Joe Kennedy finally met with President Roosevelt in October 1944, and was “shocked beyond words” when he saw the president’s physical deterioration. When he was asked to make a speech endorsing the president in the upcoming election that November, Joe’s response was uncharacteristically terse and laden with sorrow: “With one son in the hospital, one son dead, and my son-in-law killed… I don’t think it would be very helpful.”

The war ended on August 14, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that Japan had surrendered. By then Joe Kennedy was in semi-retirement, occasionally returning to public service, such as in September 1945, when Governor Maurice Tobin of Massachusetts invited Joe to become the “chairman of a commission to study the establishment of a state department of commerce,” to help rejuvenate the state’s economy.

As a private citizen, Joe founded the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in 1946 in memory of his late son, which in the beginning was created for the purpose of providing “relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm.” Jack served as the first president of the foundation.

After Joe Jr.’s death, Jack channeled his grief for his brother by collecting and editing a series of essays written by individuals who had known Joe Jr. during his lifetime. Privately printed in the spring of 1945, As We Remember Joe was Jack’s loving tribute to his older brother. In addition to editing the memorial book, Jack was a Hearst correspondent at the United Nations conference in San Francisco during the spring of 1945 and then returned to Great Britain for the first time since 1939 to report on the British elections. He also traveled to France, Germany, and Ireland, where he met Irish Prime Minister Éamon de Valera, with whom he struck up a friendship that lasted the rest of Jack’s life. Still later, in July 1945, James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, invited Jack to accompany him to the Potsdam Conference in Berlin, Germany. At the time, Forrestal was interested in recruiting Jack for a position with the Navy Department. However, Jack had other ideas in regards to his future.

On April 22, 1946, Jack declared his candidacy for the Massachusetts Eleventh Congressional District, a seat once held by his grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. The whole Kennedy family supported Jack in his endeavor. Rose made campaign speeches on Jack’s behalf throughout the eleventh district, and as a lifelong campaigner and a Gold Star Mother, she was instrumental in his success. Kennedy strategist Dave Powers wrote that “with the double-barreled name Fitzgerald and Kennedy she was better known than any in that 11th Congressional District… In 1946, she had a greater understanding of precinct politics than anyone in our organization.” When Rose would finish speaking on the campaign trail, Powers noted, “she got a standing ovation.”

Bobby greets his father aboard the USS Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., April 12, 1946.

Eunice, Pat, Bobby, and Jean worked in the campaign office and helped organize house parties where the constituents of the eleventh district could have an opportunity to meet and speak with Jack. Kick, who had remained in England after her husband’s death, provided moral support from afar as did Teddy, who was then enrolled at Milton Academy in Massachusetts.

On June 19, 1946, the front page of the Boston Daily Globe declared, kennedy tops primary field for congress. Jack won the Democratic nomination and then went on to defeat his Republican rival by a three-to-one margin. At age twenty-nine, Jack had reclaimed the Eleventh Congressional District seat that his grandfather, Honey Fitz, had held from 1895 to 1901, fortifying the connection to Boston that the family had never left behind, despite its sojourns around the world. Jack’s decisive win in the November 1946 election began the next chapter in the Kennedy family history.