then tell me please...

"That young American friend of yours, he hasn't got a year to live."  John Kennedy's English physician, who diagnosed his Addison's disease during the freshman congressman's 1947 trip to Ireland, made that statement to Pamela Churchill, according to the JFK bio An Unfinished Life.
--------------------- excerpt---------When he came home from London in September 1947, he was so ill that a priest came aboard the Queen Mary to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher.

In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip "iffy," he told Ted Reardon, "It's okay for someone with my life expectancy," but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train....

Events affecting Jack's sister Kathleen deepened his feelings about the tenuousness of life.   Jack was closer to her than to any of his other siblings.  They shared an attraction to rebelliousness or at least to departing from the confining rules of their Church and mother.

Jack had supported "Kick" in a decision to marry Billy Hartington, outside of her faith.  Billy's death in the war had brought her closer than ever to Jack.  Each had a sense of life's precariousness, which made them both a little cynical and resistant to social mores.  And so in the summer of 1947, during his visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, Jack was pleased to learn that Kathleen had fallen deeply in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy English aristocrat and much-decorated war hero. 

A breeder of racehorses and a man of exceptional charm, with a reputation for womanizing despite being married to a beautiful English heiress, Fitzwilliam reminded some people of Joe Kennedy -- "older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male."  Jack saw Kathleen's determination to marry Fitzwilliam -- who would have to divorce his current wife first -- despite Rose's warnings that she and Joe would disown her, as a demonstration of independence and risk taking that he admired. 

Before any final decision was reached, however, a tragic accident burdened the Kennedys with a far greater trauma.  In May 1948, while on an ill-advised flight in stormy weather to the south of France, Kathleen and Fitzwilliam were killed when their private plane crashed into the side of a mountain in the Rhone Valley.

Jack found it impossible to make sense of Kathleen's death.  When it was confirmed by a phone call from Ted Reardon, Jack was at home listening to a recording of Ella Logan singing the lead song from Finian's Rainbow, "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"  She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton.  Then he turned away and began to cry. 

"How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?" Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings.----------- [end excerpt]

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An Unfinished Life
Robert Dallek
2003
Little Brown

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