by David Nasaw
Joseph P. Kennedy was a lucky boy, the son of one of East Boston’s most prosperous, respected, and powerful politicians. He was an attractive child, with short reddish brown hair. Years later, commenting on a childhood photograph of him wearing what looks like a dress—“a rather striking costume,” he called it—Kennedy half jokingly asked his son, Ted, “to observe . . . the sharp piercing eyes, the very set jaw and the clenched left fist. Maybe all of this meant something!” Even wearing a dress as a four- or five-year-old, he looked tough—or tried to. He was not, like his grandparents who had landed in the New World forty years before his birth, a stranger in a strange land, but an American boy who spoke with a Boston, not an Irish, accent, whose paternal roots extended back two generations—a long time by East Boston standards, and whose mother came from one of the town’s more prosperous families. The Hickeys were every bit as well-known in East Boston as the Kennedys. Joseph’s maternal uncle Charlie Hickey was elected mayor of nearby Brockton; Uncle Jim was a Boston police captain; Uncle John was a doctor in Winthrop.17
Joe Kennedy grew up in a neighborhood where everyone, it seemed, knew and respected his family and his people. In the four decades since the first Kennedy had arrived in East Boston, the Irish had become the old-timers, the establishment, the majority, the insiders. The local bankers, landlords, shopkeepers, and politicians were more likely than not to be Irish and Catholic, as he was. It was the newly arrived southern Italians and Eastern European Jews who were struggling for a foothold, crammed into the unsanitary, overcrowded wooden tenements built to receive them, forced to send their children to work instead of to school.
As the oldest child in the family and the only male, Joseph Kennedy was the prince of the household, the successor who would inherit the family name, fortune, property, and the responsibility of looking after his sisters should they not find husbands. He was given a healthy allowance, dressed well, offered music lessons (which came to naught because he refused to practice), and at age six sent off to the parochial school at Our Lady of the Assumption, a three-quarter-mile walk from his home, where he was taught by the Sisters of Notre Dame until he was old enough to be handed over to the Xaverian Brothers.
P. J. and Mary Augusta had, some years before, moved their family from the dusty flats of Meridian Avenue in the business district to 165 Webster Street, an elegant, tree-lined, almost suburban-looking avenue, where the wealthiest men and most powerful public officials in East Boston made their homes. Webster Street was within walking distance of the shops and the ferry terminal, but high enough above the “factories, shipyards, docks, piers, fish-curing establishments, oil works, coal depots, and grain elevators” to provide a bit of protection from the foul air and smoke that lingered below.18
The Kennedy house was not the grandest on the street, but it was large and imposing, at the top of the hill, on a double-wide lot, with a deep, wide backyard that sloped down to the water. Mary Augusta put in a garden with her “precious apple trees” but allowed her boy almost free rein in the backyard. Joe was, already by age eight, the leader of his pack. He organized the ball games, supplied bat, ball, and gloves, and in a large playhouse in the backyard (possibly converted from an old barn), rehearsed his friends and occasionally his sisters in plays performed—at no charge—for the other kids in the neighborhood. As was befitting the son of a ward boss, he organized his own July Fourth pageants and, on Decoration Day, assembled his gang to march in line to the cemetery for the official ceremonies.19
From his backyard, Joseph could look across the Inner Harbor to Boston proper, a faraway city that was not his own. East Boston might share a name, mayor, and board of aldermen with the larger city across the channel, but it had a feel, an identity, a being, all its own. Home for Joe Kennedy was not “over there,” a ferry ride away, but “here” in East Boston, where his grandparents had arrived, lived, and died, where his parents had been born and raised, where he and his sisters went to church and school.
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We know little of his boyhood in East Boston in part because Joseph P. Kennedy had no interest, as an adult, in looking back on his childhood, other than to recall on occasion in conversations with close friends how much he admired and adored his father. He had loved nothing more than accompanying the handsome, black-haired, mustachioed ward boss to torchlight parades, picnics, and outdoor rallies. He had almost nothing to say of his mother, Mary Augusta, a handsome, white-haired woman who, as she aged, grew rather stout. In the years to come, he would make little mention of his two adoring sisters, Margaret and Loretta, though he would remain in touch by letter and phone and support them financially.
Part of the reason for Kennedy’s reluctance to recall his childhood may have been a desire to give himself full responsibility for his financial success. While he never professed to be either a “self-made” man or a child of poverty, he did not want to call attention to the obvious advantages he had enjoyed growing up as a member of one of East Boston’s first families. He preferred to emphasize the ways he had made his own way and his own money by doing odd jobs in the neighborhood and organizing sandlot baseball games to which he charged admission.
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Joseph P. Kennedy grew up in a Democratic ward in a Democratic city, controlled locally by Irish ward bosses such as his father and superintended by a citywide “board of strategy,” a shadowy, extralegal, irregular caucus that met at the Quincy House Hotel, behind City Hall, to choose nominees for office, dispense patronage, and try to maintain some semblance of party discipline. When in November 1899 the Boston Daily Globe ran a preelection exposé on the “board” and the handful of bosses who controlled the Democratic Party in Boston, it identified P. J. Kennedy of East Boston as “the silent man” of the group, the only one who was not a strong stump speaker. “He is classed among politicians as a man of extremely good sense and sound judgment, an unselfish man, whose work is almost always directed to serving some friend rather than himself.”20
In the fall of 1899, after Mayor Josiah Quincy announced that he would not run for reelection, the “board of strategy” nominated former congressman Patrick Collins to replace him. For P.J. and his fellow ward bosses, Collins—who had returned to Boston from London, where he had served as President Grover Cleveland’s consul general for four years—was a dream candidate. The son of Boston and of County Cork, Patrick Collins never forgot his roots but never flaunted them. He had gone to Harvard Law School, been a successful businessman and diplomat, dressed and spoke from the stump like a Boston gentleman, and identified himself as an American and a Democrat first, then an Irishman. There would not be another Irish Catholic, Harvard-educated candidate for office like him for another forty years—and his name would be John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Joseph Kennedy was eleven years of age and at the Assumption school when Patrick Collins ran for mayor. Collins easily carried the Irish Catholic wards but did not do well enough to offset an unusually heavy Republican Protestant vote elsewhere in the city. Two years later, Patrick Collins ran again and this time was elected. P.J., who had, in 1899 and 1901, returned a heavy majority for Collins in the East Boston wards, was rewarded with patronage positions, first as an election commissioner, then as a wire commissioner, positions that paid handsomely but required almost no work.21
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The Kennedys of East Boston would enter the new century with P.J. guaranteed a $5,000 salary from the city, equivalent to more than $135,000 in purchasing power today, and healthy incomes from his many business concerns. When Joe Kennedy left home that fall to attend school across the Inner Harbor, he did so as the privileged son of one of East Boston’s wealthiest, most powerful, and most respected men.
Two
SCHOOL DAYS
On September 12, 1901, Joe Kennedy walked down Webster Street to the East Boston slip at Lewis Street, where, with several other East Boston boys, including his childhood friends Joe Sheehan and Joe Donovan, h
e paid his penny fare and boarded the ferry for Boston and his first day at Boston Latin, the oldest, best-known, and arguably most academically rigorous public school in the country. It was not uncommon for Catholic boys to go to public high schools in Boston. Joe’s future father-in-law, John Francis Fitzgerald, had been a graduate of Boston Latin, as had many prominent nineteenth-century Catholics.1
While Boston Latin was the “elite” among the city’s public schools, every male student who had graduated from a public grammar school or taken the entrance exam was entitled to entry—as long as he brought with him a “written statement from parents or guardians of their intention to give such candidates a collegiate education.” This requirement drastically reduced the list of eligible applicants to those whose parents could afford to pay college tuition and forgo the four years of wages their boys might have contributed to the family income.2
Boston Latin, founded in 1635, boasted among its former students (and boast it did) Cotton Mather, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909. The school had been the pre-Harvard training grounds for boys from Boston’s oldest and most distinguished families until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Adamses, Cabots, Eliots, Lowells, and Everetts opted for newer, more exclusive private boarding schools. The blue bloods’ places were taken by boys who were just as smart or smarter, but whose Boston ancestry did not extend back as far, a significant number of them Jewish and Catholic.
The curriculum remained a classical one, in large part because Boston Latin cherished its historic role as primary feeder school for Harvard College. From the moment they entered until graduation, Boston Latin students were drilled, trained, and prepared for the Harvard entrance examinations. There were no electives. Every student was required to take six years of Latin, centered on translation, memorization, writing from dictation, and reading metrically from Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, Sallust, and the Aeneid, six years of science, six years of mathematics, six years of English, five years of history (including a year of Roman history and a year of Greek history), four years of French, and three years and two months of Greek.3
Boston Latin’s reputation as the “hardest” school in Boston was well earned. As Joe recalled in his 1935 speech at the school’s tercentenary, even those who did as poorly in the classroom as he did regarded the school as “a shrine that somehow seemed to make us all feel that if we could stick it out at the Latin School, we were made of just a little better stuff than the rest of the fellows of our own age who were attending what we always thought were easier schools. . . . It seemed that everyone knew that we were the best ‘prep’ school in the country. The public officials and the City of Boston which maintained and supported the Latin School for us, must have felt the same way, for after all, were we not the only public school graduates who received actual sheepskins? Our diplomas . . . were printed on parchment whereas every other public school diploma was printed on paper.” Getting that parchment was no easy task. The school showed little hesitation in asking those who did not meet its standards to transfer. Of the 116 members of Joe’s sophomore class, only 79 would be promoted to their junior year and fewer still to their senior.4
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In September 1905, during Joe’s junior and most difficult year at Boston Latin, Boston’s political world was turned upside down when the beloved mayor, Patrick Collins, died suddenly and unexpectedly at age sixty-one. P. J. Kennedy and the ward bosses on the “board of strategy” mourned their fallen hero but did not allow their grief to distract them from the task of choosing someone to replace him. In past years, their candidate would have been guaranteed the nomination, but in 1903, the Republican-led general court had passed a law mandating direct primary elections, hoping that this might reduce the power of the bosses and/or encourage strife among them. It succeeded in doing just that. Before the “board of strategy” had had a chance to nominate one of their own, John Francis Fitzgerald, former state senator, congressman, boss of ward six, and newspaper publisher, declared his intention to run for mayor.
“Honey Fitz” or “Little Johnny Fitz” or “Fitzie” or “young Napoleon” or “the little General,” as he was variously referred to, was a small man with a large, round face, blue eyes, dark hair neatly cut and parted in the middle, and the build of a slightly over-the-hill welterweight. He was, in many ways, a strutting, singing, fiercely ambitious repudiation of everything Patrick Collins and P. J. Kennedy stood for. Fitzie reveled in his Irishness, refused to rein it in, and made it clear he had no use for Yankee politicians of any sort, Democrat or Republican. He was loud, brash, unrestrained on the stump, an indefatigable backslapper and hand shaker, who refused to bow to party discipline or accept the dictates of the “board of strategy.” A decade earlier, at thirty-one years of age, he had run for Congress and defeated the “acceptable” Irish candidate whom P.J. and the other ward bosses had backed. Now, he campaigned for the mayoralty “from the back seat of an open touring car,” speaking in every one of the city’s wards and declaring to his Irish audiences that it was high time they elected a real Boston Irishman.5
The campaign for the nomination between quiet, dignified Ned Donovan, whom P.J. and the “board of strategy” backed, and the renegade Fitzgerald was as heated as any in Boston’s past. On October 25, three weeks before the primary, the Boston Daily Globe announced on page one that East Boston’s Democrats had endorsed Ned Donovan. “The friends of Hon. P. J. Kennedy, wire commissioner, will now take off their coats and help along the Donovan campaign on Noddle Island.”
It didn’t much matter. Fitzie was too energetic, too outspoken, and too frenetic a campaigner to be ignored—and his message, that the Irish needed a loudmouthed fighter to battle the Yankees, resonated with voters. Ned Donovan carried only four wards on primary day; P.J.’s was one of them.
P.J., for whom loyalty to the party trumped all else, did not oppose Fitzgerald in the general election, but neither did he go out of his way to support him. When Honey Fitz came to East Boston and spoke at the ward two meeting hall, P.J. was conspicuous in his absence. Fitzgerald didn’t need him. In December 1905, John Francis Fitzgerald, still a few months shy of his forty-third birthday, was elected to a two-year term as mayor.
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While P.J. spent the fall of 1905 campaigning for Ned Donovan, his son struggled through his junior year at Boston Latin. “It is said that Winston Churchill was near the foot of his class,” one of Joe’s classmates later recalled, “and I think Joe must have tried to emulate that other great man, for scholarship was not a field in which Joe sought or obtained success.” A near failure in the classroom, Joe was a star outside it. At Boston Latin, as in most institutions attended by adolescent males and watched over by men who fondly recalled their adolescence, athletes were accorded more than their fair share of respect. Joe was quite an athlete. He managed the football team in the fall, played basketball in winter and baseball in the spring, and was captain of the tennis team. He also became adept at military drill, one of the high-prestige activities at Boston Latin, where students were required to spend two hours a week. Joe, a natural athlete with perfect posture and obvious leadership skills, won his first prize at drill in his sophomore year and was named corporal of Company A. In his junior year, he was promoted to sergeant; in his senior year, to captain.6
In the fall of 1906, Joe invited the mayor’s daughter, Rose Fitzgerald—without question the most famous and surely one of the prettiest Catholic girls in the city—to the first Boston Latin regimental dance of the year. Rose was petite, poised though vivacious, with shining black curly hair and a twinkling smile. The two had met in the summer of 1895 at a picnic at the Boston politicians’ favorite summer resort, Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Joe was seven, Rose five. Eleven years later, they met again, but only briefly. “He was tall and thin and had sort of reddish hair and wore glasses,” and, more important
, he had made a name for himself at Boston Latin. “He was a very good baseball player. . . . He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and that impressed me as a girl . . . and then he was a very good polite Catholic . . . that made an impression too.”7
Rose had to turn down her first invitation from Joe Kennedy. Her father, the mayor, “refused to let me go. He disapproved of a girl of sixteen going around to dances in strange places and meeting people who might cause trouble.” Rose was, she remembered, struck by the illogic in her father’s reasoning. There was nothing strange about Boston Latin, Honey Fitz’s alma mater, and Joe Kennedy was not a boy who caused trouble. “He knew Joe and the Kennedys, and besides it was an afternoon dance, so I would be home before dark.” Still, she had to have been aware that her father was not terribly fond of P.J., who was from East Boston, and had on two separate occasions backed his opponents. “Temperamentally,” Rose Kennedy recalled in her memoirs, putting the best possible spin on their mutual enmity, “they were opposite, and I suppose they must have grated on each other’s nerves at times.”8
Undaunted by her father’s refusal to let her go to the dance at Boston Latin, Rose asked Joe to a dance at her school, Dorchester High. While “regular dating was taboo and ‘going steady’ was completely out of the question,” Rose and Joe spent a good deal of time together during the 1906–1907 school year. Rose attended “lectures in German and French and music at the Lowell Institute in Boston and they used to take place in the afternoon.” Joe would meet her after the lecture, and “we would quite regularly walk miles towards home.” Their relationship was a secret only to her father—and not much of a secret even to him. Her girlfriends, Joe’s friends, and even her father’s chauffeur knew all about it and did what they could to assist the young couple. “It took teamwork and conspiracy, because we needed reliable allies. Some were girlfriends of mine in Dorchester. . . . They gave more ‘drop in’ parties—well planned ahead—than they would have otherwise. . . . During that last year at Dorchester High, and the following year, when I was commuting to Sacred Heart, Joe and I managed to see each other rather often. Less often than we would have liked, but more often than my father was aware of.”9