Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family by David Batcher Amber Hunt, David Batcher Read Free Book Online Page A

response. Joe Jr. had been the Kennedys’ golden boy his entire life: He’d been healthier, more athletic, a better student, and better looking than his sly, sickly, underachieving brother. Especially since the collapse of Joe Sr.’s political career, Joe Jr. had become the repository of all of the ambassador’s political hopes and family ambitions. For the favorite son in a clan that thrived on competition, Jack’s sudden shift into the limelight was a shock, and Joe craved more than ever what so many young men of the time craved: to prove himself through wartime heroics. After a brief visit in Hyannis Port for his father’s birthday, he piloted his VB-110 across the Atlantic to England, carrying his crew, gear, and a carton of fresh eggs for his sister Kick, whom he’d visit shortly in London.Stationed in Cornwall, he received a letter from his mother containing a silver religious medal to protect him during his service far away.
    While in London, Joe Jr. visited Kick when he could. Despite the hazards of bombing raids and the privations of wartime rationing, Kathleen couldn’t be more excited to be back there. She missed it terribly and kept in touch with many of her London friends after her departure with the family in 1939, and now that she was back she spent as much time on the town and at country homes with friends as she did at her tony assignment as program assistant at Hans Crescent, an officers’ club in a Victorian hotel in the Knightsbridge section of London. Kathleen wasn’t nursing to wounded soldiers as a Red Cross volunteer; she was, she wrote to a friend, exhausted from “jitter-bugging, gin rummy, ping-pong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1500 doughboys a long way from home.”
    Two weeks after her arrival, she ran into Billy Hartington (aka William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington) for the first time since her departure four years earlier. They’d met in 1938 at the king and queen’s annual Buckingham Palace garden party, just as London’s social set was opening its arms for her. He was widely considered the most eligible bachelor in England: polite, self-effacing, funny in a gentle way, he behaved with none of the pompousness of a man set to become the Duke of Devonshire. It was a title held by members of the Cavendish family since 1694 and would make Billy one of the wealthiest men in England upon his father’s death. He and Kick had hit it off immediately.
    Now, in 1943, it was love at first sight all over again. They spent increasing amounts of time together, and soon enough there was talk of marriage. There was only one problem: Billy was a Protestant, and Kick was Catholic. Billy’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, saw how clearly besotted their son was, and they begged Kathleen to convert to Anglicanism. But Kick argued that she couldn’t convert. Catholicism, so deeply ingrained by her upbringing, was central to her life. Billy was similarly steadfast in his faith. Though Rose liked Billy very much and was no doubt impressed by his place in the peerage, his Protestantism rendered him, in her eyes, an utterly unacceptable husband for her daughter.

    Jack finally returned to the United States in January 1944, barely five months after the PT 109 incident, his health so poor that he flew to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, even before heading home to see his family. He was told he’d need surgery on his back and was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer and malaria. When Jack finally arrived in Palm Beach, even normally undemonstrative Rose could not contain herself. “The mere feel of his coat brought her joy,” Barbara Perry wrote. “Incredulous at his homecoming, she touched his arms to convince herself that he was really there.” Her prayers had been answered: Her “elf” was home safe.
    In England meanwhile, Kick became engaged to Billy, and the future Marchioness of Hartington. As far as the difference in their faith went, Joe refused to get up