The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [127]
Joe could not go to Rose and share his fears. And so he held them within himself for three terrible days, pretending to Rose and to everyone he met that life was as it had always been. On the fourth day, he was driving his car back from his morning horseback ride, listening to the news on the radio. When the announcer said that Jack had been found, Joe drove his car off the side of the road.
When Joe Jr. heard the news and read the stories of his brother’s heroism, he did not share his father’s pure elation. “When I returned home the other day, Mother told me she had finally heard from you,” his father wrote him on August 31, 1943, in a passage that in the lexicon of the Kennedy family was stinging in its rebuke. “We were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you. I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had had any news as to how Jack was.”
Joe Jr. had learned that Jack was missing when a friend wrote him from the Pacific. Three hours later he saw the headlines about his little brother being rescued. Despite that, he could not bring himself to call Hyannis Port to ask about a brother who had won the public praise that he sought so desperately.
All that Joe Jr. wanted in family life was to be first, a condition that he thought was his natural right. His letter to his parents cried out, Look at me, look at your other grown-up son, your first son. “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in the various parts of the world, and the countless number of paper clippings about our young hero, the battler of the wars of Banana River, San Juan, Virginia Beach, New Orleans, San Antonio and San Diego, will now step to the microphone and give out with a few words of his own activities,” Joe Jr. began his letter.
Joe Jr. was struck full in the face by the sheer unfairness of it all, and in his letter he mentioned his brother’s name only once. His words reeked of bitterness that a younger brother whom he considered second in everything but name had supplanted him. Joe Jr. had entered the service while Jack was malingering. He had gone through a merciless gauntlet to win his wings, while Jack had been given yet another free pass. Joe Jr. had not lost a ship to the enemy. He may not have sunk a German U-boat, or even seen one on his endless patrols out over the Atlantic, but it was planes like his that had helped drive the U-boats back from preying on merchant shipping; in the Caribbean arena the Germans had been sinking a ship and a half a day during the first half of 1942. The risks he courted daily had won him not a line in the nation’s papers. He had served his country in a series of posts all over the East Coast and Puerto Rico, and now he was ferrying planes out to San Diego to be heavily armed, an endeavor that in the end would go further to defeat the Axis than anything Jack had done.
“In their long brotherly friendly rivalry, I expect this was the first time Jack had won such an ‘advantage’ by such a clear margin,” Rose wrote in her autobiography. “And I daresay it cheered Jack and must have rankled Joe Jr.” Rose may have believed that Jack reveled in his victory as much as Joe Jr. agonized over his perceived loss, but Jack no longer saw the world as the playing fields of Hyannis Port writ large. Joe Jr., for his part, still lived partially in that boy’s world. He was obsessed not only with his little