders looking down at him and the crew. One of them says, in a perfect British accent, “I have a letter for you, sir.” Lieutenant Wincote, a New Zealander who is working with the US Army, writes, “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me.”

  On August 8, after enduring six days in enemy territory, Jack and the crew reach the US base at Rendova.

  Nearly two decades later, that crucial dried coconut husk is displayed on President Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office, and he remains in correspondence with Gasa and Kumana, even inviting them to his inauguration.

  The machinist McMahon, whose burns covered 70 percent of his body, eventually recovers from his injuries. The onboard collision ruptured a disk in Jack’s back. He will require surgery, but his psychological wounds run even deeper.

  Elevated to full lieutenant and now in command of PT-59, Jack sees further action in the Solomon Islands until November 16, 1943, when the mentally and physically exhausted officer is ordered to the naval hospital at Tulagi Island, where he relinquishes his command. Jack returns to the United States on December 21, already having been declared a “Hero in the Pacific” by the New York Times.

  To Rose, “he [Jack] is just the same,” she declares in a family letter. “Wears his oldest clothes, still late for meals, still no money. He has even overflowed the bathtub, as was his boyhood custom.”