On May 6th, 1944, a young woman stood in a register office in London and married the man she had waited six years for. Of her entire family, one person came. Her name was Kathleen Kennedy, the favorite sister of the future president of the United States. She had given up her faith, defied her mother, and chosen England over everything she had been raised to be.
Four months later, her husband was dead. Four years after that, so was she. Only her father came to her funeral. The same one who had not come to the wedding. This is the story of the Kennedy that history forgot and what she gave up to become herself. Welcome. There is a small church in the English countryside in a village called Edenser tucked inside the estate of Chhatzsworth in Darbisha where the grass grows quietly over a grave that most of the world has forgotten.
The stone reads, “In loving memory of Kathleen, 1920 to 1948, widow of Major the Marquis of Hartington, killed in action, and daughter of the Honorable Joseph Kennedy, sometime ambassador of the United States to Great Britain.” And then four words carved beneath her name. Joy she gave. Joy she has found. It is a beautiful inscription.
It is also, if you know her story, one of the saddest sentences ever put on an English grave. Because what it does not say is this, that when Kathleen Kennedy was buried in that churchyard in the English countryside, only one member of her famous family stood [music] by the grave, one out of nine children. Out of a mother and a father who had raised her, shaped her, and defined her entire world. Her father came. He stood alone.
He looked, one observer later said, like a man who had been crumpled from the inside. Her mother did not come. Her brother Jack, the one she had been closest to, the one she had called her other self, the one who had become president of the United States, did not come. And sadly, tragically, nobody else came.
She was 28 years old, and she was buried not as a Kennedy, but as a Caendish. In the family plot of the English aristocracy, she had chosen over everything she had been raised to be. Her name was Kathleen Kennedy, but almost everyone who loved her called her kick. She arrived in London in the spring of 1938, 18 years old, a daughter of the new American ambassador to Great Britain.
The city took one look at her, this compact, sparkling, entirely unself-conscious girl from Massachusetts, and fell in love. She was not the great beauty of her generation. She would have been the first to tell you that. But she had something rarer. An absolute delight in being alive. A refusal to be intimidated by anything. A gift for making rooms feel brighter without trying.
The English press called her the American princess. The London social set simply called her the best thing that had happened to their season in years. And somewhere in that last golden summer before the war, she met a young man named Billy Caendish. Quiet, thoughtful, impeccably English, and they fell so deeply in love that it would cost her everything.
Her faith, her family, her country, and in the end, for a brief and luminous time that would break your heart to hear about everything she had been waiting for. Tonight, we tell the story of Kathleen Kennedy. A story that the Kennedy family spent years trying to bury quietly alongside [music] her. Because it was complicated, because it was painful, because it did not fit the gleaming political dynasty they were building above her grave.
She was the only rebel of the nine Kennedy children. The only one who refused to march down the road her parents had drawn for her. the only one who looked at everything her name required of her. The faith, the ambition, the carefully managed image and said, “Not this time.” And she paid for it. This is not a story about the Kennedy curse, though tragedy comes for her like a tide.
This is a story about a woman who loved with her whole self in a world that punished women for exactly that. A story set against the backdrop of a world going to war in the ballrooms and bombed out streets of wartime London. in the cold stone corridors of Chhatzsworth in a tiny churchyard in Darbisha village where a president of the United States would one day kneel in the grass and lay flowers alone in secret because he could not bring himself to come any sooner.
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Her story begins in the last summer when everything was still possible. London 1938. On a warm evening in July 1938, a garden party was held at Buckingham Palace. This was not unusual. Garden parties happened every summer, and London’s aristocratic families attended them the way they attended everything with practiced ease, as though the whole elaborate pageant of their social lives was something they had never had to work for and never would. The men wore morning suits.
The women wore hats. Champagne was poured. Small conversations were held. And somewhere in the crowd, standing near a young English lord named William Caendish, was an 18-year-old girl from Massachusetts who had been in England for less than 4 months. She was the daughter of the American ambassador.
She had grown up Catholic in a house full of nine children and a mother who quoted St. Luke at breakfast. She had never been to a Buckingham Palace garden party in her life. She didn’t seem to notice. That quality, the absolute refusal to be intimidated by rooms that were designed to intimidate, was the thing people would remember most about Kathleen Kennedy.
She called the Duke of Morbra Jukkey Wookie. She chewed gum on the streets of London. She laughed at herself before anyone else could. In a world of English debutants trained since birth to hang back with practiced reserve, she was something London had never quite encountered before. A young woman who was simply, entirely, and without apology present.
The English social set did not know what to make of her. Then they decided they adored her. Billy Caendish was 20 years old that summer. He was the eldest son of the Duke of Devincshire, heir to Chhatzsworth, one of the grandest estates in England, and to a dupdom that had been built in part on a deep and inherited suspicion of the Catholic Church.
He was tall, reserved, [snorts] thoughtful. He was exactly the sort of young Englishman who had been educated to carry great weight without appearing to feel it. People described him as quiet. People described him as kind. People described him always as good. They were in almost every visible way completely unlike each other.
They talked until the party ended. It would be easy looking back to say that what happened next was inevitable. It was not. The world they were living in was balanced on the edge of something enormous. And everyone in that garden, every man in his morning suit, [music] every woman in her hat, could feel it, even if no one said so out loud.
The newspapers were full of Hitler. The conversations at dinner had changed. There was a quality to that summer, a particular brightness that people would later describe as the brightness of [music] something that knows it is about to end. Kick felt it, too. She threw herself into London with the intensity of someone who understood, without quite articulating it, that the window was small. She went to every party.
She worked on social committees. She attended the races at Goodwood with Billy and a circle of friends that included, remarkably, the Mittford sisters, whose world of English aristocracy and country houses and crackling political argument was exactly the kind of world that kick understood instinctively.
Deborah Mittford, later the Duchess of Devincure, later Billy’s sister-in-law, would become one of her closest friends. In her memoir, Debo would write that kick had a quality she had never seen before or since, the ability to make everyone in a room feel that they were the most interesting person in it. She made her formal debut on May 12th, 1938.
The press named her debutant of the year. She was not yet 19, a young woman at the center of the world. And through all of it, the parties, the races, the dinners, the bright particular madness of that last London season, Billy Cavendish was there. Quiet, steady, reliable Billy. They talked about politics. They talked about faith.
They talked about what it meant to inherit a title you had not asked for, a set of obligations you had been born into before you could decide whether you wanted them. He was in many ways the opposite of the men she had grown up around. The Kennedy men who filled every room they entered, who were always performing some version of ambition. Billy simply was.
And Kick, who had spent her whole life surrounded by noise, found that restful in a way she could not explain. She wrote to her father. She had met someone interesting. Then September came, a month that changed everything. Germany invaded Poland on the first day of the month. Within 48 hours, Britain declared war, and Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador, made a decision that would define his daughter’s next four years.
He sent his family home. Kick was 19 years old. She begged to stay. Her father said no. She sailed back across the Atlantic on a ship crowded with refugees and diplomats and people who had left behind everything they owned. She did not write about the crossing in ways that survive, but we know what she left behind.
the friends she had made, the city she had fallen for, and Billy, who was already, by the time the ship departed, looking to enlist because young men like Billy did not ask whether they should serve. They simply went. She spent the next four years in America. She attended the Finch School. She studied briefly in Florida. She volunteered with the Red Cross in New York.
She took a job as a research assistant at the Washington Times Herald, where her colleagues found her charming and sharp and unusually interested in politics for a woman who was 22. She wrote home to her friends in England whenever she could. She kept up with the war news with the particular obsessiveness of someone who has people in it and she waited because she was kick Kennedy and she did not know how to give things up.
What America gave her in those four years was also this, a clearer picture of what she was returning to. The Kennedy House was not a quiet place. It was a place of ambition, organized, relentless Catholic ambition, managed with the precision of a campaign. Rose Kennedy ran the household the way generals run operations, schedules, rules, expectations.
Sunday mass was not optional. The faith was not background. It was architecture. It was the structure everything else was built on. Rose had not been happy about London. She had not been happy about Billy. She spoke in the language of duty, of God, of what was expected of a Kennedy daughter. And what was expected was straightforward.
You married within the faith. You did not marry a Protestant. You certainly did not marry the heir to one of the most aggressively anti-atholic aristocratic families in England. Kick knew all of this. She had always known it, and she had come home and lived inside it for 4 years, and attended mass and volunteered dutifully and written her letters and waited.
But she was not, had never been, the kind of woman who let other people’s expectations reshape her own. She was, as her biographer, Lynn McTagot, would later write, the only one of the nine Kennedy children who didn’t march down the prescribed road. The prescribed road was very clear and Kick had already quietly turned away from it.
In July 1943, she wrote to her brother Jack. She had found a way back to England. The American Red Cross was sending volunteers to London and she had signed up. She would be assigned to the Hans Cresant Club, a Red Cross service center near Nightsbridge, where she would work 12-hour days providing food and supplies to American officers.
She told Jack she had spent a day and a half in the country with Billy. For 24 hours, she wrote, “I forgot all about the war. She had found him again, and everything she had been carrying for 4 years. The waiting, the distance, the stubborn refusal to let the thing go had come flooding back.” “Billy is just the same,” she wrote.
A bit older, a bit more ducal, but we get on as well as ever. A bit more ducal. It is a small phrase, but underneath it is something that would not be fully understood until later. The weight of what Billy carried. The Caendish inheritance, the estates, the obligations, the ancient Protestant tradition that had defined his family for generations had drawn tighter around him in the years of war.
He was not just a young man in love. He was an heir. And what an heir of his house married and what faith his children would be raised in. These were donastic questions. They were political. They were, in a very old-fashioned English sense, a question of duty. He would propose to her within the year.
And before she could say yes, she would have to decide what she was willing to lose. The problem was not that Billy didn’t want to marry her. The problem was the children. Because Billy Cavendish was not just a Protestant. He was the heir to a dukedom built on the Protestant settlement. If his children were raised Catholic, they could not, under the laws governing the periage, inherit the title, the Devincure line.
500 years of it, Chadzsworth and all that Chadzsworth represented, would pass to someone else. Billy was not asking Kick to change her faith for him. He was asking her to consider what her faith would cost their children. And he could not pretend that didn’t matter. Because for a man like Billy, it was not only personal, it was everything.
Kick went to priests. She sat with a question for months. She wrote to her brother Joe, the eldest, the one she trusted most, and asked him what she should do. Joe, to his enormous credit, told her the truth. that he thought she should follow her heart, that the church’s position was not the only position, and that if Billy was the man she loved, the rest could be worked through.
He was the only Kennedy who said that he would also be the only Kennedy who stood beside her on her wedding day. She wrote to her father. Joe Senior’s response was characteristically practical. He was not going to tell her what to do, but he was going to make clear that whatever she decided, she would be deciding alone and the consequences would be hers to carry.
She never asked her mother. She already knew what Rose would say. Rose Kennedy’s Catholicism was not background noise. It was the central fact of her life, the framework inside which everything else, including her children, existed. She had lived inside a marriage that tested her in ways she never spoke about publicly. And the faith had held her.
It was the thing that made sense of suffering. It was, as she would tell her children over and over again, the only thing that lasted. When Kick’s situation became clear, when it became apparent that her daughter was seriously considering marrying outside the church in a civil ceremony with no Catholic dispensation and no promise of Catholic children, Rose responded with the full weight of everything she believed.
She told Kick that what she was contemplating was a mortal sin. She said, according to those who were present, that this was the darkest day she had ever known. She did not come to the wedding. We should be careful here. Rose Kennedy was not a simple villain. She was a woman of genuine faith under genuine anguish, acting according to a moral framework that was entirely consistent and entirely sincere.
She believed with every cell of her body that her daughter’s soul was in danger. That is not nothing. That is not cruelty for the sake of cruelty. But the effect on Kick, who had spent her whole life trying to be everything her mother needed her to be, who had returned to America and waited and attended mass and tried for 4 years to be the daughter Rose required, was devastating.
There are no letters from Kick describing what it felt like to know her mother would not be there. We only know what she did next. She signed the register on the morning of May 6th, 1944. The ceremony was held at Chelsea Register office on King’s Road in London. A civil ceremony, quick and unadorned, the kind that left no room for pageantry.
Kick wore a pale pink dress. She carried flowers, pink chameleas brought from Chhatzsworth that very morning. The first gesture from the Caendish family that said, “You are one of us now.” Billy stood beside her in his Cold Stream Guard’s uniform. Joe Junior signed the register. The Duke of Devincshire signed the register.
A small group of friends, the London set that had loved her since 1938, stood around them in the plain room and watched. That was all. 400 miles away in America, Rose Kennedy did not attend. Back in his own corner of the world, Jack Kennedy, who had wanted to come, who had written to say he was sorry he couldn’t be there, was in the Pacific, recovering from injuries sustained when his patrol boat was destroyed by a Japanese destroyer.
He sent his love from a long way away. It was by any measure one of the loneliest wedding mornings in living memory. A woman marrying the man she had waited six years for in the middle of a war with one brother present and the rest of the people who should have been there scattered across two continents. Some by circumstance, some by choice.
Kick did not write about the morning in terms that survive, but those who were there said she was radiant. not performed radiance, not the bright social face she had learned to put on since childhood, something quieter and more real than that. The particular expression of a person who has paid a price and decided finally that it was worth it.
Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devincure, took Kick aside after the ceremony. She told her, according to accounts that have been passed down, never to forget that marrying Billy had given him complete happiness. It is a gift of a sentence. It is also, in retrospect, the saddest thing anyone said that day because they had so little time to find out what happiness for the two of them actually looked like.
4 weeks after the wedding, Billy was called up. He reported for duty on June 13th, 1944, 7 days after D-Day, as his battalion prepared to push into France with the guard’s armored division. He left Kick standing in London in a city that still smelled of smoke from the years of bombing with a marriage that was barely a month old and a war that had not yet decided whether it would let them have each other.
She went back to work at the Red Cross. She wrote to him every day. She told herself it would be short. London in the summer of 1944 was a city living on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, the buses still running, the shops still open, the BBC still broadcasting its careful, measured voice into every home, life continued in its interrupted way.
Underneath the city was exhausted. The Blitz had ended two years earlier, but now there were the V1s, the Doodlebugs, as Londoners had grimly named them. Unmanned bombs that flew in silence and then cut their engines before impact, giving you, if you were listening, approximately 12 seconds of warning before the world came apart.
Kick wrote in her diary about the sound of them, the way everyone in a room would stop mid-sentence when the engine went quiet, waiting. She had chosen this. She had chosen to be here in this city, in this war, in this life. She had paid everything her mother had asked her not to pay. And she was here doing the work, writing the letters, counting the days, living inside the particular faith of wartime.
The faith that the person you love will simply somehow come back. Billy wrote to her from the front. His letters were careful in the way that soldiers letters always are, shaped by the knowledge that they might be the last thing he sent her and by the equally powerful instinct not to let her know he was thinking that.
But the feeling came through anyway. In the first week of September 1944, Billy Cavendish’s battalion crossed the river Som. They pushed east through northern France and into Belgium, moving through towns and villages that had been under German occupation for 4 years. The people came out to meet them. Not the careful, hesitant welcome of people who weren’t sure yet, but something roarer and louder than that.
They decorated the tanks with flowers. They lined the roads. They wept and cheered and reached out to touch the soldiers uniforms as they passed, as though they needed to confirm that this was real, that the liberation was actually happening, that the years of waiting were finally over. Billy wrote to Kick from the middle of it.
He described the crowds, the flowers, the particular quality of the welcome, the way people who had endured something terrible received the news of their own rescue. He was moved in a way that surprised him. He said he had lived through the war at a distance, training in England while other men fought, and he had felt the quiet shame of that, the sense of being spared something he should have been part of.
Now he was here and the gratitude of the people around him was almost too much to bear. I feel so unworthy of it all, he wrote, living as I have in reasonable safety and comfort during these years. And then a few sentences later, the line that stops you. I have a permanent lump in my throat and long for you to be here as it is an experience which few can have and which I would love to share with you.
He wanted to share it with her. The liberation of Europe, the flowers on the tanks, all of it. He was 26 years old, standing in the middle of one of the great moments of the 20th century. And what he thought about was kick. The letter was written sometime in early September 1944. He was dead within the week.
On September 9th, Billy Caendish was shot and killed by a German sniper near the town of Heepen, Belgium. He was 26 years old. He had been married for 4 months and 3 days. The news reached Kick in London. We do not know exactly how she received it, who came to the door, what words were used, what the room looked like in the moments after.
What we know is what came next. She wrote to a friend very shortly after, “Life is so cruel. Writing is impossible.” Three words. Then she stopped. She did not go home to America. This is the first important thing to understand about what happened after Billy died. every instinct her family had, every Kennedy reflex, the pull toward home, toward the compound at Hyannisport, toward the Catholic parish and the family dinners and the managed grief of a household that had already survived so much said, “Come back.”
And Kick stayed. She stayed in England. She stayed in the house that was no longer exactly hers. the Cavendish world that had welcomed her so completely that had put flowers in her hands on the morning of her wedding and told her she belonged and she grieved there quietly in the English way.
Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devincere, wrote to her. She told Kick never to forget that her marriage had given Billy complete happiness. It was under the circumstances exactly the right thing to say. And it was also under the circumstances the thing that made it hardest to leave because Kick had given him happiness. She had done that.
Whatever her mother thought of the marriage, whatever the church thought of it, whatever it had cost, she had given the man she loved 4 months of complete happiness. That was real. That was verified in writing by his own mother. And in a life that had asked her to pay so much for love, the knowledge that it had been worth something, that Billy had felt it, had known it, had written about it from a muddy road in Belgium was the thing she held on to.
She was 24 years old. She was a widow. She was the Martianess of Hartington, a title that had no meaning anymore without the man who had given it to her. And then 33 days after Billy was killed, the telegram came again. Her brother Joe was dead. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., the eldest, the heir apparent, the one who had signed the register at her wedding, the one who had told her to follow her heart when no one else would, had been killed on August 12th when his experimental aircraft exploded over the English Channel. The family had known
for 3 weeks by the time Kick received the news. They had been protecting her, waiting for her to have a little more time before another loss arrived. There was not enough time in the world for that. She had lost her husband and her brother within a month of each other. Both young, both in uniform, both in a war that was still technically going well.
She sat with the Caendish family for Christmas that year. The Duchess had insisted, had made clear that Kick’s place at the table was not conditional on Billy’s presence, that she was family now regardless, and she tried to find a way forward in a world that had, in the space of 8 weeks, removed the two people she had loved most. She did not write very much about that Christmas.
What survives is a letter to a friend written sometime in early 1945 in which she said simply, “One thing you can be sure of. Life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage, and death before the age of 25.” It reads like bravado. It reads like a person talking herself into something. But it also reads, if you’ve been paying attention to who Kick Kennedy was, like the plain truth, she had faced all of it.
She had not been destroyed by it. She had chosen this life with open eyes and she was going to keep living it because to do anything else would be to say that Billy had not been worth it. And he had been worth it. She was certain of that. She would never stop being certain of that. Back in America, the Kennedy household absorbed the losses in the way it absorbed everything by continuing.
Joe Senior wept when he heard about Billy, according to those who saw him that September. He had liked Billy. He had, in the complicated calculus of a man who had spent his life calculating everything, understood what Billy represented. Not just a husband for his daughter, but a bridge to a world of English power and aristocracy that Joe Kennedy had always coveted from the outside.
He had paid Kick’s diary [music] in ways that were never discussed publicly. He had in the end been more understanding than Rose. But understanding was not the same as coming. He had not come to the wedding. He would come eventually to the grave, but not yet. Not while there was still a political dynasty to build, still sons to position, still the long project of the Kennedy name to manage.
Rose, for her part, received the news of Billy’s death with something that those around her described carefully as resignation. She had prayed for this marriage not to happen. When it happened, she had stayed away. When it ended, when the very Protestant heir to the very Protestant dupdom was killed in action 4 months after the ceremony Rose had refused to attend, she said very little.
Some biographers have suggested that she saw it privately as a kind of answer to prayer. We cannot know that with certainty. What we know is that she did not go to London. She wrote to Kick. She asked her daughter to come home. Kick did not come home. The war ended in the spring of 1945. London came back to itself slowly, the way cities do after long catastrophes.
Not all at once, but in pieces. One reopened shop at a time, one repaired window. One evening, when the blackout curtains finally came down, and the light spilled out onto the street, and people stood outside their houses and looked at it as though they had forgotten what ordinary brightness felt like. Kick stayed.
Her mother had asked her to come home. Her father had suggested in the measured way he had of suggesting things that America might be a better place to rebuild. The Kennedy machine was starting to move again. Jack was thinking about politics. The family name was being positioned. There were plans to make and futures to organize.
There was a place for kick in all of it if she wanted it. She did not want it. She had made her decision in the autumn of 1944, in the weeks after Billy died, and she had not changed her mind. England was her home. The Caendish family had taken her in without conditions. the friend she had made in those last pre-war summers, the Mitfords, the Caendish cousins, the whole sprawling social world of English aristocracy that had opened itself to her in 1938 was still here, still intact in the ways that mattered, still willing to set a
place at the table for Billy’s widow. She had earned her place in this world. She was not going to leave it because her mother wanted her in a different zip code. She threw herself into life. She chaired charitable committees. She attended dinners and weekends in the country and the sort of house parties that resumed tentatively as England tried to remember what peaceime felt like.
She became, in the eyes of the people who knew her, something she had perhaps always been on her way to becoming. Not just the ambassador’s daughter, not just Billy’s wife, but a figure in her own right, a woman who had paid for her choices and was still standing and was still astonishingly still warm. The Times of London would write about her after everything was over, that no American, man or woman, who has ever settled in England was so much loved as she.
And no American ever loved England more. They were not wrong. But there is something in that sentence worth sitting with. The word settled. Because Kick had not drifted into English life. She had fought her way into it at enormous cost against the wishes of her family and her church and the entire structure of expectation she had been raised inside.
To call it settling is to miss the violence of the choice. She had not settled. She had chosen. There is a detail that gets lost in the larger story and it is worth pausing for. While Kick was in London living quietly as a widow, attending charity events and managing her modest income from the Caendish estate, her brothers were doing what Kennedy men did.
Jack was pursuing women, many of them openly, with a casual entitlement of a man who had never been asked to account for his desires. Her father had kept a mistress for years. The Kennedy family’s relationship with fidelity was, by any honest accounting, entirely flexible, so long as you were male.
Kick had married one man outside her faith. She had loved him publicly and faithfully, buried him, grieved him, and stayed in the country that had been his. And for this, for this single act of choosing her own life, she had been told she had committed a mortal sin, been absent from her own wedding, been asked repeatedly to come home.
The asymmetry of it did not make her bitter. That was not her nature, but it was there, visible in the letters and accounts of the period for anyone who wanted to see it. She had been held to a standard that her brothers were not held to. She had paid a price that they would never be asked to pay. And she had paid it without complaint and stayed and built something real out of the ruins.
That was Kit Kennedy. That was the woman England loved. It was at a charity ball in 1946, the Commando’s Benevolent Fund Ball held in London that she met Peter Fitz William. He was the eighth Earl Fitz William. He was 35 years old. He was by virtually every account extraordinarily charming.
The kind of man who filled rooms the way kick filled rooms with the particular energy of someone who had decided that life was short and that the correct response to its shortness was to live it as fully and as recklessly as possible. He had served with distinction in the war. He had inherited from his father one of the great English fortunes, estates, houses, land.
He was in the language of his world a very considerable catch. He was also married. His marriage by 1946 was a wreck. His wife Olive was struggling with alcoholism and Peter was by the time he and Kick met already quietly pursuing a divorce. whether the divorce would come through and when and what the church would make of it when it did.
These were not simple questions, but they were questions, not prohibitions. And Kick, who had already once paid the full price of loving someone her family didn’t approve of, was not inclined to let the complications stop her. She fell for him. Those who knew them together said there was something between Peter and Kick that was different from what she’d had with Billy.
Less tender, perhaps, more electric. Billy had been her counterweight, the stillness to her energy, the England that grounded her. Peter was more like her, restless, social, alive to everything. Where Billy had given her a home, Peter gave her something else. the sense that life, even after everything it had taken from her, still had rooms she hadn’t entered yet.
She began to think about the future in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to since Billy died. She also began quietly to consider the problem of her family because Peter Fitz William was Protestant and he was not yet divorced. And the Kennedy family, the Catholic Kennedy family, the family that was building itself toward the presidency, the family whose image could not absorb another Kick Kennedy scandal, was going to have an opinion about this, a loud one.
By early 1948, she had made up her mind. She was going to marry Peter. She was going to do it right or as right as the circumstances allowed, which meant first telling her father, not asking permission exactly. She was 27 years old, a widow, a woman who had already demonstrated that she was capable of making her own decisions and living with the consequences.
But she wanted to tell him. She wanted, if possible, to have his blessing, or at least his understanding. Joe Kennedy was in Paris in the spring of 1948. That was where she would go. She booked the flight with Peter. They would fly to Paris, meet with her father, and from there continue south to the French Riviera.
a few days, some sun, a brief rest from the complications of London before they came back and got on with the business of building a life together. It was by any measure a reasonable plan, a practical plan, the plan of a woman who had learned through years of loss and compromise how to navigate the gap between what she wanted and what the world was willing to give her.
She had no way of knowing that it was the last plan she would ever make. On May 13th, 1948, Kick and Peter boarded a De Havlin Dove at Cudon Airport outside London. The weather reports were not good. Peter told the pilot to fly anyway. The De Havlin Dove took off from Cudden Airport at 3:30 in the afternoon on May 13th, 1948.
It was a small plane. Four passengers, two crew. Kick and Peter sat together. The pilot’s name was Peter Townsend. The navigator’s name was Arthur Freeman. They climbed to 10,000 ft and turned south toward France, toward the Sun and the Riviera and the meeting in Paris that Kick had been building herself up to for weeks.
One hour into the flight, the plane entered a storm. What happened next is known from the French and British investigation that followed. The aircraft flew into severe turbulence over the region of Vienn. Not the gentle turbulence of a bumpy crossing, but something violent and relentless, throwing the small plane up and down by thousands of feet at [music] a time.
For 20 minutes, the four people inside endured it. 20 minutes of being hurled through the interior of a cloud that had no floor and no ceiling, of not knowing which direction was up, of waiting for the plane to find the other side. When it finally broke through the clouds, it was in a steep dive.
The pilot pulled back on the controls. The maneuver, the only possible response to what was happening, placed more stress on the aircraft than it could bear. A wing came loose. Then both engines, then the tail. The fuselage spun and struck the ground nose first in a ravine on the plateau duaron near the village of Sambuzil in the Aardesh.
All four were killed instantly. Kathleen Kennedy was 28 years old. The Kennedy family learned of the crash that same day. What happened next is the part of the story that the family managed carefully. and that history has had to piece together from the edges, from accounts of people who were there, from biographies written decades later, from the simple fact of what did and did not appear in the newspapers at the time.
The family suppressed the details, not the crash itself that was public, [music] that was in the papers within 24 hours. What they suppressed was the context, the relationship, the fact that Kick had been traveling with Peter Fitz William, a man who was married, who was in the process of divorcing, who represented exactly the kind of scandal that the Kennedy family in 1948, with Jack Kennedy’s political career just beginning to take shape, could not afford to have attached to the family name.
The newspaper accounts of the crash identified the victims. They did not describe the nature of Kick and Peter’s relationship. The Kennedy family saw to that. Joe Senior was already in Europe. He flew to France. He identified his daughter’s body. He made the arrangements or rather he accepted the arrangements that the Caendish family with tremendous grace had already begun to make.
The Devinces organized the funeral. They gave kick a full Catholic ceremony. They buried her in the family churchyard at Edenser in the Caendish plot in the Darbisha Hills in the earth of the country she had chosen. They did for her in death what her own family had been unable to do in life. They claimed her without conditions. Joe Kennedy attended the funeral.
He stood at the graveside in Darbisher in the spring of 1948. And those who saw him that day described a man who looked, in the words of one account, crumpled just like the suit he was wearing. The man who had built the Kennedy dynasty, who had positioned his children for greatness with the precision of a chess master, who had managed everything, the money, the image, the political ambition, the careful distance from scandal, stood in a churchyard in the English countryside and could not manage this.
He was alone. Rose Kennedy did not come. She was in America. She stayed in America. She did not attend her daughter’s funeral. Did not stand at her grave. Did not make the crossing that Joe had made. The reasons she gave to those who asked were various. Her health, the distance, the impossibility of the arrangements.
Some biographers have written carefully that she experienced Kick’s death through the lens of her faith. that the losses which had accompanied both of Kick’s relationships with Protestant men confirmed something Rose had believed from the beginning. We cannot put words in Rose Kennedy’s mouth that she did not leave on the record.
What we can say is what the record shows. She was not there. Her daughter was buried without her. The grave was marked with a simple stone. The inscription read, “Joy she gave, joy she has found.” The Cavendishes had chosen it. It was perfect in the way that things chosen by people who loved her were always perfect.
The way that England’s love for Kick was always somehow cleaner, less conditional, less attached to what she was supposed to be than the love of the family she had come from. Back in America, the silence settled in. Jack Kennedy, who had been closer to kick than to almost anyone in the world, who had followed her into the English social set in 1938 and found there the intellectual world that shaped his presidency, who had wanted to come to her wedding and couldn’t, who had not come to her funeral, carried the loss privately in the way Kennedy men carried
things. He did not speak about her publicly. He could not. The circumstances of her death made silence the only safe choice for a man whose career depended on a Catholic constituency. The family did not speak about her. She became in the years that followed a footnote, a name in the genealogies, the sister who had gone to England and married the wrong man and died young.
The Kennedy curse, people said when they mentioned her at all, as though tragedy was something that happened to the Kennedys from the outside, rather than something the Kennedys sometimes in their own ways helped along. But the people who had known her, the Devinces, the Mitfords, the friends from those last golden summers before the war, did not forget.
They remembered a woman who had walked into their world with gum on her shoes and laughter in her voice and a refusal to be intimidated by anything and who had loved one of their own so completely that she had given up everything to stay. They remembered her as she had been, not a Kennedy, a Caendish, a woman who had chosen England and whom England had chosen back.
And in a small churchyard in Darbisha, in the ground of Chhatzsworth, her name sat in the stone and waited for someone to come and read it. For 15 years, no one from her family came. There is one more thing worth saying about the silence. Kick had gone to Europe to ask her father’s blessing.
That was the purpose of the flight. Not a vacation, not a holiday, but a daughter making one more attempt to bring her family with her into the life she had chosen. She had paid every price they had ever asked. She had lost Billy. She had stayed. She had grieved and rebuilt and found her way forward. And now she was ready to love again.
And she wanted, perhaps for the last time, to do it with her father’s knowledge and his blessing and something that resembled his peace. She never got to ask. The plane came apart over the Aardesh before she reached Paris. Before she reached her father, before she could say the words she had crossed a continent to say. That is the thing the newspapers did not report.
That is the thing the family buried along with the details of who she was traveling with. Not just that she died, but that she died on her way to trying one more time to bring her two worlds together. She almost made it. She almost always almost made it. On the afternoon of July 29th, 1963, the sound of a helicopter broke the quiet over the village of Edenser.
The villagers heard it before they saw it. the low thrum of rotor blades coming in over the hills, dropping toward a field behind the churchyard. People came out of their houses in shirt sleeves and carpet slippers, surprised, blinking in the afternoon light. A small group of security men was already waiting in the field.
And then the helicopter touched down and a single figure stepped out. John F. Kennedy, president of the United States, the most famous man alive, had come to Darbisha alone. He had just visited Ireland, 4 days in the country his greatgrandparents had left a hundred years before, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who had lined the roads just to see his face. He had given speeches.
He had shaken hands. He had been the symbol of everything that Irish immigrants had dreamed of when they boarded the boats for America. And then quietly, without announcement, he had broken from the official itinerary and flown to a small estate village in the English countryside to do something the president of the United States had no protocol for.
He walked across a temporary bridge that the chats with groundsmen had built especially for his visit. He passed through the churchyard gate. He walked the short distance to a headstone near the edge of the Caendish family plot. And then, according to those who watched from a respectful distance, he walked the last few yards alone.
He stood at his sister’s grave for several minutes. He knelt. He placed flowers on the stone. He read the inscription that had been chosen by the family who had loved her without conditions. the family she had chosen over everything she had been raised to be. Joy she gave. Joy she has found. He rose. He stood there a moment longer.
Then he turned and walked back through the churchyard to the waiting car. The whole visit lasted less than an hour. He wrote to the Duchess of Devincure a few weeks later. It was a short letter, handwritten, the kind that a man writes when he is trying to say something he does not entirely have words for.
He thanked her for what she and the family had done for Kick. He said that the arrangements at Edenser were beautiful, and then slightly misquing the inscription, getting one word wrong, the way you do when something is so close to you that you can’t quite see it clearly, he wrote. The inscription, “Joy she gave, joy she found,” is so appropriate and moving.
And then I hope the next time we come, we can make a longer visit. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd, 1963, 116 days after he knelt at his sister’s grave in Darbisha. There was no next time. The churchyard at Edenser is quiet now. It has always been quiet. That particular English quiet of old stone and old grass and the particular quality of light that falls on the Peak District in the late afternoon when the shadows come down from the hills and the air smells of something that is not quite
history but is close to it. There are two markers at Kick’s grave. The first is the headstone, the one the Caendishes chose with the four words that say everything and nothing. Joy she gave. Joy she has found. Beneath her name the acknowledgement that she was the widow of Major the Marquis of Hartington killed in action and the daughter of the Honorable Joseph Kennedy sometime ambassador of the United States to Great Britain.
Martianess, ambassador’s daughter, both things, neither thing fully. The second is a small plaque set into the ground beside the stone. It reads in memory of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America, who visited this grave on 29th of June, 1963. Two markers, a sister and a brother. She has been here since 1948.
He came once in secret in the last months of his life and knelt in the grass and could not stay long enough. The Caendishes are buried all around her generation after generation of the family she married into, the family that claimed her when her own would not. Billy is not here. Billy is in Belgium in the ground where he fell, far from Chadzsworth and far from her.
They were married for 4 months and 3 days and they have been separated in death for more than 70 years. She is 28 years old forever. The grass grows over the stone. The light changes through the afternoon. And somewhere on the far side of all the things this life required of her, the faith she gave up, the family she defied, the years of waiting and loss and beginning again.
There is still the girl who walked into a Buckingham Palace garden party in the summer of 1938 and refused to be intimidated by any of it. the girl who chewed gum on the streets of London, who called the Duke of Marra Juky Wookie, who wrote to her brother that for 24 hours she had forgotten all about the war, who loved England so completely that she stayed, who gave everything she had and found in the giving something that cannot be taken back.
Joy she gave.
