An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, like the ulcer and osteoporosis and degeneration of his lumbar spine, was likely the result of the supplemental hormones he had apparently been taking on and off since the 1930s. It is now also understood that sustained treatment with steroids can cause the adrenal glands to shrivel and die. Doctors who had treated Jack’s Addison’s or read closely about his condition have concluded that he had a secondary form of the disease, or a “slow atrophy of the adrenal glands,” rather than a rapid primary destruction. Because his sister Eunice also suffered from Addison’s, it is nevertheless possible that the disease had an inherited component.

  Yet whatever the etiology of the problem, it was yet another potentially life-threatening disorder for Jack. An insufficient supply of cortisone reduces the body’s capacity to resist infection and makes people ill with Addison’s disease susceptible to medical crises from any sort of surgery, even the extraction of a tooth. By the time Jack was diagnosed with Addison’s, however, medical science had developed hormone replacements that, if given in proper doses, could ensure a normal life span. But it was hard, even given the Kennedy family confidence, not to fear that Jack’s days were numbered.

  JACK’S MEDICAL ORDEAL paralleled family suffering that, added to his experience in the war, made him intensely conscious of the precariousness of life. In 1944, his brother Joe had been flying antisubmarine patrols in the English Channel. Although he had been entitled to return home after thirty missions, he insisted on remaining through at least the D-Day invasion to help guard the amphibious Allied forces against possible German U-boat attacks. But even after contributing to the success of the June 6 landing by providing air cover against submarines, Joe Jr. was not content to go home. Part of his eagerness to stay in the war zone was a competitive urge to outdo Jack. On August 10, Joe wrote him that he had read Hersey’s New Yorker article and was “much impressed with your intestinal fortitude.” But he could not resist asking: “Where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar.” The underlying message was: Some hero to have let your boat been sunk. Joe was also intensely conscious of who got what awards. “My congrats on the [navy and marine] medal,” he wrote Jack. “To get anything out of the Navy is deserving of a campaign medal in itself. It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.”

  But it was not enough. In August, Joe volunteered for a terribly dangerous mission flying a navy PB4Y Liberator bomber loaded with 22,000 pounds of explosives, the highest concentration of dynamite packed into a plane up to that point in the war. The objective was for Joe and his copilot to fly the plane toward the principal German launch site on the Belgian coast of the V-1s, which were then terrifying London with their distinctive buzzing sound before impact and destruction of lives and property. The two pilots were to parachute out after activating remote-control guidance and arming systems, turning the plane into a drone controlled by a second trailing bomber. Although Joe assured Jack in his letter of August 10 that he was not “intending to risk my fine neck . . . in any crazy venture,” he knew that he had taken on what might well be a suicide mission. Several earlier attempts to strike the V-1s in this way had failed with casualties to the pilots, who had to bail out at dangerously high speeds and low altitudes. “If I don’t come back,” Joe told a friend shortly before taking off, “tell my dad . . . that I love him very much.”

  The mission on August 12 ended in disaster when Joe’s plane exploded in the air before reaching the English Channel coast. An American electronics officer had warned Joe before he took off that the remote-controlled arming system on the plane was faulty and that a number of things—“radio static, a jamming signal, excessive vibration, excessive turbulence, an enemy radio signal”—could prematurely trigger the explosives. Joe waved off the warning, assured by Headquarters Squadron that tests with 63,000 pounds of sand, substituting for the cargo of explosives, had produced “excellent” flight results and a “perfect” performance by the equipment.

  An air force report on August 14 assessing the causes of the explosion speculated that it could have resulted from any one of seven possibilities, including “static—electrical explosion” or “electric heating of Mark 143 electric fuse from unknown source.” The analyst believed “a static electric explosion . . . highly improbable.” Because “the explosion was of a high order,” he suspected “a possible electrical detonation . . . by a friendly or enemy stray or freak radio frequency signal.”

  U.S. military authorities never established a clear cause of the premature explosion. In 2001, however, a veteran of the British Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers serving as a telecommunications mechanic in Suffolk, England, where the Kennedy plane exploded, came forward with an explanation. “The Americans, based all over the South [of England], had turned off their radars,” he explained, “so as not to interfere with their flying armada. Unfortunately, they did not warn their British Allies of the exploit, so that it came under the scrutiny of a large number of powerful and less-powerful ground-based radars. Their pulses upset the delicate radio controls of the two Liberator bombers, leading to gigantic aerial explosions and the total destruction of the air armada.” It was a crucial, and fatal, error of omission by the U.S. air command.

  Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.

  His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack. He eased his grief partly by conceiving the idea for a book of personal reminiscences about Joe by family and friends. As We Remember Joe was not only a tribute to him but a kind of lament for all the fine young men who had perished in the war and would never realize their promise.

  His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.

  Less than a month later, the family suffered another blow when Kathleen’s English husband, William Hartington, was also killed in combat by a German sniper in Belgium. “The pattern of life for me has been destroyed,” Kathleen wrote Jack in October. “At the moment I don’t fit into any design.” Four months later, in February 1945, when Kick, as the family affectionately called her, heard news of two other friends killed in the fighting, she wrote from England: “The news of Bill Coleman really upset me because I know how much he meant to Jack and how Jack always said that he would do better than anyone else he knew, and then Bob MacDonald lost in a submarine. Where will it all end?”

  “Luckily I am a Kennedy,” Kathleen told Lem Billings. “I have a very strong feeling that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability to not be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”

  Jack shared Kathleen’s resiliency. He also saw valuable lessons in human suffering and tragedy. As he later said of the poet Robert Frost, “His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.” Having been spared in the war, enjoying so much God-given talent, Jack was determined to make a mark on the world. But how? It was a question he had been struggling to answer for a number of years. Now, at long last, he would begin to answer it.

  PART TWO


  Public Service

  They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life.

  — Plutarch

  There is no cause half so sacred as the cause of a people. There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of service to humanity.

  — Woodrow Wilson, October 31, 1912

  CHAPTER 4

  Choosing Politics

  I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness—“a full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life-affording scope.”

  — John F. Kennedy (1960)

  SIGMUND FREUD BELIEVED that a well-spent life rests on successful engagement with Arbeit and Liebe—work and love. Both require difficult choices, and neither is made easier by the abundance of possibilities open to the offspring of society’s most comfortable families.

  For Jack Kennedy, finding a life’s vocation was a crucial matter of his early adulthood, but especially after he returned from the war and turned twenty-eight in 1945. Some useful—indeed, vital—occupation was the only acceptable goal for the Kennedy children (except Rosemary). But the boys carried the family name and were explicitly responsible for upholding its public reputation, and for Joe Kennedy, the family’s reputation was a consuming concern. “The desire to enhance the Kennedy image was a driving force in this complicated man,” one biographer wrote, “and the skill he evinced at creating just the right image was phenomenal.”

  From early on, Joe ruled out a business career for his sons as likely to be more a source of frustration than satisfaction. He had been highly successful at making money, and he did not want them to stand in his shadow. Moreover, adding to a multimillion-dollar fortune seemed pointless. Joe had made all the money the family would ever need. Some other productive calling made more sense.

  A logical alternative was politics. The careers of Honey Fitz and P. J. Kennedy were local examples, but Joe was thinking on a grander scale. He believed that the Depression marked a sea change in American life, from a country dominated by business to one controlled by government. In 1930, Joe declared that “in the next generation the people who run the government would be the biggest people in America.” High public office, which FDR’s administration opened to Catholics and Jews, had replaced accumulating money as the greater social good and a worthy aspiration for second- and third-generation immigrants reaching for higher social status. Joe himself had crossed over from business titan to FDR partisan and head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Maritime Commission, then ambassador to Britain; and as he did so, Joe Jr. and Jack became increasingly attentive to public affairs.

  Although Jack’s navy service had put his career plans on hold, he spent the war thinking about politics and international relations. In the fall of 1941, while serving in the ONI in Washington, he had begun gathering material for a book on the isolationist-internationalist split in the United States. Put off by strict ideological advocates, he prided himself on his realism and pragmatism. Before Pearl Harbor, he noted in a memo to himself that “for people to take a die-hard position on the war is wrong. Our policy must be flexible, fluid, if it is to stay abreast of the changing conditions of the world.” In the winter of 1942, from his exile in Charleston, he had fretted over reverses in the Pacific and worried about isolationist impediments to American willingness to make necessary sacrifices in the fighting. “I never thought in my gloomiest day that there was any chance of our being defeated,” he wrote Lem Billings in February. But American reluctance to look at widespread “examples of inefficiency that may lick us” greatly troubled him. “It seems a rather strange commentary that it will take death in large quantities to wake us up. . . . I don’t think anyone really realizes that nothing stands between us and the defeat of our Christian crusade against Paganism except a lot of Chinks who never heard of God and a lot of Russians who have heard about him but don’t want Him.”

  Jack’s qualified pessimism lasted as long as he remained sidelined in Charleston. Once he got to the South Pacific and began to take part in the fighting, he became more hopeful; his activism relieved much of the feeling of defeatism that ran through his commentaries in early 1942. The American naval victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in May and June of 1942, respectively, were also salutary in changing his perspective.

  What remained the same, however, was an intense interest in the political questions that would need attention as postwar challenges replaced military exigencies. During his almost nine months in the war zone, while many of his fellow officers diverted themselves with card games, Jack, according to his commander in the Solomons, “spent most of his time looking for officers who weren’t in any game, as he did with me. We’d sit in a corner and I’d recall all the political problems in New Jersey and Long Island where I come from. He did that with everybody—discussed politics.” One of Jack’s navy friends in the Pacific recalled: “Oh, yeah, he had politics in his blood. . . . We used to kid Jack all the time. I’d say, after the war is over, Jack, I’m gonna work like hell and we’re going to carry Louisiana for you.” Another of Jack’s pals, who remembered spending “a lot of time, every single day practically, with him” just before Jack returned to the States, said, “He made us all very conscious of the fact that we’d better . . . be concerned about why the hell we’re out here, or else what’s the purpose of having the conflict, if you’re going to come out here and fight and let the people that got us here get us back into it again. . . . He made us all very aware of our obligations as citizens of the United States to do something, to be involved in the process.”

  In the winter of 1944-45, as he left the navy and settled outside of Phoenix to recuperate from back surgery, Jack wrote an article, “Let’s Try an Experiment for Peace,” which he hoped might contribute to postwar stability. The essay formed a sharp departure from the argument in Why England Slept. Whereas he had previously pressed the case for a U.S. arms buildup in response to German and Japanese aggression, he now warned against a postwar arms race that could precipitate another conflict and cripple American democracy. He predicted that an American effort to outbuild a big-power rival such as Russia would lead Moscow to match U.S. military might and would provoke smaller states to form alliances against the United States. As bad, such an American buildup would divert resources from productive domestic enterprise and the creation of jobs for returning veterans. Jack feared that an effort “to compete with a dictatorship like Russia in maintaining large armies for an indefinite period” would destroy the U.S. economy and democracy. “Democracy sleeps fitfully in an armed camp,” he concluded. Jack underestimated the economic benefits to the nation from continuing defense production; ultimately, it was, of course, the Soviet Union that could not bear the cost of the arms race. Nevertheless, he accurately foresaw that an international struggle like the Cold War would put a debilitating strain on America’s democratic institutions just as earlier isolationists had warned.

  Although Jack saw his essay as innovative, editors at Life, Reader’s Digest, and the Atlantic Monthly all rejected it. Reader’s Digest thought the piece too “exhortative.” The Atlantic editor dismissed the article as “an oversimplification of a very complicated subject. Some profounder thinking is needed here and conclusions not based on cliches,” he said. There was some merit in this dismissal: Jack’s argument was in fact not much more than a statement of liberal orthodoxy in 1945 America. Arms limitation, disarmament, and world government were progressive prescriptions for postwar peace; even future conservatives such as Ronald Reagan considered them viable alternatives at the time.

  If Jack lacked originality in addressing postwar armament and peace, at least he was well informed about foreign affairs; the same was not true of domestic issues. Yet he worked hard to round himself out. During his stay in Arizona, he became friends with Pat Lannan, a C
hicago millionaire who was also nursing himself back to health. Lannan explained that “labor was going to be a very important force in the country.” “Jack,” Lannan told him, “you don’t know the difference between an automatic screw machine and a lathe and a punch press and you ought to!” Jack took Lannan’s words as a challenge and asked his father to send him a crateful of books on labor and labor law. Lannan remembered that Jack, with whom he shared a cottage, “sat up to one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate.” The episode speaks volumes about Jack’s combination of intense curiosity, ambition, and competitiveness.

  IN APRIL 1945, shortly before the war ended in Europe, in response to a suggestion from Joe, the Hearst Chicago Herald-American invited Jack to cover the United Nations conference in San Francisco. He jumped at the chance, perhaps seeing his work in journalism as a prelude to a political career—a career whose scope might be hinted at by the fact that writing for Hearst newspapers in Chicago and New York (the Journal-American) was not an especially effective way to win political standing in Massachusetts. In addition, in May 1945, when Joe wrote daughter Kathleen about a possible appointment in the new Truman administration, he said, “But if he’s going to give me a job, I’d rather have him give it to Jack and maybe make him minister to some country or Assistant Secretary of State or Assistant Secretary of the Navy.” That said, neither father nor son saw Jack running for office.

  In sending Jack to San Francisco, the newspapers were not doing the Kennedys a favor. They received good value for the $250 a dispatch they paid Jack. As the author of a successful book on foreign affairs, someone with access to significant American and British officials—including the ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman; Soviet expert Charles E. Bohlen; and British foreign secretary Anthony Eden—and a navy hero who could speak “from a serviceman’s point of view,” Jack had credibility with his editors and reading audience as an expert on postwar international affairs.