CHAPTER 4 )

Chemistry

Joe and Jack, the oldest of the boys, entered the 1930s aged fifteen and thirteen. Ted, the youngest, was born in 1932. So those prewar summers at the Cape were crucial formative ones for a Kennedy generation that would in the 1940s meet many fates and then, in the case of the survivors, move on to lives of such extraordinary distinction they helped define the later half of the American Century. Of the nine Kennedy children, one became president, one became U.S. attorney general and a U.S. senator, and another was the fourth-longest serving U.S. senator in history. Three, including two daughters, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. One daughter helped redefine how people around the world treat and think about people who have disabilities. Another daughter was U.S. ambassador to Ireland, instrumental in bringing a peace settlement to northern Ireland. The oldest daughter after Rosemary married the heir apparent to a British duke. Patricia married a Hollywood leading man. The oldest son was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the navy’s highest decoration.

There are times and places in history where circumstances converge and human chemistry is just right to create something extraordinary. Hyannis Port in the 1930s was not Gertrude Stein’s apartment in 1920s Paris, nor was it Liverpool in the late 1950s when the Beatles formed a band. The Kennedys were just children summering by a seashore. But given what grew out of that time and the turns of fate to come in the years right afterward, something was at work then to influence what they thought about, what their aspirations would be, what motivated them. They would later say it was parental influence, and perhaps so. It must also have been sibling influence. As a place, Hyannis Port, its windswept waters, and its sailboats have remained a Kennedy touchstone ever since. Year after year, as pages turned on extraordinary family chapters, heroic and tragic, they always returned, rejoined, and reaffirmed family at Hyannis Port and offshore at sail, especially on Victura.

After Joe and Jack, Rosemary was next oldest, first daughter in the Kennedy family, born seventeen months after Jack. As she grew older, she showed increasing signs of struggle with learning. Walking came late. Reading was much harder. Eventually symptoms revealed problems beyond those of work habit or proneness to distraction. She had an intellectual disability—retardation as it was known then, though they never applied the word to her. How she would have been diagnosed by today’s standards is a subject of some disagreement. Like cancer, mental disability was unspoken of in those days, and Rosemary’s siblings protected her. They acted in public as though nothing was wrong and because of their numbers could always ensure someone was with her. She was by no means hidden from public view as were similarly afflicted children of other families. She is in all the family photographs of the early years and routinely joined brothers and sisters at youth social events, with brothers asking her to dance and Eunice always playing with her and keeping her company. Less was recorded of her childhood in Hyannis Port, no doubt because the youthful accomplishments, accolades, and sporting achievements of the others were for her so few and modest.

During Rosemary’s adolescence in the 1930s, she began showing increasing signs of emotional volatility and mood swings. Brain science being in such infancy, doctors recommended a prefrontal lobotomy, shockingly extreme in hindsight but state of the art at the time. She underwent the procedure in 1941 when she was twenty-three, and the consequent brain damage required she be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Members of the family long afterward were haunted by the episode and the treatment they chose. It pushed many of them to later use their celebrity to advance the cause of people with disabilities, particularly intellectual ones. Rosemary could not consciously influence the public lives of Kennedys, but unintentionally her influence on their understanding of disability would have lasting consequences for the country, across borders and for decades to come.

Next born after Rosemary was Kathleen, or “Kick,” less than three years younger than Jack but precocious enough to become a peer as they matured together in the 1930s. Given Rosemary’s state, Kick was regarded as the eldest daughter. By the time she was thirteen, Kick’s parents were growing concerned about the extraordinary attentiveness of every boy who met her. Constantly on the phone, she was pretty, not beautiful, dressed in the conservative style cultivated at convent schools that in her case made her no less desirable. Boys were drawn by her unreservedness tempered by aloof sophistication, her graceful assertiveness that did not diminish her femininity. Her quick wit and cleverness helped her filter out all but the brightest of the handsomest boys. She would not be intimidated by any of them. Her high-speed repartee with Jack, their duel of quips, made them inseparable at times, frustrating to many hoping to keep up the conversational pace. At Jack’s side in social settings, her electric presence was the perfect complement to his youthful shyness with strangers. It was said, “Every friend Jack brought home from Harvard without exception fell in love with her.”1 Said another who knew her then, “I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life. She wasn’t especially pretty, but she just had this appeal.”²

Dinah Bridge, who befriended the Kennedys later in London and Georgetown, said of Kick, “I’d characterize her as being sort of sunshine really. Everybody she saw she always made feel terribly happy and gay. She always came into a room and everybody seemed to sort of lighten up. She was that sort of a character.”

Eunice, born in 1921, four years after Jack, was thin with some of the same then-undiagnosed health problems Jack had, including Addison’s, whose symptoms include fatigue, weight loss, and muscle weakness. She nonetheless managed to be among the most athletic of the girls. She was the best female sailor in the family, better than one or two of her brothers perhaps, and at least one 1930s newspaper account of local regattas put her among the top finishers with male competitors.³ She was also closest to Rosemary, playing games that kept Rosemary active and engaged despite the widening intellectual distance between Rosemary and her maturing siblings.⁴ More than her sisters, she was powerfully driven to achieve professionally. Eunice’s sensitivity to Rosemary’s condition and her forceful personality, later given a national stage with the help of her successful brothers, led her to so influence American understanding of intellectual disability that some say her lifetime contributions to social justice rival those of her brothers. She would one day receive from Ronald Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, as would her future husband, R. Sargent Shriver, a founder of the Peace Corps and Head Start and the 1972 Democratic candidate for vice president. Had she been born in another era when political aspirations extended to females, one may justly wonder if Eunice might herself have become president.

Some thought the most beautiful Kennedy daughter was Patricia, born in 1924 and said to have inherited Rose’s aristocratic airs. She was also intelligent, sophisticated, and athletic. But despite her gifts, she was the one Kennedy who in those years lacked the family’s drive and thirst for competition. Her mother worried Patricia was squandering her opportunities.5 In the 1950s Jack was only two years in the U.S. Senate when Patricia had already achieved a level of fame in her own right, though in her case it was fame of the Hollywood variety. She married film star Peter Lawford. They later gave a daughter the middle name “Frances,” partly after Lawford’s “Rat Pack” pal Frank Sinatra. In time, with the political rise of her brothers, Patricia also focused energy on public service, most notably on programs addressing mental disability and addiction.

Eight years separated Jack’s birth from Bobby’s in 1925. They really did not get to know each other well until much later. Though Bobby enjoyed sailing all his life, as a youngster he never was as competitive at that sport as his brothers or Eunice. He did not immerse himself in interests or show much enthusiasm for anything. This of course all dramatically changed by the time he and Jack became adult professionals and partners in politics. As a youngster he was prone to injury because he was so fearless at play, a trait that stuck into his adulthood of outdoor adventure.

Jean, born in February 1928, was quiet, perhaps a bit cowed when young by the assertiveness and decibel level of her older brothers and sisters. For years to come she was considered shy and guarded compared to her siblings.⁶ Nonetheless, she developed friendship networks of her own, and as a college student introduced both her brothers Robert and Ted to the women they would marry. In the Clinton administration, as U.S. ambassador to Ireland, she took a more assertive role in the peace process in that country than most protocol-conscious diplomats would dare. She founded Very Special Arts, or VSA, a program now in sixty countries that promotes artistic achievement by people with disabilities, an achievement cited by President Barack Obama when he awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2010, when she was the last of her siblings still alive, she said, “all my brothers and sisters were my best friends.”7

It is likely Joe and Rose anticipated no more children after Jean, for the family named their sailboat Tenovus. Ted’s arrival in 1932 made it a family of eleven, four years after the birth of his youngest sibling, Jean. Ted, sixteen years younger than Joe Jr., saw his oldest brother more as father figure than brother, and the reverse was also true. Ted was a chubby boy with a perpetual smile and greeted his oldest brother by rushing into his arms and getting hoisted up. Ted’s love of sailing pours out of his memoir, published just weeks after he died at age seventy-seven in 2009. Ted’s long Shakespearean life journey ended with more years served in the U.S. Senate than all but three Americans. He became America’s voice of liberalism as the “Lion of the Senate.” It is unlikely any of the Kennedys spent as much time on Victura, or loved it as much as Ted, the boat’s long association with Jack notwithstanding.

~ There was little indication in the 1930s of all that Kennedy children would achieve in their adult lives. After a year of study in London, Joe enrolled in Harvard in the fall of 1934. Jack studied briefly at the London School of Economics and at Princeton, but illness again interrupted and he left Princeton. He joined his brother at Harvard in the fall of 1936, a place close enough to Hyannis Port to allow occasional visits. A classmate remembered,

I think the thing that impressed me most about the Kennedy family was the great affection that they had for each other and which was shown outwardly. Many, many times I’ve seen Joe Jr. or Jack pick up Bobby or Teddy and hug them just like a father would hug a youngster. And I also noted the great affection and outward display of it that they had for their sisters, especially of Kick, as we knew Kathleen in those days, and Eunice. This was evidenced even in law school when Eunice came regularly to the apartment. The outward show of affection that Joe would evidence when she came into the apartment was amazing.8

As Joe and Jack grew older and their rivalry faded, Jack learned not to compare himself to his brother. He did not then project—or perhaps even aspire to have—the leadership traits for which his brother was known. Though Jack lacked the academic discipline of Joe, he showed signs of greater intellectual depth. Both wanted to be football players but neither made it very far, particularly the frailer, younger brother. Collegiate sailing may not have been the ticket to campus popularity that football was, but it was a Harvard sport where both could excel, and they did.

Wianno Seniors, beloved on the Cape’s South Shore, were not sailed extensively elsewhere on the Atlantic coast. For Joe and Jack to advance to the next level of competition, they would have to race against a different kind of one-design sailboat. The boat to master was a Star, the first to be raced in the Olympics. During the 1930s Joe and Jack acquired two Stars. The first, Flash, was soon replaced with another dubbed by Jack Flash II. Robert would, in the 1950s, sail Stars too, though none of that class would win the enduring family loyalty of Wianno Seniors. Joe and Jack sailed in the Star-class Atlantic Coast Championships, with Joe skippering in 1934 and 1935, with the ongoing financial support of his father.⁹ A 1934 telegram from Joe Jr. to his father states that he “Qualified for Atlantic Coast Championship. Should have new sails. Cost one hundred forty dollars. Is that OK? Please reply Western Union. Love, Joe.”¹⁰

The summer before entering Harvard as a freshman, Jack skippered and won the last race of the 1936 Atlantic Coast series, also with paternal underwriting. Jack relayed through family aide Paul Murphy a request for a new jib sail “of light material for use in medium breezes.” Telling Joe Sr. of Jack’s request, Murphy revealed Jack’s lofty nautical aspirations, adding that a trusted adviser recommended they buy not just a jib but “a complete set [of sails] now as he thinks this year will be a big one for racing. He feels that if you expect to make the Olympic tryouts, you must have good sails.”¹¹ Family confidant Edward Moore further reported to Jack’s brother Joe, “Jack did very well in Long Island getting in first, and as a matter of fact, first by 4½ minutes, and yesterday he won the Star boat race at Wianno.” Moore’s report wasn’t entirely flattering however: “Yesterday I was standing on the wharf at Wianno watching Jack come in from the races. Captain Billings was standing on the after deck of the Star boat and Jack jibed and the sail caught the Captain half way between the fanny and ankles and he went overboard. Jack didn’t know it until after he was in the water and yelling.”12 Jack’s Nantucket Sound Star-Class Championship Cup from that year is now on display in a glass case at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, next to a Hyannis Port Yacht Club trophy he won racing Victura to Edgartown.

After 1936, now both at Harvard, Joe Jr. and Jack could team up in collegiate sailing. They did so with impressive results. The major sailing event of 1938 was the MacMillan Cup, where Harvard faced nine competitors, with Williams and Dartmouth as the teams to beat. Some of the best young sailors in the world competed in the MacMillan Cup. Sailing for Williams that year was Bob Bavier, who would go on to successfully defend America’s Cup, sailing Constellation in 1964. By 1943 Bus Mosbacher would lead Dartmouth to two MacMillan Cup victories before culminating his nautical career by twice successfully defending America’s Cup in 1962 and 1967, the former race witnessed by President Kennedy, watching from the deck of the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.

Despite the level of competition, Harvard carried the day. According to the New York Times, “The Crimson skippers out-sailed the Williams stars, their most dangerous rivals, in two contests which practically amounted to match races. . . . The helm for the Crimson was handled by the local Wianno boys, Jack and Joe Kennedy, sons of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, and by Loring Reed of Marion.”¹³ Joe Jr.’s biographer maintains that the Kennedy role in that victory was overstated, but in 1940 the sailing team’s captain, James Rousmaniere, reporting on the class of 1940’s nautical victories, credited Jack and Reed as two from that class who “sailed Harvard to a victory” in 1938.

A point missing from almost every account of that race is the fact that the Kennedys had a competitive advantage. That year the race was held at the Wianno Yacht Club in the same unique Nantucket Sound waters Joe and Jack had spent years mastering. Moreover, the one-design boat chosen for the competition was the Wianno Senior.¹⁴

~ Jack’s other athletic achievement at Harvard was, unsurprisingly, in another water sport. All those Cape swimming lessons—all that experience under sail with crew so often jumping over the rail—made Jack an excellent swimmer. For the Harvard swim team he mastered the backstroke and as a freshman helped his team beat Dartmouth in the three-hundred-yard relay. His coach called him “a fine kid, frail and not too strong, but always giving it everything he had.” As had happened so often in the past, illness interfered in 1937, just before a big Yale meet. A friend helped him sneak out of the infirmary to practice his backstroke a few times, but his determination this time was insufficient to contribute to a win.15

~ Joe, Jack, and Kathleen were launched toward college and adulthood from the idyllic settings of New England boarding schools and Cape seaside summers. The younger children came of age in more worldly settings and then in wartime. Joe Sr.’s well-chosen investments spared them from personal experience of the Depression, but his involvement in politics and his support of President Franklin Roosevelt gave the children personal exposure to the political turmoil arising in Europe. In 1938 President Roosevelt appointed Joe Sr. U.S. ambassador to the Court of Saint James. That spring Rose, eighteen-year-old Kick, and the four youngest children joined their father in London. Kick commenced studies at Queen’s College in London, while Joe and Jack remained at Harvard for a few weeks more. Joe graduated in June, and Jack traveled to London for the summer to work with his father in the U.S. Embassy, giving him an opportunity to experience the kind of intensely vibrant social life that older children of an ambassador are privy to. Back home, the family apparently let friends race Victura. The Hyannis Port Yacht Club team beat Wianno, with Victura winning both the day’s races, skippered by “F. Syme” in the morning competition, and “J. Whitehead” in the afternoon.¹⁶

Members of the family spent those prewar years traveling between London, the continent, New York, and Massachusetts. Joe, Jack, and Kick were all single and highly eligible, achieving celebrity status as the children of the American ambassador at a time when much world attention was on London and the spreading war in Europe. Five years apart in age, the three were old enough to go out on dates. They watched out for one another and experienced popularity and the gaiety of the London social scene, all under a darkening war cloud and the distant sound of jackboots in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. Later recalling the summer of 1938, Jack wrote, “You had the feeling of an era ending, and everyone had a very good time at the end.”17

In the fall of 1938 Jack took extra courses at Harvard so he could take a semester’s leave in the spring to tour European capitals and conduct research for his honor’s thesis. That trip apparently hastened the end of one of his first serious romantic relationships, with Francis Ann Cannon of the prominent textile family. As he departed on the SS Queen Mary, he received from her a telegram dated February 25, 1939: “GREAT GOLDEN TEARS TOO PLENTIFUL FOR VERY FAMOUS LAST WORDS. CAN ONLY SAY STAY WAY FROM THE HAY. GOODBYE DARLING. I LOVE YOU. FRANCES ANN.”¹⁸ Just fourteen months later Jack was a guest at her wedding to John Hersey, a twenty-six-year-old journalist whose path would soon cross Jack’s again. Hersey was on his way toward developing a groundbreaking new form of journalism, writing nonfiction that employs the story-telling techniques of a novelist.

Jack’s itinerary included Danzig, Warsaw, Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, Turkey, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, and Athens, visits made especially fruitful by the access his father gained for him with diplomats and other government officials. His travels extended in the summer of 1939, bringing him to England, France, Germany, Italy and even Nazioccupied Prague, a front-row seat to the great unfolding drama of the twentieth century. Despite the seriousness of the times, he had an extraordinary social life along the way.

During that same summer Joe Jr. and Kick visited Spain. “It wasn’t until the summer of ’39,” Kick wrote, “when he took me on a trip to Spain three months after the end of the Civil War that he became aware of me as a companion as well as a sister. What fun we had! I remember thinking then of how brave Joe was when different Spaniards told me how he, the only American there, used to walk the streets during the horrible, bloody days of the siege of Madrid.”¹⁹

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and the young Kennedys would travel no more on the continent. Britain declared war, and Joe Jr., Jack, and Kick accompanied their parents to watch Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain address Parliament to outline his nation’s declaration of war on Germany. Joe Sr. called President Roosevelt and said, “It’s the end of the world . . . the end of everything.”20

Jack returned to Harvard for his final year and for the completion of his honor’s thesis, heavily armed with research made possible by his father. His thesis came to 148 pages and had the title, “Appeasement at Munich,” exploring the roots of England’s inability to avoid another war so soon after the first Great War. His paper showed how England’s democratic institutions may have slowed the country’s response to Hitler. Harvard faculty judged it very good—not great—but Jack was nonetheless convinced to turn it into a book. Academics were judging scholarship, not marketability, and Jack could create a book on a timely topic of great worry to Americans, written by the son of the ambassador in the middle of everything. With editing, it became Why England Slept, brashly invoking Winston Churchill’s book of two years earlier, While England Slept. Jack went on the road to promote it on radio and in newspapers, and it became a bestseller from an author just twenty-three years old.

Timely it was. In May 328,000 British and French troops were miraculously evacuated from the French port of Dunkirk, after being encircled by Germans. In June Churchill gave one of the century’s great speeches: “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”²¹ Paris fell to the Nazis a few days later.

In Hyannis Port, the summer of 1940 was, at least on the surface, back to normal. The family had spent the previous summer in England and Europe. Much of the family, except for Joe Sr., was back in Hyannis Port, including Joe Jr., Jack, and Kick. Joe Jr. launched his long-contemplated political career, winning a delegate’s seat in the 1940 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Those immediate prewar summers at the Cape were the start of another phase that would distinguish the Kennedys—the love affair news photographers developed for the imagery of the Kennedys at play. It is hard to underestimate the role that Life magazine had in shaping the Kennedy image, more than once with Victura as a prop. One Life photographer visiting Hyannis Port then was Alfred Eisenstaedt, arguably the greatest news photographer of all time. He had already photographed Hitler meeting Mussolini in 1934 and captured Joseph Goebbels hauntingly scowling at Eisenstaedt’s lens in 1933 after Goebbels learned the photographer was a Jew. Eisenstaedt went on to create famous images of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and, most memorably, of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. In 1940, out on the water of Nantucket Sound, Eisenstaedt stood on the bow of Victura so he could point his Leica toward the stern and focus on Ambassador Kennedy’s handsome family. Joe Jr. was at the helm, with Bobby holding the mainsheet and Rose, with a scarf on her head, sitting to Joe Jr.’s right. With them were three sisters and Ted in the midst of his young chubby phase.

Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen, at that time so full of promise and already accomplishing extraordinary things, all high on pedestals from the perspective of their younger siblings, have been described more than once as the “Golden Trio.” One visitor that summer was in awe:

I was fascinated by them. Jack was autographing copies of Why England Slept while Grandfather Fitzgerald was reading to him a political story from a newspaper. Young Joe was telling them something that happened to him in Russia. Mrs. Kennedy was talking on the phone with Cardinal Spellman. A tall and very attractive girl in a sweat shirt and dungarees turned out to be Pat, who was describing how a German Messerschmitt plane had crashed near her father’s house outside London. Bobby was trying to get everybody to play charades. The next thing I knew all of us were choosing up sides for touch football and Kathleen was calling the plays in the huddle for the team I was on. There was something doing every minute. The conversation at the dinner table was wonderful, lively and entertaining, ranging from the war and Washington politics to books, sports and show business.22

Joe Sr. returned from London in October 1940 with an air-raid siren. He would use it at Hyannis Port, he said, as a signal to bring the children in for dinner from their sailboats in the Sound.²³

~ In July of a summer not long before the war, before Joe Sr. became ambassador, a Boston newspaper gave an account of an oddity concerning Victura. The boat’s ownership was attributed to Joe Jr. rather than to Jack, perhaps because Joe was so clearly the leader of that generation of Kennedys.

OSTERVILLE, July 11—During the freak storm early today a bolt of lightning split the mast and drilled a hole through the side of the Wianno Class sloop Victura owned by Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., son of the ex–Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who summers at Hyannisport. The yacht was hauled upon the ways for repairs this afternoon.24