True Compass (5 page)

Our parents escorted us on frequent excursions beyond the house and grounds. A Sunday ritual, after church, was our two-car caravan into Manhattan for a family luncheon at a Longchamps, that bygone chain of art deco restaurants with their stained glass and murals and heaping plates of delicious food. Then we'd all head over to Radio City for a movie. Jack must have loved those outings; he often brought Jackie to Longchamps for dinner in the early days of their marriage.

A reminder that the outside world was a lot less secure than our own occurred when I was five, shortly after I was enrolled at a kindergarten off Pondfield Road in the Bronx. The school was only a five-minute car ride from our house, and one fine autumn afternoon I decided to impress my parents with my independence by walking home through the crunchy fallen leaves. My mother wasn't expecting this, and when she drove to the school and didn't find me, she grew terrified. The famous Lindbergh baby kidnapping and killing had occurred shortly after my birth, and parents across the nation were still haunted by it. My parents knew the Lindberghs and had observed their pain firsthand. And so instead of congratulating me on my adventure when I strutted through the door, my mother reasoned with me via a coat hanger, and then banished me to the closet.

But the outside world also held wonder, especially when my father was along. He took me to a ball game at Yankee Stadium once when I was about seven. We had box seats, but Dad apparently found these a little too remote from the action, and boosted me over the wall onto the playing field during batting practice. The ushers smiled at us and touched their caps. We strolled around and I drank in all the huge famous men in pinstripes firing baseballs at one another, and was just turning my attention back to the hot-dog vendor roaming the seats when I heard Dad say, "Teddy, come over here." He was standing beside a big grinning moonfaced man in a business suit. "Teddy, this is Babe Ruth," Dad said, "the greatest baseball player of our time." Ruth had been retired for a couple years, but I knew who he was. Honey Fitz had told me about cheering the Babe when he played for the Red Sox before 1920, and my grandfather was an organizing member of the Royal Rooters. Now I'd have something to tell Grampa.

Ruth reached down a huge paw and grabbed my hand. I can't remember what I said to him, but to this day, meeting Babe Ruth remains the strongest memory I have of being awestruck by someone. I was tonguetied.

A household as teeming with children as ours required some reinforcements for the parents. I recall a couple of governesses in particular, one of them a legend within the extended Kennedy family, the other not quite so beloved.

The less-than-adored caretaker was an Irishwoman we called Kico, who sometimes let our rambunctiousness get the better of her. I can still hear the nighttime
thump... thump... thump
of poor Bobby's forehead as Kico banged it against a wall in an effort to discipline him. Bobby's famous hardheadedness served him well in these moments. Kico did not last long at the Kennedy house.

The legendary governess was Luella Hennessey (later Donovan), who was in our lives for forty years, assisted at the births of twenty-three Kennedy children, lavished tender care upon my father after he suffered his stroke in 1961, helped nurse me back to health after my airplane crash in 1964, and was a particular favorite of Jack's. In 1963, President Kennedy coaxed the hardworking Luella to expand her horizons by enrolling at Boston College to get her college degree. He died before she received her bachelor of science diploma, but she endearingly remarked, "The president said he would come to my graduation if I got my degree. I guess he'll know I'm getting it."

Our expanding household, as I noted earlier, was an important reason that Dad found it necessary for us to leave Boston. But there were other reasons--reasons I did not suspect as a child; reasons that had to do with the outside world from which he tried to shield us until we were ready for it. Much of what he knew about the world did not please Joe Kennedy, and some of it quite rightly infuriated him.

The Boston of my dad's young manhood remained in certain ways as it had been since the mid-nineteenth century: two cities, in effect, mutually hostile and resentful. One was the silk-stocking Boston of old, landed Yankee power and influence; Beacon Hill; Harvard; the bankers and captains of industry. The other city consisted of the teeming storefronts and docksides. This was the Boston of immigrants' working-class descendants. These were mostly Irish, but included Italians and Portuguese.

The Irish Catholics had established a small middle class, which overlapped with a strong and tightly knit political class. Mayor and Congressman "Honey Fitz" was an exemplar of the latter. My dad's own father, Patrick Joseph, lived in both. He was the soft-spoken owner of three saloons and a liquor-importing business, a bank founder and president, a real estate promoter, and a leader of East Boston's Democratic Party, serving four terms as a state representative. He was a regular presence at community events, known for his gentlemanly manner and political influence. P.J. and his perceptive wife, Mary, hoped their son would move upward in the world through the classic Irish route of politics.

Dad had his own ideas. He thrived academically, at Boston Latin School and then Harvard. In 1914, he blocked the hostile takeover of his father's neighborhood bank and became, at age twenty-five, the state's youngest bank president, ultimately becoming one of the financial masterminds of his generation. Dad immersed himself in the intricacies of buying and selling stock. In 1934, when the U.S. Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect investors from insider trading, President Roosevelt appointed him chairman of the new regulatory agency. He was the right man for the job precisely because he knew how the system worked.

Yet even as he marched through one invisible barricade after another, Dad always understood that he was never
completely
accepted as an equal by the old Yankee stock. He would always be an "Irish Catholic" first, and an individual second. "I was born here. My parents were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?" he blurted after yet one more paper referred to him as an "Irishman." In 1922 he was turned down for membership in a country club on Boston's South Shore, and years later complained that the Protestant elite would not have accepted his daughters as debutantes. He bought the home in Hyannis Port only after realizing he could not gain entry into a more exclusive neighborhood, and even many families in Hyannis Port greeted him coldly. His conviction that "Boston was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children," as he declared to a reporter, was the impetus for the family's self-exile from the city.

Dad could convey strength and inspiration precisely at those moments when he might seem, at a glance, to be stern and unbending. One example among many has lodged in my memory, perhaps because it involves an early encounter with the sea. We must jump ahead in time for a few moments, from Bronxville of the 1930s to Hyannis Port in the summer of 1943, when I was eleven. The war across the sea cast its long shadow--a half-terrifying, half-enthralling shadow for a boy--even into our little coastal village. Car owners were instructed to paint their headlights half black. All of the drapes in the Cape house were black, to keep any light from shore from reflecting off our tankers and troopships that were moving up and down the coastline.

And yet for a Hyannis Port boy, these were almost make-believe precautions, hardly more urgent than storybook drama. The true object of my epic dreams was the timeless, shimmering water that lay before my eyes each summer day.

For some months, I'd been allowed to explore Nantucket Sound in that sixteen-foot sloop, the
One More
. But I had another adventure in mind, and I was finally successful in getting Dad's permission.

I wanted to take the boat around Point Gammon, at the tip of Great Island, some two miles out on Nantucket Sound, and then to the mouth of the Bass River, five miles east: a short distance for an experienced sailor, an uncertain voyage for an eleven-year-old boy. Adding to the adventure was the understanding that I would be out on the boat overnight.

My "crew" on that voyage, as on so many voyages of my boyhood, was Joey Gargan, then an old salt of thirteen. It was a rainy day, but we boarded the little open boat anyway, clutching paper bags with our sandwiches inside. It rained and rained, but we pressed ahead through the choppy water. The "Big House" disappeared into the fog behind us. Squinting against the wind and the salt spray, we made it around the point and on to the river mouth, and anchored the boat near shore. Still it rained and it rained, and it was cold, and the day crept along, and it rained, and it was cold.

We found ourselves trapped. Our overnight adventure no longer looked so enticing, but we had neither the strength nor expertise to get the boat back home. We spent a frigid night huddled inside that boat, hardly sleeping. A gray morning dawned. Wet and hungry, we left the boat at anchor and swam to the shore. Then we trudged until we found a gas station, from where we called up the house. Dave, our chauffeur, answered the phone. I groaned, "You've got to come down and get us. It's been bad. It rained all night. My sandwiches are wet, and I'm cold. Oh, I'm so cold."

Dave came down and picked us up and drove us back to the house. Just as we arrived, we met my father getting ready to go out for his morning horseback ride. He said, "Teddy? I thought you were going for your little cruise."

I said, "I did, Dad. But it was cold! It rained. It was bad, it was cold!"

"Where's the boat?" he asked. I said, "It's anchored at Bass River. We'll go back and get it later. But now I'm going upstairs to get warm, and get breakfast, and rest, and get some sleep. I'm so cold and wet." But my father said, "Dave, take Teddy and Joey back to the boat. Teddy, if you leave with the boat, you come back with the boat."

So the car turned around and off we went, me boo-hooing all the way. If there was anybody in the world who felt sorry for themselves that morning, it was me. But we arrived back at Bass River, and suddenly the sun came up, and a breeze came on up, and the sails on the boat came up, and the warmth came on out, and Joey and I had just a terrific sail that day.

In the long hours and days and years, my father has been there to turn me around and send me back to do what is necessary. To come back with the boat. I can envision him now, striding toward me, looking me straight in the eye, his handshake firm, his laugh wholehearted. I grew up eager not to disappoint him, determined never to meet any challenge in a halfhearted way, ultimately confident that if he knew I had done my best, he would--even if things turned out badly--give me what amounted to his benediction:

"After you have done your best, then the hell with it."

My father knew whereof he spoke. By the dawn of the 1940s he had already done his best, on the world stage, and failed--failed to forestall the most devastating war in history.

In February 1938, within days of my sixth birthday, Joseph Kennedy sailed for London to take up his duties as President Roosevelt's newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James's. History shows that Roosevelt, whose campaign Dad had vigorously supported, had conferred the appointment despite my father's lack of diplomatic experience in hopes that Dad could negotiate an important British-American trade agreement, and that his famous bluntness would give the administration an unvarnished pipeline into Britain's responses toward Nazi Germany.

On March 12 of that year, Adolf Hitler lit the fuse that would in time dash everyone's hopes for peace and detonate the second global war of the century, by sending his storm troopers across the German border to occupy Austria, in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Three days earlier, the happy insularity of my early childhood ended. Along with my mother, the other four younger siblings, Miss Dunne, and Luella Hennessey, I marched up the gangplank of the USS
Washington
to join Dad in London. (Joe Jr. and Jack remained at Harvard.) This would be my first time on the open sea. More important, the voyage would mark a transition in my understanding of the world, at a moment in history when the world was careening nearly beyond all understanding.

CHAPTER THREE

Wartime London

1938-1939

My first ocean voyage opened up many facts about the sea that I'd never before suspected. One such fact was that it could make you seasick. Our six-day crossing from New York Harbor to London took us through the North Atlantic at the height of the winter storm season, and my stomach felt every one of the thirty-foot waves that daily lifted and rolled our ship. I loved the water, but this was more water than I really wanted.

The American ambassador's residence then was 14 Prince's Gate, on Kensington Road across from Hyde Park. I later learned that this four-story Victorian building had once been the London home of the banker J. P. Morgan. I was more interested, at the time, in the Indian chief in full headdress sculpted above the main entrance.

Kathleen, Rosemary, Bobby, and I lived at No. 14 with our parents, while Eunice, Pat, and Jean boarded at a nearby convent. Our bedrooms were on the third floor. "Bedroom" hardly does them justice. Luella Hennessey later recalled mine as being almost as big as a schoolroom. She noted the twin beds, the big fireplace, a desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers, a chaise lounge, and a breakfast table with two chairs. A caged elevator got us to the main floor and back. I loved to race ahead of everyone else and push its activating button and hear the machinery start to clank.

At age six, I could tell that Dad was on an extremely important mission in London, but its nature was a mystery. Important visitors came to our residence: the king and queen of Great Britain, for instance.

It took more than a year, but George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid a call on Ambassador Kennedy in May 1939. We children were fixed up, cleaned up, and gussied up for this occasion. I seem to recall being told that they were the most important people in the world, and that this was the most important event that was ever going to happen.

My involvement in it all was rather brief. I have blurry memories of the king in a scarlet tunic, his chest covered with braids and medals. And I remember that I practiced for hours to perfect my bow. Bobby and I later met Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Windsor Castle. We danced with each other. I doubt that any of us children made a huge impression on any other.

The London press and public seemed taken with us. Everyone was curious about my dad, of course--what news and assurances this new ambassador might bring from America to a nation bracing for a massive Nazi assault, and how sympathetic this Irish Catholic would prove to British interests. I knew nothing of all this; just that a lot of adults with serious expressions wanted to talk to him. As for my sisters, Bobby, and me, we submitted to scrubbing and hair-combing, marched out to watch the Changing of the Guard, and smiled. My mother certainly never forgot the "spontaneous outpouring of human warmth," as she put it. She later wrote, "I almost began to feel that we had been adopted, as a family, by the whole British people."

Life in London held its dangers. I found this out when a zebra decided to have me for lunch. He'd made a good start on my arm before a rescuer managed to get his mouth open.

It happened during ceremonies reopening the Royal Children's Zoo in Regent's Park. The great British biologist Julian Huxley himself handed me the shears to cut the ribbon as the photographers pressed in, Bobby and Jean watched (representing little children everywhere, I suppose), and nice British ladies beamed.

I cut the ribbon and handed the shears back, and then a zebra in a nearby cage caught my eye. I'd never before seen a real zebra. He looked friendly. I wandered over and reached through the bars to hand him a peanut. In the next instant he had my arm in his mouth all the way up to my elbow.

I screamed. The more I pulled away, the deeper the zebra's teeth took hold. Luckily I had a thick coat on, and a jacket underneath it, and a shirt underneath the jacket, so the animal wasn't able to bite deeply into my flesh. Still, he wouldn't let go. I screamed and pulled and hauled, and the zebra kept angling for a better fix. Some guards came running and tried to help, but they didn't quite have the drill down on how to extract an arm from a zebra's mouth. So someone summoned a very special zebra keeper--that's how I thought of him, anyway--and he arrived and snapped a whip across the zebra's tailbone, and the animal sort of gagged and let me go.

I wasn't seriously injured, but I did cause an incredible commotion that took a bit away from the occasion. There was Julian Huxley, and the nice ladies, and the pretty ribbon, and all the cookies and crackers, and all the little cups of juice that we were going to have--and suddenly there was this kid screaming at the top of his lungs that he was getting eaten by a zebra. And the kid happened to be the ambassador's son.

I recall all the grown-ups in the vicinity calling out to me to "keep a stiff upper lip." It wasn't my upper lip that I was concerned about.

My sisters performed their ceremonial roles with a great deal more poise. Rosemary, then nineteen, and Kick, eighteen, made their social debuts just weeks after we arrived. The setting was Buckingham Palace, where they were to be presented to the queen, and the event required endless drilling and preparation. My mother took them across the Channel to Paris on several weekends to select gowns for their debuts and the long string of social events that would follow.

The evening arrived, and when their names were called Kathleen and Rosemary made their march together in their shimmering white gowns from the antechamber up the red carpet toward the queen. My sisters curtsied perfectly. Kick danced especially brilliantly through all of the debutante balls that season, the Kennedy ball included, and her smiling beauty attracted partners from the British Isles, Europe, and Russia.

For Bobby and me, the pageantry grew familiar in time, along with the peculiar diesel smell of London's streets and the accents and the left-side driving. The demands of schoolwork took hold; and, for me at least, a certain loneliness as well.

The Gibbs School on Sloane Street near the square inaugurated my long and somewhat unhappy years of school life in Britain and then America: an endless succession of institutions, each of which had its own rules, cliques, standards and punishment systems (I was to become something of an expert in punishment systems), and obstacles to being liked. I liked to be liked, and up until my school years I'd taken my likability for granted. After all, I was the youngest, used to being doted on by everyone. I am by nature and disposition a happy person. I like to laugh and have people laugh with me. If my siblings found themselves in trouble with Dad, they would sometimes send me into his room ahead of them to "soften him up" before the reckoning began.

The world of strangers proved different.

Bobby and I were driven to Gibbs in an embassy car at first, but before long we were confident enough to make our way by bus and Underground.

Bobby was thirteen then, older than most of the Gibbs boys. He had little trouble with the curriculum. I was younger than most, and had trouble with the curriculum and with everything else. I struggled to learn my lessons; I struggled to learn cricket. When I broke the rules, I was invited into the headmaster's office, where he made me hold my palms up and then whacked them with a ruler until they were bright red.

One rule that I'd learned from my parents was the need for politeness, especially given my high visibility as a diplomat's son. And so when a young British schoolmate named Cecil took to pounding on me every day, I handled the problem with perfect tact. I politely secured my father's permission before flattening Cecil.

The loneliness I felt was obvious to those around me. Bobby tried to keep me company, but he'd joined a circle of friends his age. Dad spent as much time with me as he could--an amazing amount, given the obligations that preoccupied him. He came to my cricket games at school. He invited me with him on morning horseback rides along the centuries-old Rotten Row in Hyde Park, or at the lovely stables in Roehampton. In the evenings, before leaving the house with Mother for a dinner or the theater, he would come into my bedroom and read to me, sometimes for forty-five minutes or an hour.

I couldn't then fathom, of course, the burdens on his mind as he shared those moments with me. Only as a grown man myself, after the London days had passed into a bygone era and I began to look through its history and our family's archives, did I begin to understand my father's anguished role in prewar diplomacy: his passionate wish for American neutrality; his belief that neither America nor Britain was prepared militarily to engage Hitler's forces; the streams of letters he was writing back to President Roosevelt, senators, and journalists analyzing the international situation; and the speeches he delivered, blunt to the point of provoking outrage, that led to the foreshortening of his diplomatic career.

Nor could I have suspected that, even as he poured out those unvarnished dispatches and speeches, Dad was dooming a possibility for himself that he must have known about and desired. The 1940 presidential campaign in America lay not far ahead. Franklin Roosevelt had already served two terms, and no president had ever served more. No one then knew for sure whether he would try to break the precedent--but, as I learned much later, my father's name was among those being prominently circulated as his successor.

I never asked my father about these things. I've often wished I had. But they belonged, like other elements of his life, to a part of him that existed beyond our personal relationship. In my family, we did not press one another beyond these boundaries. Nor did we discuss with one another or the world the details of private behavior. It was a matter of respect.

The Munich Conference of September 1938 (which he did not attend) had given my father some hope that war might be averted. His friend and ally, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, along with the French prime minister, yielded to Adolf Hitler's demand to occupy the Sudetenland, part of the famous "appeasement" strategy that in hindsight was catastrophic. German troops invaded Czechoslovakia the following March, and the frenzy of futile diplomacy intensified.

As this latest barrier to peace was falling, our family journeyed from London to Rome to witness the coronation of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli as Pope Pius XII. Dad was President Roosevelt's representative to the ceremony. We viewed the ceremony from the front row of a stand in a portico outside St. Peter's Basilica on Sunday, March 12, 1939. I later learned that the Kennedy entourage had created a minor diplomatic crisis for the Vatican: official delegations were limited to seven persons, and our group, including the governess, numbered eleven (Joe Jr. was in Spain). But the problem was handled in the usual suave Roman manner: new seats were added, and everything was just fine.

On the following day, Dad had an audience with the new pope, and on Wednesday, March 15, I received my First Holy Communion from the pope himself at the Vatican. I wore a blue suit and had a white rosette on my left arm. As he blessed me, he said, "I hope you always be good and pious as you are today." It caused a great deal of a stir in some circles--a seven-year-old American boy given his First Communion by the pope, who himself was giving that honor for the first time as pope and to a non-Italian to boot. But it was among the greatest moments of my life. I received a beautiful rosary blessed by the pontiff on that occasion, which I later gave to my stepdaughter Caroline Raclin on the day of her First Holy Communion some sixty-odd years later.

Our last family interlude of prewar leisure was a monthlong holiday in a villa Dad rented at Cannes, on the French Riviera. Joe and Jack were on hand, and they gave me some sailing lessons and also taught me how to dive, using a cliff above the Mediterranean at the Eden Roc as the instruction site. That I had not yet learned how to swim well did not strike them as relevant to the exercise--one or the other would fish me out after I hit the water. All three of us kept this activity a secret from our father.

Our interlude was cut short on August 24. Germany and the Soviet Union informed the world that they had signed a mutual nonaggression agreement. The implications were massive. Poland in particular appeared to lie in the path of destruction.

Dad left for London as soon as he heard the news. After meeting with a shattered Chamberlain, he contacted Mother and told her that she and we children must leave Europe.

Our mother needed no convincing. The dread of a Luftwaffe assault over London had been running rampant since spring, when air raid drills grew common. Bobby and I witnessed the city's preparations for civil defense on our way to school and back: the sandbags, the barrage balloons, the scaffolding for gun emplacements. We'd participated in air raid drills, joining the flow of schoolchildren into bunkers, strapping on foul-smelling gas masks. We returned to classes clutching emergency rations. I have the strangest and most vivid memory of seeing human blood on the streets. Given that the bombing of London would not commence for a year, when I was safely out of the country, this memory is all but inexplicable--unless it was blood from an accident or an incident that I had seen. Perhaps my "memory" is of a dream, fueled by the growing terror I saw and heard and felt every day.

Whatever it was, the blood of Europe began to flow soon enough. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain gave up the pretense and declared war on Germany, along with France. My parents, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen sat in the Strangers Gallery in the House of Commons that Sunday afternoon to listen to Neville Chamberlain issue the declaration that broke his heart, and to speeches in support of the declaration. Afterward, hysteria seized the city. Keepers killed all the poisonous snakes in the London Zoo, lest they be freed to slither about the city when their cages were shattered by Nazi bombs. That night the city was blacked out and air raid warnings sounded throughout London, but no attacks came.

On September 5, President Roosevelt issued a proclamation of American neutrality.

Poland surrendered on September 27. By the end of 1939, artillery duels were erupting along the Western front.