AS EXPECTED, ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, HITLER INVADED Poland. Joe and Rose, still planning the family’s departure, were at the US ambassador’s Hertfordshire home. They left on Sunday morning for London, where Rose attended Mass, while Joe hurried to the embassy and listened to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s radio broadcast announcing that Britain was now at war. Ambassador Kennedy confided to his diary, “I almost cried. I had participated very closely in this struggle and I saw my hopes crash too.” Rose’s car arrived from church just as air-raid sirens began to wail. Joe ordered Joe Jr. and Jack to escort their mother across the street to the basement of Molyneux, Rose’s favorite couturier. Fortunately, no bombs landed on London. Not recognizing the pun, Joe called the air raid a “dress rehearsal.”1
Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kick set out on foot toward Westminster to witness the House of Commons’ war declaration. Photographers captured a compelling portrait of the three Kennedy offspring: Joe and Jack handsomely attired in double-breasted suits, Kick in a smart black dress and hat, her pearls swinging to one side; the confident trio seems to stride off the page even seven decades later. Rose, however, suddenly looked all of her forty-nine years of age as she marched to Parliament. The sort of photo she detested, catching her in a bad pose, reveals her vulnerability. Her eyes are askew; the lace collar and cuffs of her dark suit seem matronly.2
“Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins,” Neville Chamberlain confessed before the Commons.3 “My heart sank, of course, and my whole world was shattered …,” Rose remembered.4 She felt particularly distraught for the elderly prime minister whom she so admired and who she thought had spared the world from war in 1938. He and her husband had earned considerable enmity for their “appeasement” of the Germans. Now their best efforts to avoid war had come to nothing. In fact, worse than nothing; their policy of placating Hitler only emboldened him. Rose defended her husband, writing later that he was one of many statesmen who urged a peaceful solution to Hitler’s aggression. She cited Joe’s concerns about the United States’ unpreparedness for war. He had, after all, secret knowledge of American naval resources from his tenure at the US Maritime Commission.5 “Plus there was a great deal of anti-war sentiment in [the United States], and he didn’t think it was right to promise help [to Britain] … when he knew a lot of people in this country felt the way they did.…”6
The British government urged parents to evacuate their children from London in case Germany bombed the city. Planning the Kennedys’ departure, a nightmare scenario haunted Joe. On September 3 a German U-boat had torpedoed the British liner Athenia, bound for Canada with three hundred US citizens aboard. Though rescue efforts minimized the loss of life, Joe worked feverishly to book varied conveyances for his family, so that a German submarine attack on one ship wouldn’t decimate the Kennedys. Rose, Kathleen, Eunice, and Bobby returned on the jam-packed American SS Washington. Joe Jr. sailed on Britain’s Mauretania; Jack flew on the new Pan American Airways Yankee Clipper; Jean, Teddy, and Pat sailed with Miss Dunn, the governess, aboard the United States. By the end of the month, all but two of the Kennedys (Joe Sr. and Rosemary) were safely on American soil.
Rose and Joe thought it best for Rosemary to remain in England. She had been vacationing at Belmont House, a Catholic abbey, with her aide, Dorothy Gibbs. Located in Hereford, near the Welsh border, they were far away from danger. Yet war news reverberated even in Rosemary’s cosseted world. “How is the situation coming along. How do you think about the war,” she asked Joe.7 On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, September 13, 1939, Rosemary wrote in her childlike printing and elementary narrative to her father, asking if she would be returning to the States or would study “in Montessori” at Hertfordshire’s Boxmoor, with Mother Isabel.8
The Kennedys continued to perpetuate their wishful thinking, with the media and Rosemary herself, that she was taking vocational training to teach young children.9 So little was understood about mental retardation at the time that the family had always hoped Rosemary could lead a productive life to the extent her abilities allowed. In that desire they actually foreshadowed modern theories of promoting meaningful lives for the disabled. In sometimes thinking that Rosemary wasn’t trying hard enough, however, whether it was in her studies or maintaining her weight, Joe and Rose revealed a misunderstanding of her condition.
Joe, who for so many years had happily pursued his business and political careers away from his family, discovered that forced wartime solitude was less desirable. “Now darling, as to me,” Joe wrote tenderly to Rose,
[w]ith all of the family safe in America I have no worries. I will miss you terribly but that can’t be helped. With the state of the world I doubt if I could be happy in business as long as I had any money to live on and support my family.… Get the children set in a way you will be happy and then take it easy.… Well, darling, drop me a line and tell me all the news, there ought to be a few laughs over there and remember you’re still the most attractive woman in the world. All my love, always, Joe.10
Rose encouraged him to continue writing, in addition to his transatlantic phone calls. The sound of his voice soothed her. If he couldn’t travel home, she intended to go back to London.11 Perhaps because of the distance between them, and Joe’s proximity to danger, the couple’s letters became noticeably more loving.
Meanwhile, the Kennedy offspring scattered to their various educational institutions. Joe Jr. started law school at Harvard, where Jack returned to complete his undergraduate degree and write his senior thesis on Britain’s failure to prepare for war, based on research he had gathered during his six months in Europe. In his Winthrop House suite he placed the Hal Phyfe portrait of Rose, looking beautiful but stern, on the bureau. Kathleen enrolled at Finch, a junior college, and Eunice at her mother’s alma mater, Manhattanville College, both in New York. Bobby headed for St. Paul’s, an Episcopalian prep school in New Hampshire, where a Harvard classmate of his father was rector. After only a few weeks, though, Bobby transferred to Portsmouth Priory, a Catholic school in Rhode Island. Rose preferred it, and Joe assured her from England, “Whatever you do will turn out OK, so don’t worry.”12 Pat, Jean, and Teddy stayed with Rose in Bronxville; the girls returned to Maplehurst Convent, and Teddy enrolled in Lawrence Park Country Day School.
Rose settled into her sedate post-London life, relaxing in the garden, listening to the radio, playing golf, visiting the dentist, and shopping. Unlike her frenetic days as ambassadress, “I seem to have no desire to go to the theater or run around.”13 When she did go to a play, Rose became the object of autograph seekers. Occasionally, she spoke to women’s groups about her “experiences as wife-hostess-consort of the American ambassador.” Eunice and her mother traveled to Richmond, Virginia, in late September 1939, where Rose “made two marvelous speeches,” according to her daughter. Rose had to learn, however, to avoid errors arising from her elite status, such as declaring, “Of course, you’re all familiar with Windsor Castle.…” That presumptuous introduction to the story of her weekends with the royals prompted one women in a Boston Irish Catholic audience to stage whisper, “What does she mean, ‘We’re all familiar with Windsor Castle!’”14 Such lessons about how to relate to the average woman would serve her well in future campaigns.
Joe decided that Rosemary should attend Boxmoor in Hertfordshire and continue working under Mother Isabel in a Montessori course. His daughter’s presence north of London seemed to comfort him. “I told Rose[mary] on the phone,” Joe wrote to Rose, “[that] she was going to be the one to keep me company, and as this house [also in Hertfordshire] is very handy to her new school, I would invite some of her girl friends and herself down to spend every other weekend with me and I would have a picture show at the house. That tickled her no end. So we will see how that works out. I think I will have the Moores stay over … until I see how serious this bombing turns out and then if it gets real bad they can take her home. And in the meantime the Moores can take Rose[mary] out every once in a while and between us all she will be really happy and enjoy herself,” Ambassador Kennedy tried to reassure his wife. Although he supervised her care, Rose continued to worry about the small details of her daughter’s health, especially her exercise regimen.15
Miss Gibbs thanked Ambassador Kennedy for “Rosemary’s beautiful 21st birthday” presents, which the nuns had presented her at breakfast and lunch, “so again there was fresh excitement.” She wanted to let Joe know that his daughter was “still perfectly happy and very, very well.… Everyone clapped her tremendously and she looked so very charming.” Gibbs bolstered the Kennedys’ hope for a miracle and prayed, “Please God that some day He will grant you all the joy of perfect healing for her.”16 But Joe knew that Rosemary was “not 100% of course.…”17
By October the ambassador was convinced that he had made the correct decision, to let Rosemary remain abroad. Spending weekends with her, Joe and Mary Moore both remarked on Rosemary’s transformation in mind, body, and spirit. She looked “better than she ever did in her life,” seemed completely happy to be working with Mother Isabel, and was relaxed. Her time with Joe at the ambassador’s country home, with no mother or siblings to intervene, made her feel as though she was the “boss.” What a boost to her self-esteem after her frustrations over never feeling independent. “Mother says I am such a comfort to you,” Rosemary reported to her dad. She so wanted to please him. “Sorry. to think that I am fat you.think—” Rosemary wrote to Joe in her fractured syntax. She didn’t seem to miss her family but loved “to get letters from the children telling her how lucky she is to be over here, (tell them to keep writing that way),” Joe urged Rose.18
The Kennedys always searched for ways to make Rosemary feel special in a clan of celebrated children. Letting her remain in England, which Rosemary desperately wanted to do, gave her a sense of privilege. “I feel honor because you chose me to stay,” wrote Rosemary to her father. She didn’t have to compete with her siblings for attention, and Rosemary thought they were “wild” with envy.19 “She is much happier when she sees the children just casually,” Joe concluded. “For everyone[’s] peace of mind, particularly hers, she shouldn’t go on vacation or anything else with them. It certainly isn’t a hardship when everyone, especially Rose[mary] is 1,000 times better off.” Looking to the future, Joe speculated, “I’m not sure she isn’t better staying over here indefinitely with all of us making our regular trips, as we will be doing, and seeing her then. I have given her a lot of time and thought and I’m convinced that’s the answer. She must never be at home for her sake as well as everyone’s else.”20
Ambassador Kennedy thought he had discovered the perfect solution to Rosemary’s domestic disruptions, her upset over competition with active siblings, and her potential embarrassment for the family if the truth about her condition found its way into the press. Even as late as the 1950s, “[m]ental retardation was viewed as a hopeless, shameful disease, and those afflicted with it were shunned from sight as soon as possible,” writes historian Edward Shorter.21 The Kennedys had already resisted prevailing norms by giving Rosemary a home life, as well as stimulating opportunities beyond it. Keeping her active, happy, and fulfilled in the English countryside, far away from prying British and American media, seemed to be the answer. Rose’s response to Joe’s strategy remains unclear. Perhaps she and Joe spoke of it by phone, but her surviving letters don’t.
Far from his family and facing professional uncertainty as his differences with Roosevelt over the war became more pronounced, Joe reached out to his spouse: “I am sick of everybody [in England] and so I’m alone tonight by choice. It’s funny that nobody in the world can be with me very long without boring me to death. I just can’t help it. You are the only individual in the world that I love more every day. I’m sorry I’m not there for our 25th [anniversary;] to say they have been great years is [an] understatement. They’ve been the happy years that poets write about. I would like to live every day of them over again with you, but wouldn’t want to live one more without you. So Darling, we’ll celebrate when I get home. I love you devotedly. This job without you is comparable with a street cleaner’s at home.” In a funk, he told Rose, “I’m convinced more than ever that you, not I, made the 25 years a success.”22
Joe rejoined his family for Christmas 1939, staying for several months in the States. Some American reporters still touted him as a potential 1940 presidential nominee. Publicly, Joe always claimed no interest, and Rose maintained that she and her husband never really discussed the possibility. In fact, she dismissed the idea years later: “I don’t remember very much about that. The job he really wanted was secretary of the treasury, which he would have enjoyed. I know he didn’t respond to making speeches … and a lot of things connected with the presidency. They didn’t appeal to him as much as they did to Jack or my father, for instance. The financial situation all over the world, finances of the United States, that was more down his alley.… I never heard the presidential move talked about very much.”23
HEADING BACK TO England by way of Italy and France in March 1940, Joe spent most of the voyage in bed with a fever. He reported to Rose that Clare Boothe Luce was aboard, bound for Europe to gather material about the war for a Life magazine feature, which eventually became the book Europe in the Spring. According to Clare’s biographer, Sylvia Morris, Joe may have used a new country getaway, in Windsor, loaned to him by US car mogul Horace Dodge, for trysts with Boothe Luce.24 This was Joe’s womanizing modus operandi: to be open about his “friendships”; even if Rose knew of his serial philandering, she could never divorce him.
While telling Rose, “I just need my family,” he discouraged them from returning.25 His expressed rationale was that they would be offended by the Brits’ anti-Americanism, prompted by the United States’ neutrality. Yet by April 1940 he missed Rose so much that he reevaluated his position on her visit. “[Y]ou could stop off in Paris for a few days before coming over to London,” he suggested. Suffering from an upset “tummy,” he bemoaned eating the “wrong things” in Paris. “Well, my darling I guess it’s right [that] nothing is perfect in this life and I just don’t like being so completely away from you. Yet knowing myself as I do when I’ve been home 6 months I’ll want to get going again. Maybe old age and a bad stomach will change me. I don’t know. I guess I’m a restless soul: Some people call it ambition. I guess I’m just nuts! Nevertheless, I love you so much. Joe.”26 At age fifty-one, the ambassador seemed to be suffering a delayed midlife crisis over his uncertain future.27
Rosemary, too, worried about her future, comprehending that her English adventure might be truncated because of the war. “I am dreadfully sorry about leaving. I will cry a lot,” she told her father.28 That was the wrong admission. Kennedys were raised under Joe’s edict, “There’ll be no crying in this house.” Rose, too, usually displayed epic restraint, holding back tears in front of her family or household staff. Telling Joe about her tearfulness would earn Rosemary no sympathy. Joe’s ban had “the force of moral law,” according to Teddy. “[A]ll of us absorbed its import and molded our behavior to honor it.… To understand the profound authority of this charge to us is to understand much about my family.”29
Rose searched for some way to see Joe, and bring Rosemary home, in May 1940. Trying to organize affairs in Bronxville while preparing the Kennedys’ summer home at Hyannis was burdensome. Edward Moore, always a help with the children and logistics, remained in England with Rosemary. The children’s governess had left, Nurse Hennessey had fallen ill, and Rose’s secretary had taken another position. Even so, Rose prepared to leave for England on May 10, the very day the Battle of France began, forcing the British retreat to Dunkirk’s beaches. “It seemed like taking too many chances. I am still hoping I may go a little later, which will be better for me,” she informed Joe.30 Years later, Rose remembered this frightening time: “[W]e decided it was too dangerous because, if both of us were together in London and were bombed, it would have left nine orphans under the age of 25.”31
“I’m heartbroken,” Ambassador Kennedy replied to Rose’s news, “but you just couldn’t be here.” As for the Nazi offensive on the Western Front, “I think the jig is up,” Joe reported. “The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the Allies. I’m planning to get Rose[mary] and the Moores out either to Ireland or Lisbon. We will be in for a terrific bombing pretty soon and I’ll do better if I just have myself to look after. The English will fight to the end but I don’t think they can stand up to the bombing indefinitely.” Joe had consistently given Britain long odds against Germany. He predicted a “dictated peace” in which the Nazis would get the British Navy, “and we will find ourselves in a terrible mess. My God how right I’ve been on my predictions. I wish I’d been wrong.”32 After cancelling her trip to England, Rose departed for West Virginia’s Greenbrier Inn, where she and Joe had spent part of their 1914 honeymoon.
On June 1, 1940, Rose told Joe that she wished he had left with Rosemary and the Moores the previous week.
I am hoping and praying that somehow or other, I shall see you soon. I suppose we are infinitely better off than thousands of other people. I do hope your tummie [sic] is not too awful—but of all places to be! There seems not much more to be said. It was such a wonderful experience, and as I said to the children … so few youngsters their age have seen the old Europe. But you are so important to me—my darling—so do take care of yourself the best way you can & we shall just keep on praying.
The short note crystallized Rose’s essence. As the European war crept closer to her home and hearth, she continued to focus on the details of her husband’s health and her children’s worldly opportunities, while placing her larger concerns in God’s hands. “I believe you said you had got to church all right. At this time of my life there need be no mental reservations,” Rose wrote to Joe.33
Ambassador Kennedy missed Jack’s 1940 Harvard graduation, but Rose, Eunice, Bobby, Rosemary, and Kathleen attended. Jack’s irresponsibility in failing to plan the family’s visit rankled his mother, but she was proud of his looks: “He was really very handsome in his cap and gown as he had a tan which made him look healthy and he has got a wonderful smile.”34 The once indifferent student had earned magna cum laude on his thesis, “Appeasement at Munich,” allowing him to graduate cum laude. With his father’s help, Jack had it published as a book, Why England Slept. Displaying his wry humor, he inscribed Rose’s copy: “To Mrs. K. Who in spite of her many houses and many children manages to retain that charm which causes us to echo John F. Fitzgerald’s trumpet, ‘Get a girl like your mother!’ Jack.”35 His inscription to the Kennedys’ longtime governess was equally witty: “To Kiko who was always going to ‘tell my father the moment he stepped into the house’—but never did!—With love from ‘that bold stump’—Jack Kennedy.”36 JFK biographers who suspect a distant relationship between Rose and Jack could cite “With love,” in his inscription to Kiko and its absence in his mother’s copy.37
WITH ROSEMARY BACK in the States, Edward Moore began investigating new places for her to study and receive supervision. An Assumption convent outside Philadelphia seemed to be the perfect spot. Its facilities and surroundings were more commodious than those at Noroton, the Sacred Heart school in Connecticut that Kathleen and Eunice attended. Several Assumption nuns had connections to the sisters Rosemary loved in England. Moore cryptically suggested that “Miss Dunn [the Kennedys’ governess] … could discuss some of the more intimate matters [about Rosemary] with the Reverend Mother.…”38 As Rosemary moved into adulthood, desiring more freedom and male companionship, her parents worried for her safety. They sent her to Camp Fernwood, in the Berkshires, for the summer of 1940, where she served as a junior counselor, teaching arts and crafts to young children.39
For the first time, Joe saw Rosemary as an adult and used more mature language in correspondence:
It looks to me like all the rest of the Kennedys are still going to school, including the boys, while my eldest daughter is out working. I … have talked to Mother Isabel on the telephone and she is very anxious to have the war over soon so that you will be able to come back and take up your duties with her.… Mother Isabel is hoping that while you are waiting to come back to England to work with her, you will be going to the Assumption Convent in Philadelphia to continue your work, because she is very anxious to have you continue with the Assumption nuns since the other [Kennedy] girls are with Sacred Heart [nuns].… Give my love to all and keep right on working and setting a good example for your brothers and sisters.40
Even with Nazi bombs raining down on Britain, Joe took time to encourage Rosemary to further her schooling “so that you may be able to do that teaching that you hope to do when you are over here.” The next week he cabled, “You see, darling, with all the bombs I couldn’t forget your birthday. My love to my oldest daughter and many happy returns.”41 Ultimately, the Kennedys decided to send Rosemary to St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts in Washington to practice some of the basic teaching skills she had learned in England.
Joe’s London life grew increasingly precarious. Dodging Luftwaffe bombs, marginalized by Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s new Conservative government, “thoroughly disgusted” with FDR’s approach to the war, and missing his family, Joe longed to leave. He kept Rose apprised of his medical condition, assuring her that he felt amazingly well and had even regained weight lost under stress. He was sticking to his bland diet and had stopped taking belladonna, a plant-based drug prescribed for peptic ulcers. Only “occasionally” did he have to take an antispasmodic for gastrointestinal distress. Joe also found time for recreation, attending Clare Boothe Luce’s new play, Margin for Error. On entering the theater, he received a round of applause from the British audience. Yet he knew that his popularity was fleeting at home and abroad. He wished he could simply depart. Most other American ambassadors in Europe had already gone. “[B]ut I don’t want to do anything that would reflect [poorly] on the family,” Joe reasoned. “After all that is why we went into this [ambassadorship], and I don’t want to spoil it.…”42
For Joe’s fifty-second birthday, Rose sent a recording of the children’s musical greetings. He reported playing “it at least twenty times already.… And incidentally your piano touch was never better.” German bombing raids intensified. One night a bomb hit 250 yards from his Windsor retreat, and the embassy had a closer call. From the roof of the US chancery, Joe could see St. Paul’s Cathedral dome silhouetted against the burning sky. He shared his fatalism with Rose: “I don’t think anything is going to happen to me, and for that reason it doesn’t worry me the slightest bit.” What did she think, he asked: should he stay at his dangerous post or come home?43
As the 1940 presidential election approached, and Roosevelt finally tossed his fedora in the ring for an unprecedented third term, Rose wrote an uncharacteristically political letter to her husband after consulting with his friend and attorney John Burns. Rose recognized that the president wanted to keep Joe in England, where his “explosive, defeatist point of view” would be less likely to “upset” FDR’s reelection. Rose offered to go “to the W[hite] H[ouse] as a wife, say I am worried about your health, think you have done enough, guarantee to chloroform you until after the election and say you should be brought home.”44
Finally, in mid-October 1940, FDR summoned Joe home for “some relief” and to learn his “last reactions with regard to the war in England.”45 Roosevelt invited him and Rose to spend the night at the White House, and they gathered for drinks in the president’s study along with his secretary, Missy LeHand, and South Carolina senator Jimmy Byrnes and his wife. The president wielded his cocktail shaker and spoke informally, but Rose thought he looked pale and had a “habit of nervously snapping his eyes.”46
After libations, the small party had a simple supper of scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, and rice pudding. Perhaps the White House chef knew of the Kennedys’ preference for bland meals. Politics was on the agenda. Byrnes suggested that Joe deliver a radio address supporting FDR’s bid for an unprecedented third term. At first Joe balked, complaining about how the administration had mistreated him. “The president worked very hard on Rose, whom I suspect he had come down [to Washington] because of her great influence on me,” Joe thought.47 FDR told her flattering stories about Honey Fitz. Rose recognized the manipulation, but she couldn’t resist Roosevelt’s charm. Both Joe and Rose agreed to endorse the president on radio just before the election.48
Using his own money to buy airtime on 114 CBS radio affiliates, Ambassador Kennedy expressed his pessimism about the European war. He and his wife had “given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world. The kind of America that they and their children will inherit is of grave concern to us all. In light of these considerations, I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be reelected President of the United States.”49
Rose’s brief radio endorsement of the president started where Joe’s had ended:
I am the mother of nine children. Four are boys, Joe, Jack, Bobby, and Ted. I love those boys, although I have no monopoly on motherhood; I do have a big share of it. Like all of you other American mothers, I want to vote for a president, who will keep your boys and mine out of war, and who will make this country so strong in its defense, that never again will I have to see gas masks on my children, as I did in London. I shall never forget war torn London and England and the courage and spirit of its people. Nor will I forget the gallantry of those English lads. American youth, too, has devotion and gallantry and bravery. It, too, is entitled to the best defense and training in the world. Therefore, on next Tuesday I feel I have a solemn duty to my sons and to all the sons of all the mothers of America to vote for Franklin Roosevelt and the road to peace.50
Rose’s public image over the past two years had been entwined with her nine children. Now she and her husband made them the centerpiece of a “family values” argument to reelect FDR. Roosevelt embraced the theme, proclaiming at a pre-election Boston Garden rally, attended by Honey Fitz and Jack, “Your boys will not be sent into any foreign wars.”51
Rose’s files are silent about who wrote her endorsement, but it appears that she deleted its last few lines from her radio broadcast: “It is impossible for me to understand all of the issues of the campaign. I do feel confidence in Mr. Roosevelt because of his long experience and because of the valiant efforts already launched for our defense.”52 Perhaps she thought the first sentence offensive to her and other women. She was no Eleanor Roosevelt, deeply immersed in public policy, but she understood issues. And she certainly possessed a genetic feel for politics.
Joe submitted his resignation to President Roosevelt a day after the election, but FDR asked him to keep the ambassadorial title until the administration named his successor. As of February 1941, Joe’s tenure at the Court of St. James’s officially ended. The war years would stand in stark contrast to heady weekends at Windsor Castle, dinners with kings and queens, audiences with the pope, and Riviera family vacations. And through a self-inflicted wound, Joe Kennedy banished himself to the political wilderness for the rest of his life. Thinking that an interview with the Boston Globe was off the record, Kennedy opined, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here, too.”53 That quote, and several derogatory statements about Eleanor Roosevelt as well as the British cabinet, appeared on the Globe’s front page and made its way into the English press. Joe’s undiplomatic comments permanently relegated him to the political sidelines, where his wife joined him, at least for a while.
The sidelines turned out to be literal. At the 1941 Foreign Service football game in Miami, Mrs. Kennedy sat with hoi polloi.
[I]t seemed so strange to sit with the rank and file of Americans again. Every possible type of person was around me.… A woman well and expensively dressed in summer clothes with a couple of children was next to me, all of whom were vigorously eating peanuts. Behind me were a half a dozen football fans, clad in flashy sport coats who were shrieking … at anything and everything long before the game commenced.… Girls and women were talking loudly, calling back and forth, men were bandying bets back and forth about the players and the game.…54
Hardly the royal box at Wimbledon.
Another of Joe’s decisions further separated Rose and him from the centers of American political and social power. Joe no longer wanted to maintain three homes.55 He sold the Bronxville estate in late 1941. Henceforth, the Kennedys would live in Palm Beach from Christmas through Easter and at Hyannis Port from late spring through Thanksgiving. Rose left Bronxville feeling rather nostalgic, telling her children, “[Y]ou all grew up there very happily.…” But she was a pragmatist: “I am relieved too to have one less house to worry about; with none of you there, the house was no longer a necessity. So today I feel quite relieved and very free with nothing on my mind except the shades of blue for my Palm Beach trousseau.”56
Teddy suffered most as his parents followed the sun from Florida to Cape Cod and back. In the spring of 1941 Rose had decided to send him to boarding school although he was only nine, much younger than his three brothers had been when they went away to school. Because of his youth, Rose had Teddy join Bobby at Portsmouth Priory. It was an odd decision; the Rhode Island school started with seventh grade, four levels ahead of Teddy. Thus began Teddy’s academic odyssey that “did not prove to be happy, joyous years,” according to his memoir. All told, he attended nine schools prior to settling at Milton Academy, outside Boston, for high school. During these years, his cheerful disposition—for which his mother took credit—turned to loneliness and despair, often triggered by bullying and abuse at the hands of older students and dorm masters. Too ashamed to tell his mother, he rejoiced when she took him and Jean with her to Palm Beach each winter and enrolled them in day school there.57 Peripatetic Rose admitted years later that Teddy had changed schools “too much.”58 She had drawn the line at taking the children to California in the 1920s or to Washington in the 1930s, when Joe’s work took him away from Boston and New York. As noted previously, moving seven children to different doctors and orthodontists was her stated reason for not following; living separately from him also reduced her pregnancies. Now age fifty, however, Rose needed more rest, and she reduced her maternal duties by sending the youngest children away to school.
Rose struggled with a common parental tension. She had fond memories of early motherhood, but grown offspring in her home disrupted her preferred solitary routines. Yet she missed them after they departed. After their annual Palm Beach Christmas in 1940, she wrote,
Dear Children: We have missed you all very much since you left, although I must say while you were here it seemed a little more hectic than usual. When you all were little and I could regiment you and have you all come and leave at a certain time and at the same time, and when I was sure of what clothes you were going to wear and how you were going to have your hair cut (Kathleen) and what hat you were going to wear, it seemed to me much more simple. However, time marches on and I suppose I must get used to the new uncertainties and excitement.59
Now Rose faced her own midlife crisis, complicated by empty-nest syndrome as well as Rosemary’s struggle in adjusting to life after England. “She started to deteriorate,” Eunice explained years later, observing that Rosemary “was high strung and had quite a lot of temper tantrums all the time, and she had some epileptic attacks.” Doctors would rush to the house with injections to calm her. The family arrangements that Rose had made over twenty-one years for her retarded daughter were becoming unfeasible. Rose had spent considerable time with young Rosemary, but she also relied on Eunice, particularly, to help entertain her slower sister. “[S]he [would] say to me, ‘Will you play tennis with Rosemary?’ Eunice recalled. “She wasn’t very good, Rosemary, but I played tennis with her. Or [Mother] would say, ‘Would you take her sailing, racing?’ I was quite good at racing in those days so I handled a boat all right by myself, so I would take Rosemary. Then I’d tell my mother she did well on the boat and she was pleased.” Eunice emphasized, “Rosemary was never hidden away or anything. She was pushed right on. She would come with me.… And even though she was slow, she was always given every opportunity that everybody was given.”60 But now Rosemary was a woman of twenty-one, with a child’s mental capacity. Planning tennis or sailing outings simply wouldn’t solve Rosemary’s deterioration.
Until 1941 or so, the family tried to “jolly Rosemary along, and she laughed, she was always rather jolly, not that we weren’t terribly serious about her problem,” Eunice explained. “Like Jack would be told to take her to a dance, and he would take her and kid with [his friend] LeMoyne Billings, and they [would] take turns dancing with her. She’d come home at mid-night, and he’d go back to the dance.”61 “Why don’t other boys ask me to dance?” Rosemary would inquire from the time she was a teenager.62 Instead, she had to attend dances with her popular brother and his gay friend, who would then bring her home and return to the party without her. How frustrated would Rosemary have felt, after the excitement and semblance of independence during her life in England, to be patronized by her parents and siblings—no matter how well intentioned their efforts?
According to Billings, Rosemary “became aggressively unhappy, irritable,” even physically and verbally abusive upon returning from Britain. Of most concern to the family, she would wander away from caretakers, especially at night. As we have seen, since the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder, Rose had worried about the safety of her children. The possibility that men would take advantage of Rosemary added to Rose and Joe’s fears.63 As Catholics, they presumably wouldn’t have sterilized their daughter, a common procedure for the “feeble-minded.”
Rose’s pattern of removing herself from stress now returned in full force. In April 1941 she decided to explore South America. Distracting herself from the impending entrance of the United States into the war and worries over Rosemary, Rose prepared to leave for a five-week trip in two hemispheres that would require clothing for two different seasons. She and Eunice, who would accompany her, also had to receive vaccinations for smallpox and typhoid. “I must be a gypsy at heart,” Rose told Joe, “because I get such a thrill out of it all no matter how uncomfortable I may be—which was the case yesterday when I felt the reaction from my typhoid inoculation.”64
Thus began another of Rose’s anthropological observations about the people, clothing, food, topography, religion, and sights encountered on her travels. Yet Rose’s comments reveal more about her than about the people she observed. For instance, the Latin American passengers bidding farewell to their families on shore “were much more demonstrative and more unashamed of their tears,” so different from the Kennedys’ Yankee stoicism. The small ship compared poorly with the “trans-Atlantic deluxe steamers” that Rose preferred. She was pleased, however, when a Dominican priest on board told her that Argentina’s constitution required its president to be a Catholic. That “evened things up,” because in New York she had heard so often that a Catholic couldn’t become president of the United States.65
In Barbados, Rose and Eunice were surprised to see “colored and white children sitting together” at an Ursuline convent school. “The nun said the sisters took them because one could not discriminate and they seemed to get on quite happily together, the children making their own friends as they chose.… Was struck by the cleanliness of all the children. They looked so scrubbed and immaculate, and I blushed when I though of my little Teddy when he rushed to school some days.” She discovered several children saying their prayers. “I have seldom been so moved; to see that group of dark skinned, little faces, with those immense, trustful, gentle brown eyes raised in prayer, convinced me for all time that there must be angels with dark faces as well as light ones, although I have never thought of them before.”66
In Rio, Jack, who had left Stanford Business School after just one term, joined his mother and Eunice for a few days of sightseeing and took in the famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio and a funicular ride to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain. Yet, Rose concluded, “Not anything of special historical interest in South America compared with all the multitude of things in Europe and those monuments which there are mean little to us, since we are unacquainted with history while in England or Italy we are familiar with most of the landmarks through study and experience of our friends.”67 Eurocentric, to be sure, yet at least Rose now added Hispanic and indigenous cultures to her experiences.
Eunice and her mother pressed on to Buenos Aires, where Rose found the Argentines “not a well-proportioned, handsome, virile looking race.” They seemed “short, pudgy, and once they reach maturity, they seem to be heavy, coarse-looking, fat.” In contrast, she had thought the women in Rio “were quite chic and smart,” as in Biarritz or Cannes. After crossing the “dreary and bleak” Andes and spending a few days in Chile, they proceeded up the west coast of South America to Peru and Ecuador. When fog stranded them just outside Lima, Rose and Eunice explored a small village. “Never saw such poverty,” Rose wrote. “[C]hildren barefooted—dressed in dirty rags, living in shacks without roofs made of reeds, with goats and mules living alongside. Still they seemed happy.… They had small Indian faces—broad, brown and patient.” Rose’s determination never wavered, despite delays, snowy weather, and primitive airports. She displayed an adventurous streak that differentiated her from most women of her age and background. Rather than return by ship, Rose and Eunice caught a flight in Quito for the United States and went straight to Cape Cod “just in time to get almost the full benefit of a Cape Cod summer.”68
IN THE LAST few months before Pearl Harbor, the older Kennedy children scattered again. After two years at Harvard Law School, Joe Jr. headed to the US Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, for pilot training and to earn his officer’s commission.69 Ambassador Kennedy, pulling strings with an American naval attaché whom he had known in London, enabled Jack to bypass medical requirements and become a Navy ensign with an intelligence assignment in Washington. Rose could take pride that her “republican motherhood” had produced two sons now in service to their country. As for the girls, Kick served on the staff of the Washington Times-Herald, a position arranged by another of her father’s friends.70 She pined for her days in England and Billy Hartington, with whom she had fallen deeply in love. Eunice transferred to Stanford University in hopes that the warmer California weather would prove more healthful. Like her parents and Jack, Eunice suffered from digestive upsets and a tendency to lose weight.
That fall Joe Sr. made a decision that would haunt the Kennedys forever. He had heard of a new psychosurgical procedure, first used by Portuguese physician António Egas Moniz, that severed neural connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobes. The surgery, called a leucotomy (from the leucotome instrument used in the procedure), and, later, lobotomy, reportedly might relieve patients of psychiatric illnesses, especially “agitated depression.” By 1936 two American doctors, Walter Freeman and James Watts, began performing leucotomies, with alarmingly variable effects, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC. The American Medical Association warned in 1941 that mutilating a part of the brain by definition couldn’t “restore the person concerned to a wholly normal state.” Yet at the time no other medical governing body questioned the procedure. Moreover, Freeman, a neurologist and psychiatrist, and Watts, a neurosurgeon, never claimed that lobotomies would produce restorative results. They simply promoted it as the final resort for seemingly hopeless cases of mental illness. Pharmaceutical therapies were, of course, decades away. British neurosurgeons, typically more conservative than their American counterparts, began using the procedure in 1941.71
In the fall of that year Joe Kennedy, without Rose’s approval, subjected Rosemary to the psychosurgery hoping that it would provide a cure for her agitation and violent outbursts. It failed and undid all of the progress she had made with the family’s loving support and attention. Reduced by it to a childlike state, Rosemary now required constant custodial care. The one thing that Joe had vowed never to do—institutionalize Rosemary—he now had to force upon her. She disappeared from the family and, for most of the 1940s, lived at Craig House, a psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York. In 1949 Joe, with Boston Archbishop Richard Cushing’s guidance, quietly sent her to reside at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where nuns cared for her.72
The story about Rosemary that the Kennedys had offered while in England—that she would be a teacher—simply continued. When she disappeared from view, they told the press that she was continuing her studies. Such a secret could never be maintained in today’s ubiquitous media culture, but, amazingly, it worked in the 1940s and ’50s. More heartbreaking was Joe’s ban on visits with Rosemary. He told the family that she had to be institutionalized because they could no longer care for her. Even Rose couldn’t see her, he said, because Rosemary had to get used to her surroundings without disruptions from home.73
Only in 1962 did Eunice admit, in a Saturday Evening Post article on mental retardation, that her sister had been institutionalized twenty-one years earlier. No mention was made of the surgery.74 Dr. Moniz won a 1949 Nobel Prize for pioneering the procedure, but by 1955 it had fallen into disrepute. Twelve years after Eunice’s article, Rose publically acknowledged that Rosemary had undergone “a certain form of neurosurgery” for “tantrums, or rages” and “convulsive episodes.” She wrote that she and Joe had “brought into consultation the most eminent medical specialists,” who had recommended the operation. Rose didn’t elaborate, however, on her husband’s ultimate decision. Kennedy biographer Laurence Leamer believes that Rose had asked Kathleen to investigate the surgery and that they both decided it wasn’t appropriate for Rosemary.75 Comments to Doris Kearns Goodwin reveal Rose’s unvarnished feelings: “I will never forgive Joe for that awful operation he had performed on Rosemary. It is the only thing I have ever felt bitter towards him about.”76
Rose’s 1972 comments to Robert Coughlan, her memoirist, are also revealing. She described Rosemary’s having had “an accident … in which her brain was further damaged, and so [it] was found expedient and necessary, really better, for her to go to this home in Wisconsin where she is very well taken care of with the nuns of St. Coletta.” Coughlan gently pressed: “You don’t want to say anything about the accident.” “No,” Rose replied. “Her mind is gone completely.”77 When Coughlan followed up with Eunice several weeks later, she used the same term, “accident,” to describe the reason Rosemary had to be institutionalized. The Kennedy Library’s interview transcript blacked out Mrs. Shriver’s forty-year-old response and her reference to Rosemary’s “labadomy,” which, she said, doctors had recommended. Granting a scholar’s 2011 request, the library finally removed the redaction, allowing Eunice, now deceased, to confirm the surgery that ended any hope of Rosemary leading a productive life. “We couldn’t dream of letting her live alone; she couldn’t function at all in the outside world,” including “in a workshop,” Eunice had sadly explained.78
Not commenting directly about Joe’s decision to lobotomize Rosemary, but about his dominant role in the family, Rose explained in 1972 why she accepted her husband’s influence in a very traditional marriage:
I married a man who I felt made very good decisions. Who was almost infallible. My sons thought he was almost infallible. Because over the years his judgment was so perfect that what he foretold did happen. And in finance and in people and so I relied on that more or less, because I was brought up that way. Your husband worked hard, and he had a good many difficulties during his business day and when he came home he wanted to have comfort and peace and love and affection. He didn’t want to be bothered, and he didn’t want a cocky wife or a complaining wife. And I had all day to rest and enjoy myself outside, and, if he wanted to stay in or if he wanted to do something I was ready and expected that was my role. And as I said when the children were ill or I was ill and he was in California working [in the 1920s] I never told him.79
This obsequious posture, typical of many women in Rose’s era, would only have encouraged Joe to wield familial power without reservation. Moreover, although Rose typically kept track of the young children’s basic medical records and illnesses (through her famous card file), her husband clearly managed the more complex health issues as they matured. When Jack fell ill with mysterious gastrointestinal problems and a low blood count during college, Joe handled the physicians and supervised JFK’s care. He also helped Jack finesse his physical handicaps, including back injuries from football, to enter the Navy. No evidence from Rose exists, at least in written form, to indicate that she questioned Joe’s decisions to keep Rosemary in England or to remove her from most family gatherings and vacations. Moreover, Rose and her husband participated in efforts to protect one another from bad news. She didn’t even want to bother her husband when she gave birth to their children.
WHAT REMAINED OF Joe’s public life consisted primarily of commencement speeches, where he began to soften the anti-interventionist rhetoric that had cost him a future political career. Just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he wired FDR: “Name the Battle Post, I’m Yours to Command,” but the president offered nothing that appealed to the ex-ambassador.80
With Eunice studying sociology at Stanford, and the world at war, Rose began to explore the American West, reachable from Florida in less than a day by air. At age fifty-one, Rose told her children that the easier mode of travel “would be less tiring for me, as I seem to tire easily now.”81 In the spring of 1942 she fell in love with Palo Alto’s Spanish architecture, Stanford’s date palm trees, and northern California’s temperate climate. “I feel much peppier than in the South. It is also much less expensive than in N.Y.—so come the Revolution—I know just where to go,” she quipped. Always pursuing self-improvement, Rose attended courses with Eunice and began contemplating an autobiography: “I am thinking of a name for my memoirs and as [actress] Ilka Chase named hers Past Imperfect I thought mine might be Past Pluperfect.”82 The title, with its play on a verb tense, may have been an inside joke with her children, whose grammar she frequently corrected. But how absolutely essential that she described her life as “more than perfect; supremely accomplished; ideal,” according to pluperfect’s other denotation.83
During the war, as her children went their separate ways, Rose became, more than ever, the central family correspondent, writing round-robin letters to all of the Kennedys. Jack, now a best-selling author, could not help needling his mother over her famous efficiency: “I am saving [the letters] to publish—that style of yours will net us millions … it’s enough to make a man get down on his knees and thank God for the Dorchester High Latin School which gave you that very sound grammar basis which shines through every slightly mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive.” Knowing that his mother would want a medical report, even from a grown man in the US Navy, he closed, “My health is excellent—I look like hell, but my stomach is a thing of beauty—as are you, Ma,—and you, unlike my stomach—will be a joy forever.”84
Bobby, now sixteen, received special attention from his mother for earning poor grades, especially in Christian Doctrine. After all, why had she sent him to Catholic school except to learn about his religious faith? Rose also urged him to take dance lessons because they would boost his confidence, although he loathed them.85 Joe Jr., approaching his late twenties, received advice regarding his Lenten observance. He had told Honey Fitz that he planned to give up candy for the pre-Easter season of self-denial, but Mother thought that a bad idea: he had lost too much weight, it would put candy-makers out of work (according to the Catholic Church), and it would be better to do something positive, such as “say a Rosary occasionally.” If he had to abjure a treat, she suggested Coca-Cola: “[Y]ou know that I am thinking about you and always hoping that you are having the best possible break whether it is worldly or spiritual.”86 Young Joe wrote his mother faithfully, ending one letter, “There is nothing new in the girl situation, but I’m still hopin to find a gal like you.”87 Though using a teasing vernacular, both Joe Jr. and Jack demonstrated a gallant devotion to their mother that must have pleased Rose.
On the home front she tried to do her small part for the war effort, taking a first-aid course in Palm Beach. A letter written in early 1942 reveals her tendency to become involved in the mundane details of her children’s lives, her sense of entitlement, and her frustration at playing second fiddle to her husband. She reported to her children that young Joe had received “five hours’ marching and ten demerits for having a dirty wastebasket” at the Naval Air Station. “I think it is very unfair myself and I wanted to write a letter to the Navy Department and the War Board and some Commanders—and maybe Mr. Roosevelt himself.… [B]ut your father has again restricted my activities and thinks the little woman should confine herself to the home. Personally, I think it shows [an] antiquated system with emphasis made on the unessentials, and after all, there are times when a woman should show initiative, even to the extent of counseling the Navy Department to use common sense in disciplinary methods.” Parenthetically, Rose added, “This, of course, is all in fun, and don’t discuss it outside of the family circle.”88
But perhaps more than fun was involved here. Joe Jr. was her perfect firstborn. How could the Navy treat him so inequitably? Didn’t her husband’s position as former ambassador to England count for something? Did Rose believe that she could not seriously critique the role of women in American households, especially her own? She made these private comments only a few short months after her husband’s unilateral decision to lobotomize Rosemary. As we have seen, Rose expressed a very different image of her marriage for public consumption in her 1972 interview with Robert Coughlan, describing her husband as “almost infallible.” (That view also absolved her of any complicity in Joe’s treatment of Rosemary.) Many years later, in a lighthearted exchange with granddaughter Caroline Kennedy about marital differences, Rose claimed that she and Joe didn’t quarrel. “I would just say, ‘Yes, dear,’ and then I’d go to Paris.”89
Rose soon had an opportunity to apply her first-aid lessons. In 1942 ten-year-old Teddy, now at Riverdale School, contracted whooping cough and pneumonia. From a New York hospital, she brought him to Hyannis Port for recuperation. “This was the first time since infancy that I really had my mother to myself,” Teddy recalled, “and the first time I enjoyed such close attention from her, and I basked in it. We took long walks on the nearly deserted beach together … and in the evenings she would read to me: books on science, history, geography, and the occasional adventure from Jack London or Sir Walter Scott.… But more than any specific activity, it was my mother’s constant tenderness and attention that I cherished.” He concluded, “As sick as I was, those days were a tonic for me. And they cemented a special bond between my mother and me that survived until her death.…”90 Such devoted caretaking showed Rose at her maternal best.
As for Kathleen, who had been promoted from her Times-Herald secretarial position to society columnist, Rose wrote to her in fall 1942 from Los Angeles, “I can see improvement in your column,… so you are certainly to be congratulated.” Nevertheless, Rose had found errors that “were probably typographical, but as people notice your English now, I want to be sure they are familiar to you.” Interspersed were Hollywood tidbits. Rose had taken tea with Mary Pickford and seen Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, and William Powell at MGM’s studio. She would spend Christmas with Eunice at Sun Valley but longed for a family holiday in Palm Beach. “Now that I am rested, I have a strange nostalgia for all the excitement and confusion and turmoil [at home].” “Much love to you, dear Kathleen and do keep writing.… I am planning to see you in Washington on my return. Love again, darling, Mother.”91
As the United States sank deeper into war across two theaters, Rose worried about her sons’ spiritual lives. Jack wrote to her from his new post in Charleston, South Carolina, that the Navy Yard had given him an extracurricular religious assignment that he asked Rose to review. Always less formal in tone than Joe Jr., who only referred to Rose as “Mother,” Jack began, “Dear Ma: Thank you for your latest chapter on the ‘9 Little Kennedys and How They Grew,’ by Rose of Old Boston. Never in history have so many owed so much to such a one—or is that quite correct,” Jack teased. He joked that she might want to verify the quotation in her book of sayings under “Churchill, Winston.” “You now really have the obligations of Motherhood—with none of the pleasures (the pleasures that is of seeing all of us and [Lem] Billings.)” Although she took her maternal role very seriously and knew that her brood of nine added to her celebrity, Jack used it as a humorous foil. Was his following discussion of Catholicism, the most profound element of Rose’s life, another way to tweak her? “They want me to conduct Bible class here every other Sunday for about½ hour with the sailors. Would you say that is un-Catholic? I have a feeling that dogma might say it was—but don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church? We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we. [The Catholic Church was exactly as Jack described it.] However, don’t worry about this—just send me Father Conway’s Question Box as I would like to look through it.… Love from your Lt. son, John.”92
In February 1943 Rose wrote to Joe Jr., now stationed in Puerto Rico, with a simple request: “I hope you are still saying your prayers when you are hopping about in all those different countries. I got Jack a medal while he was here but I expect Father Sheehy [Joe’s Jacksonville priest] fixed you up. If not, please let me know as I think you should have a medal on saying that you are a Catholic in case of an accident.” Rose had developed the religious equivalent of a mother telling her son to wear clean underwear. She didn’t know, it seems, that military dog tags list a wearer’s religious affiliation. Or maybe she merely wanted Joe to emphasize that aspect of his identity. “Jack would like to get into and see a little fighting and of course would prefer to go straight to whatever point the Japs are fighting furiously,” she reported. “I guess the plans of the whole T.P. [P.T.] boats are rather up in the air.” “I am sure, dear Joe, that I do not hear all that is going on as they fear it will worry me,” she admitted.93 Two months later Jack arrived in the Solomon Islands to command PT 109.94
From the South Pacific, Jack reported, “[G]ot to Church Easter—they had in a native hut—and aside from having a condition red ‘enemy aircraft in the vicinity’—it went on as well as St. Pat’s,” and later that “you will be pleased to know that their [sic] is a priest nearby who has let all the natives go and is devoting all his energies to my salvation. I’m stringing along with him, but I’m not giving over to[o] easy—as I want him to work a bit—so he’ll appreciate it more when he finally has me in the front row every morning screaming halleluyah [sic].”95
As Jack settled in overseas, Kathleen sailed for England as a Red Cross volunteer. She couldn’t have been happier to return, after four years, to her London friends, especially the love of her life, the Marquess of Hartington. She went out with him a few weeks after arriving, prompting gossip about what the future could possibly hold for this couple. Kick, after all, hailed from the world’s most prominent Irish Catholic clan, while Billy’s titled family represented pillars of the Anglican faith.
One morning in early August 1943, Rose received a confusing phone call at Hyannis Port, informing her that Jack had been found. “I didn’t know he was missing,” Rose later explained. “Somebody called his father. It was early in the morning about 8 o’clock, and I answered the phone. His father had left to go riding, so I got his father at the stable on the farm, which was perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes from our house at Hyannis and that was the first time [I heard about it].”96 The explanation was simple—Joe had not told Rose or the children that Jack had been declared “missing in action,” after a Japanese destroyer sliced his PT boat in two during a night patrol of Blackett Strait in the Solomons. The collision had slammed Jack into the cockpit, reinjuring his back, already unstable from sports injuries. Nevertheless, Kennedy swam with his eleven surviving crew members to nearby islands, as he towed a badly burned sailor. After a desperate week of scavenging for food and water, and eluding the Japanese, PT 109’s crew encountered a friendly native on Olasana Island. He led Jack to an Australian coast watcher and ultimate rescue of the crew. In a letter home after his harrowing experience, Jack wrote that he survived thanks to Saint Christopher, Saint Elmo, and Saint Clair. “One of them was working overtime.”97 As Rose would write about Jack’s exploits, “[W]e are more proud and thankful than words can tell to have him such a hero and still safe and sound.”98
Joe and Rose were less pleased about Joe Jr.’s behavior after Jack’s heroic story made the papers. “We were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you,” Joe Sr. chastised him. “I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had had any news as to how Jack was.”99 They hoped that Joe would head to Hyannis Port prior to leaving for his next post, in England, later in September. All was forgiven, however, when Joe Jr. arrived at the Cape for his father’s birthday. “Joe Darling: It was wonderful last week to have seen you looking so well and feeling so full of pep …,” Rose wrote to her cherished son. She concentrated on finding a gold religious medal, with a gold chain, to send him for protection overseas. Complications ensued, Rose explained to him, “until in desperation I mailed along a simple silver one bought and blessed down here [at the Cape].”100 She hoped that it would protect him as well as the gold version. By September’s end, Joe had reached England, where he visited Kick in London occasionally and reconnected with old friends. “Mother, there is no need in worrying about me over here,” he assured her. “If I can keep my feet dry, the greatest hazard will be overcome.”101