The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [80]
Joe Jr. took to the winter sports of Saint Moritz as if they were no more difficult to learn than checkers. He jumped on a one-man bobsled and, zooming down the run at seventy-five miles an hour, came close to setting a world record. On the ski slopes there were no records to challenge, but if there had been a trophy for speed and daring, he would have been a finalist.
On one spectacular spill he fell on his arm, cutting his skin. He skied the rest of the way down and called the family nurse: “Luella, I need a Band-Aid.” Luella took one look at the injury and sent Joe Jr. off on a sleigh to the hospital, where he was treated for a broken arm. In her years as a nurse, Luella had seen how pain that drove one man to scream would cause nary a whimper in another, but she had rarely seen a person who seemed entirely immune to pain, who almost enjoyed it, like a tonic. Joe Jr. laughed at the injury, as if he had nicked himself shaving. Sure enough, he was immediately out skating again with Megan Taylor.
His younger brothers applauded Joe Jr. by imitating him, with results that were only slightly less harsh. Bobby sprained his ankle on the nursery slope, while Teddy suffered a wrenched knee. Little Teddy enlivened his enforced convalescence by playing with matches in his room at the Palace Hotel before coming down to the lobby. “Eddie Moore came in and found the whole wastebasket on fire,” Ted recalled. “My father being outraged, I think I got another spanking for that.”
Teddy had his defender in Luella. “Joe Jr. used to tease Teddy terribly,” the nurse recalled. “It was all in fun, but he was the only one who did it. If he was teasing Teddy or saying, ‘Why don’t you do this,’ or, ‘You’re too old to act that way,’ I’d say, ‘Now don’t be teasing. He’s my Edward.’ Teddy was my favorite, a happy little fellow. I just loved Teddy.”
For Joe Jr., his vacation in Saint Moritz had been a glorious winter adventure, but it was also inevitable that a young man of his passion, political ambition, and daring would want to be a witness to the Spanish Civil War. As Joe Jr. headed south, he was an anomaly among the young men of America and Europe who had gone to Spain. Most of them had arrived to fight with or support the loyalist Republican troops. Among them were a number of the greatest writers of the time. Ernest Hemingway. George Orwell. André Malraux. Stephen Spender. W. H. Auden. Langston Hughes.
Unlike these men, Joe Jr. was naturally sympathetic to the reactionary General Franco and his German and Italian Fascist allies. In church Joe Jr. had heard the priests talking in menacing detail of the godless hordes who burned churches and killed priests and nuns. His own father had protested when the president had contemplated lifting America’s embargo on arms to the belligerents. At Harvard, Joe Jr. wrote his thesis on “Intervention in Spain,” a document that perhaps was destroyed so that the Kennedys would not have to explain Joe Jr.’s enthusiastic support for Franco. As Catholics, not only Joe Jr. but his whole family saw Mussolini and Franco as bulwarks against atheistic communism.
In early 1939, Franco and his allies were in the ascendancy. Hemingway had already left Madrid to write his great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. George Orwell was gone too, after fighting in the trenches and writing his classic book Homage to Catalonia, documenting the deceit of the Communists and their role in destroying Republican idealism.
Joe Jr. was not a rightist ideologue who reveled in the Republican defeat. He was a man who felt as much as he thought. Even before he entered Spain, he had visited a camp in France along the border where members of the International Brigade were interned. They had come from all over the world to fight for the Loyalist cause. He was shocked at the conditions in which they lived, and he listened to their tales with