by David Nasaw
When Joe graduated in the spring of 1908, his class book “prophecy” predicted, with a world-class bad pun, that he would “earn his living in a very round-a-bout way. He will run the flying horses at ‘Severe’ beach [a reference to the carousel at Revere Beach]; on every horse there will be a pretty Rose—that is where the Rose Fitz.”10
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Sometime in the spring of 1907, in what he thought was going to be his last year at Boston Latin, Joe and his parents were informed that he was going to be held back. Even for a boy with his inexhaustible energy and drive, his out-of-the-classroom activities—the romance with Rose, sports and military drill and baseball on the weekends, and the commute back and forth every day—had taken its toll. Although his grades were in the passing range, the faculty had concluded that he needed at least another year to prepare for the Harvard entrance examinations.
His second senior year would be marked by one triumph after another. In September, the Boston Daily Globe noted Joseph Kennedy’s reelection as manager of the football team with a large photo. That same month, his classmates voted him senior class president. In October, he was reelected captain of the baseball team. In December, at “Exhibition Declamation Day,” he was awarded “the beautiful silver cup offered by Mayor Fitzgerald to the one attaining the highest batting average on the Latin School base-ball team.” That spring, his photo appeared yet again in the Boston papers, this time in full military uniform, with his cap artfully askew, after the second Boston Latin regiment that he commanded swept the citywide “drill” competition at Mechanics Hall. Six weeks later, he was in the paper again, this time with a baseball cap on his head, having been selected as the starting first baseman on the Boston Interscholastic Nine.11
Sated, feted, and celebrated, Joseph P. Kennedy—colonel, all-scholastic first baseman, and class president—had just one more task to complete.
On June 22, he sat for the first of four days of Harvard entrance examinations. He received Cs in elementary and advanced Greek and in French, a D plus in algebra, Ds in English, Latin, and geometry, a D minus (still passing) in history, and Fs in elementary physics and advanced Latin. Because two “advanced” examinations and one in science were required for admission—and he had failed his advanced Latin and elementary physics tests, he was admitted with “conditions,” which were removed in his freshman year when he retook and passed the exams with Ds.12
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And so it was on to Harvard in the fall of 1908. At age twenty, Joe was older than many of his classmates, more physically and emotionally mature and strikingly handsome—tall, trim, with the build of an athlete, burning blue eyes, a freckled face, brownish red hair still cut short, and gleaming white teeth. Academically, Harvard held no fears for Joe Kennedy and the Boston Latin boys. At Latin, they had had to take a rigorous diet of ancient languages; at Harvard, where the elective system was still in force, there were no required courses, no need even to choose and build a major. The result, as Van Wyck Brooks wrote in 1908, the year he graduated and Joe entered Harvard, was to encourage undergrads to follow “the line of least resistance” and take courses they knew they could pass with minimal effort. Joe took no math or science, but four years of economics and government; three years of German, English, and history; two half-year courses in comparative literature; a year of Latin; and half-year courses in education, social ethics, and public speaking.13
In 1908, as in preceding years, Boston Latin sent more students to Harvard than any other public or private high school, twenty-five, half the graduating class. The majority of Harvard undergraduates were “proper Bostonian” Protestants, but there were more public school graduates, more Jews, and more Catholics than at Princeton or Yale. About 9 percent of Kennedy’s entering class was Catholic, enough to support a healthy St. Paul’s Catholic Club, which Joe joined at once.14
Joe Kennedy did not disguise the fact that he was an Irish Catholic and a Democrat (a risibly small minority at Harvard), but neither did he emphasize it. He intended to make his mark, as he had at Boston Latin, not as a Catholic or an Irish descendant or the son of a Democratic ward leader, but as an athlete who played that most American of games, baseball. Early in the first semester of his freshman year, he invited Bob Fisher, a star football player who had graduated from public school, then spent a year at Andover, to share his Perkins Hall rooms. He also befriended Tom Campbell, an Irish Catholic athlete from Worcester who lived off campus. Campbell and Fisher formed the nucleus around which Joe constructed his social network. “He had tremendous charm,” Campbell recalled, “and as one friend described it ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree.’” It was impossible to resist him once he decided that he wanted you in his corner. He was attentive, generous, loyal, fun to be around. “Joe led a model life” at Harvard. He attended Mass every Sunday and was a first Friday communicant as well. “He never drank, smoked or gambled at cards—off color stories were taboo.”
In his senior year, Campbell, Joe, and Bob Fisher were invited to dinner with Professor Charles Copeland, one of the few professors who socialized with undergraduates. “When the coffee was served Joe apologized and said he never drank coffee. Later ‘Copey’ passed around his cigarettes.” Everyone but Joe took one. “Not believing that anyone could spend four years at Harvard without some bad habits ‘Copey’ stared at Joe with mock severity and said, ‘Young man, do you drink?’ to which Joe replied, ‘No sir.’ ‘Copey’ then shook his finger at Joe and said, ‘Young man, I suspect you of some great crime.’”15
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There were several Harvards: the Harvard of the Adamses, Saltonstalls, Thayers, Cabots, Lowells, Lodges, and their elite clubs; the Harvard of the intellectual strivers such as Van Wyck Brooks and George Santayana and Walter Lippmann; and the Harvard populated by the public school graduates who spent their four years in dormitories or commuting to Cambridge from home. Joe was firmly situated in the public school sector. In his freshman year, he was an active member of the group that sought, unsuccessfully, to elect a public school boy as class president. He also volunteered for and served as a member of his finance committee of the Class of ’12. As a sophomore, he helped plan the class smokers, the only events on campus that attempted to bridge the chasm between the “proper Bostonians” and the public school boys. As a junior, he was a principal organizer of the class dinner and junior prom. When, in his senior year, the men of ’12 voted to wear a class button, it was Joe Kennedy who volunteered for the committee to design and distribute it.16
In February 1909, he tried out for the freshman team, made the final cut to twenty in April, and started at first base when the season began. In the most important game of the year—against Yale—he got two hits in four times at bat and stole two bases. As a sophomore, he expected to graduate to the varsity but didn’t make it. He played instead for the sophomore class team. In his junior year, he was invited to make the trip with the varsity to Annapolis for spring training and started at first base in a practice game against Navy on April 18, but, as the Boston Daily Globe noted a week later, neither he nor his chief competitor for starting first baseman seemed to “be measuring up to the work.” A Harvard classmate and rival, Ralph Lowell, later described him as “an ice wagon . . . slow and heavy. He couldn’t run very fast at all.”17
He didn’t get into a varsity game until the very end of the season, when he played in four and came to bat seven times. Fortunately, one of those was the final home game against Yale, which earned him his Harvard letter and the game ball, which he pocketed. The story of Joe taking the ball for himself instead of giving it to the pitcher and team captain would decades later become a staple of the Joe Kennedy literature, early evidence of his unquenchable ambition and ruthless disregard of others. Kennedy’s surviving teammates, when asked about the incident, denied that Joe had done anything wrong. He had, after all, made the final putout, and as Arthur Kelly, who played second base, recalled, it was the custom “t
hen and now” for the man who made the final putout to keep the game ball.18
Joe did not try out for the baseball team as a senior, probably because he did not want to suffer the humiliation of not making it or of spending the season on the bench. Instead, he moved to the sidelines and coached the freshman team, a position that paid him a salary and brought with it some distinction. That summer, he concluded his career as a ballplayer in the semipro White Mountain League, organized by resort owners as free entertainment for their guests.
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For an Irish Catholic public school graduate from East Boston, Joe Kennedy would do quite well socially at Harvard. He began with a cadre of friends from Boston Latin, added to it athletes he thought might be future teammates, and reached out to a few men (such as Arthur Goldsmith, a New York City Jew) who were neither Catholic nor Irish nor from Boston. In the fall of his sophomore year, he was selected with 128 other members of his class of 500 for the Institute of 1770, an honorary association that existed solely to differentiate the members of the class from one another. Harvard social hierarchy was so carefully calibrated that it mattered not just if one was selected for the institute, but in what rank order one was selected. Institute members were chosen in groups of ten; the first seven or eight tens were initiated into yet another secret society, DKE, also known as “Dickee” or “Deke” or “Deeks.” DKE had no club rooms and no eating facilities. All it bestowed was honor—and a week of cruel hazing. Arthur Kelly, who lived in the Holyoke dorms, was in the room when “Joe returned from his initiation into the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. After observing his back I was not impressed with fraternities.”19
In the winter of his sophomore year, the next act in the drama of Harvard social life was played out when the “final clubs” (so called because students, once initiated, would remain with these clubs until they graduated) chose their members. His friends Bob Fisher, the football star who had spent a year at Andover, and Bob Potter, another athlete who had come to Harvard from a private school, were swept into the top clubs. Joe, with his classmates from Boston Latin, and Irish Catholic Tom Campbell, from Worcester, were not. He had to have been disappointed not to get into Fly or Porcellian or A.D., though not as much as when he failed to make the starting baseball team. Joe Kennedy was, even at age twenty-one, too sure of himself to suffer for long because a group of Republican Episcopalians preferred not to live and dine with him. In his junior year, he was inducted into Hasty Pudding and invited to serve on the junior prom committee. In his senior year, he moved into Hollis Hall, the oldest and grandest Harvard dormitory, and along with Robert Benchley, from Exeter, and several of the better-known men of his year, was tapped for Delta Upsilon, a worthy (if not top-rank) Harvard club.
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East Boston was only a few miles distant but worlds apart from Harvard Yard for everyone but Joseph P. Kennedy. His father had been tied to the Democratic Party since before he was born; he had grown up campaigning with his father and watching as he soothed tempers at ward meetings and catered to his constituents. The Democratic mayors, Irish Catholic and Yankee alike, had rewarded P.J.’s loyalty and political talents with high-paying, no-responsibility patronage jobs. These regrettably came to an end in 1907 when Honey Fitz, after a two-year term marked by scandal and charges of graft that were hard to refute and impossible to escape, was defeated for reelection. With a Republican now mayor, the only way P.J. could work his way back onto the municipal payroll was to run for office. And so, in the fall of 1908, at age fifty, after three decades in politics, he announced his candidacy for street commissioner, an elected, nearly no-show position that paid $4,000 a year. P.J.’s opponent in the primary was Captain Dunn, an unknown, untried, unaffiliated Spanish-American War veteran from South Boston. In years past, a ward boss with P.J.’s impressive and lengthy record of service to the party would have been swept to victory. But P.J., a cautious man who would not have put himself forward if he imagined the possibility of defeat, was caught unknowingly in the trap that had been set years before when renegade Democrats launched their attack on members of the “board of strategy” for being undemocratic “bosses.”
When the votes were counted, Captain Dunn of South Boston had 380 more than his opponent. The only possible explanation for the upset, the Boston Daily Globe concluded, was that “the democratic voters of Boston [had grown] weary of bossism. . . . Mr. Kennedy, who is a good party man, was defeated because he was favored by bosses, whereas his opponent, Capt. Dunn, without any political leaders at his back, was elected.”20
That was the official explanation. The unofficial one was that though Honey Fitz and his supporters had publicly endorsed Kennedy, they had privately betrayed him by keeping down the vote in their wards. P.J. had supported Fitzgerald for reelection in 1907, but that had not been enough to undo the enmity he had engendered by opposing him in earlier elections.
P.J. graciously accepted defeat but was so humiliated by it that he pulled up stakes and, after a lifetime of service to and residence in East Boston, moved the family to Winthrop, Massachusetts. He was far from destitute and would continue for the rest of his life to live well on the income he received from his coal, real estate, liquor importing, and banking businesses. The new family house in Winthrop was spacious and attractive, and Joe would visit there often with his Harvard classmates and, in the years to come, with friends and family. But Winthrop was not and would never be his home.
Patrick Joseph Kennedy would not publicly complain about his fate, nor would his son in future years allow himself to feel sorry for his father. But P.J.’s defeat—in a primary for street commissioner—soured the son on local electoral politics forever. That an unscrupulous buffoon such as Honey Fitz could succeed where a man of dignity, discretion, and decency such as Patrick Joseph Kennedy could not was simply unacceptable. Joe Kennedy, like his father, would remain a lifelong Democrat, but not a very regular—or particularly loyal—one. Forty years later, when his son ran for public office, he would help him put together his own campaign organization, rather than trust his fate, as his grandfather had, to party leaders.
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While his father’s political career had come to an abrupt halt, his future father-in-law, John Francis Fitzgerald, ran for mayor again in 1910. Successfully dodging questions about the outsized amounts his administration had paid contractors to crush stone for the city’s streets and supply it with coal, electricity, and other vital services, Fitzgerald campaigned around the clock, traveling by motorcade through every ward of the city, never failing to remind potential voters that his Republican opponent was a rich, spoiled, Harvard-educated Protestant businessman with no sympathy—and perhaps a bit of animosity—toward Irishmen, Catholics, and working people in general. Holding the attention of audiences with the skill of a seasoned vaudevillian, Honey Fitz told stories, made jokes, “called for ‘Manhood against Money,’ and promised his supporters ‘A Bigger, Better, Busier Boston.’ Before he left each gathering, he would sing ‘Sweet Adeline’ at the top of his voice, to the delight of his partisan supporters.” He was narrowly elected to a four-year term.21
Though Fitzgerald never let potential voters forget that he had fathered six children, he had sent his oldest daughters out of the country after his 1907 defeat to protect them from the personal attacks and often well-founded accusations that their father was a grafter, boodler, payroll padder, liar, and crook. Rose and her sister Agnes spent a year at the Sacred Heart Convent in Holland, far from the reach of the Boston dailies. When Rose returned from abroad, she was sent away again, this time to the Sacred Heart Convent school on 133rd Street in upper Manhattan. Only after her father’s election in January 1910 and her graduation from Sacred Heart in June was she permitted to return home to Boston. She was immediately thrust onto the public stage as she accompanied her father, the mayor, on official trips and appeared at his side at public ceremonies, substituting for her absent mother. The long-suffering
wife of a politician who was never at home for long and known for his skirt chasing, Mary Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald, called Josie, was a quiet, dignified, deeply religious woman, the family disciplinarian, who took no pleasure in appearing in public with her husband. “For reasons not only of temperament but of time,” Rose would later explain, “Mother had a limited capacity for the official social whirl. She also had young children at home who needed her.” In her absence, Rose became her father’s “companion, hostess, and assistant on a good many of the trips he took.”22
In January 1911, Rose Fitzgerald celebrated her coming of age—with a spectacular formal debut at her parents’ mansion of a home before an admiring claque of five hundred of her father’s friends and political associates, every Democratic politician of note in the city and state, and a few out-of-town luminaries, including William Randolph Hearst and his wife, Millicent. As the papers dutifully reported the next morning, young Rose had looked gorgeous in her delicately embroidered white chiffon gown.
Despite P.J.’s lukewarm support of the mayor and his virtual exile in Winthrop, he and his family were invited to the event. “They were,” Rose later remembered, “around at a lot of the festive gatherings that the politicians had.” After the main reception, the older generation, including P.J. and his wife, Mary Augusta, returned to their homes, while Joe and his Harvard friends and roommates, Bob Fisher and Thomas Campbell, joined the younger set at a sit-down dinner and dance.23