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Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.'s Death and Memorialization in "As We Remember Joe"
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.'s Death and Memorialization in "As We Remember Joe"
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Description:

Kennedy, Jr. Joseph

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s Death and Memorialization in As We Remember Joe

 

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY JR. Archive of ten items, including four typed letters with envelopes, two handwritten letters, three newspaper clippings, and a printed invitation with envelope, 1944-1945. Envelopes torn on opening; all other items very good.

 

This small archive of ten items surround correspondence with Kennedy family friend Richard R. Flood, who was a close friend and roommate of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. at Harvard and Harvard Law School and who contributed an essay to the memorial volume As We Remember Joe.

 

Doris R. Walker, secretary to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (1888-1969) sent and signed the first typed letter on March 20, 1944, from Palm Beach, Florida. She sends Flood in Rhode Island Jack Kennedy’s new address at the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami, Florida, where he was recuperating from injuries he sustained in the destruction of PT-109 in the Solomon Islands in August 1943. She also sends Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s address in care of the Fleet Postmaster in New York, New York and informs Flood that “The letter to Joe which you sent him here was re-addressed and sent along to him.”

 

After Joe’s death, his father sent a typed letter from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to Flood in Boston on August 31, thanking him for writing his thoughts of Joe. “In the sorrow of the event,” the elder Kennedy wrote, “it is comforting to realize how much Joe was beloved and admired by those who, like yourself, knew him best. Our pride, thus heightened, cannot quite fill the void in our lives but your tribute to his memory is a real consolation.”

 

The remaining three letters concern the efforts of Joe’s mother Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995) to learn the address of Dick O’Toole, who knew Joe at Harvard. On August 29, 1944, Marilyn McElwee (1919-2007), Rose Kennedy’s secretary, sent a typed letter to Flood telling him that “Mrs. Kennedy has received a letter of sympathy from a Mary O’Toole O’Connor. In it she said her brother Dick knew Joe at college. Mrs. Kennedy was wondering if perhaps you might happen to know who they are and what their address might be.”

 

On September 10, Flood replied in a handwritten letter that “after having turned the name of Dick O’Toole over in my mind several times I am still unable to place it.” Flood was certain that O’Toole did not attend the Law School with them, but thought that he might have been a member of Joe’s undergraduate class of 1938. Although he had been “pretty much confined to my station” for the past week, Flood planned to visit the office of alumni affairs at Harvard and would forward any information he obtained.

 

On September 12, McElwee responded from Hyannis Port with the typed reply, “I just looked at the copy of the letter I sent you and discovered that the name is Dick O’Toole O’Connor. Perhaps this will make a difference as I noticed you referred to Dick O’Toole in your letter. I do hope this letter reaches you before you check the records. I realize how busy you must be and hate to cause you any inconvenience, but Jack suggested that I write to you as he naturally didn’t know all of Joe’s friends.”

 

Flood was correct in assuming that O’Connor was Mary O’Toole’s married name. Richard J. O’Toole (1915-2003) graduated in 1933 from Leominster High School, where he was an outstanding football player. After attending a one-year program at Worcester Academy, O’Toole won a scholarship from the Fitchburg Harvard club and in the fall of 1934 entered Harvard University, where he was captain of the freshman football team. During World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and rose to the rank of Captain. In 1948, he graduated from the New England Institute of Embalming and Funeral Directing in Boston. For more than thirty years, he owned and operated a funeral home in Ayer, Massachusetts. His sister Mary O’Toole O’Connor (1912-2005) married Paul X. O’Connor (1912-1990) in 1935 and was a school teacher in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1940.

 

Two of the newspaper clippings deal with As We Remember Joe, a compilation of twenty essays by Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s friends and family, compiled by John F. Kennedy and privately printed in 1945. One clipping is Joseph F. Dineen’s column “Inside Boston” from the October 24, 1945, issue of The Boston Daily Globe. Dineen ended his column, “Personally, I remember Joe as a big, square-shouldered athletic lad with tousled bronze hair, greeting his father aboard the Queen Mary in a suite crowded with newspapermen who had come down to Quarantine in New York Harbor to meet him…a good-natured, grinning son with smiling eyes that were always determined, looking at his idol—his father.” Another of the clippings, entitled “Lt. Kennedy, Jr., Honored by Book,” begins, “In book form, and from the pens of people who knew him, and knew him well—traced in indelible tears rather than ink that might fade some day—has come to the public 20 colorful word sketches of one of America’s great war heroes, Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., USNR, who paid the supreme sacrifice last August while on a secret air mission over Europe.” The final clipping, also from October 1945, provides details about Kennedy’s final mission, finally released by the Navy Department.

 

The invitation to Richard Flood, sent July 12, 1945, is for the launching of the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., a Gearing-class destroyer, on July 26, 1945 at Quincy, Massachusetts. Enclosed with the invitation are two printed cards, inviting Flood to a reception following the launching and a second that reads, “as the launching date of a combatant ship is confidential information, please do not discuss the launching date on this invitation with anyone until it has been made public by the navy department.” Undoubtedly Flood, on duty in the Navy in the Pacific, could not attend the launching. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s 17-year-old sister Jean Kennedy (b. 1928) sponsored the launching, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) sailed on the vessel’s 1946 shakedown cruise in the Caribbean as an apprentice seaman.

 

Also included is a handwritten letter by George A. Schmiedigen (1906-2000) to Richard Flood on Department of State stationery, dated December 3, 1945. Schmiedigen wrote in part, “The other day Eunice Kennedy gave me a book about Joe. I noticed that you wrote an article. It was very nice of you to do that. I understand that Jack is going now in politics. I am sure he will do well.” Schmiedigen had attended Harvard Law School with Joe Kennedy and Dick Flood and graduated in 1942.

 

 

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (1915-1944) was born in Massachusetts, the oldest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.  He graduated from the Choate School in Connecticut in 1933 and from Harvard College in 1938. While at Harvard, Kennedy participated in football, rugby, and crew and served on the student council. He then spent a year studying at the London School of Economics before enrolling in Harvard Law School. Both he and his father had aspirations that Joseph Jr. would become President of the United States, and he planned to run for Congress in 1946. Kennedy left before his final year at Harvard Law School to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve on June 24, 1941. He trained as an aviator and received his commission as an ensign in May 1942. In 1943-1944, he completed twenty-five combat missions from Great Britain. He then volunteered for an Operation Aphrodite mission in which two crew members took off in a bomber, activated a remote-control system, and parachuted from the aircraft. A ground crew then navigated the unmanned, explosive-laden bomber to crash into a target. In the Navy’s first Aphrodite mission, on August 12, 1944, Kennedy and his co-pilot took off in a B-24 bomber, set the controls, and armed the explosive package, which detonated prematurely over southeastern England, killing Kennedy and his co-pilot instantly. Kennedy received the Navy Cross posthumously.

 

Richard R. Flood (1914-1969) was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard College in 1939 and from its law school in 1946 as of 1942. Flood served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War II. He received a master’s degree from the Harvard Business School cum laude in 1947. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1948, he established a practice in Lowell, Massachusetts, and was a partner in the firm of Flood, Valentine, and Foisy until his death.

 

 

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