The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [141]
Rose woke up her husband and said that there were priests downstairs who insisted on talking only to him. Joe went downstairs and led the priests to an anteroom. Joe queried them again and again until he knew that Joe Jr. was gone, gone forever. Then he came out of the closed room and with his arm around Rose told his three surviving sons and his daughters that Joe Jr. was dead.
“Children, your brother Joe has been lost,” he said, looking at Jack, Bobby, Teddy, and their sisters, his eyes gleaming with tears. “He died flying a volunteer mission. I want you all to be particularly good to your mother.”
Rose turned to her church and found the solace available only to a woman of profound faith. As for Joe, he had no such faith and could offer his children nothing but cliches. The most profound tenets of faith and philosophy were to him just mindless platitudes, propping up the soul. “We’ve got to carry on,” he told his children. “We must take care of the living. There is a lot of work to be done.”
There is no device calibrated to judge the magnitude of a father’s mourning over his lost son, but those who saw Joe said they had never seen a man suffer more and feel more deeply. When Joe called his sister, Mary Loretta, his mournful sobs were so deep that she feared he would never stop.
“Joe’s death has shocked me beyond belief,” Joe wrote James Forrestal, the secretary of the navy, responding to his letter of condolence. “All of my children are equally dear to me, but there is something about the first born that sets him a little apart—he is for always a bit of a miracle and never quite cut off from his mother’s heart. He represents our youth, its joys and problems.”
“He was a real man,” Joe wrote Forrestal. Joe had brought his sons up to be true men, to pursue lives of courage, and his eldest son had lived as his father had wanted him to live. Joe could have manipulated his sons’ military careers so that they would have been away from the cannons’ roar. He had not done so, and he allowed them to fight in a war in which he did not believe. And what did he have for his misbegotten nobility but a dead son, and a second son who was half dead, a pallid invalid?
“And so the story of young Joe, some may think is at an end,” Joe wrote the official. “But is it? I cannot but believe, as you so nicely said in your letter, that ‘his character and extraordinary personality’ will be a legacy to others.” Joe would found a foundation in Joe Jr.’s name. He would have a ship named after his firstborn son. But the memorial he cared about was flesh and blood, Joe Jr.’s life of true manhood living on, memorialized in the lives of others.
Jack wandered the beach at Hyannis Port that Sunday afternoon and then returned to his hospital bed in Boston. Jack was the sickly brother. As he saw it, his own death would have been far easier to bear. “It came at a time when I was really awfully, you know, I was weighed at 122 or 123 and sick as hell, gray and green and yellow,” he recalled years later. “If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, but anybody who is really living at the top of the peak, then to get cut off, it is always more of a shock.”
Jack had time now to contemplate his brother’s loss and to puzzle out his own uncertain fate. Gone was all his ambivalence toward his big brother. He remembered him first of all as a man who “enjoyed great health.” It was a characterization that would occur only to a brother who was himself sick. Jack saw that Joe Jr.’s health was the mother of his other traits, his “great physical courage and stamina, [and] a complete confidence