Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (3 page)

She went to Europe at least seventeen times during the decade, often by herself; this included the trip that Joe gave her in the fall of 1934 for their twentieth anniversary, which tellingly she went on without him. At other times, though, she traveled in the company of the older children, who were learning to travel in the Kennedy fashion: often and lavishly.

It wasn’t all shopping and beaches, though. In 1936 Rose and Kathleen (nicknamed “Kick” by the family) went to Russia, or “The Soviet,” as Rose referred to it. In Moscow, they visited Lenin’s tomb and the czars’ palace; they sampled Russian ballet and theater and toured its art museums. Joe Jr. had visited the previous year, and his descriptions had fired her curiosity.

After FDR’s 1936 reelection, the president convinced Joe to tackle another administration role, this time as the head of the United States Maritime Commission. After performing the job ably, Joe felt he was in line for something more exalted. The call came late in 1937: Roosevelt appointed Joe as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the official title for the integral role of US ambassador to the United Kingdom. It was time, after almost twenty-five years of marriage, to move the whole family to London.

5

Ambassadress

In July 1937, thirteen-year-old Patricia was rushed to St.
­Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston for an emergency appendectomy. She was cared for by a nurse named Luella Hennessey; the Kennedys liked Hennessey so much, they asked her to care for Pat in Hyannis for the rest of the summer. There, Rose thought she fit in nicely: Aside from taking care of Pat, Luella was adaptable enough to pick up a tennis racket, go swimming with the kids, even act as crew in the family sailboat races. She stayed with the Kennedys until September, when she returned to her post in Boston.

In an odd coincidence, Rose had her own attack of appendicitis while visiting her parents in Boston the following February and was rushed to St. Elizabeth’s for her own emergency appendectomy. “Her doctor called me and said that she would not be operated on unless I was there!” Hennessey remembered. That evening, when Joe visited Rose in her room at St. Elizabeth’s, he asked Hennessey if she would accompany the Kennedys to London, to act as the family nurse and help with the children as they settled in over the first six weeks. She agreed, and would remain with the Kennedys not only for six weeks, nor just through their sojourn in England, but for years afterward.

Sworn in as ambassador at the White House on February 18, 1938, Joe headed to England while Rose took two weeks to recuperate in Palm Beach before organizing the transport of the Kennedy troops. From Florida, she sent Hennessey a note. It read:
Do you understand the art of packing?

“I wondered why she did that,” Hennessey said. “But I certainly learned in London, when we went to the south of France, or went to Switzerland for winter sports; there would be forty-five and fifty trunks and
boxes packed for eleven, twelve of us to move.” Rose confronted a logistical nightmare anytime she had to move the family en masse; her can-do temperament, along with a sizable household staff, made it possible.

Joe’s media profile was at its zenith. By now a multimillionaire with a beautiful wife and nine photogenic children, and fresh from successful stints at both the SEC and US Maritime Commission, he was a press darling. Roosevelt, correctly sensing that Kennedy represented a potential rival should the president try for a third term in 1940, was all too happy to send him across the ocean. Roosevelt also took great delight in putting a plainspoken, even brusque, Irish Catholic into the role of ambassador to England, a spot previously reserved for Anglo Protestants. “Almost invariably they have been chosen for the Englishness of their background and manner,” reported the
New York Times
. Joe’s appointment was a move designed to create a stir, and it did. Newspapers and film crews covered his New York departure and his arrival in England.

Rose’s role, as wife of the United States ambassador, was critical. Representing America at the Court of St. James would require tact, diplomacy, and impeccable manners. It would mean exquisite attention to detail in dress and comportment. It would require minute observance of obscure protocols and an almost archaic level of formality. And all of that under the watchful gaze of the papers and the newsreels. It was, in short, what Rose had been preparing for her entire life.

In March of 1938, Rose crossed the ocean with Kick, Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy; Luella Hennessey, governess Elizabeth Dunn, and all that luggage came, too. Expecting a media circus awaiting the family’s arrival, Rose had Eunice and Rosemary wait five weeks to make the trip in order to shield Rosemary from the media glare. Joe Jr. and Jack, both at Harvard, stayed behind for the time being, but they were to join the family that summer.

The ambassador’s residence at 14 Prince’s Gate was a six-story, fifty-two-room mansion. Donated to the US government in 1920 by banker and philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan, it was within walking distance of the embassy and just off of Hyde Park, where Joe went horseback riding
almost every morning before work. It had its own elevator, which Bobby and Teddy used as their personal amusement-park ride until Rose put a stop to it. She redesigned the mansion to suit their needs. It would cost Joe a fortune to renovate the residence for a family of eleven; he was able to make peace with that more easily than with his office at the embassy. “I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect as a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May,” he sneered in a letter to a friend. “If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my life.”

The children were all soon settled into local schools. Eunice, Pat, and Jean were enrolled in the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton; Bobby and Teddy went to the Sloane School for Boys, a day school that allowed them to live at the residence with Joe, Rose, and Kick. Kick had decided not to start college in London, opting instead to embrace the London social scene. Rosemary went to the Convent of the Assumption School in Kensington Square, a training center for Montessori teachers. When Joe Jr. arrived in June, freshly graduated from Harvard, the ambassador hired him as his private secretary.

Rose took to life in upper-crust London immediately. Early in their visit, Rose and Joe were invited by the king and queen for a weekend at Windsor Castle. They were lodged high in the castle’s tower, in high-ceilinged chambers with sweeping views of the park below. Upon their arrival, Joe looked out the window, around the room, and at his wife. “Rose,” he said, “this is a helluva long way from East Boston.”

They dined and socialized with the king and queen throughout the weekend, joined by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, foreign secretary Lord Halifax, and their wives. Discussions ranged from their children and families to the future of Europe. With war in the air, there’s no doubt that Chamberlain and Halifax were eager to get a sense of the opinions and temperament of the man who would serve as the primary intermediary between Britain and the United States. Rose would remember it, decades later, as “one of the most fabulous, fascinating experiences of my life.”

Rose’s engagements were more or less constant; as the wife of the ambassador, it was her duty to socialize. She threw society debuts for Rosemary, Kick, and Eunice, and, following custom, the young women
were presented to the king and queen. Rose spent hours working with Rosemary on perfecting her curtsy, and she was proud to see her eldest daughter show impeccable form when she met the queen. She and Joe went to Ascot, Private View day at the Royal Academy, Founder’s Day at Eton, and any number of teas, parties, and balls. She hosted dinners and parties at the embassy, the details of which she agonized over. Rose’s sense of correctness—in manners and dress—stood her in good stead on these occasions, and where she didn’t know the proper protocol, she wasn’t afraid to ask: At one point, she contacted officials at Buckingham Palace to ask when and where it was appropriate for her to wear a tiara. She was informed that a tiara should be worn at any dinner at which a member of the royal family was present.

Not surprisingly, Rose had special admiration for the royals; they confirmed every instinct and opinion she had about what was ideal in public life. “Disciplined, stoical, eternally gracious, they went through life wearing impenetrable masks of civility,” wrote Laurence Leamer. “The routine was a matter not of sentiment, deeply felt emotion, but of training, deeply ingrained habits.” In the English aristocracy, she found her ideas about child rearing, class, and so much else affirmed.

March of 1939 brought Rose another peak experience when Joe, with the family accompanying him, was sent to the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Vatican City as FDR’s personal representative. Pius met privately with the family and presented Rose with a silver rosary. A few days later, seven-year-old Teddy received his first communion from the new pope.

Another bright spot of their term in England concerned Rosemary. Her time at the Montessori school was going exceptionally well; by 1939 the twenty-one-year-old’s cognitive impairment remained but the mood swings she had experienced increasingly throughout her adolescence had calmed and she seemed happy, content, and fulfilled. Several factors seemed to be at work. First, Rosemary was told the white lie that if she worked hard enough, she would get a diploma certifying her as a Montessori teacher; this was plain fiction, but it seemed to give her a sense of purpose and satisfaction. Secondly, the nun who worked most closely with Rosemary, Mother Isabel, had a rare connection with the young woman. Finally, perhaps not coincidentally, Rosemary had never had such
frequent contact with, or affection from, her father. She brought out in both parents a directness of affection that the other children never saw, and in England she was given healthy doses of it. “You have worked very hard and I am very proud of you and I love you a lot,” Joe told Rosemary in a letter. It was a sentence nearly impossible to imagine him writing to any of the other children.

Rose and the children used their residence in London as a base for further European forays. Joe Jr. traveled to Spain, Rosemary to Ireland, and Rose to Egypt, the Holy Land, and Greece. In 1939, Jack took a leave of absence from Harvard and saw firsthand the state of Europe as it eddied into war: He traveled to Romania, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Greece. After a brief respite with the family in Cannes, he road tripped with Harvard roommate Torb Macdonald through France, Germany, and Italy.

Despite the initial warm reception the Kennedys received, Joe’s ultimately mistaken support of appeasement—that if Hitler were allowed to annex large parts of Europe, he would not turn to bloodshed—along with his pessimism about Britain’s chances in the event of a war against Germany, soured the British to him. His private clashes with FDR discredited him both to the president and the diplomatic corps, and they made his ambassadorship increasingly untenable. “Try as he might,” Nasaw wrote, “he could not quite do what was expected of him. He was simply unfitted by temperament for the position of impartial, impassive listener and reporter, especially at moments of crisis.”

By the second half of 1939, Ambassador Kennedy was effectively sidelined and watched in impotent horror as Europe moved inexorably toward war. In the end, Joe’s conviction that, no matter what Europe’s troubles, they were worth not one drop of American blood, placed him on the wrong side of history. His own political fortunes would never recover.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland; two days later Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany. Rose, Kick, Bobby, and Eunice boarded the USS
Washington
bound for New York on September 12. Pat, Jean, and Teddy followed on a separate ship. Later
that month, Joe Jr. sailed home on the RMS
Mauretania
, and Jack flew home on a Pan Am “flying clipper.”

Only Rosemary stayed behind with her father. She was doing so well at the Montessori school that it was decided it would be best if she evacuated with the nuns and her classmates to the Hertfordshire countryside rather than return to the States. Her father spent his weekends at a nearby estate owned by J. P. Morgan and was able to see her often. In spite of Joe’s crumbling ambassadorship and the incipient war, they delighted in their time together. She remained in England until June 1940. Joe would stay until the middle of October.

Another member of the Kennedy party had wanted to stay behind in September when the rest evacuated. Luella Hennessey recounted in her 1991 oral history that, while in England, she had fallen in love with a young man and informed Joe that she intended to stay. “We expected to get married,” she said.

Joe explained that “it was going to be a long, hard war . . . He gave me quite a bleak picture of the future there, but I still thought that love would take care of everything.” After some argument, Joe finally convinced her to sail with the family back to New York, after which, if she wanted to return to London, that was her affair. “You can wait for the boat to turn around and come right back again,” he told her, “or you can stay in America.”

“I came back with the family,” Hennessey continued. “And I was so glad; I knew he was right, because when I arrived in New York, I knew this was my home, and I had no idea of going back again.”