The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [169]
The next day Jack and Eunice traveled up to Hyannis Port to be with the rest of the family. Teddy was already there. He had left Milton Academy when he heard the terrible news and had taken the next train to the Cape. Jack was outraged that the masters at Milton had let his distraught little brother leave by himself. But there was a profound homing instinct in Teddy that in moments of grief, uncertainty, and doubt brought him to the restless seas of the Cape and the solace of a family and a house that resonated with memories of good times.
Kathleen was buried in the small cemetery in the Cavendish burial grounds at Edensor. She had been a well-loved woman and two hundred of her friends came to bury her. Of the Kennedys, only Joe was there that day. Rose had not felt right about the way her daughter was living her life, and Jack seems to have been so stunned that he could not bring himself to fly to London.
Joe stood at a distance from all those who had known and loved Kathleen, greeting no one and saying nothing. “He stood alone, unloved and despised,” recalled Alastair Forbes. And he left that day as silently as he arrived, not even stopping to pay the priest.
Joe was haunted by the image of his gay, ebullient daughter whom he would never see again. He knew that some people thought that the death of one child did not make him terribly depressed, for he had so many children. How little they knew. He thought to himself that no one had any idea that he was depressed, not even Rose, who had faith as her solace.
When Kathleen died, Bobby had been at the Grand Hotel in Rome in the midst of a six-month-long European and Middle Eastern tour. He was suffering from a bout of jaundice, and when Jack called to tell him of the accident, his companion, George Terrien, recalled that he “broke down like a little kid.” Despite his illness, he could have traveled to the crash site to accompany his sister’s body back to England, or he could at least have flown to the funeral. He did not, however, and that said much about how his father saw the world, and the obligations he had put on his sons to be forestalled not even by the death of a sister.
Bobby’s journey replicated the youthful journeys that Jack and Joe Jr. had made. Like his older brothers, Bobby was accompanied by a friend, George Terrien. He stayed in the best hotels, but that was the least of his privileges. Joe had seen to it that his twenty-two-year-old son would meet with ranking diplomats and leaders. Despite Bobby’s total lack of either experience or apparent interest in journalism, he carried reporter’s credentials from the Boston Post.
What saved Bobby from being simply a spoiled son of wealth were two qualities he could claim as his own: courage and physical daring. His brothers were brave too, but they did not extend courage as the defining virtue not only of men but also of nations. Jack perceived the postwar political world as a massive conflict of ideological systems in which too much of what was once called courage might destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. Jack, moreover, astutely perceived why democratic man in the mass was often less than brave.
Bobby, however, saw the world through a prism of courage. He had at times a simpleminded belief in the absolute virtue of courage, not recognizing that physical and moral courage were not the same, and that a man could be physically brave and a moral coward.
When Bobby arrived in Palestine, he saw the