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Overview
With the conflict in Europe already underway, Wilson, working with Kennedy, shares the grip of war with the men and women who are engaged against Germany. When the bombs finally fall on Britain, Kennedy sends Wilson back to America--fulfilling a promise he and Roosevelt made to keep her safe—where she anxiously awaits US involvement. Upon meeting the man she will marry, a combat pilot, her role begins to mirror that of so many women of war era—the struggle to maintain a home that is re-billeted constantly and the worry for her husband in combat.
Wilson’s journey starts with an appointment from the highest levels of government and continues along a path many young women would take as America fought to bring peace to the world. These women’s lives are a shared battle through the years of the worst war the world has ever known, the years of struggle between Munich and Hiroshima, between certain death and brave survival, not only for the men and women under arms but for their wives and families back home as well.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781631580734 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yucca |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part One
The Impending Storm
Dance at the White House
Sometime soon after Roosevelt's inauguration, the first lady had a dance at the White House. My sisters — Rosalind and Nancy — and I were invited to the party. We each knew some of the three honorees: Margo Delano, a cousin of the President, was a friend of both my sisters at Greenwood School; Marietta Peabody, daughter of the head of Groton School, the President's old alma mater which he had stayed close to over the years, whom I had gotten to know on the St. Midas's dance circuit; and Barbara Cushing, sister of Jimmy Roosevelt's wife — I had met Barbara several times and, of course, had met Jimmy at Frank Jr.'s birthday party. Anne Lindsay Clark, a dear friend, and classmate of mine at Greenwood School, was also there. I had introduced her to John Roosevelt. They fell in love and were married in 1938.
* * *
At one point in the evening Jimmy asked me to dance. He was a marvelous dancer and after twirling me around for a few minutes he suggested we sit down to talk. We chatted a little about the merry birthday party that past summer and, of course, talked a little about current political issues. I remember especially our agreeing that it was a huge step forward for democracy that Congress had agreed to the passage of the President's Social Security bill.
Jimmy asked me in a general way how my life was faring. "I am fevered with the sunset," I said. "I am fretful with the bay," and was about to go on when he filled in the next lines, "the wanderlust is on me and my soul is in Cathay." He smiled that big double Roosevelt smile, the result of both TR and FDR's smile genes.
"You're obviously restless," he said. "Are you serious about wanting to travel?"
I assured him I was and told him about the suggestion I'd made to my mother a while ago that I might try to take enough courses sometime to try to qualify for a job in the Foreign Service. I thought that could lead to lots of traveling and an adventurous life.
"Look," he said, "a good friend of mine, Joe Kennedy, is about to be appointed ambassador to England. Would you like me to find out if there is any spot on his staff where you might fit in?"
I told him I couldn't think of anything more exciting. He suggested I send him a few paragraphs about myself as soon as I could. The paragraphs I sent were few indeed. I didn't exaggerate my experience at working successfully in a popular store, or of my proficiency at typing and shorthand, but I took great pains to type my brief bio extra neatly. My letter was double-spaced.
One evening the next week Jimmy called me to say that Joe Kennedy wanted me to come to Washington to talk to him. "I have given him a copy of your bio and he may have a job for you," Jimmy said. "There is a spot open on his staff for which you might qualify," he explained. The appointment of Joseph P. Kennedy as ambassador to the Court of St. James's had just been announced. I had, of course, read about it with huge interest.
Jimmy told me to call Mr. Kennedy's office in Washington and set a date to go over to see him. His secretary would be expecting my call.
I was early for my appointment with Mr. Kennedy — I was always early for everything — but I was ushered into his office immediately. He greeted me warmly, indicated a chair and suggested I sit down. I noted how blue his eyes were. Maybe they seemed so blue because his face was so suntanned, I thought. He sat down in the chair behind his desk, leaned back, appeared relaxed and asked me to tell him a little about myself. He said Jimmy had given him the material I'd sent him.
I suggested that there really was not a lot more to tell, and confessed that I had practiced a little spiel on the train coming over. Basically I told him what I had already said in the note he had, that I could take shorthand and could type, and that I now was working in a store in Baltimore which sold riding clothes and anything else to do with horses, and that I had briefly attended an evening lecture series on international relations at Johns Hopkins University. Then I explained why I had only gone to the series briefly: because the professor was German and markedly anti-American, so much so that he insisted that the Americans has sunk the Lusitania in the World War and blamed it on the Germans. Furthermore, he hadn't wanted a woman in his course, and clearly resented my being there. Anyway, I explained that I felt compelled to quit that lecture course.
Mr. Kennedy smiled when I finished. It was a kind of gentle smile, as if to convince me that he was smiling at my frankness, not at my awkwardness. He said he had looked into the situation at the embassy in London and there was one vacancy in an office there which would be fine for me. He went on in the same voice to say that I could be working for the man he was taking over as his press attaché and who would help with speech writing.
"Sort of a clerk to him," he said. "Let's call it an assistant," he added. I tried not to seem overwhelmed with excitement. I kept nodding in agreement as he talked, and frowning because I thought that made me look businesslike. His secretary had some papers for me to fill out, he told me, winding down our meeting.
"I will send you a copy of a letter I'll be sending to the passport division of the State Department asking them to issue you a diplomatic passport," he added. I was so consumed with anticipation that I nearly left his room without thanking him. I recovered just in time to tell him how much I looked forward to the assignment.
"I hope you can be ready to go by the end of February," he said. My smile was all I needed to tell him that I'd be ready, with bells on.
On the way to his secretary's office, I passed the women's room. I decided to pop in there to look in the mirror. I still couldn't believe that this was happening to me. I was reassured to see that the face that looked out at me in the mirror was mine, perhaps a little flushed, but it was still mine.
On one of the forms his secretary gave me there was a space in which to write the annual salary I expected. I was prepared for that. When Jimmy had called me to tell me about the possibility of a job, after I had dropped down to earth we had discussed what my salary would be if I was lucky enough to be hired. He said it would be probably be in the neighborhood of $25 a week. I thought that sounded munificent.
Knowing there are twelve months in the year and figuring that there were four weeks a month, thus smartly calculating that there were 48 weeks a year. I multiplied that by 25 and came out with a salary of $1,200. A little later I realized that I had neglected to consider that there are actually 52 weeks a year. I understood now that the figure of $1,200 a year that I put down should have alerted anyone looking at this form that I was a total rube.
* * *
As soon as I got the copy of the letter Kennedy had said he'd send me, I went back to Washington and showed it to the woman at the passport division. She gave me a form to fill out. To my surprise, it said I had to have a witness to identify me in order for me to get my diplomatic passport.
I wondered who in the world I knew in Washington to perform that role. I told the woman there I would go out for lunch and come back in a little while. That would give me a little time to think, I figured.
I walked down the steps of the State Department trying to decide what I should do. Was it really true that the only people I knew in Washington were Jimmy or Frank or Johnny Roosevelt? In any case it would be too ridiculous for me to call one of them to help me on such a silly mission. And besides, I thought, I've no idea if any of them were in town.
As I was sweating out my problem, a nasal voice crept up behind me and said, "How'd they let you out of Baltimore?" The voice sounded as if it meant, "How'd they let you out of jail?"
I turned around and saw that it was a friend of Eddie's, the other salesperson at my emporium, the De Luxe Saddlery.
Eddie was in charge of things such as saddles, horse blankets, tools for mucking out stalls, and such items which were on display in a large space in the basement. Our boss at De Luxe, the man who had hired me, was Samuel Tissenbaum, a dear middle-aged man addicted to smoking cheap cigars, who had come from Poland some years ago. I soon learned that he was a fiercely patriotic American, and not only that, he had a markedly profound sense of rectitude. What Sam never knew, and would have died had he ever discovered, was that Eddie, in his empire in the basement, was not only selling equine paraphernalia but was also making book. Among Eddie's customers was Johnny, the cop from the corner up the street from our store, who came in to bet, I knew.
I now realized that the voice which just spoke to me at the bottom of the State Department steps belonged to Bootsie, another of Eddie's bookie customers. I liked all of Eddie's colorful pals, especially Bootsie. He was small and bandy-legged. I thought he must have been a jockey a long time ago. Now his more regular occupation was probably racetrack tout.
"Hi, ya, Bootsie," I said. "How come you aren't at the track? Although I must say I don't know where the ponies are running at this moment. Anyway, what luck to come across you!"
"My luck," he said, very friendly like.
"You asked what I'm doing here." I looked at him earnestly. "Well, Bootsie, you can do me a big favor, so I'll tell you what I'm doing here."
He came with me back to the passport desk and swore that I was who I said I was. To celebrate, we slipped into the closest bar we could find. He wouldn't even let me treat him and instead he insisted that he pay for my cola, as well as his beer. I thanked him warmly for the role he played in my getting a diplomatic passport.
Later Daddy asked to meet with Mr. Kennedy and we drove over together to Washington. The two men talked for a half an hour or so. Both mentioned their Harvard days proudly, and Kennedy promised that in the unlikely event that war broke out in Europe and he felt I would be in harm's way, he would send me home, just as he would send his own children home in the same circumstances.
Driving back home from Washington, Daddy said he suspected that Kennedy recognized that Europe was a "cauldron these days, what with a vicious Civil War in Spain, a maniac in Germany bent on havoc, and a mini-maniac in Italy with dreams of glory."
"Included Out"
"Button up your overcoat, when you're on a spree," I sang in my tuneless fashion as I danced onto the deck of the USS Manhattan on a bitterly cold day in late February 1938. And if "spree" wasn't the exact word, I figured it would serve as an adequate substitute for the adventure on which I was embarking: I was setting off with Joseph P. Kennedy to work for him in his spanking new post as the US ambassador to England.
"Take good care of yourself, you belong to me," I sang, smiling at my father, there to see me off on my journey. His old friend, "Uncle" Courty Moss, who had joined him for this occasion, picked up my nonsense: "Button up your overcoat when the wind is free," he sang. As he was singing, a blast of freezing air blew in off the Hudson. He looked hard at me and thought I was shivering. Now suiting his action to his words, he carefully buttoned up my overcoat all the way to my collar.
I wasn't shivering from the cold. I think I was just trembling with excitement about the job that lay ahead, and also I may have been quivering with apprehension about my qualifications for it. And so I was not as gracious as I should have been about "Uncle" Courty's kindly meant gestures. Further, by buttoning up my collar, he had hidden the beautiful Italian silk scarf that my mother — now stuck at home with the flu and thus unable to come to see me off — had given me some six weeks ago for my twentieth birthday present.
I tugged at my buttoned-up coat and wrestled out at least enough of my lovely scarf so that some of it could be seen above the collar.
Later the kindness of Harold Hinton and Harvey Klemmer, the other two members of the ambassador's entourage on this trip, subdued my nagging apprehension about my job. Our first night out to sea, when Kennedy had dinner at the captain's table, Harold, who was to be the ambassador's press officer, and Harvey, slated to be the ambassador's speech writer (with fine tuning by Harold), had already made me feel like a member of a seasoned team. We gossiped together about rumors of Kennedy's ambition to run for president if Roosevelt decided not to seek a third term, and about his passion to be the first Irish-American in the White House.
Harold pointed out that there were already four men who had been ambassadors to Britain who later became presidents. Then he named them (John Adams, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan) as if he had planned to all along, but I felt he had done it — gracefully — only for my edification.
Harold was on leave from the Washington bureau of the New York Times and he was to be my boss. I liked him immediately and looked forward hugely to working for him in whatever capacity he would find useful. "I'm going to be a happy drudge," I assured him.
I had ferreted out as much of their histories as I could beforehand. Harold, I had learned, was the son of an Episcopal minister. He had worked in England some years before for the Times and told amusing tales of London and other cities he had lived in or visited, all with a Southern raconteur's flair. He had a sophisticated little trick at dinner which fascinated me. He couldn't get the simple dressing he wanted for his salad, so he mixed his own, for himself at first, and then for me too. He held a big spoon in his left hand, added the ingredients for the dressing (oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper) with his right hand, and then stirred the mixture with a fork held in his right hand. It was delicious each time and I especially enjoyed the ceremony.
Harvey Klemmer had written much of the Maritime Commission Report for Kennedy when Kennedy was chairman of the Commission, the position he had just left on his appointment as ambassador to England. Kennedy had given Harvey much credit for his contribution to the Report. Harvey was grateful for this generosity, he told me, and added that generosity and frankness "are qualities not rife in Washington."
Where all the edges on Harold were smooth and rounded, those on Harvey were rough and sharp. To start with, he was the son of sharecropper parents in Michigan.
After working as a printer's devil at a local newspaper until he was sixteen, he had been a lumberjack, a factory worker and a merchant seaman. Somehow he acquired a formal education and was the principal of a high school near Detroit until he became a reporter for a Detroit newspaper. He had written several books, among them one called Harbor Nights, a copy of which he had with him. He gave it to me to read and since he figured Kennedy might not approve of my reading a book on the exploits of sailors on leave, Harvey covered the book with the jacket of a milder book, which he had gotten from the ship's library. He said he had tried to get a copy of Little Women for the use of its jacket, but there were none in the library.
We saw Joe Kennedy mainly at the evening meal when we all ate together. At lunch, however, there was no set hour, so we all ate at whatever time suited our fancies. On several occasions the ambassador and I hit the same lunch hour, and when we had finished we took a walk around the deck. They were brisk walks — he was not a stroller — and since it was windy we didn't try for protracted conversations, but on one of our walks we paused where it was quiet, near a funnel of the ship, and there we talked.
We chatted about this and that and he asked me how my family happened to know Courtland Moss, whom he had seen when he came over to say hello to Daddy and to welcome me aboard. Kennedy explained that when he was a freshman at Harvard, Courty was a senior and a devoted baseball player. Courty used to come to Joe Kennedy's pickup baseball team on Saturdays to coach the informal group "just for the fun of it," the ambassador said in an admiring voice. I commented that I had noticed with interest how fondly they had greeted when they ran across each other on the ship, and we laughed at the coincidence.
I explained that Courty (or Uncle Courty, as I called him) and my father had been friends forever, it seemed, although Uncle Courty was younger than Daddy, and they had indeed been members of the same club at Harvard.
"I'll bet you it was either Porcellian or the AD club," Kennedy said.
I smiled and said he was right. "It was the AD club." He smiled now, too, but this time it seemed to me his smile didn't look happy. I learned then that Joe Kennedy had a large repertoire of smiles.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Carnage & Courage"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Page Wilson.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preamble,
Part One: The Impending Storm,
Dance at the White House,
"Included Out",
Last Night on Our Trip,
Diplomatic Dilemma,
Kennedy and the State Department,
Old Warrior,
Two Wrong Ways, One Mine and One Corrigan's,
Munich,
Kristallnacht,
Twenty-First Birthday,
Heartbreaking News from Home,
Spring 1939,
A Holiday Interrupted,
Part Two: Sugar Candy,
Let Slip the Dogs of War,
The Wheel of Fortune,
London at War,
Europe in the Spring,
Paul Shot Down,
Kennedy and his Children,
For the Duration,
Embassy Characters,
Dunkirk: Between the Devil & the NOT Deep Blue Sea,
The Mosquito Fleet,
Thank God for Churchill,
"Second" World War,
The Code Clerk,
Was Kennedy Taken Into Camp?,
Part Three: Ask the Infantry and Ask the Dead,
The Ambassador Remembers a Promise,
On the High Seas,
Home Again: Happy and Sad,
Life on a Dizzy Newspaper,
Cissy and FDR,
Jack Kennedy's Book: Why England Slept,
The Wild Goose Chase,
Busy Nocturnal Life,
Coventry,
Mint Juleps,
Mackerel Sky,
The Attack,
Gargantuan Preparations for War,
Lobster Heaven,
The Battle of the Coral Sea,
Personalities on the Paper,
My Left Wing Friends,
A Modern Art Gallery,
No Dice on my Project,
Part Four: A Rose is a Rose is a Rose,
Picnic at Lovers' Leap,
My Favorite Washington Visitor,
The Price of All-Out War,
The Elastic Truth,
Who's the Lucky Bastard?,
Getting my Ducks in a Row,
Stalingrad,
Wedding at Long Branch,
Dawdling Our Way to Columbia,
Cissy's View of the Wedding,
Perspective Gets Skewed in Wartime,
Telling Frazer Goodbye,
San Francisco Surprise,
The Army Steals Time,
Part Five: O Brave New World!,
Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats and Liddle Lamzy Divey,
Pattern for Poppa,
My Little Christian and his Hobby Horse,
Tom Didn't Get to Be That Old,
The World and His Wife,
Omaha Beach,
My Fabulous News,
General Hunter,
We Learn About the Holocaust,
Part Six: The Moon, the Stars, and the Planets,
Victory in Europe Day,
Part Seven: The War is Over,
Truman's World-Shaking Decisions,
Hiroshima,
The Forever Hiroshima Problem,
Part Eight: Future Landscape,
About the Author,