The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [126]
“On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time was the way that everyone stood up to it,” he wrote his parents. “Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s trouble.”
Jack had found a commonality here in these men, no matter their backgrounds. Jack was a man of the Spee Club and the Stork Club, of Palm Beach and London, and they were men mainly from small towns and modest circumstances, and they had come together and worked together as one. He was a man, despite his education and travels, of profoundly limited experience, having gone from one oasis of privilege to the next, hardly even observing the world that lay between. This was the first time in his life that he broke the bread of life with all kinds of people, and much of what he thought of America he extrapolated from this time.
Jack had an authenticity about him now that was forged in the hot blasts of combat. He was an officer, but he had a grunt’s vision of war and could be just another kvetching voice in the mess line. “When I read that we will fight Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must—I always check from where he’s talking—it’s seldom from out here,” he wrote his parents in his anti-heroic mood. Back in Washington, the politicians tossed out words like “sacrifice” and “honor” and “courage” like cheap baubles, but out here he had learned their true meaning. For the most part, there were no flag-waving heroics in this struggle, no awesome acts of self-sacrifice, but good men were doing what they had to do. Jack was a patriot now in a way he had not been before the war. He was a patriot no more or less than most of his comrades, and in a way that Americans would not be again, not in his lifetime.
Jack believed that those who spoke of sacrifice and courage in the distant halls of power had better see to it that the peace was worth the war, “for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.” That was the one worthy road open to him—to help to see that life in the postwar world would be worth all the dread losses of war. His would be an arduous journey in its own right, if only he could take it.
When Joe learned that Jack was missing in action, he did not tell Rose. They treated each other with the courtly reserve of monarchs, civil and gracious in public, circumspect and contained in private. Joe knew that he was terribly complicit in what appeared to be his son’s death. Earlier in the year, he had written Father Sheehy that while he had “pride in … [his] … heart” that his sons had opted for the most dangerous of services, he had “grief in … [his] mind.” His was the pride that his sons were living out his vision of what a true man must be. His grief was an ominous, oppressive sense of impending tragedy that had haunted him since his days at the Court of St. James’s, a grief that never left him. For once in his life his heart had triumphed over his mind. He had not stood back when his sons rushed toward the sound and smoke of combat, but had pushed them ahead.
As for Rose, his wife had the constant solace of faith, believing that if God took their sons, He would only pluck them away to a better place. In her chatty chain letters to her sons and daughters, she treated the dangers of war as if they were no worse than a pickup football game on the lawns at Hyannis Port.