The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [134]
After that day of so-called rest came a day of briefings, and then the following morning he went up into the gray skies once again. As often as not, Joe Jr.’s most implacable foe was not the Germans but the confounded climate of southern England. He would return after ten hours of fruitless searching to find the airfield socked in. Low on fuel, tired and cold, he would have to find somewhere else to land. At its best, landing was a hairy business, and it had gotten some of his colleagues killed. The worst of it had occurred a couple of weeks before Christmas, when they had been sent out even though the weather reports said that the airport would be closed by the time they got back. When he reached the base, dark clouds blanketed the airport, and he was ordered on to Beaulieu Airdrome outside Southampton. He headed east in the black, rainy night and found himself in the midst of the Southampton barrage balloons, a weapon against his plane as much as they were against the Germans. He descended beneath the five-hundred-foot ceiling. Later he noted in his report that “the wind at the time made it doubly hazardous and trying to watch the field and make a two-needle-width turn at 500 feet in the rain made it quite difficult. I made a short circle and came in.”
Sooner or later the Dunkeswell dampness got through not just to the bones but also to the souls of everyone on the base. Joe Jr. was a man of matchless high spirits, fueled by his incomparable Kennedy energy, but his letters home sounded wistful and melancholy. He wrote about the weather because that was the reason he was sitting in his dank quarters writing his family instead of flying. He had only been there a few months, but he was already talking of going off on another assignment. “My love life is still negligible,” he complained to his parents in a letter written at the end of January. “Around here, I am taking out a Waff [sic] who is very cute but nothing very exciting. There seems to be quite a little talent around the town, but it’s such a bother to get in and out, and the added difficulty of obtaining reservations. It’s really not much fun unless you know someone.”
This was not the boastful Joe Jr. of a few months before who had bragged at the wide swath he had cut through the young ladies of Norfolk. This was a Joe Jr. who, when he opened his letters from home, discovered inevitably that Jack was the big news—Jack’s sickness, Jack’s appearances, Jack’s publicity, Jack’s future. His little brother was such a phenomenon that the New Yorker ran an article about him and PT-109 by John Hersey; later in 1944 it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest. Joe Jr. could hardly bring himself to mention his little brother without inserting at least a small dig. “Several people have called my attention to my dear brother’s portrait in News week [sic], and my apologies for his appearance have been profuse. Who hates him on that paper?” It wasn’t enough just to put Jack down; he had to push himself forward in the next sentence. “There have been some articles written over here on our work which I shall send you.” Joe Jr.’s problem was a simple one. “I have done nothing to make myself outstanding, but manage to get back, which I suppose is the important thing.”
Even in the muck and the cold, Joe Jr. still had his vision of a political ascent ahead of him in America. “What you gonna do when you get back to Delaware?” he asked Duffy one day.
“Got no idea, Joe,” Duffy shrugged, looking at what he considered “a big amiable Irishman.”
“Politics! That’s the game, Bob,” Joe Jr. enthused. “We gotta go back and run this country.”
Although Joe Jr. still fancied himself as a candidate for high office, he confided to Angela Laycock on one of his trips to London that a Kennedy would be president one