V

In Ted Kennedy’s recollection of that awful Sunday on the Cape, Jack turned to him after the priests had left and said, “ ‘Joe wouldn’t want us to sit here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.’…And that’s what we did. We went sailing.” Afterwards, Jack wandered the beach alone before returning to his hospital bed in Boston. He had time now to think about his brother’s death and the strangeness of it all: Joe, with his robust good health, was gone, while he, laid up in a sick bed, got to live. Jack commented in writing a few months afterwards that “the best ones seem to go first,” and that there was “a completeness to Joe’s life, and that is the completeness of perfection.” Jack was proud of his actions in Blackett Strait one year before, but he knew there was a sharp distinction between his experience and the top-secret mission that led to his brother’s death. It surprised him not at all when Joe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross “for extraordinary heroism and courage.”49

His father’s demeanor in the weeks following the tragedy only confirmed the sense that the best one had gone first. Joe Senior was bereft, his grief all-consuming. He withdrew inside himself, spending hours alone listening to classical musical and avoiding social interactions. Young Joe, his firstborn and namesake, had been the embodiment of his dreams and ambitions, of his determination to take the Kennedys to the pinnacle of American public life. He was the crown prince, and now he was dead. “It was as though Joe Kennedy had mounted,” one observer later said, “with painstaking attention to the smallest detail, a drama intended to be long and triumphant, only to see the curtain rung down with cruel finality after the prologue.” To a friend Kennedy confessed, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him. Now it’s all over.”50

An enveloping sense of guilt may have deepened the sorrow. Arthur Krock, who knew his man well, later confided that the fatherly despair at the death was among the most severe “that I’ve ever seen registered on a human being.” He speculated that there was a specific reason for Joe Kennedy’s extreme reaction: “Joe Jr. when he volunteered on this final mission which was beyond his duty, beyond everything, was seeking to prove by its very danger that the Kennedys were not yellow. That’s what killed that boy. That’s why he died. And his father realized it. He never admitted it, but he realized it.”51

For Rose, the early weeks after the tragedy were the darkest time she had ever known. Joe had always been her great joy, ever since he smiled up at her from his crib in the little house in Brookline three decades before. She couldn’t sleep at night as she pictured the terror he must have experienced in his final moments of life. She kept seeing him as a young boy, “running into my arms and snuggling into my lap,” and thought about the steady presence he had always been in the Kennedy household, as a kind of surrogate parent and consummate role model for his siblings. Then, as letters poured in from near and far, Rose’s anguish began, ever so slowly, to lift as she willed herself to acknowledge that Joe’s death was part of God’s mysterious plan, a plan she did not have to understand in order to accept it.52

On August 16, Jack was on hand at Boston’s Logan Airport as Kathleen arrived from England. She collapsed into his arms, weeping. From there the two siblings went to little St. Francis Xavier Church, in Hyannis Port, for some quiet time together. According to her biographer, Kick was shocked by Jack’s appearance: “He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His cheek and jaw bones jutted out prominently, and his skin had a terrible yellow cast to it.”53 But she relished being with him, and he with her, and they saw each other frequently in the weeks that followed. Then, only a month later, on September 19, another stunning blow: news arrived that Kick’s husband, Billy Cavendish, had been killed in action in Belgium nine days earlier, shot through the heart by a German sniper. “So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” she wrote in her diary as she prepared to return to England for the memorial service. “Yesterday the final word came. I can’t believe that the one thing that I felt might happen should have happened. Billy is dead—killed in action in France Sept 10th. Life is so cruel.”54

Jack, reflecting on Joe’s and Billy’s deaths while laid up in the hospital that fall, filled a notebook with fragments about them—a letter from Kick about her husband’s passing, condolence notes from Billy’s fellow Coldstream officers, a Washington Post editorial about Joe as well as his posthumous citation. Jack’s thoughts went back to two accounts he had read of Raymond Asquith’s death in 1916, one in Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way, the other in Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. He inserted both in the notebook:

Buchan: “He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of the immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”

Churchill: “The War which found the measure of many men never got to the bottom of him, and, when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate, cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.”55

An idea took root in Jack’s mind: he would honor his brother by putting together a memorial book, made up of recollections and reminiscences from family and friends. He would serve as editor and pen the introduction. The undertaking became bigger than he anticipated—“The book on Joe is going slower than I had hoped,” he wrote Lem Billings in early 1945, “but it should be out in another month or so and I think will be pretty good”—but he took it seriously, spending long hours, in sister Eunice’s recollection, making calls and writing letters and gathering the collected pieces that made up the finished work, a slim but moving book titled As We Remember Joe. Three hundred and sixty copies were printed and privately distributed, mostly to friends and relatives and service colleagues.56

“The book, I am afraid—may make you sad,” he wrote his parents upon publication. “I hope that the sadness will be mitigated by the realization—clearly brought out in the book—of what an extraordinarily full and varied life Joe had.” (Mr. Kennedy was not willing to take the chance; for the rest of his days he could never bring himself to read more than a few pages of the volume.57) In his introduction, Jack wrote of his brother’s early acquisition of a “sense of responsibility towards his brothers and sisters, and I do not think that he ever forgot it. Towards me who was nearly his own age, this responsibility consisted in setting a standard that was uniformly high.” Touching ever so lightly on Joe’s shortcomings—his short fuse, his unwillingness to suffer fools—Jack said he would be forever grateful for the way his brother always led by example, and he left no doubt that the ill-fated mission on August 12, 1944, cut short a life destined for greatness: “His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things.”58

More than a few commentators would later say the same thing: that Joe was the Kennedy child marked for political stardom. These observers in effect embrace the narrative constructed with painstaking care by Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, which put their eldest son above the others in the brood, not merely in God-given talent and worldly accomplishments but in future potential. The reality was different, as Joe Junior himself seemed to grasp near the end. Alongside his leading-man looks, his work ethic, his loyalty, his physical courage, and his ebullience stood other qualities. He was hot-tempered and domineering, and often socially aggressive. Relentlessly argumentative, he struggled to dial this tendency back in debates, his need to win all-consuming. His humor tilted to the belittling, sarcastic variety, and his writing lacked subtlety and grace.

Above all, Joe’s policy misjudgments, not a few of which flowed from his unshakable determination to do his father’s bidding, would have posed obstacles to any future hope of political prominence in the Democratic Party—here one thinks, for example, of the admiration for Hitler’s Germany, expressed at various points through the 1930s; the stubborn vote against FDR’s nomination at the 1940 party convention; the hard Lindbergh-like anti-interventionism, more extreme even than his father’s and held long past the time most of the country had moved away from it; and the founding role in the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. The pro-Franco sentiments in Joe’s senior thesis and in his post-graduation reports from Spain likewise would have elicited uncomfortable questions, particularly as the fascistic policies of Franco’s regime became more widely known. (All copies of the thesis seem to have vanished in the years following his graduation, suggesting the family perceived the problem.59)

Nor should we necessarily accept the corollary judgment, even more widely held, that John F. Kennedy chose politics for a career only because of his brother’s passing and because his father commanded him. Jack had ample time to ponder his options that fall and winter of 1944–45, and there can be no doubt that Joe’s death factored into his thinking. It’s even possible to endorse historian Herbert Parmet’s subsequent assertion that Jack’s political career began with “an explosion high over the English coast.” His father certainly wanted it to be so, and he began nudging Jack hard in that direction in Palm Beach as early as Christmas 1944. (“I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” Jack confided to Red Fay that holiday season.60)

But Jack had his own reasons for selecting his path. His youth had been imbued by the political legend of his grandfather John F. Fitzgerald, and he had been reared in a household that revered public service and preached the obligation to do something worthwhile with one’s life. More than that, he had long been fascinated by politics, and his flirtation with law school was at least in part an expression of that interest. Professors and fellow students at Harvard who knew both brothers believed Jack had the greater interest in, and knowledge of, contemporary politics and political history.61 Already with Inga Arvad in early 1942, he had mused at length about running for office—the two of them even joked about the highest office in the land—and his subsequent war experience deepened his understanding of world affairs and of what made people tick. At the nightly bull sessions he conducted in the South Pacific, politics was a frequent topic of discussion. And in the late winter of 1944, several months before Joe’s death, Jack met with veteran Boston political operative Joe Kane to discuss potential political opportunities he might seek.62 Jack also had more publicized achievements than did his brother, meaning that in popular terms he, rather than Joe, had the advantage (as Joe himself sensed). The most that can be said is that his brother’s passing opened up an arena Jack might well have entered at some point anyway, not in order to take Joe’s place but in order to express his own ideals and aspirations. In the recollection of Theodore Sorensen, later a top aide, “His entry [into politics] was neither involuntary nor illogical.”63

In any event, nothing had been decided that December. Jack had not been released from the Navy, and his precarious health did not allow for firm planning. He also was not yet willing to commit himself to politics as a profession. He had other options. He liked writing, and moreover it was the only occupation for which he had some training and credentials. Plus his success with Why England Slept convinced him he could be good at it. To Chuck Spalding and others, he said he might make writing his career, perhaps as a journalist. Academia also held appeal for him, but not the years of additional study it would require. Business enticed him not at all.

VI

But first things first: he needed to get his health in order before committing to any particular path. In December 1944 he appeared before the Retirement Board in Washington, D.C., where it was determined that he would be transferred to the retired list at the rank of lieutenant, “by reason of physical disability,” bringing an end to John F. Kennedy’s military career. (His official release would be March 1, 1945.) In January 1945 he went to Arizona to try to recover his health in the warm sunshine, renting a room at the Castle Hot Springs Hotel, in the Bradshaw Mountains. On February 20 he reported to Billings that recovery was slow, and that he would return yet again to the Mayo Clinic if he did not feel improvements soon. Still, he was well enough to pay a visit to Phoenix: “Their [sic] was some pumping which interested me, and I did take [actress] Veronica Lake for a ride in my car….I don’t mean by all this that I pumped her or that if you should ever see her you should get a big hello. You would get the usual blank stare you get under similar circumstances.”64

In his cottage he also pecked out a draft article, “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace,” which focused on rearmament and the prospects for postwar stability. Whereas previously Jack had championed military preparedness to counter the threat of German and Japanese aggression, he now warned that a postwar arms race could threaten great-power peace and undermine American democracy. (“Democracy sleeps fitfully in an armed camp.”) Instead, U.S. leaders should pursue the kind of “intelligent and imaginative statesmanship” required to prevent a renewed arms scramble after the Axis powers were defeated, lest a rival power—here he anticipated it would be the Soviet Union—should try to match America’s might, and lest weaker nations “bind together for security against us.” Reader’s Digest took a pass on the article, as did The Atlantic Monthly, its editor lamenting that Jack had tried to cover too much ground in too little space, “with the result that your argument does not clinch the reader as it ought.” It was a fair critique; the draft lacked spark, and Jack did not offer a particularly novel argument in the context of early 1945, when innumerable other observers were likewise preaching the importance of disarmament, arms limitation, and vigorous diplomatic engagement. Still, the piece provides insight into its author’s evolving views on the efficacy of military power, and on his concern—well founded, it would turn out—that postwar strife among world powers could put serious strains on American democratic institutions.65

Most notable of all was this farsighted passage: “Science will always overtake caution with new terrors against which defense cannot be anticipated. It is not an exaggeration to expect that missiles will be developed to a point where theoretically any spot on the globe can send to any community in the world, with pinpoint accuracy, a silent but frightful message of death and destruction.”66

Foreign affairs remained, as always, Jack’s principal policy interest, but he sought in Arizona to round himself out by learning a bit more about domestic issues. He befriended a wealthy Chicagoan named Pat Lannan who was likewise in the desert to gain back his health. Lannan impressed on Jack his belief that organized labor would be extremely influential in American politics going forward, and he urged him to learn all he could about the subject. Jack promptly got his father to ship a crate of books on labor unions and labor law, and he dove into them as soon as they arrived. Lannan recalled that Jack, with whom he shared a cottage, “sat up until one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate.”67 The episode spoke to Jack’s curiosity and drive, and was a further clue that he saw elected office in his future.

Lannan, however, didn’t necessarily see presidential material in his new friend. “Certainly when I met Jack in 1945,” he later said, “never in my wildest imagination was there an idea that he would become a future president of the United States!” Rather, Jack struck him as a “thoroughly amusing guy,” but normal and pragmatic, not on the fast track to high office. What did come through, however, was Jack’s devil-may-care bravado, back problems notwithstanding, especially when the two went riding in the hills. “It was a wonderful place to ride horses, and we did that every day. He was a wild rider. He would charge his horse down a mountainside. He loved speed. He was a very daring fellow, but not that good a horseman. He was always taking chances. He always wanted a race—he was very competitive, but in a nice way.”68

As the two young men whiled away their days in the Arizona sunshine, they could sense that big changes were in the offing. War, it seemed, would soon give way to postwar, and to uncertainty over what that would mean for America, for the world, and for their own futures.