Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [26]
Those who visited Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston saw him lying there wracked, alternately, by chills and fever. Torby Macdonald offered his impression of Jack’s case: “His skin had turned yellow. His weight had dropped from 160 pounds to about 125 pounds. When I came into his room, he raised a bony hand and gave me a shaky wave.” Jack insisted he felt “great.” When Torby refused to believe him, the patient amended it to, “Great, considering the shape I’m in.”
In June 1944, while still in Chelsea Naval Hospital, Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Medal for “extremely heroic conduct.” But medals don’t mend bodies. Chuck Spalding, who visited him a little later after he’d gone down to Palm Beach to rest in the sunshine, gave this graphic account: “That wound was a savage wound, a big wound. It went maybe eight inches or so down his back. It would never heal and it was open and painful. He had to fight to get his back healed and I would walk up and down the beach with him with the back still open and he’d say ‘How is it now?’ or ‘Is any stuff running out of it?’ It was severe pain.”
Spalding, who was himself a navy pilot, said, “I’ll never forget Jack sitting at our table watching the ‘home front.’ All he felt was cynicism—everybody dancing, the lights, the women. It was the only time I ever saw him reacting like a real soldier. It was the rapidity of his move from the Pacific to Palm Beach, the juxtaposition.”
That August, Joe Jr. was killed. He and his copilot had accepted a mission to fly a plane packed with 20,000 pounds of TNT toward a V3 site on the French coast, then parachute out before reaching the target. The idea was to create a guided missile, but before the two men could bail to safety, the deadly cargo detonated.
Jack, up at Hyannis Port when the telegram came, went out walking alone on the beach right after he heard. His brother had been the family standard-bearer and, in matters of politics, the prospective heir. The rivalry between the brothers, especially for the father’s colors, had always been a part of their lives and endured right to the end.
There was a revealing story Jack heard about a farewell dinner for Joe, occurring just before Joe was sent to Britain as a naval aviator. It had taken place soon after accounts of Jack’s Pacific ordeal were splashed across the front pages. One of the guests at the party, trying to do the right thing, had raised a glass to toast “Ambassador Joe Kennedy, the father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” However, Jack was absent. Joe was very much there.
Later that night, as it was reported to Jack, Joe was seen on his cot “clenching and unclenching his fists,” saying to himself aloud, “By God, I’ll show them.” Jack understood that it had been his brother’s desire to match, or even top, his own courage in the South Pacific that drove him to volunteer for the high-risk mission over Europe. In fact, when Joe Jr. perished in the line of duty, he’d already flown twenty-five combat missions, enough to permit him, honorably, to fly no more, but his fraternal competitive spirit was too deeply rooted: he simply couldn’t stop trying to beat the younger brother who’d managed to pull ahead of him.
A month later, another terrible blow was dealt the Kennedys. In the spring, Jack’s sister Kathleen, his beloved Kick, had married Billy Hartington, the elder son of the Duke of Devonshire and a major in the Coldstream Guards. Now he was declared a casualty in Belgium, causing Jack to write his grieving sister that Billy’s death reminded him of Raymond Asquith, that other privileged Englishman whose promise was cut short on the battlefield.
Despite