The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [105]
To Jack, being emotionally vulnerable was like being bound in silk so fine that it was hardly noticeable until he sought to pull away. He could not abide the idea that he might have exposed himself to Harriet by something he said or felt or wrote. “As I remember some of your most interesting mornings would be the mornings you spent reading your letters from your beaus in the East to a squad which you gathered down at the restaurant,” he wrote her on October 9, 1941. “Do me a favor and don’t read this.”
The couple exchanged letters for a number of months as the romance faded away like the images in old photographs. In one note Harriet told Jack that she was almost killed in an automobile accident; thrown out of her car after hitting a tree, she was miraculously unhurt. “But as you say ‘That’s the way it goes,’ “she wrote.
That was one of Jack’s favorite phrases. His father believed that life was something that a man could create in his own image. Jack believed that fate was the god to whom one showed obeisance, not by prayers, but by shrugs.
Shortly after reading Jack’s ardent missive about the dangers of simple-minded isolationism, Joe decided to testify before Congress in favor of aid to Britain. Joe agreed with Jack now that the best way to keep out of war was to build up the American defense and send ships full of armaments to England from what Roosevelt called “the arsenal of democracy.”
As for Joe Jr., he had taken the isolationist torch from his father. He was now one of the most vocal leaders of the Harvard movement. While his father was presenting a very different message before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Joe Jr. was back in Boston at the Foreign Policy Association fervently arguing that the United States should not send convoys of food and weapons or it would find itself standing next to Britain in the front lines.
Joe Jr. made one unusual point for a man so passionate in his isolationist beliefs. He said that if most Americans decided they wanted to go to war, he was willing to go too. Joe Jr. hoped to be president. He could feel the winds of war blowing in across the Atlantic.
If Joe Jr. held his position too long and too firmly, he risked seeing his political future swept away, a minor casualty in all the carnage of war. He saw himself as a proud patriot, not as a pacifist or an ironic bystander like his younger brother. “I think in that Jack is not doing anything,” Joe Jr. wrote his father early in 1941, “and with your stand on the war, that people will wonder what the devil I am doing back at school with everyone else working for national defense.”
In June 1941, months before many student internationalists who despised Joe Jr.’s views even thought of military service, Joe Jr. enlisted in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. His physical examination at the Chelsea Naval Hospital showed him to be in splendid condition, standing five-feet-eleven, weighing in at 175 pounds, and bearing not a single glitch on his health. Joe had greased things as best he could for his namesake, writing his son that he had set up the navy physical on “a personal favor basis” and then arranging for him to see Admiral Chester Nimitz in Washington.
Not every cadet arrived at Squantum Naval Air Facility that summer escorted by such a notable as Joe Timilty, the Boston police commissioner, driving his official car. Nor had most cadets taken private flying lessons, as Joe Jr. had done thanks to a family friend, Benedict Fitzgerald. He nonetheless underwent the same rigors as the other cadets, facing a gauntlet that washed out half the would-be pilots. He ran double-time between classes and studied the arcane minutiae of navigation. He sat in a double cockpit with instructors who liked nothing better than to wash out another incompetent wretch who, if not for their good judgment, would one day have lost a good plane, killing himself in