IN JANUARY 1944 ROSE’S RESERVE VANISHED MOMENTARILY when Jack returned safely home. The mere feel of his coat brought her joy. Incredulous at his homecoming, she touched his arms to convince herself that he was really there. Even she could hardly believe that her prayers had been answered: “What a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him.” While Jack was at war, Rose’s normally sparkling eyes would dim at the mere mention of his name, as fears for his safety gripped her. Nightmares that he had died would rouse her from fitful sleep, and she would awake clutching her heart. Now he was safe, but Jack had changed. His once boyish face looked thin and drawn. South Pacific sun and combat had etched it with lines and fatigue. Jack’s ordeal had played havoc with his delicate digestive system, and he ate sparingly back in Palm Beach, even of his favorite meals. As it had when he was a boy, his weight loss concerned Rose. More worrisome was how nervous and skittish he had become after his brush with death in the Solomons. But other habits had not changed: “He still is late at meals—He still is vague on his plans—he still overflows his bathtub and ruins my bedroom rug,” Rose complained.1
While Joe planned how to attract media attention to Jack’s heroism, Rose reverted to her usual concern with detail, focusing on a relic of his miraculous escape from the Japanese—a coconut. It had been Jack’s only means of communicating with the Australian coast watcher who then alerted the US Navy to the stranded PT 109 crew’s location. With no paper or writing implements, Kennedy had used his service knife to carve a message on the nut’s smooth skin: “NAURO ISL … COMMANDER … NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT … HE CAN PILOT … 11 ALIVE … NEED SMALL BOAT … KENNEDY.” Then handing it to the non-English-speaking native who had discovered him and his crew on a deserted island, Jack prayed that the SOS would fall into friendly hands. Rose now urged him to preserve it before shrinkage obliterated Jack’s printing.2 Following his mother’s suggestion, he had it placed on a wooden base and encased in plastic as a permanent symbol of his wartime exploits.3
With Jack home, and Joe Jr.’s reassuring letters from England, where he was safe at his English countryside airfield, Rose turned her attention to Kathleen, who was attempting to remove the religious obstacles to marrying Billy Hartington. His parents, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, adored Kathleen, and they asked King George VI’s chaplain to describe how she might find spiritual parity as a convert to Anglicanism. In turn, Kick explained that Catholicism’s centrality in her life made her reluctant to embrace “a substitute.” Likewise, she knew that Billy wouldn’t renounce his religious duties, about which he was fanatical, according to Kathleen. Flattering Joe and Rose, Kick wrote that they had “been wonderful and a great strength” in the midst of her crisis. She especially appreciated her mother’s prayers.4
Joe, always less doctrinaire than Rose, wired Kick a supportive message: “I feel terribly unhappy you have to face your biggest crisis without Mother or me.… With your faith in God you can’t make a mistake. Remember you are still and always will be tops with me.”5 Three weeks later, Kick informed her family that she would marry Billy. Rose followed her usual pattern when worries inundated her—she left home. Retreating to The Homestead, a luxury hotel spa in Hot Springs, Virginia, Rose felt “horrified—heartbroken” at Kick’s news. How could she plan to marry Billy Hartington, the heir to the Duchy of Devonshire, in a London registry office? Despite Joe’s more pragmatic outlook, he was sleepless after hearing Kick’s intentions. Joe and Rose felt guilt-ridden for allowing Kathleen to “drift into this dilemma.” Perhaps it wasn’t too late “to extricate her” from a life-altering mistake. They cabled Kick, instructing her to seek advice from a colleague of their friend New York archbishop Francis Spellman. Rose’s advice consisted primarily of religious platitudes: “Anything done for Our Lord will be rewarded hundredfold.”6
Rose thought it unfair for Kathleen to make all the sacrifices to marry Billy. Would he consider some “concessions?”7 Agonizing over the repercussions of Kick’s actions, Rose combined religious fears with concerns for her family’s reputation. Everyone took such pride in the Kennedys, Rose thought, and now their prestige would be ruined. She wondered why no one worried as much as she about that result. The perfect family image that Rose had worked diligently to create would now be destroyed. She prayed fervently for a different outcome, trying to protect herself from “emotional upset.” Perhaps Kick could continue her Red Cross work as Lady Hartington.8 But Rose literally made herself so ill with worry that she spent several days in New England Baptist Hospital.9
How could this have happened? The plan had been to spirit Kathleen away from boys by depositing her in Catholic boarding schools, but now she was a determined woman of twenty-four, preparing to marry the man she loved, despite her parents’ disapproval. Rose’s own matrimonial history was repeating itself. She had married Joe without the Fitzgeralds’ enthusiastic support. They wanted her to marry Hugh Nawn. But Rose had been adamant: she loved Joe, “and that was that!”
Moreover, in London Rose had been utterly starstruck by the English aristocracy. Could it really seem inconceivable to her that Kathleen might marry a member of that class? Billy wrote to Rose directly, trying to change her mind: “I could not believe … that God could really intend two loving [?] people, both of whom wanted to do the right thing, and both of whom were Christians, to miss the opportunity of being happy, and perhaps even useful, together because of the religious squabbles of His human servants several hundred years ago.” But he refused to budge on his faith or its edict that the marriage’s children be raised Anglican.10 Kick cabled her father, “Religion everything to us both. Will always live according to Catholic teaching. Praying that time will heal all wounds. Your support in this as in everything else means so much. Please beseech Mother not to worry. Am very happy and quite convinced have taken the right step.”11 Rose remained obdurate. In the eyes of the Roman Catholic church, Kathleen’s marriage wouldn’t be valid.
On May 6, 1944, with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Nancy Astor, and Marie Bruce in attendance, along with Joe Jr., Kathleen Agnes Kennedy became the Marchioness of Hartington. The civil ceremony at London’s Chelsea Register Office lasted ten minutes. Debo Mitford Cavendish, Kick’s friend and new sister-in-law, remembers that the vows were said only after “a long tussle with two archbishops and goodness knows who else because the Catholic and Protestant trouble that there was at that time between religious people of that day, and it’s extraordinary to think of it now, to think what a barrier it was, but it was.…”12
Rose’s friends, Lady Astor and Marie Bruce, cabled that she “would rejoice in their [Billy and Kick’s] young happiness. Only grief your sorrow. Kathleen looked lovely. Pale pink [dress].”13 Now it was Joe Jr.’s turn to take his parents to task: “The power of silence is great,” he wrote in a terse wire.14 On her honeymoon, the new Mrs. Kathleen Kennedy Hartington took time to cable her father, expressing distress over Rose’s upset and urging her not to worry.15
Joe Jr. now played the responsible role that his mother had prepared him to assume. Presenting a tableau of Kick’s rise to marchioness, he tried to convince his parents to accept the marriage. “Billy is crazy about Kick, and I know they are very much in love.… As far as Kick’s soul is concerned, I wish I had half her chance of seeing the pearly gates. As far as what people will say, the hell with them. I think we can all take it. It will be hardest on Mother, and I do know how you feel Mother, but I do think it will be all right.”16
Kathleen was relieved to hear from Joe Sr. that her mother was not seriously ill, as the papers had indicated. But on both sides of the Atlantic, the press accurately reflected the historic British Anglican v. Irish Catholic rifts reopened by the merging of two such prominent families.17 Indeed, irate Catholics wrote to Kick, accusing her of selling her soul for a British title. Trying to assuage Rose’s guilt, Kick assured her that she had performed her “duty as a Roman Catholic mother.”18
As the summer of 1944 wore on, marked by the Allies’ D-Day invasion of Europe, Rose seemed to rethink her position. She told Kathleen that the Kennedy clan was looking forward to Joe Jr.’s return to Hyannis Port on leave. “We only wish you and Billy were going to be along too.” The Duchess of Devonshire, Billy’s mother, had written warmly to Rose, expressing heartfelt love for Kathleen. That prompted Rose to tell Kick, “I hope Billy felt we were giving him an equally warm welcome into our family.” She began to regret having written to Billy when she was still in shock over the nuptials. “However, that is all over now, dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will receive him with open arms. I guess I told you that Joe [Jr.] liked him better every time he saw him, which was a great satisfaction to all of us.”19 Rose’s change of heart revealed the better nature of her Christian faith—forgiveness.
NEARING THE ONE-YEAR anniversary of PT 109’s sinking, Jack faced ongoing health problems, including malaria. Even worse, his colitis medication may have caused spinal deterioration. In midsummer 1944 he underwent surgery at Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital for relief of chronic back pain, and Rose noted that “[h]is tummy was a bit upset yesterday, but I am sure that he will get that straightened out.” Unfortunately, both his back and gastrointestinal ailments would flare up periodically throughout his life.20 Meanwhile, Rose was relaxing at Hyannis Port, nursing her own stomach problems and reading books all day at her small beach cottage.21
Despite the thaw in Rose and Kathleen’s relationship, Kick contrived to campaign for her mother’s approval. Praising Rose’s maternal skills was both genuine and strategic: “First,… you are the most unselfish woman in the world. Any house where we have all been has been difficult to run and you have always put us before any of your own desires or pleasures. We all have happy personalities and get along with people far easier than most people—This is due to the happy atmosphere which has always surrounded us. When I see homes I marvel at you more and more. Certain qualities I have—people admire. They are all traits that you have instilled in me.”22 Years later Marie Bruce confirmed Kick’s feelings about her mother. Taking shelter one day during an air raid on London, “clutching our possessions and waiting for the next bomb,” Marie recalled, “Kick looked at one of her [jeweled] clips and said, ‘Dad was wonderful to us. He gave us lovely things, but it is Mother who gave us our character.’”23
Rose now seemed much more at peace with herself and her children. Kathleen adored married life, although Billy had to leave for the Continent just five weeks after their wedding to join the attack on Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Jack was home, safe, if not quite sound, but was receiving medical attention for his ailments. The Kennedys awaited Joe Jr.’s arrival on leave. He wrote in late July, however, that he had decided to extend his stay in England. For every extra month overseas, he would earn nearly three more days of R & R stateside, before his next assignment that he might not like as well. With the invasion of Europe under way, and the Germans on the defensive, his antisubmarine patrols over the English Channel were more like training exercises, he explained. Joe also told his parents that he had spent his twenty-ninth birthday with Pat Wilson. He didn’t mention that a romance had developed; the Australian woman was married to a British soldier stationed in Libya. Kick joined the birthday celebration and welcomed a break in the peaceful countryside, after harrowing experiences with German buzz bombs dropping on London.24 The German weapons, used as a form of terrorism against the British population, were part of Joe’s decision to stay in England. In letters to both his parents and Jack, he mentioned that he was working on a “quite secret” project. “Don’t get worried about it, as there is practically no danger,” he wrote Joe and Rose on August 4.25
A little more than a week later, two Navy chaplains appeared at the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port doorstep. Joe was napping upstairs; Rose sat reading the Sunday newspaper. She assumed that the priests wanted to see Joe on routine business, so she invited them in and asked if they might wait for her husband. “No,” the clergymen replied, “the matter is urgent.” Joe Jr. was missing. Rose stumbled upstairs to tell her husband, who raced down to the priests. They relayed the stark report that the Kennedys’ son had perished. The former ambassador, who had tried so hard to avoid war for fear of losing his sons, then repeated the unbearable news to Jack, Teddy, Eunice, and Jean. The usually stoic family, including Rose, dissolved into tears. “Our first born who had shown such promise and had always been such a joy to us and the other children” was gone, Rose thought to herself. Some of the children wailed in grief, Teddy remembered. Joe, his face twisted in pain, disappeared upstairs to hide his sobs. Rose later claimed that the Kennedy patriarch told them, “We must carry on like everyone else. We must continue our regular work and take care of the living, because there is a lot of work to be done.”26 Teddy only recalled that Jack, now the head of the Kennedy brood, declared, “Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.”27 And they did.
Joe Jr.’s last mission had been designed to attack sites along the French coast where Nazi troops were launching buzz bombs and were preparing a “super gun” to shoot 300-pound projectiles at London. Joe had volunteered to pilot his PB41-1 Liberator bomber, packed with 22,000 pounds of explosives, toward a predetermined German target and bail out with his crewmate over the English countryside. By remote control, the plane would then cross the Channel and crash like an unmanned drone into the site at Mimoyecques, France, near Calais. Just after Joe affirmed that the plane was flying by remote, and a few minutes before he was to exit, it exploded in midair. Flaming wreckage scattered across a wooded area just south of Blythburgh, a small British coastal village in Suffolk.28 Lt. Kennedy and his crewmate died instantly. It didn’t matter if Joe’s religious medal was silver or gold. No trace of him was ever found. And now Rose was a Gold Star Mother. That fall she would accept for her son the Navy Cross, the service’s premier medal. Surrounded by her husband and Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy, Rose and her family never looked so grim.
Clara St. John, wife of Choate’s headmaster, summed up Rose’s agony in a poignant condolence letter that she kept for the rest of her life:
August 25, 1944
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
“There is no anodyne for pain
But just the shock of it.”
I wish I could have some word of comfort for you in your overwhelming grief. All one’s children are equally dear, but there is something about the first born that sets him a little apart—he is always a bit of a miracle and never quite cut off from his mother’s heart.
And Joe was such a son as any mother would pray for—with charm and integrity and responsibility and rare power of mind and character. Even to a stranger it must seem a tragedy that such a life should be cut short. But “honorable age is not that which standeth in lengthe of days, nor that is measured by number of years, having fulfilled his course in a short time, he fulfilled long years. For his soul was well-pleasing unto the Lord.” Solomon knew! But for the loneliness and the continuing sorrow and the beautiful unfinished promise, our hearts go out to you all in deepest sympathy. We too loved Joe—and love him always. Faithfully yours, Clara St. John.29
Mary Jo Gargan Clasby, Rose’s niece, remembers that her aunt would disappear for hours each afternoon to mourn alone in her little beach cottage. “It was so hard for her,” Mrs. Clasby recalls.30 Kathleen flew home for a memorial service, bringing comfort to her parents. She made sure she would be notified if Billy received a leave and could return to England. In that case, Kick would join him in London immediately. On September 4 Billy wrote to his bride from “a great city” on the Continent, which he could not identify for security reasons. (Later she discovered it was Brussels.) Major Lord Hartington’s Coldstream Guard’s battalion had helped to liberate the populace, and Billy was overcome by their gratitude. “I long for you to be here as it is a[n] experience which few can have, and which I would love to share with you,” he told Kick. “Such Germans as we find, and there are quite a lot, are quite exhausted and demoralized and I cannot believe that they can go on much longer.”31 A few days later, as Kick shopped in New York City, she received word to come to her father’s suite in the Waldorf-Astoria. There Joe told her that Billy was dead, the victim of a German sniper in Belgium. Quickly returning by plane to England, Kathleen wrote to her parents about the irony of her mixed marriage: “Remember I told you that [Billy] got holier after we married. Now he is the one to bring me closer to God—what a funny world.”32
Bolstered by her own religious faith, Rose responded immediately to Kathleen:
I have been thinking about you day and night ever since you left and praying for you and loving you more and more.… I have been to Mass for Billy frequently. In fact, I am on my way now (7:15 a.m.). After I heard you talk about him and I began to hear about his likes and dislikes, his ideas and ideals, I realized what a wonderful man he was and what happiness would have been yours had God willed that you spend your life with him. A first love—young love—is so wonderful, my dear Kathleen, but, my dearest daughter, I feel we must dry our tears as best we can and bow our heads to God’s wisdom and goodness. We must place our hand in His and trust Him.
In such sorrow, Rose’s sense of her personal relationship with God felt most comforting, and she hoped Kathleen would also find spiritual solace. Emphasizing corporal works of mercy, Rose urged her to support Billy’s mother because then Kick would focus less on her own grief. Only one month removed from Joe Jr.’s death, Rose knew how much support Kathleen’s mother-in-law would need. Rose even arranged for Masses to be offered in Billy’s honor.33 That gesture itself was significant. Catholics rarely request Masses to be said for those outside the faith. Rose must have thought her prayers answered when Kick informed her mother that she had begun receiving Communion again.34 No longer would her invalid marriage prove a barrier to that sacrament in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Kathleen was again a Roman Catholic in good standing, much to her mother’s relief.
BY 1944 ROSE took on more responsibilities for her late sister Agnes’s three growing children, Joey, Mary Jo, and Ann Gargan. The Kennedys invited them to spend part of their summers at Hyannis and paid for their schooling. (In fact, they offered college tuition to all of their more than forty nieces and nephews.) “[I]t was a tragedy … leaving three little children … ,” Rose remembered about the Gargan trio, left without their mother, and then their father, at such young ages.35
Rose treated the Gargans with the same “tough love” that she applied to her own children, yet Joey and Mary Jo described their aunt with genuine fondness. Joey recalled that every summer Rose drilled him on religion, current events, table manners, and wardrobe rules. Imposing strict curfews when he began dating, Rose warned, “I don’t want one of those girl’s mothers calling here wondering where they are.”36 Rose sent Mary Jo Gargan to her alma maters, the Sacred Heart Convent and Manhattanville College. The young girl would receive a letter, phone call, or other communication at least every two weeks from Aunt Rose.37 “She always had a sense of responsibility for us,” Mary Jo remembers.38 Rose modeled the behavior she expected from her charges.
Both Joe Jr. and Billy had died less than a year before the war in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945. Joe Sr. wrote to Kick, “Mother is feeling a little better, but after reading your letters has made up her mind that she doesn’t think you’ll come back very soon, and she thinks she’ll probably just move over there. I think she can hardly wait to get back to London and Paris.”39 As for himself, he admitted to Cissy Patterson, “I find it very difficult to get over Joe’s death.… I don’t think that the older people ever get over the death of the younger ones.”40 Even so, he negotiated a deal that would expand the Kennedys’ postwar business empire and become the basis of their charitable work. On July 21, 1945, Joe purchased Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest commercial space, for $13 million. Experts predicted the investment would reap profits of 23 percent a year. Three months later he created the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. Buying one-fourth of the Merchandise Mart, the foundation received a quarter of its profits tax free.41
The US Navy honored Joe Jr.’s memory. Two days before his thirty-first birthday, the Kennedy family gathered at Bethlehem Steel’s Quincy, Massachusetts, shipyard to launch the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., a Navy destroyer. Rose, Joe, Pat, Eunice, Teddy, and Honey Fitz gathered around as Jean, Joe Jr.’s sister and goddaughter, christened the ship. In Joe’s memory, the Kennedys donated the central altar to St. Francis Xavier Church, their summer parish in Hyannis. On the second anniversary of his death, they contributed $600,000 in his name to Franciscan nuns. The donation was to establish a convalescent home “for crippled children and mentally deficient ones.”42 Rosemary’s experiences were beginning to shape the family’s charitable mission.
Joe Kennedy also turned his energies to twenty-eight-year-old Jack’s future political career. “I think it extremely likely that he will run for Congress …,” Joe wrote to the editor of the Washington Times-Herald in late 1945. “With his background, brains, and his courage, he would do a good job if anybody could. I hope, for his peace of mind, that he does.”43 The Kennedy legend, revised and re-created by the clan, absorbed Joe Jr.’s death and moved forward. “Jack originally intended to be a writer, editor or something in the literary field,” Rose explained. “[W]e lost our oldest son, and Jack assumed his mantle in a way because I noticed it not in politics only.… But his attitude toward the younger children and his attitude toward me. He took on more responsibility, and I spoke of him to his father, and his father agreed.” Jack’s change in attitude occurred spontaneously, according to his mother.44 Finally, Rose could apply the adjective “responsible” to her second son. Had he truly become so, or did she simply bestow that characteristic on him as a means of replacing Joe Jr.?
John Kennedy’s own description of his decision to choose a political career reveals more complexity:
I was at loose ends at the end of the war; I was reluctant to begin law school again. I was not very interested in following a business career. I was vitally interested in national and international life and I was the descendant of three generations, on both sides of my family, of men who had followed the political profession. In my early life, the conversation was nearly always about politics. My father, who had directed much of his energy into business, nevertheless, as the son of a Massachusetts state senator, was himself interested in politics. My mother, also, shared the interest. Her father had been mayor and a United States congressman, and both my great uncles were state senators and my father’s first cousin was mayor of Brockton, Massachusetts.…
But I never thought at school and college that I would ever run for office myself. One politician was enough in the family and my brother Joe was obviously going to be that politician. I hadn’t considered myself a political type and he filled all the requirements for political success. When he was 24 he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic convention in 1940 and I think his political success would have been assured.…
My brother Joe was killed in Europe as a flyer in August 1944, and that ended our hopes for him. But I didn’t even start to think about a political profession until more than a year later. When the war came I didn’t know what I was going to do, and in those days … and for those few months after the [war] … I didn’t find it oppressive that I didn’t know. In ’44 and ’45 I had been in the hospital for about a year recovering from some injuries I received in the Pacific. Then I worked as a reporter covering the San Francisco [United Nations] conference, the British election, and the Potsdam meeting—all in 1945.
So there never was a moment of truth for me when I saw my whole political career unfold. I came back in the fall of ’55 [sic—it was 1945] after Potsdam, at loose ends, and the head of the Boston Community Fund asked me to help him during the drive … [which] meant making speeches for the first time in my life, and they seemed to be acceptable. The first speech I ever gave was on “England, Ireland, and Germany: Victor, Neutral, and Vanquished.” It took me three weeks to write and was given at an American Legion Post. Now, the speech went rather well. A politician came up to me afterwards and said that I should go into politics, that I might be governor of Massachusetts in ten years. Then I began to think about a political career. I hadn’t even considered it up [un]’til then. Later in the fall, James M. Curley was elected mayor of Boston and a congressional seat became vacant. This was the Eleventh Congressional District, which my grandfather had once represented in Congress 50 years before.
Suddenly, the time, the occasion, and I all met. I moved into the Bellevue Hotel with my grandfather [Honey Fitz] and I began to run.…45
By Rose’s own admission, she played no direct role in Jack’s decision to run for Congress in 1946. Joe would talk by phone with him regularly, but the Kennedy men simply didn’t consult Rose about their political decisions.46 She was relegated to household management and assumed another task, destined to last for decades—tracking bills incurred by her grown children. “I still have a lot of trouble with bills down here [at Palm Beach],” she declared in one of her round-robin letters, listing purchases from New York, Boston, and Florida that she couldn’t identify. She and her secretary had to phone stores asking which Kennedy had charged this item of clothing or that piece of jewelry. Rose warned, “I am afraid it is going to be embarrassing [for the children] from now on as I have just told them I would not be responsible [for the bills].”47
Rose had begun leading an even more solitary life, with her adult children out on their own and the younger ones (along with the Gargans) away at school. She wrote in early June 1946 to Kathleen, who had settled in England, that she was back at the Hyannis Port house, now “very quiet with little excitement.” Perhaps she had achieved her dream, a home all to herself, but Rose sounded rather lonely, rattling around in a large, “very damp” house. Despite the isolation, she remained “cheerful,” but hoped that warmer weather might attract “somebody” to join her. Instead, Jack was now the family beacon. Eunice was with him in Boston, working on his primary campaign. Rose still worried about Jack’s health. She thought him too thin, and she was right—photographs revealed a haggard candidate. Believing that he worked too hard, Rose wished that he could spend a few days each week at the Cape, where she could supervise his diet.48
But she had become an empty nester. If only her son would return, she could care for him. Despite craving solitude when her house had been filled with rowdy children, these were difficult days for her: Rosemary institutionalized, Joe Jr. dead, Kick living in London, Joe Sr. relegated to the political sidelines. “Your father has kept out of it [Jack’s campaign],” she wrote to Kathleen, “and is only doing a little work behind the scenes so whatever success there is will be due entirely to Jack and the younger group.”49
Rose didn’t mention that Joe’s controversial career had also forced her out of the spotlight. In the past, travel would have banished her boredom, but in the immediate postwar years, she couldn’t escape to devastated Europe, and shortages meant that she couldn’t shop for wardrobes at home or abroad. “I am hoping to see you soon,” Rose told Kick, “although I am afraid it will not be this summer [of 1946].”50
About this time, a wave of uncharacteristic sentimentality swept over Rose, making her nostalgic for the days of early motherhood in Brookline, as she chose to remember them: “Life indeed was busy but how absorbing and there was no mental hazards. Just take care of 3 or 4 wonderful active bouncing offspring, feed them, air them and make them rest, read books on child psychology, discuss your problems with other young mothers and with the young teachers and always carry on with the conviction that your children were always the loveliest, the brightest and the ones with the rosiest futures.”51
Now even her youngest children, Jean, eighteen, and Teddy, fourteen, had been bitten by the political bug and were anxious to join the all-consuming family business—politics. Jean had just completed her first year at Manhattanville College. Instead of going to Hyannis for the summer, she headed to Boston and Jack’s campaign. “Teddy is chafing a bit and wants to go up and be with the gang,” Rose told Kick, “but I think I have prevailed on him to stay the weekend here. Possibly, we may all go up next week.”52
Rose applied her attention to detail in helping with Jack’s campaign. She encouraged his staff to record the names of everyone who attended Kennedy rallies. According to Jack’s campaign operative Dave Powers, “She didn’t do a lot of speaking. We used her just at special times where it could count most, like with the Veterans of Foreign Wars.… Each time she was the star of the show. She must have been about fifty-six then, but she looked more like thirty-five.” Rose relied on her tried-and-true subjects—raising nine children, managing her household (including the famous index cards), her tenure in London before the war, and life at the embassy. “When she finished she got a standing ovation. Then she introduced her son, the candidate for the nomination in the Eleventh Congressional District.”53 Rose confined her advice for Jack to tips on public speaking. Slow down, she told him.54
While Rose played only a small role in Jack’s first congressional campaign, she supplied a very large asset—the Fitzgerald name. Both she and her father had been born in the Eleventh District, also encompassing the Kennedy enclave of East Boston. “I had in politics, to begin with, the great advantage of having a well-known name and that served me in good stead,” Jack later commented. “Beyond that, however, I was a stranger in Boston.… I was an outsider, really. I was living in a hotel. I had never lived very much in the district. My family roots were there, but I had lived in New York for ten years, and on top of that I had gone to Harvard, not a particularly popular institution at that time in the Eleventh Congressional District.”55 As a novice public speaker, with Rose’s somewhat reserved nature, Jack needed all of the advantages he could find to boost his candidacy. One day, speaking to Gold Star mothers at an American Legion hall, he inserted an impromptu remark that struck an emotional chord among the ladies. “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too,” Jack confided.56 The women grew misty-eyed and swarmed around the young war veteran.57
In fact, they wanted to take care of him. Jack’s wan appearance, resulting from malaria, chronic digestive ailments, and undiagnosed Addison’s disease, ironically became something of a benefit. His mother agreed: “[Women] used to have this sympathetic feeling toward him because [of his appearance]. And some of the younger women—of course he was a bachelor. So romantic.…”58 Nearly fifteen hundred women of all ages turned out in their best finery (some even rented formals) to meet Jack, the war hero, and his celebrated family, including Rose, at a “tea” just three days prior to the June 1946 Democratic primary. Having received engraved invitations, Irish American ladies flocked to the unique political event at Cambridge’s Hotel Commander.59 Rose’s days as hostess for Mayor Fitzgerald and as wife of the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s provided perfect preparation for meeting and greeting Jack’s future constituents. On primary election day, Jack cast his ballot with proud maternal grandparents, Josie and Honey Fitz, at his side. That night Joe and Rose stood arm and arm with their son, so lanky (at six feet tall and 120 pounds) that he looked like a teenager. All three Kennedys beamed with joy, as a crowd of well-wishers gathered around them.60
Jack attributed his nearly eleven-thousand-vote victory margin to his early start and “long, long, long labor.”61 His father’s strategic planning, unlimited funds, and public relations resources (including distribution of the PT 109 story) also contributed to Jack’s success. In a solidly Democratic district, he won decisively that November. John F. Fitzgerald’s namesake, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, now sat in the US House of Representatives.
With Jack in Congress and Europe rapidly rebuilding, Rose made her way back to England. This time she took twenty-four-year-old Pat, “my 6th child.” “That’s another advantage of having a large family,” Rose explained. Taking “a trip with a different offspring every time” takes us out of our “grooves.”62 Recovering from Billy’s death, Kathleen had bought a town house in London’s Smith Square, near Parliament. The brick building reminded Rose of the posh homes in Boston’s Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. “It has been done up very attractively and she has all her friends (all of whom I like) dropping in and so it is very pleasant,” Rose wrote home to Joe. She seemed a bit homesick, however. “I shall be glad to get home in spite of all the gaiety, but I shall come again and hope you will the next time at least for a quick look.”63
Kathleen welcomed her mother to Lismore Castle, the Cavendish estate in County Waterford, Ireland. Acquired by Billy’s family in the eighteenth century, the Gothic edifice recalled to Rose “a picture-book castle, with the grey walls covered in moss—green and soft—and ivy on the other turning red now in the autumn.” She loved the surrounding pastoral scenes of Eire. “It is beautiful here beyond words, quiet, peaceful, secluded,” she wrote to “Joe dearest.”64 Rose seemed rather disappointed, though, to learn that Glocca Morra didn’t exist, “like in the play Finian’s Rainbow.”65 The fictional town had appeared in a song from the 1947 Broadway play about an Irishman and his daughter who come to America to turn a pot of gold into a massive fortune, and reminisce about the Old Country.66 The play’s romanticism matched Rose’s description of the magical time spent with Kathleen exploring County Waterford. “I feel perfect,” Rose proclaimed.67
Rose might have felt less perfect had she known of Kathleen’s new love interest. In mid-1946, she had begun to see wealthy Lord Peter Fitzwilliam, a war hero but inveterate womanizer ten years her senior. If Billy Hartington’s religious affiliation had been vexing to Rose, how would she respond to the fact that Peter was not only a Protestant, but also married and the father of a young daughter? Kick didn’t want to find out. She spared her parents the truth about her romantic pursuits until she moved closer to marrying Peter, which she planned to do as soon as his divorce was final.68
Within the family, only Jack knew about Kick’s romance. She had told him on his 1947 visit to Lismore, and he approved, seeing how happy the relationship made her.69 On that trip, Jack had fallen ill, and Kathleen’s friend Pamela Churchill, former daughter-in-law of Winston, had arranged for his medical care in London. The doctor issued a dire diagnosis—a chronic adrenal deficiency, Addison’s disease, was the cause of Jack’s perpetual brownish skin tone, gastrointestinal distress, low blood pressure, and weight loss. “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live,” the London physician reported to an alarmed Pamela. The Kennedys sent a nurse to accompany Jack on the ship back to the States, where he received the Catholic Church’s sacrament of extreme unction.70 Once again, Jack defied the odds and survived.
Years later, Rose spoke of her role, or lack of it, in her adult son’s illnesses: “Jack was ill so long that he [Joe] was so involved because he sort of took over that responsibility, talking to the doctors and deciding where he would go and what he’d do with his physical ailments—. . . rather than have me do it.” At times it seems that Rose continued to view her son’s serious health problems as if they were a minor stomach ache. “Jack inherited the same thing [Rose’s “tummy” problems]. Eunice has it. My father had it. It’s just a personal thing, as I said.”71
The development of effective cortisone treatment for Addison’s gave JFK the more robust appearance he presented to the world in the 1960s. He worried, however, that the medication sometimes made his face puffy, and he thought he looked overweight, a sin in the Kennedy family.72 When pressed about Jack’s medical condition in later years, Rose grew testy: “I don’t know why he happened to be sick. How does anyone happen to be sick? I don’t know the answers. I didn’t follow Mr. Kennedy, that was his department. He decided whether Jack should go to the hospital. He talked to the doctors whether he had something which makes your face all brown. Jaundice or whatever it was he had. Then he was … in England and he almost died in England they said.”73 That’s as far as Rose would go in discussing her second son’s complex medical problems. Even as late as the 1970s, she labeled his illness as “tummy problems,” couldn’t admit his Addison diagnosis (Eunice also had the disease), and absolved herself from decisions about his care.74 As with Rosemary’s lobotomy, it appears that Joe Kennedy called the shots for his son’s medical care without his wife’s input.
In February 1948 Kick returned to the United States knowing that she had to tell Joe and Rose of her plans to marry Peter. But two months elapsed in Palm Beach and Washington, and still she couldn’t do it. When she finally did in April, at a Greenbrier resort family gathering a few days before her departure for England, Rose responded more vehemently than she had to Kick’s first marriage, threatening to disown her daughter for marrying a divorced man, strictly forbidden in the Roman Catholic Church. For his part, Joe offered none of the you “always will be tops with me” pep talks of 1944. He may, however, have consulted with his Vatican contact, seeking some way to validate a future union between Kathleen and Fitzwilliam.75 Kick held out hope that her father might approve of her choice if only he could meet Peter. Joe had business to conduct in France and England that spring, so he agreed to meet the pair in Paris three weeks later. The couple decided to spend a few days relaxing on the Riviera before the tense summit with Joe. Fitzwilliam chartered a plane for the trip. After a refueling stop at Le Bourget, the pilot informed him of stormy weather between Paris and Cannes, recommending the flight’s postponement. Fitzwilliam, a well-known risk taker, ordered the two-man crew to take off.76
1948 May 14 11:07
Washington DC Via Hyannisport Mass
Urgent Joseph Kennedy
Department of State regrets to inform you that according to a message received from the American Consulate at Lyon France that Katheline [sic] Hartington bearer of Passport 40507 showing birth Brookline Massachusetts February 20 1920 has been identified as one of the four persons killed in an airplane crash near Privas France
Edward E. Hunt Chief of Protective Services
Department of State
No family members were in Hyannis Port to receive the Western Union telegram. Rather, news reached Joe the morning after the accident, at his Paris hotel, where he had planned to meet Peter and Kathleen. Then came the excruciating task of traveling to the Rhone Valley in order to identify his daughter’s body. Searchers had retrieved it from the side of a mountain where the plane had crashed in a violent thunderstorm. In Washington, Jack initially received unconfirmed media reports about Kick’s death at the apartment he shared with Eunice, who was working in the Justice Department. As they awaited the dreaded follow-up call, Jack listened to the haunting strains of “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” about the Irish lass with the twinkling eyes. When confirmation arrived, he broke the Kennedy rule, shedding tears for Kick.77
“It is a terrible thing … she was a beautiful girl. Please don’t disturb her mother,” a bereft Honey Fitz implored the Boston Traveler.78 Jack called Rose at Virginia’s Homestead spa, where four years earlier she had agonized over Kick’s marriage to Billy. Now her daughter and both loves of Kathleen’s life were gone, all victims of violent death. Everyone but Joe gathered at Hyannis Port. Where so many happy summers had transpired, the Cape Cod retreat was becoming the family’s grief shelter. Joe accompanied Kathleen’s body back to England, where Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devonshire, offered the family plot in Edensor, near the Cavendish ancestral home, Chatsworth. No other member of the Kennedy family saw Kick to her final resting place.79
Andrew Cavendish, Kick’s brother-in-law, asked London newspapers to say only that a chance meeting caused Kick and Peter to be passengers on the doomed plane.80 American papers followed suit, portraying Kathleen as the beautiful but star-crossed Kennedy daughter. Eunice requested that her boyfriend, Sargent Shriver, who managed the Merchandise Mart for Joe, gather the newspaper stories about Kick’s death and send them to her parents. “Merely looking at these clippings is not pleasant for me, so I know what poignant unhappiness they must bring to you. Please accept once again my deepest sympathy,” Shriver wrote to his future in-laws.81 At least Rose didn’t have to read that her daughter had died on route to a Riviera assignation with a married man.
A devastated Joe Kennedy made his way back to Hyannis Port, where he wrote an effusive and frank thank-you letter to the Duchess of Devonshire for her many kindnesses during “the whole sad affair. I would like to be able to tell you that I am very much better,” he wrote, “but I just can’t.” He simply couldn’t expunge memories of Kick from his mind. The thought of never seeing her again, never experiencing her effervescence, plunged him into a dark depression. Like all the Kennedys, he tried to hide his pain, not even revealing it to Rose. She was “ten thousand per-cent better than I am,” he told Billy’s mother. “Her terrifically strong faith has been a great help to her, along with her very strong will and determination not to give way.”82
Rose’s own thoughts from that dreadful time are conspicuously absent from her records, but she had a telling exchange about the accident in a 1972 interview with Robert Coughlan. He conversed routinely about Fitzwilliam: “As it happens, one of those small coincidences, I knew _________, the man who was flying back [sic] with Kick.” “Oh, yes,” Rose replied. Coughlan added, “He was a very pleasant guy,” to which Rose replied, “Yes, he was nice. I didn’t know him.” “I was in England in ’48 _________,” Coughlan continued. “Oh, when he was killed,” commented Rose. The interviewer clarified, “Very soon afterwards.” Rose recalled, “In the spring—because her father was over there.” Then Coughlan switched the subject to Rose’s thoughts about her daughter: “And Kick was the one you feel resembled you the most of all the girls?” “Well, she was, of course, nearer—she was the oldest one practically—in fact—and she traveled with me more, and of course—and the others were much younger during that period—and she made her debut in England, and, of course, I was much younger then—you know, interested.… She was lots of fun and very gay,” Rose summed up Kick’s personality.83
The next theme of the Kennedy legend was taking shape. Rose had persevered to perfect the nine children she had produced, scripted, and directed. She had taken the media at home and abroad by storm with her large clan of smiling Kennedys and her own youthful looks. Now the fates seemed to conspire against her. One by one, almost in birth order, they were disappearing. “Kathleen’s Death Is Third Tragedy in Kennedy Family,” ran the Boston Globe.84 Joe’s description of his wife created another public role for her: stoic mother relying on religious faith for support in times of sorrow. And yet, ironically, the next dozen years would bring success and happiness to Rose Kennedy as her children achieved unprecedented fame and produced the next generation of the Fitzgerald-Kennedy dynasty.