The House of Kennedy(14)
Joe Jr. and Lieutenant Willy are posthumously honored for their valor with the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Navy Cross.
The Cross, with its combat distinction, is a higher honor than the non-combat Navy Marine Corps Medal awarded to Jack.
Even in death, Joe Jr.’s military accomplishments outshine his brother’s. And Joe Sr. makes sure everyone knows it.
Chapter 9
On a Sunday afternoon in August 1944, two priests from the local parish knock on the door of the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port.
“[My] son was missing in action and presumed lost,” Rose remembers them telling her. Joe Jr.’s plane had gone down the day before.
Reeling in shock, she runs upstairs to wake Joe Sr. from a nap.
“We sat with the priests in the smaller room off the living room, and from what they told us we realized there could be no hope…our son was dead.”
“Joe went out on the porch and told the children. They were stunned. He said they must be brave: that’s what their brother would want from them.”
Jack corroborates his father’s attitude. “Joe would not want us to stay around here crying, so let’s go sailing,” Rose’s nephew Joe Gargan recalls Jack telling his younger siblings. According to the historian and sailor James W. Graham, they venture out on the family sailboat, Victura.
Joe Sr. retreats to his bedroom. He plays Beethoven on the turntable, despite his longtime concerns that love of classical music is a sign of weakness in a man. Not now, not at this moment.
Rose’s only consolation is her Catholic faith. For many weeks, she retreats to her room, with only a rosary for solace.
Weeks later, a final letter from Joe Jr. arrives at Hyannis Port. The sight of the familiar handwriting plunges his father into the depths of sorrow.
Then another letter arrives. A naval lieutenant who attended Harvard with Joe Jr. offers comfort and consolation. “Through Joe’s courage and devotion to what he thought was right, a great many lives have been saved.”
Joe Sr. vows not to let his dream of a Kennedy son rising to the Oval Office die along with Joe Jr.
Kathleen channels her family identity into coping with the loss of her big brother, best friend, and champion. “Luckily, I am a Kennedy,” she writes. “I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability not to be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”
*
Six years earlier, when the Kennedys had landed in England, the government called Joe Sr. “Ambassador” and tall Joe Jr. was known to British debutantes as “the Big One.” In that first whirl of the London social season, Kathleen, known as Kick, set her sights on William John Robert Cavendish, the future Duke of Devonshire.
The outbreak of World War II would eventually separate the pair, as Billy explores a career in politics and Kick works at the Washington Times-Herald. But by 1943, Kick has negotiated a return to London through service in the Red Cross. She makes a late-June crossing to reunite with Billy in early July.
The pair is in love and determined to marry. Yet despite Billy’s impressive wealth and pedigree—assets Rose’s father once insisted Joe was lacking—Joe and Rose withhold their blessing. Kick’s parents hold hard and fast to the Catholic teaching that marrying outside the Church is a mortal sin. And Billy, a handsome, six-foot-four soldier who would rise to the rank of major in the Cold Stream Guards, is not only an Englishman, but also of Anglican faith.
Rose dismisses any possibility of compromise. “When both people have been handed something all their lives,” she tells Kick, “how ironic it is that they can not have what they want most.”
Only one Kennedy supports her decision: Joe Jr. Breaking from his role as one of the like-minded “two Joes,” as Kick and Eunice call father and son, Joe Jr. chastises his hard-hearted parents. Joe says of their condemnation of her so-called sinful marriage, “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.”
On May 6, 1944, in the midst of the privations of wartime London, the couple forgoes the kind of lavish, formal wedding that could have topped the society pages of every newspaper around the world for a modest civil ceremony at a registrar’s office in Chelsea. Not only is Joe Jr. the sole Kennedy in attendance, but he gives the bride away. Kick loves him even more for that fraternal gesture.
“MISS KENNEDY A MARCHIONESS” a London paper announces. “THURSDAY—ENGAGED: TO-DAY—MARRIED,” the headline continues somewhat snidely, noting that although the “engagement was announced only on Thursday,” the couple had “a quiet wedding” that Saturday. “The bride’s naval brother, Lieutenant J.P. Kennedy, brought her in, and the ceremony took place in a bare room, brightened only by three vases of carnations.”
“MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!” Kick jubilantly reports to her family. But barely five weeks later, on June 13, Billy is ordered to active duty in France.
He leaves his beloved bride in a flurry of romantic longing. “This love,” Billy writes, “seems to cause nothing but goodbyes.”