Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the son the family expected to be president, and he volunteered for a mission that killed him at twenty-nine. He was the eldest of nine, born in 1915, and raised explicitly for public office by a father who had been ambassador to London and had views about which of his children would carry the family. He went to Harvard, studied briefly under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and at twenty-five was a delegate to the 1940 Democratic convention, where he voted against nominating Roosevelt for a third term and would not be moved. He joined the navy before Pearl Harbor and flew Liberators on anti-submarine patrols over the Bay of Biscay, completing a full tour of operations. He had orders home when he volunteered for a second tour and then for Operation Aphrodite, an experimental scheme against the German V-weapon sites: a worn-out bomber was packed with about ten tons of explosive, flown off by two pilots who were meant to arm it and parachute out, and then guided to its target by radio from a mother aircraft. On 12 August 1944 his aircraft exploded in the air over Blythburgh in Suffolk, before the crew could jump. He and Wilford Willy were killed outright and nothing identifiable was recovered. The cause was never established with certainty; a fault in the arming circuit is the usual explanation. He was awarded the Navy Cross. The consequence for everyone else was that the family's political expectation moved down a place to his brother John, who had not been raised for it.

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