Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (12 page)

Meanwhile, life at the Kennedy residence appeared to go on much as before. A visitor to the household at the time, Jack’s friend Charles “Chuck” Spalding, later recalled a typical afternoon there: Jack autographing copies of the recently published book version of his Harvard senior honors thesis,
Why England Slept,
about the Conservative politician Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Munich, and the policy of appeasement; Joe Junior holding forth on his Russian travels; Rose Kennedy conferring on the telephone with a priest; Pat recounting how a German aircraft had crashed in the proximity of Ambassador Kennedy’s country home near Windsor; Bobby attempting to persuade his brothers and sisters to play charades; and all the young people suddenly choosing up sides for a game of touch football, with Kick “calling the huddle” for the team on which the delighted guest soon found himself.

Also that vacation season, Kick, usually with Jack at her side, cut a ubiquitous figure on the major East Coast social circuits in Newport and Long Island. At Bailey’s Beach, an elite club in Newport, she was so often observed dressed in tennis whites, racket in hand, that she came to be regarded as something of a regular there. Other than the sight of her at Cape Cod knitting a scarf for Billy, to all outward appearances Kick seemed to have compliantly and contentedly settled in to the sort of existence that her parents had hoped she would embrace when she returned to the U.S. the previous autumn.

But the picture was deceptive, for all that summer of 1940, far from having given up on finding her way back to Billy and England, she had merely been waiting for her opening.

It came at last in the form of a letter from her father that was delivered in Hyannis Port on the sixth of August. Actually, several letters from Prince’s Gate arrived that day, one for each of the Kennedy children then in residence at the Cape, including Rosemary, who had been sent home in May for safety’s sake. In his message to Kick, Joe Kennedy reported on the activities of the Astor family and other of her London friends. But it was the ambassador’s long letter to Rose Kennedy—who, as was her custom, passed it around to all the children—that provided Kick with the opportunity to approach him anew on the subject of a London visit. At a moment when Joe Kennedy was feeling miserable at his post, alienated from the Churchill administration on one side and from the Roosevelt administration on the other, he wrote of his great sadness at being separated from his wife and children through all this: “The big difficulty, of course, is being lonesome,” he told Rose, “but I have to keep my mind off that or I’d throw up the job and go home.”

Kick wasted no time writing back to propose that she might be just the person to assuage Joe Kennedy’s loneliness: “I wish I could come to England to keep you company,” she declared on the sixth. “Is there any chance of it? I should so love it.” Given the concerns that had motivated the ambassador to repeatedly reject previous appeals, was it reasonable or realistic to think that he would let her come over at a moment when the defense of the island—perhaps even the fighting in the fields and streets evoked by Churchill—threatened to begin at any time? Probably not, but when it came to Billy, Kick was not then in a condition of mind that might adequately be described as reasonable. The young man she loved was facing another monumental fight for his life, and she wanted to be there with him.

So Kick sent off her request, though by that point her father was plainly as desperate to escape London as she was to get there. His ambassadorial heyday had coincided with the premiership of Neville Chamberlain; there was simply no comfortable place for the defeatist, anti-interventionist Joe Kennedy in Winston Churchill’s Britain. Enraged that in its dealings with Churchill and the British, his own government had transformed him into, in his bitter phrase, no more than “a $75 a week errand boy,” Kennedy longed to quit.

If he remained on the job, it was because he wanted to avoid being charged with cowardice for abandoning his post and his president at a time of grave danger. As he suggested to Rose Kennedy and others, he wished to do nothing to jeopardize his family’s reputation and thereby harm the two eldest boys’ futures. The White House, though it had ceased altogether to trust Joe Kennedy’s judgment or recommendations, was content to leave him in place for now. It seemed the lesser evil to keep Kennedy in London than to bring him home during the run-up to the 1940 presidential election, when any critical public comments by a disaffected former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St James’s could prove highly damaging to Franklin Roosevelt.

In early September, Hitler, having failed in his efforts to outmatch the Royal Air Force in combat, shifted tactics. Over the course of nine months, German planes attacked London in an effort to terrorize and demoralize the British people and leave them begging for peace. Night after sleepless night, the face of the city was transfigured by relentless bombing. Thousands of German aircraft filled the skies like swarms of buzzing bees. Craters opened in the streets. Buildings burned. Residential and shop windows blew out. Walls shook, cracked, and collapsed. Billows of acrid smoke befouled the air. Emergency crews scrambled to rescue survivors trapped in the mountains of rubble. The death toll climbed to more than twenty thousand.

Fragments of the city that Kick had come to know so well in 1938 and 1939 began to vanish. A Nazi bomb pulverized the balcony in Grosvenor Square where she had sat late one night listening to Tony Loughborough hold forth on the future of Europe. Another bomb gutted the Cavendish family house where the duchess had made the audacious gesture of seating Kick to Billy’s right, in the position of honor, at his twenty-first birthday party. Still another bomb destroyed the Earl of Airlie’s residence, where Kick had often lunched with Jean Ogilivy, Debo Mitford, Gina Wernher, and other debs.

At length, both Jean and Debo were shipped off to live with Nancy Astor. Debo worked in the hospital for Canadian soldiers that had been set up at Cliveden, while Jean traveled daily into London, where she was employed at the Women’s Voluntary Service caring for victims of the Blitz. Formerly the most sheltered of the debutantes in Kick’s group, Jean would walk from Cliveden to the main road, a distance of about a mile, where she would hitchhike into town, usually in a truck, before reversing the process at the end of the workday. Some two and a half years after “the two Joes,” as Kick and Jean had dubbed their fathers, agreed about the wisdom of avoiding a second world war, Joe Airlie had become an ardent and active supporter of the fight against Nazi Germany. Back in the uniform he had worn in the First World War, he was stationed near the Tower of London, where, as a member of the Home Guard, he watched for fires and participated in rescue missions.

The Germans had calculated that Britons would react to the mass bombing by ejecting the Churchill government. But, as the American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow told his listeners on September 10, 1940, “It’s more probable they’ll rise up and murder a few German pilots who come down by parachute.” On not a single occasion, Murrow continued, “have I heard man, woman, or child say that Britain should throw in her hand.”

On the very day that Edward R. Murrow spoke those words to his CBS radio audience, Joe Kennedy was writing home with a rather different picture. Kennedy reported that while Britons kept saying that their chins were up and that they would not be beaten, “I can see evidence of some people beginning to break down.” As far as his own response to the bombardment of London was concerned, he insisted: “Haven’t the slightest touch of nervousness.” That, however, was far from how the British people perceived his behavior. Kennedy’s nightly search for safety in a house in the country caused contemptuous Londoners to refer to him as “Jittery Joe.” Foreign Office documents characterized him as “thoroughly frightened” and as having “lost his nerve” and “gone to pieces” as a consequence of the Blitz. Whether because of fear of the German bombers, a sense of his inefficaciousness in London, resentment about how the White House had been treating him, or some mixture of those factors, Kennedy finally decided that he had had enough. Given that Roosevelt was intent on keeping him in London until after the election, Kennedy sent word, via U.S. Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, that if he were not allowed to come home at once he would publish an indictment of the administration in the American press a few days before the presidential contest.

Oddly, the U.S. ambassador made similar claims at the time to British foreign secretary Lord Halifax, boasting of the impact his printed comments promised to have on the outcome of the election. Roosevelt, threatened in this manner by one of his top diplomats, reluctantly consented to summon Joe Kennedy to Washington, though with the stipulation that Kennedy make no statement to the press until he and the President had had a chance to agree upon what ought to be said. Roosevelt instructed Kennedy to come directly to the White House on his arrival in the U.S. Soon, official word went out that Ambassador Kennedy was being brought back to America for consultations.

Newspaper accounts in the U.S. described Joe Kennedy as coming back for a brief vacation, for a prolonged stay, or for good. There was meanwhile much concern in high British quarters about the role Kennedy might play in the American election when he went home. The Churchill government emphatically preferred Franklin Roosevelt to his Republican challenger, Wendell Willkie, and there was anxiety that, once he was safely back in the U.S., Kennedy would announce his support for the latter. Halifax, unlike a good many of his colleagues, predicted that Kennedy would agree to support the very candidate he had been threatening to attack.

At LaGuardia Airport in New York, Kick and her sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean rushed forward like so many well-synchronized ballerinas when Joe Kennedy finally came into view amidst the numerous reporters who were clamoring to ask about the circumstances of his departure from London. Had Kennedy come home for good? Did he intend to resign? What were his plans otherwise? How did he feel about the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt? And what about Wendell Willkie? The ambassador’s return had been postponed for two days due to severe storms over the Atlantic, and the delay seemed only to have intensified public curiosity about the purpose of his trip. Kennedy had refused to answer press questions when he changed planes in Portugal, and he proved to be similarly uncooperative now.

The inrushing Kennedy girls crowded round the old man in such a way as to temporarily block the correspondents’ access. Their father proceeded directly to the White House, where he signed on to campaign for Roosevelt in the expectation that at length the President would accept his resignation and find a new official post for him in Washington. Kennedy delivered a highly effective radio address on Roosevelt’s behalf that was broadcast on more than a hundred stations nationwide, and he appeared beside the President at a rally in Boston, which some commentators later saw as having been key to Roosevelt’s successful reelection bid.

That same month, Kennedy went on to damage himself immeasurably by a rabid interview with
The Boston Globe
and a similarly ill-considered address to film industry figures in Los Angeles. In both venues, he reiterated his predictions of social and economic apocalypse should the U.S. allow itself to be drawn into the war. And this time he seemed to go even further. “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here,” Kennedy informed the Boston newspaper in what he later insisted had been off-the-record remarks. The ambassador predicted that even if the Germans were to win the war, the U.S. would continue to trade with Nazi-dominated Europe. The speech in Los Angeles that followed struck attendees as being shot through with anti-Semitism, when Kennedy warned Jewish producers and film studio executives to stop making anti-Nazi motion pictures lest Hollywood and the Jews later be blamed for the horrors and hardships that would ensue should the U.S. join the fight against Hitler.

Referring to the
Globe
interview, the
New York Herald Tribune
accused the ambassador of telling the Germans quite what they wanted to hear and to believe. Old Joe, full of self-pity, privately lamented that while the bombers might be tough in London, “ill-disposed newspapers” were even tougher in the U.S. Taken together, his Boston and Los Angeles performances constituted a spectacular act of self-destruction. By the time Roosevelt finally accepted and announced Kennedy’s resignation, in December 1940, it was not just old Joe’s ambassadorship that had come to an end; it was his public life as well.

During the past year and a half, Kick’s arguments for being allowed to return to London had all been predicated on her father’s ongoing presence there. After his resignation had been accepted, she could no longer talk of living with him again at Prince’s Gate or of playing a role in mitigating his loneliness. If Joe Kennedy had refused her pleas in the past, he was not likely to assent now. Less tenacious souls might have lost hope at this point, but Kick was nothing if not resolute. Her attachment to Billy and Britain had become intrinsic to her sense of herself as a soloist rather than as a mere member of the Kennedy girls’ corps de ballet.

She cabled Billy at Christmastime 1940 to communicate that she had not abandoned her goal: “Hope the New Year brings us together again.” Was she worried that her beloved would be discouraged by the ambassador’s departure from the London scene? Did she fear that, in the matter of love, blue-blooded Billy would prove less stalwart than she? Soon, Nancy Astor was signaling that Kick might indeed have reason to be concerned. Ostensibly, her February 22, 1941, letter to Kick was about the impending marriage of Debo Mitford, aged twenty, to Andrew Cavendish, who had just turned twenty-one and seemed exceedingly young to Lady Astor. Having imparted the news of the one brother’s wedding plans, she went on to pointedly say about the other: “Your Billie
[sic]
is still heart-free.” This was surely a hint that, devoted to Kick though Billy still was, he might not remain hers for long in the present climate. Read in the context of other of Lady Astor’s letters (both to Kick and other correspondents), it seems clear that she was not alluding to any potential lessening of Billy’s ardor. She was speaking of the changed reality that faced all the young people there, and of how that new reality might affect Billy’s thinking with regard to waiting for Kick.