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of life in the Pacific. Jack was heartened at the sight of Joe and Lennie and Johnny and Al and by their enthusiasms. But as consummately as Jack could portray himself as far healthier than he was, now he was so weak that he could do little except lie there. Lenny had brought his bride, Kate, along. She was a nurse, and she found it ominous that Jack’s bed had not been cranked up and that he lay there perfectly flat. The visitors had hardly been in Jack’s room a few minutes before a nurse walked in and told them that they would have to leave. Jack was so tired, so terribly spent, that he did not protest, but bid them adieu.

For Joe Jr., these last two weeks in August 1944 had been full of baleful signs. Training flights had gone astray. The project was raked with silly bureaucratic ineptitude. Serious warnings about the faulty electrical system had been smothered by the command. The whole project reeked of the military’s institutional stupidity and sterile arrogance that had made Jack so despairing of the war efforts. On the evening before the mission, one of the men, Earl Olsen, tried to warn Joe Jr. that the arming panel and so-called safety pin might blow up the plane. Joe Jr. cut him dead. He did not want to listen to the man. When the mission was delayed a day, Olsen had another chance to talk to Joe Jr. and tell him explicitly about the problem. Joe Jr. might have asked some more questions, but he turned from the man and his menacing truths. Joe Jr. admitted to another officer that he was sorry he had volunteered, but he believed that it was too late to do anything but go on.

Joe Jr. could have gone to his superior and asked that the mission be postponed until the plane was properly checked out. That would have required a different kind of courage: if he had done so, some men might have wondered whether Joe Jr. was a coward, and that was an appellation that he would allow no man to connect with him. A brave man is often as fearful as a coward. It pains him to be called a coward, for he knows what lies within himself and fears what he might have been or might well be.

August 12, 1944, dawned a cloudless day, and Joe Jr. knew that his mission would be delayed no longer. Late that afternoon he and his co-pilot, Wilford Willy, boarded the shiny new PB4Y drone loaded with 23,562 pounds of Torpex, an explosive nearly twice as powerful as TNT. This was a mission to be chronicled to the last detail and to be celebrated as one of the triumphs of the war. It was so important that Eliot Roosevelt, the president’s son, was on hand taking photos of the men before they took off, then flying off himself in a Mosquito plane to memorialize the flight even further.

They were a mini-armada, with Joe Jr. at the center of it all, piloting his silver PB4Y, the two mother ships, Roosevelt’s plane, sixteen Mustang fighters as fighter protection, plus a B-17 ready to fly to another airport to pick up the parachuting navy men. Joe Jr. took the plane up to two thousand feet and leveled off. The first step was to let the mother ship take control of the drone and run through a few maneuvers. Once that was over, Joe Jr. and Willy would bail out. It was as simple as that.

The mother ship gently guided the robot plane into a left turn. At that moment, Joe Jr.’s plane exploded in an immense yellow circle of flame, like the sun blazing in the evening sky. Then the light was gone, leaving the sky filled with black smoke and small fires in the woods below.

Book Two

12

A New Generation Offers a Leader

On the second Sunday in August 1944, Joe lay upstairs in his bedroom in Hyannis Port taking his afternoon nap. For a man whose sons were the unmitigated joy of his life, this weekend was a blessed time, almost the way it had been before the war. Jack had come home on leave from Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston. Bobby had made it to the Cape for a couple of days. He was wearing navy blue, but as Joe saw it, Bobby was still blessedly thousands of miles from combat. Little Teddy was his irascible self, running around the grounds, he and