The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [81]
“The last few weeks, before they got across into France, were terrible,” Joe Jr. noted. “Without arms and with no idea just where they were, as they retreated they expected at any moment to find themselves surrounded by Franco’s men…. Most of them were Communists, whose families at home were being supported by the various trade unions.”
Joe Jr. understood the universal language of valor. He saw that these men were brave and true. He was sorry that their adventure had ended in the squalor of a camp, where they were reduced to squabbling over crusts of bread. He traveled into Spain, arriving in Barcelona in February only a week after its fall to Franco. The area around the harbor was a charred ruin, but gleaming steel Italian and German warships sat proudly in the port.
From Barcelona, Joe Jr. sailed on a British destroyer to Valencia, one of the last strongholds of the Loyalists. Joe Jr. had what Orwell would have called a soldier’s vision of the war; that is, he was no jingoistic cheerleader viewing the destruction as God’s revenge on a heathen people. German bombs had leveled the area around the port, but back a short way from the rubble children played as children always play. “It made me sick,” Joe Jr. wrote in a letter published in the Atlantic Monthly. “The sound of those little kids’ voices.”
Joe Jr. was not only an American but a Kennedy; his father was an enemy of the Loyalists. Joe Jr. had turned in his diplomatic passport for ordinary documents, but he was peculiarly vulnerable. He was an uninvited guest in a society that stood on the edge of panic and paranoia over what measure of blood Franco would consider his just revenge.
The story of the civil war lay not among the orange fields of Valencia, however, but in Madrid, held by the Republicans. It was here that the war had begun and it was here that it would end. Joe Jr. talked his way onto a military bus traveling to the besieged city, rationing out cigarettes to his new friends on the bus as it bounced northward along ravaged roads. Joe Jr. didn’t speak much Spanish, but his smile and his backslapping good cheer served him well, and doubtless his new comrades thought that Joe Jr. was one of them.
The Madrid that Joe Jr. entered was a beggar city; its boulevards had been stripped of trees, chopped down for firewood, and its sidewalks were full of shuffling, hungry, bewildered people. Stray dogs and cats had long since been eaten, and the meat on sale in the Plaza Mayor was rat. Foreign journalists and most other observers had fled the city as well, and Joe Jr. was a unique witness to the last days of the Spanish Republic.
He staked out a room at the abandoned American embassy and set out to imbibe the full flavor of the beleaguered city. He could hear Franco’s artillery sounding in the distance. Down the street lay savage fighting between the Communists and their erstwhile allies, the Socialists and anarchists. Thus sounded the death knell for the republic: the soldiers who had fought years together against an implacable foe were now dispensing the last ounces of their resolve against each other.
Joe Jr. was perhaps the only nonresident American in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He had proved his bravery just by being there, but he had an even more daring idea. He wanted to find the Franco underground. He was told that he should go to a certain address, 19 Castelló Street. There he saw affixed to the door an American flag and a certificate stating that the house was a diplomatic enclave.
Joe Jr. met Antonio Garrigues y Díaz Canabate and his American wife, Helen Anne. And he saw basement quarters where the couple sheltered nuns and others. They were not passive recipients of Catholic refugees; they were running operations in a city that verged on anarchy.
Joe Jr. asked to join them. He squeezed into Garrigues’s small car with three others, and they headed out into the Madrid streets. The Spaniard carried several sets of documents with which he played his own peculiar form of Russian roulette. When the vehicle was stopped, he had