He got worse. When the ship reached U.S. shores, his condition was so grave that a priest gave him last rites. Death grazed him. On the evening of October 18 he was carried ashore on a stretcher (through a lower-level hatch on the ship, to avoid detection) to a waiting ambulance, which took him to LaGuardia Airport and a chartered DC-3 to Boston.
There followed weeks of treatment at the Lahey Clinic, during which he was a no-show in the House of Representatives. His attendance record would be among the worst in the Eightieth Congress. Thanks to his superb staff, however, he kept on top of numerous duties sufficiently well. His standing with his constituents might have even risen, as people took pity on him for his “malaria struggle.” On February 1, 1948, The Boston Post, perhaps with an assist from the Ambassador’s public relations team, exulted that Congressman Kennedy was fully on the mend, his political future rosy: “He has overcome the malaria he brought back from the South Pacific with him and he is in better physical condition now than at any time since his discharge from the Navy. In fact, according to his supporters, his health is almost as robust as his political courage.”39
IV
It was a brutal Boston winter, with snowstorm after snowstorm, but by the end of February 1948, all the Kennedys—save Rosemary, who was still institutionalized at her facility in Wisconsin—were lapping up the sun at the family home in Palm Beach. Even Kick was there, having arrived from England for a two-month stay. Jack had kept his promise not to tell their parents about Peter Fitzwilliam, but Kick knew she could not hide the truth much longer. Still, she vacillated, sure of the reaction she’d get. Only on April 22, shortly before her return to England, did she find the courage to tell them of Fitzwilliam and her plan to marry him. Rose responded by vowing to disown her daughter if she married a divorced man. Joe said nothing, suggesting he agreed with his wife.40
The Palm Beach home on North Ocean Boulevard.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps, Kick hoped, her father’s silence meant she could yet bring him around. She was a favorite of his, and she’d often been able to get her way with him in the past. Upon her return to London she convinced Joe, who was visiting Paris, to at least meet Fitzwilliam. The couple planned a brief two-day holiday in Cannes before joining Mr. Kennedy for lunch in the French capital on Saturday, May 15. On May 13, their chartered plane landed at Le Bourget airfield, outside Paris, to refuel. They met friends for a meal and returned midafternoon to reports of inclement weather in the Rhône valley, to the south. Pilot Peter Townshend recommended that they wait out the storm, but Fitzwilliam insisted on flying right away, even after being told that all commercial flights had been grounded.
Flying at ten thousand feet, they entered the storm just north of the Ardèche Mountains. Townshend and his copilot tried desperately to steady the aircraft as violent crosscurrents tossed it from side to side. Visibility was zero. They lost radio contact, and the instruments spun uselessly. The pilots didn’t know if they were descending or climbing. Suddenly the plane emerged from a cloud and they saw a mountain ridge straight ahead. Townshend yanked the controls to avoid a crash, but it was too late. For several seconds all four people aboard would have realized they were going to crash.41
It was Eunice who answered when the phone rang at midnight in Georgetown. A Washington Post reporter introduced himself and said a report indicated that a Lady Hartington had been killed along with three others in a plane crash in France; might this be her sister? Eunice replied that she was not sure, as there was also a second Lady Hartington—Kick’s ex-sister-in-law Debo. To which the reporter offered a crushing detail: a passport found at the crash site, on a mountainside near the tiny village of Privas, showed the victim’s Christian name to be Kathleen. While Eunice spoke on the phone, Jack was on the couch, listening to a recording of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical that had opened on Broadway the previous year. Billy Sutton was there, too. Jack got on the phone and asked the reporter to read the dispatch to him, then hung up and immediately dialed his aide Ted Reardon and instructed him to check the story out; Reardon called back soon thereafter and confirmed the worst. As Jack put down the receiver, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” was playing on the stereo. “She has a sweet voice,” he murmured of the vocalist Ella Logan. Then he turned away and wept.42
The following day, Reardon made arrangements for the two Kennedy siblings to fly to Hyannis Port. Once there, Jack hunkered in a back room, refusing to see anyone and having his meals delivered to him. He was disconsolate, unable to make sense of what had happened. Joe’s death had been awful, but at least it happened in wartime; he had given his life for his country, as had countless others. Kick’s was different. She had died on account of love, and the stifled romantic in Jack had always admired her refusal to repress her affections. More than that, she was his soulmate, the one he could confide in about anything, the one who completed his sentences, his thoughts, the one to whom he didn’t have to explain his feelings, his moods, for she intuited them. She had always believed in him, had always championed his prospects, even more than she had Joe Junior’s, had always prized him for who he was. And now she was gone.
With Kick to be buried in England, Jack sent word that he would come over for the May 20 service, arranged by Kick’s former in-laws, the Devonshires. He arrived in New York City on the eighteenth, with plans to fly across the Atlantic that evening. In his distressed state he had neglected to bring his passport. Hasty arrangements were made to try to secure an emergency replacement that would be rushed to him at the airport. His staff determined it could be done, if barely. Jack, however, suddenly called a halt, as though he could not bear the thought of attending his sister’s funeral. He instead returned to Washington. Among the Kennedys, only a grief-stricken father would be present for the requiem Mass. He cut a solitary figure, in light of his ignominious tenure as ambassador. “He stood there alone,” Alastair Forbes said, “unloved and despised.”43
For weeks Jack had insomnia, telling Lem Billings that when he drifted off he would be jolted awake “by the image of Kathleen sitting up with him late at night talking about their parents and dates. He would try to close his eyes again, but he couldn’t shake the image.” During congressional hearings, his mind would drift to all the things he and Kick had done together and all the friends they had shared, in England as well as at home. To make matters worse, Billings added, “there was no one in the family with whom he could share this loss.” He didn’t feel close enough to any of them. So he kept quiet, saying little that has been recorded, though years later he remarked to campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns that both Kick and Joe had perished just when “everything was moving in their direction.” That made losing them doubly hard to take. “If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”44
Kick’s death, coming so soon after his own severe health scare in London, made him acutely aware of his own mortality. Suddenly only he remained of the supposed golden trio of Kennedy children, and they had effectively also lost Rosemary, who was closest to him in age. Could he be far behind, especially considering his alarming recent diagnosis? He thought not, and told acquaintances flatly that he did not expect to live past forty-five. He began to obsess over the mind’s workings in the moments before death—would one think about all the joyous things that had occurred, or would one feel regrets about choices made, things not experienced? On a fishing trip with George Smathers he mused out loud on the topic, then leaned over to Smathers and said, “The point is that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day. That’s what I’m doing.”45
Although this fixation on mortality and his own premature death might have made Kennedy self-pitying and sullen, he was nothing of the kind. If anything, associates noted, his belief that his days were numbered, and that he had to live each one to the fullest, made him more convivial and expressive. Like Raymond Asquith and the other gallant World War I figures he so admired, he made a point of smiling at fate. In Chuck Spalding’s recollection, “There was something about time—special for him, obviously, because he always heard the footsteps, but also special for you when you were with him. So whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn’t have to try. He had something nobody else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there’s no other way to describe it.”46