Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  And if Kennedy’s humor was mordant, Reagan’s was usually unrelentingly cheerful. He explained his sunny outlook with the story of two brothers, one a pessimist and one an optimist, who are taken by their parents to see a psychiatrist. The pessimistic child is locked in a room filled with shiny new toys, while the optimistic child is locked in a room filled with horse manure. When the parents checked on the boys, the pessimist was crying; he had refused to play with the toys for fear of breaking them. The optimist, however, “was cheerfully shoveling through the manure” because, he told his parents, “With this much manure around, I know there’s a pony in here someplace!”

  CHAPTER 4

  DIFFERENT INCOMES, SIMILAR FAMILIES

  It may seem ludicrous to suggest that John F. Kennedy, son of one of the richest men in America, and Ronald Reagan, son of a struggling shoe salesman in a small town in central Illinois, had a similar upbringing, but the dynamics in each family were remarkably similar. Each man had a rakish father who burned with ambition to succeed in business, a pious mother who tried (with differing success) to interest their sons in religion, and a domineering and favored older brother.

  Neither Kennedy nor Reagan also ever really had what could be called a boyhood home—though for opposite reasons. In Reagan’s case, his parents never owned their own home and instead lived in a dizzying succession of apartments and rental homes. Reagan moved seven times by the time he was nine years old, and in one stretch he attended four different schools in four years. Kennedy led almost as nomadic a childhood because his family owned so many homes and because he attended elite boarding schools.

  This lack of roots, the absence of a place to truly call home, factored into two shared characteristics of Kennedy and Reagan. First, each man, because of the need to continually make new friends, developed certain skills that were helpful later on in politics, particularly the ability to make a quick emotional connection with a total stranger. Second, they would have learned that to give too much of themselves would likely lead to disappointment. Just as a bond would be formed, it would be broken as they were uprooted from a place of comfort and were forced to move to a new home, a new town, or a new school. Giving only a small piece of themselves must have become a habit, for later in life, even those who knew them best, including their wives, acknowledged that both Kennedy and Reagan had erected invisible walls denying others access to their deepest thoughts and feelings.

  The Kennedy and the Reagan families were always on the move because the fathers in each household were always on the go, always seeking to move up in the world. Joseph P. Kennedy and John Edward “Jack” Reagan trod the same path; the greatest difference between the two was where they started out.

  Jack Reagan had been orphaned at the age of six and never finished high school, while Joe Kennedy was the fortunate son of a successful Boston businessman and politician and attended the very best schools, including Harvard. Yet Reagan and Kennedy shared handsome looks and solid athleticism. They were each unusually charming men, though mercurial in temperament, and resentful that they were often treated as outsiders. They had great personal vices: women, in Kennedy’s case, and alcohol, in Reagan’s. They each also burned with determination to succeed in business, and they worked every angle they could to achieve that goal. They played the same game, but with different stakes.

  Both men demonstrated business acumen and a love of work at a young age. At the prestigious Boston Latin School, Kennedy was an average student who excelled in sports and extracurricular activities.* He even led the city high school baseball league in batting his senior year, but his real proficiency was in making money. At age fifteen, when other boys might be selling newspapers to earn a small pittance, Kennedy organized a neighborhood baseball team, bought uniforms, rented fields, sold tickets, and installed himself as manager, coach, and first baseman while making a tidy profit. Other players complained that Kennedy was domineering; Kennedy did not care. His motto, he told his sister, was “If you can’t be the captain, don’t play.” During another summer, while still a teenager, Kennedy and a friend bought a tour bus and turned a $600 investment into a $10,000 profit.

  * Among the many illustrious alumni of Boston Latin are Cotton Mather, John Hancock, Charles Sumner, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  While Joe Kennedy was making small fortunes in his spare time at Boston Latin and Harvard, Jack Reagan was focusing on a seemingly more modest goal that was nonetheless considerable for a boy with his background. After his father died two years after his mother, Jack and his five siblings were farmed out to various relatives. Jack lived, at least for a time, with an aunt who was married to the owner of a department store in Bennett, Iowa. This move may have influenced his choice of profession as shoe salesman, for though he was the son of a farmer, there is no record of Jack having ever worked on a farm, nor did he ever express a desire to own land. By the time he was sixteen, Jack’s occupation was listed in the 1890 Census as “dry goods salesman,” but his dream was to own his own shoe store.

  Jack was becoming well established as a seller of shoes and dry goods when Joe Kennedy entered Harvard. Surprisingly for an Irish Catholic in this milieu, Joe did well socially—but not well enough to spare his extraordinary sensitivity to slights, real or perceived. Granted membership in several social clubs, Joe failed to gain admittance to the most prestigious clubs on campus. It was a snub he never forgot or forgave. He was still trying to buy favor with his WASP-ish former classmates by providing free beer and entertainment at his Harvard reunions, but when he was booed at his twenty-fifth class reunion (when he was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission), he never attended another and developed a rabid hatred of Harvard. As Joe told New York Times columnist Arthur Krock many years later, “For the Kennedys it is the shit house or the castle—nothing in between.”

  The boos may have represented an expression of disdain for anything or anyone connected with the Roosevelt administration, but they also represented the opinion old money holds for the nouveau riche, particularly those who seem to be strivers, and Joe—a model university student—had seemed a striver at Harvard. When one of his professors, Charles Copeland, learned that Kennedy neither smoked, nor drank, nor played cards, nor told off-color stories, he shook his finger at Joe and said, “Young man, I suspect you of some great crime.” People were always suspecting Joe Kennedy of some great crime because his business success was so extraordinary that people assumed it could not possibly have been legal.

  At the age of twenty-five, Joe borrowed money from friends and wealthy relatives on his mother’s side of the family to preserve controlling interest in a bank, the Columbia Trust Company, which his father had helped found several years before. With more stock shares in the bank than anyone else, Joe made himself president of the bank, appointed as bank officers friends who would rubberstamp any decisions he made, and subsequently received considerable media attention as the youngest bank president in Massachusetts and perhaps the country.

  The Harvard boy who did not smoke or drink had fewer scruples in business. Joe demonstrated early in his career that he did not flinch from doing what he thought was necessary to get the edge on the competition. For example, shortly after Joe took control of Columbia Trust, new Boston mayor James Michael Curley (whose exploits provided him the nickname “The Rascal King”) announced he was establishing an economic development fund called “Boom Boston.” A number of banks refused to contribute to what they clearly (and correctly) understood would be a Curley campaign slush fund. Kennedy understood the nature of the fund too but did not care. He made a substantial contribution. The banks that did not pony up saw Curley withdraw city deposits from their institutions, and some of those deposits made their way to Columbia Trust.

  Jack Reagan, of course, had no access to such capital, but he still sought an edge in business wherever a poor clerk could find one. Jack was, in the words of his son, the future president, “burning with ambit
ion to succeed.” His son said he “loved shoes . . . [and] spent hours analyzing the bones of the foot.” Jack took a variety of correspondence courses, including one that allowed him to announce to readers of the local newspaper in Dixon, Illinois, that he was now a “certified practipedist,” which gave him knowledge of “all foot troubles and the correct methods of relief for all foot discomforts.” Later, the Dixon shoe store Jack managed, the Fashion Boot Shop, became one of the first shoe stores in Illinois to use X-rays to help fit customers’ shoes.

  Jack no doubt hoped the success of the Fashion Boot Shop might someday allow him to realize his dream of owning his own store, but after eight years in business, the store became a casualty of the Depression, which arrived in farm country sooner than the rest of the nation. Fashion Boot Shop closed in 1929, and Jack again had to scramble to find work as a clerk in his mid-forties.

  The Great Depression was far kinder to Joe Kennedy. Contrary to legend, Kennedy had not made his fortune in bootlegging; he never imported or sold any liquor during Prohibition. Rather, his fortune was built upon banking, shipbuilding, and, especially, motion pictures. Kennedy did not go to Hollywood with any great artistic aspirations; he went to make money. Kennedy acquired, merged, and sold production studios at a dizzying pace. Fortune magazine estimated transactions involving one company alone netting Kennedy $5 million, while another acquisition and merger, which resulted in the formation of the RKO studio, netted Kennedy and his partners perhaps $15 million. Using his Hollywood profits to short-sell stocks during the market crash, Kennedy was probably worth more than $100 million by 1930.

  There was one other thing in Hollywood besides money that interested Joe Kennedy: beautiful women. Kennedy was a philanderer on a grand scale, and he made no effort to spare his wife and family knowledge of his womanizing. Joe was known to “tease” his wife, Rose—in front of friends—about her supposed belief that “there is no romance outside of procreation.” Rose’s supposed rule that sex was only for conceiving children may be partly true, for the story is told that after Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the ninth Kennedy child, was born, Rose told Joe, “No more sex.” But even if Rose Kennedy had been even more enthusiastic about lovemaking, there is no sense that this would have reduced Joe’s philandering. He believed, an acquaintance said, that sleeping with attractive women was something a rich man was entitled to, “like caviar.” It was “his idea of manliness.”

  In 1920, after six years of marriage and four children, Joe’s infidelities led Rose to separate and return to her childhood home. After three weeks, her father, who himself had had a notorious affair with a cigarette girl named “Toodles” Ryan while he served as Boston’s mayor, ordered Rose to return home and make her marriage work. “You’ve made your commitment, Rosie,” he said, “and you must honor it now.” After first attending a religious retreat, Rose did return home and essentially turned a blind eye to her husband’s activities from then on.

  These activities included Joe’s attempts to “seduce” (assault may be more accurate) the young female friends of his children. Jack used to warn young women spending the night, including his dates, “Be sure to lock the bedroom door. The Ambassador has a tendency to prowl at night.” One of Jack’s girlfriends, Mary Pitcairn Keating, recalled that when she spent the night at the Kennedy home, while sharing a room with Eunice Kennedy, Joe came in while she was in her nightgown to “kiss me goodnight. . . . [He] really kissed me! It was so silly. I remember thinking, ‘How embarrassing for Eunice!’” Or it may not have bothered Eunice at all. Another Kennedy daughter, Kathleen, thought it was “hysterically funny” when a newspaper identified her father as “the playboy of Palm Springs,” and gushed, “I think it shows a lot of life left in that old man of ours.” In a letter to her daughters, even Rose joked about Joe’s pledge to bed one of his youngest son’s dates once she turned eighteen; Joe was sixty at the time. Inga Arvad, who dated John Kennedy during World War II and for whom he seemed to have genuine feelings, reported that when Joe was present he would “try to hop in the sack” with her whenever Jack left the room. Arvad thought “there was something incestuous about the whole family.”

  Arvad’s observation was vividly demonstrated by the boys’ willingness to occasionally help procure women for their father. Washington socialite Kay Halle recalls being invited, while at a Washington restaurant, to join the table of Joe Kennedy and his sons John and Robert—John being a congressman at the time—and the boys told her that their father would be in Washington for a few days “and needed female companionship. They wondered whom I could suggest, and they were absolutely serious.”

  How the boys were able to square this behavior with their supposed affection for their mother is hard to fathom, though the knowledge that their mother tolerated their father’s behavior may have perversely made them more contemptuous of her than of him. Joe’s most brazen affair was with the film actress Gloria Swanson, whom Joe even brought along on a family cruise to the astonishment of Swanson, who wondered of Rose: “If she suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never gave any indication of it. . . . Was she a fool . . . or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”

  Rose Kennedy was no fool. She was the beautiful, well-educated, and refined eldest daughter of John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, onetime congressman and three-term mayor of Boston. Educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart first in Boston and later in the Netherlands, Rose’s coming-out party was attended by several congressmen and was declared a holiday by the Boston City Council. Because her mother disliked public life, Rose served as her father’s unofficial hostess while he was mayor and became a local celebrity. “There have been times when I felt I was one of the more fortunate people in the world,” Rose acknowledged in her memoir.

  Over the objections of her father, who believed his daughter could have the “pick of any beau,” Rose fell in love with Joe Kennedy. But Rose was a serious woman—“Aimless frivolity has never appealed to me,” she said—and she saw that Joe Kennedy was “a serious young man.” She liked that he did not smoke or drink. And while Joe had an infectious laugh along with a “quick wit and a responsive sense of humor,” Rose also noted that even as a teenager what she really liked about the man she described as “the father of my children, and the architect of our lives,” was that he possessed “an aura of command.”

  There was little doubt Joe was in command in the Kennedy home, just as he was in any of his business ventures. His centrality in the lives of his children is demonstrated by the story of his eldest son, Joe Junior, who, as he was about to embark on the mission during World War II that would claim his life, said to a friend, “If I don’t come back, tell my dad . . . that I love him very much.” There is no record that he left a similar message for his mother. One of John Kennedy’s girlfriends, Mary Pitcairn Keating, a frequent visitor to the Kennedy homes, said of Rose, “I had the feeling that the children just ignored her. Daddy was it. When she went to play golf, she’d go by herself. She did everything by herself. I never saw her walking with one of the children on the beach. . . . She was sort of a non-person.”

  Keating’s comment is unduly harsh and overlooks a number of reasons why Rose was not intimately involved in any of her children’s lives, save one. While Rose had a bevy of nursemaids to help with the children, she was also pregnant a full 40 percent of the time during her first eighteen years of marriage, which must have limited her activities. She also adhered to a parenting philosophy espoused by Dr. L Emmett Holt, the Dr. Benjamin Spock of his day, who counseled parents to limit displays of affection for their children. Finally, Rose spent an inordinate amount of her time caring for her third child and eldest daughter, Rosemary, whom Rose described as “retarded,” though exactly how Rosemary was mentally challenged seems never to have been properly diagnosed. Rose might not have played tennis or taken walks with her other eight children, but she did with Rosemary, who was a ye
ar younger than Jack.

  The other Kennedy children grasped Rosemary’s condition and did not seem to resent the extra attention she received from their mother. But a lack of resentment toward Rosemary did not mean a lack of resentment toward Rose—at least as far as Jack was concerned. While Rose left most of the day-to-day child-rearing duties to nursemaids, she set the many rules of the household, and Jack was not much for rules. His closest boyhood friend, Lem Billings, described Rose as a “tough, constant, minute disciplinarian with a fetish for neatness and order and decorum. This went against Jack’s natural temperament—informal, tardy, forgetful, and often downright sloppy—so there was friction and, on his part, resentment.”

  Jack particularly resented Rose’s frequent trips away from home without her children. Once, as she was departing for a three-week trip to California with her sister, six-year-old Jack spoke up, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” Jack never understood why his mother went away so often and told a friend that he used to cry every time she packed her bags before he realized his crying merely irritated her and made her even more remote. “Better to take it in stride,” Jack said he concluded. Yet he found ways to strike back. Rose took her Catholic faith particularly seriously, and Jack learned that an excellent way to irritate his mother was to challenge her religious beliefs. Once, on a Good Friday, when Rose urged her children to pray for a happy death, Jack responded that he preferred to pray that he would get a dog.

  Jack Kennedy seemed to see his mother’s faith as one reason she withheld affection, saying, “She was terribly religious. She was a little removed.” As an adult, he described his mother to a friend as “so cold, so distant,” and claimed that Rose had never told him she loved him. Jackie Kennedy, who had a strained relationship with her mother-in-law, went further, telling the journalist Theodore White, “His mother really didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”