The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Meetings were arranged with officials in charge of finance and banking in the Western European capitals, including, in London, Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain and former chancellor Winston Churchill. Bernard Baruch had cabled Churchill in advance, suggesting that he be sure to make an “appointment to see [Kennedy] as he is important and good relationship between you two might have far reaching results.”2

  After a visit to Chartwell, Churchill’s estate in Kent, and a week spent mostly in London, Kennedy crossed the English Channel for meetings in Switzerland, Holland, France, and Italy. His tour was cut short when Jack, whom he had left behind to register for classes at the London School of Economics, took ill and had to be hospitalized. Kennedy returned to London, cabled Jack’s doctors in the States, and was informed that Jack was probably suffering from a relapse of the “agranulocytosis” that had led to an earlier hospitalization. This time, as twice before, Jack miraculously recovered as quickly as he had taken ill. “I am once more baffling the doctors,” he wrote Lem Billings from London. “I am a ‘most amazing case.’”3

  While Jack put on the bravest of fronts, his father was frightened. He had witnessed too many unexplained illnesses, too many relapses, too many emergency hospitalizations. There was no telling when the illness would fell him again. If and when it happened, Kennedy wanted his son nearby, not in London, an ocean away. With a bit of help from Swope, the master fixer, strings were pulled and Jack was admitted, after the semester had begun, to Princeton, where Billings and his friends were in residence and where he could go to school without being compared with his older brother, Joe Jr., who was still at Harvard.

  His improvement, so rapid at first, stalled when he got home. “Jack is far from being a well boy,” Kennedy wrote Ambassador Robert Bingham in London soon after his return, “and as a result I am afraid my time for the next six months will be devoted to trying to help him regain his health.” After consulting with Jack’s doctor at Princeton and the specialist who had been treating him at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Kennedy decided to let him stay at school through Thanksgiving. “Then, if no real improvement has been made,” he wrote Jack, “you and I will discuss whether or not it is best for you to lay off for a year and try and put yourself in condition. After all, the only consideration I have in the whole matter is your happiness, and I don’t want you to lose a year of your college life (which ordinarily brings great pleasure to [a] boy) by wrestling with a bad physical condition and a jam in your studies. A year is important, but it isn’t so important if it’s going to leave a mark for the rest of your life.”4

  A month later, Jack was back at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In mid-December, he was officially withdrawn from Princeton. He spent the Christmas holidays in Palm Beach with friends from Princeton and would have preferred to recuperate there for the rest of the winter, but his father was determined to find out what ailed him and how to treat it. He sent Jack back to the hospital in Boston for two months of tests (with weekends off). In late February, the doctors released him to his father’s care in Palm Beach. They had failed to come up with any diagnosis or treatment plan. It was too late to return to Princeton—and Kennedy was not convinced his son was up to it. What the boy needed, he decided, was to build his strength to the point where he could fight off future infections.

  Arthur Krock, who was visiting in Palm Beach, recommended a cattle ranch in Arizona. Jack reluctantly agreed, and after a bit more time in the sun in Palm Beach and a trip to New York, he went west to work on the ranch. He came home that spring, hale, hearty, and relatively healthy, to inform his delighted father that he had decided not to return to Princeton, but to join his brother at Harvard.5

  Kennedy wrote the Harvard dean of freshmen, with whom he had already been in correspondence, to push the boy’s application forward. He was so anxious to have Jack admitted that he preemptively identified, then apologized for, his son’s shortcomings: “Jack has a brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault.” Still, he wanted the dean to know that Jack was so committed to returning to school and catching up on his year away that he intended to complete the work for his degree in three years, not four (thereby accomplishing something his older brother had never imagined attempting). Kennedy applauded his son’s ambition but requested that the dean’s assistant “confer with Jack on whether or not this three-year idea is to be encouraged.” He himself was on his way to Europe on business but would return in time for the opening of the school year. “I shall make it my business to go to Boston and talk with the teachers from whom Jack will receive instruction in his freshman year.”6

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  In November 1935, after delivering his report to the president, Kennedy held an informal press conference to remind reporters of his existence, then in early December flew to Palm Beach for the rest of the winter. “Without me,” Rose recalled, “he was an unattached male,” that most coveted of dinner guests in Palm Beach. Still, he declined almost every invitation. Having his dinner anywhere but home, he risked getting “into an argument of some sort,” Rose told an interviewer in 1972. “He often sat next to some prying female who asked stupid inarticulate questions and why should he be thus bothered.” On those few occasions when he did go out, he was inevitably sorry the next morning, because he had gotten into “a fight about Roosevelt or he was asked advice about the Stock Market and was quoted or misquoted later.”7

  Rose visited Palm Beach occasionally, but she never stayed for long—and was seldom there alone with her husband. “I hope this letter reaches you in Florida,” Kick wrote her mother on February 8, “as you seem to jump around like a frog between N.Y. and Florida—One minute in New York the next in Florida.”8

  Rose did not particularly enjoy sharing the Palm Beach house with her husband’s golfing buddies, especially Arthur Houghton. When they were around—and they always were—she stuck out like a sore thumb. And then too there were the other women in Kennedy’s life. Though she would never articulate it as such, Rose had to have known in some way that her husband did not remain celibate during the three hundred or so days a year they remained apart.

  As Joe Jr. and Jack grew older, and sexually active, they began to take notice of the beautiful young women their father kept company with. During his brief stay in London in the fall of 1935, Jack wrote Lem of his own interest in the “very good looking blonde whom Dad seems to know, about 24, who is a divorcee.” Joe Jr. wrote his father in Palm Beach the following February to say that the beautiful “Barbara Cushing [Barbara “Babe” Cushing, later Paley, was James Roosevelt’s sister-in-law at the time] & a friend who was out with you in N.Y. hearing Toscanini, Persian Room etc. till 3 o’clock were up here and gave me the low down on you. They said they nearly went South [to Palm Beach]. I think Mother ought to keep a better eye on you.” Kennedy responded lightheartedly that his son should not “worry too much about Barbara Cushing and her pal . . . 21 or 22 is still a little too young for me.”9

  From Palm Beach, Kennedy kept in touch with his children by letter. To Joe Jr., who was still more than a year away from graduation but had no real career plans, he suggested he consider the family business, politics. “Get yourself signed up and possibly make some speeches in the fall in the campaign throughout Massachusetts. It would be a very interesting experience and you could work up two or three subjects you wanted to discuss and go out through the State. Of course, the trouble is football may be on.” He suggested that Joe Jr. might also want to “drop in at the bank [Columbia Trust Company in East Boston] and see Mr. Porter [the president] and look around. There may be some points of interest there you would like to follow up.”10

  Rosemary was still living in Brookline with Miss Newton and appeared to be doing well. Looking at her, one would not guess that she was “slow.” Joe Jr. invited her to school dances and funct
ions at Harvard, which she mightily enjoyed. She was also spending time with Rose’s sister Agnes and other members and friends of the Fitzgerald family. Her letters home were chatty but rambling and disorganized—in the manner of a five- or six-year-old. “I take my red pills, injections in my arm 3 times a week. My new white shoes are ready. I have a new necktie red and white the color. I am going to study Napoleon.”11

  Kick had been homesick at first but had adjusted, as she always did, to her new circumstances at her convent school in France. Her father worried that she was a bit too eager to get away with her American friends for weekends and holidays in Paris, London, and Italy. Kennedy had no objection to her sightseeing, but he wanted her to make the most of her trips away from the convent. “Try to get all you can out of this trip, because it will be of great help to you in everything you do hereafter.”12

  Eunice, who never had to be prodded to focus on her schoolwork, had finished her “orals” and, her father supposed, was now “taking it nice and easy.” He suggested that she work on her penmanship, which was still pretty bad. “By this time I suppose Bobby has that bugle and the house is pretty nearly a mad house. However, maybe you could arrange to send him down near the railroad station and let him play when the trains come in.”13

  He asked Bobby, though only ten, to step up and begin taking a bit of responsibility at home in Bronxville. “Joe, Jack and I talked it over the other night and decided we really depended on you to do a good job in the house now that you are . . . the only man left in it.”14

  In late February, in his letter thanking Eunice, Patricia, and Jean for their valentines, Kennedy announced that the “golf professor” their mother and brother Jack had taken lessons from would be staying with them at Cape Cod for the summer. You all can take lessons every day and become good golfers—and that means Jeannie, too.” He wrote a separate thank-you note to Bobby and Ted. “I do not think you two boys would like to get a letter with the girls so am writing you one separately. . . . The girls will tell you about the golf lessons . . . I think Teddy would be a little too small, don’t you?”15

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  As the world’s leading authority on procedures and requirements for registering new issues with the SEC, Joseph P. Kennedy, private citizen, was in great demand. In early 1936, David Sarnoff asked for his help in putting together a recapitalization plan for RCA, which would include the issuance of new SEC-registered securities. Kennedy, who had remained on good terms with Sarnoff since they had parted company seven years earlier, flew north to discuss his new assignment with him and the RCA board. On the way back to Palm Beach, he stopped off in Washington to meet separately with the president and with his former associates at the SEC. The announcement of his contract with RCA, followed two days later by his visit to the White House and the SEC offices, the New York Times reported, had “set brokers to speculating whether he is in business or in politics, or in both.” Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and at the time perhaps the New Deal’s most acerbic critic, published an editorial on January 18, 1936, attacking the president for having appointed Kennedy to the SEC and Kennedy for parlaying that appointment into a lucrative consulting contract with RCA.

  Kennedy asked John Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt’s husband, who had worked for the Chicago Tribune, to help him draft a response. Though he did not say so to McCormick, he expected to return soon to Washington, and once he did so he would have to give up all moneymaking activities. Why not, then, while he was still a private citizen, make as much as he could?16

  He began work on the RCA project by assembling a team of accountants, several of whom had worked for him at the SEC. In April 1936, he flew to New York City to deliver his recommendations at a stockholders meeting. Following his presentation, he took questions. The first one was about his fee. Betraying not the slightest sign of embarrassment at the question—or the answer he was about to give—Kennedy began by explaining that “at the SEC we always demanded the truth and I guess some of you will get a shock. . . . My fee was $150,000 [equivalent to about $2.25 million today], from which I paid $30,000 to accountants.”

  “The stockholders,” Time magazine reported on April 20, “were indeed shocked [by Kennedy’s disclosure], for a profound silence descended upon the rest of the meeting.” Moments later, however, they voted to approve his plan and his fee. The next day, the RCA stock price began an upward climb.

  Almost immediately on turning in his RCA report and pocketing his fee, Kennedy was hired as a special adviser to Paramount. His mandate was to offer recommendations on how the studio could cut costs, increase profits, and cover dividend payments on its preferred stock issues. Six weeks after taking the assignment, Kennedy submitted his report to the board of directors and asked that it be made public. He bit down hard on the hands that had fed him, recommending a shake-up in the board of directors, “drastic and courageous revision of management,” and substantial cuts in executive salaries. He was paid a $50,000 fee, making his total consulting salary for three months’ work $200,000. President Roosevelt’s annual salary in 1936 was $75,000; Vice President Garner’s was $20,000; the dean of Harvard Law School earned $14,000.

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  To make sure no one in the White House would forget him while he was on what he hoped would be a temporary hiatus from Washington, Kennedy sent bottles of Haig & Haig’s best Scotch to the president for Christmas and stayed in close contact with the Roosevelt children and with Missy LeHand, the president’s secretary since 1920, who now lived in the White House and, when Eleanor was absent, acted as presidential hostess. He called Missy regularly, got her brother Bernard a job with Somerset, and invited her to make use of the Palm Beach house, which she did on several occasions.17

  In Washington, he had regularly invited the president, Anna and Jimmy Roosevelt, and Missy to Marwood for fresh seafood dinners and first-run films in his private theater. He tried to keep up with at least part of that tradition by airmailing stone crabs to the White House from Palm Beach. “If after what I called the air plane company yesterday morning [a reference to his foul mouth] they don’t throw the stone crabs off the plane for spite, you will have them in Washington tomorrow afternoon,” he wrote Missy LeHand on February 17, 1937. “They are being cooked and packed in dry ice and leaving here at nine-thirty Thursday morning. In fact the head of the air plane company said he would much rather carry stone crabs than carry one Kennedy, the worst crab he ever knew. . . . Anyhow the crab will be there tomorrow and they better be good.” The following month, he sent lobsters to the president and his entourage in Warm Springs. “This is the first time live lobsters ever flew to Pine Mountain,” FDR wrote back. “We are informing Smithsonian.”18

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  Though he was not above criticizing the president behind his back to his conservative friends in the press, including William Randolph Hearst and Frank Kent, Kennedy considered himself a member of the Roosevelt team and intended to work for his reelection. In January 1936, the president sent him a list prepared by his secretary of commerce of fifty prominent businessmen who might be considered “friendly” to the administration. He followed up with a call to Palm Beach to ask Kennedy to solicit the businessmen on the list for endorsements and/or campaign contributions. Their conversation was cut short so that Kennedy could attend Mass. The next day, Kennedy followed up on the president’s proposal with one of his own: “About the list you sent me, I feel it is not at all strong enough to do what we thought of, but I will go ahead and try to think out some plan and if any of your people have a suggestion as to how it can be well used, I wish they would let me know. It isn’t that I am stubborn or stupid, but I am anxious to get a result that will merely not be just a superficial gesture. I still think I can do it.”19

  He had been both astounded and appalled by the depth of anti-Roosevelt sentiment he had encountered in Palm Beach among the wealthy. The very men and women who should have been among the p
resident’s strongest supporters because he had saved capitalism and their fortunes were his most venomous opponents. “We are witnessing,” he would later write in his Roosevelt campaign book, I’m for Roosevelt, “the strangest hatred of history.”20

  Some among his conservative friends, especially those to whom he had voiced his doubts about New Deal programs and the antibusiness radicals who were running them, had hoped that when he left Washington he would join them in opposition. They were quite disappointed when he did not. “When you resigned as Chairman of the Securities Commission, the whole country rose up as one to acclaim you,” Paul Block the conservative publisher of several newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote him on April 10, 1936. “And when you told me the various reasons for your resignation, I thought even more of you, but now I read in the paper that you are going back to Washington to start fighting for the re-election of the radical New Dealers. If this is true, then all I can say is, ‘Poor Joe,’ and I think I should also say ‘Poor America.’ We thought Joe would help the sane people, but he is going back to the asylum.”21

  Kennedy didn’t see it that way, of course. He was supporting Roosevelt for a second term because in his first he had gotten the economy going again. On April 28, when Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau phoned to ask for his assessment of market conditions and the recent drop in stock prices, Kennedy reassured him that there was nothing to worry about. Stock prices might drift a bit lower, but not by much; the bond markets were safe; the worst was over. He told Morgenthau he was drafting an answer to New Deal critics like Al Smith, Herbert Hoover, banker and former Roosevelt appointee James Warburg, and others who insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that the Roosevelt administration had been bad for business.22

  He had decided that the best help he could offer the president’s reelection campaign was to concentrate his attention on businessmen and explain to them, as one businessman to another, why he was supporting Roosevelt—and why they should as well. He would put these thoughts into a booklet, I’m for Roosevelt, which would be subtitled A Businessman’s Estimate of the New Deal. To help him with the writing, he recruited James Landis, his successor at the SEC, and John Burns, still general counsel there. On May 4, he asked Missy LeHand “to tell the president that the booklet is finished, but I am having it re-read and re-edited, and will send it down for comments a little later.” In mid-June, he forwarded a draft to the president, who thought it “splendid and . . . of real service, not only from a campaign point of view but also as a distinct step in sane education of the country.”23