The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  In marrying Rose Fitzgerald, Joe Kennedy had pledged to faithfully love and support her—and the children they might have together; to keep them safe and secure and well sheltered; and to do everything in his power, to work day and night, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year if necessary, to provide for them. What he did not intend to do was give up being a “ladies’ man.” And we do not know if Rose expected him to. Her father had most certainly been with other women during his marriage. So had, and would, a large number of Joe’s friends. Like them, he successfully demarcated his life into two parts, one of which he shared with his wife, the other spent apart from her, because he wanted to avoid situations that might cause her embarrassment or force her to confront the fact that he enjoyed the company of other women, hundreds of them over his lifetime: actresses, waitresses, secretaries, stenographers, caddies, models, stewardesses, and others.

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  The Kennedys were outsiders in Brookline and preferred it that way. They did most of their shopping and socializing in Boston and spent their summers at the seashore in a rented house on C Street in the Waveland section of Hull on the Nantasket Peninsula, about twenty-five miles away. It was there, in Hull, that their first child, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was born on Sunday, July 25, 1915, nine months, two weeks, and four days after his parents’ wedding. Rose, as was the custom, gave birth at home, with a squadron of doctors, attendants, and her housemaid. Joe waited in the next room; Honey Fitz was outside on the beach. When the doctors announced that it was a boy, a blue-eyed, big, healthy one, Honey Fitz rushed inside, greeted his grandson, daughter, and son-in-law, then contacted his friends in the Boston press to report how happy he was to be young (fifty-two), healthy, and a grandfather. Though Joseph P. Kennedy was not mentioned in the newspaper reports, the baby was named after him, not his famous father-in-law or father.

  The Joseph P. Kennedys, now numbering three, returned to Brookline that fall. Columbia Trust continued to do well, riding the waves of prosperity set in motion as Great Britain and France, now entering their second full year of war, increased their purchases of American food and manufactured goods, much of it funded by credit from American financial institutions. Joe Kennedy was entering a new stage in his banking career, no longer a novelty, but on his way to becoming a respected, if decidedly minor, member of the business community. In May 1916, Eugene Thayer, president of the Merchants Bank of Boston, appointed him to the board of directors of a recently established “credit union” for workingmen. Serving with Kennedy on the board were a number of distinguished Boston businessmen and bankers.

  By early 1917, Kennedy was making enough money to hire a full-time trained nurse to stay with Rose through her second pregnancy. The boudoir was turned into a nursery. Though the house had only one staircase—for the use of family and servants alike—it was large enough to accommodate three full-time servants on the third floor: nurse, nursemaid, and maid. The laundress who came in twice a week to do the family’s wash, supplemented now by diapers, worked in the basement.

  That spring of 1917, the tidy little world Joe Kennedy had created for himself in Brookline and in East Boston was threatened by forces beyond his control. On April 2, President Woodrow Wilson had gone before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war. On April 4, the Senate approved Wilson’s declaration. On April 6, the House concurred and Secretary of War Newton Baker submitted legislation authorizing the drafting of a “National Army” of half a million men.

  Kennedy was determined, from the moment war was declared, to do everything he could to remain out of uniform and stateside. As an Irish Catholic, he had no great love for the English and no desire to risk his life to protect the British Empire. As a young father, whose second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been born on May 29, 1917, he believed his first responsibility was to his family. As an ambitious young banker, he did not want to interrupt his career to spend time in the trenches. Kennedy did not advertise these views. His decision not to enlist or allow himself to be drafted was a private one, based on practical, not moral, choices. He was not opposed to all wars, just to Americans getting involved in this one. He resisted entirely the claims of the British propagandists and their American allies that the fight against the Huns was a fight for civilization.

  Years later in a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rose recalled how upset her husband got when, at a weekend gathering, his Harvard classmates applauded the daring and deadly British offensive at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. “As Rose remembered the conversation at the house, at first Joe just listened to the enthusiasm of his friends and didn’t say much. ‘He merely shook his head with sadness.’ And then, he counter-attacked. ‘He warned his friends [that] by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of a senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.’”3

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  President Woodrow Wilson would have preferred to fight the war with an all-volunteer army, but resisted doing so in large part because of the British experience. The problem with a volunteer army, the British had learned, was that the wrong men volunteered for the battlefield, leaving the home front—which would have to supply the soldiers with armaments—bereft of skilled workers. The United States would prevent that from happening by organizing a “selective service” system to scientifically distribute the nation’s young men, as needed, to the various branches of the war effort. Millions would be sent to the battlefield; others would be directed into munitions factories and the shipyards, where they too would fight the war against the Hun. To forestall the divisions, chaos, and occasional riots that marked the conscription process during the Civil War, the Selective Service Act of 1917 mandated that there were to be no substitutions, commutations, or abbreviated terms of service, no way, in other words, for wealthy businessmen such as Joseph Kennedy to buy their way out of the draft.4

  On June 5, 1917, Joseph P. Kennedy reported as directed to his local polling place and filled out his registration card. The Brookline registrar certified that he was tall and stout, with blue eyes, brown (really brownish red) hair, and no lost limbs or disabilities. Line 9 affirmed that he had a “wife and 2 children” who were “solely dependent on [him] for support.”5

  That was not going to be enough, however, to get him the exemption he wanted. In the second week of August, the provost marshal general’s office in Washington and the state director of military enrollment in Massachusetts issued what the Boston Daily Globe referred to as “sweeping orders” to reduce “exceptions of married men.”

  Honey Fitz, never one to sit out a battle, especially one as clear-cut as this, jumped into the controversy, his mouth wide open, demanding that the Republican governor of Massachusetts and the Republicans on local draft boards petition Congress to spare married citizens and draft aliens in their place. Though he may have had the best interests of his daughter and son-in-law in mind, he did them no favors by intimating that Republican draft board members, including the three in Brookline who would hear Joe’s case, were less interested than he was in keeping American families intact.6

  In late October, the provost marshal general declared unequivocally that “married men who have independent incomes . . . where the support of the dependents in their absence was assured” would be denied exemptions. Each case would be heard on an individual basis. To secure his “dependency” exemption, Kennedy would have to prove—which he could not—that his three dependents were fully “dependent” on him for support, that no one else, not even his rich father-in-law, would be able to provide for them.

  Fortunately, there were other categories of deferment. At the same time that he moved to restrict “dependency” exemptions, the provost marshal general, in response to a petition from a committee of shipbuilders, authorized large numbers of “industrial” exemptions for “shipworkers of military age” with specialized skills. A number of those exemp
tions went to employees of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company of Quincy, Massachusetts, just ten miles from downtown Boston, which in 1913 had been acquired by Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem had been contracted by the government to build forty-five destroyers at Fore River and been given $9 million of government money to construct a ten-bay shipyard at Squantum in Dorchester Bay.7

  Joseph P. Kennedy was not a shipbuilder; in fact, as he admitted in a letter to his draft board, he had “absolutely no technical knowledge of shipbuilding.” But he was young, smart, ambitious, disciplined, and well connected; he knew how to negotiate a contract, read a balance sheet, and get things done in Boston. He was, it appeared, a perfect candidate for a management position at Fore River—and the “industrial exemption” that would come with it.

  In mid-October, three high-level executives of Fore River—J. W. Powell, the general manager, who had been promoted and was about to be transferred to Bethlehem headquarters in Pennsylvania; Samuel Wakeman, whom Powell had chosen to succeed him; and Guy Currier, the company’s lawyer and chief lobbyist—met with Joseph Kennedy at Young’s Hotel in Boston and offered him the newly created position of assistant general manager.8

  For Kennedy, this was a golden opportunity. The pay was decent: $4,000 a year, equivalent to about $68,000 in purchasing power today, with a bonus based on total manufacturing profits at the plant. He would get an “industrial exemption” from the draft and the opportunity to associate himself with Bethlehem Steel, one of the nation’s most dynamic corporations, led by two of its most respected businessmen: Eugene Grace, president, and Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the board.

  The Fore River project was going to be huge. Thousands of new jobs were going to be created, bridges and roadways built, docks extended, and tons of building materials transported to Quincy and Squantum to construct an industrial city populated by tens of thousands. Every state and city politician, businessman, contractor, manufacturer, real estate promoter, and banker would want a piece of the multimillion-dollar project that Kennedy would now have a hand in managing.

  On the morning of October 15, 1917, Joseph Kennedy got into his Ford, said good-bye to Rose, two-year-old Joe Jr., and five-month-old John, and drove the fourteen miles from Beals Street in Brookline to the Fore River plant.

  Kennedy’s first assignment was to help design and oversee the company’s employee insurance programs. He was also asked to manage construction of the transportation infrastructure required to get twenty-six thousand workers to, from, and between Boston, Quincy, Fore River, and Squantum. He secured from the state the right to build and operate a privately owned Bethlehem shipyard railroad to connect the Fore River and Squantum shipyards. To get workers to Fore River, he negotiated with public and private authorities to rebuild the Neponset Bridge from Dorchester to Quincy and have the streetcar rails double-tracked and extended from downtown Boston to Quincy Square and on to Fore River. All this required endless meetings with the Boston Elevated Railway, Edison Electric, the Bay State Street Railway, the navy, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the United States Housing Corporation, and state and government officials as to who would pay for what and when.9

  As the new shipbuilding facilities went on line, the number of workers commuting to the shipyards increased to the point where the Bay State Street Railway, which was owned by Massachusetts Electric, was asked to add new trains for the morning commute. The railroad requested that the company instead stagger the hours for its morning shifts to relieve overcrowding. Kennedy had been named a trustee of Massachusetts Electric in May, but that didn’t stop him from supporting the railroad’s request. He persuaded the plant managers to agree to change their work shifts, thereby saving the Bay State Street Railway and Massachusetts Electric the cost of paying additional crews to run additional trains to and from the plant. Union representatives pointed out the obvious conflict of interest, but Kennedy did not back down. Still, he had learned his lesson. When, in the fall of 1918, he was offered a directorship of the Citizens’ Gas-Light Company of Quincy, he turned it down. “My short experience . . . has taught me that the attitude of labor to-day towards management in charge of enterprises is not improved much by having labor think that there is too close a connection between the employers and those that sell them the commodity that they use.”10

  Kennedy quickly became a victim of his own competency and exceptional stamina. His workload increased exponentially as new duties were added to old ones. When it became apparent that the government would have to construct temporary housing for shipyard workers, he was assigned to negotiate with government officials on how to spend the funds quickly and efficiently. He was also asked to oversee the feeding of the tens of thousands of men who now worked at the shipyards. He brought in outside contractors to set up a self-serve cafeteria at Squantum that served 1,380 meals in fifteen minutes. Seeing the opportunity to make a handsome profit for himself, he organized a privately held company, the Fore River Lunch Company, and contracted out to it the task of feeding the Fore River employees.11

  In the midst of all this activity—on insurance, transportation networks, housing, and lunchrooms—and to his (and his employer’s) great surprise, Kennedy received a 1-A draft classification from the Brookline draft board in mid-February 1918. He appealed immediately to the district draft board for a “deferred classification on industrial grounds” and accompanied his appeal with a long letter in which he detailed his responsibilities at Fore River. J. W. Powell, vice president of Bethlehem Shipbuilding, sent an additional letter and then, a week later, followed up with a note to the Emergency Fleet Corporation executive in charge of securing exemptions for shipyard workers. The letters did the trick. Kennedy would never receive any official deferment, but neither would he be called for the draft. He would spend the remainder of the war at Fore River.12

  Well aware that sending conscripted young men to risk their lives in European trenches would be met with significant opposition at home, President Wilson had, from the moment the nation declared war, focused his attention—and that of his newly created Committee on Public Information—on winning the battle for public opinion. In April 1918, Washington launched its third “Liberty Loan” campaign to raise money for the war and remobilize the home front. The opening of the drive in Boston, as elsewhere, was marked by a massive patriotic parade. Kennedy, assigned the task of publicizing and celebrating Bethlehem Steel’s contribution to the war effort, conceived the brilliant idea of putting three hundred Fore River workmen on floats to demonstrate how they were aiding the war effort by “riveting a bulkhead of a destroyer, riveting a copper condenser-head and other work.” The demonstration was such a success that Kennedy arranged for “two gangs of riveters [to give] an exhibition of their daily toil” at B. F. Keith’s vaudeville theater to the accompaniment of “We’re Building a Bridge to Berlin.”13

  While Kennedy was putting on shows in vaudeville theaters, his friends and classmates were serving in the armed forces, most of them still on this side of the Atlantic. Arthur Kelly, Tom Campbell, and Joe Sheehan were stationed at Camp Devens, about forty miles from Boston; Bob Potter was in Washington, D.C. Joe visited and wrote them regularly. He was neither ashamed of nor guilty about evading military service. Though not in uniform, he believed he was doing his part for his nation, working sixty-five to seventy hours a week, occasionally spending the night in his office.

  When, in mid-April, the officers and foremen at Squantum held their first “get-together banquet,” Kennedy was one of the six company executives invited to sit at the head table. In August, he was among the three Fore River executives delegated to greet Eugene Grace, the president of Bethlehem Steel and Bethlehem Shipbuilding, on his visit to Quincy.14

  Still, he was decidedly middle management, an assistant general manager who remained in the background, doing research, running numbers, reviewing contracts. He would later boast loudly and often of having negotiated a deal with Assistant Secretary of th
e Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a matter involving Argentine dreadnoughts that had been built at Fore River and returned for repairs. There is, however, no evidence and little likelihood that he ever dealt directly with Roosevelt or any decision makers in Washington, Boston, or Bethlehem headquarters in Pennsylvania.

  The closest he came to managing anything was in the spring of 1918, when, reportedly on instructions from Charles Schwab, Bethlehem Steel organized a Steel League of baseball teams made up of steelworkers and shipbuilders, with as many major leaguers as could be “enlisted.” Perhaps because he had won his Harvard “H” in baseball, a fact of which he was inordinately proud, Kennedy was recruited as general manager of the Fore River team.

  On May 19, Fore River opened its 1918 Steel League season against Wilmington and won 4–2. Samuel Wakeman, Fore River’s general manager and Kennedy’s boss, “threw out the first ball and presented a silk flag to the team of his company,” the Boston Daily Globe reported the next morning. “Before the game there was a parade to the grounds, headed by the Fore River Band and Fore River Guards. . . . A number of players of former big league fame were in the lineups” for both teams.15

  Plant managers from Lebanon and Steelton, Pennsylvania, to Sparrows Point, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware, to Fore River, Massachusetts, competed for big leaguers with offers of generous salaries, minimal work in the yards, and guaranteed exemptions. Shoeless Joe Jackson, perhaps the best player in the major leagues, on receiving word from his Greenville, South Carolina, draft board that he had been classified 1-A and would be called to serve between May 25 and June 1, left the White Sox for the Bethlehem shipyard in Wilmington, Delaware. Two weeks later, on June 15, Boston Red Sox star Dutch Leonard arrived at Fore River. Kennedy offered him a salary of $250 a month, $200 from the plant and $50 from his own pocket, “thinking,” as he wrote Eugene Grace’s assistant at Bethlehem Steel, “that with the acquisition of this man it would make the pennant sure” for Fore River. Leonard pitched his last game in the major leagues on June 20, but then, instead of relocating to Fore River to pitch on June 21 or 22 as he had promised, he tried to get a better deal on the West Coast, playing for a naval reserves team. When the West Coast deal fell through, he returned to Fore River to pitch a game against Steelton on June 29, then a second against Bethlehem, with eighteen strikeouts, on July 4. Leonard continued to pitch until the end of August, when he lost his exemption—as did many other ballplayers—after a brief investigation (what took so long?) determined that he had signed on at Fore River “for no other reason than to ‘duck the draft.’” Fore River ended the 1918 Steel League season in last place.16