The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [142]
As Jack lay in his hospital bed, his father did not stand outside the door with Joe Jr.’s fallen banner, waiting to thrust it into Jack’s unwilling hands as soon as he was able to walk unaided. Joe surely wanted his oldest surviving son to continue on the pathway set out on by his brother, but there were other pressures on Jack as intense as his father’s expectations. One of them was the profound question that every surviving combat soldier asks: Why me? Why was I saved?
Jack received many deeply felt letters of condolence, futile attempts to ponder the imponderable. “You are the Kennedy fame,” Mike Grace wrote him, “but it becomes all too plain that Joe was the heart behind your name.” The friend meant to honor Joe Jr., not to demean Jack, but there was the devastating reality that he faced.
Jack thought that “the best ones seem to go first,” and that there was “a completeness to Joe’s life, and that is the completeness of perfection.” It was part of the solace of war to believe that the bravest died young, their virtue confirmed by their deaths. “There must be a reason why the good are called upon while the bad are left to rot,” his old flame Harriet Price wrote him.
There in its starkest form was the psychological reality that Jack faced. He had not volunteered for a hero’s role. He was a man of intellectual honesty and saw that there was a profound distinction between what he had done to live and his brother’s actions that had led to his death. As sick as Jack might be, he was alive. No matter how he had suffered, how bravely he had acted, he dared not think of himself as being as good as his brother who was gone. And now he had the additional burden of picking up a banner that he felt he could hardly lift. “You will have some of your brother’s unfinished business to do during the long years that face you, so get thoroughly well before you start,” Barbara Ellen Spencer wrote him.
The night turned even darker a month later in September 1944 when a friend, Kathleen’s new husband, Billy Hartington, died leading his company in a fight against the retreating Germans in Belgium. That October, as Joe sat in Hyannis Port thinking of Joe Jr.’s death and Billy’s death and of poor Jack lying in the hospital in Boston, he wrote his friend Lord Beaverbrook that he was writing with his “natural cynicism.”
That was as close to a moment of psychological insight as he would allow himself. He would never say that he was “depressed”; the emotional lexicon of the Kennedys did not contain this word. “To have boys like ours killed for a futile effort would be the greatest reflection on us all,” he wrote Beaverbrook. “Yet, if you would ask me what I am doing to help, I would tell you nothing. However, I assure you it is not by choice but rather by circumstances.”
“Why does no one come to see me?” Joe asked his first cousin Joe Kane, a shrewd political operative close to the family.
“Who’d you ever go to see?” replied Kane. A man’s goodness and generosity are his capital, and Joe had spread precious little of it beyond the precincts of his home. All he seemed to have left was his cynicism, and that he had in bountiful supply. He was an old sailor adrift on a lifeless sea.
Joe had let it be known that he was thinking of “making a speech for [Governor Thomas] Dewey,” Roosevelt’s putative Republican opponent in the 1944 election. That was surely high on the list of reasons that the president called his former ambassador at the Waldorf on October 24 and invited him down to Washington for a visit two days later. When Joe walked into the Oval Office, he was shocked at the aged man who put his hand out and waved him to a seat. The president had always had a splendid memory, but now events seemed to be lost in a fog of memory, names half-remembered, numbers skewed.
As Joe sat there realizing that the