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The family had vague feelings that Jack might become a teacher or a writer. He was a sickly, bookish boy who preferred Billy Whiskers and James Fenimore Cooper to the family calisthenics ("I wasn't a terribly good athlete," he admits, "but I participated"). A passing-fair student at Choate (although an atrocious speller), Jack reached his second stage at Harvard, graduated cum laude in 3½ years, and at the suggestion of Arthur Krock rewrote his thesis into a bestseller, Why England Slept. By implication it refuted most of Joe Kennedy's dogmas about keeping out of war with Nazi Germany.
The Grim Years. The war and its after math shook the Kennedy family to its roots. First Jack, a naval lieutenant on duty in the Solomons, was reported missing in action. His gallant and harrowing role in rescuing the crew of his PT boat after a Japanese destroyer had sliced it through is one of the great tales of heroism in the South Pacific. Jack was still recovering in a naval hospital when the family learned that Naval Lieut. Joseph Kennedy Jr. had been killed over the English coast. After two complete tours over enemy waters, Joe Jr. had passed up home leave orders to volunteer as the pilot of a highly secret "drone" plane, which was aimed at a Nazi V-2 launching site. Once the overloaded plane, crammed with explosives, was at cruising level, Joe and his copilot were instructed to parachute to safety while the Vega Ventura escorts guided the drone by radio on to its target. Just before their scheduled jump, the plane exploded. The bodies were never found. (Bobby, a sophomore at Harvard, quit school a few months later to serve as a seaman aboard a destroyer that was named in honor of his hero brother.)
Three weeks after Joe's death, Kathleen's husband, the Marquess of Hartington, was killed in Normandy in infantry action. A lively, pretty girl, Kathleen ("Kick") met the young nobleman, heir of the Duke of Devonshire, during her debutante days in London. When she returned to Britain as a Red Cross worker during the war, Kathleen saw the marquess again, and they decided to be married. It was a poignant, Montague-Capulet romance: both the Catholic Kennedys and the Anglican Cavendishes were bitterly dismayed (Lieut. Joe Kennedy took leave from his naval air base to give his sister in marriage at a drab civil registrar's office in London, but the rest of the Kennedy clan made no sign of recognition). A month after the wedding, the marquess went off to war with the Coldstream Guards. Four years later, the widowed Kathleen was killed in a plane crash in France, not far from the scene of her husband's death.* Her death was especially shocking to Jack, who had been closest to Kick when they were growing up.
Rosemary, the eldest of the Kennedy daughters, was a childhood victim of spinal meningitis, is now a patient in a nursing home in Wisconsin. Says Joe Kennedy: "I used to think it was something to hide, but then I learned that almost everyone I know has a relative or good friend who has the problem. I think it best to bring these things out in the open."*