The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [111]
Rosemary was shipped away to a private sanatorium, and for years her siblings simply did not talk about her anymore. Her mother wrote letters to her children in which her name was never mentioned. Rosemary’s name was excised from the family and its history and its aspirations. For little Teddy, already uprooted, shuttled around schools, his own sister, whose sweet gentleness had been one of his few constants, was gone, as far as he knew forever, unmentioned and unmentionable.
There had been no more vociferous opponent of American entree into war than Joe Jr., but now that he wore the navy blue he turned all his energy toward becoming a pilot. At the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Joe Jr. continued his training. He got up at 5:00 A.M. cursing the bugle and did his jumping jacks as the sun rose. He had no gentleman’s gentleman to pick up after him now, and he received an unhealthy quota of demerits during inspections.
On one occasion, his wastebasket did not pass muster, and he was handed four demerits and five hours marching. His mother considered this punishment so outrageous that she had to be talked out of writing “the Navy Department and the War Board and some Commanders—and maybe Mr. Roosevelt himself.”
For all his attributes as a cadet, Joe Jr. was not a natural pilot with the intuitive sensibility in which a man and a plane mesh together as one. In the evenings, he often played a strong game of blackjack or bridge, gleefully sweeping up the winnings.
Joe Jr. was a popular cadet who, after some shrewd maneuvering, won election as the president of the Cadet Club. He had little time to chat with his new friends at the club, but it was not all a merciless grind. “I am sorry Gunther’s storage department sent Joe’s morning coat instead of his tails down to Jacksonville, but if he had wired back in time, they could have sent his tails by air,” Rose wrote the family.
Joe Jr.’s mother would have been impressed by one aspect of her eldest son’s life, and that was his faith. Joe Jr. was far more religious than Jack. As a boy, Joe Jr. had met the princes of the church in his own house, and he was comfortable around priests in a way Jack would never be. He was the last one in line for confession on Fridays, but he was always there. The base chaplain, Father Maurice S. Sheehy, heard what passed as sins among these cadets, the carnality, the lies, the blasphemies, and in the end there stood Joe Jr. This moment to the priest was one of the blessings of faith.
“There is nothing comparable to the beauty of the soul of a young man who opens the window of that soul to a priest in confessional, and who reveals, in so doing, the passion for what is honest and decent and good,” Father Sheehy recalled. “The faith in many generations of Kennedys and Fitzgeralds was revealed in the humility of this favorite son of fortune whenever he went to Confession.”
Young Joe Jr. was a child of fortune. Life’s blessing shone on him. He was a talisman of good cheer.
Unlike his brother, Jack was in no hurry to thrust himself up in the front lines to be ready when war began. In Washington he put in his hours in the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue, but he took far more interest in his evenings and weekends and his pursuit of a different sort of prey. Washington was full of young single women, and Jack doubtless would have had scores of sexual adventures if one day soon after his arrival his sister Kathleen had not introduced him to Inga Arvad, her colleague on the Washington Times-Herald. “He’s coming to Washington,” Kathleen exulted. “I’m going to give a party at the F Street Club, you will just love him!” And so she did.
Inga’s ripe, sensual beauty would have been enough to attract Jack for a short-lived affair, but it was not her blonde looks that led him into the deepest relationship of his young life. At the age of twenty-eight, Inga had already lived half a dozen lives, shedding her