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By Root 1532 0

his doubts and fears wrapped up tightly in his own psyche. He was a young man in any other world but this one. At twenty-eight, Joe Jr. was older than most of the other pilots. He was persistently upbeat, never letting on to his family the uncertainties that he felt. “They really don’t give us quite enough instruction … before turning us loose, and this has brought about quite a few accidents,” he wrote the family, coming as close to admitting his anxieties as he ever did. Only to one of his father’s friends, John Daly, did he admit the darkest of his doubts. “In my talks with him during his training … I always felt he had a premonition that he would not be one of the fortunate ones to come out of the war,” Daly reflected. “Disregarding this feeling, even though approaching his thirtieth year, he fought hard to excel as a pilot and become as proficient as any of his younger cadet associates.”

Once Joe Jr. checked out in the plane, he flew several of the squadron’s new PB4Ys to San Diego, and then back again with their new bow turrets installed, making five trips cross-country in eight days, a schedule that would have done in a commercial pilot. He would have no second chances flying above the Bay of Biscay, and the navy prepared him and his crew with merciless rigor. Radar. Strafing. Guns. Instrument training. Tactics. Plane recognition. Physical conditioning. Antisubmarine work. Dawn to dusk, day after day, the training continued.

When the regimen finally ended, Joe Jr. got a short leave to travel to Hyannis Port in time for his father’s fifty-fifth birthday. Although the birthday celebration on September 6, 1943, was for his father, Joe Jr. had reason to think that he would be honored that evening as well. In a few days he would be flying off to England to test his mettle against the savagery of Nazi arms. Although he knew himself to be a child of fortune, this might be his last great occasion with his family. He had come through. He had done everything he was supposed to do and more. He had written his father about preparing a will. He wore his navy whites, and as the group sat down, no one could look at young Joe Jr. without thinking at least momentarily of the war.

Judge John Burns stood up to propose a toast. The judge looked down the long table and raised his glass. “To Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” The silence hung in the air like a condemnation. Joe Jr.’s face froze in a smile that was more like a grimace. Then he drank a sip of the bitter wine. Later that evening Police Commissioner Timilty heard Joe Jr. crying in the bed next to him. “By God, I’ll show them,” Joe Jr. said as he clenched and unclenched his fist. “By God, I’ll show them.”

Bobby and Teddy were too young to prove themselves on the fields of battle, and their lives continued much as they had before the war. For years Rose had been complaining that whatever her third son did, be it reading, sailing, or collecting stamps, he did by rote, without the enthusiasm that to Rose’s way of thinking defined a young Kennedy. Bobby hadn’t liked to go to the young people’s dances in Palm Beach, where he would have picked up the social graces that he would need as a young man. He appeared singularly disaffected by the world where his family thought he belonged.

Bobby arrived at Milton Academy as a junior in the fall of 1942. After attending seven schools in little more than a decade, Bobby had never stayed long enough at one school to set his roots deep into the nurturing soil of friendship and place. The students at the Massachusetts prep school were for most part conservative in dress, Republican in politics, and High Church Protestant in faith.

As a Roman Catholic transfer student, Bobby would have done best to slip silently into the school, hoping slowly to win acceptance. Instead, Bobby arrived in a checked coat that looked as if it could have been played as well as worn, gray pants, white socks, and a flamboyantly loud tie. If there was a choice between being viewed as