The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [82]
Joe Jr. was there in March, when the city fell, not in some great battle, or with Franco marching proudly and dramatically into Madrid, but in a strangely desultory manner. Joe Jr. saw a car rushing through the city, the Nationalist flag waving from its window, then a second car, a truck full of gesticulating young men shouting, “Franco is coming!” The once-banned scarlet and gold Nationalist colors were everywhere, hanging in windows, worn on scarves, draped in restaurants. “We were touched by the expressiveness in their voices and the look in their eyes,” he wrote his father, “by occasional sad faces, by a woman in black holding two children with a bitter look on her face.”
Joe Jr. flew to London to greet a father full of immense pride at his son’s daring and resolve. While his son was in Spain, Joe had read some of Joe Jr.’s letters to Chamberlain at a dinner one evening. Joe had not wanted to inflict too much of this on the prime minister, but Chamberlain had asked him to read on, and so he had.
Joe wanted not only for his sons to experience life in all its rich manifestations, but for their adventures to be trumpeted in newspapers and magazines, spreading the glory of the family name. That was the approach to everything they did. Win a sailing race. Triumph in a football game. Travel to war-torn Spain. Then make sure that your achievement is widely known and richly celebrated.
Joe Jr. had written a letter to the Atlantic Monthly about Valencia for which he received twenty-five dollars, but his ambitions were greater now. He had had an experience that he could weave into a book, and he began by writing a series of six articles.
For weeks Joe Jr. had gone through events in Spain that should have been burned into his consciousness. Yet there was a distant quality to much of the writing, as if he were remembering events of twenty years before. A passage would be full of vividly observed detail, followed by pages with no more verve than a legal brief. What was missing was a sense of politics, without which the events he had seen were largely meaningless, and his account merely a travelogue of adventure.
Joe Jr. was a highly opinionated young man. Whatever the issue, he had his stance, strongly argued and strongly felt. He also had political ambitions, and he may well have felt that he should position himself as an honest observer and keep his political views to himself, confining them to private letters and memos to his father. In doing so, however, he stood back from his own sense of truth and wrote a paltry outline of what he had seen and felt, leaving out what he believed. In the end, none of these articles saw publication, and Joe Jr.’s journey was celebrated more within his own family than in the greater world.
Joe thought that his sons were never too young to learn to be the public men he wanted them to be. Joe’s sons felt the need not simply to emulate their father but to defend him. Even young Bobby got into the fray. In November 1938, Walter Lippmann wrote a thoughtful column rightfully criticizing Joe as one of those “amateur and temporary diplomats [who] take their speeches very seriously. Ambassadors of this type soon tend to become each a little state department with a little foreign policy of their own.” Twelve-year-old Bobby wrote a tedious rebuttal that was little more than a regurgitation of some of his father’s more extreme views. There was a slovenly quality to the letter, with myriad typos, including a misspelling of Lippmann’s name.
Although Bobby would presumably have found it offensive if