25

Just like Lazarus

BILLY HARTINGTON took a leave from the Coldstream Guards in January 1944 to stand for Parliament as a Conservative. The Derbyshire seat for which he ran was one that had been occupied by Cavendishes for 205 of the previous 210 years. Despite this history, Billy’s election was by no means a sure thing. It was ebb tide for the Conservatives nationally. Even Churchill himself would be voted out of office the following year. Billy’s rival, fifty-three-year-old alderman Charles White, whose father had beaten Billy’s father many years before, ran on the Independent Socialist ticket. White prided himself on being a cobbler’s son, and he sought to portray the election as a battle between the classes. Kick spent many a weekend campaigning. “Billy made about ten speeches a day and did very well with the odds against him,” she reported to Lem Billings once the election was over and Billy had been trounced. Billy returned to his regiment in mid-February.

Taking as much time as possible off from the Hans Crescent Club, Kick continued to make her usual social rounds. The stark realities of the war, however, seemed hard to escape. In fact, they were beginning to invade even the most rarefied precincts, and finest homes, of England. Visiting Yorkshire that February, Kick spent some days with Lord Halifax’s daughter, Anne Feversham, and Halifax’s youngest son, Richard Wood, who had been badly wounded in the Middle East and was still getting used to his two new wooden legs. Wood met Kick at the train station and was “most efficient driving a car etc.” Part of what Kick discussed with Anne and Richard that weekend was the dilemma of her love life with Billy, and the desperate turmoil in which they, and their families, found themselves.

Kick and Billy were by now quite candid—with themselves, their families, and their friends—about their desire to marry. This decision having been made, they began slowly and methodically to confront the religious and political quagmire that stood a good chance of keeping them apart. The Kennedys—although wary of the long-term Boston political implications of having a Protestant lord in the family—had no major objection to Billy so long as Kick’s marriage to him was conducted by a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a ceremony, however, would be possible under canon law only if Kick and Billy promised to raise all children of the union as Roman Catholics. The Cavendish family, in turn, did not have any problem with Billy’s marrying Kick—nor even with Kick’s remaining a practicing Catholic—so long as children of the union (particularly any heir to the Devonshire title) be brought up in the Church of England.

Had Billy been just any Anglican—or even a low-ranking noble like his cousin David Ormsby-Gore—the problem might have been more easily resolved. Kick wrote her family, “Poor Billy is very, very sad but he sees his duty must come first. He is a fanatic on the subject and I suppose just such spirit is what has made England great.” All told, the Devonshires constituted the highest-profile Anglican family in England after the royals. The duchess was considered the first lady of the realm after royalty and, as Mistress of Robes to the Queen, served as chief lady-in-waiting. All of these positions held religious as well as social significance. What was more, Billy’s ancestors had played pivotal roles in spreading Protestantism—and stifling Catholicism—throughout Britain and Ireland. A forebear on Billy’s mother’s side, Robert Cecil, chief minister to James I, had personally refused to allow the Prince of Wales to marry the Spanish infanta on grounds of her Catholicism. As well, many generations of Billy’s paternal relatives had not only participated in but led the orchestrated domination of Irish Catholics. In 1870 the eighth duke, then serving as secretary of state for Ireland, defied his prime minister, broke with the Liberals, and formed his own party to oppose Irish home rule. In 1882 that same duke’s younger brother (and successor as secretary of state for Ireland) died by assassination at the hands of nationalist militiamen in Dublin. Clearly, given the prominence of the Devonshires in the Anglican Communion, if there was to be compromise on the issue of marriage it would have to be the Catholic Church—and the Kennedys—that would do the compromising.

From his base of operations in the States, Joe Kennedy did his best to see what sort of dispensation, if any, could be got from the Vatican. What Joe sought was a Church-sanctioned marriage that would allow Kick and Billy’s children to be raised as Anglicans while at the same time allowing Kick to remain a Catholic in good standing. This circle-squaring ambition was doomed from the start. The ambassador, so good at finding loopholes for himself and his children in every other area of life, had finally run across something he could not fix. Even high-powered friends like Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, appeared unable to arrange a solution.

In England, Kick visited David James Matthew, the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Westminister, to make her own personal, if futile, argument for a dispensation. When she failed in her task, she arranged an appointment for her brother Joe, who engaged in the same conversation with the same gentleman and came away with the same dismal result. Both Kick and Joe found it ironic that up until a relatively recent revision of Church law—a change made just fifteen years before, according to Matthew—Billy and Kick’s marriage could have been solemnized by the Church with just one simple stipulation: that girl children be raised in their mother’s Catholic faith. This compromise, no longer an option, was the type Kick believed might have actually succeeded in drawing Billy to a Catholic altar, as under the arrangement male heirs to the Devonshire title would still be safe from the wiles of Rome.

During mid-February—right about the time Kick sat chatting in Yorkshire with Anne and Robert—the ambassador looked back on a succession of failed attempts to gain a dispensation and, it seems, made a decision. Jotting a note to his daughter, he circled the question of marriage and quietly signaled that Kick might still, as usual, have whatever she wanted. He hinted she should proceed as she saw fit, saying he would bet on her judgment “anytime for any amounts.” A similar signal went to Joe Jr. when the old man announced: “Kick can do no wrong.” Rose, on the other hand, fully expected her daughter to abide by the ruling of the Church and, for the sake of religious principle, go for the first time in her life without a thing she desperately craved. How ironic it was, wrote Rose, for two people who had always been handed everything they ever wanted to now be denied the one thing they both wanted most.

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JACK FLEW FROM Palm Beach to New York on February 5, where, despite his continuing ill health, he mustered the stamina for a fling with Flo Pritchett, the very beautiful fashion editor of the New York Journal-American, a former model, and the recently divorced wife of a conspicuously rich New York Catholic. One evening late that week, Flo and Jack emerged from his hotel room long enough to team up with Frances Ann Cannon and her husband, John Hersey, for drinks at the Stork Club, where Jack regaled the party with his own (by now much-rehearsed) version of the PT 109 story.

Hersey—who, as Kennedy well knew, had already written quite a bit about PT boats—was captivated by Jack’s first hand account and asked if he might write it. If Jack cooperated, Hersey said, he believed he could probably place the piece with Life magazine. Intrigued with the idea of Hersey immortalizing his story in a high literary manner—and intrigued, too, with the notion of Hersey’s account being distributed to millions of Life readers—Jack agreed. He insisted, however, that the writer speak not only with him but also with those other veterans of the affair who were now stateside, most of them based at Melville. He also asked that royalties from the piece go to the widow Kirksey.

The hero of the 109 was late to arrive at Boston’s Parker House Hotel on the 11th, where Honey Fitz and some Democratic boosters—in fact, three hundred paying guests—had gathered to celebrate the old mayor’s eighty-first birthday. Snow had delayed Jack’s plane from New York. Midway into the proceedings, Clem Norton of the Boston Schools Committee—one of Honey Fitz’s closest and oldest political cronies—interrupted the steady round of tributes to the mayor in order to reassure the increasingly restive crowd that young Kennedy (the real star of the show) would soon arrive. “He’s the boy they thought was lost in the South Pacific,” Honey Fitz shouted happily from the head table. “He came back, just like Lazarus from the dead. . . .” The old man broke down with happy tears when Jack—in dress uniform—turned up a few minutes later. First taking a moment to eye his grandson’s emaciated frame and jaundiced complexion, he then hugged him hard and long. “I haven’t seen this boy for more than a year, and he’s been through hell since that time.”

Proud Honey Fitz posed delightedly with his grandson. The photographs, which ran in all the Boston papers the next day, did much to boost attendance at yet another Kennedy appearance. Jack proved highly successful as the featured draw at the Lincoln’s Birthday War Bond Rally (held in the Jordan Marsh department store downtown). Governor Saltonstall and Mayor Tobin also showed up, but played only supporting roles in the program that starred Jack. “Come and buy YOUR bonds,” read newspaper ads and posters, “and hear Lieut. John Fitzgerald Kennedy—son of a former Ambassador to Great Britain, grandson of a former Mayor of Boston—of whom James Morgan of the Boston Globe said, ‘his resourcefulness after his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer is one of the great stories of heroism in this war.’ ” An enormous crowd turned out, and Jack sold a half million dollars’ worth of war bonds. Jack told a friend later he came away from the event feeling “like Sinatra.”

Or at least like Sinatra with a badly beaten body. Given his frail condition, Jack requested and received a change in his orders, which had called for him to report to Melville on February 15. Instead he took leave and went to New England Baptist Hospital for two weeks, during which a team of Lahey Clinic doctors studied him carefully and agreed that major surgery on the spine—the same surgery that had been discussed and then put off in South Carolina the previous year—was now absolutely necessary. Without it, Jack could count on using crutches at best, or a wheelchair at worst, for the rest of his life. The doctors scheduled Jack’s surgery for early June. Until then, Jack was to report to the Submarine Chaser Training Center (essentially a PT-boat shakedown base) at Miami, where he would be assigned “limited duties” and permitted to bunk at his father’s Palm Beach mansion.

Before his release from the hospital, Jack gave Hersey an extensive interview during which he described—in far more detail than he had over drinks at the Stork Club—his version of the 109 affair: a version carefully calibrated to make both the crew and their commander look absolutely perfect in just about every way. Several weeks later, eyeing Hersey’s first draft, Kennedy would request just three small changes, all of them designed to make various of his cohorts in the 109 affair show up better against Hersey’s larger-than-life, heroic portrayal of JFK. Kennedy suggested, first of all, that Hersey expound more on the role played by Lennie Thom, who had been instrumental in saving Johnston and done so much to keep the eight surviving crew organized while Kennedy and Ross explored. Ross, too, needed more attention than Hersey had given him in the first draft. After all, it was Ross who had been personally responsible for towing the engineer Zinser. Most important, perhaps, Jack requested that Hersey delete a specific reference to one crew member, subsequently killed in other Solomons action, who had been conspicuous in losing his nerve at one key point during the long ordeal. The seaman went unnamed in Hersey’s draft—as he will here—but Kennedy wanted the entire circumstance of the man’s “lack of guts” stricken from the record. “I feel,” wrote Kennedy, “. . . that our group was too small, that his fate is so well-known both to the men in the boats and to his family and friends that the finger would be put too definitely on his memory—and after all he was in my crew.”

Of course, Hersey’s account purposely obfuscated with regard to the role of coast watcher Evans, whose presence in the Solomons still remained secret. Perhaps somewhat less purposely—for Hersey could only know what Kennedy and company told him—the piece failed to explain just how 109 came to be rammed in the first place. Hersey’s article came no closer than had Byron White’s official report. “I read the piece . . .” Joe Jr. would write Jack after Hersey’s piece appeared not in Life but The New Yorker, “and thought it was excellent. The whole squadron got to read it, and were much impressed by your intestinal fortitude. What I really want to know, is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar?” (An older-model Elco boat, PT 109 had no radar.)

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JACK REPORTED TO the Submarine Chaser Training Center, Miami, on March 14, 1944. Here he quickly fell into the habit of mocking the Florida locals, and he commented frequently on their witless lack of appreciation for the real war. “[They] all wait anxiously for D-day,” he wrote a friend, “and you can find the beaches crowded every day with people—all looking seaward and towards the invasion coast.”

In mid-April, when asked to conduct drills designed to simulate unlikely naval attacks on Miami by enemy forces, Kennedy perhaps took a secret pleasure when he and his fellow Miami PT commanders inadvertently threw a good scare into civilians at a dogtrack not far from Miami Beach. As part of their exercises for the day, several PT boats (Kennedy piloting one) approached the shore and began laying smoke. Meanwhile, unexpected breezes blew the smoke inland. When the smoke and fumes reached the dogtrack—where several thousand spectators sat watching dogs chase a mechanical rabbit—someone shouted “Poison gas!” and there was a panic. It was presumed the Germans were at that moment landing on the beach. A rush to the exits followed. Neither Jack nor any of his compatriots in the escapade ever received a reprimand.

In the midst of all this, Jack monitored the news from Europe closely, and noted with alarm the high number of casualties in Joe’s squadron: not so much from enemy fire—although two planes had been lost to the Germans—as from accidents. “Heard from Joe a while back,” he wrote Billings. “They have had heavy casualties in his squadron. I hope to hell he gets through OK. . . . I really think that Bobby [just graduated from Milton Academy and recently enrolled in the Naval Reserve] shouldn’t go into aviation. I don’t see where it is any more fun than P.T.s or D.D.’s or any other small ship—particularly as Bobby has spent so much of his life on small boats. I’m going to write him to that effect + I wish you would advise the same thing. It would be just his luck to get hit when old worn out bastards like you + me get through with nothing more than a completely shattered constitution.”