The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [136]
The possible marriage risked splitting the Kennedys. Rose stood on one side, a mother who had forfeited much for her family and her faith. For her, the matter had already been decided because it was simply unthinkable. “I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family tradition,” she wrote Kathleen in February in a sentence that could have been Rose’s own epitaph. As the weeks passed, Rose’s entreaties ranged from shrewd arguments to near hysteria.
Kathleen’s father adored his daughter and valued her happiness more than all the proprieties of faith, but on this of all matters he dared not stand against his wife. In February, he wrote Joe Jr. that his sister was “entitled to the best and with us over here it’s awfully difficult to be as helpful as we’d like to be. As far as I personally am concerned, Kick can do no wrong and whatever she did would be great with me.” Joe always cut through the externalities, be they of politics or faith, and he was all for his daughter getting on with her life and happiness, but he could not be seen confronting his wife. As far as he was concerned, he wrote Kathleen, she and Billy should work it out together and “let all the rest of us go jump in the lake.” He had heard that his daughter was making converts to the Church, surely a mark of her deep and honest faith. “Maybe if you make enough of them a couple of them could take your place,” he wrote his daughter in March 1944. “If Mother ever saw that sentence I’d be thrown right out on the street…. I’m still working for you so keep up your courage.”
Kathleen endlessly pondered the question of whether she dared to turn away from a Catholic religion that would cast her out of its sanctuary of certainty if she married this good man. Billy had come back to run for the House of Commons in his family’s bailiwick. His defeat had brought the question of duty and happiness even more to the fore.
Joe Jr., a man of deep Catholic faith and natural conservatism, might once have sided with his mother. Now, with the tacit blessings of his own father, he stood with Kathleen. “Never did anyone have such a pillar of strength,” she reflected later. Joe Jr. had always accepted the dogma of his church, but on this matter he stood up to it, and to his own mother. His was a courage that others outside the family would not see or understand. It was a courage that merited him nothing but the deep gratitude of his sister, and a private satisfaction that he had helped to contribute to what might be Kathleen’s happiness.
Rose thought that Kathleen, like all women, was susceptible to the evil blandishments of men, seducers of mind and body. Kathleen astutely realized that her own brother “might be held largely responsible for my decision.” Indeed, when she announced her engagement, Rose cabled Kathleen from the hospital bed where she had gone in distress: “HEARTBROKEN. FEEL YOU HAVE BEEN WRONGLY INFLUENCED.” On May 6, 1944, Joe Jr. stood next to his beloved sister at the Chelsea Register Office, where he gave her away in marriage to Billy Hartington. He joked that by doing so he had ruined his political future, losing the votes of Boston’s Irish. But on this day he hardly seemed to care.
As the firstborn Kennedy son, Joe Jr. had always assumed that he belonged nowhere but at the mountainous heights of life, celebrated for his courage and applauded for his awesome accomplishments. The war had convinced him, though, that human happiness was a worthy goal, not a shameful avoidance of life’s high struggles. First, he must complete what he had come here to do, to win a high and noble honor.
“I have finished my missions and was due to start back in about two weeks,” Joe Jr. wrote his parents two days after the wedding, “but volunteered to stay another month. I persuaded my crew to do it, which pleased me very much. We are the only crew which has done so.”
That was a lie. Perhaps Joe Jr. was trying to reassure his family, but he had not asked his crew to stay on after