by David Nasaw
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Occupied with both the Maritime Commission and, to a lesser extent, Hearst business, Kennedy commuted back and forth to Hyannis Port that summer of 1937. Jack, healthy now for almost a year, had left for Europe with Lem Billings in early July. Rose departed at the end of the month with Joe Jr. and Kick. Bobby and Pat went off to one camp, Rosemary to another. Eunice was left behind in Hyannis Port with her baby brother and youngest sister, but that was fine with her; she had learned to sail by crewing with Joe Jr. and had her best year yet, winning several races. Jean won some races herself that summer.
While Jack’s trip to Europe was done on the cheap to accommodate Billings’s relatively modest budget, there were, as befitted the son of a Washington insider, appointments at the American embassies in Paris and Rome, a private meeting with Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pacelli, and an audience with Pope Pius XI. In late August, Kennedy wrote to thank Count Enrico Galeazzi for entertaining his son, joking that “the only trouble with all of this is that I have such a large family that those who have enjoyed your hospitality insist upon their return that the others must go to Rome to meet Mr. Galeazzi. So, if your patience will hold out, I will send the little Kennedys along as they gradually get old enough to travel.”14
In summers past, Rosemary had joined the family at Hyannis Port, but this year, with her older brothers and sisters and mother going abroad and Bobby and Pat at camp, it was thought best to send her to camp, with an adult companion to look after her. In the fall, she would return for a second year to the Residence School at 37 East Eighty-third Street in Manhattan, which was run by Miss Mollie Hourigan. Her parents had sent her to New York so that she might, after being tutored one-on-one in Brookline for two years, be able to live with other girls, take a group class in choral singing, and go on group trips to the opera, concerts, lectures, and horse shows on Friday evenings. Her schoolwork was overseen by Miss Amanda Rohde at her studio on West Eightieth Street; Miss Rohde also took her to her dancing lessons once a week and to the doctor’s offices on East Ninetieth Street for her “gland” injections.15
On paper, the arrangement appeared to be the best possible for Rosemary, who got the personal attention she required from a private tutor and, at Miss Hourigan’s Residence School, the group activities that she had missed at Miss Newton’s. Much like Miss Newton in Brookline, Miss Rohde found Rosemary difficult to teach and her “attitude towards her work, and consequently towards me” particularly troubling. “Rosemary,” Rohde wrote Rose in mid-October, “has been allowed to escape too much for her own welfare. She has found it more pleasant to day-dream. Now she makes herself unpleasant when she finds herself in a situation in which she has to think. If she is allowed to continue in this, she will become more and more difficult to live with. Little by little she must be brought to face reality. It will be a long siege, but it can be done.”16
That past spring, the Kennedys, still in search of the expert who could diagnose Rosemary’s problems and prescribe a cure, had taken her to Dr. Walter Dearborn, a Harvard research scientist and clinician with degrees in experimental psychology and medicine and expertise in intelligence testing, growth studies, and the development of reading comprehension. Rosemary met with Dr. Dearborn at the Psycho-Educational Clinic at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Like the other experts who had examined Rosemary, Dearborn assured her parents that he could help and designed a personalized curriculum that leaned heavily on the work of John Dewey and the first generation of progressive educators. To teach her “practical arithmetic,” he proposed giving her an account in the “department store” with regular bills she would have to pay. “She should be trained to shop within a given budget and to go through step by step all of the processes of shopping accounts, records, and so forth.”17
Dearborn had several recommendations for next year’s course of study. Amanda Rohde could continue as Rosemary’s tutor. What remained for Rose to decide was whether it would be best for her daughter to stay on for another year at the Residence School or move to the Sacred Heart Convent in Manhattanville, where she would be watched over by the nuns and live with girls her own age instead of the much younger Residence School students.
In July 1937, after much procrastination, Rose notified Miss Hourigan that she wanted Rosemary to return to the Residence School. She was caught entirely off guard when Miss Hourigan replied that it would be best if Rosemary boarded elsewhere. Although she was “drawn to Rosemary and I feel that I shall always be interested in her,” she could not allow her to return for a second year. “Quite frankly, the responsibility was much greater for me, last year, than I had anticipated. Having accepted the child, and agreed upon the arrangements with you, it was only a short time before I realized that Rosemary needed continual protection or supervision. This entailed a constant checking, which was a responsibility that could never be let down. I do not think we have ever had a more lovable girl, dear Mrs. Kennedy but frankly, I have never before carried as great a responsibility, both for your child, and for my school.” Miss Hourigan recommended that Rose try to arrange some sort of living arrangement for Rosemary at the Manhattanville Sacred Heart convent, which would be much more suitable for her, “because, in that large group there would be contacts of every kind, without ever leaving the convent grounds.” With more to do at the convent, Rosemary, a rather pretty, though slightly overweight, nineteen-year-old, might have less incentive to wander away, unnoticed and unchaperoned, which either had already happened or, Miss Hourigan feared, would happen if she remained at the Residence School building on East Eighty-third Street.18
As Rosemary got older, the distance between what she was permitted to do and what she wanted to do had grown enormously. She had always been the only Kennedy child who was not allowed to go sailing or play in the yard or go for a walk or swim without her brothers, sisters, companions, or mother tagging along. “As she grew older and was a teenager,” Rose remembered some three decades later, “I was always worried that she would run away from home someday and get lost, or that she would meet with an accident, or that [in the wake of the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping] she would go off with someone who would flatter her or kidnap her as the kidnapping craze was on then.”19
Her parents—and siblings—wanted more than anything else for Rosemary to feel comfortable in the world, to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, but that was becoming more difficult for her anywhere outside the Kennedy home. She was uneasy in public and often froze when confronted by a simple task, such as paying for something. Dr. Dearborn suggested that she was beset at such moments by a kind of “intellectual blocking as a result of failure in . . . tense social settings—‘the concerned looks of all concerned.’”20
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Kennedy spent more time at Hyannis Port that summer than he had planned. What had begun as a peaceful vacation had turned hectic when Pat was stricken at camp with an acute case of appendicitis and had to be transported to Boston for an emergency operation. Soon afterward, Bobby came down with pneumonia and was taken to the same hospital. Kennedy arranged for round-the-clock nursing for both children. When they were well enough to come home, Luella Hennessey, one of the six nurses who had cared for them, was asked and agreed to accompany them to Hyannis Port and remain there until they were well again. Luella would remain part of the Kennedy family for the rest of her life, caring for children, grandchildren, and after his stroke, Joe Kennedy himself.
It was not until after Labor Day that Kennedy was able to return to Washington. “I just got back to Washington this week,” he wrote a business associate on September 9, “after having stayed up at the Cape with two very sick children. . . . I gave up all business and confined myself exclusively to them.”21
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Almost immediately upon his return, Kennedy got a phone call from the American vice consul in Montevideo, Uruguay. A group of American seamen on the S.S. Algic had defied the orders of their captain, re
fused to unload cargo, and gone on a sympathy strike with the local longshoremen. Because the ship was owned by the government, though leased to a private concern, the ship’s captain wanted Kennedy to order the sailors back to work and punish them as mutineers if they refused. Kennedy could have ignored the request or deflected it elsewhere. But he did not. He had made it clear in May that he was going to involve himself in maritime labor disputes. The strike or mutiny of a few seamen, though thousands of miles away, presented him with the opportunity he had been looking for to dramatize—to the seamen, their unions, Congress, the president, the press, and the public—the need to reform labor practices in the maritime industry.
Kennedy notified the president that he needed to speak to him “about the terrible conditions on our American ships with regard to discipline.” He had, he wrote Roosevelt, consulted with the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, who had indicated that he was prepared to use the “Mutiny Statute” against any sailors who were guilty of refusing to “obey the lawful order of the Master.” Kennedy was “firmly convinced that such action if promptly taken would go a long way toward clearing up insubordination and generally deplorable conditions in the American Merchant Marine.” To make sure his letter was brought to the president’s attention, Kennedy sent a separate note to James Roosevelt, who now worked as his father’s secretary: “This thing is getting terribly serious. If you think it worthwhile to give it a little pressure, all right, but if you don’t we will take it out of our files. Really though, something should be done.”22
Arthur Krock claimed to be in Kennedy’s office when Roosevelt called to urge restraint but was, according to Krock, talked out of it by his maritime commissioner. “‘No, sir, I don’t go with that idea of compromise. . . . Listen, boy. If we do that we’ll land in the ———.’ (At which mention of the ignoble but functional edifice to which Kennedy was wont to refer, came a delighted roar . . . from the other end of the wire).”23
Kennedy cabled the ship’s captain to “instruct crew to proceed with your lawful orders. If they still refuse warn crew that all still refusing . . . will be placed in irons and prosecuted to full extent of law on return to United States. If they still refuse, place ringleaders in irons. If other crew members still refuse duty, have them removed from ship and replace them with American, if available, and if not, foreign seamen.” The cable was signed, “United States Maritime Commission,” though as Time magazine reported, its “terse message . . . looked as if it had had the personal attention of Chairman Kennedy.”24
The National Maritime Union (NMU), to which the sailors belonged, protested immediately that Kennedy and the commission had no right to intervene in a labor dispute in Uruguay. Nonetheless, the seamen returned to duty.
When the Algic landed in Baltimore a few weeks later, fourteen crew members were arrested by federal agents and indicted for “revolt and mutiny.” Joseph Curran, the president of the NMU, publicly blamed Kennedy for the arrests, declared the union was “going to get Kennedy’s scalp,” and cabled Roosevelt at Hyde Park, “asking that justice be procured” for the jailed sailors and that Mr. Kennedy be fired. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who was on good terms with Curran and the CIO officials who backed him defused the crisis by suggesting that Roosevelt ignore the telegram. She then persuaded Curran to apologize to Kennedy for making the Algic affair into a personal dispute. Kennedy accepted the apology but refused to back down. He was not, as he had made clear in his Harvard speech that spring, antiunion, but neither was he going to sit idly by and let unionized seamen disrupt commerce by going on sympathy strikes in Montevideo.25
The fourteen seamen were found guilty of violating a 1790 mutiny law. Nine were given two-month prison sentences, the remaining five $50 fines. The CIO unions would never forgive Kennedy. The business community, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for his tough talk and actions.
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Kennedy sailed on from triumph to triumph. On July 1, 1937, he had announced at a press conference that the Maritime Commission had reached agreement with twenty-three of the shipping companies that for the past nine years had received bloated “disguised” subsidies for carrying the mail. That Kennedy had secured these agreements by July 1, less than three months into his tenure as chairman, and saved the government millions of dollars was, Arthur Krock reported, nothing less than miraculous. Even the president sent Kennedy a letter of congratulation or, rather, had his son James do so over his signature: “It was a grand job to get those contracts out of the way on time.”26
In November, with consummate showmanship, Kennedy made even larger headlines with the release of a compendious report to Congress on the state of the merchant shipping industry. “Joe Kennedy was a genius at public relations,” recalled Harvey Klemmer, who worked at the Maritime Commission in Washington and then with Kennedy in London. “He had the whole country waiting for the economic survey. He built up suspense until you thought it was the second coming of Christ.” To gather maximum publicity for the commission’s report—and its chairman—Kennedy sat for interviews with newspaper and magazine reporters and appeared in a March of Time and a Hearst newsreel. The New York Times declared in an extended editorial that Kennedy’s report was “a model of what such a report should be. . . . It is informative, concise, lucid, and above all readable” and urged that Congress follow its recommendations.27
In early December, Kennedy appeared before the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries to present his report and answer questions about his progress—or lack of it—in getting new ships into the water.
“‘You have been chairman of the Maritime Commission for eight months?’
“Kennedy nodded in agreement.
“‘How many ships have you laid down in that time?’
“‘One.’
“‘Are any others to be built soon?’
“‘I have no assurance under the act as it stands that any ships will be built.’
“‘Do you think this act is workable as it now stands?’
“‘No . . . I think it is about the worst I have ever seen.’”28
Kennedy insisted that until Congress passed the amendments to the 1936 maritime legislation the commission had recommended—and mandated compulsory arbitration of labor disputes—it would be impossible to get more American ships into the water.
The next week, he took his seat for a repeat performance, this time before a joint meeting of the Senate Committee on Commerce and the Committee on Education and Labor.
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The president’s second term had begun rather disastrously when, in February 1937, he proposed legislation to radically change the composition of a hostile Supreme Court by adding an additional justice for each sitting justice seventy years or older. The response of the public, the press, and members of both parties to what became known as his “court-packing” plan was decidedly negative. As a loyal member of the Roosevelt team, Kennedy agreed to line up support for the president. “Before I ask you in the name of the Holy Father to help on a plan,” he wrote Bernard Baruch on March 3, 1937, “are you for or against the Holy Father’s suggestion on the Supreme Court and if you are for his plan would you care to go along and help. Wire me care of the White House.” In the end, there was nothing Baruch or Kennedy or anyone else friendly to Roosevelt could do to save him from the grievous political miscalculation that he would be able to bully the Congress into approving his plan.29
In late July, the doomed bill was “recommitted” to committee, where it would die of inaction. Weeks later, the bottom fell out of the economy.
The administration had decided earlier in the year that the recovery was proceeding so impressively, it was time to steer back to normalcy, reduce federal expenditures, and cut the budget. The result was economic disaster. Stock market prices began falling in August, the sell-off accelerated in October, and by December the Dow
Jones Industrial Average was a third of what it had been at the start of the summer. The economy appeared to be going through the same kind of meltdown as at the start of the Great Depression eight years earlier. Corporate profits fell, national income declined, and unemployment increased dramatically.
Kennedy could have kept quiet and ridden out the storm, but he preferred not to. As an insider now, he defended the administration and, as he had in his 1936 campaign book, insisted that he was doing so not as a professional politician, but as a businessman who understood the workings of the economy.
On December 7, 1937, he took the pro-Roosevelt side in a debate organized before fifteen hundred members of the Economic Club of New York at its annual black-tie dinner at the Hotel Astor. The anti-Roosevelt position was presented by former budget director Lewis Douglas and Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia. Douglas attacked the administration for being antibusiness. He was followed to the podium by Senator Glass, who declared that he was “totally in disagreement with nearly everything that had been done in Washington” since Roosevelt took office. After Glass had received round after round of applause and shouts of “More!” from the crowd, Kennedy was called to the podium. He began by pledging to follow the instructions he had been given and not to make a speech. “I have only one thing to say. About three years ago I went to Washington as a real enthusiast of the New Deal, and in spite of everything that has been said, and in spite of everything that has happened, I still am an enthusiast for the New Deal.” He urged the members of the Economic Club to stop “bellyaching” and if they had ideas about recovery, to do as he had, go to Washington and offer “to help and assist, not for Roosevelt, not for the New Deal, for yourselves, because by doing something now, you can help the whole cause.” His speech, the New York Times reported the next morning, “was greeted with applause and an undercurrent of booing.”30