CHAPTER FOUR
1940-1950
Back home in America at the end of 1939, I began my preparatory school years on a note of great expectation. Yet these did not prove to be happy, joyous years.
I was very young, nearly always younger than my grade level. And nearly always a stranger: counting kindergarten at Pondfield and Gibbs in London, I attended ten schools between 1937 and 1950, nine of them before high school. That kind of transience was not a recipe for academic success. In those years, as the family shuttled seasonally between Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, I was essentially without a central home as well, although Cape Cod felt most like one. My father met with Roosevelt in Washington on December 8, 1939. We all celebrated a Christmas reunion at the Palm Beach house, and not long afterward my father sailed back to London. In January 1940 we all began to fan out.
Pat, Eunice, and Jean returned to their pre-London schools. Kathleen, almost twenty-one now, completed her studies at Finch College in New York. Early in 1941 she took her writing talents to the Washington Times-Herald, working as a research assistant before she was promoted to reviewing plays and movies. In the spring, Rosemary flew home from England, in the care of Dad's close friends Edward and Mary Moore.
Joe Jr., who'd served as an informal secretary to Dad in London after graduating Harvard in 1938, enrolled in Harvard Law School. Jack graduated cum laude from Harvard in June, the season in which Why England Slept was published. He enrolled in the fall at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and in the spring he traveled through South America, meeting up with Mother and Eunice in Rio de Janeiro.
Mother enrolled Bobby at Portsmouth Priory, a school run by Benedictine monks in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I initially stayed with Mother, but when she moved from Palm Beach to Bronxville with the seasons, I did too. In the second grade alone, I attended three different schools, with three different curriculums, with three different peer groups and sets of friends to make.
By the spring of my third-grade year, Mother thought that a shortterm stint in boarding school was the best option for me, and she tried to ease the pain of separation by having me go to the same school as Bobby. If we both were at Portsmouth Priory, she reasoned, he could look after me, and I wouldn't be so lonely. And anyway, we would all be together on Cape Cod in the summer.
The Benedictines were happy to accommodate Mother's wishes, but there was a bit of a complication: Portsmouth Priory started in the seventh grade; it had no elementary school. No problem, said Mother. Bobby, a fourteen-year-old eighth grader, would be there to look after me, and after all, she was planning to keep me at Priory just until the end of the school year. Unfortunately, "just until the end of the school year," even if it's just two or three months, can be a very long time.
I entered the seventh grade at Portsmouth Priory in the spring of 1941 when I was barely nine years old, boarding and competing with boys who were four years older than me. It was a recipe for disaster.
My time at Portsmouth Priory was not an education; it was a battle. I took French, which I'd studied a little at Gibbs. On my first exam, I got a 13. I went to math class but the work was incomprehensible to me, and so was Latin.
My classmates did not befriend me. Once in a while, if I was really lucky, someone would take me out for a sail on a boat. But I was rarely chosen to go. I was rarely picked to be on any of the teams during that period, because I was so young. Bobby was there, of course, but, being a regular teenage boy, he already had his own group of friends and was generally involved with them. A few of my classmates proved as cruel as only children can be.
I'd brought my pet turtle to school with me, and in those hours of loneliness I played with him. But after a few weeks, my turtle died. I took him outside and dug a hole in the frozen ground outside my dormitory where I buried him and said a few prayers, giving him my own nine-year-old version of a funeral. Then I went back inside, found my cubicle--our dormitory rooms were cubicles with open ceilings--and crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a strange sound from the hallway. Thump. Thump. Thump. And then laughter. I didn't know what it was until the next morning, when I awoke to find my dead pet turtle in my bed. Some of the students must have spotted me burying him. That night, they dug him up and tossed the shell with his lifeless body back and forth down the hall. Thump. Thump. Thump. And then they put him between my sheets. I buried him again that morning.
Bobby didn't think that family solidarity required him to be my protector. One day I got into a fight with a boy named Plowden. He was a head taller than me, and soon had the better of me, twisting my arm up between my shoulder blades. Bobby came walking past, and I shouted to him, "We're fighting because he says the Plowdens are better than the Kennedys!"
Bobby walked on. As he left me behind, he called back, "You have to learn to fight your own battles in life."
I didn't learn much else at Portsmouth Priory. I certainly didn't improve my spelling. "Dear Daddy, We are down in cap-card," I wrote to my father around this time, "mother has gone to jacks graduain. joe is here. The weather is very dad. Would you get the kings autograph for me I will send you an other lettor soon."
In the summer of 1941, Cape Cod was for me an oasis of stability and family love. Joe and Jack helped me with my sailing when they were there. My sisters and Mother doted on me. Bobby paid more attention to me than he had at Priory. And I basically was able to be a carefree nine-yearold boy, riding my bike, swimming, and perfecting my sailing.
In September 1941, Mother sent me to Riverdale Country School for Boys in the Bronx. All three of my older brothers had gone to Riverdale. They had been day students, but since the family was no longer headquartered in the house in Bronxville, I was a boarder. And the happiness of my Cape Cod summer did not take long to evaporate.
If Portsmouth Priory taught me about the cruelty of children, then Riverdale taught me about the cruelty of adults. And it was not the kind of cruelty that could easily be erased by the happy days of summer. Our dorm master was an abuser. He lived in the residence hall with us, in loco parentis if you will, and violated every trust that our parents had placed in him. He specialized in terror and humiliation. In evenings, at "lights out" time, R., as I will refer to him, would summon a rotating group of boys to his room, have them stand in a circle, and lead them in a matching-word game. He might say "shoe," and someone would respond with "leather." He'd say "heel," and someone would say "sole." Then he might say "shoelace," and if you couldn't think of a matching word, you'd have to take off an article of clothing. Since the boys were in pajamas, they didn't have too many articles of clothing to take off. Soon they were naked and subjected to R.'s "inspection." No boy was spared the humiliation.
R. had enlisted two senior boys, Argentines, as accomplices who would sometimes help him lead the word game. They added a cruel twist by shouting out words in Spanish. But the young boarders at Riverdale didn't know any Spanish. The humiliation arrived even sooner.
I could not believe this was happening. There were whispers that R. also took a private interest in some boys and would send the Argentines to round them up. I spent many terror-filled nights under my bunk, hiding lest I too become one of those victims. I kept telling myself that this would pass. That I would get through this nightmare. That my brothers had survived boarding school and I would too. It's going to be okay, I told myself. I had to believe that.
I have a particular memory of that horrible time that I can see in my mind as vividly as if it happened five minutes ago. There was a path on the grounds at Riverdale that led along a ridge, where the ground fell away quite steeply. Quite a way down, another path ran along the top of a bluff above the Hudson River. One fall afternoon, I was walking the upper path. I looked down and saw a little boy, maybe even younger than I was, walking fast and half running along the lower path. He carried a suitcase and his teddy bear. R. was hurrying after him. The boy was trying to run away, but the older man caught him. "Where do you think you're going, young man?" he shouted. The poor little boy was weeping and clutching his teddy bear and his suitcase. R. ripped the teddy bear from the boy's arms and threw it on the ground. Then he yanked away the suitcase and with one of the most evil expressions I have ever seen, he opened the suitcase and emptied all of the boy's belongings down the hill. Then he dragged the sobbing child back to the dormitory. I couldn't stop staring at the clothes strewn everywhere and the teddy bear still lying on the ground.
The dorm master was eventually caught and fired. But his activities were all hushed up; nothing was ever said to the parents.
As for the Argentine accomplices, I saw one of them ten years later. I was in the army, doing basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Two buddies and I were in a New York bar on a weekend pass, having a drink. I looked at the man standing next to me at the bar. It was one of the Argentines. I said to him, "I know you from Riverdale. This bar isn't big enough for both of us." He took a look at me and my friends and walked out.
Just a few years ago, as I write this, I was at a social event in Palm Beach, chatting with a lot of people. I saw a man approach and said to myself, "Who is he? I know him from somewhere." Then it hit me: he was the other Argentine. When he came up to me and put out his hand, I turned my back on him.
I was saved from the worst of R.'s terror by two things. First, Mother wanted my sister Jean and me to be near her during the winter months, so she took both of us out of boarding school and had us attend day school while we lived with her in Palm Beach. While this plan of switching schools for just the winter term was not exactly conducive to keeping and making friends or to doing well in school, it saved me from R.'s abusive games during that winter. I was too ashamed to tell my mother what had happened, but I was thankful to be safe at home with her.
The second thing that saved me was whooping cough. When the winter came to an end, I went back to Riverdale, where the terror began all over again. Perhaps it was the stress, but I got sick, very sick, with pneumonia and whooping cough. And again, I was able to return to the safe and loving arms of my mother.
Whooping cough was serious business back then, before the pertussis vaccine was widely available. Children often died after days or weeks of sustained coughing and gasping for breath. It nearly killed me when, accompanied by a case of pneumonia, it struck me in 1942.
When I first fell ill, I was rushed from school to a New York City hospital for emergency treatment, after which Mother brought me up to Cape Cod to recuperate. This was the first time since infancy that I really had my mother to myself, and the first time I enjoyed such close attention from her, and I basked in it. We took long walks on the nearly deserted beach together--it was spring, and the crowds hadn't yet descended on the town--and in the evenings she would read to me: books on science, history, geography, and the occasional adventure from Jack London or Sir Walter Scott. I still remember those terrible dogfights in London's White Fang. I couldn't sleep after I heard them read. And the elaborate prose of Ivanhoe, those chivalric images and cadences.
But more than any specific activity, it was my mother's constant tenderness and attention that I cherished. When the original bout of whooping cough was nearly over, I went out in the rain and suffered a recurrence of the pneumonia, and Mother patiently nursed me back to health again. As sick as I was, those days were a tonic for me. And they cemented a special bond between my mother and me that survived until her death at the age of 104.
Dave Powers, one of President Kennedy's closest friends and aides, long remembered and wrote about an incident that happened when I was about sixteen. Dave was having breakfast at the Cape house with us and listening to me excitedly tell Dad about my plans to compete in the Edgartown regatta that weekend. Mother walked into the room in time to hear some of this. She reminded me that she expected me to make my annual visit to a religious retreat north of Boston, which was happening that same weekend. Without so much as furrowing my eyebrows, I immediately replied--as Dave recalled--"Yes, Mother, I'll be ready to go."
My father was watching this exchange as well. He supported my mother, disciplinarian that he was. But after observing the exchange, he volunteered that I could drive his car to the retreat. Since no one ever was allowed to drive Dad's car, the message was unmistakable. I know this is hard for you, Teddy. I know you want to compete in the regatta. But you're doing the right thing by honoring and obeying your mother. I've never forgotten that day. And as much as I'm sure I would have loved the regatta, I doubt I would have remembered it any more than the one the year before or the year after.
Friends have asked me, over the years, whether I felt anger toward my parents for this exacting discipline, and for launching me off to these nomadic boarding schools at such an early age. My answer is that no, I did not, and do not. For one thing, I was taught not to complain. That was one of the rules that Dad lived by, and thus one that we all lived by. "Kennedys never complain!" For another, sending children away to school was simply what many parents did in those days. I knew lots of other children in circumstances similar to mine. Some suffered, but suffering is a given in life. Most, I think, grew up to be good parents themselves and to enjoy prosperous lives.
Besides that, I never once doubted my parents' love. Dad could be stern, but he not only loved us; he showed us all a deep respect. He always kissed us when we came home. Not many fathers kissed their children back then. And even as grown men, we kissed our father on the cheek when greeting him or saying goodbye. I continue that tradition with my own sons.
Now, I don't mean to imply that Dad was a pushover. I was reminded of the limits of his indulgence--and of his insistence on self-discipline--at age eleven, when I was about to leave home for yet another boarding school: Fessenden, I believe. Dad sat me down for his traditional pep talk. At the end of it, he said, "Well, now, Ted, you may go down to the cupboard in the pantry and help yourself to a piece of my butter crunch."
Everyone in the family knew that Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch was my favorite treat. It was a taste I shared with my sister Rosemary--and with Dad. I raced into the pantry and helped myself to much more than one piece. My pockets were bulging with as much butter crunch as I could jam into them. My newly bulky profile proved suspicious to my eagleeyed father. He insisted on looking in my pockets, where he found them chock-full of what amounted to two complete boxes of the candy. He exploded. And I was sent off to school without so much as a taste of Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch.
Confrontations (as opposed to competition) were actually quite rare in our household, and they almost never occurred between any of the brothers and sisters. This was no accident. Dad raised us to cooperate, not to quarrel. This may sound like a tall order for any parent, but our father made it work. First, he respected us, and in that way he showed us how to respect him and one another. He used a tactical ploy as well: he would draw any sign of tension away from us and toward himself. Mother did not always understand this, and would worry when one of us argued with Dad. He would explain to her, "As long as they're not fighting with each other, as long as their disagreements are with others and not among themselves, I can deal with it. I can't deal with the fact that they're differing or fighting with each other."
Another important factor in our harmony was that, as strange as it might seem, Dad and Mother never fought. My niece Caroline Kennedy tells of asking Mother once, "Did you and Grampa ever fight?"
Mother said, "Oh, no, dear. No, Grampa and I never fought."
Caroline said, "Well, how did you handle your differences?"
Mother replied, "I would always just say, 'Yes, dear,' and then I'd go to Paris."
It was about three years until Dad and I clashed again, but it was a beaut. This time I was the aggrieved party, or I thought I was, and the upshot was that I decided to run away from home. The provocation was something silly. My parents had promised that I could go on the boat, and then they withdrew their promise. That was my perception, anyway. The more I reminded them of the promise, the more unreasonable they grew--in my view. I was an adolescent now, and so I was mortally wounded. "I'm going to run away," I announced. I stormed out of the house and got into one of the cars and started driving. I drove west, toward the Cape Cod Canal, as I remember. Just before I crossed the Cape Cod Canal bridge, the landmark that would officially take me "off-Cape," I stopped and found a telephone and called home. My intent, or so I told myself, was to reiterate to my parents that I was running away.
Jack, who was visiting the Cape house, and not Dad, answered--to my great fortune. "I'm running away from home!" I repeated to him. "I'm tired of it all. This is it. I'm finished. I'm out of here."
Jack subtly took charge of the situation. He didn't try to persuade me that our parents may have had a point. Instead, he said, "Well, Teddy, before you run away, why don't you meet me at the Midtown Theater?" This was a movie house in Hyannis.
Pride made me hold out in grim silence.
"There's a war picture on," Jack said. "Come and watch a war picture with me."
He really knew how to get me. Watching a war picture with a hero of World War II. Who was my brother. It was all over, and we both knew it, but I needed to salvage a little dignity. I pretended to think about it.
"Well," I said. "All right."
I turned around and headed for Hyannis, where I met my brother at the movies. At the end of the war picture, as we were walking out, Jack turned to me and said, "It's getting late, Teddy. Why don't you come home with me and get a good night's sleep and run away in the morning."
"I'm not sure about that," I said.
"That's the right thing to do, Teddy. Otherwise you're going to have to find some other place to sleep tonight," he said.
That convinced me, even though the truth is that I didn't need too much convincing by then.
When we got home and I went to sleep, Jack found our father and said, "I think you ought to let up on Teddy."
Early the next morning, Dad knocked on my bedroom door and said, "Teddy, do you want to go riding?" I said, "Sure, Dad." And all was forgotten.
Jack's easy mastery of a crisis, and his way of making an adolescent boy feel like a worthy person whose feelings mattered--these formed another aspect of my wish to "catch up." It wasn't entirely about matching my brothers' accomplishments. It was about conducting myself like them as well.
When Dad was still in England, he was never far from my thoughts. Looking over old and poorly spelled letters, I find myself making many assurances that I was living up to his wishes: "We had a Halloween party lost week. Afterwards I got dressed up like a ghost and went all the way down the road I didn't scare because you said not to scare anyone because they may have a weak heart."
Dad never wanted us to flaunt our wealth. Thus I was not allowed to even have a bicycle until the majority of boys among my friends had received theirs. Later on, I was not allowed to have a car until most of my friends owned one. My brothers and sisters had to obey the same rule. At the time, we felt a little sorry for ourselves. We never complained, of course. And years later, we all looked back and understood how important this rule was to our development. The underlying principle was that we were always to distinguish ourselves through achievement, not mere flamboyance.
I didn't write as often as Dad would have liked. "You and Bobby are the worst correspondents I have in the family," he chided me in September 1940. German bombs were falling on London by then, and Dad's life, like everyone else's in the city, was in danger. It was typical of him to tell me about the bombing in a casual, man-to-man sort of way, as if I were his intrepid chum who just happened to be on the other side of the ocean:
I don't know whether you would have very much excitement during these raids. I am sure, of course, you wouldn't be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety.... I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to make people happy instead of making them miserable as this war does today.
Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren't you?
Love
Dad
With Bobby, who was fourteen then, Dad was more candid:
I thought you might be interested to get my opinion as to the present situation here. There is... a very definite feeling that within the next forty-eight or seventy-two hours Germany will try an invasion. There are evidences that they have accumulated a number of barges and ships to move their forces all along the French Coast. There is also an indication that their guns, which they are firing from the French Coast... will [produce] the sort of rainbow effect over the channel that they will send their fleet under for protection....
The whole problem will finally be dropped in the lap of the United States, because as the manufacturing facilities here are destroyed... we in the United States will have to furnish more supplies... within a very few months we will have the settling of the whole matter right in our own hands.
The "settling of the whole matter" implied almost certain U.S. involvement in the European war. Far from my awareness and even Bobby's, Dad's desire to keep America neutral and his pessimism about Britain's capacity to defeat Germany was costing him the goodwill of the British government and people. His stormy relationship with Franklin Roosevelt was likewise reaching a breaking point. As correspondence was to reveal years afterward, Roosevelt had long considered Joseph Kennedy "dangerous" because of his bluntness and penchant for harsh public criticism, but valued his skill as a negotiator and his keen ear for information.
My childhood self suspected none of these intrigues. But the upshot of them rang clear as a bell to me. I excitedly wrote this letter to Dad, shortly after receiving some good news in the autumn of 1940:
Dear Daddy, I was so glad when you told me today that you were coming home soon. I had my bicycle painted blue and silver, and fixed up, so now I don't need a new one. I hope it didn't cost too much. Are you lonesome at wall hall? How is Rose and Stevens and Mr. Begley? Is he as nice now as he used to be? Does Stevens go fishing anymore? He was awfully nice to take me when I was at wall hall. Are there any fogs now? Or any air raids? Write us again. Love, from Teddy.
My father returned to America from London for the last time as ambassador on October 26, 1940. Letters and diaries show that he was am-bivalent about supporting Franklin Roosevelt for a third term, and preoccupied with resentments about what he saw as a falling away of trust and support from his chief. He poured out his frustrations directly to FDR over dinner at the White House the day after he arrived back home. Yet the next night, less than a week before the election, Dad put all this aside and spoke to the nation as a patriot. Paying for his own airtime, Joe Kennedy delivered an address over 114 radio stations of the Columbia Broadcasting Network urging Americans to reelect their president. He saved his most heartfelt argument--the famous "hostages to fortune" passage--for the last.
FDR won reelection. On December 1, Dad announced his intention to resign as ambassador to the Court of St. James's within a week. He was never again to serve in public life.
In the spring of 1941, I entered the Palm Beach Private School, not far from my parents' Florida house. I was nine then, and was placed in the fourth grade. School life quickly returned to normal for me: my teacher, Mrs. Cochrane, wrote on my first report card, "No foundation for fourth grade." But I liked her, and slowly my grades improved.
Following that glorious summer at the Cape in 1941, the summer of cranberry bogs and horseback riding with my dad, I resumed a pattern that would hold for the next four years: shifting from school to school, south to north and back again, as I followed the sun with my parents.
I put in three stints at the Fessenden School, a forty-one-acre campus in West Newton ten miles west of Boston, in the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and then again in the fall of 1944. I distinguished myself during my first tour at Fessenden by getting paddled fifteen times. I've always joked that my father must have been the inspiration for Federal Express. When the headmaster wrote the parents at the beginning of the year to ask whether to paddle their sons or dock them days from their vacation if they misbehaved, my father's approval to have me paddled seemed to arrive by 10:30 the next morning. I had no resentment about being paddled. It was delivered by Mr. Giles, an elderly instructor who'd lost a leg in the First World War, and although it stung immediately, it didn't hurt so much after a few minutes. Anyway, I deserved it every time. Walking on the roof, for instance, with some of my friends, with water bombs--water inside the fold of a little paper--and dropping them three stories down onto members of the faculty. Not a wise thing to do. Or we would put strips of tape between our cubicles to trip the night watchman and make him fall down. That was not a good thing to do either. These boyhood pranks, more than anything else, were my way of trying to fit in and be one of the guys.
My most incredible escapade was with two brothers who went on to distinguished careers, and they are still good friends of mine. But at Fessenden they had a sort of an outlaw streak. We all did.
One night we thought it would be a good idea to lower one of them down on a rope from the roof to the faculty room window, so the boy could climb through, locate the student files, and find out our grades. I thought that was a good idea myself. So we lowered one of the boys down. Just as he got inside, it began to rain. One of the teachers was trapped outdoors and got rained on. He headed for the faculty room to get his umbrella. The boy heard footsteps and scampered into the closet. The teacher opened the closet door to get his umbrella, and there he was. That was nearly the end for the brothers. They came within a whisker of getting expelled. Luckily for Fessenden, they were allowed to stay and graduate. The last I heard, the brothers had contributed a boatload to the school.
Far from these hijinks in Massachusetts, the war that Dad had tried to keep at bay from his country and his children exploded onto American territory on December 7, 1941. World War II proceeded to draw several of Joseph Kennedy's "hostages to fortune" into its maw.
Joe was the first. He earned his navy aviator wings in May 1942 at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. My father was on hand to pin them on him.
Jack followed our brother a few weeks later. He had faced numerous health challenges growing up, and he was concerned that he wouldn't be allowed into the military. And in fact he had failed the army physical, mostly because of his torturously bad back.
But he would not give up. He threw himself into a rigorous exercise program. Then he prevailed on Dad to help get him in. After some behind-the-scenes prodding by Dad's friend and former naval attache in London, Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk, Jack passed a second physical and joined the navy as an ensign two months before Pearl Harbor. He served in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he socialized with Kick and her friends. In January 1942 he was sent to a South Carolina ONI office, then spent some time recuperating from illnesses in naval hospitals before reporting to the midshipman's school in Chicago in July.
Kick soon put aside the glittering Washington life that suited her so naturally. In July 1943 she resigned her newspaper position and returned to a now devastated London, where she was handed a gas mask and took up the grimy demands of volunteer work for the American Red Cross.
Bobby was chafing to enter the service as soon as he came of age. He followed the war's news intently in that summer of 1941. He would turn seventeen in November of the following year and become eligible to enroll in a training program for the navy.
The summers at the Cape changed as the war went on, with so many of my brothers and sisters absent, and sometimes one or the other of my parents as well. I sailed alone and with Joey Gargan, exhilarated by the freedom and sense of power in my little sloop, at the safe fringes of an ocean where U-boats preyed upon convoys of ships.
The war reached its midpoint in 1943, and that was the moment when Jack was nearly killed and emerged a hero.
Jack got himself assigned to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific theater and arrived as the twenty-six-year-old commander of a patrol torpedo boat, an extremely dangerous assignment that he'd virtually demanded. PTs were small, often badly built, lightly armed craft deployed to prowl combat-zone waters at night in search of Japanese destroyers and cruisers. Jack's boat was numbered 109.
On August 2, as part of a squad of fifteen such craft sent to intercept a Japanese convoy off the island of New Georgia, PT 109 was rammed by an enemy destroyer and sliced in half. Two of the thirteen-man crew were killed. My brother exhorted the survivors to swim toward a flyspeck island, personally towing the badly burned engineer for five hours by clamping the man's lifeboat straps in his mouth. Jack then swam back out into the ocean to try and signal a passing boat, though he'd been without sleep for a day and a half. Unsuccessful, he swam back to his men half unconscious. The ordeal continued for a week, with Jack directing swims to larger islands. The men went days without water. The navy assumed that all of them had been killed, and in fact held a funeral service for them on the small island of Tulagi a few days after the encounter. On August 9, the party made contact with a New Zealanders' camp on Cross Island via a message Jack had scraped into a coconut shell. (That coconut is now in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.) The message made it to an American base, which sent a PT to rescue the men.
I didn't even know my brother was lost and presumed dead until I learned he had been found. Along with my sister and some friends, I rode my bicycle over to the News Shop in Hyannis Port one balmy August night to get the papers for our parents. We stared at the big headlines that confronted us, along with a drawing of a PT boat. We raced home, yelling that our brother was a hero. Dad heard us out, and then told us he had been notified several days earlier that Jack was missing. He'd remained hopeful, he said, and had decided not to worry us with the news.
On furlough the following year, Jack playfully let me share the aura of his "hero" image--which he himself never took seriously. Tanned and rawboned and flashing his great smile, he showed up at the family residence in Palm Beach with his service buddy Paul "Red" Fay Jr. When I ventured inside his room to awaken him on that first morning, he hugged me, then dug some war souvenirs out of his duffel bag and gave them to me: native swords and clubs from the South Pacific.
Then he appointed me courier in a make-believe PT mission. He ordered me to awaken "Red" Fay, down the hall, with the message, "This is PT 109 to Captain Fay, over." I gladly ran off. Red sent me back to Jack's room with, "Romeo Echo Delta A-okay. What is our first mission this morning?" This went on for a while, and the jargon got a little too military for me to understand--but those two found it a great joke. And I was in the clouds.
Better still, Jack escorted me on board an actual PT boat. He was stationed at a shakedown center in Miami Beach, and before sunrise one morning he rousted me out of bed to come along with him. I couldn't believe it. I was barely twelve years old, and my hero brother was going to take me aboard a ship with him. What I didn't know at the time was that civilians, especially little kid civilians like me, weren't really supposed to be aboard navy vessels and certainly weren't supposed to go out to sea on them. But my brother knew how much it would mean to me and all the crew enjoyed being co-conspirators in our adventure.
As we boarded the boat and headed for open water, I had a huge smile plastered across my face until I got drenched by a torpedo-like squirt of tobacco juice from the mouth of the biggest sailor I'd ever seen. It splattered my shirt and hands. The crew loved it, and Jack showed me no mercy whatsoever. After I got over the initial shock, I thought it was pretty funny too. I prowled the coastal waters for a couple of hours that day with my brother and his crew, and I've treasured the memory my entire life.
Jack's back problems prevented him from returning to active duty, but while in a naval hospital, he was awarded four more medals. He was released in October 1944.
* * *
If my brother gave me an imaginative glimpse into World War II that year, another colorful relative whisked me back into the brass-band exuberance of my Boston Irish political roots.
Fessenden was near enough to the city that on autumn Sundays I could board a train on the Boston & Albany Railroad line in West Newton and roll along the few short miles to South Station in the heart of town. From there I would walk up Beacon Hill to the old Bellevue Hotel. Standing as it did next to the State House with its golden dome, the Bellevue is properly remembered as "a political Grand Central Station." I would wait in the lobby until I was summoned up to the suite of the stationmaster, one of Boston's greatest politicians: my maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald. Honey Fitz.
He was eighty then. He was the son of an Irish immigrant family who made it to the top: a Massachusetts state senator from 1892 to 1894, a U.S. representative (1895-1901), and twice mayor of Boston (1906-08 and 1910-14). But those offices hardly begin to describe how much Grampa meant to Boston, and vice versa.
Pay a visit sometime to Franklin Park Zoo, that wonderful seventyacre site down in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. It's one of the oldest zoos in the hemisphere now, built in 1913. That zoo was developed by Grampa.
He played a key part in the shaping of Fenway Park, which was finished in 1912. This was back in the glory years when the Red Sox won six pennants and five World Series from 1903 through 1918. Honey Fitz was right in the middle of it all--a passionate Red Sox fan. He formed the team's first pep club, the Royal Rooters, along with his pal Mike "Nuf Ced" McGreevey, a bartender with a walrus mustache. Every Opening Day, the two of them would put on their silk top hats and cutaway coats, hoist a few frothy pints at the bar, light up their cigars, and then go strutting at the head of a parade through the city to the ballpark, waving their red umbrellas and belting out songs, while a brass band behind them oom-pa-pa'd. Grampa was short and stout, and he had a big, sweet tenor voice. If things were going badly for the Sox, either Grampa or "Nuf Ced" was likely to begin bawling from the stands the words to the sentimental waltz "Tessie," which became the team's unlikely lucky song:
Tessie, you make me feel so badly,
Why don't you turn around?
Tessie, you know I love you madly,
Babe, my heart weighs about a pound.
Don't blame me if I ever doubt you,
You know I couldn't live without you.
Tessie, you are the only, only, only.
"Tessie" may sound a little quaint to today's ears, but Grampa's rendition of it was good enough to cause the great Pittsburgh third baseman Honus Wagner to commit three errors in one inning during a World Series game.
Honey Fitz provided and lit the first civic Christmas tree in the United States, on Boston Common, back in 1912. New Yorkers sometimes like to claim credit for the first public tree, in Madison Square Garden, but an expert researcher named Caroline Kennedy did some digging and figured out that Grampa's tree went up fully thirty minutes before the one in New York.
He was a life force, and that force fueled the life of the city. Many of his ideas came from his travels in European countries. He'd take note of the dynamic civic features in all the European capitals, and he'd say, "There's no reason that Boston can't have these, just like these other great cities!" So he adapted them to Boston. And then his innovations were adapted in other cities across the country.
Grampa loved people. And the people he came in contact with felt his warmth and returned it. I think Grampa wished he could get to know every single person in town.
There's no question that I inherited this joy of people from him. I inherited the whole way I approach politics. Being in a crowd, looking into new faces, shaking hands, laughing, swapping stories, singing some of the old songs--I love it all.
Still, Honey Fitz's love of people exceeded anything I've ever seen. He used to board the passenger train at North Station and ride it up the Atlantic coast to Old Orchard Beach in Maine, a distance of about a hundred miles. The trip would take two hours and ten minutes. Once there, he'd board the next train back to Boston. These trains left at intervals of about an hour in those days, and Honey Fitz would take them all, at intervals of about five days. He'd stagger his departures and returns so that each time he would catch a different crowd of commuters. And what would he do on those journeys? Why, he'd walk up and down the aisles of the passenger cars the whole time, tipping his hat and shaking the hands of the people on board. Grampa respected working people, and it's largely because of him that my brothers and I respected and fought for them as well. Grampa would lean down and start chatting with some fellow puffing a stogie and squinting at the racing form, learn his name and opinions, and by the time the train pulled into Old Orchard Beach, Honey Fitz would have fifty or seventy-five new friends. And then he'd get on the train heading back, with a new group of strangers, and do it all over again.
Of course, even a man of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald's energy needed a little downtime now and then. And so on weekends he would march into the lobby of his favorite hotel, find himself a comfortable easy chair, and wait for the people to come to him. Someone would walk through the main door, and he'd jump up and bound over to them with his hand outstretched. He would do this all day long. When I was about sixteen, I remember driving Grampa to the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Grampa's idea of fun was to sit in the lobby and wait to meet new people. He would tip the hotel desk clerk to ring the bell when guests checked in--once if they were from Massachusetts; twice if they were from Boston. When the bell rang twice, up would go Grampa, introducing himself to the strangers. "I'm John F. Fitzgerald. You're from Boston, aren't you?" By the end of the day, he would have gotten himself invited to lunch and dinner and would have had the time of his life. I'd pick him up at 10 p.m., and he was overflowing with stories about his great day. Grampa loved to laugh. He would get tickled by his own stories. One of his favorites was a tad off-color. But nobody ever realized that it was off-color, because Grampa could never get to the punch line without falling into a laughing fit so severe he could barely breathe, let alone finish the joke. The joke involved the name of a lovely little seacoast town about twenty miles southeast of Boston, named Scituate. Well, I can't reconstruct Grampa's joke completely, but the punch line involves a slight scatological mispronunciation of the town's name, so that it comes out--well, you know. Grampa would always try his best to make it through. But as he got close, he'd begin to chuckle, and then fight for breath, and his eyes would squeeze shut and fill with tears, and his face would turn red, and he'd fish his handkerchief out of his breast pocket. And everybody else in the room would be laughing and choking along with him, not knowing really why they were doing it. They were all just captured by Grampa's sense of fun. It was so infectious.
In 1943, Honey Fitz was just seven years from his passing in 1950, but his mind was still sharp and his political sense acute. On those autumnal Sundays of 1943, I had this marvelous legend all to myself. He took a special interest in me, for Lord only knows what reasons. In my later grade school years, he and I grew very close. While my older siblings would be off at different places and doing different things, Grampa Fitzgerald and I would be together, traveling around Boston.
Entering his suite at the Bellevue, the first thing I'd see would be what looked like a moving newspaper, with short legs. Grampa liked to keep informed, and he'd have torn-up editions of all the Boston papers scattered around the floor. In those days the newspapers published several editions, with updated news all day long, and Grampa read all of them from cover to cover. The items that interested him he would pin to his lapels and other parts of his clothing. (When he visited at the Cape, he'd have us kids constantly on the run to the village for the latest editions.) I believe Mother's habit of adorning the bulletin board near our dining table with topical items came directly from this.
He'd unpin himself--mostly--and take me downstairs to lunch in the hotel restaurant. I'd have to hustle to keep up with this plump, dapper old man with the twinkling blue eyes. We'd enter through the kitchen. This gave Grampa the chance to introduce me (once again, in most cases) to all the cooks and waitresses. At the table, I could hardly wait to order my mashed potatoes and meat, but as soon as we sat down, a crush of Bostonians would descend upon us, and Grampa would greet each one and make introductions again. Often my ice cream would be melted before I had a chance to spoon it. Then we'd hurry out of the hotel--Grampa scooping up the newer editions of the papers in the lobby--and he would lead me on one of his enchanted walking tours of Boston.
He'd take me to Milk Street and tell me, "It's called Milk Street because that was where the cows used to walk down and wait at the Commons." And Water Street: "Because of the well that was there." And then down to where the ships came in. And then we'd walk over past Paul Revere's house, and he'd talk about Paul Revere.
Along the way, he would tell me about the Irish experience in Boston. He'd talk about the discrimination against the Irish that he'd seen, and would show me the signs he'd collected: "No Irish Need Apply." I still have some of those signs in my house. Then he would take me down Beacon Street and Tremont Street and show me the glass windows that dated to American Revolution time. He'd talk about the difference in the Boston social classes illustrated by Boston Common, and the Public Garden. The Common, he'd explain, was were where the British soldiers trained. And where the cattle used to graze. The Garden was funded by, and largely enjoyed by, the wealthy people, though it was open to the public.
Finally we'd get to the Old North Church, where Grampa would spot the rector. The two of them would cross Salem Street and cock their chairs back opposite the church, so they could look at the steeple. They'd begin to talk, oblivious to the people walking by. They would talk about the architecture, and about the church, and about what was happening in the North End. Grampa would give me some money to go buy cannolis. At last the time would come when he would say goodbye to the rector, and continue our little tour, and finally bring me back to Park Street. I'd get on the train to get back to Fessenden.
Grampa had a good pal, a fellow named Clem Norton, who seemed to spend his whole life reading books at the Athenaeum on Beacon Street. Sometimes Grampa would go and fetch Norton. "Nawton! " he'd say, in that Boston accent of his. "Let's go and watch the boys row over at Hawva'd!" Norton would say, "Fine!" and put down his book. They'd go over to the Charles River and watch the college boys row. Grampa would call out, "Who's that Number Two, Nawton?" "Number Two, that's Hallowell's boy! State Street Bank! Hallowell! State Street Bank!" "Who's that Number One up there?" "That's a Lowell!" "Is that Ralph Lowell's son?" "Yes, he's up at the First Bank of Boston!" And on it would go. And then my grandfather, ever the politician, would head over to State Street Bank, for example, and wait outside until closing time, when Mr. Hallowell left the building. He'd rush up to the banker and say, "Mr. Hallowell, Mr. Hallowell, I'm John F. Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston." I doubt that Hallowell was pleased to see him. But then Honey Fitz would say, "I saw your boy row over at Hawva'd today. Number Two. Beautiful stroke. Beautiful stroke." And in a beautiful stroke of political genius, Grampa would have won over the Brahmin banker. And of course, that was exactly what he had in mind the whole time.
My memories of this good, grand old man have restored hope in me when things have been darkest in my life. He was a constant in my life during the difficult, nomadic years of boarding school. His simple bequest to me has been more precious than any fortune. Love life, and believe in it.
In September 1943, the newly commissioned naval pilot Joseph Kennedy Jr. made a dashing farewell visit to the family at Hyannis Port. I came over from school for the occasion. With permission, he flew his PB4Y Liberator up from Florida to the Cape, where he landed and shook hands all round and said goodbye. He took off again, and this was the last glimpse we were to have of Joe. Soon he was in England, where he would complete twenty-five combat missions, and then, in August 1944, volunteer for one more.
Bobby and I became quite close that autumn. He was attending Milton Academy just south of Boston, playing football and studying as he kept his attention focused on the war and international politics. In October, still six weeks shy of eighteen, he enlisted in the naval reserve as an apprentice seaman, restricted from active duty until the following year.
We spent several weekends together at the Cape house that fall, usually just the two of us, though sometimes Lem Billings would come along. We'd drive to Hyannis Port after dusk and comb the deserted streets for a lonely open grocery store where we could buy some staples. Dad closed the house down when the weather turned cold, so we would sleep in the little apartment above the garage, bundled up against the frosty nights. Before turning in, we'd walk along the shore. Our talk would be typical of any two brothers--plans for the future, our schools, girls. I relished his company. He was still quiet, inner-directed, deeply devout. But the selfdeprecating humor that would mark him as a grown man was beginning to emerge. And he was always interested in what was going on in my life. Those chilly weekends at the Cape cast a quiet spell on both of us, I think, that is hard to describe.
I do recall one preoccupation of Bobby's around that time. I'm convinced that his anguish over it led directly to one of the most famous Catholic doctrinal disputes of the late 1940s and early '50s, a dispute that still has resonance today. I believe, though I cannot be certain, that Bobby's concern resulted, over time, in the excommunication of a popular Boston priest, and to a major shift in Catholic teaching regarding the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics.
Bobby was among many students attracted to the Thursday evening lectures given by Father Leonard Feeney, a priest, Jesuitical scholar, and a colorful, mesmerizing advocate of traditional doctrine. In the mid-1940s Father Feeney had become convinced that Catholicism as practiced in America was defective. In particular, the Church had gone lax on a tenet that Feeney believed to be a pillar of the faith: that salvation for people outside the Catholic Church was impossible.
This implied consignment of millions of worthy souls to Purgatory troubled Bobby, and he talked to me about it as we walked along the beach. He discussed it with our father one weekend at the Cape house. I well remember the conversation.
Dad could not believe that Bobby had heard Father Feeney correctly. "But," he said, "if you feel strongly that you did, I'm going to go into the other room and call Richard. Maybe he'll want you to go up to Boston and see him."
"Richard" was Richard Cardinal Cushing. Dad and the cardinal enjoyed a long and profound friendship. I remember the cardinal coming to visit at the Cape. He and Dad liked to go out on the Marlin, dad's motorboat, with a pitcher of chowder and another pitcher of daiquiris, and talk theology and world issues while they cruised.
Bobby said he felt strongly indeed. Bang! Dad called up "Richard" and arranged for Bobby to visit him. The cardinal, as nonplussed as Dad, sent some of his people over to hear Father Feeney's Thursday evening lecture. When he found that my brother was right, Cushing banned Feeney from speaking there; Feeney refused to obey the order, and in September 1949 the archdiocese formally condemned the priest's teaching and suspended him from his duties. In February 1952, Father Feeney was excommunicated.
Bobby wasn't the only critic of Father Feeney, of course, but he was among the first to achieve results. Nor did his principled gesture end with the banishment of Feeney. Reinforced by Cardinal Cushing's discussions with the papal hierarchy in Rome, it became an animating impulse of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, which opened under Pope John XXIII in 1962.
It was in August 1944 that I had my first encounter with tragedy. Our family, Mother especially, was already digesting some unsettling news: in May, Kick, at twenty-four, informed us from London that she'd married her beau of six years, a British lord named William Cavendish. Cavendish was an Anglican--a Protestant--and as deeply as Mother loved Kick, she could not at first reconcile her daughter's decision with her own strict Catholic tenets about marrying and agreeing to raise your children within the faith.
This situation was still fresh in our minds as several of us idled away the pleasant Sunday afternoon of August 13, in the sunroom of the Cape house. Our little family group included Mother, Jack, Joey Gargan and me, and Jean and Eunice, and also a young European friend of Eunice's, Peggy Edgerton Byrd, who was about eighteen. We were listening to a recording of Bing Crosby singing the number one tune of that year, "I'll Be Seeing You," when a strange dark car pulled into the front driving circle and stopped. Two naval chaplains got out, walked up the steps to the porch, and knocked on the screen door. Mother looked up from the Sunday paper she'd been reading in a tiny rocking chair that only she could fit into. As she received the clerics, we could hear a few words: "missing--lost." All of us froze.
The chaplains asked to speak to Mr. Kennedy. Mother turned and rushed upstairs, where Dad lay napping. Moments later the two of them came back down. They took the clergymen into another room and talked briefly. When they emerged, Dad's face was twisted. He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead.
After completing his required twenty-five combat missions and earning the right to return home, Joe had volunteered for a mission so dangerous that some members of his ground crew pleaded with him not to go. Along with a copilot, he was to take off in an experimental drone loaded with high explosives and pilot it on a trajectory toward a target in Germany. Over the English Channel, the two young Americans were to eject themselves, parachute into the sea, and let a radio beam guide the craft, by then a loaded weapon, to its target. Something had gone wrong. Perhaps the radio beam itself had ignited a tiny spark. Whatever the cause, the drone had exploded into a fireball just minutes before the two pilots were due to bail out.
I recall that suddenly the sunroom 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.
This went on for about fifteen minutes. And then Jack spoke up.
"Joe wouldn't want us sitting here crying," my brother said. "He would want us to go sailing. Let's go sailing. Teddy, Joey, get the sails. We're going sailing."
And that was what we did. We went sailing.
My countless hours upon the sea have mostly been happy ones. This was the first of the many times when taking the tiller has steered me away from nearly unendurable grief across the healing waters on the long, hard course toward renewal and hope.
Joe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Air Medal. In 1946, the navy commissioned a destroyer in his name. None of that mattered to my father. I don't think Dad ever fully recovered from the death of his eldest son.
Three weeks after those men visited the house with the tragic news about Joe came the news of a second crushing loss. Billy Cavendish had been shot dead by a German bullet in Belgium. Kathleen, who had returned to be with our family after Joe's death, was shopping with Eunice in New York when a messenger found her and told her she must go back to the Waldorf-Astoria, where Dad had a suite.
Kathleen and Billy had been married four months, and had spent only a month together before Cavendish was called to the front.
* * *
My prep school education moved along in its checkerboard fashion, and then stabilized. In 1945, the year of the Allied victory in World War II, I was enrolled at Cranwell, in western Massachusetts. There, I kept getting into fights with my roommate, a fellow named Francis Aloysius O'Hara. The punishment for misbehavior at Cranwell was memorizing and reciting long prayers. O'Hara had a photographic memory and could learn the prayers in no time. I had to struggle for hours with them.
Then the following year I finally was matched up with a school where I felt at home, and stayed a while: Milton Academy, where I spent my four high school years.
Mentally and physically, I began my transformation from boy to young man at Milton. My grades improved, spurred by my blooming interests in civic affairs, debate, and public speaking. For the first time, I thought of a career in public service. And I started to convert the chubbiness that I'd carried since childhood into muscle. I began to go out with girls at Milton. Nancy Burley was perhaps my first sweetheart--she attended the nearby Milton Academy Girls School. We went to dances together for about three years.
I had not quite outgrown my love of pranks while at Milton. I had an outside tutor for chemistry, an extraordinary teacher in the local community named Dr. Nervais, a Belgian. He turned out students who won all sorts of national awards. None of them, I must report, came from my crowd.
We were more absorbed in playing practical jokes on Dr. Nervais. Among his teachings was that a liquid substance, when vaporized, would weigh exactly the same if it were passed through a sealed pipe, then exposed to cold water on the pipe's other end until it cooled to room temperature. "You vill see," he'd say in his studious Belgian cadences, "that ven it comes through, it vill veigh the same as ven we started--exactly two and a half grams." Except it never did. "Well, it isn't the same," one of us would muse. "It's heavier over here." And Dr. Nervais would patiently repeat the experiment: "Vell, ve vill do the situation again."
I can't remember how he found out about the magnets in the drawer on the cooling side of the table. I should not have even been a part of that prank. But it seemed very funny at the time. Dr. Nervais was actually quite a good sport about the whole thing. He was an excellent teacher and obviously knew a lot about how to handle silly adolescent boys. But I still can't figure out valences.
I joined several of Milton's teams: wrestling, then track, and ultimately football. Milton had a famous wrestling coach named Louie Andrews. Louie's squads didn't lose a meet in twelve years. They used to beat even Andover and Exeter, two hot teams. Louie's approach was simple and inspirational. He wanted you to be the best, and you didn't want to disappoint him.
I must thank Bobby, as in so many things, for connecting me with Louie. Before he graduated, my brother went to the coach and said, "Teddy is coming. Shape him up." Which he did. I learned balance, I learned how to use my legs and feet, and I learned muscle-building and aggressiveness. All these were to come in handy sooner than I could have predicted.
The Milton years were like a bright dawn to me after the cheerlessness of my early boarding school years. My knowledge increased more rapidly in Milton's classrooms than at any other place of learning, perhaps including Harvard. Even the summers away from school, at the Cape, were especially glorious.
Joey Gargan and I were sailing on August 15, 1945, when we heard a deafening volley of explosions erupting from Hyannis Port. Fireworks. We headed for shore, and learned that World War II was over--Japan had announced its surrender, following that of Germany the previous May. A parade was organized, and Joey and I found ourselves in a convertible filled with happy relatives and friends, driven past the dancing, cheering crowds lining Hyannis's streets by Lieutenant Jack Kennedy.
I began sailing in earnest during those years. I had loved the sea even before I could name it, but now I began to take full command of my nautical skills and plunged into competitive racing. I raced Wianno Juniors with Joey and then Wianno Seniors, sometimes with Jack and sometimes with local friends such as Dickie Rounds. I did well and soon began to place second and third and even first. Sailboat racing is an indescribably joyous thrill. It combines the adrenaline edge of competition with the exuberance of simply being on the water, the boat leaning sidelong into the waves as its sails take the wind and convert it to velocity. I learned all the winds; I learned the tides and currents; I learned the movement of the boat through the sea; I learned to judge my location on the water by the distant cliffs and lighthouses and rooftops onshore. Those were the sparkling summers when the sea transformed itself into a home for me, a charmed universe that I could enter in any season, any weather, and find comfort, transcendence.
As I hit the books at Milton in November of 1946, Jack distinguished himself again by getting elected to Congress at age twenty-nine. Jack's initial interest in elective office registered as a mild surprise in our family. He had never to my knowledge talked about political ambitions. The last I'd heard, he was thinking about a career in journalism. He'd written articles for the Chicago Herald-American and the International News Service after his injuries in the Pacific. In the months after the war ended, he kept writing as a stringer for those outlets, covering stories in Ohio, London, Potsdam, and other places, and also did work for the United Fund in Boston.
Not even Dad saw this coming. Jack later credited those dinnertime political conversations, steered by our father, as stimulating his interest in the field, but as Jack saw it, Dad didn't think he had the stamina for politics. He weighed 120 pounds after the first of three operations on his warinjured back. He still felt and showed the effects of the malaria he'd contracted in the Pacific, and of the synthetic drug known as atabrine that was used to treat the disease, which tended to discolor the skin. The igniting spark, as we later learned, seems to have been a speech--the first public speech Jack gave. He delivered it to a Boston American Legion audience in August 1945, on his return to the United States from his reportage in Europe. It covered the wartime fates of Britain, Ireland, and Germany--"Victor, Neutral and Vanquished," as his title had it. The speech was a big success, to Jack's surprise, as were several others he gave not long afterward. The following year, James Michael Curley resigned his congressional seat to run for a fourth term as mayor of Boston. Jack, at loose ends and not sure of what to do with his life, decided to run for Curley's vacant 11th Congressional District seat. He won.
I was sleeping one early morning at Milton in the middle of May 1948 when I heard the door to my cubicle open. I opened my eyes to see the headmaster, Mr. Norris, peering at me. I immediately suspected that something bad had happened.
This time it was Kick. A small chartered plane in which she was flying had crashed in the south of France. Killed along with her was the man she wanted to marry, the Irish-born Lord Peter Wentworth FitzWilliam. The two had been flying to the Riviera and on to Paris where Dad awaited them. Kick was twenty-eight.
Even though it was spring, I remember that morning as exceptionally cold and dark. I waited alone for a long time before Jack arrived to pick me up and take me to Hyannis Port.
My mother was right when she observed in her memoir, "It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time--the mind, protecting its sanity--covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone."
Bobby graduated from Harvard that spring and set sail with a friend on the Queen Mary for a tour of Europe and the Middle East. Two years later he married Ethel Skakel, and they began to raise up a large new brood of Kennedys.
Jack remained a larger-than-life presence. The Edgartown regatta had been an annual chance for us to race together. One July not long after Jack's reelection to Congress, I entered the race with Joe Gargan as my partner. As the weekend approached, Jack decided that he wanted to sail too. He telephoned me at the Cape house to advise me of his intentions, but told me not to wait for him if he got there late. But of course Joe and I wanted him with us, and so on the day of the race we sailed our boat around and around the Edgartown harbor until it was almost time for the race to start. It was an overcast day, and suddenly out of the mist there appeared a single-engine plane, descending rapidly over Edgartown. The plane flew over our boat. We looked up and saw Jack grinning and waving down at us. He zoomed for shore and touched down on a grassy field at the edge of town.
A huge crowd milled around the pier, and twenty boats in each of two classes were tacking back and forth, their crews getting ready for the start. Joe and I realized that even if Jack could worm his way through the humanity, he would not have the proper racing identification, an official red tag, in his billfold. (He rarely even carried a billfold.) We began to appreciate how far-fetched his impulsive scheme had been. Still, he'd just flown over our heads, and so there was nothing to do but wait.
We didn't wait long. About six minutes after he touched down, a taxicab screeched to a halt at the edge of the pier and Jack jumped out, wearing a blue suit and tie and clutching his briefcase. He sliced his way through the mob of people toward the end of the pier and I steered the boat into the wind and alongside the pier for a quick pickup. An official started to yell, "Hey! You can't just pick people up here!" but Jack barged past him and leapt onto the boat. Just then the gun went off marking the start of the race. The three of us quickly pushed off, set the sails, and headed out to the starting line. Jack made a quick change belowdeck into clothes more appropriate for sailing, and I handed the tiller to my brother. We were late, but we were on our way.
It was a long course and a drizzly, misty day, and we had trouble seeing the other boats. But even with our late start, we managed a first in our division. Jack had taken a different route from all the other boats and there had been a wind shift that we were able to take advantage of before any of the other racers. What a thrill! There was a lot of cheer aboard Victura that afternoon. On the way into Edgartown harbor, Jack got drenched by a passing motorboat, but he quickly dried himself off and changed back into his blue suit. Pretty soon we saw his little single-engine plane flying over us again, en route back to Washington. He disappeared into the mist.
I said farewell to Milton in May 1950 and launched out with Joey Gargan on a summer trip through Europe. My letters home show that I complained of "paying an outrageous bill" and getting caught stealing ashtrays in Sorrento, eating cornflakes in Florence, upsetting a canoe on Lake Como, visiting Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, and contemplating the Nazi death camp at Dachau.
Harvard awaited me in the fall. I felt ready for it.