True Compass (7 page)

Now, I don't mean to imply that Dad was a pushover. I was reminded of the limits of his indulgence--and of his insistence on self-discipline--at age eleven, when I was about to leave home for yet another boarding school: Fessenden, I believe. Dad sat me down for his traditional pep talk. At the end of it, he said, "Well, now, Ted, you may go down to the cupboard in the pantry and help yourself to a piece of my butter crunch."

Everyone in the family knew that Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch was my favorite treat. It was a taste I shared with my sister Rosemary--and with Dad. I raced into the pantry and helped myself to much more than one piece. My pockets were bulging with as much butter crunch as I could jam into them. My newly bulky profile proved suspicious to my eagleeyed father. He insisted on looking in my pockets, where he found them chock-full of what amounted to two complete boxes of the candy. He exploded. And I was sent off to school without so much as a taste of Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch.

Confrontations (as opposed to competition) were actually quite rare in our household, and they almost never occurred between any of the brothers and sisters. This was no accident. Dad raised us to cooperate, not to quarrel. This may sound like a tall order for any parent, but our father made it work. First, he respected us, and in that way he showed us how to respect him and one another. He used a tactical ploy as well: he would draw any sign of tension away from us and toward himself. Mother did not always understand this, and would worry when one of us argued with Dad. He would explain to her, "As long as they're not fighting with each other, as long as their disagreements are with others and not among themselves, I can deal with it. I can't deal with the fact that they're differing or fighting with each other."

Another important factor in our harmony was that, as strange as it might seem, Dad and Mother never fought. My niece Caroline Kennedy tells of asking Mother once, "Did you and Grampa ever fight?"

Mother said, "Oh, no, dear. No, Grampa and I never fought."

Caroline said, "Well, how did you handle your differences?"

Mother replied, "I would always just say, 'Yes, dear,' and then I'd go to Paris."

It was about three years until Dad and I clashed again, but it was a beaut. This time I was the aggrieved party, or I thought I was, and the upshot was that I decided to run away from home. The provocation was something silly. My parents had promised that I could go on the boat, and then they withdrew their promise. That was my perception, anyway. The more I reminded them of the promise, the more unreasonable they grew--in my view. I was an adolescent now, and so I was mortally wounded. "I'm going to run away," I announced. I stormed out of the house and got into one of the cars and started driving. I drove west, toward the Cape Cod Canal, as I remember. Just before I crossed the Cape Cod Canal bridge, the landmark that would officially take me "off-Cape," I stopped and found a telephone and called home. My intent, or so I told myself, was to reiterate to my parents that I was running away.

Jack, who was visiting the Cape house, and not Dad, answered--to my great fortune. "I'm running away from home!" I repeated to him. "I'm tired of it all. This is it. I'm finished. I'm out of here."

Jack subtly took charge of the situation. He didn't try to persuade me that our parents may have had a point. Instead, he said, "Well, Teddy, before you run away, why don't you meet me at the Midtown Theater?" This was a movie house in Hyannis.

Pride made me hold out in grim silence.

"There's a war picture on," Jack said. "Come and watch a war picture with me."

He really knew how to get me. Watching a war picture with a hero of World War II. Who was my brother. It was all over, and we both knew it, but I needed to salvage a little dignity. I pretended to think about it.

"Well," I said. "All right."

I turned around and headed for Hyannis, where I met my brother at the movies. At the end of the war picture, as we were walking out, Jack turned to me and said, "It's getting late, Teddy. Why don't you come home with me and get a good night's sleep and run away in the morning."

"I'm not sure about that," I said.

"That's the right thing to do, Teddy. Otherwise you're going to have to find some other place to sleep tonight," he said.

That convinced me, even though the truth is that I didn't need too much convincing by then.

When we got home and I went to sleep, Jack found our father and said, "I think you ought to let up on Teddy."

Early the next morning, Dad knocked on my bedroom door and said, "Teddy, do you want to go riding?" I said, "Sure, Dad." And all was forgotten.

Jack's easy mastery of a crisis, and his way of making an adolescent boy feel like a worthy person whose feelings mattered--these formed another aspect of my wish to "catch up." It wasn't entirely about matching my brothers' accomplishments. It was about conducting myself like them as well.

When Dad was still in England, he was never far from my thoughts. Looking over old and poorly spelled letters, I find myself making many assurances that I was living up to his wishes: "We had a Halloween party lost week. Afterwards I got dressed up like a ghost and went all the way down the road I didn't scare because you said not to scare anyone because they may have a weak heart."

Dad never wanted us to flaunt our wealth. Thus I was not allowed to even have a bicycle until the majority of boys among my friends had received theirs. Later on, I was not allowed to have a car until most of my friends owned one. My brothers and sisters had to obey the same rule. At the time, we felt a little sorry for ourselves. We never complained, of course. And years later, we all looked back and understood how important this rule was to our development. The underlying principle was that we were always to distinguish ourselves through achievement, not mere flamboyance.

I didn't write as often as Dad would have liked. "You and Bobby are the worst correspondents I have in the family," he chided me in September 1940. German bombs were falling on London by then, and Dad's life, like everyone else's in the city, was in danger. It was typical of him to tell me about the bombing in a casual, man-to-man sort of way, as if I were his intrepid chum who just happened to be on the other side of the ocean:

I don't know whether you would have very much excitement during these raids. I am sure, of course, you wouldn't be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety.... I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to make people happy instead of making them miserable as this war does today.

Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren't you?

Love

Dad

With Bobby, who was fourteen then, Dad was more candid:

I thought you might be interested to get my opinion as to the present situation here. There is... a very definite feeling that within the next forty-eight or seventy-two hours Germany will try an invasion. There are evidences that they have accumulated a number of barges and ships to move their forces all along the French Coast. There is also an indication that their guns, which they are firing from the French Coast... will [produce] the sort of rainbow effect over the channel that they will send their fleet under for protection....

The whole problem will finally be dropped in the lap of the United States, because as the manufacturing facilities here are destroyed... we in the United States will have to furnish more supplies... within a very few months we will have the settling of the whole matter right in our own hands.

The "settling of the whole matter" implied almost certain U.S. involvement in the European war. Far from my awareness and even Bobby's, Dad's desire to keep America neutral and his pessimism about Britain's capacity to defeat Germany was costing him the goodwill of the British government and people. His stormy relationship with Franklin Roosevelt was likewise reaching a breaking point. As correspondence was to reveal years afterward, Roosevelt had long considered Joseph Kennedy "dangerous" because of his bluntness and penchant for harsh public criticism, but valued his skill as a negotiator and his keen ear for information.

My childhood self suspected none of these intrigues. But the upshot of them rang clear as a bell to me. I excitedly wrote this letter to Dad, shortly after receiving some good news in the autumn of 1940:

Dear Daddy, I was so glad when you told me today that you were coming home soon. I had my bicycle painted blue and silver, and fixed up, so now I don't need a new one. I hope it didn't cost too much. Are you lonesome at wall hall? How is Rose and Stevens and Mr. Begley? Is he as nice now as he used to be? Does Stevens go fishing anymore? He was awfully nice to take me when I was at wall hall. Are there any fogs now? Or any air raids? Write us again. Love, from Teddy.

My father returned to America from London for the last time as ambassador on October 26, 1940. Letters and diaries show that he was am-bivalent about supporting Franklin Roosevelt for a third term, and preoccupied with resentments about what he saw as a falling away of trust and support from his chief. He poured out his frustrations directly to FDR over dinner at the White House the day after he arrived back home. Yet the next night, less than a week before the election, Dad put all this aside and spoke to the nation as a patriot. Paying for his own airtime, Joe Kennedy delivered an address over 114 radio stations of the Columbia Broadcasting Network urging Americans to reelect their president. He saved his most heartfelt argument--the famous "hostages to fortune" passage--for the last.

FDR won reelection. On December 1, Dad announced his intention to resign as ambassador to the Court of St. James's within a week. He was never again to serve in public life.

In the spring of 1941, I entered the Palm Beach Private School, not far from my parents' Florida house. I was nine then, and was placed in the fourth grade. School life quickly returned to normal for me: my teacher, Mrs. Cochrane, wrote on my first report card, "No foundation for fourth grade." But I liked her, and slowly my grades improved.

Following that glorious summer at the Cape in 1941, the summer of cranberry bogs and horseback riding with my dad, I resumed a pattern that would hold for the next four years: shifting from school to school, south to north and back again, as I followed the sun with my parents.

I put in three stints at the Fessenden School, a forty-one-acre campus in West Newton ten miles west of Boston, in the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and then again in the fall of 1944. I distinguished myself during my first tour at Fessenden by getting paddled fifteen times. I've always joked that my father must have been the inspiration for Federal Express. When the headmaster wrote the parents at the beginning of the year to ask whether to paddle their sons or dock them days from their vacation if they misbehaved, my father's approval to have me paddled seemed to arrive by 10:30 the next morning. I had no resentment about being paddled. It was delivered by Mr. Giles, an elderly instructor who'd lost a leg in the First World War, and although it stung immediately, it didn't hurt so much after a few minutes. Anyway, I deserved it every time. Walking on the roof, for instance, with some of my friends, with water bombs--water inside the fold of a little paper--and dropping them three stories down onto members of the faculty. Not a wise thing to do. Or we would put strips of tape between our cubicles to trip the night watchman and make him fall down. That was not a good thing to do either. These boyhood pranks, more than anything else, were my way of trying to fit in and be one of the guys.

My most incredible escapade was with two brothers who went on to distinguished careers, and they are still good friends of mine. But at Fessenden they had a sort of an outlaw streak. We all did.

One night we thought it would be a good idea to lower one of them down on a rope from the roof to the faculty room window, so the boy could climb through, locate the student files, and find out our grades. I thought that was a good idea myself. So we lowered one of the boys down. Just as he got inside, it began to rain. One of the teachers was trapped outdoors and got rained on. He headed for the faculty room to get his umbrella. The boy heard footsteps and scampered into the closet. The teacher opened the closet door to get his umbrella, and there he was. That was nearly the end for the brothers. They came within a whisker of getting expelled. Luckily for Fessenden, they were allowed to stay and graduate. The last I heard, the brothers had contributed a boatload to the school.

Far from these hijinks in Massachusetts, the war that Dad had tried to keep at bay from his country and his children exploded onto American territory on December 7, 1941. World War II proceeded to draw several of Joseph Kennedy's "hostages to fortune" into its maw.

Joe was the first. He earned his navy aviator wings in May 1942 at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. My father was on hand to pin them on him.

Jack followed our brother a few weeks later. He had faced numerous health challenges growing up, and he was concerned that he wouldn't be allowed into the military. And in fact he had failed the army physical, mostly because of his torturously bad back.

But he would not give up. He threw himself into a rigorous exercise program. Then he prevailed on Dad to help get him in. After some behind-the-scenes prodding by Dad's friend and former naval attache in London, Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk, Jack passed a second physical and joined the navy as an ensign two months before Pearl Harbor. He served in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he socialized with Kick and her friends. In January 1942 he was sent to a South Carolina ONI office, then spent some time recuperating from illnesses in naval hospitals before reporting to the midshipman's school in Chicago in July.

Kick soon put aside the glittering Washington life that suited her so naturally. In July 1943 she resigned her newspaper position and returned to a now devastated London, where she was handed a gas mask and took up the grimy demands of volunteer work for the American Red Cross.