The Marchioness and the War Heroes
As the United States entered the war, Rose became the hub of family correspondence, writing round-robin letters to Kennedy children scattered across the country and the globe. From her perch in Palm Beach or Hyannis Port, she could worry after Jack’s stomach, Bobby’s grades, Eunice’s health, Joe Jr.’s prayer life, and Kathleen’s grammar. Since returning from England, Kick had worked her way up from a secretarial position to society columnist at the Washington Times-Herald, and Rose sent her qualified congratulations: “I can see improvement in your column,” Rose wrote her in 1942, unable to resist noting that the columns contained errors. “Probably typographical,” Rose granted.
American soldiers were fighting and dying, both in Europe and in the South Pacific; three of the Kennedy children were called overseas. Jack went from training in Charleston, South Carolina, to commanding a PT boat in the South Pacific in mid-1943; Kathleen sailed to England around the same time as a volunteer for the Red Cross; and Joe Jr., after a post in Puerto Rico, was sent to London in September.
Wisecracking slacker Jack Kennedy showed a valor few would have expected late that summer when he helped save the lives of eleven men in the aftermath of an ill-advised naval battle in the Solomon Islands. His vessel, PT 109, was part of a squadron sent in pitch-blackness to intercept a convoy of Japanese supply ships on August 1. The attack was a disaster, and Kennedy’s boat was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer. Two of Kennedy’s crew members were killed, and the other eleven were set adrift. After clinging to the hull of the ship for nine hours, Kennedy organized the survivors for a swim to a nearby deserted island. (He carried one badly burned man, Pat McMahon, on his back.) The swim took five hours. The men were rescued seven days later, after scavenging for food and surviving mostly on the water they could catch in their mouths during rainstorms. Jack organized an expedition to a neighboring island; there he found a native who took a coconut, into which Kennedy had carved a plea for help, to an Australian naval base. Jack’s endurance and heroism are even more impressive in light of his poor health. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the military. His perennial back and stomach troubles would have kept him out had Joe not called in favors from his military contacts.
The incident and rescue were picked up by the media worldwide, and Jack, already well-known for being the wealthy son of the former US ambassador to England, became a media darling. Asked later how he became a war hero, he replied with characteristic wryness: “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.”
Rose found out that Jack had been missing in action only after his rescue; Joe, notified by the navy, had kept the news from her and the other Kennedy children while he awaited more information. Joe often kept worrying news from Rose, not wishing to upset her, and it seems that she did not begrudge him his decision not to worry her with Jack’s disappearance. Rose wrote, “We are more proud and thankful than words can tell to have him such a hero and still safe and sound.”
Joe Jr., still based in Puerto Rico at the time of the rescue, had a more complicated response. Joe Jr. had been the Kennedys’ golden boy his entire life: He’d been healthier, more athletic, a better student, and better looking than his sly, sickly, underachieving brother. Especially since the collapse of Joe Sr.’s political career, Joe Jr. had become the repository of all of the ambassador’s political hopes and family ambitions. For the favorite son in a clan that thrived on competition, Jack’s sudden shift into the limelight was a shock, and Joe craved more than ever what so many young men of the time craved: to prove himself through wartime heroics. After a brief visit in Hyannis Port for his father’s birthday, he piloted his VB-110 across the Atlantic to England, carrying his crew, gear, and a carton of fresh eggs for his sister Kick, whom he’d visit shortly in London. Stationed in Cornwall, he received a letter from his mother containing a silver religious medal to protect him during his service far away.
While in London, Joe Jr. visited Kick when he could. Despite the hazards of bombing raids and the privations of wartime rationing, Kathleen couldn’t be more excited to be back there. She missed it terribly and kept in touch with many of her London friends after her departure with the family in 1939, and now that she was back she spent as much time on the town and at country homes with friends as she did at her tony assignment as program assistant at Hans Crescent, an officers’ club in a Victorian hotel in the Knightsbridge section of London. Kathleen wasn’t nursing to wounded soldiers as a Red Cross volunteer; she was, she wrote to a friend, exhausted from “jitter-bugging, gin rummy, ping-pong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1500 doughboys a long way from home.”
Two weeks after her arrival, she ran into Billy Hartington (aka William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington) for the first time since her departure four years earlier. They’d met in 1938 at the king and queen’s annual Buckingham Palace garden party, just as London’s social set was opening its arms for her. He was widely considered the most eligible bachelor in England: polite, self-effacing, funny in a gentle way, he behaved with none of the pompousness of a man set to become the Duke of Devonshire. It was a title held by members of the Cavendish family since 1694 and would make Billy one of the wealthiest men in England upon his father’s death. He and Kick had hit it off immediately.
Now, in 1943, it was love at first sight all over again. They spent increasing amounts of time together, and soon enough there was talk of marriage. There was only one problem: Billy was a Protestant, and Kick was Catholic. Billy’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, saw how clearly besotted their son was, and they begged Kathleen to convert to Anglicanism. But Kick argued that she couldn’t convert. Catholicism, so deeply ingrained by her upbringing, was central to her life. Billy was similarly steadfast in his faith. Though Rose liked Billy very much and was no doubt impressed by his place in the peerage, his Protestantism rendered him, in her eyes, an utterly unacceptable husband for her daughter.
Jack finally returned to the United States in January 1944, barely five months after the PT 109 incident, his health so poor that he flew to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, even before heading home to see his family. He was told he’d need surgery on his back and was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer and malaria. When Jack finally arrived in Palm Beach, even normally undemonstrative Rose could not contain herself. “The mere feel of his coat brought her joy,” Barbara Perry wrote. “Incredulous at his homecoming, she touched his arms to convince herself that he was really there.” Her prayers had been answered: Her “elf” was home safe.
In England meanwhile, Kick became engaged to Billy, and the future Marchioness of Hartington. As far as the difference in their faith went, Joe refused to get up in arms about a difference he didn’t see as terribly important. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll gamble with your judgment,” he wrote Kick. Rose, however, was mortified at the thought of any of her children marrying outside the faith. And not just embarrassed; literally sickened. After Kick announced that she would indeed marry Billy, Rose wrote in her diary that she was “horrified—heartbroken.” She made herself so sick with worry that she ended up spending several days in New England Baptist Hospital.
As stubborn as her mother, Kick cabled Joe. “Religion everything to us both,” she wrote to her father. “Will always live according to Catholic teaching. Praying that time will heal all wounds. . . . Please beseech Mother not to worry. Am very happy and quite convinced have taken the right step.” On May 6, 1944, Kick married Billy in a civil ceremony attended by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and Joe Jr., among others, but not the bride’s parents. The eldest Kennedy child sent an icy, six-word cable to his absent parents later that day: “The power of silence is great.”
A month later, on June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces invaded Europe. Billy Hartington was called into active duty and two weeks later crossed the English Channel. Joe Jr. delayed his leave to fly support missions for the invading Allies. That summer, while waiting for her son to return on his planned leave, Rose softened. She wrote to Kathleen expressing her wish that she and Billy could accompany Joe Jr. when he visited. She regretted the things she’d said in opposition to the marriage. “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 you with open arms.”
Joe Jr. wrote home at the end of July to explain his further delay:
No doubt you are surprised that I haven’t arrived home. I am going to do something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So I probably won’t be home until sometime in September.
In truth, Joe Kennedy Jr. had volunteered for a near-suicidal mission—to take out a V-1 launching pad in Belgium. The navy had stripped down a Liberator bomber so that it could be fully packed with explosives. His mission was to get the bomber to the target, turn over control of his plane to two B-17s that were accompanying him, and parachute to safety.
On August 13, 1944, two naval chaplains knocked on the door of the house at Hyannis Port and delivered the news Rose and Joe had dreaded to hear. Joe’s plane, they said, had exploded before even reaching its target.
“Dad’s face was twisted,” Teddy would write in his memoirs.
He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead. . . . Suddenly the room was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guest, myself—everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.
Tellingly, Rose’s memoirs painted a more stoic picture: “There were no tears from Joe and me, not then. We sat awhile, holding each other close, and wept inwardly, silently.” Kick flew home and joined them on August 16. Though devastated, they attempted to stick to their routines and move on stoically. They stayed at Hyannis Port through Labor Day, and the Kennedys continued to have dinner on the front porch, play tennis, and go sailing as if it were a normal summer. In this way, they each grieved privately. After Labor Day, Joe moved into a suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, and Rose moved nearby with her daughters into New York’s Plaza Hotel, as was becoming her post–Labor Day custom. It was in New York that, on September 16, Kick was informed that Billy Hartington, her husband of only four months, had been shot dead in Belgium by a German sniper. She quickly returned to England, a widow at the age of twenty-four.
Subsequently, Rose wrote to Kathleen about how, after hearing about Billy’s personality 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—a 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.
It seems that Rose dealt with her own grief over the loss of her eldest child, Joe Jr., in a similar way. Joseph P. Kennedy wrote about her to a bereaved friend years later. “With her supreme faith [Rose] has just gone on and prayed for him and has not let it affect her life.” Rose mourned, quietly, privately, and with the poise that would come to typify, again and again, the Kennedy approach to grief.
When the war ended Joe Kennedy busied himself with a new venture. In July 1945 he purchased Chicago’s Merchandise Mart for thirteen million dollars. At the time, it was the world’s largest commercial space, and it would prove to be hugely profitable. Just a few months later, he established the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, named in memory of his son, and gave it a 25 percent ownership in the Mart. The foundation would become the charitable vehicle for the Kennedys’ wealth, and over the years it would come to fund research and treatment for persons with intellectual disabilities. On the second anniversary of Joe Jr.’s death, the Kennedy family contributed $600,000—the equivalent of $7.8 million in 2014—to a group of Franciscan nuns to start a convalescent home for “crippled and mentally deficient children.”
As Europe rebuilt from the devastation, Rose went to visit Kathleen, who was now well ensconced in London society. Staying with Kick in 1947 at Linsmore Castle, the Cavendish family estate in Ireland, Rose wrote to Joe: “It is beautiful here beyond words, quiet, peaceful, secluded . . . I feel perfect.”
Back in Massachusetts, Jack had been elected, at only age twenty-nine, to the US House of Representatives in the same district his grandfather Honey Fitz had been elected in the previous century. Though Rose did help with the campaigning in the 1946 election, she participated less than the rest of the family, and certainly not to the extent she would in coming years. The second half of the 1940s seemed to be a reflective period in Rose’s life.
That decade, already so tragic, held one final profound heartbreak for her. In 1948 Kathleen returned to the United States for a two-month visit. At the end of it, she announced to Joe and Rose that she intended to marry Peter Fitzwilliam. She’d been seeing Fitzwilliam, a married English aristocrat—and yes, Protestant—ten years her senior, since 1946; now that his divorce was set to become final, the two were ready to wed.
Rose was furious, threatening to disown Kick if she again broke with Catholic doctrine by marrying a divorced man. Joe offered no support either, but was at least open, a month later, to meeting Peter. In France for business, Joe agreed to meet the two in Paris. Kathleen and Fitzwilliam relaxed for two weeks on the Riviera before flying back to Paris in Fitzwilliam’s private plane, ignoring warnings that the weather was too treacherous to make the trip.
At his Paris hotel the next morning, May 14, 1948, Joe received a telegram informing him that Kathleen’s was one of four bodies recovered from the site of a plane crash on the side of a mountain in the Rhone Valley. She was buried in the Cavendish family plot in Edensor, near the Cavendish ancestral home. Joe was the only Kennedy who attended her burial.
Though Rose spoke little of her feelings after Kathleen’s death, she did remember her in a diary entry, dated June 24, 1962. It was fourteen years later, and Rose was on one of her religious retreats at Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut. “I heard the grandfather clock chime in the hall,” she wrote, “the clock which we had given to Msr. Cushing when we moved to Bronxville . . .” Her handwriting is nearly illegible, and the connection difficult to discern, but the sound called to mind Kathleen, and the “many problems” life threw her way. The entry is in fragments: “Falling in love with Billy. Both young people knew it would be difficult if not impossible to marry—both were young—deeply in love—admirably suited to one another . . .” Fourteen years later, she was turning over the events in her head, wistfully trying to make sense of Kathleen’s short life. Rose, though publicly stoic, had room in her life for sorrow, and room for grief. But it was in a mysterious, private part of her, never available for anyone but God to see.