bravest feat he had ever seen performed by an American soldier.) Ted Jr. died five weeks later of a heart attack. His son would write his mother: “It was like the magnificent climax of a great play.” FDR, his longtime nemesis, the commander-in-chief he had finally chosen to serve, would die the following year.
Joe Jr. and Jack Kennedy might have had it even tougher. They not only had to satisfy their demanding father’s ambition for them; they were called upon to burnish Joe Kennedy’s tarnished reputation. As Emery writes, “Joe [Jr.] had to excel, to live up to the faith that his father had in him . . . Jack had . . . to equal his brother or outperform him . . . [Both] had to refute the idea that their father (and they) were lacking in courage.” Jack, in the early years of the war, saved his shipmates when the PT boat he captained was destroyed; he came home to be toasted as a hero. “Joe smiled and drank with the others. Then he went upstairs and cried.” Joe, a Navy pilot, was so eager for his own medal that he volunteered for a daring, reckless mission, on which he perished.
Comments