The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [138]
Some would argue later, from the safe distance of time and place, that Joe Jr.’s act was not heroic but mindless bravado, a twisted working out of the Kennedy family drama. What must be said, though, of the other officers who volunteered? Would these young men have been held to the same merciless scrutiny? What monsters lay in their childhoods? What demons dogged them? How could they come forward so boldly when they shared neither Joe Jr.’s blood nor his heritage?
Great and noble acts of heroism are born of complicated, ambiguous motives. It is best to use restraint in analyzing them, lest one make cowards of heroes and heroes of cowards. There was perhaps no one better suited to ponder the nature of Joe Jr.’s heroism than his own brother. Years later, when scribbling notes for a letter to Ernest Hemingway, Jack had deep, telling insights into the nature of such self-conscious acts of heroism as his brother’s. Jack had lived too long and seen too much to imagine that heroism was a simple, idealistic act. A hero’s courage came from “pride—his sense of individuality—his desire to maintain his reputation for manliness which may be more important to him than office—the desire to maintain his reputation among his colleagues as a man of courage, his conscience, his personal standards of ethics—morality—his need to maintain his own respect for himself which may be more important than his regard of others—his desire to win or maintain the opinion of friends or constituents.” Even after all the motivations were duly noted, it remained a mystery why in World War II many men lay huddled, shivering in their foxholes, not even firing their weapons, while a few brave men stood up and rushed forward through a ring of fire. That was a mystery that lay at Joe Jr.’s core, a mystery to those who sought to understand him, and a mystery perhaps even to Joe Jr. himself.
Joe Jr. transferred immediately to the base at Fersfield, where the U.S. Navy was preparing Anvil. The immense dangers of the project were not just theoretical. The Army Air Corps had already lost one man, and two others were seriously wounded in developing a similar program. The navy, which thought itself better, smarter, and quicker than its sister service, was forging ahead, hoping to be the first to strike a fatal blow at the Nazi bases.
During the day Joe Jr. flew the new plane, empty of its deadly cargo, on testing missions. In the evenings he cycled off the base to a phone booth and talked to Pat for twenty minutes or more. Before he went to bed, he got down on his knees in his room full of other men and said his prayers. If another officer had done that, somebody would probably have made a dismissive aside, but no one said anything. And one night, when the other men were still playing cards at two in the morning, and Joe Jr. got up and told them enough was enough, no one told him to buzz off. Some of them outranked him, but they went somewhere else to play their game.
Two of the other officers confided to each other that Joe Jr. was their model of what a man should be. He did not wear his life on his sleeve, spewing out all the details like a tour guide to his own autobiography. At times he would venture a word or two, saying that his father wanted him to enter politics after the war, but he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do. One night, as he lay half asleep in his bunk, he mumbled a few words about getting married and heading off to Scotland on his honeymoon. But these were just snippets of dreams, memories floating through the night.
Another man would have written letters to his family and friends to be delivered only if he died. Joe Jr. was not a man to take ominous precautions. He wrote a letter to Jack that he knew would not