by Thomas Maier
Joseph P.Kennedy had neither a brogue nor any other stereotypical characteristic of Irish-American life of old. Even his name reflected these changes. Joe didn’t receive his father’s moniker because his ambitious mother, Mary Augusta Hickey, felt “Patrick” could be identified too easily by the bigots. She wanted a “less Irish” name so that her middle-class son could meld more quickly into Yankee society. (Unlike other Irish women bounded by the moral conscription of the church, Mary showed a fair degree of independence and, according to one obituary, was “always interested in woman suffrage” along with her other political concerns in East Boston.) Until the eighth grade, her son attended a neighborhood parish, the Assumption School, and then Xaverian School run by the Christian Brothers, before transferring to Boston Latin, one of the finest public schools in the nation. Its alumni included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cotton Mather and four signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Thomas Paine. Mary Augusta, in particular, didn’t want her boy’s ambitions stymied by the narrowness of a Catholic parish school. With his quick mind and athlete’s skills, Joe Kennedy excelled at Boston Latin. He became captain of the baseball team and won the city’s batting title. It earned him a trophy from Mayor Fitzgerald. In the meritocracy of Boston Latin, Joe Kennedy flourished.“To strangers, I could not possibly convey the reasons for the powerful and sweet hold which the School has on my affections,” Kennedy explained years later at Boston Latin’s tercentenary dinner in 1935. “It would be like trying to explain to strangers why I love my family.”
Although they were good Catholics, the Kennedys didn’t agree with Cardinal O’Connell’s view that a Harvard education “does more harm than good.” If Harvard held out the same promise as Boston Latin—reward and recognition through achievement—then Kennedy had nothing to fear. But to his dismay, the closely guarded social rankings within Harvard, with its relatively few Catholic and Jewish students, presented barriers that even Joe Kennedy couldn’t leap. Within the confines of Harvard Yard, the lanky red-haired young man from East Boston seemed ill at ease. His roommate, Bob Fisher, a football all-American and a favorite among the Brahmins, reminded Kennedy that “he was always being watched for any lapse that would justify the anti-Irish prejudice of snobbish classmates.” His grades mediocre, Kennedy managed to join a handful of respected clubs, including Hasty Pudding; but the top fraternities, where membership was still guided by social standing as much as merit, were denied him. For years afterward, Joe Kennedy remembered the day he didn’t make the Porcellian Club, the most desired in his mind, realizing that none of the Catholics he knew at Harvard had been selected. Rather than deny his heritage or smooth over his rough edges,Kennedy remained cocksure, defiantly emphasizing in his speech and manner those crass traits attributed to the Irish.
Upon graduation in 1912, Joe Kennedy, with some help from his father’s political connections, landed a job as a state bank examiner. The job allowed him to look at the books of financial institutions throughout eastern Massachusetts, a guided tour of how to make money. When Columbia Trust Company in East Boston, one of Pat Kennedy’s modest holdings, was threatened with takeover by another bank, the boss of Ward Two rounded up as much capital as he could from friends and associates and enlisted his son in the effort to save Columbia. The bank was a favorite in the Irish immigrant community, and Joe’s successful intervention earned him its presidency at age twenty-five and established him as America’s youngest bank president. The publicity surrounding Kennedy’s financial acumen also impressed Honey Fitz. He dropped his opposition to Rose’s suitor.
Fitzgerald was no longer in a position to tell his daughter how to conduct her life. A few months earlier, Mayor Fitzgerald had ended his bid for reelection against James Michael Curley after his relationship with Elizabeth “Toodles” Ryan—who worked at a gambling roadhouse as a cigarette girl and was about the same age as Rose—was threatened to be exposed. Rose and her mother, who had received an anonymous letter about the affair,waited at the door one night when Fitzgerald came home and confronted him. Distraught about being caught, Fitzgerald dawdled in defeat, hoping the crisis might pass over. After all, Honey Fitz and his wife were rarely seen together in public, and wagging tongues talked knowingly about the mayor’s wandering eye. In Massachusetts, Irish Catholics had learned to be as intolerant of weaknesses of the flesh as the Puritans. P. J. Kennedy may have been aware of the mayor’s libertine ways in arriving at his disdain for His Honor. But Josie Fitzgerald didn’t seem to want to know the truth about her husband’s unfaithfulness. Only when Curley, clearly a snake displaced from Ireland, announced a public lecture titled “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles” did Honey Fitz finally drop out of the race.
For Rose Fitzgerald, a young woman devoted to the church, the revelations about her father must have been severely disappointing, if not shattering. Undoubtedly, she believed such a fate could never happen to her. Over time in her own marriage, though, she would adopt the same distinctions as her mother between sex and love, between the lasting obligations of family and the none-too-discreet urges and gropings of the moment. After that night in the doorway, John Fitzgerald’s reservations about his future son-in-law were gone. On September 20, 1914, the social page of the Boston Sunday Post carried a short notice, headlined “Simple Wedding for Daughter of Ex-Mayor,” that said the couple’s “romance has been one of the most closely and confidentially watched” in Boston. Three weeks later, in the small private chapel of Cardinal William O’Connell, with her sister, Agnes, as the maid of honor, Rose Fitzgerald married Joseph P. Kennedy. The presence of the cardinal, who shared a private disdain for Honey Fitz similar to that of the groom’s father, nevertheless underlined the political clout of the two families who were now joined as one. “I always wanted to be married by a Cardinal,” Joe crowed years later,“and I was.”
AFTER A TWO-WEEK HONEYMOON, Rose and Joe Kennedy moved into a modest gray frame house on Beals Street in Brookline, a quiet, tree-lined suburb where the Kennedys were one of the few Irish Catholic families. Their home exhibited plenty of signs of their heritage, including the guest room bedspread with its harp and shamrocks, a gift from Mayor Fitzgerald after a trip to Ireland. It was a sign of progress that this couple didn’t consider living in the Boston enclaves where their fathers had made their mark. Brookline, with nearby streets named “Harvard” and “Crowninshield,” was far different from East Boston, where Irish immigrant families worked a variety of odd jobs to put bread on the table. Rose and Joe were both well educated, a modern couple adhering to the customs of contemporary American families. As a wife, Rose was focused on the daily demands of raising a family while her husband pursued a business career. Like a firm with clear lines of authority drawn, they both fell into their jobs with characteristic single-minded enthusiasm. “We were individuals with highly responsible roles in a partnership that yielded rewards which we shared,” Rose later explained in a remarkably detached tone. “There was nothing that he could do to help me in bearing a child, just as there was nothing I could do directly in helping him bear the burdens of business.”
After an initial success in local banking, Joe Kennedy expanded his financial empire to shipbuilding and later the liquor distributing business. By several accounts (none terribly well substantiated, as his grandchildren later pointed out, but repeated so much that they became part of the Kennedy lore), Joe was a middleman in the underground liquor industry, reaping another fortune as a bootlegger. He dealt with so many mobsters during Prohibition that some elder Mafioso would later remember him by name. During the Roaring Twenties,America’s swearing off booze created one of the most bizarre social experiments in the nation’s history. Prohibition had its peculiar class distinctions, shutting down the taverns and saloons of immigrants and the social life surrounding them, while providing enough loopholes and leeway for the rich to stash away their bottles in their wine cellars or country clubs for a quick nip of the hard stuff. Kennedy r
eportedly made a bundle from his large-scale bootlegging endeavors, which included shipments of Irish whiskey and Scotch from England. When Prohibition was repealed a decade later, he turned his interests into a legitimate liquor distributing business. He became the U.S. agent for Haig and Haig, John Dewar and Sons and Gordon’s Dry Gin. Ironically, Joe Kennedy didn’t drink at all himself, just like his father, who owned the East Boston tavern which begat their financial and political fortune. There was something quite delicious about making money from this duplicitous social policy, imposed by the same people who refused him memberships to their exclusive clubs—the Cohasset Country Club and the Somerset Club. “Those narrow-minded bigoted sons of bitches barred me because I was an Irish Catholic and son of a barkeep,” he fumed years later. “You can go to Harvard and it doesn’t mean a damned thing. The only thing these people understand is money.” Making a fortune was his best revenge; he even named his liquor company Somerset Importers.
A YEAR AFTER the couple’s 1914 wedding, a boy was born and christened Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. He was followed in succession by John Fitzgerald Kennedy in May 1917, and a daughter, Rose Marie, about whom one newspaper said “a brilliant future is predicted” given her socially prominent parents. Though Joe Jr. grew up a vibrant, healthy boy, little John, named in homage to Rose’s father, suffered from a variety of illnesses. Their eldest daughter, later known as Rosemary,was slow to respond to the simplest tasks. Her parents eventually realized that she suffered from mental retardation.
Often left alone with her children, her husband engrossed in business affairs, Rose felt worn down by the responsibilities of motherhood. Although she had a maid and a nursemaid to help, she found herself pregnant again with a fourth child and unable to manage her overwhelming responsibilities. During this time, Rose apparently got wind of her husband’s randy social life without her. Whatever the reason, in an act of desperation early in her marriage, Rose Kennedy left her husband and children and moved back into her parents’ house in Dorchester. After a very long two weeks in January 1920, the former mayor informed his daughter that she must return to her own home. “You’ve made your commitment, Rosie,” he told her. If she needed more household help, or more time to herself, she must take it, he advised. But both knew divorce was unthinkable in an Irish Catholic family, and such a long separation placed an unfair burden on her husband and children.“So go now, Rose,” her father urged, “go back to where you belong.”
Before she returned home, Rose went for a few days on a religious retreat, sponsored by the diocese, to pray for the inner strength she felt so lacking in herself. In quiet meditation, Rose found strength in her church, and recalled the instructions for a life of sacrifice and self-denial that she had learned in the Sacred Heart convents. From these moments on, Rose’s approach to her family life would bear the stamp of Madeleine Sophie Barat, the founder of the Sacred Heart order later anointed a saint, who taught that the family unit was the essential bulwark of society and that women were its captains. Barat’s schools rejected the Jansenism of her native France, with its severely threatening and demanding image of God, absolutely convinced of humankind’s sinfulness. Instead, women were encouraged to see God as warm, generous and just. The tragedies and tribulations of life could be overcome through prayer, usually in private, constant and heartfelt. Though she was a tough, complicated woman who came of age during the French Revolution, Barat’s legacy appealed to Rose, a young Irish-American woman with many of the same characteristics herself. In rearing children, Barat said, mothers must keep in mind that “in this love, there must be neither weakness nor familiarity, it must be lofty, pure, disinterested, aiming only to gain souls to the Heart of Christ.”
Through her religion, Rose found a way to cope, and she approached motherhood as both her church and the baby experts proscribed. During strolls with her children, she would stop into nearby St. Aidan’s Church to say her prayers, her children silently in tow. At times, she’d pass time under the hairdryer while saying her rosary beads, or dash off reminder notes to the children about upcoming holidays of the saints or holy days of obligation. As a Catholic mother, she intended to form the habit of “making God and religion a daily part of their lives.” Rose also followed many of the “scientific” theories espoused by Dr. L. Emmet Holt. His guidebook—the “bible” of American parenting during the early part of the twentieth century— instructed mothers to follow a precise schedule of feeding and sleeping. Wary of contagious diseases, Dr. Holt frowned on all signs of affection by parents.“Infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead,” Dr. Holt advised,“but the less of this the better.”Through this combination of forces, Rose, the bouncy young girl with a wide smile who enjoyed being her father’s favorite child, could at times be an emotionally reserved parent who would love her children but, as she was told, in the distanced manner that all good mothers should demonstrate.
About this same time, another crisis tested the faith and strength of the Kennedy marriage. Just as Rose gave birth to their fourth child, Kathleen, their little boy Jack became deathly ill with scarlet fever. If Joe Kennedy had not been already humbled by his wife’s desertion and the realization of great trouble in his marriage, the threat of seeing his second oldest son die before his eyes seemed more than he could bear. In the past, he had regularly attended Sunday morning Mass, dressed like a peacock, his wife at his side for all the parishioners to see. But now Joe Kennedy, the hard-nosed entrepreneur with the go-go career, could be seen slipping into church during the middle of the day to pray fervently that God might spare his son. If only his son lived, Kennedy beseeched, half of his money he’d donate to some charity doing the work of the Lord. When Jack recovered from his long illness, Joe Kennedy made out a check to the Guild of St. Apollonia, providing dental care to children in Catholic schools. The scenario calls to mind the Old Testament tale of an omnipotent Yahweh who spared Abraham’s son from death. Perhaps Joe Kennedy had this biblical parable in mind when recounting this experience years later, and with his usual bravado, to friendly reporters. But for even the most skeptical eye, it seems reasonable to conclude these family traumas shook Joe Kennedy to his emotional core. As he recalled,“During the darkest days, I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery.”
Although his relationship with Rose was never quite the same again, this tycoon decided the family would be the centerpiece of their lives together, that he’d never become the absentee landlord of his children’s hearts. “After Jack’s illness, Joe was determined to keep up with every little thing the children were doing,” Rose later wrote.“It made me feel that I had a partner in my enterprise.”
Chapter Eight
Hard Lessons
WITHIN THE KENNEDY HOUSEHOLD, Rose usually handled matters related to school. She made sure that homework assignments were completed. She checked preparation for tests and consulted with teachers. She also supervised religious instruction at home. For a time, Joe Jr. and Jack served as altar boys, and later so did Bobby and Ted. When other children whispered loudly in church, young Jack shushed them into silence. “I wanted all of the children to have at least a few years in good Catholic schools, where along with excellent secular education they would receive thorough instruction in the doctrines of their religion and intelligent answers to any doubts or perplexities,” Rose explained.
In deciding what school their boys should attend, however, Joe Sr. debated strenuously with his wife, arguing that Catholic classes were too limiting. They received sufficient religious training at home, he contended. His boys were headed for a world of power and money, and he wanted them fully prepared. “If Joe wouldn’t accept a Catholic school,” Rose later recalled, “I thought they should go to public school. They could have seen that some of those boys were even brighter than they were. But as it was, Joe took responsibility for the boys while I took charge of the girls.” Joe proposed a third option—sending their sons to the long-established private academies favored by the Brahmins and w
ell-to-do Protestant families, a place most Irish Catholics had never dreamed of attending.
While the family lived in Brookline, the Kennedy boys went to the exclusive Noble and Greenough School, attended by the sons of many prominent Bostonians, including James Jackson Storrow III, the grandson of the Yankee banker that Honey Fitz beat for mayor in 1910. Joe and Jack were likely the school’s only Irish Catholic pupils. One day, a group of Protestant boys decided to shove Joe around until he dashed away and stopped in the doorway of a Catholic church. “This is a shrine!” Joe shouted, his fists curled in a ball.“You can’t touch me here!”The boys never entered. But there were other ways bigotry could hurt. One summer when Joe was thirteen, he became enchanted with a beautiful young girl, a Unitarian from California, who was visiting her Boston relatives for an extended vacation with her mother. After they went sailing a few times, the girl’s hosts became upset that she was seeing an Irish Catholic boy, and she soon left for home. Joe spent the rest of the summer heartsick.“I have been thinking about you ever since you went away,” Joe wrote to his first love. “Really I love you a lot.”He never saw her again, though bittersweet memories of the experience remained.