IDENTWYING INFORMATION

THUMB

FINGERPRINTS—RIGHT HAND, IF OBTAINABLE

She was the romantic spirit of her generation —impulsive, willful, “lighter than air.” When she held up that Kennedy chin, she conquered Britain... Her name was Kathleen Kennedy—fondly, “Kick.” A young woman in search of her “destiny,” she was fierce in her loves, defying traditions. She was twenty-eight when her plane went down, smashing the tender obsession of a brutal age

THE KENNEDY KICK

The hundreds of people who braved the banshee winds and bone-chilling drizzle to see Kathleen Kennedy buried in the small cemetery at Chatsworth had been stunned a few days earlier, on May 13, 1948, when the private plane she was in slammed into a mountainside in southern France. It was not just that at twenty-eight she was too young to die; not even that such a disaster was the wrong ending for someone who had always been, in the words of one friend, “lighter than air.” For those who had traveled to Chatsworth to mourn her, Kathleen’s death was not only a personal tragedy but also a metaphor for the end of the romance and drama that had gripped England during the past decade.

The outlines of the story were well known. She had come from America in the middle of the war, defying family and religion to marry the young man who would have inherited Chatsworth and the title of Duke of Devonshire. After he was killed in battle, she had stayed on alone, refusing entreaties to return home, determined to succeed on her own in postwar London society. Those closest to her also knew the turn her life had taken in the past few months, since she had fallen desperately in love with another nobleman, who was not only Protestant but married and with little hope of obtaining a divorce. Her decision to go off and live with her lover, regardless of the consequences, had caused a serious breach with her family; she had been on her way to meet her father in a last attempt to reach an understanding, in fact, when her plane went down.

Joseph Kennedy, the family’s only representative at the funeral, wept as he stood bareheaded in the rain, alone in the middle of the crowd. The English had never forgotten or forgiven his efforts in support of appeasement and compromise while he was wartime ambassador to their country; but Joseph Kennedy had long since realized that it was as a father rather than a diplomat that he would make his mark. He had shot his nine children into the world like arrows aimed at success. Jack was on target, but Kennedy had already lost his favorite son and namesake, Joseph Jr. Kathleen, his favorite daughter, had gone further faster than all the others, traversing the social distance between the Boston suburb of Brookline and the magnificence of Chatsworth in a single audacious step, but now she too had come to rest. He couldn’t even embrace her triumphs. On one level her life had been like a Jamesian novel about a headstrong young American girl and her transatlantic obsessions, a girl who had tested her limits and tried to pick her way through the minefields of the heart. But on another level her story was a parable about the hunger involved in being a Kennedy and the price required to satisfy that hunger, and as such it provided a dangerous way of viewing the political enterprise that was just beginning back home in Massachusetts. And so although she was the child who most resembled him, Joseph Kennedy now had to try to bury what she had been and done under the modest inscription chosen for her headstone: “Joy She Gave—Joy She Has Found.”

Peter Collier

David Horowitz

On one level her life had been like a Jamesian novel about a headstrong young American girl and her transatlantic obsessions... But on another level her story was a parable about the hunger involved in being a Kennedy...”

One of those at the funeral service, Margaret Hutchens, was an old school friend of Kathleen’s who had also moved to England from the States. She found herself thinking back to an occasion ten years earlier, when Kathleen was leaving for England and she had gone to see her off. Kathleen said to her, “So, then, I guess I’m off to find my destiny.”

It was said with the appealing sense of irony she shared with her brother Jack, but there was a serious undertone. Destiny, as Hutchens and everyone close to the Kennedys knew, was at least as important an idea in the family as original sin or Irish home rule—an idea which, like everything else, flowed out of the experience and philosophy of Joseph Kennedy.

Kathleen had once described her father as “a powerhouse, a force of nature.” His wife Rose, searching for a phrase to explain his impact on them all, called him “the architect of our lives.” When Kathleen was born in 1920—the fourth Kennedy child in five years of marriage—Joseph Kennedy was thirty-one, a rising young banker who had graduated from Harvard and already taken the first steps toward his primary goal in life: to make a million dollars by the time he was thirty-five. He was also on his way to becoming Boston’s leading Irish Catholic. But this distinction, so vital to his father’s generation, only signified to him the limitations inherent in his situation; and so, when Kathleen was six years old, he packed the growing family into a private railroad car and moved them to New York, where they eventually settled in Bronxville.

He later said that he had made the move to New York because he felt that his daughters would never be invited to the best coming-out parties in Boston, no matter how rich he became. The real reason, as Fortune later put it, was that he had in mind to become “the central character of a picaresque novel of a sort not yet written.” Over the next decade, operating out of New York, which was a more open city than Boston could ever be, he became involved, with marked success, in everything from liquor to stock pools. He spent time on Wall Street making notorious bear raids on the market; in Hollywood producing movies and making studio mergers; and in Washington, where he was an early backer of the New Deal, which he hoped would preserve the estimated $200 million he had by then acquired in his picaresque travels.

From 1932 onward Joseph Kennedy was President Roosevelt’s Mr. Fixit, a utility man at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Maritime Commission, and elsewhere. But he was always lobbying for some larger political reward. Becoming Secretary of the Treasury would have allowed him to triumph over the economic royalists (equivalents in the financial world of Boston Brahmins) who had opposed him in his rise. Although FDR was reluctant to give Kennedy such a sensitive post, he did decide that the man’s well-known advocacy of isolationism might be useful in England. In addition, the idea of sending a “redheaded Irishman” to the Court of St. James’s was just too good to resist. So in December 1937 he made the appointment.

Destiny was at least as important an idea in the Kennedy family as original sin or Irish home rule ...”

Kennedy knew how to make a favorable impression when he wanted to. And since he felt that England was an important part of his destiny—he accepted the post in the hope that a creditable performance as ambassador could help him become successor to FDR should the President decide against running for a third term—he made a point of taking the British by storm.

One advantage he had was his brashness, which had been largely the reason for his swift rise, and which he knew would seem refreshing in comparison with the usual stodginess associated with diplomats. (He called the Queen “a cute trick” to her face, and far from being insulted, she was titillated by the comment.) Another advantage was the family he brought with him to the magnificent embassy at Prince’s Gate. Almost immediately the British newspapers lionized him as the “nine-child envoy” and the “father of his country” and treated the windswept, photogenic children as if they were the result of some remarkable American experiment in eugenics. Bobby’s shy, mumbled conversations with Princess Elizabeth received almost as much space in the press as his father’s pronouncements on the Austrian crisis. When sixyear-old Teddy took an upsidedown picture of the changing of the guard, a London daily got hold of it and put it on the front page. There was chatter about the aggressive way Eunice and her sisters played field hockey at their boarding school, and there was anticipation over the arrival of Joe Jr. and Jack when the semester at Harvard ended. But Kathleen made the biggest hit of all.

At eighteen she was small and lively, with the deepset agate eyes of her mother’s side of the family; fullfaced, slightly heavy in the jaw—a “soft Kennedy,” someone once said, comparing her with her taller, toothier, more angular sisters. Joseph Kennedy had long acknowledged that he was no impartial judge of his children—“All my ducks are swans,” he liked to say—but Kathleen was “especially special.” He gave her the nickname Kick.

Rose was meticulous about the children’s upbringing. She kept the huge walk-in closets stocked with combs and toothbrushes and shoestrings purchased by the gross; colorcoded their bathing caps to keep track of them at the beach; supervised their religious instruction. Yet in her piety and desire for respectability she retained a vestige of that Irish lace-curtain world Joe Kennedy had sought to escape. He had considered leaving her once, but he soon learned that he could impose on her the various other women he acquired with his influence. (Gloria Swanson was the first one he brought into the family circle, where he encouraged her to scrawl her autograph on the wall of Kick’s playhouse.) Owing to his sheer energy, he was the emotional center of their lives, and the children competed for his favor.

He shuttled them between Bronxville and Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. He raised them to be worldly, with the immigrant’s obsessive interest in belonging, yet also to be absorbed with one another and peninsular, like the two areas where they vacationed. An important element of their childhood was the competition between the two oldest sons, Joe Jr. and Jack. Another was the way Kathleen moved ahead of her sister Rosemary—“shy” was the code word the family used to avoid the subject of her retardation—to assume the role of eldest daughter.

Like her sisters, Kathleen was obliged to go to Sacred Heart convent schools and acquire the trappings of Catholic womanhood, but at home she sat with her two brothers at the “big table,” feeding on her father’s ambition and his cynical observations about the world, while the younger children ate at the “overflow table” with the governesses. Joe Jr., the heir apparent, argued with his father, challenged his authority, even boldly contradicted him. Kick, like Jack, learned to get her way through charm. She spent her adolescence getting Joe Jr. and Jack dates with her friends and falling in love with her brothers’ roommates at Choate and Harvard. “These three—Joe Jr., Jack and Kick—were like a family within the family,” says one Kennedy acquaintance. “They had come out of a sort of crazy house—that weird situation between the mother and father, all the compulsive sports and proving themselves all the time, the restless activity which allowed nobody to read or think—but they were as perfect as if they’d been made in a laboratory. They were the pick of the litter, the ones the old man thought would write the story of the next generation.”

It became clear in the first weeks they were in England how much Kathleen’s destiny would be altered by living there. At home, since graduating from high school, she had attended Parsons School of Design without particular enthusiasm and had dated Winthrop Rockefeller and shipping heir Peter Grace. Yet she was in a sort of social limbo; her father had postponed her coming out because he knew it would be attended only by Sacred Heart debs, not by girls from the families Rose referred to as “the good people.”

But Joseph Kennedy’s ambassadorship enabled his family to pass through the invisible barrier blocking their way to the top in America. Suddenly they were at the pinnacle of international society. Others might worry about the lights going out all over Europe, but for the Kennedys the prospect was glittering and bright. Soon after establishing the family at the embassy, Rose decided to bring Kathleen and Rosemary out together. She used her position as the ambassador’s wife to get the most prominent girls in London to attend her daughters’ debut.

Kathleen didn’t need help in making friends. Many of the young women she met—at the embassy, at Cliveden, the Astors’ country estate, and at the other great houses to which her family was invited—remained close to her for the rest of her life. One of them, Jean Ogilvie, now Lady Lloyd, says: “At this point she was an ingenue, an innocent, but incredibly high-spirited and appealing, especially for people like us who’d grown up in a ‘proper’ English atmosphere. The day after I met her, for instance, she called and asked me to come to lunch that afternoon. Typically such an invitation required weeks of advance planning. But Kick absolutely refused to observe such conventions and insisted that my father and I come over to the embassy right then. We did and we spent an entire afternoon listening to American jazz on a Victrola. It was just the most wonderful thing.”

Lady Lloyd was also struck by Kathleen’s uniqueness: “She had an absolutely wonderful sense of humor—bright-eyed and constantly teasing like the rest of the Kennedys, but without the abrasiveness of her brothers. She would manage to get us all doing crazy things, strip away our reserve. One time a group of us were eating dinner, and someone tossed a dinner roll to someone else. Suddenly we were throwing rolls at each other. Kick had started it, of course, and by the end was not only throwing rolls like everyone else, but standing on the table and throwing them. If someone else had done that, it might have been rude or shocking; but she had this way about her that made it seem an absolute liberation.”

She was besieged by young men. Her father had made it clear that this was her field to succeed in, a woman’s equivalent of politics, and as Jane Compton, another friend, says, “Kathleen was as much a natural politician as anyone in the family.” Kathleen’s most impressive suitor was William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire. Lord Hartington, or Billy, as everyone called him, was a member of one of the richest and most powerful families in England. His father’s dukedom of over 180,000 acres brought in a quarter of a million pounds a year. The Cavendishes had estates all over England, chief among them Chatsworth in Derbyshire, one of the great houses of Europe. Kathleen first weekended there in July 1938.

Kick was just eighteen and Billy was almost twenty when they met. She was upstart Boston Irish; his bloodline was so refined he had been mentioned as a suitable husband for Princess Elizabeth. She was bright and pretty; he was saturnine and well over six feet tall, stooped, forever clasping his hands behind his back or chafing them together nervously as if uncertain what to do with them. She was all on the surface, like a plant (Billy provided the simile) whose roots have been pinched to force a luxuriant external growth; he was something of an intellectual, brooding about whether people liked him for himself or because he would one day be duke.

Billy’s sister Anne felt that he was one of those aristocrats “you would have thought had been wiped out in the first war,” and that Kick’s teasing irreverence was just what he needed. Billy’s cousin Fiona Gore, now Countess of Arran, remembers that Kick would call Billy at Chatsworth and say to the butler answering the phone, “Hello, is the King perchance in his castle today?” Or she’d be standing next to him in polite company and, if the question of nobility happened to come up, she would say sweetly, “Being a duke is something of a joke, isn’t it? It’s like being a cartoon character, no?” He would grin, then catch himself and say, “Well, no, not quite a joke.” The countess says, “It was wonderful to see. Here was this lively American girl who through some odd circumstance had become the toast of the town, and she was paying all this attention to Billy. It gave him such confidence. She swept him right off his oh so steady feet.”

Ambassador Joe Kennedy “called the Queen ‘a cute trick’ to her face, and far from being insulted, she was titillated by the comment”

Because of Billy, Kick began to see her father through English eyes. When Kennedy had first arrived in London, his political philosophy— avoid war at all costs—was close to official British policy. As Britain edged toward the precipice of war, however, he had gone beyond the protocol required of his position in trying to urge caution. He had hailed Munich as a great act of statesmanship; even when public opinion began to shift against Chamberlain, he had stuck stubbornly to his guns, expressing views that irritated Washington as well as Whitehall.

A typical incident occurred during an embassy evening when he was showing a film he had got through contacts from his Hollywood days. Billy Hartington and the other young Englishmen Kathleen had invited all talked eagerly about getting into uniform. The film that night was about World War I, and throughout the showing the ambassador muttered a sarcastic running commentary, especially during a scene that showed English Tommies being slaughtered in the trenches: “See that? That’s what you’ll look like if you go to war with Germany.” Kick sat red-faced. Afterward, she apologized to Billy: “You mustn’t pay any attention to him. He just doesn’t understand the English as I do.”

She was at Chatsworth in August 1939 for the extravaganza celebrating Billy’s coming of age—several parties over a three-day period, thousands of guests, so many hands to shake that the doctors eventually had to put the duchess’s arm in a sling. But the event was clouded by the increasingly grim situation on the Continent. On September 3 Kick was with Joe Jr. and Jack in the gallery of the House of Commons when Chamberlain finally declared war. Afterward she went out secretly to celebrate with Billy and her friends. Meanwhile Joe Kennedy, in a state of near collapse, was consulting with Washington about what he gloomily called “the end of everything.” Within a week he had arranged to send the family home, in small groups so that no disaster could claim them all. Kick begged to stay with her father, pointing out that he was allowing Rosemary to remain in her Montessori school. But he was adamant, alarmed almost as much by her relationship with Hartington (as the courtship got stronger, Rose had constantly reminded him that the Cavendish family was as Protestant as the Church of England) as by the deteriorating international situation. In the end Kick sailed with Eunice and Bobby on the SS Washington.

The sensation of coming home, as she described it to an old school friend, was like “returning to a house you lived in as a child and being surprised at how shabby everything suddenly seems.” Admitting that she was just “serving time” until she could return to England, she toyed with the idea of attending Sarah Lawrence but instead enrolled at Finch, a junior college in New York City. She gave teas for British War Relief, went to polo matches with her old beau Peter Grace, and stood up for her friend Anne McDonnell in her marriage to Henry Ford II. She went up to Harvard, where Joe Jr. was in his first year of law school and Jack was finishing the honors thesis that would eventually be published as Why England Slept. Her brothers set her up with dates, but they all seemed tame in comparison with the English noblemen she’d known.

By the spring of 1940 Kick was getting what she called “gloomy letters’’ from Billy, who was serving at the Maginot Line with the British Expeditionary Force. She knit him a scarf. Later she found out he had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and that summer she tried once again to return to England. But the ambassador had decided that England was no place for his family. On the outs with Churchill, ignored in large part by the U.S. State Department, he realized that the political career he had foreseen for himself was now impossible, and he demanded to be brought home.

The Kennedy children went along in general with their father’s politics. Yet they were irresistibly drawn to action, so by the spring of 1941, when it was obvious that America would become involved in the war sooner or later, Joe Jr. was preparing to join the naval air reserve. Jack was trying to overcome a chronic back disability so that he too could get into the navy. Kathleen wrote to Jane Compton in England late in May, after Roosevelt had declared a state of emergency:

Everyone feels that we are in the war although there has been no official declaration. Of course we have gone so far it is silly to think of turning back... .We do live in upsetting times. There is so little, if anything these days that is a sure thing. I suppose it seems funny for me to say this when we haven’t begun to feel the horrors and uncertainties of real war. But sometimes I feel that almost anything is better than an existence that is neither one thing or another.

At the end of the summer her father asked his friend Arthur Krock of the New York Times to help her get a job on the 'Washington Times-Herald. Kick was hired and left home, as it turned out, for good.

The other employees at the paper expected just another of the ornamental young debs the Times-Herald frequently hired as cheap labor. (A little over ten years later, Jacqueline Bouvier was hired in the same capacity.) But Kick won them over immediately. Because of her father’s connections, she was in constant demand in diplomatic and political circles, the most sought-after “extra girl” in the city. Yet she was wholly unaffected; co-workers remember her averting her glance when she was with them in public for fear some prominent figure she had spotted might recognize her and somehow embarrass them. Sometimes they caught her at the entrance of the Times-Herald after lunch, stuffing the mink coat she’d worn to some state function into a paper bag before returning to the office.

After a few weeks as an assistant to the executive editor, Frank Waldrop, she began to work with thirtyyear-old John White, the staff writer then in charge of the paper’s personality feature “Did You Happen to See _?’’ It was the beginning of a close friendship—meticulously chronicled in White’s diary—with overtones of the wacky romantic film comedies they often attended together. Kick took the sharptongued Jean Arthur role (calling White a “shrunken, bald-headed, irritable old man”), and White bounced her insults right back (she was ‘‘an ignorant, thickheaded mick”).

White lived with his sister Patsy (now Mrs. James Carter) and her children, and Kick visited frequently. She was attracted by the simple family atmosphere and also by the fact that the Whites were, in her phrase, “free thinkers.” “She’d sit and talk about anything,” White recalls. “She just loved to talk. She was like Jack in this regard—she had an insatiable curiosity about people. It was like both of them suspected how cloistered their growing up had been and were trying to make up for it by finding out what made people who didn’t happen to be Kennedys tick.” White’s diary shows that Kathleen was trying out her parents’ view of the world on him, passing off their opinions as lightly held arguing points while actually attempting to find out what he thought about them. “KK calls to tell me all birth control is murder. I say her position is just Catholic Church technique for helping keep membership.”

Kick also brought up the subject of Rosemary, who had come back from England plump and obtuse. She was not seriously retarded but had become increasingly intractable because of the restraints Rose put on her after the onset of sexual maturity. White was then writing a series of articles on the treatment of the mentally ill. One of the topics he covered was the prefrontal lobotomy. “[Kick] pumped me for everything I found out. She never did tell me the details about her sister, just talked in a general way about what she referred to as the ‘deep secret’ of her condition.” It was at about this time that Rosemary was institutionalized, having undergone a lobotomy that quieted but did not cure her.

Kick was trying to get distance on her family, John White felt, but she was neither rebellious nor critical. He didn’t realize the strong connection Kick had with the other Kennedys until one afternoon when she suddenly told him more about his life than anyone other than a member of his family could have known. “I asked her where she’d gotten this information. She said she’d mentioned me to her father and that he’d gotten one of his ‘operatives’ to look into my background and character. I asked her what they had decided. She smiled and said, ‘That you are aimless but harmless.’ ”

“She was upstart Boston Irish; his bloodline was so refined he had been mentioned as a suitable husband for Princess Elizabeth”

She saw a good deal of her two older brothers. Joe Jr. was training at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station and frequently came to Washington on leave. Jack was in town at the Office of Naval Intelligence. He and Kick soon met Inga Arvad, a former Miss Denmark who worked on the Times-Herald. As a journalist in Europe, Inga had interviewed Hitler and had been his guest at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Later she had been married to a Hungarian flying ace, and she was reputed to have been the mistress of a Swedish industrialist accused of collaborating with the Germans.

Inga and Jack began such a torrid romance, according to John White, that Joe Kennedy became concerned. “Okay as a teacher but not okay for a wife,” he grumbled about her. When the ambassador found out that the FBI had Inga under surveillance, he got Jack transferred to South Carolina.

Kick’s relationship with John White was cooling too. “She loved to cuddle. I don’t think there had been much of that sort of thing when they were kids. But it had to take place apart from sex, which she referred to as ‘the thing the priest says not to do.’ I remember one night when I was rubbing her back and she was getting sort of sleepy, she suddenly looked up at me almost as if she was about to cry and said: ‘Listen, the thing about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack—incapable of deep affection.’ This was one of the few times I got the feeling she was really revealing something about herself.”

By late 1942 Joe Jr. was training in PBM bombers off Puerto Rico, and Jack was with a squadron of PT boats. It was a time of decision for Kick. She quit the paper and went into training with a Red Cross unit headed for England. She told her mother the only reason she wanted to go was that she felt concern for old friends suffering in the war. But in one of his final diary entries about her White had written: “She indicates a certain eagerness to get to England and perhaps marry a certain Duke who seems to be languishing for her.” On June 27, 1943, Kathleen sailed with other Red Cross workers for Europe.

In England she was immediately caught up in the war. She went to work at the Red Cross club in Belgravia, a converted brick town house swarming with servicemen. One day she was photographed pedaling to work in her uniform, and soon she became known as “the girl on the bicycle,” a symbol of Allied cooperation. She wrote to Frank Waldrop:

Dear Ex-Boss,

I am stationed very near where I once lived and need I add that life is very different from those good old days....You will be glad to hear that I am more proBritish than ever and spend my days telling the GIs about that great institution, “the British Empire.”

As we get a day and a half off a week, I am here recuperating from five days and a half of jitterbugging, gin rummy, pingpong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1500 doughboys a long way from home. (I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think this is what I was born for.)

There’ll always be an England,

Miss KK

Exhausting as her work was, she soon picked up her old relationships with the Astors, Ormsby-Gores and other friends, and especially with Billy, who dropped his other girlfriends as soon as she arrived. On July 14 she wrote home to Hyannis Port after the two of them had begun making the rounds in London: “It really is funny to see people putting their heads together the minute we arrive anyplace. There’s heavy betting on when we are going to announce it. Some people have gotten the idea that I’m going to give in. Little do they know. It just amuses me to see how worried they are.”

By “they” she was referring principally to Billy’s family. They had been anti-Catholic at least since the first Cavendish of note, Sir William, was given his land by Henry VIII from confiscated church property. They had been anti-Irish for almost as long. Billy’s father, when asked about the possibility of Kathleen’s becoming his daughter-in-law, exhibited his good breeding by merely saying, “You can’t expect an American girl to know how to run British estates.”

Dramatized by parents as opposed as Montagues and Capulets and by the war, their love took on a starcrossed quality that made it even more attractive. Lady Lloyd says, “Billy wanted to marry her badly and absolutely didn’t want to think about the implications. It was the most definite thing in his life.” If Kick was not transported by passion, she was like her father in regarding what was forbidden as especially appealing, and she was moved by how much Billy loved her. As she wrote to Jack, who was serving in the South Pacific: “He is so unlike anyone I have ever known at home or anyplace really. Of course I know he would never give in about the religion, and he knows I never would. It’s all rather difficult as he is very, very fond of me and as long as I am about he’ll never marry.”

Joe Jr. was in England too, stationed on the Cornish coast with a PBY squadron. He had fought to get into action since his enlistment, but his efforts had taken on a special urgency following Jack’s much-publicized exploits in the Pacific on PT-109. (A family friend at Hyannis Port during a celebration in which elaborate toasts had been drunk to Jack’s heroism later saw Joe Jr. clenching and unclenching his fists, crying and muttering under his breath, “By God, I’ll show them!”) He flew antisubmarine patrols across the Channel, and whenever he got leave, joined Kick and Billy in London’s nightclub scene. On Sunday nights he went back to his squadron exhausted, ready to resume patrols the next day. As Kick wrote in a letter home about him: “One feels one must pack all the fun possible in the shortest space of time.”

“She’d be standing next to him in polite company and say sweetly, ‘Being a duke is something of a joke, isn’t it?’ He would grin, then catch himself and say, ‘Well, no, not quite a joke

By the end of 1944, as it became obvious that the invasion of Europe was inevitable, Kick and Billy decided to force the issue. Seeing how important Kathleen had become to their son, the duke and duchess softened their opposition. The Kennedys, meanwhile, became even more unyielding. In a flurry of letters and telegrams, Rose ordered, cajoled, pleaded with Kathleen not to go through with a wedding that might jeopardize her faith.It was the most animated anyone could recall seeing her. “For the most part Rose liv*d in.de/ own world and left family affairs to the old man,” says one Kennedy friend. “But religion was the one thing that brought her to life. The social climber in her gloried in the idea that a daughter of hers had gotten to the top of English nobility. If only Billy had been the Duke of Norfolk or some other Catholic peer it would have been the capstone of her life. But he wasn’t. And the Catholic in her quaked at the idea of Kick roasting in hellfire.”

When entreaties failed, Rose had her husband try diplomacy. He got Archbishop Francis Spellman, the most powerful Catholic in America, to be the family advocate at the Vatican. In England Kick visited Archbishop Godfrey, the apostolic delegate, in an effort to effect a compromise. There was no question of either marrying in the other’s church. The debate focused on the children they might have. Billy’s friend David Ormsby-Gore, who had married a Catholic, suggested that Kick and Billy raise the boys Church of England and the girls Catholic. Billy was against dividing the family in that way. The best they could do was wait and see what happened after the war. If the aristocracy diminished in importance, as Billy thought it would, they might have some flexibility in their arrangements.

The wedding took place on May 6, 1944. Rose, who was checking out of a Boston hospital that day, replied tersely to reporters’ questions: “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel physically well enough to grant an interview now.” The only family representative present at the brief civil ceremony was Joe Jr., who had continued to support his sister despite his family’s opposition. After a brief honeymoon, Billy had to return to his regiment, which was preparing for D-day near the little town of Alton. Kick stayed in a small country inn nearby and referred to herself as a camp follower in letters home. “I had five weeks with my husband and now he has gone,” she wrote to a friend on July 1. ‘‘I shall return to the Red Cross very soon and as soon as the war is over hope for a visit to America and home.”

But her father didn’t want her to wait. He had never felt so strongly as his wife about the marriage, and by the end of July he had prevailed on Kick to come back and try to heal the family wounds.

Her mother was cool to her, but the rest of the family were pleased with her triumph, making elaborate bows and referring to her as “Your Ladyship” and “the Marchioness.” Rosemary was gone, but otherwise it was the first time this many of them had been together since 1941.

The only one missing was Joe Jr. He had completed enough missions to be able to come home, but he remained in England, hoping to make some grand gesture that would even the score with Jack, thus reasserting his right to leadership of the next Kennedy generation. He heard of a top-secret mission to wipe out V-l launching pads on the Continent and volunteered for it. The plan called for a PBY-4 bomber to be crammed with 25,000 pounds of explosives. Joe was to pilot the plane as far as the Channel and bail out after transferring control to a mother ship, which would then guide the primitive missile to a target by means of a television camera in its nose.

On August 13, 1944, two priests sent by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, a family friend, arrived at Hyannis Port, woke Joseph Kennedy from his afternoon nap, and told him and Rose that Joe was missing and presumed dead. Twenty-eight minutes into the flight, a short circuit had apparently set off the explosives, and their son’s plane had disappeared in a giant fireball over the English countryside. The ambassador broke the news to the rest of the family; then he locked himself in his room.

Jack went out alone on the beach, aware that the competition he had always enjoyed was over now, and that his victory would imprison his future. (“I can feel Dad’s eyes on the back of my neck,” he said to navy buddy Red Fay a few days later. “My God, now I’m it.")

Kathleen was mired in guilt, feeling that because her brother had stood up for her, he had died unreconciled with their father. (“If I don’t come back,” Joe Jr. had told his friend Lorelle Hearst before taking off on his mission, “tell Dad that despite our differences I still love him very much.”)

Less than a month later a call came from the British government. It was about Billy. His regiment had fought its way into Belgium, and he was leading a platoon that had been ordered to take a heavily defended town. He had just turned around to say, “Come on, you fellows,” when a German sniper bullet struck him in the heart, killing him instantly.

Feeling incapable of dealing with Kick’s sorrow alone, Joseph Kennedy called his daughter’s old friends the Whites in Washington. “I know you guys probably hate me,” he told Patsy White over the phone, “but Kick needs someone to be with her. Please come up and help.”

Patsy arrived in New York to find Kathleen hollow-eyed and pale. “Have they given you a sleeping pill or anything?” she asked.

“No,” Kick said, shaking her head sadly, “my mother just keeps taking me to Mass and saying that God doesn’t send us a cross heavier than we can bear.” She kept saying, as if stunned, “The amazing thing about Billy was that he loved me so much. I felt needed. I really felt I could make him happy.” She told Patsy her main regret was that she hadn’t gotten pregnant.

A few days later she flew to London. She threw her arms around Billy’s sisters, saying that she was glad to be “home.” Later, speaking bitterly about the controversy that had seemed such an obstacle in the way of their happiness, she said, “I guess God has taken care of the matter in His own way, hasn’t He?”

“I’ve never met anyone so desperately unhappy,” Billy’s sister Elizabeth later said of Kathleen. “I had to sleep in her room night after night. Her mother had tried to convince her that she had committed a sin in this marriage, so in addition to losing her husband, she worried about having lost her soul.” For the first few weeks, she stayed close to her inlaws. Chatsworth had been commandeered by the army, so they stayed at Compton Place in Eastbourne. Billy’s youngest sister, Anne, remembers that Kathleen taught her how to dance during this period of mourning. The two of them spent hours fox-trotting down the mansion’s Long Gallery while buzz bombs fell outside.

Kick and Elizabeth next moved to Smith Square in London. She wrote melancholy letters home, such as the one dated April 1, 1945, to Frank Waldrop: “At present I am directing and entertaining at a nurses’ club in London. Very nice job and plan to stay on here until summer anyway. It seems hard to believe that the war is really going to be over soon. I’m glad, thankful, but I don’t think anyone feels terribly joyful. Do you?”

She told friends that she didn’t like going out in public places because she felt people were “looking to see how I’m taking it.” But gradually she began to return to life. Jane Compton was with her on a rare sunny day that summer when all her doubts seemed to melt: “She smiled sort of sadly and said to me: ‘It’s such a wonderful day. You don’t think Billy would mind if I wore a really flowery dress, do you?’ ”

The postwar period became for Kathleen a time of personal exploration, a bit like her father’s earlier breakout into the wider world. Just as he had felt confined by the idea that being Boston Irish meant sharing in a group fate, so Kathleen chafed at the idea that she had to participate in the collective effort of the Kennedys to establish the family in American politics. Jack had shouldered that burden; she decided to go her own way. She used her title of Marchioness of Hartington not only because it indicated her social achievement, but also because, as she remarked lightly to a friend, “It’s rather nice not having to be a Kennedy. Lord knows there are enough of them as it is.”

Her prewar social life in England had revolved around a self-contained set of people, most of them at least distantly related—the Comptons, Astors, Ormsby-Gores, Cavendishes. But now social protocol was disappearing, along with the rest of the old ways. Living alone in Smith Square now, she did what she wanted—went out with eligible men her age and launched herself into society. She lunched with Churchill and Beaverbrook and made her place into something of a salon for such celebrated people as Evelyn Waugh and George Bernard Shaw. In just a few months she had become a fixture in London’s smart set.

Jack arrived in 1947, a freshman congressman on his first junket. They met at Lismore Castle, the Duke of Devonshire’s estate in Ireland, where Kathleen was staying with Pamela Churchill and other friends. She felt that Jack seemed weighed down by what had become an obligation to fulfill the promise of their dead brother. He was struck by how mature she seemed, and felt that she had “gone English.”

Back in London, Jack fell desperately ill. The doctor who examined him in the hospital diagnosed the lingering malaise that had afflicted him since childhood as Addison’s disease, and said that he might have no more than a year to live. Kick helped get him onto a ship bound for New York. She found out later that he spent the voyage in the dispensary, and that a priest was summoned to administer the last rites as he was being carried off on a stretcher. Subsequent press releases mentioned only a recurrence of his wartime malaria.

Kick was entering what she saw could become a public relations crisis of her own. At the beginning of the war, when it had looked as though she would never manage to get back to London, she had written Jane Compton a letter discussing the reasons why she would probably never marry. Chief among them: “No one I have ever met has made me completely forget myself.” Now someone had. It was thirty-six-yearold Peter Fitzwilliam, the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam, who had been introduced to Kathleen by Frank More O’Ferrall, an old friend with whom Joe Jr. had sometimes gone to the races during his stay in England.

Fitzwilliam was a horse fancier, elegantly aristocratic, long-faced, handsome, and married. There was no formal courtship of Kick, at least none that took place in front of anyone. According to one friend: “Peter and Kathleen sort of eyed each other awhile at parties and other functions. Then suddenly they were together. It was overnight and it was the real thing—illicit, passionate, encompassing. One got the impression that she’d discovered something she didn’t really plan to experience in life.”

The Fitzwilliams didn’t have the status of the Cavendishes, but they were nearly as rich. Their ancestral estate was Milton, near Peterborough; they had also acquired through marriage the famous Wentworth-Woodhouse, near Yorkshire. It was the largest private house in Europe, with 365 rooms, one for each day of the year. There was also a beautiful Irish estate in County Wicklow, called Coollattin.

Students at Eton had regarded Peter Fitzwilliam as indolent and pampered. As a young man he had been headstrong like Kick, defying his father at the age of twenty-two to marry the daughter of an Irish Protestant bishop. They’d had one daughter only, and by the time the war began they were living apart. Fitzwilliam volunteered to command the gunnery on a merchant vessel carrying airplane parts from Sweden to England. He later received the Distinguished Service Medal for his bravery.

After the war he returned to a life that revolved around horses. A gambler and something of a rake, Fitzwilliam was in contact with both the aristocratic circles of London and the gamy elements of the city’s night life. The family barrister later said, “Peter had all the charm in the world—to a rather dangerous extent, really.” Many women had found that charm irresistible, and he had acquired an amorous reputation.

Friends who found out about the romance saw it as part of the changing pattern of Kathleen’s life, a pattern in which she was moving away from her father’s expectations but closer to him in reality. “Billy was pure, noble and gentle, and a reaction against her father,” Jane Compton later said. “Kick had been terribly fond of him, but in her desire to marry him she had been aiming high, as she thought Kennedys were supposed to do. Peter Fitzwilliam was much more like Joseph Kennedy himself—older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male. Perhaps in the last analysis those were the qualities required to make her fall deeply in love.”

If Kick’s first great romance had been played out against the backdrop of a world at war, this one took place within the more complex but equally dramatic context of a world in which old social relationships had changed irrevocably. The changes could be seen in the great houses like Chatsworth and WentworthWoodhouse, which had been conscripted during the war and afterward seemed no longer inhabitable. There was also a sense that it would be impossible to fill these houses up again with the kind of life that had existed before the war. Such a prospect certainly no longer interested Kick.

They decided to escape to Ireland, a neutral country untouched by the ravages of the war and the class antagonism that followed it. Kathleen recognized an odd symmetry in a return to the country from which her family had been trying to distance itself for over a hundred years. But Ireland had become, as she said to Jane Compton, a place where “one could start over.” She and Peter traveled to Coollattin frequently in late 1947 and early 1948. Kick showed an abandon in this affair that people had never seen in her before, a radical departure from the calculation and control that had always been family traits. Peter’s wife made it quite clear to him that it would take a messy divorce trial, with Kathleen named as corespondent, to dissolve the marriage. But as Lady Lloyd noted: “Kick didn’t care. She was willing to do what was necessary to have Peter, even if it meant scandal or excommunication. They planned to do what they had to and then go to Coollattin to live. It was their Shangri-la.”

Kathleen told her parents about the relationship. Her mother responded by sending her frenzied letters. Her father, who was worried principally about the effect such a scandal could have on Jack’s career, was also opposed, although he claimed it was for moral reasons. (“What hypocrisy!” Kathleen said to Jane Compton after one angry transatlantic conversation with him.) Finally she decided to go home and try to resolve the issue.

The scene with Rose involved “a spiritual knock-down, drag-out,” in the words of a close family friend, LeMoyne Billings: “Rose was hysterical about the whole thing and couldn’t be reconciled to it. As far as she was concerned it meant spiritual damnation. After the initial confrontation, Mr. Kennedy, as usual, began considering the practical side of things. He began wondering if Fitzwilliam’s marriage could be annulled, and began trying to find a way to fix things, to keep the family from falling apart over this issue.”

Shaken at the prospect of being forced out of what Billings calls the “true mother church”—the family itself—Kick left her parents and went to Washington to see Jack and visit some of her old friends from the Times-Herald days. John White was struck by how much she had changed. When he had last seen her she had been tentative, girlish, anxious to discover how the world worked. Now she seemed “like a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was prepared to do what was necessary to get it.”

She also visited Patsy White and told her, “I don’t know what to do. Eunice has made me a date with Bishop Sheen and I don’t want to go. What good can it do? I’m not going to change my mind about Peter. It’s just more pressure.”

They talked for a couple of hours. Kathleen was amused by the family’s attempt to use the charismatic bishop against her, but she was also agitated over the spiritual implications of what she was about to do, and annoyed with herself, at the age of twenty-eight, for still being so vulnerable in regard to the family.

“What would you do?” she asked.

Patsy White hesitated a moment. “I’d cancel the appointment.”

“You’re right, of course,” Kick said. “It is my life. I guess there’s no point in going through catechism all over again.” Then she shrugged. “I’m just going to go back to England. Whatever happens, happens.”

Frank Waldrop asked her if she was ever coming home for good. “No,” she said, smiling and pointing in the direction of the Atlantic. “Home is over there.”

Back in England she joined Fitzwilliam in preparations that resembled the declaration of a separate peace. Fitzwilliam had leased Wentworth and decided to sell the furnishings. The auction was conducted by Christie’s. Everything but a few pictures was sold; some of the best rugs were purchased for Buckingham Palace.

Finally they were ready. His mother, the old countess, approved of his plan to divorce his wife and marry Kick. Joseph Kennedy, in Europe for a meeting at the Vatican, asked them to join him on the Riviera in a last attempt to reach an agreement. On May 12 Kick and Fitzwilliam stopped at Milton to visit his cousin. They talked about moving to Ireland and about flying to France the next day to meet the ambassador. Fitzwilliam joked, “I’m going to do all I can to try to bring the old boy around. If religion is the problem, I’ll build him a bloody church if he wants.”

The next morning they climbed into a DeHavilland Dove eight-seater and flew to Paris, where they went into town to lunch with friends. By the time they returned to the airport, the weather had turned bad. Their pilot urged them to wait until the storm was over. Kick was insistent. “We must go,” she said. “We must make it because it is very important that we see my father.”

By late afternoon, as they were passing through the Rhone Valley, the plane was struggling against treacherous winds and squalling rain. Not far from Lyons they were apparently struck by lightning. The plane crashed into a seam of the Cevennes Mountains. The explosion was heard in the small village of Privas, and by evening a rescue party had reached the wreckage and found the pilot and copilot dead in the front of the plane. Fitzwilliam’s battered body had been thrown several feet away from the wreck. Kick was near him, on her back, a small cut on her forehead and one of her shoes ripped off by the impact, but otherwise looking as if she were asleep.

Word of the crash came to the Kennedy congressional office in Washington and then to Jack’s Georgetown house. An aide, Billy Sutton, answered the phone and relayed the message. “Is it for sure?” Jack asked with the remarkable detachment that had helped see him through all his ordeals. “Tell them to call back when they know one way or another.” A few minutes later another call came confirming Kathleen’s death. Jack turned his head away from Sutton and began to cry.

Joseph Kennedy was waiting when they brought Kick down off the mountain in a peasant’s cart. Later on, he would allow her to reenter the family as one of the sainted dead, the lost sister of candidates. But for now, in what he called the second most sorrowful day of his life, he took her body back to England to be buried at Chatsworth.

Rose regarded the death, according to LeMoyne Billings, “as a matter of God pointing his finger at Kathleen and saying no!” Those who sent condolences to her received a black-bordered note signed by her daughter Jean in her behalf: “Mother wishes to thank you with all her heart for your kind message of sympathy sent at the time of the passing of dearest Kathleen. She wants you to know that your prayers and thought helped her so much.” With the note came a little card with a picture of Kick on one side and these words on the other:

Kick had gone further faster than all the others, but now she had come to rest—under the modest inscription Joy She Gave —Joy She Has Found'

Kathleen

Marchioness of Hartington February 20, 1920-May 13, 1948 Look down upon me good and gentle Jesus